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Nov. 10, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
15:20
1786 Environmentalism, Feminism and Statism

Please please stop selling off our liberties for grant money.

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So recently I was in California and I took a cab from Los Angeles airport to the hotel that I was at and it was ninety dollars to take this cab ninety dollars to take this cab and of course I looked over at my wife because we we had our our baby in the cab and and we just had a four and a half hour flight with the baby with my daughter who hadn't fallen asleep and I said oh man we should have rented a car because it's so expensive to take a cab and I talked to the cabbie about it and he said oh the taxi license is hugely expensive and I also am not allowed to take a cab fare back from your hotel to the airport that's illegal that's why and of course there are all these taxes and that's why the cab fare was ninety dollars Now,
of course, I thought about this, and I thought, what an insane system.
And then I thought, where are the environmentalists in all of this?
Where are our good friends, the lean green machines, who are absolutely dedicated to trying to reduce carbon emissions, who are absolutely dedicated to trying to reduce car usage, Why are they not staging protests against all of the government factors which add to the high costs of taking a cab?
If a cab was one quarter of the cost that it is now, it's certainly possible that some people would choose to take cabs rather than take a car.
If a cab ride was 20 bucks, From the airport to the hotel, then people would be more likely to take a cab around rather than rent a car, which is far better for the environment.
In San Francisco, a license-free taxicab costs $250,000.
It's like you've built a little house on top of the back of the cab, which everyone has to pay for just for the privilege of getting from A to B. You'd have fewer cars on the road, fewer emissions, fewer cars would be built, thus Requiring less destruction of the Earth's precious and limited resources.
But why do environmentalists, to my knowledge at least, and I worked in the environmental field for almost 10 years, I have some knowledge of it, why have the environmentalists not mounted a campaign to eliminate The license fees for taxicabs.
And to allow freer competition.
To have no licenses for taxicabs.
It can't be because people are afraid of being ripped off.
Because if you've got a quarter million dollar lien sitting on top of a cab that everybody has to pay for to pay off, you're automatically being ripped off.
Far more than anyone could ever rip you off in the free market.
But at least there'd be competition for ripping you off.
Well, they don't talk about that.
Here's another one. All the mail that I get, with the exception of maybe three letters a week, all the mail I get is junk mail.
Now junk mail is heavily subsidized by most governments around the world, and of course the post offices in most Western countries is nationalized, is run by the government.
So here you have a massive subsidy for junk mail.
Junk mail, of course, the trees have to be grown and cut down and pulped and turned into paper and the inks and the blah blah blah and all of the emissions to move this stuff around.
How much mail would be delivered to me if junk mail were as expensive as its actual real true costs?
Well, you know, there'd be like 12 letters a week going out across the country, you know, from the three great-grandparents who still write longhand.
So why oh why oh why are environmentalists not protesting the subsidies for junk mail?
The answer is simple and shocking.
People think that they're Doing some virtuous social movement.
They think that they are pursuing environmentalism.
But if you look at the actual trend, it always goes to the increase in government power.
It always goes to the increase in government power.
See, if you were to de-license taxicabs, that would be a reduction in government power.
If you were to de-subsidize junk mail, that would be a reduction in government power.
As opposed to carbon offsets and additional regulations and new departments and additional controls and additional bureaucracies and additional taxes and additional laws and additional fines and additional imprisonments.
All of that swells government power.
And environmentalists know this deep down, which is why every single environmental solution that is proposed, with almost no exceptions, every single environmental improvement that is proposed is always and forever about increasing the use of violence in society.
It's about another law, another department, another bureaucrat, another regulation, another budget, another tax, another duty, another tariff.
Environmentalists, environmentalists, environmentalists, please, please, please recognize this.
You are not saving the environment.
You are not saving the environment.
You are the pig grease on the slippery slope to fascism.
You are tools of the ruling class.
They wave you around and subsidize you so that you can clamor for more government control, which they are happy to provide.
Because the sociopaths in power love having the power.
They love being able to dangle benefits and subsidies and taxes in front of people.
Why? So the people will come and beg them for favors, kiss the ring, give them campaign donations, beg for their time.
These are incredibly empty people, can only be filled up with the bottomless, coerced needs of other people.
You are fueling this sociopathy.
It has nothing to do with saving the environment.
If everything that you propose It's for the increase in government power.
You know that if you propose something that benefits the environment, that decreases government power, you will get the door slammed in your faces.
You know this, which is why you never do it.
Not seen one single article written by an environmentalist that says, you know, we really should praise the free market for coming up with email and reducing the amount of mail that has to go out around.
Fantastic. We should really thank Skype for coming up with video conferencing so that fewer people have to take flights for meetings.
Never ever seen anything like that because that is to praise voluntarism and peace compared to primitive coercion and violence.
Do you see what I'm getting at?
You are a tool of the ruling class.
And I add the last four words with some reservations.
Why do you never ever suggest Programs to benefit the environment that result, that require the reduction of state power because you know that that will never happen.
You know that your funding will be cut.
You know that you won't get any meetings.
You know that you will be shut out of the entire discourse because the discourse is not about saving the environment.
The discourse is about expanding government power and environmentalism is simply the method by which that is achieved.
I'll give you another example from feminism.
There are two women Two amazing women, strikingly absent from the feminist discourse about the 20th century.
Two women. And look, I'm for environmental protection.
I'm just not for violence to achieve it.
I'm for the equality of women.
I'm just not for violence to achieve it.
I'm pro-life. I am pro-environment.
I am pro-feminine. I'm just not pro-violence.
Two women you never hear feminists talk about.
One, Margaret Thatcher.
Margaret Thatcher. The first female leader of a modern industrial western nation that's of any size and power.
And not just a little more, not like the Queen of Malta.
She was the very first woman to head England who wasn't a slave-owning queen.
Why don't feminists talk about her?
Why don't they praise her? Why haven't they written books saying what an amazing woman Margaret Thatcher was?
Her iron will, her discipline, her determination to make it in the old boys club of British politics?
You never hear about it. Why?
Because Margaret Thatcher was small government.
Was anti-big government.
And feminism, like environmentalism, is simply the grease that is used to slide the cattle down into bigger, deeper, and shorter-lived pens for harvesting.
Feminism, like environmentalism, I'm talking mainstream academic, is used to grease the slide to fascism.
It's not about the rights of women.
It's about expanding government power.
Because feminists propose, again I'm using a collective, it's not everybody, but it's the vast majority of feminists always propose expansions in government power.
Expansions in government power.
More subsidies. Subsidized daycare.
Pay equity clauses. Anti-harassment laws.
It's always about an expansion in government power.
Do you see the pattern? Do you see the pattern?
Or it's about dangling little tax breaks, which then women become dependent on the government for, and therefore will vote for whichever politician promises to expand or extend them.
Who's the other woman that feminists don't talk about?
Much more powerful than Margaret Thatcher.
Well, Ayn Rand.
You don't hear feminists talk a lot about Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand, surely one of the most stellar women of the 20th century.
One of the most astoundingly accomplished, brilliant, creative, Electric women of the 20th century.
I mean, Atlas Shrugged is second only to the Bible in influential works.
The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are like in the top few of influential books of the 20th century.
This from a woman who's an immigrant who's not even writing in her native language.
This is astounding!
It's incredible! It's monstrously brain genius cool.
But feminists don't talk about Ayn Rand.
Why? Ayn Rand chose not to have children in order to pursue her career, which, you know, feminists are not going to have any problem with, and which at the time she made that decision in the 40s and 50s was a pretty unusual and radical decision.
Ayn Rand rewrote the face of the American literary scene, of the American philosophical scene, of the American political scene, at least in the populist sense.
Astoundingly accomplished woman.
Wrote brilliant fiction.
Wrote brilliant plays.
Wrote some fairly reasonable movie scripts.
Wrote some truly brilliant non-fiction in the realm of philosophy, and she had an undergraduate degree in history and is an incredibly influential populist philosopher.
Staggering achievement for a woman.
A staggering achievement for anyone but an immigrant woman Writing in her non-native language.
Becoming the leader of a countrywide movement.
That unfortunately collapsed, but still.
Incredible achievements.
Astounding achievements. Man or woman, there's almost nobody more influential than the 20th century.
In the literary scene.
In the populist philosophical scene, there's nobody.
Now, some feminists say, well, but she had these kinky sex scenes in her novels.
So what? Simone de Beauvoir had threesomes.
She's a feminist icon.
But you see, like Margaret Thatcher, Ayn Rand was small government.
And that doesn't fit into the socialist Greece that is feminism.
Feminism, mainstream feminism, again, is designed as an excuse to ratchet up the cogs of power.
It is not designed to help women.
It's designed to use the neediness of women The injustices towards women largely perpetrated by the state, always and forever throughout history, it was a state who oppressed women.
Feminism is designed to use the neediness of women to help expand the power of the state.
Because we care for women, we want women to be treated justly and equally.
The only thing that is ever proposed, the only thing that is ever funded, the only funding that is ever received by feminist organizations is from the state!
And the state doesn't pay people to diminish the power of the state.
And so feminists know you have to avoid the women who are free market.
You have to! Because the purpose of feminism is to crush the free market and impose government coercion power and control in its place.
So you can't be for Margaret Thatcher.
You can't be for Ayn Rand, who are small government, anti-government, anti-coercion thinkers, at least, and how they act.
Who cares? We're talking about the philosophy.
You can't be for those women because your entire purpose is to be for the expansion of the state.
The feminist ideology, like the environmentalist ideology, is just the excuse for increasing the power of the state.
What will you buy?
What can we sell you?
What can we bamboozle you with in order to get you to give up more of your money, in order to get you to give up more of your freedom?
Oh, you care about the environment? We'll use that to further cloak you in the bloody wet rags of power.
Oh, you care about equal treatment of women?
Great! We'll use that to expand our power and control over you.
But it's not to do with the things themselves.
So please, if you're involved in these movements, look critically in the mirror.
For heaven's sake, for the sake of the environment, for the sake of women, who are now forced to leave their precious children behind to go out back into the tax farms to generate more money to be used as collateral to sell off their children!
The women go to work to have an income because you can tax that.
You can't tax staying at home.
They go to work to have an income.
The income gets taxed.
The tax gets used to pay off some portion of the interest.
The tax, that money that they pay to the government, gets used as collateral for further indebting their children.
So not only do they not get to raise their children, which is a beautiful and wonderful thing, which I'm doing full-time.
There's nothing better in the world.
Not only do women not get to raise their children, but the money that they generate is used to sell their children's future into the hands of banksters and foreigners and the other scurvy parasites on the human condition.
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