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Oct. 10, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:47
1173 Current Events Examples

I'm thinking of starting a new channel devoted entirely to current events, here are some ideas I've had for shows.

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Good evening, everybody. Hope you're doing well at stuff.
It is Sunday evening, October the 12th, 2008, and it's time for our regularly scheduled cleaning and chores.
So join me, everybody!
Scrub, two, three, four.
And I wanted to have a little chittle-chattle about what I would like to do next.
Now, given that the arrival of the little chatty forehead is, i.e., the baby, is verging on imminent, I don't want to take on any big projects.
I could, really, if I pushed myself, I could try to get another book done, but I don't see how that's going to work, and I also think it'll be fairly lengthy.
This is the sequel to How Not to Achieve Freedom, which is how to achieve freedom.
Which will be somewhat time-consuming, to say the least.
So I don't think that will be a reasonable thing for me to try and get done.
Because you never know, maybe it could be early.
So what are we going to do?
Well, what I thought I would try to do, in sort of sniffing out the market as it stands, I thought it would be worthwhile I sort of just did some interesting experiments with this current events stuff that's going on.
So I did a current events one which didn't talk at all about principles in terms of why this financial mess within the United States is going on at the moment.
And I did one where I didn't talk about principles at all, and that got, you know, for an FDR video, quite popular, 7,000 views or so.
And then I did one, which was HouseMD, which was an analysis of the housing crisis.
And it only got less than 2,000 views.
And the reason for that, of course, I have about 2500 subscribers, but the reason for that is that people weren't sending it around.
So I'd like to think about this, or at least I think I'm going to give it a shot.
I'm going to create a new channel, and this was suggested by I mulled it over before, but I think I'm going to give it a shot.
They created a new channel.
The existing one is called StephBot because I didn't really think I was going to do that much with it.
So I set it up. I didn't change it because it is a director account which you actually can't get anymore, at least I don't think you can, which allows me to upload more than 10-minute videos.
So I couldn't really get rid of it, given that my podcasts from the car were just a little longer.
But I'd like to do this, which is, you know, freedom morsels, or freedom nuggets, or, you know, this isn't anything other than a way of us talking about it here.
It's certainly not a brand name. And so the channel will be Free Domain Radio, and I'm going to try...
The strategy, and this is just to raise the profile of the show and to have it be sent around, and to try and gain people's trust that I'm not going to freak them out by talking about religion or anarchic theories of government or anything like that, but it's just going to be pure current events.
Just puro, puro current events.
And, you know, 5 to 10 minutes.
Of course, this new one, I won't be able to do videos longer than 10 minutes.
So even the longer ones, then it could be that the HouseMD one is not that popular because of the length, 20 minutes as opposed to the other one with 10 minutes.
I'm going to try and do philosophical analyses.
Not anarchic analyses or anything.
Philosophical analyses of current events.
And keep them, you know, five to seven minutes.
Ten, I guess, is the maximum that I could do.
But try and keep them as short and as snappy as possible.
And I can, you know, with research, and I'll need to find a way to set them up that's a little more professional looking.
In fact, I will even wear a suit.
To do the presentation, but do one of those a day.
I could do one of those in the morning and do a little some other FDR work in the afternoon.
But it would be a place to come to where people would be able to get the kind of analysis that they just can't get elsewhere, that's easy to get elsewhere.
Try and differentiate that stuff by bringing a philosophical analysis to current events, but without focusing on no God, no state, or any psychology, because that is something that people find hard to send around.
I think they get more nervous about it.
Some people love it. I've got some emails saying, oh, when you said violence doesn't solve social problems, it's like, wow, I got it, blah, blah, blah.
Some people do like it, but I think it's sort of a minority, so I'd like to try this out.
I can take a run at it for the next couple of weeks and try and do one a day.
It's relatively easy. You can take philosophy and apply it to just about...
Everything these days everything is so in your face as far as philosophical principles go But I'd like to create an analysis of that that would be free of the You know free of religion free of this political spin that people you know really want to put stuff on I think it would be and I can sort of do some stuff to focus on the US election So I'll drop a couple of topics.
I've got sort of four topics that I was thinking about, and this is the kind of stuff that I'd like to do.
And you can let me know if this sort of stuff would you think be of interest to others, the general population.
So here's one, and this goes back to something that I talked about in a very early podcast about Al-Qaeda.
As you know, probably know, Bin Laden was trained on how to bring down an empire by engaging it in a lopsided financial battle through military means, right?
So he would take down a 20 million dollar plane, with a $20,000 stinger missile in Afghanistan against the Soviets and this did not do much to help the Soviets maintain the finances that they had in the Treasury, right? So this idea that you engage a far superior enemy in a basically it's a war of economic attrition because to attack is far more expensive than to defend.
So this war of attrition He was trained to do in the United States.
Now, he very explicitly said that the purpose of the 9-11 attack was to get the United States engaged in the Middle East, where they could reach them, where they could get at them, where the Al-Qaeda could get at them, because of course they're not going to They're going to land in Fort Bragg and do anything there.
This is why they spent half a million dollars or whatever on 9-11, and the United States has spent multi-trillions of dollars responding to it.
That, of course, is not a sustainable economic situation.
Another way of looking at this economic crisis that is occurring in the United States is that to get the American population to buy into a war Because you can't just draft people anymore.
I mean, that just doesn't work. Ever since Vietnam, it just doesn't work.
Consciousness has raised in human society to the point where a draft would be inefficient, it would be expensive, it would be morally abhorrent to most people.
So, because they can't conscript labor, they have to Conscript money, right?
Because you have to pay for the labor, which you formally got for virtually free.
And so they could not start the war.
You can't have a war if the true costs of the war are evident up front.
That just doesn't work.
You can't have a war and have an immediate 30% increase in everyone's taxes, right?
Because then everyone will say, shit, You know, no way.
I'm not going to do it.
You know, my standards of proof become a little bit higher.
I'm not just going to take rhetoric as the proof to the danger to me.
Right? Be like if you signed a contract with, you know, Home Alarm System and locked them in for five years, and then they said, oh, there's some dangerous guys around.
We're going to have to double your rates.
For the next couple of years, and, ooh, they're just, trust us, there are lots of dangerous people around.
You'd probably say, well, I don't mind paying more if there is, in fact, a genuine and unforeseen danger, but I'm not going to just take it on your say-so, right?
So in order to keep the standards of proof low to get people into war, you have to have it not hit them financially up front, right?
That just won't work.
So you have to spend a lot of money on the war, of course, And you have to hide that spending from the American people in order for them to not have an immediate like, screw you, we're not doing a war because I've got to eat, right? So I'm not going to pay an extra $10,000 a year to pursue this war, right?
So you have to keep the cost of the war hidden in order to have the war occur.
So what you do is you inflate, you Subsidize.
You create weird incentives.
You manipulate the economy to give the impression.
To give the impression that the war...
I'm just cleaning the toilet. Don't worry, I'm not doing anything hideous.
To give the impression that the war is cost-free, and thus to keep it off people's radar, to keep the requirements for proof very low, And...
So you have to mutate the economy.
And, of course, Americans have not been hit with the costs of the war, right?
I mean, their taxes haven't gone through the roof, even though trillions of dollars are being spent and massive amounts.
And, of course, there's lots of future liabilities in a war, right?
I mean, that... That aspect of warfare is completely horrendous.
After the First World War, the British government was paying like a third of its revenue in medical benefits to the soldiers, right?
So it was all very bad indeed for the public purse.
Again, I'm going to synthesize this down and I'm just sort of giving you the general outline of the idea.
Hopefully it will make some sense.
And, you know, I can't remember exactly how long it took.
If I remember rightly, Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1980.
By 1989, the Russian Empire was effectively toast, right?
So, it took about nine years.
It's a little less, I think, for the United States, because it should take a little less for the United States, not because the U.S. are poor, of course, but because...
Spending on the war is just that much higher, right?
So... Oh, man.
If I die young from bad lungs, it's from the fumes of this stuff that I clean the tiles with.
So... That's another reason why this economy boom and bust has occurred.
The government was lowering interest rates and printing money in order to cover up the true costs of the war.
And the result has been the boom and the bust.
So the American economy has hit the shitter Because, to a large degree, because of the war, which was the conscious and express goal of Al-Qaeda, to get it to spend itself into oblivion, which is exactly what the US had trained it to do with the last superpower.
Underestimating your enemies is almost always one of the worst tactical mistakes or strategic mistakes that you can make.
In any battle, right? Underestimating the intelligence and abilities of Al-Qaeda.
Very bad idea.
I mean, these are smart people.
And I would submit it's one of the reasons that the United States did not want Bin Laden to be caught, right?
I mean, what's he gonna do?
He's gonna go on trial And he's going to talk about how he was trained by the United States to bring down a superpower by engaging it in this war of economic attrition.
That's not so good for those who want to use the attacks on 9-11 to drain the public treasury.
Because that's what's really going on.
The attacks on 9-11 were a great excuse Not to enslave the American public, but simply to start a war to drain the treasury.
I mean, people get very rich in a war.
Some people, the average population gets poorer, right?
So this war of economic attrition that was launched has been very successful because it's fucked up the American economy.
I'll use pronged up or pranged up, of course, because it'll be a family show.
And this is not just my say-so.
This is not...
No need to take what I'm saying on faith, right?
Because this is exactly what Al-Qaeda has said.
Al-Qaeda has said, yay, you know, our plan has worked, right, of messing up the U.S. economy by getting them involved in a horrendously expensive war.
Because, you see, people who want to get rid of imperialists, and the US is a massively imperial country, of course, but people who want to get rid of the imperialists, they study their history, right?
And they say, well, you know, the British Empire was a huge and powerful empire.
Sun never set, biggest empire the world's ever seen.
How did it end? How did this, you know, massive Goliath come crashing down?
Well, it ended because it was blood dry militarily through World War I, of course, and then the death blow of World War II, right?
So they're very aware that the British Empire was defeated.
Britain was reduced to a second-rate post-imperial power.
It was achieved through economic attrition, through England getting involved in all of these completely unsustainable wars.
Now, the difference, of course, and believe it or not, I will try and get this into 10 minutes.
Now, the difference, of course, is that in the past, because the cost of attack and the cost of defense were about the same, right?
Anti-aircraft guns, enough anti-aircraft guns to bring down a bomber cost about as much as a bomber.
So, you know, attack and defense were, you know, more or less equivalent in terms of cost.
Unless you got a third party to do it, I mean, India didn't get Britain out by attacking Britain through a war of attrition, but because Germany and Italy and Japan were willing to do it, they just, you know, got the pickings, right? They got the leftovers. So you can't do that, you couldn't do that in the past, but you can do it now, of course, and technology has made attack so much more expensive.
So the people who want to devote their lives to getting rid of an imperial power, they do their homework.
They're not idiots. They do their homework and they say, well, shit, the only way to get rid of an imperial power is to break its back militarily.
And we can't do that. Oh, we couldn't do that in the past.
But we sure as heck can do it now, right?
And so they study and they study and they take the lesson of the Soviet Union.
They take the lesson of the British Empire and of all the other empires.
I mean, all the European empires went kaplooey.
After the Second World War, because they were just broken.
Because empires are a net loss to the countries that run them, right?
And a net loss to the countries they prey upon.
It just net gains to specific elements of the ruling class, right?
So that will sort of be one of the costs, right?
To help one of the videos.
To help people to understand...
You know, what is going on with this financial crisis?
This is the price of the war, right?
And the war is the price of listening to your leaders, right?
So that's sort of one aspect of it.
Now, if I have time within those 10 minutes, which I think I will if I organize it properly and help me, don't tangent myself into oblivion, which is unlikely but possible, I guess with enough takes and perhaps a bullwhip.
Wielded by the lovely and talented Christine.
Now, the other sort of topic that I would like to talk about is the question of just sort of saying, look, the...
The crisis that is occurring in the financial sphere is the result of the Fed.
Government monopoly on currency is the number one issue.
I want to say it like this.
I know that there's a lot of crazy, creepy weirdos who talk about the Fed buggered my dog or something.
All the evils in the world flows from the new world empire and the Fed.
I know that those people Are not way positive for the credibility of these kinds of genuine solutions, right?
Genuine answers as to what's going on.
But nonetheless, it's important to separate the wheat from the chaff, right?
To sort of understand that even though there are some weirdos talking about the Fed, it doesn't mean that that is not an answer, right?
It just means that there are some people who aren't very healthy who like to talk about it as an answer.
and there's no you know to believe in illuminati or some sort of new world order international conspiracy of armenian bankers or whatever the hell it is but i mean the fed is it's pretty easy to to understand right just this idea that if you can type whatever you want into your own bank account then you will end up spending a lot of money right so if you can type 10 million dollars into your bank account this year then you're going to go buy You know, a yacht and a house, right?
Which is going to send all these price signals to yacht and house makers to buy or to make more yachts because they go like, wow, there's a lot of demand for these yachts, right?
And those resources will then be used to produce yachts and houses, which would otherwise be used to produce other things, you know, cars or bicycles or iPods or whatever, right?
And unfortunately, to some degree, fortunately for those who print the money, their money is not subject to the inflation that comes later.
Because the first guy to spend the fiat currency, the unreal currency, gets full value.
But then it sort of goes out in time waves to the rest of the economy.
And people who then have dollars later end up paying the $10 million through inflation.
So they, because...
Because their money is worth less, they end up not buying stuff that they otherwise would have.
Maybe even they don't buy yachts and houses, right?
Because if it results in a 10% real inflation and a yacht is now, I don't know, 5.5 million instead of 5 million, then there's going to be some guy who won't buy that yacht.
So all of these resources that are put into building these yachts because of this artificial demand, because of this fiat money, ends up Causing this inflation, which causes a whole bunch of other stuff not to be bought, including the high-end stuff, right? When the inflation goes up, it's the high-end stuff that goes first, right?
So all of this demand about, let's build all these yachts and big houses, turns out to be incorrect market signal brought about by fiat money.
And that's why you have these booms and these busts, right?
And again, this is an overly simplistic way of looking at it.
It's not exactly all the details of the Austrian cycle in terms of industrial versus consumer goods and so on, but that doesn't really matter.
Just to get people to understand the basic principle.
So... So, doubtless...
If you're looking at these videos, I'll sort of say to people, if you're looking at this video, or if someone has sent you this video, it's because that someone wants you to understand this Fed thing, right?
Now, I know that it can be weird and uncomfortable to talk about this Fed thing, and it can make you feel like, I don't know, maybe a bit of a lone nut conspiracy dude or whatever, but it's important to understand this stuff.
It's important to understand it and it's important to talk about it with people and to help them understand it, right?
Because libertarians, God love them, I know that some of them can be pretty nutty, right?
And, you know, in many ways there can be a little alarming, you know, like end-of-the-world types whose beards are longer than their hair and who don't seem to own suits.
And so they can be a little weird, a little nutty, and that's fine, right?
So I'm just trying to tell you like I'm not one of those guys, although I guess it wouldn't take much for my beard to be longer than my hair.
And I'm kind of here to tell you that you're totally free to ignore all of this fiat money stuff.
Totally free, right?
But if you ignore this fiat money stuff, your stock portfolio will continue to go down.
right it's not it's not a curse that you know i'm putting on you it's not a curse that uh the libertarians are putting on you it's just the reality that if you kind of say well i don't like this fed stuff it seems kind of weird i'm sure it's all nonsense you know it just seems like a bunch of crazy people talking about things which i can't control and blah blah blah well you know you can ignore the signs of cancer let me make the cancer go away you can ignore All of this stuff about the Fed and government control of the money supply and all this stuff which sounds weird and creepy and culty,
you can ignore all of that.
And all that will happen is another 10 or 20% is going to be lopped off your net worth.
There's a price for ignoring this stuff.
I mean, it's not like libertarians wake up every morning and say, ooh, can I get into more fights about the Fed, please?
Wouldn't that be great? Wow, what a wonderful way to spend my day, right?
They don't. And they don't enjoy...
I don't believe, at least I don't know any who do, they don't enjoy having people sort of say, no, no, no, we need more government regulation, no, no, no, it's not the Fed, no, no, no, the Fed is here to help, and blah, blah, blah, and rolling their eyes whenever this essential and rigorous and well-proven, well-established Nobel Prize wing and economists have pointed out exactly the same thing.
And yeah, you'll find a bunch of status economists who won't, but it's just a common sense issue.
And you don't have to listen at all.
But if you don't listen, if you don't think about it, if you don't do the research, if you don't find out the truth, you're just going to lose more money.
You're going to lose more money, you're going to lose more money, you're going to lose more money.
Now at some point, you're going to listen, right?
As long as... You know, at some point, these libertarian predictions are going to be believable to you.
At some point! I don't know how much money people have to lose in order to start taking those who accurately predict this stuff seriously.
I don't know how much money people have to lose.
It seems to be that they have to lose quite a lot, and that's a real shame.
But at some point, you know, you're going to say, well, more regulation is the answer.
You're going to support that. And you're going to say to the libertarians, forget it.
You guys are crazy, right?
What do you mean less regulation?
It's regulation that caused the problems.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that sort of shit.
We've all heard it a million times before.
You're crazy. You're pro-business.
You're anti-poor.
You're, you know, all of the crap, right?
And the libertarians, at least those who are wise and patient, are going to say, okay, fine.
Go run to the government.
Go run to the guns.
Go run to the people who caused the problem and praise their booties for being able to solve it.
Right? Go. Do it. Do it.
You don't have to listen to us.
You really don't. Right?
If you think that smoking is going to cure your emphysema and the doctor and you won't listen to any reason, all the doctor can do is say, go for it!
I can't control what you put in your lungs or your mouth, right?
So go, you know, go to the government, go to Barack Obama, or John McCain, or it's probably going to be Obama, go and say, you know, hey, you guys are right, and cheer the bailout, right?
Cheer the addition of more fiat money, more bullshit interest rate manipulation, Go and put your faith in the people who steered you into the rocks.
And say, oh, now I've got it down.
Now we're going to fix it. Now we know what we're doing.
But what's different? Nothing.
We're still blindfolded.
We still don't have a compass. But don't worry.
This time, the psychic budgie Bernie is going to tell us which way to go and how to solve the problem.
So go to those people. Because if you won't listen to reason...
Then you're just going to have to listen to disaster.
I mean, I wish there was another way.
I really, really, really wish there was another way.
If you're not going to listen to reason, if you're not going to understand these issues, then your life will just keep getting worse, right?
Like some guy who says, no, no, my drinking is not a problem when it actually is, right?
It's like, okay, well, if you're not going to listen to the intervention, then you have to keep drinking, right?
Until, you know, you crash a car.
Say, ah, my drinking is fine.
I don't have a problem. Okay, well, until you crash another car, until you lose your job, until your wife leaves you, until...
Like, at some point, though, you're going to say, yeah, I have a problem.
Right? And at some point, you're going to say, the system is a problem.
Not just the guy who's in charge of it at the moment.
Not just a specific strategy for this, that, or...
At some point, at some point, I guarantee you, you're going to say...
Hey, there's something fundamentally wrong here.
And then, I hope, at least, if you're reasonable, I hope, you're going to then listen to the people who've been saying, this bailout won't work.
This solution won't work.
The problem is systemic. The problem is systemic.
The problem is... The problem is with the system.
The problem is not that one slave is beaten or one woman is beaten.
The problem is that slaves don't have rights, that women don't have rights, and the problem is that the government has a monopoly on the money supply.
So, my only question to you is, well, how bad are you going to let it go?
How bad are you going to let it be?
I mean, they say with anything, You know, you're bidding for something or whatever.
They say, have a standard, right?
Have a standard, right? And that's all we're saying.
All the libertarians are saying, have a standard.
I don't presume to speak for all libertarians, forgive me, but I think that they would agree with me, even those who don't agree with me on other things.
Have a standard. That's all we're saying, right?
So maybe you've lost 30-40% of your stock portfolio, and maybe you feel that some bailout is going to make it better.
And maybe it will for a little while, for sure.
Heroin makes anyone feel better for a little while.
It's by the long term that they shall be judged, right?
So, at what percentage do you stop...
Do you start rethinking what you think you believe?
And what percentage loss are you going to do?
I just think it's really important.
Say when you're in Vegas, if I'm down $500, I pull out.
When you're bidding, I'm only going to go so high, buying a car, I'm only going to accept so many, this is the payment that I will accept per month and you don't go beyond it.
That's the basic aspect, foundational aspect of money management.
So, this all I'm saying is that have a standard, right?
Say, okay, I'm going to give these ass clowns who got us into this mess one more chance, right?
Because I don't want to listen to the libertarians.
Okay, fine, don't listen to the libertarians, right?
And say, shit, well, I lost 40% of my stock's value under these guys' watch.
But now...
I'm going to give them one more chance.
So then, when you lose another 10% or 20%, it doesn't work out, then will you listen to reason?
Or will you, like a moronic broken record, go and run back to the same guys for the same crappy treatment?
When you have a dollar left, will you listen to us then?
When you have no roof over your head, will you listen to us then?
At some point, you're going to have to listen to reason.
You're going to have to listen to reason.
At some point, because everybody does, who doesn't die.
Every alcoholic who doesn't die at some point has at least the opening to listen to reason.
So, that's all we're saying.
At some point, you have to listen to reason.
So, my argument is, well...
Why not listen sooner rather than later?
Okay, so I said I was going to talk about four topics, and that was just two, but that's the kind of stuff that I would...
I guess it was two and a half. It's the kind of stuff that I'd like to talk about, and I hope that you will let me know what you think, and thank you so much for listening.
If you would like to donate, I think that would be great.
I know that it's tough during these hard economic times, but of course this is exactly the time when we need to get the message out the most, so I hope that you will.
Dig even a little deep and to try and help out the dissemination of these philosophical ideas during this time of general crisis.
Thank you so much for listening.
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