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Sept. 29, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:12
1472 True News 54 - Olympics, Health, Language
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Muller from Freedom Made Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. This is true news early October 2009.
A bit of a low-tech ramble through the thoughts that have been tracing through my pasty noggin over the past few weeks.
I hope that you will find them of use and possibly of interest.
So Barack Obama has slithered off to Copenhagen to pimp Chicago for the Olympic Games 2016, I think.
And the question is why?
Why? Who really gives a rat's ass about who runs faster or jumps higher?
It really makes no sense whatsoever until, of course, you recognize and remember.
What democracy is all about.
People talk about democracy as majority rule.
It's completely not the case.
Democracy is minority rule, which is lobbyist rule, which is lobbyists give money to politicians who go and pillage the general population in order to give back goodies to the people who gave them donations.
This we all understand, and the donators and the lobbyists write the legislation because they're the ones who are aiming to get the goodies.
And so there's no such thing as majority rule.
There is a minority rule.
And the reason that you can understand this quite easily by just asking yourself if everyone in the world wanted to tax just you, would that work for them or not?
And of course the answer is no, because they'd get a shaving of a percent of 1%.
The only way that using the power of the state makes sense is if you can get a minority to attach themselves like remorae or some sort of intestinal parasite to the wealth and productivity of the majority so that they can siphon off a disproportionate amount of money relative to the numbers involved.
If you can get a thousand people to tax a million people, the thousand people do very well and the million people, you know, it's kind of a drag but, you know, Relative to the gain to the smaller percentage, it's not too painful.
And of course what that means is that it's minority rule, the minority being the special interests and lobbyists who pay the politicians to use the military and the police and the court system to threaten people with jail who don't pay off the minority.
It's majority rule in the same way that if the Mafia runs a neighborhood, it's majority rule.
No, it's a minority rule that is run for the benefit of those who can attach themselves and prey off the body politic as a whole.
If you understand that, then we can understand what the Olympic bid is all about.
The Olympic bid is not about anything to do with pride.
The athletes are just pawns in the game.
They're sort of shiny distractions to make people cheer for things that they can't do themselves.
And the real purpose, of course, is to use the athletes and use civic pride and all that kind of exploitive nonsense in order to give billions of dollars to the politicians in order to hand those out as favors.
Politicians are continually in search of new favors because the groups they've already bought off stop giving them a lot of money.
And what they do is they just start threatening them if they don't continue to pay them off.
So if you pay off the farmers with subsidies and grants and protection and tariffs and all that sort of stuff, Then you've continued to buy them off, and they'll donate something towards you.
But what you really need is to buy off new people, which is why government always grows.
It has to get new ways to extract money from the general population and give them to the vile and parasitic special interest groups.
And so the Chicago bid for the Olympics, as it is around the world, is simply the desire for politicians to create an excuse to be able to hand out billions of dollars more, in other words, to guarantee their re-election.
So that they can continue to get money for their campaigns and get people motivated to get their votes out and so on.
So this is all it is.
I hope that you can see through all of this shiny ab ripped nonsense and just look at it for what it is.
Just dangling some shiny athletes with inconsequential and stupid physical abilities.
Ooh, I can jump!
I mean, how ridiculous! Ooh, I can run!
I mean, how ridiculous is that?
2,500 years after Socrates and we're still impressed by people who can merely sing or jump or run or look pretty or act or whatever you want to call it.
We're still not that impressed by the fundamental virtues of the species that we actually need to have a peaceful, healthy and happy world.
Anyway, enough said about that.
I hope that you will understand and see it for what it actually is.
Now, the second thing is this healthcare bill that's going on.
I hope that you get a glimpse of just how much democracy is available to the average citizen when a bill was put forward or a motion was put forward.
To have this thousand-plus page bill available on the internet for people to see for a grand total of 72 hours before it was voted on.
And this was even considered to be much too much audience participation in the one-way show that is democracy.
And this, of course, has been shouted down.
But can you imagine, even if we went through this, it's taken them years to come up with this legislation.
It has taken them months and years to debate it.
If you go back to Hillarycare and further back, Medicare and Medicaid, decades.
But at the very least, it's taken them months of intense full-time wrangling back and forth to get this hammered out.
And you were allowed to look at it for a grand total of 72 hours, a thousand pages.
My God, can you imagine what we call this participatory democracy?
Even that is considered too much.
And, you know, you're going to get, if you're in the States, and I don't live in the U.S., but if you're in the States, you're going to get socialized medicine.
And the way that it's going to happen is very, very simple.
And it has been going on for quite some time.
And I'm not going to go through every detail.
I'll just give you the general picture.
But you're going to end up with it. And for the reason that I will talk about in just a sec.
Well, what's going to happen is it's called the public option, right?
And the majority of Americans agree with the public option.
However, when it is referred to as the government plan, then people disagree with it in the majority because apparently people have a big problem differentiating the word public and government and option and plan.
We live in a world of crazy, kaleidoscopic, bizarre LSD, just invective and language, and it's all just nonsense.
It's all postmodern crap, because that's all that's coming out of the universities in terms of philosophy.
But that having been said, the way that it's going to happen is that the public option shows up, right?
And how is the public option paid for?
Well, it's paid for either through raising taxes or through printing money.
In other words, inflation or taxes or some combination thereof.
Now, if inflation is used, then what's going to happen is the price of your healthcare is going to go up from your private providers.
Why? Because inflation reduces the value of every dollar through overprinting money.
And therefore, since the dollar value of the money you're paying to the insurance companies is going down, they're going to have to charge more to cover the difference.
So everyone's going to go, oh my god, the price is going up, right?
The second thing that's going to happen, and this is already the case in some places, is you're not going to be allowed to be disallowed.
Sorry, that's a bad way of putting it.
A company is going to be forced to take you if you have a pre-existing condition.
If you have cancer or Alzheimer's or multiple sclerosis or something, the insurance company is going to be forced to take you on as a customer.
Why is this bad? Well, I mean, not wanting to sound at all heartless to people who are suffering from terrible ailments.
I mean, my heart goes out to you.
It's a terrible, terrible thing to have to deal with.
But from a pure economic standpoint, when you say to insurance companies, you must take people with pre-existing conditions, what happens?
Well, people stop signing up until they get sick.
I mean, what else would they conceivably do?
Not everyone, but a lot of people will simply say, well, hell!
If I can't be refused insurance for a pre-existing condition, I won't buy insurance until I get sick.
And so this is going to do two things.
One, a number of people are going to drop out and we're going to say, oh my god, we have even more people without insurance.
Why would they pay for insurance?
It's like paying for life insurance when you can apply for it or your relatives can apply for it after you're dead.
Or it's like saying, well, I'm not going to buy fire insurance for my house because I can call them after my house burns down, get the insurance, and for one month payment, get my house completely rebuilt.
The whole point of insurance is the moral hazard, is the risk, right?
You can't apply for it afterwards because you haven't paid when there wasn't a risk.
So, obviously, people are going to drop out of insurance because they'll be like, I'll wait till I get sick and then I'll get insurance.
So that's going to increase the numbers and then it's going to increase the calls for the government solution.
And of course, when people drop out, And then only sign up again when they get sick.
What that means is everybody else has to shoulder all that cost, right?
So if I stop buying health insurance and then I get some sort of horrible ailment, then I sign up.
Well, they have to pay out a huge amount relative to what I've paid into because I've just signed up.
So that cost has to be spread out to everyone else.
So you're going to get more people who are going to jump off the insurance bandwagon, thus increasing the cries of, oh my God, there are so many people uninsured.
And the price of everything is going to go up, right?
So either through tax increases, which the insurance companies have to pass along to you, or through inflation, ditto.
And through the fact that they can't deny coverage to people who have pre-existing conditions, means the price for everyone else goes up, and so on.
And last but not least, and this is already the case in many states, You can't age discriminate, which means that a 20-year-old athlete is forced to pay the same price as a 60-year-old.
And of course, the 60-year-olds are very happy with that because they tend to get subsidized by the young, which is basically Social Security.
But the young are not happy with it because they're paying a disproportionate amount of insurance Relative to the risks that they're actually facing, because they're subsidizing the risks of those who are in a higher risk category, i.e.
60 or 70 or whatever.
And there are lots of other things where you're simply not allowed to rationally discriminate.
Except against smokers. You're always allowed to discriminate against smokers.
That is one of the last prejudices.
Smokers, atheists, anarchists, we can go on.
But there are still a number of prejudices that are very much encouraged within society.
So there's a whole other thing, a lot of other things that are going to happen.
But fundamentally, this is why you're going to end up with it, because the government is going to force people It's going to force the insurance companies to have to raise prices by taxes or through inflation or both.
It's going to kick people, in a sense, off the rolls by forcing insurance companies to take people with pre-existing conditions.
It's going to force no intelligent statistical proportional discrimination with regards to age or gender or sex or whatever.
Which is going to mean that younger people are...
It's not a good deal for them at all.
At all! It is not a good deal for you to pay the same price for health insurance when you're 20 as someone who's 60.
So they'll just drop out. This combination is going to increase the price of private insurance.
It's going to decrease the number of participants.
And then we're going to say, well, you know what?
Freedom doesn't work, right?
Let's say this over and over again, as if it's going to be true.
And then you're going to end up with socialized health care.
It will go in a generation or two when it goes through the same disgusting vile mess that every other socialized healthcare system goes through, but nonetheless, that is what's going to happen.
You're welcome to fight it if you want, but there are way too many special interest groups involved.
You'd have to go all the way back to the turn of the last century, To push back the AMA's restriction on the number of doctors in the field.
You would have to expect that lawyers who write the laws and who are generally politicians are going to reform taught so that lawyers don't have to practice defensive medicine by ordering every test under the planet just in case they end up getting sued.
Of course, doctors are paying Tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in malpractice insurance because the lawyers like the fees that come out of tort law, right?
A third sometimes of the settlement.
That's a lot of money. So all of these things are never going to happen.
The doctors aren't going to give up their exclusive privilege.
You don't work for 10 years or 15 years to get your medical license and then say, hey, let's let midwives and nurses do some of my job.
It's just not going to happen. The reason you went into so much debt and the reason you went into get that education was so you could get, like academics do, the blood prize, the blood sport at the other end, which is restricted government-enforced exclusivity in your field.
So you're going to get it.
I hate to say it.
I wish it were otherwise, but this generation, in my opinion, is just rolling down the domino hill towards statism or a kind of fascism.
Not much we can do about it other than continue to speak the truth so that when the system goes south, we will at least have the credibility of having been right.
It was four years ago I made the prediction that it was about five plus years until the financial crisis hit.
Okay, so I was off by a little bit, but I certainly wasn't expecting the war to go on this long.
So, the last thing that I sort of wanted to mention, I'll keep this brief, is to sort of understand, and you'll I think really experience and understand this if you are out there advocating for non-violent solutions to social problems, non-status solutions, non-legal solutions, voluntaristic, participative, peaceful solutions to social problems.
The thing that's amazing, and it really is just instinctive stone genius on the part of our political masters and the academic and media toadies that lick their boots to get some of the blood droppings from the carcass, that is us.
It is just amazing what they're able to do with language.
And, you know, George Orwell, aka Eric Blair, aka one of the most prophetic geniuses who ever lived, I've just been listening to an audiobook of his about writing.
The great enemy of clear writing is insincerity.
You can really mull that statement over and get a lot out of it.
He said that we just have to distort the language and we can no longer talk about Clear concepts of freedom.
So if we look at the word freedom, it's been completely distorted.
We say freedom, or people say, well, freedom from what?
Freedom from poverty, freedom from illness, or freedom from whatever, right?
So it's freedom from, not the freedom to act, but the freedom from certain negative consequences just involved in living.
So the word freedom doesn't matter. I'm for freedom.
It's like the UN and lots of laws and intellectuals have completely corrupted the word.
So then you say, well, I'm pro-capitalist.
Well, I will do a review of Michael Moore's new film, Capitalism, a Love Story.
I already know what's going to be the case, which is that Michael Moore will be talking about state fascism as if it were capitalism.
But you can't use that word anymore because capitalism to people means Evil, liandry, ruling, blood-soaked corporations making boots out of small Singaporean waifs and corrupting the helpless governments who only have military weapons that God himself would shrink before.
These corporations will run everything, they're multinationals, and they strip people of their rights.
So that's what people mean by capitalism, the evil banks who get money from the government and so on.
So, you can't use the word capitalism.
When you say the free market, people think it's dog-eat-dog capitalism, old people dying in the streets, as if dogs eat dogs even in nature, which they don't, and people use this social Darwinism as a way of talking about the free market, which is completely incorrect.
Darwinism, nature as a whole, is 99.99999% about cooperation, not about eating each other.
Just think of all the organs in your body that cooperate to have you sit and listen to this or do whatever, right?
It's all about cooperation.
Think of all the people you deal with economically in the world and then think about the person you're in competition with for a job or for a contract or whatever.
99.99999% of people cooperate with you perfectly and then you're in just competition with a very few people.
So anyway, people just don't understand but you can't use the free market.
You can't use the Constitution and God-given freedoms because that mixes in crazy-ass culty superstition into a rational approach to philosophy.
Can you use the word pacifism?
No, you can't use the word pacifism because that has been corrupted to mean appeasement and I don't know lying down and curling into a small Japanese schoolgirl huddling sucking thumb ball when people come to rob your house and not believing in self-defense and just you know letting everything happen to you and never you know letting looking forward to speaking German if you were in 1930s Europe.
So you can't use that word, right?
And so you can't use the word anarchism because people just think that means that you're some extra NML Gibson movie with shaven heads, a facial tick, and, I don't know, bolts through your cheeks or something.
So you can't use that word. Libertarian is very associated with the Ron Paul religiosity, rejection of evolution stuff, which, again, So it's really, really tough because the words have been perfectly perverted so that you can't get anything intelligible across, which is why I really try to focus not on the conclusions like strong atheism, like...
Anarchism, like all of these things which are conclusions, but really focus on the process.
The process of reasoning from first principles is what we really have to do.
We have to be philosophers. We have to speak philosophically and not just say, we should have a small government.
We should get rid of the government or whatever, but to help people to reason from first principles, because it is only thought that will get us through these rapids, not labels.
Labels of the rocks that we will smash upon if we are not careful.
So I hope that this is helpful and useful.
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