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Oct. 25, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
10:52
1773 The Idiocy of Politics

Why no intelligent discussion can ever occur in the hellscape of politics...

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well. So, American tax cattle, you have your election coming up in a week or two.
Oh, I get some emails asking me what I think about the election and...
I don't really know what to say.
I don't particularly delve into election politics for the same reason that I don't go and have arguments about metaphysics with people currently staring glassy-eyed and drooling on their bibs in the old age home because you don't waste your brain on tax cannon fodder.
The reality is the election is all smoke and mirrors and sophistical manipulation of language.
I'll give you one example. So this tea party woman was on Bill Maher, and here's the...
When you ask the tea party people about how should we solve this problem, it's always about, yes, we should cut.
We don't want to pay more taxes.
We should cut stuff. But I never hear exactly what we will cut.
What would you cut? Because we need a lot of cuts.
Defense? Homeland Security?
When you spend money that we don't have, that money has to come from somewhere.
Medicare? Medicare is already broke.
How can you cut it? How can you cut something that doesn't have any money?
Entitlement is bad. What would you cut?
It's already been cut because it doesn't have any money.
What would you cut? What would you cut? We don't need all the excessive stimulus spending.
We don't need the $26 billion at your jobs bill.
I would not spend $26 billion for a fake bill that ended up going really to fund us.
That's what that would be. It's really more to cut.
You know, if you really want to put a dent in it, you would cut.
The bailouts worked, and we got our money back.
We have over 10% unemployment.
We lost another several hundred thousand jobs just since our construction jobs are down.
I mean, these are, I mean, this is, I'm not like making this up.
These are actual, this is like government.
But wait a second. What about the real bloat?
You know the Department of Homeland Security?
Yeah. There's 854,000 people who have top security clearance.
That's more than the population of Washington, D.C. That's a little bit much.
What about defense? $700 billion there.
See, that's really where the bloat is.
But they'll never cut those. That's what our government's job is.
Would you cut those? I would not cut national security.
Really? There are certain enumerated things in the Constitution.
That's what our government is supposed to do.
Of course they're supposed to secure us, but do they need $700 billion to do it?
I wouldn't be doing bailouts. I wouldn't be doing $26 billion for teachers.
The bailouts didn't cost us anything.
We got the money back. We had $800 billion, and we still had $38 billion left over, and we passed an additional $26 billion?
You're supposed to be for the people, but most of that defense budget is a jobs program, which you hate, to build shit we don't need, like fighters for all those dogfights we get in with the Taliban.
And it's corporate welfare for defense contractors.
Most of that is.
So as you can see, it's all very silly and very embarrassing.
Because she can't answer the question.
And no politician can answer the question.
This is what's so foolish and silly and laughable and boring about electoral politics.
No politician or wannabe politician can talk about actual deficit reduction for a very, very simple reason.
The moment that you target any particular group in terms of deficit reduction, that group is going to erupt In a fiery geyser of ad hominem and spent like crazy to smear and attack and humiliate and denigrate and insult and claw you down, Like any predator, like any parasite, they don't like it when the host threatens to cut off the food.
So any group that you talk about, any specific group that you target, all you're doing is you're provoking them to attack you, thus harming your chances or probably destroying your chances of getting elected.
So let's take a simple example.
So let's say that You want to privatize the post office.
Well, so you say, I'm going to privatize the post office and that's how I'm going to save X amount of dollars.
Let's just say that's your only platform.
So, all that happens is that everybody who's in the post office, and the post office is 40% ex-military, not people you particularly want to irritate, All that happens is everybody in the post office and the post office union has millions or tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of incentive to claw your political career down and grind it under their statist bloody booted heels.
That's all that happens. All you're doing is provoking the parasitical predators on the far side of the fiery state line of predation to come and attack you.
That's why no intelligent discussion can be made about politics.
See, I mean, as I've said before, and I'm sure I'll say again, politics is a suggestion box for slaves.
It never gets opened, and it is only suggestions.
The question isn't who should you vote for.
The question is who's on the ballot and why.
And everybody knows this.
Everybody knows this. It's completely simple to understand.
People are put on the ballot because special interest groups want to use their charm, their charisma, their language skills, their rhetorical skills, their sex appeal to bamboozle you.
Political candidates are like the urchin that bumps into your side so that the pickpocket can grab your money.
They're a distraction.
But there are, hey, look over here!
Got your cash, got your children's future.
Own you.
So why are people on the ballot to begin with?
Who's funding the Tea Party movement?
Well, the rich people who are facing tax increases if the small government party doesn't win.
That's the only reason people are on the ballot.
It's because people want to wave them in front of you, right?
Like that angler fish that has that glow light at the end of its appendage, right?
You come and look at, ooh, pretty light, ooh, politics, ooh, look, distraction.
That's all that's happening in politics.
You're being distracted so that you can be skinned semi-alive.
The only reason that people are on the ballot is the only reason that people fund politicians.
It's so that the politicians will return the favor and grant them special privileges at your expense after they get elected.
That's what politics is.
Politics is choose who's going to rob you blind.
It's sort of hard to get interested in such a ridiculous scheme.
And this is known to absolutely everybody.
There's nobody alive who doesn't understand how many lobbyists there are and what the lobbyists are doing and why people fund politicians.
Now, sorry, let me be clear about that.
There are two groups who fund politicians.
The first group is the people who pick Whoever you're going to vote for or whoever you might vote for.
Those are the special interest groups who pay the politicians in return for getting special favors and the blood money of taxation, regulation, and so on after the election.
That's one group. The second group are the bar-bar foolish sheep who believe the words only that the politicians speak.
Ah, words are easy to speak.
You can get cancer. You can stand in front of the mirror.
You can chant, I don't have cancer.
Doesn't change whether you do or not.
But if you believe the words alone, you'll believe that you're magically cured.
Words can be manipulated.
Reality cannot.
If a bridge is falling down, I can point at it and shout, Bridge is not falling down!
And if you only look at me and not the bridge, you may think the bridge is not falling down.
But the purpose of philosophy, of science, of reason, and evidence, of empiricism...
It's to not look at the words, but only look at the actions.
So the second group of people who fund politicians are the people who believe what the politicians say.
So the Republicans believe that the Republican Party is the party of small government.
And why do they believe this?
Why? Because the Republican Party says so.
The Republican Party says that it wants to cut spending.
It wants to cut government. We're a small government party.
Well, look at this graphic.
See?
Doesn't really change no matter who's in power.
But these are the facts. Obama has actually cut the deficit apparently more than Bush did.
But who knows? I mean, it's all nonsense.
I mean, they just make these numbers up to pacify people.
So the people who listen to what the politicians say, rather than look at the facts of what actually goes on in the machinery, in the reality of politics, are the other people who fund politicians, because they have this illusion that the political process responds to some sort of ideology.
But the political process is an exercise In indoctrinated violence.
The political process is a bunch of hyper-speaking, glib-talking sociopaths attempting to shine bright lights in your eyes so you don't feel the hands rummaging through your wallet.
It is a grappling For the gun cloaked only by propaganda, the gun of law, the gun of violence, the gun of intimidation, the gun of regulation, the gun of corporatism, it is a massive blood-soaked feeding frenzy grabbing for the gun painted red, white, and blue to point at citizens and fleece them.
And to participate in this process is an act of shameful Imagine what would be said about the political process if nobody showed up to vote.
If nobody participated in this delusion that we can control the ruling classes who hold us at gunpoint and fleece us at will.
The illusion that we can control the ruling classes by choosing which farmer gets to farm us.
Farmers chosen by the farmers.
Stay home.
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