1487 True News 57 - Stop Defending Freedom!
How to shift the burden of proof to a statist.
Oct. 19, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:25
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| Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing very well. This is true news, current events clarified, up to our asses in water. | |
| My plea to stop defending freedom. | |
| What is the status quo? | |
| Well, the status quo at the moment for just about everybody who's involved in questions of social organization, the allocations of resources, financial, military and human... | |
| Is that statism is the status quo. | |
| We need a government to order people around, a bunch of people with guns and bombs and planes and aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons, who order everyone around and throw those in jail who disagree with them and so on. | |
| Statism is the status quo. | |
| And for some strange reason, a public school. | |
| It is considered that alternatives have a very high standard of proof. | |
| In other words, the status quo is great, but alternatives need a very high standard of proof. | |
| This is sort of like if you and I are sailing on the Titanic, and on the first day out of port I say, let's take to the frozen North Sea in a lifeboat. | |
| And you say, no, they're having shuffleboard and the Lido deck, and so I'm not going to go off into the sea with you in a lifeboat, because the status quo is that the ship is, well, afloat. | |
| You know, when people are falling and banging their heads on the propellers and Leonardo DiCaprio is bubbling out his last lines, then the status quo has changed somewhat, let's say, and we now can look at the lifeboats because the status quo, i.e. | |
| staying on the Titanic, is no longer feasible. | |
| So, statism hit the iceberg decades ago. | |
| We are in the death throes in the US of the statist philosophy, the outcome of the statist philosophy. | |
| We cannot stay on the ship of state. | |
| And so, the need to prove all the possible alternatives as being valid has gone down somewhat, which is why you don't need to defend freedom. | |
| You can actually take another approach, which I found to be quite helpful. | |
| So, let's say somebody's saying, nah, the state is great, government, statism is the great, it's the way to go. | |
| Well, let's shift the burden of proof. | |
| This happens in religion versus atheism as well, and it can be very powerful. | |
| See, we don't have to prove freedom. | |
| We don't have to say, well, you see, in a free society, the roads will be taken care of this way, and national defense will be taken care of that way, and so on. | |
| But statists have to prove how statism can work, because it no worky at the moment. | |
| So, I think that's, let's take the United States for an example. | |
| Federal deficit, over $1.8 trillion recently, is a 12% spike in just one year. | |
| Federal debt, $545,668 per household, per household, my friends. | |
| As the former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker said, We have a huge implicit mortgage on every household in America, except unlike a real mortgage, it's not backed up by a house. | |
| So that is a staggering amount of debt. | |
| It can't conceivably be paid off. | |
| So statism simply is going to collapse, right? | |
| The Titanic hit the iceberg decades ago, and so you can ask the status, well... | |
| What are you going to do to fix your system which doesn't work? | |
| Debt to GDP ratio. | |
| This is USA versus Japan versus Germany. | |
| As you can see from 1970, it goes from 40% to 180% as of 2008 in America. | |
| Completely unsustainable. | |
| So how is this going to be fixed? | |
| Unsustainable for the other countries too, but we'll get back to that in a sec. | |
| Just to cover the federal deficit, the federal deficit, not even state and local, 40% tax increase is required. | |
| That's not going to be the case. | |
| And it's probably much higher because this is going on the amount of indebtedness the government claims that it has, which of course is going to be far lower than what it actually has. | |
| So what would it do to the economy to jack up taxes 40% during the middle of a recession? | |
| Well, it would do exactly what it did in the 1930s in America, late 1920s, early 1930s. | |
| It would produce a catastrophic depression, which would ripple around worldwide into probably a world war. | |
| I don't really think that could be accepted as a feasible solution. | |
| So, if you're arguing with a statist who says, oh, you know, we need to do this, we need to do that, and there's no way I would go for some voluntarist stateless society option because, you know, what we have works. | |
| It's like, okay, show me how it can work. | |
| Show me how it can work. | |
| What will you cut? How can this continue? | |
| If you support this crazy coercive system called Statism, prove to me how it can be saved from certain demise, right? | |
| If you think that staying on the Titanic is a good idea, tell me how it won't sink, and then we'll talk about it. | |
| But since it's almost completely underwater now, it's a pretty high bar to cross over. | |
| So you just plop them down, and I've got a link off to the right here, fdrurl.com forward slash tn57, truenews57. | |
| There's a downloadable PDF. Just slap down this PDF in front of these people. | |
| This is U.S., federal, state, local government spending. | |
| What are you going to cut? Are you going to cut pensions, right? | |
| Remember, you've got to come up with, you know, maybe $3 trillion, at least $2 trillion to cover the deficit and another trillion to start paying the debt down. | |
| So you've got to cut a couple of trillion dollars from this budget, right? | |
| What are you going to cut? All the pensions? | |
| Are you going to cut Medicare, Medicaid? | |
| Are you going to cut vendor payments and welfare under health care? | |
| What about education? Are you going to cut all the education? | |
| What about defense? Are you going to cut all the defense, or most of the defense? | |
| Welfare, police services, law courts, prisons, transportation. | |
| What are you going to cut? General government. | |
| Other spending here is a fairly large item, which includes things like wastewater management, pollution abatement, housing development, general economic, commercial, and labor. | |
| And of course, some of this stuff can be cut for sure within a statist society, but to get to where statist becomes a sustaining proposition, what are you going to cut? | |
| Let's go through line by line and figure out what you're going to cut. | |
| Not to mention, you have $252 billion in interest payments. | |
| Not even payments on the principal, just interest. | |
| So how's that going to be paid? | |
| So, you just have them go through and say, well, what is it that you're going to cut, you know, to make this sustainable? | |
| Because if you don't want to cut anything, you have no right to defend statism whatsoever, because then you're just claiming that 2 plus 2 equals a pink unicorn that's going to dance all the fairies of the future on your forehead, which, unless you're heavily medicated, is not going to happen. | |
| Are they politically feasible? | |
| So let's say that you're going to cut the military by 50%, which isn't going to get you more than a few percentage points towards actually being able to pay for the state. | |
| Is it politically feasible? | |
| What is going to happen to the government when the payroll drops? | |
| There's a loss of revenue when payroll drops, right? | |
| Because it means that people aren't paying taxes, right? | |
| You fire half the military, they're no longer paying taxes on their salaries. | |
| It's a drop. Now, there is an increase, of course, you're saving money, but there's a drop as well. | |
| And if you fire half the military, it's going to be really a little tough for the vestiges of the free market to sop up all of these people, particularly if they've seen combat and therefore are not particularly emotionally stable. | |
| How is the free market going to absorb all of these people in the middle of a recession? | |
| So you're going to have increased expenditures in welfare, government unemployment, food stamps, Medicare, housing costs, other kinds of things. | |
| So how's it going to work? | |
| Just have somebody show me the money. | |
| Show me how this crazy system is going to work. | |
| And then maybe I will accept your criticisms of my alternatives. | |
| But switch from defense. | |
| Instead of trying to prove how freedom can work, demand to be shown how the current system is going to be saved, even just on a financial statement, and then start asking how the politics of it are going to work. | |
| Because it kind of looks like Thurston Howell III is standing on the Titanic saying, Oh, I don't know. | |
| That lifeboat looks a little leaky to me, you know? | |
| And meanwhile, it's like, that lifeboat looks a little leaky to me. | |
| Going underwater. It's a sad, sad spectacle to see people defend statism at this particular late stage of the game. | |
| We are currently... Up to our asses in water. | |
| And those of us who are proposing viable and peaceful and voluntary alternatives should get, I think, just a tad more airtime in the mental space of the culture. | |
| Unlikely, but we should. | |
| But I would suggest stop trying to defend freedom and put the onus of defense upon the statists to say, hey, slap down this piece of paper. | |
| Here's a spreadsheet. You tell me how this goddamn system is going to be saved, because I can't see any conceivable way And if they say, well, we've got to cut back government and rewind the tape to back when it was smaller, well, it went from smaller to larger and it always does. | |
| And so how is it that the government is going to be safe? | |
| Put the onus, put the burden of proof on the status and stop accepting it yourself. | |
| Give it a shot. I think you'll find that it is a pleasantly surprising change of venue and approach. | |
| So here's an example of projected spending from 1994 to 2014. | |
| Total spending is just staggering, right? | |
| We're only, I guess, two-thirds of the way through this graph. | |
| How is it going to be fixed from here on in? | |
| And if they want to cut the items now, say, well, how's it going to work in 10 or 20 years when the boomers are all retiring and picking up Social Security? | |
| Put the onus of proof back on those who claim that irrationality and violence can work and say, well, it really hasn't worked, so how's it gonna? | |
| See what they come up with. | |
| And if you get good solutions, please send them to me and I will be more than happy to publicize them. | |
| And this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. |
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