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March 1, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
15:53
1598 State Milk Blood Addiction - Why Political Action Will Never Work

Here is one proof as to why political action will never work - it is just a numbers game.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. Just a reminder to check out Libertopia.org for information on where I will be speaking in San Francisco July 1st to 4th, 2010.
I get a lot of comments.
Sort of along the lines of this.
Oh, StephBot, you are so very pessimistic, you are so very critical, you are so very negative, and all you ever do is come up with problems and criticisms, and you never seem to offer any solutions.
Well, first of all, that's not true at all.
I have scads of solutions, and they're easily available.
The reality that my solutions fall into the careful what you wish for, you just might get it category because I have many solutions and a pretty ironclad way on how we're going to achieve freedom in the world.
Or maybe not us, but those down the road.
People don't really like it so much because it's a lot more fun to muck about with politics and ballots than it is to do what I suggest.
And if you have more curiosity about that, you can check out my podcast.
But let me tell you what I think is really, really important.
And this falls into a number of categories, but let's start with humility.
The anti-state or state-limiting movement has been around, if you count the Enlightenment, for hundreds of years.
If you count more specifically and more recently, classical liberalism was big in the mid-19th century, so a little over 150 years.
And some stone geniuses have been involved in that movement.
I mean, you could go through the list, but I'm sure that you know them all.
There's Bastiat, there is Lysander Spooner, there's Adam Smith, there's Hayek, there's von Mises, there's...
I mean, you name it.
People have written about this stuff and just stone geniuses.
And I think it's really important to look at that amazing, illustrious line of people who were...
That's far, far smarter than I'll ever be to look at that and say, well, if all these stone geniuses have completely failed in their mission to control and limit the size of the state through writing, through rational argument, through empirical evidence, through political action, if they've all completely failed, and we now have the largest state in history, I'm not going to think that I'm smarter than them.
I'm just not going to do it.
I'm not going to think that I'm smarter than all these people put together, so I'm going to say, okay, they failed, so let's figure out why they failed, and let's not replicate their mistakes, because you scarcely serve your teachers by replicating their gravest errors.
I'm not going to write a better novel than Atlas Shrugged.
I'm just not going to do it.
I'm not going to be a better economic theoretician than Hayek or von Mises.
Of course not, right? I'm just not going to be a smarter guy than Rothbard.
I mean, just not. So, looking at all of that and saying, well, you know, what they did really, really, really completely didn't work.
And having the humility to say, I'm not smarter than them, I'm not going to do a better job than all of them put together, so what else can we do?
People are still very addicted to political action in libertarian circles, and I can understand why.
It's like, if you don't know what else to do, or if whatever else you can do is completely unpalatable, then you're just gonna, you know, blindly and dumbly trudge down that deathtrap, foggy, off-the-cliff road of political action.
And I can understand why people do it.
It's because they don't know that there are powerful alternatives that will work versus politics, which simply won't.
The other thing that I think is important to have humility with regards to is I think it's really, really important that when people regularly kick your ass and you can't even get one of these girly fight landings in, That you recognize that and not regularly go back into the cluster frack of Mike Tyson body blows and get yourself all beaten up once again.
What I mean by that is to recognize that politicians and statist intellectuals and teachers and priests and all those people who support this massive edifice of state power that towers over all of us, like stone bomb-dropping cumulus clouds from hell, that These people are not dumb.
They're not dumb because if they're dumb then we're even dumber because they regularly kick our ass.
Reason and evidence has had its ass kicked from the days of Socrates and before all the way through the present.
That's 2500 years of reason and evidence and even passion Being the 98-pound weakling in the Charles Atlas commercial who's getting sand kicked in his face by the dumbass, brute-majority idiots who are incredibly sophisticated in their drive for, desire for and achievement of power.
States are really, really good at gathering power and expanding.
And we, as freedom thinkers, We have regularly had our ass kicked all over the quad, and our lunch money gets stolen, and our glasses get crushed, and we just wander around bumping into things.
That's the reality. That's the humility.
Our best and most powerful thinkers have not achieved even a smidgen of what it is that they wanted.
They haven't even slowed down the size of the growth of the state, because it's hard to believe that this tomb of growth is slower than it could have alternatively been.
The greatest thinkers have completely failed, and the people that we think are creepy and weak and false and so on have massively triumphed in every conceivable way.
That's just the reality.
That's just the reality of the situation.
So political action isn't going to work.
It's not going to work. I've got lots of videos out there, but I'll give you one really concrete example.
As to why it won't work.
And hopefully, and I know you got to sort of stare this one square in the mirror and say, ah, political action isn't going to work.
What else can I do? Well, again, I've got videos and podcasts on my perspective that I know works and you can pursue that if you want or not.
But let me give you the reason why one of the many, many reasons why political action won't work.
And oh my God, I don't mean to shock you, but we have some facts.
So this is from 2007, and of course it's even worse now, but I couldn't find more contemporaneous statistics.
In 2007, slightly over half of all Americans, 52.6%, now receive significant income from government programs, according to an analysis by Gary Schilling, an economist in Springfield Simpsons.
That's up from 49.4% in 2000, and it's far above the 28.3% of Americans in 1950.
One in five Americans hold a government job or a job reliant on government spending.
A similar number receive Social Security, Or a government pension.
About 19 million others get food stamps.
2 million get subsidized housing.
5 million get education grants.
For all these categories, Mr. Schilling counted dependents as well as the direct recipients of government income.
Now, I would go even further than this because teachers represent the educational system, the state-run educational system, represents a brain-leaching, soul-destroying, but nonetheless free daycare for tens of millions of Americans who otherwise would have to figure out some other place to put their kids during the day.
So, I think that's really, really important as well.
So, slightly over half of all Americans, 52.6%, are now receiving significant income from government programs.
Let's zoom in with a little bit more recent data.
This is from February 2010.
This is from California.
Approximately 85% of the state's 235,000 employees, not including higher education employees, are unionized.
As Governor Schwarzenegger noted during his $83 billion budget rollout over the past decade, Pension costs for public employees increased...
Are you ready?
Vendover, California, 2,000%.
Decade of pension costs for public employees increased 2,000%.
State revenues increased only 24% over the same period, or about 1% of the actual increase for the public sector pensions.
A Schwarzenegger advisor wrote that this year alone $3 billion was diverted to pension costs from other programs.
There are now more than 15,000 government retirees statewide who receive pensions that exceed $100,000 a year.
Many of these retirees are former police officers, firefighters, and prison guards who can retire at age 50 with a pension that equals 90% of their final year's pay.
The pensions for these and other retirees, all other retirees, increase each year with inflation and are guaranteed by taxpayers forever, regardless of what happens in the economy or whether the state's pension funds have been fully funded.
Which, of course, they haven't been.
A 2008 state commission pegged California's unfunded pension liability at $63.5 billion, which will be amortized over several decades.
That liability, released before the precipitous drop in stock markets and real estate values, certainly will soar.
So... The government is not stupid.
Politicians are not stupid.
At all. They're drug dealers.
Government money is a drug.
State money is a drug.
And like all drug dealers, they will give you free samples until you're hooked.
And then, once you're addicted to the crack cocaine, you're not going to be part of a big anti-drug program.
Once you're addicted to the crack cocaine, you're not going to be part of a big anti-drug program.
See, this is...
Ideology.
Political ideology is something that is invented after the fact.
After people get corrupted by power and greed and the blood money stolen from productive citizens, they then come up with ex post facto justifications called socialism or statism or support for the government.
People are patriotic because they're bought out.
The patriotism is something that they invent after the fact to explain away the fact that they have been bought out.
And so when you're arguing with people at an ideological level, you're not even touching the real reasons for their belief.
There are only two classes in this world.
There are only two classes in this world.
And Marx got it completely wrong.
There is the productive class, and there is the parasitical class.
There is the class that gains its wealth through voluntary exchange, and there is a class that gains its wealth directly or indirectly through violence.
That is it. The bankers and the welfare recipients are in the same category.
They receive their money through violence.
Do you understand? The bankers and the government teachers, with their couple of months off a year, ridiculous pensions, professional development days, in by 8.30, out by 3, assigning homework to kids, which does no good to the kids whatsoever, because it's easier than teaching them in the class.
These people are in the parasitical class.
Do you understand? And on the other side, and this is the class which is rapidly falling away, crumbling and diminishing, either involuntarily or voluntarily in the Atlas Shrugged model, this class is decaying and falling apart, and this is the class that is being preyed upon.
This is the cancerous class, this is the healthy tissue class.
And like all cancers, it will grow until it overwhelms the healthy class and brings around a collapse.
But see, this is the reality.
This is why voting to reduce the government is never going to work.
If you believe, if you genuinely believe, that you can get people to give up their $100,000 pensions, which they got at the age of 50, for Christ's sake, if you really think that that's possible, then this is my suggestion to you.
Forget about theories. Forget about the theories.
The theories are a huge waste of time.
Empiricism, empiricism, empiricism is all that matters.
If you think that you can talk people out of giving up their government largesse, here's what you do.
Easy peasy. You can test this theory out.
If you have these amazing persuasive powers, you can test it out very quickly.
You go to your local convenience store and you look around.
You hang around the cash register until someone comes in with a winning ticket.
And it's got to be a good winning ticket.
A couple of thousand bucks at least, right?
And what you need to do is you need to say to that person, You know, you gotta not cash this ticket.
You gotta not cash this ticket because the government runs these lotteries and the money is taken from people at gunpoint and so on.
So it's wrong and it's immoral for you to cash in this lottery ticket.
Give it to me. We'll tear it up together and we'll walk out arm-in-arm, brothers in freedom, to a happier, sunnier, and better future for us, our families, and our descendants.
How well do you think that's going to go?
How often do you think, when somebody rushes in because they've won $5,000 in the lottery, how often do you think you will be able to talk them out of, with appeal to principals, the act of cashing in that tax-free couple at large in cash?
You understand that's not going to happen, right?
You're going to stand there till kingdom come, and you're not going to talk anybody how to cash it.
Elbow you aside! Get out of my way, punk!
It's time for some Kino money, right?
And that's the reality of the situation.
Now, Of course, the government has endless laws against conflict of interest, and in any sane system, if you've got government money, you should not be allowed to vote.
Of course, it's a clear conflict of interest, but that's not the point.
The point is to give you the government money to buy support for additional government spending.
That's what they're doing. They're not stupid, and they've been creating this over time, been doubling it since 1950.
They get more and more people addicted to the saccharine teat of state funds, and then those people become addicts.
So of course they're not going to give it up.
Have you had much luck trying to talk someone out of smoking or drinking?
Come on, it takes 9 people and 1,200 video camera episodes on a show called Intervention to get at least some people to give up self-destructive habits like drinking.
And in self-destructive habits like drinking or smoking, the damage is accruing to you personally, to your health.
You're getting free pensions of $100,000 at the age of 50.
It's everybody else who's paying, not you.
So if you can't talk people out of drinking and smoking when they're the ones being harmed by it, what chance do you think you have of talking people out of giving up these amazing free goodies from the state?
No, it's not going to happen. I mean, somebody who retires at 50 has been in the government job for 20 or 30 years with the express intention of getting this pension.
They're entitled. It's owned.
It's owed to them. It's in the contract.
You're never going to be able to talk them out of it.
More than 50% of the people would have to give up a significant portion of their income to reduce the size and power of the state.
That's why voting is never going to work.
Well, it's one of the many, many reasons why voting is never going to work.
It's just not going to happen.
And try that lottery experiment if you think I'm wrong.
Try it. Stand there. Try and talk people out of cashing in their lottery.
Or go to old age homes and try and talk people out of cashing in their old age security checks, their social security checks.
Or go to welfare. And try and get people to stop cashing their welfare checks.
Because that's what you're asking them to do when you're asking them to vote Libertarian.
And it's not going to work.
So please, please, please, put down the addiction to the political solution.
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