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April 5, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:15
1884 The Return of Doug Casey - The Freedomain Radio Interview

Doug Casey discusses the imminent breakup of the USA, and how to save your money from the fiat currency printing press. www.caseyresearch.com

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Well, hi everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux.
Back by enormously popular demand is the great Doug Casey, who we've managed to catch once more back from digging his feet into the sand in Uruguay.
And so thanks so much for taking the time, Doug.
It's great to chat with you again. Pleasure to be here, Stefan.
I'm almost always in Argentina, but the last time at this time you've accidentally caught me looking at the ocean here in Uruguay.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
So what are your thoughts on this recent budget quote showdown where the numbers being tossed around just seem entirely too ridiculous for words?
They're talking about cutting $4 trillion over 10 years, which will probably never happen.
But at the same time, they're adding another $10 trillion to the debt.
It just seems like a weird exercise in financial illiteracy.
What are your thoughts on this situation?
I would... At this point, I think the situation is totally and absolutely out of control.
The U.S. government is like a gambler on tilt, where it's no longer thinking.
There's not even an appearance of thinking rationally or clearly.
I mean, the dollars can be created by the hundreds of billions or trillions out of thin air, and they are.
And they're spending them willy-nilly to patch up any of the hundreds of leaks in the sinking ship.
So I think things are going to get really, really interesting over not just the next 10 years, because they're talking about cutting...
I don't know.
I mean, there's so many proposals.
31 billion or maybe 63 billion a year for the next 10 years or maybe, what is it, 8 billion, 10 billion over the next...
These are meaningless numbers.
The situation is completely out of control and I just don't know how this is going to end except to say I don't see any way except it can end extremely badly.
Well, I think that's right. I think that the dependent classes are going to be cut loose to the detriment of...
I think you wrote recently about how if the government loses or gains hatred of the people, things can get very badly, very quickly, particularly in a well-armed country like the US. You know, I wonder if the US... You know, the interesting thing is that throughout the Arab world, These governments have been delegitimized in the eyes of the people, or at least the current rulers have been delegitimized in the eyes of the people.
It's not just a question, perhaps at this point in the Arab world, of, well, we need somebody different and better.
Maybe there are groups of people there that are starting to think that the whole idea of having a nation-state It's a bad idea.
Take Libya, for instance, where it's not a country.
I mean, these people share a language, Arabic, but they're all members of different tribes.
And this idea of Libya is a completely artificial construct.
And this is true of most of the nation-states in the world, frankly.
And I wonder if the U.S., The idea of a government in Washington, D.C. isn't going to start to be delegitimized, and you're not going to start feeling centripetal force.
In other words, what I'm saying is, as this gets more and more out of control, I can't feature a young Hispanic male in California wanting to pay up half of his income to subsidize some old Anglo-American White broad in Massachusetts.
He's not going to want to do it.
And I think it's possible over the next X number of years that the U.S. is going to start flying apart into different entities, actually.
Yeah, I think that's inevitable.
And the demographics are very clear that you white children in the U.S., the numbers have fallen.
Excuse me one second. Sorry about that.
Yeah, in the U.S., the numbers of white children have fallen enormously over the past few years by a few million, whereas, of course, the numbers of black and Hispanic children have risen proportionately, and the U.S. would actually be in a European-style demographic decline if it wasn't for immigration and for minority births.
So yeah, you're right, there's going to be a lot of class warfare, there's going to be a lot of cultural wars that are going on, because most of the promises made by whites to whites will have to be paid for by minorities and foreigners, and they have no stake in the system in the same way.
Yes, Stephen, can you hear me clearly at this point, or am I breaking up at all?
No, it's good. Sorry, I just had a bit of a hiccup on the line here.
Am I coming through okay? You're breaking up slightly, but that's okay.
I can certainly make out what you're saying.
This is actually kind of an interesting subject.
In Arthur C. Clarke's excellent book, which he wrote not so long after World War II, called Childhood's End, he actually made a prediction in that book that people We're going to largely stop reproducing in the generations after World War II. And that's pretty well happened in the West,
where the populations of all the developed countries, not just the Europeans, but the white Americans and the Japanese, these are the most advanced civilizations in the world, they're really not producing.
And this is actually quite interesting.
The reason for this is that As people become urbanized these family ties which are tribal basically start falling apart and as they start working in more industrial environments they don't have to rely upon their children to support them and care for them in their old age so you don't need children and of course with all the exigencies of living in a city you Can't really take the time for children because you don't have grandmothers around to care for them.
So this is very interesting how the populations of advanced countries are actually going into collapse.
And that's not the case in the more primitive world where there are several generations in the back of us, but the same thing is going to happen to them, too.
I don't know. This is just a thought.
I'll bet that 50 years from now, instead of people worrying about overpopulation, people are going to be worrying about underpopulation.
It's almost like Roseanne Zanadena on Saturday Night Live said, if it's not one thing, it's something else.
It's always something.
Well, I think you're right.
Certainly Japan has a ridiculously low fertility rate.
I think it's around 1.2 per family.
And you're right.
I mean, I think there's a number of factors that go into that.
You've mentioned some. I don't think intelligent human beings breed very well in captivity.
They're sort of like the great white sharks at the aquarium world.
And I would also say that there's a rational calculation around having children that is really tough, which is...
If both parents have to work, having children becomes very difficult.
You lose a lot of sleep and you don't get the benefits of parental life.
You just get a lot of the negatives.
And so I think a lot of people make a rational calculation about the costs and benefits.
I think if one person can stay home or both, hopefully, then it's a lot more fun.
That's certainly my situation.
But if you have kids and both have to work, that's really, really rough.
I think that people also underestimate the degree to which changing demographics is behind what people call the Arab Spring, which is that the birth rate in a lot of the Muslim countries has gone down from six or seven or eight children per family to two or three recently because women have gotten more control over their reproductive rights and there's enough wealth in many of those countries that you don't need as many children.
More education and so on.
So this is another reason why people are beginning to demand rights.
I mean, if you grow up as a poor kid with seven siblings, you're not really going to think much about your human rights or whatever.
But if you grow up in a smaller family with more parental investment, you get a little bit more used to having your needs met and so on.
And it becomes more of a clash than when you try and deal with your government.
I think those things are underestimated when looking at some of these movements in the Middle East.
Yes, yes, I agree.
You know, it just seems to me that a little bit like we touched on the last time we spoke, I really am almost forced to believe that over the next generation, we're going to be looking at the biggest thing that's happened in world history since the Industrial Revolution.
And that is going to be true from all Just about every point of view, especially the technological point of view, because it's always seemed to me that technology, more than anything else, is what drives the direction of civilization.
Of course, I'd also say that intellectual progress and ideology and thought in areas other than technology is extremely important.
I mean, whether everybody believes In free markets or everybody believes in collectivism.
Critical distinction. But let's put that apart for the moment.
And I think that changes in technology alone, which are actually in back of this demographic collapse in the West that we were just talking about, I think it's going to accelerate and change things almost unrecognizably over the next 20 years.
It's going to be fun to watch.
I just... Wish that I could watch it from a safe distance as opposed to watch it out my front window, which might get broken in the process.
What sort of changes do you see and what sort of effects do you think will come about?
Well, I'll give you a few things that I think are likely.
I mean, look, I think one of the most important things to recognize is that There are more scientists and engineers alive today than have lived in total in all the world's history.
And I think that that is a fact that cannot be overemphasized and bears repeating.
And it's becoming more and more the case that that's true.
Now these scientists and engineers are making tremendous breakthroughs in all kinds of technologies.
What kind of technologies am I talking about?
It seems to me likely that, you know, people are very worried about food right now.
Where are we going to get the food to feed all these people?
Well, I don't think that's really going to be much of a problem.
I mean, there are lots of technologies being developed right now which can grow immense amounts of food in totally unproductive areas of the world that have plenty of sun.
Food is not going to be a problem in the future.
The amount of wealth in the future, we've seen what factories in China can do.
Flood the world with all kinds of electronics and so forth.
Already, 3D faxes are being developed so that you download the software into a machine in your home And it will create parts or create whole items of anything you want right in your home, custom made. And robotics, Moore's Law, is a real thing.
And it seems very clear to me that people are not going to be living to go to work at a factory at all in the future.
It's basically robots that are going to do this.
The amount of wealth I mean, with nanotechnology developing, forget about worrying about resources like oil and will we have enough copper.
It's going to become, in the very near future, possible to fabricate high-density energy fuels like oil out of their raw component atoms.
And I really think we're on the threshold of this.
You know, Ray Kurzweil, Certainly somebody that I think you'd love to get on this show has said that we're approaching the singularity.
It's a point that in the future where there'll be before the singularity and after the singularity and I think we're almost on the cusp of it.
So, you know, I'm extremely very optimistic for the future.
I'm just worried about the next 20 years.
Right. No, I think that's a great way of putting it.
Now, you've recently talked—this is a few of the questions that have come in from my listeners from the last show—you've talked about, of course, the catastrophes in the U.S., and I have a fair number of non-U.S. listeners, particularly some people in Canada were— Asking about some of your predictions for the housing market.
There have been recent studies that have shown that the Canadian Housing Corporation, which is sort of the Fannie and Freddie of Canada, is sort of overextended and has a lot of risky loans.
Up to a third of the loans could be considered risky, if not toxic.
What are your thoughts about the real estate market in Canada?
Because you recently wrote that that, like China, may be in a bit of a bubble.
Well, it's not only Canada and China, but I'll put my finger on a third country that's in a bubble, and that's Australia.
So in any of those three places, if you have a piece of real estate, find a bid and hit the bid, because increasingly markets are becoming internationalized, and there's no real reason for the real estate market in Canada to be Much more expensive than the market in the U.S. In fact,
most of the time, in the not-so-distant past, Canada was much cheaper than the U.S. So, you know, free investment advice is worth what you pay for it.
But if I was a Canadian that owned a house at this point, I would seriously think about hitting the bid, putting the money someplace safe, And reallocating it to real estate sometime in the future when I think you're going to be able to do so a lot more cheaply.
And that's in addition to the fact that all over the world, interest rates are being artificially suppressed by these governments for all kinds of reasons we could talk about.
And high interest rates are the enemy of fixed assets like real estate.
Interest rates are going up, up, up over the next 10 years.
And that's going to put the final nail in the coffin of real estate, even in Canada.
So, no, forget about it.
In Canada, of course, given how I think 90% of Canadian trade is with the U.S., once the U.S. hits its black hole of, let's say, capital reallocation, the value of the Canadian dollar, the value of living in Canada is going to be, I think, significantly lowered.
Would that be a fair assessment, do you think?
Yes, exactly.
And the other thing is you cannot count on the current resource boom to maintain the levels where it is.
I mean, everybody's complaining.
Well, of course, the reason why raw commodity prices, which is what Canada basically lives off of, is raw commodities, agricultural and mining and so forth, and oil.
One of the reasons that these things are as high as they are is because that's where bubbles have been inflated by the creation of all these trillions of currency units.
But the best cure, monetary factors aside, for high commodity prices is high commodity prices.
And they're going to come down.
And that's not going to auger wealth for Canada.
So I like Canada a lot.
And I lived there for years.
But I would not own a house in Canada at this point.
In fact, I'm not sure that there's any place that I'd really want to own a house because nothing is cheap in the whole world today.
And that may sound like an odd thing to say, but it's really rather anomalous because there's almost always some place, well, Maybe things are getting cheap in places like Marrakesh, Morocco, where all the Europeans are exiting wholesale from there and trying to sell their houses and fire sale them.
That's interesting.
Things are cheap in Cairo, Egypt right now, which actually might be an interesting real estate speculation building up.
But this is not a good time to own, for capital gains, property.
The whole world has been bubble-ized.
Yeah, of course, in the free market, there should be pockets of up and down everywhere you go.
But when all governments are involved in this monetizing of debt, you do end up with a worldwide bubble.
And of course, the longer that goes up, the harder it falls.
And you're right, it is a scary time to find a safe place for your assets these days.
Yeah, it is.
I mean, I hate to say this, and I'm sure I mentioned this the last time, and I hate to say it again.
Because with gold, it hit another new all-time high today, and I hate buying things after they hit new all-time highs, especially after they've been hitting new all-time highs or going up, let's say, for the last 10 years.
But I still don't know of a better place to be than gold, and I hate to say that.
Yeah, it seems ridiculous to say.
It's like saying, buy US property in 2007.
But of course, the value of gold is, I think, reasonably measured relative to the value of fiat currency, which is declining.
The decline is suppressed at the moment, but it's declining in real terms all over the world.
So it is a weird thing to say, but yeah, relative to the amount of money that's been pumped into the economy through this counterfeiting schemes of governments, I think there's room to grow.
Yeah, I think so.
And because, you know, gold is liquid, and You know, the five reasons that Aristotle gave in the fourth century BC, why gold is money, are exactly why you want to hold it today.
It's not in the bubble, in my opinion.
Most people can't even find it on the periodic table, much less own any of it.
But it's durable, very important, it's divisible, it's convenient, high value, it's consistent.
One piece is like every other piece.
It's not like diamonds, which you have to be an expert to appraise.
And it's useful.
It's increasingly a high-tech metal.
So that's why it's money.
And I think it's going to be reinstitutionalized as money in the future when the current system collapses.
And I'm afraid it is going to collapse.
Yeah, I think it's too late for a soft landing.
I think it's too much of a nosedive.
I just hope there's enough parachutes for the wise to have a soft landing individually.
But yeah, I think as far as, I mean, look at the debt-to-GDP ratios of the Western countries, of the disaster that's now hit Japan after 20 years of a soft recession, the absolutely out-of-control spending in the U.S. government.
The fact that they've gotten involved in another conflict is just...
Completely astounding to me.
It's like watching a gambler who's down to his underwear betting his underwear.
It's just completely ridiculous.
And I certainly wasn't expecting it.
But I guess there's no end to the predatory hunger of the military-industrial complex.
It is incredible what they're doing in Libya.
But this is still just an appetizer.
Because what's going to happen when Syria blows up?
And that's not even the important thing.
The real important thing is what's going to happen when that corrupt theocracy in Saudi Arabia falls apart.
I mean, that's the big one.
And in Saudi Arabia, it's got about the youngest population in the world.
I mean, half of the population are kids under 25, just exactly the age when They'll turn on the Rolling Stones street-fighting man and go out and make it happen.
And there's really no news from Saudi Arabia at all at this point.
It's almost like there's been a subtle news blackout from Saudi Arabia about what's going on in the Arab street, as they say.
And, of course, Yemen, which is just to the south of Saudi, and Yemen, It's happening there.
So when it blows up in Saudi, there's no way of telling what's going to happen.
That could be the fourth war.
The U.S. will definitely get involved in that.
Oh, no question. And I think the reason there's a news blackout on Saudi Arabia is looking at any of Saudi Arabia's human rights record, particularly in relation to women, blows up the entire Obama story that they're interested in the welfare of Middle Eastern citizens.
I mean, you can't look at Saudi Arabia and then look at the story about going into Libya and think that there's anything objective or true about the moral justifications for the Libyan intervention.
It's a gigantic, hypocritic fraud.
It's absolutely disgusting.
And, you know, for Obama and his shills to say the things that they do and think that anybody outside of the United States, certainly anybody in the Arab world, believes any of that nonsense, I mean, it's just laughable.
These people are, it's like they're cut off from reality.
So it's amazing to me.
Yeah, and the news that came out recently, which I've only found on the internet, that according to the Freedom of Information Acts that have extracted some of the information from the Federal Reserve, that they actually bailed out a bank owned by the Libyan government not too long ago, is truly astounding.
You know, first we fund them, then we fight them.
I mean, it's a typical late empire scenario.
I know. It's simply completely out of control at this point.
It's a headless organization.
It's like a It's like a gigantic octopus.
All these tentacles are someplace that the tiny little brain can't control them anymore.
This is just fascinating to watch, actually.
But that's one of the reasons I like being here in South America.
This place is kind of out of the eye of the storm.
And interestingly, One of the nice things about most of the countries in South America having destroyed their currencies numerous times over the last couple of generations is there's no debt in this part of the world.
So it gives you a little bit of reality because everything happens for cash.
There's nothing like waiting to collapse.
And that is so untrue of the rest of the world.
It's untrue of Europe, Japan, North America, Australia.
These places are full of debt.
I read an article recently of yours that I found...
There's two things I'd like to chat about if you have the time.
The first is you wrote an article, and I always enjoy it when you move from the financial analysis, of course, which I enjoy, but when you move to more psychological topics.
And you were talking about Some of the reasons that people give for not wanting to relocate.
And it is, of course, true when Americans say, well, I don't want to relocate because of my roots and my family and this and that.
It's like, well, nobody but the natives would be in America if everyone in Europe felt the same way in the 18th and 19th centuries.
But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the most common objections that you get from people who are thinking about moving for safety and security and stability and what your responses are to those hesitations.
Yeah, yeah. You know, I think the first thing I've got to say in preface to that, Stephan, is that most people think of themselves primarily as, I'm an American, or I'm a Canadian, or I'm a Frenchman, or I'm English.
And this is an idiotic way to look at yourself.
It's putting yourself in the mindset of a medieval serf.
That where you're born in one place, that's who you are and what you are and where you'll stay.
So I think it's incumbent upon everybody to look at the world as your oyster.
So the biggest objection that I hear when I mention this to people is exactly what I just said.
It's to have this concrete bound feeling that they are where they were born.
And that is the biggest hurdle.
It's a psychological hurdle.
Of course, For a lot of other people, it's a financial hurdle.
I can't afford to move, which is another thing that a medieval serf would have said.
I can't afford to move.
How am I going to support myself if I leave my little tenth of an acre plot or whatever he had?
Of course, I'd say that there's more opportunity in other places, especially if you're moving from a more advanced, wealthy country to a less advanced, poorer one.
Better chance you're going to be a big fish in the pond at that point.
But I'm very happy being a citizen of the world, or if you would, to use Marxist phraseology, a rootless cosmopolitan, although I'm becoming a little bit more rooted at this point because, you know, I mean, here in Argentina you can afford a nice farm growing all kinds of things.
Not in a monoculture either, like in Iowa or something like that.
So, yeah, I think that anybody listening to this show should take out a globe of the world, a map of the world, and start asking themselves, where have I actually been?
And where, from what I know, might be the best place to be, other than where I am now, as an accident?
Yeah, we certainly never.
It's one of the things we don't choose is originally our family of origin and, of course, where we're born.
And I recently, in a show, I recently said that the best way to look at countries is, you know, when a guy falls from a building or is killed, they put a chalk outline around his body so they know where the body fell.
It's a crime scene. And if you want to look at the map of the world, what you're seeing in countries is the outlines of historical crimes, you know, where warlords won, where tax predation ran up against another warlord and had to stop, or where imperial powers drew things randomly.
What you're looking at is the outline of crimes.
There's nothing to have loyalty to.
What you have loyalty to is virtue, to reason, to evidence, to ideals, not to bits of land and artificial lines drawn up by mostly criminals.
Totally. I couldn't agree with you more.
And if you're going to give your loyalty to anything, I mean, the nation state is the last damn thing you'd want to give it to.
You should give your loyalty to people that you share values with, not just people that were born in the artificial boundaries that some goofy politician drew on a map.
You're quite correct. Now, another question that I had, which I thought was very interesting, came from a fairly significant number of listeners, was we talked a little bit last time about some of the social challenges that arise from having a philosophically clear-eyed view of the world or an unsentimental view of the world, which I think you and I, I think our listeners share.
In that you talked about, you know, sometimes dinner parties can be a challenge, sometimes social engagement can be a challenge, and of course, you're a little older than I am, so you've been, I guess, going down these back roads for quite some time, before the internet, before at least some kind of community of like-minded people was easier to achieve.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about your history of, I don't know, history of ostracism or history of social challenges and how you overcame them, or if you did.
Yeah, it really is interesting, because as you get older, you know, it takes a while for what you believe to be crystallized in your mind.
And apropos of what you're saying, perhaps the first time this happened to me, really, was when I was reading Ayn Rand's book, The Virtue of Selfishness, when I was about 23.
Something like that after I got out of college.
And I remember I had to put down that book after I read the first page and I was literally in shock because I could not believe somebody had written what I had always felt intuitively, but I had never formulated, I had never crystallized in my own mind.
And of course from that point forward it became more and more problematical To deal with people at large.
Now, not that I have any trouble dealing with people at large.
I don't. But the problems arise when you talk about anything other than the weather and the state of the roads.
When you talk about philosophy.
And that's where you find that people either don't have thoughts or the thoughts that they do have are those that have insinuated themselves into them from...
All kinds of ridiculous popular sources like the schools and the media.
And then they defend reflexively these stupid, counterproductive, generally collectivist and statist thoughts that they have.
And I don't get into arguments with people, but it makes it hard to relate to them as a person if you can't break through that shell and get them to think as a human being as opposed to a programmed automaton.
A product of some system.
So, well, it is interesting.
So, yeah, sure.
As time goes on, I've become much more selective in the people that I associate with, or for that matter, that I can associate with.
At least if I'm going to associate with them and talk about anything that's important, you know, as opposed to weather and sports, anybody can talk about that and have a good time.
But that's a complete waste of time.
I'd rather read a book.
So, yeah, it is problematical.
Stefan, you're quite correct.
I'm sorry that I'm talking to you.
You're in Toronto, aren't you?
Well, actually, I have listened to your advice most closely, and I'm actually scouting locations, so I'm out of the country at the moment.
So, yeah, thanks again for that advice.
I really appreciate that.
Are you able to reveal this undisclosed location?
Not at the moment.
I'm still sort of beating the bushes to see what opportunities are around.
But yeah, I've been quite taken to heart what you talked about in terms of rolling around.
So I am taking the family and we're having a look-see at some other places.
But yeah, I'm based in Canada at the moment for sure.
That's fantastic because I know you made the chicken run from South Africa years ago, right?
Well, yeah, my father lived in South Africa, and I visited a number of times.
But yeah, he left South Africa to go back to Ireland some years ago.
And so yeah, my mother's German, my father's Irish.
I was born in Ireland, I grew up in England, lived in Africa for a bit, came to Canada.
So I think for me, it's a little harder to say I've got roots in a place.
So I'd much rather choose where I live than just sort of have been deposited there by circumstances.
That just seems a bit inert to me.
So the financial challenges that are coming are a bit of a fire to the butt to sort of get myself out there and figure out, you know, if I could choose, which I can, where I want to live.
That just seems a little more self-defining than, oh, well, the sands of time, the tide of time washed me up here, so I guess I'll make a house.
That just doesn't seem very self-directed.
Well, you're very...
You're very fortunate not having U.S. citizenship because that means that wherever you go, you're not going to be a tax slave to the U.S. government for the rest of your life until you renounce it.
I presume most of your listeners are Americans just because it's...
I mean, no matter where they go, they're legally obligated to file that return every year.
Yeah, they, you know, the land that fought initially to the death against a 1% tax now keeps a very, very tight leash on its tax livestock, which is a pretty humiliating and difficult place to be.
And it's so hard, you know, when I say to people, you know, 100 years ago, there was no such thing as a passport.
I mean, not drive, but drive a horse, I guess.
But it is really hard for people to understand just how enclosed we've become, how penned in we've become.
And of course, what happens is people in charge always prefer for us to live in soft enclosures, right?
So if they ban us from leaving, then we get depressed and we don't want to work and we realize that we're in this kind of cage.
But they do all this soft stuff, like they'll give you patriotism and stirring flags and anthems and sports to make you feel like you want to stay.
And then there's all these soft restrictions.
Like, you can leave, but you have to come back, or you have to pay taxes, or you can't take this much money out.
So it's like, there's a very soft gate, but it's very firm.
It's pretty much insurmountable for most people.
But it's not like you're banned from leaving, but it's just so much discouraged that you feel like, okay, well, I guess I'll stay, as if it's a choice.
But I wonder what the world would look like if we had really a free market in movement as well as in, I guess, a few goods that still float around relatively in the free market.
Oh, God, exactly.
And that gate is closing all the time because, you know, even in the 60s, when I was a teenager, I remember a couple times I flew from Chicago to Washington, D.C., and I put my pistol and a rifle in the overhead compartment Of the plane.
And there I was. Just a kid with a couple of guns.
And I didn't think twice about it.
And nobody else did either.
And you know what would happen today.
You can forget about it.
No, you wouldn't be seen again this side of eternity.
No, my God.
I'd probably wind up in Guantanamo or something like that.
And, you know, it's funny.
You know, if you travel internationally and you enter the U.S., it used to be...
When you fill out that little form that you have to hand to the immigration guy, you just say, what country are you coming from?
Okay, and you put down France or whatever country you're coming from.
And then about five years ago, it started asking you, what are the last four countries you've come from?
And now on that form, it's list all countries that you have been to since you were last in the U.S., And of course, if you lie on these forms or make a mistake, you're subject to prosecution.
So, I mean, it's just one of a thousand things.
It's Kafkaesque.
And I really, one of many reasons, I think the whole system is going to come to a breaking point.
I mean, it's very much like could have happened back during the last crisis, which happened at the tail end of the 70s and the early 80s.
It really looked like it could have fallen apart at that point.
point, but now the situation is much, much more serious.
Yeah, I think that what saved the West was computers.
I mean, the amount of economic productivity that has come into the world through computers, and unfortunately the amount to which those computers have been set to the service of the state, is pretty tragic.
But I think what saved the West was the introduction of this I mean, not just personal computers, but I mean, obviously, technology as a whole, everything that relied on the microchip, boosted productivity so much.
Unfortunately, of course, over the past few decades, that hasn't translated into middle class income, which has been declining, particularly among the poorer.
I think we're good to go.
I don't think it's going to happen. I also think that even if the computer were invented now, it would not be able to spread as quickly because there's so much less free market now than there used to be.
So even if there is some amazing productive thing that's invented that nobody can predict or imagine, I'm not sure that it would have the kind of entrepreneurial spread that past technologies would have had in time to save what's coming.
So I think, yeah, I think we're definitely on the, there's no up button on the elevator anymore.
Yeah, you know, that is an interesting observation because I am optimistic about the technological future from one point of view, as we discussed earlier, but when you look at what you just said, you're also correct because if the automobile was invented today, let's suppose somehow we didn't have them, it couldn't possibly be made.
I mean, what are the chances that the EPA or whatever will let you drive around with 20 gallons of high explosive in the back of view.
And nobody would believe that on a roadway people could drive 60 miles an hour a couple feet from each other and not crash into each other.
They'd never allow the automobile to be made today.
No, and they would never allow you to drill for the oil necessary to power it or transport it or whatever.
And I mean, some of this is good.
I was just at a restaurant last night and I saw a little girl.
She had, you know, she had a bike out front and she had a helmet and she had elbow guards and knee guards.
And I don't know, I'm sure it was the case for you.
But when I was a kid, I mean, none of that stuff was around.
You just prayed you didn't get a concussion.
I think our focus on safety has been great in some ways, but it's become pretty crippling economically for adults.
So, you know, it's one thing for kids to put them in this suit of armor when they go bicycling, but it's another thing to restrict just about everything adults do because there may be possible negative consequences to some species or some individual somewhere.
So, but that having been said, I mean, the collapse of the Roman Empire produced a fair amount of economic and civil freedom in Europe relative.
I mean, so many of the serfs were drafted into 20 years of military service in the Roman Empire.
And when that ended, okay, you had serfdom, but you didn't have 20 years of military service, which would most likely get you killed or you'd retire with horrible wounds to live out a short life with 20 acres.
So, you know, when these things collapse, there is an extension of liberty that happens, which, you know, given the technology and given what's possible now, I think will probably produce a renaissance or a resurgence of the entrepreneurial.
But I don't think that's going to happen before the crash.
And I think people have to go through that so that it's like the drunk hitting bottom.
bottom.
He has to go through that.
So he just stops hitting the bottle once and for all.
And I think we kind of have to go through that.
It's going to be pretty ugly.
But it will be, you know, like how Europe had to go through two world wars to stop making war on each other.
I think that's just unfortunately, if you don't learn through reason, you have to learn through bitter experience.
That just seems to be where we're heading, I think.
I'm not even sure they've learned that lesson yet.
Because what happened in the Balkans after the collapse of Yugoslavia?
I mean, you'd think that the people in the Balkans would have learned, but they didn't.
So...
They'll still fight proxy wars, just as Russia and America did during the Cold War, but not those direct, you know, slaughter a fifth of your population kind of wars.
But you know, even with the state having put so many constraints on doing anything, I still like to be optimistic, notwithstanding the fact that I have a very gloomy scenario for the next generation.
But cautiously optimistic, because I think the computer revolution, that the state is controlling as much as they can, and they're using it against the citizenry to the greatest extent possible.
But the bright side I look at is that any group of teenagers today can turn into hackers that could actually destroy the Most of the world's militaries who rely on centralized computers at this point.
So this is kind of the bright side.
Yeah, and certainly if you look at things like WikiLeaks, this is the first time in history where propaganda has a noble and effective enemy in the internet.
And I think that is going to be very interesting to see.
It's very hard to hide what is actually going on in the war zones and so on.
And the last time this happened, to some degree at least, was the nightly news broadcasts from Vietnam with Walter Cronkite, where people actually got to see what war looked like.
But yeah, the technology, it is a race between the fascistic aspects of it that are so loved by those in power and the anarchic aspects that expose those in power so often that it's, you know, we don't live in that kind of monoculture of propaganda that you and I grew up in where you really only ever got one side of the story.
And now there's really a multiplicity, and I think that will be to the advantage of freedom in the future.
But that's not going to do much to avert what's coming financially in the short run.
But I think it is going to give people a pretty...
Yes, that's right.
And at least cyclically, I think the story is going to have a happy ending.
But what most people, even that think about these big themes and kind of the ebbs and flows of history and so forth, forget is that you want to make sure that you personally and your family...
Personally, are not adversely affected by these things.
And I don't think even people that watch these things and pay attention to what's happening are not putting themselves in a position financially and physically to not be adversely affected by these changes.
It's a pity.
Yeah, Sam, one of my listeners, it's an extreme metaphor, but I thought it was a good analogy.
He was saying that, are we sort of like Jews in Germany in the 1920s and the 1930s, where progressive waves of danger signs kept accumulating, but so many people are just like, oh, you know, it's going to be okay, we'll cross our fingers, this will pass.
And, you know, sometimes that is the case.
Sometimes that is the case, but sometimes, and I think this is one of those times, it's really not.
So it's an extreme metaphor, but it is something to be reminded that the mathematical signs are all very clear.
That which cannot continue will not continue.
And so I certainly appreciate the work that you're doing.
If you want to just make sure you mention your website so that people can visit you and sign up for your excellent newsletter and get, I think the wealth of the information that you provide is great.
Is it caseyresearch.com?
Yeah, it's caseyresearch.com and we have three publications, but The one that I do weekly is called Conversations with Casey, which we cover a different subject every week, so people can sign up for that.
It's free and we just send it out to you every week.
So I'd urge people to do that because I want to, at least indirectly, get on side with more people that see the world The same way, because if we don't hang together, we will hang separately.
Absolutely. Well, listen, Doug, thank you so much.
It's always a great, great pleasure to talk to you.
I really do appreciate your time, and hopefully we can do it again.
Thanks, Stefan. Same to you.
Thanks so much. All the best.
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