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April 27, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:18
1898 Adam vs the Man Number 12 - With Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio!
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Oh my god, shocking news today!
The biggest economy in the world will no longer be the United States!
That's right, according to the IMF, we will soon be overtaken by the online porn industry.
Or was that China?
Either way, we're screwed, but you don't have to be.
Stefan Molyneux joins us to expose the gun in the room behind soaring gold and rising China.
Students for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty are in studio to explain how the current education paradigm encourages violence.
And I'll tell you why when it comes to youth violence.
It's time to stop gawking and start thinking.
You're watching Adam vs.
is the man.
If you're an American whose self-worth is based on comparing the state of our nation's economy to the economies of other countries, then it's probably time to start popping some preemptive Prozac.
Things are getting worse much faster than most American economists previously expected.
It made headlines last year when Goldman Sachs and the World Bank declared that China would surpass the United States as the world's largest economy by 2025.
As of today, however, those estimates are being revised.
According to the latest report from the International Monetary Fund, China will surpass the United States in 2016, just five years from now.
To give some more historical perspective, The US economy was three times the size of China's just a decade ago.
China passed Japan as the second largest economy in 2009, and the United States has been the largest in the world since it took that position from Great Britain in the 1890s.
China's population is about 1.3 billion, and ours is about 310 million.
They have over four times as many people.
So shouldn't their economy be bigger than ours if the average American isn't producing over four times the productive output of the average Chinese person?
So, why have previous estimates been so off base?
The surge in productivity in China has not been unexpected, as their economy has been, in many ways, been more free market than ours.
From 1949 to 1978, China had a centrally planned economy, but since then has been learning and applying the lessons of the free market.
Part of the current dispute as to when exactly China will surpass the United States has to do with how size is being measured.
How do you measure the size of an economy anyway?
According to MarketWatch, the previously used measure of gross domestic product compared by current exchange rates is largely meaningless.
The International Monetary Fund's new way of measuring uses purchasing power parodies.
That is, comparing what people actually earn and spend in real terms in their domestic economies.
But who cares? And why should you?
In terms of who has the biggest economy, You shouldn't.
What we call economies are artificial measurements of trade activity within an arbitrary geographic area defined by government boundaries.
Basically, anyone saying, ah, the American economy is the best in the world!
We rule because we have the highest GDP! Might as well be saying, look, when we add up the economic activity in our country, it's more than the economic activity in any other country on the planet, including the Vatican.
So, you might say, well, per capita GDP is more important.
And to the individual capita, it certainly is.
Comparing national economies means that those of us grouped together under a single system of government are added up, And measured against those under a different system of government.
So it's not so much the measures that matter as how they change over time and the economic reality that you face as an individual no matter what country you live in.
The change over time that we see in comparing the U.S. to China is very simple.
More freedom leads to greater prosperity.
The Chinese have been demonstrating that.
The lesson for us could have been taken from Chinese history decades ago.
Or from Russian history.
Controlled economies lead to less productivity, lower quality of life, less personal prosperity.
Remember the old joke about two old ladies standing in a bread line in communist Russia when people were starving?
One turns to the other and says, at least we don't live in America.
In America, the government doesn't even make bread for its people.
Well, these days, the American government is so kind as to provide us with medical care, a retirement plan, and an education.
So you see, the more the government provides, the worse the services get.
I wouldn't be bothered by China overtaking America if it was simply a product of them adopting free market policies and overtaking our aggregate numbers.
They have more people than us, after all.
The fact that for so long, since the 1890s, when we overtook Great Britain as the world's economic power we have dominated, is a testament to the superiority of the free market.
As is the fact that we are losing our position so rapidly relative to China is a testament to how much we have abandoned free market principles.
Only a decade ago, our economy was three times the size of China's.
We have lost our position in the world precisely because our government now controls every aspect of the economy.
The idea is quite simple.
When people are free to choose how to allocate their time and energy to best serve their needs without the violent interruption of government, they will do so.
And the wisdom of the entire population is harnessed to direct resources to meet human needs.
When people are controlled by the government as to how to allocate their time and energy, the collective wisdom is abandoned for the decisions of the central planners.
Sometimes they take the form of central bankers, economists, or politicians, but their policies are always backed up by the violent coercion of government and only serve to divert productive resources away from meeting human needs to holding the guns and paperwork of control and manipulation.
Joining me now to expose the gun in the room behind the economic policies we see responsible for America's waning economic power is Stefan Molyneux, host of FreedomainRadio.com.
Stefan, thanks so much for joining us this evening.
Thank you, Adam. So, what does the slowdown that we're seeing now in foreign purchases of securities and U.S. dollars mean for the American economy?
I think it's more than an economic question, Adam.
I think it really is the end of an era.
You could really divide American history into pre-central banking, pre-government-controlled banking, and post-government-controlled banking.
Pre-government-controlled banking, it was largely a republic, a government designed to protect persons and property.
Afterwards, you have a bribeocracy, wherein governments can borrow and print money to buy votes from the populace.
That whole gravy train, that whole scam, that whole Ponzi scheme.
It's currently coming to an end.
When people stop buying U.S. securities, the government can no longer bribe people through future debts and bribe people through printing money.
And so really the whole era of this pillaging, this uncivil war of economics between the peoples of the United States is going to come to an end, and it's going to be a fundamental reshaping of society.
So what's changed recently?
Is there some new phenomenon that explains this, or is this sort of the inevitable consequence of the system as it was set up?
Well, I believe it is an inevitable consequence.
If you look throughout history, exactly the same thing occurred in the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire, when it was aggressive and violent and expansionist, it began to get a dependent class of welfare citizens dependent upon bread and circuses, or food stamps and reality television, as we'd call it now.
And they debased the currency.
They began mixing more and more junk into the gold coins until at the end of the Roman Empire you had only a few percentage points of gold left in the gold coins.
You had hyperinflation. You had all of these sorts of problems.
This, I believe, is the inevitable consequences of this kind of statism.
But what's happened more recently, Adam, There's just been a huge explosion in U.S. debt.
So the American dollar has lost, in less than a decade, it's gone down 40% against the euro.
And why is that? Because the U.S. debt has doubled.
Fully 60% of the money currently available to the U.S. economy has been created by the Federal Reserve over the past four years out of thin air.
The government is explicitly doing what is called monetizing the debt, which means that they're going to try and pay off the debt by printing money.
What that means is everybody who holds U.S. dollar in securities or in treasury bonds or as a debt is terrified that they're going to be hit with inflation, that each dollar is going to be worth less that they get paid back in.
And I think the only thing that's preventing a current route on the dollar is the fact that particularly the Chinese and the Japanese don't want to stop that because they hold so much foreign debt.
Okay, so let's get back to the situation that the average Americans are facing here, because there are a lot of Americans that are facing a massive amount of personal debt, people whose homes are underwater, unemployed.
I mean, the problems go on and on.
What is it that actually stops us from monetizing our own debt?
I'd love to try that.
I'd love to rack up $25,000 in credit card bills and just tell the credit card, you know what, I'm just going to monetize my debt.
I'm just going to print you some certificates.
I'll pay you in the future.
But for now, we're just going to monetize it.
I'm just going to print something, and we're going to make the debt go away.
Yeah, well, I mean, of course, if that were the reality, then very few people would lend to you because you don't have the right to tax others.
When you print money or when you lend money to other governments, or when you borrow money from other governments, what you're going to pay them back with is the future productivity of your citizens.
The selling of the unborn is something fundamental to the bribe-ocracy of modern democracies.
You are borrowing against the future productive tax receipts of largely unborn citizens.
It's the worst form of child labor you can imagine.
Wait, wait, but you would think...
You would think that this means that there'd be an incredible demand for labor, for employment in this country.
Why are we having these unemployment issues if we're incurring all this debt and people are demanding labor or productivity from us?
Right. Well, I mean, the fundamental issue with unemployment is that in most instances, for most Americans, and this is true throughout most of the West, the reason that people are unemployed is it's illegal for them to get a job.
What do you mean, it's illegal for them to get a job?
It's illegal to get a job. So, for instance, in Florida, you have to go through six years of training and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to be an interior designer, because we all know that the position of a throw pillow is fundamental to human safety.
And if you want to open up just about any kind of business, you have ridiculous amounts of paperwork to go through.
There are licenses for hair braiding, for hair cutting.
There is so many laws and restrictions and controls if you want to work for less than minimum wage.
You're not allowed to do so.
So you're saying basically that it's illegal for people to get a job in the sense that if they were to follow all the paperwork and follow all the regulations and pay all the fees and fines, their jobs that they would have just simply disappear because they're not economically viable anymore.
Yeah, or if you want to go and just work for someone in a voluntary way to agreements that both of you are happy with and the government doesn't happen to like it, then you are out of luck and you may be arrested and you may be fined.
So there's a lot of fear out there.
People who are desperate for jobs simply can't get them because there are so many restrictions upon the free movement of labor and capital that you're just not allowed to.
Alright, so you're coming to us from Canada.
You've got a lot of national pride up there.
How's Canada ranking in terms of the international ranking of economies these days?
We have our issues, considerable issues.
The national debt here is about $16,000, $17,000 per person.
It dipped in the late 90s, and now it's back roaring up again, of course, as all the boomers in Canada.
Wait, wait, so you're saying, as an American, I can't escape $25,000 worth of debt.
All I have to do is move to Canada.
Yes, you can cut down your debt by moving to Canada, but of course the restriction of getting across the border and staying legally is also a significant challenge.
Though we are waiting for lots of Americans to come up to do our gardening because we feel that that really is the next step in human migration.
Okay, so should we be comparing national economies globally at all at this point?
You know, I think there's some value in that.
I mean, if my lawn isn't doing well and my neighbor's lawn is doing well, I might want to ask what manure he's spreading on it.
And if some economy is doing well and the American economy isn't, I think it's instructive to look at the differences.
Obviously, China has a, you know, supposed to be this big communist dictatorship.
It has a smaller It has smaller control over its economy, the government has, than the British government does.
So I think it's worth looking at what China has done to achieve this 8%, 10%, 12% growth per year, because if you could get something like that back to the West, then we wouldn't face this inevitable decline.
Well, I would hope that our government is looking at the lawn here in the United States and going, geez, well, maybe it shouldn't be completely covered in manure if we want to get the kind of results that we're seeing in China.
Anyway, Stefan, thank you so much. Or at least it shouldn't currently be on fire.
All right. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you. That was Stefan Molyneux, host of freedomainradio.com.
When we come back, we'll show you that explosive footage from the beatdown in the Maryland McDonald's and explain the connection between that and the love triangle murder in Florida.
We'll also tell you how Senator McCain took a lesson from Obama in Libya.
Apparently, hope is a strategy. - The fear mongering used by politicians hope is a strategy. - The fear mongering used by The fear-mongering used by politicians.
Who makes decisions?
Continuable breakthrough has already been made.
Who can you trust?
No one who is imbued with a global missionary Z. Where are we heading?
State-controlled capitalism is called fascism.
When nobody dares to ask, we do.
RT question more.
Let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right here in America.
Let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right here in America.
I think Barack Obama is beatable in 2012.
Whenever government says they're going to keep you safe, get ready because you're going to lose your freedoms.
Look at where we are today.
We're in war in three different countries, and yet we can't solve our own problems here at home.
The internal military mechanisms do not work to bring justice or accountability.
I have every right to know what my government's doing.
You want to know why? I pay taxes.
I would characterize Obama as a charismatic version of American exceptionalism.
Millions of Americans were treated to another spectacle of petty violence last week when a transgender woman was severely beaten at a mcdonald's in rosedale maryland An employee who has since been fired caught most of the attack on video.
The woman was reportedly attacked because a teen said that she was a man using the women's restroom.
One of the attackers claimed the fight was initiated because the victim had hit on her boyfriend.
Regardless of the motivation, the tragedy is compounded by the failure of others on the scene.
McDonald's employees laughed and made the video you just saw.
Someone told the attackers, age 14 and 18, who have now been charged, to leave the scene in order to avoid arrest.
Physical intervention came from someone in the restaurant, but much too late for the victim.
So, the only logical conclusion is that eating at McDonald's will cause severe beatings.
Just kidding. The only thing you have to worry about from eating at Mickey D's is hormone and steroid stuffed meat, genetically modified frankenfood, preservers that can kill you, coronary heart disease, lowered libido, and generally becoming a big fat ass.
But there is a much more serious takeaway here.
The existing social paradigm tolerates and even encourages the use of violence to control the behavior of others.
In a much more gruesome example of teen violence, many Americans have also been watching the story of the love triangle murder in Florida unfold, in which a 15-year-old boy was killed by the boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend.
It's not like they just murdered him.
They tortured him. They tortured him and then torched his body.
It's very upsetting.
When we live under a government premised on violence and coercion, and children are raised under an educational system based on threats, should we be surprised that violence becomes acceptable to teens?
What example are we setting?
While many have spoken out about the failure of parenting in terms of lacking discipline, teaching by example is far more powerful.
I hope they get the electric chair and they burn.
Burn! And we can all sit and watch them like they didn't know.
Vengeance. More violence?
With stories like these, you always hear something from the victim's relatives, and this kind of vitriol is tragically common, but understandable.
The problem is that the message we are sending to children is, if someone does something bad, it's okay to kill them, then we are planting the seeds for the next act of violence in our attempt to resolve one that just happened.
Violence begets violence, and the example we set with our criminal punishment, not justice system, and our education system teach a very powerful lesson.
Joining me now to discuss the impact of these examples and the current educational paradigm on our generation are Blaine Bennett of Students for Liberty and Andrew Sharp of Young Americans for Liberty.
Thank you so much for joining us.
We've been following these stories.
I mean, it seems like they're hard to avoid when you see the nation poring over the details of some of these gruesome, hopefully, freak acts of violence.
Is there any lesson you guys take away from this?
I think a big lesson that we need to learn is that our government is coercive and does do a lot of violence on its own.
And you were talking about teaching and leading by example.
I think when kids look at the news and they see drone strikes in Pakistan, they see kill team photos in Afghanistan of people glorifying violence, And we glorify the military without questioning and then we see acts like that.
Exactly. We should not be surprised that we as a culture look to violence as a completely acceptable way to resolve issues.
And it's these kinds of videos that you look at and you really see it.
It's good that we have the evidence and we have the videos.
Maybe people will look at them and start to realize that We need to look at our culture of violence.
People try to look at the media.
It's not the media's fault.
I would point to our government of coercion and of violence that spreads this stuff and says, we are the arbiters of morality and we're saying this is okay.
And that's the ultimate leadership that people look to.
You know, and I would say that there's a huge difference between revenge and justice.
And a lot of times what's being sought after, things that happen like that, is revenge, not justice.
Which, incidentally, was part of the motivation, at least as we understand it now, for the love triangle murder in Florida, right?
And then we see the parent turning around and saying, well, here's another act of violence.
But let's go back fundamentally to the way that children are first introduced to the school system in this country.
From kindergarten, it's you have to do this or you will be punished.
Do you think that has an effect on our generation now coming up, seeing all these acts of violence by our government?
I would say more so than, except in times of massive war, ever in human history, we have coercion by government affecting us in our daily lives.
How do you think that affects people in our generation?
Well, I think through the school system and a lot of times through parenting, children are raised through the fear of punishment.
So, a lot of young people, especially that I knew growing up, were good because they were too scared to be bad or too scared to mess up.
And that comes, I think, both from parents and from the education system of You know, instead of letting young people make their own choices and face the consequences, they're scared to make wrong choices or, you know, they know that they're going to get punished and they don't care, I guess. Well, tell us a little bit about your personal story, because you didn't come to this perspective until you had gotten past the coercive high school, at least, level education system in a college.
Tell us about that. Well, I mean, I guess I really didn't have any political leanings that I knew of, or philosophical for the matter, until I got to college and was exposed to libertarianism through Students for Liberty.
And that for me was just this realization and awakening of a holistic thought process that says violence against another person is wrong and coercion is wrong.
So when you have that realization, and then you go, wait a second, I just spent The last 12 years of my education in a system where I was there because I was being forced to, I mean, is there some, you feel any resentment?
I mean, Andrew, you went to, let's not say public schools, let's be honest in our terminology here, government-funded, government-run schools.
There's got to be some resentment when you come out of that and go, wait a second, Absolutely, and even our two organizations work on college campuses, and you can't say that those are necessarily compulsory, but even today, I mean, it's part of our culture that you have to go to college if you want to go anywhere in life, and it's this idea that you can't go anywhere in the world without being forced through this rigmarole that we've already set up that has a definite beginning and a definite end, and you have to stick to that.
You have to obey that.
And like Blaine said, it's the fear of mistakes.
I mean, you have to be ready to make mistakes in order to learn, in order to be creative.
And we teach in our schools, our kids, that making a mistake is the worst thing that you could ever possibly do.
And then we force them to go anyway and say, not only is it bad to make mistakes, but we're going to force you to live up to our standards every day of your life and, you know, go to periods and take certain subjects.
I think that's definitely a major cause of this sort of mentality of you just want to break out.
You just want to free your mind and attack because your creativity has been stifled.
You have all that resentment built up from being forced in this coercive system your whole life.
Absolutely. Well, people are so upset at students dropping out of high school, but students have no real choice as to what they're going to learn in a government school.
So, I mean, they're taking social studies and history classes, whereas maybe their love is in English or in literature or something like that.
And so I think that's where a lot of resentment for the school system comes from is this lack of choice and lack of being able to guide your own life when you're capable of thinking for yourself.
Well, I love how our politicians talk about this.
In New Mexico, it's a big problem with the dropout rates and poor graduation rates.
And they're all talking about this like, it couldn't possibly be that our system is screwed up.
It must be that kids are getting dumber.
It couldn't possibly be the system that we're setting them up for.
Human nature is just fundamentally changed and we have to fight it with more coercion.
But I get the feeling that, especially in New Mexico, if you're facing a very limited set of economic opportunities and having a high school degree or not doesn't really get you to the college level, it's not going to get you to the college level anyways.
It seems like dropping out and joining the workforce and getting some valuable skills that are actually going to be relevant would be a rational decision.
Yeah, it's the old saying of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.
And that's what we're doing. We're throwing more money at schools.
We're trying to build more schools. We're trying to get more teachers in the same system and expecting different results.
Okay, so what's the alternative we're looking for here?
Well, I mean, I think you have to have choice.
And I guess if we're going to go about it incrementally, first the school system has to recognize how young people today learn differently.
We have different parameters.
We have the internet to look things up.
And, you know, instead of spending so much time memorizing facts and things like that, when those are so accessible...
We all have a perfect memory now.
Well, exactly. I mean, we can access that information within seconds.
So why not instead focus on Our analytical processes and how we think and stuff like that instead of trying to force down our throats what to think.
Andrew, last word? I would say traditional schools are becoming obsolete.
I mean, the internet has all the information you could ever want.
All you need is a little bit of guidance from maybe your parents or your community to go out and learn it on your own.
And kids are learning so much more from interacting with the rest of the world online than being forced into a classroom.
Anyways, thank you so much for joining us.
Really appreciate the perspective that you guys bring to this conversation.
Thank you.
That was Blaine Bennett of Students for Liberty and Andrew Sharp of Young Americans for Liberty.
In other news, Senator John McCain was in Libya this weekend supporting the rebels who really hate Qaddafi.
Look, these people hate Qaddafi.
That's why I think there's still a hope and a chance he may crumble from within.
But the longer we delay, the more likely it is there's a stalemate.
And if you're worried about al-Qaeda entering into this fight, nothing would bring al-Qaeda in more rapidly and more dangerously than a stalemate.
Are you frightened to death of Al-Qaeda too?
Please forget that I'm taking their side in the fight and let's spend more money on welfare!
I mean the military-industrial complex!
I mean on keeping America safe from terrorism!
Funny to hear McCain relying on hope when, what was it he said about Obama?
Oh yeah, hope is not a strategy.
No, but fear-mongering is still a strategy for McCain's brand of big government welfare.
But there are those of us within the GOP who don't think this kind of kinetic military action is a good idea.
Lots of us, in fact.
We are the ones resisting tyrants like McCain and Obama and all real threats to our freedoms here at home.
The liberation forces, as I like to call them, That's what I'd like to call us to.
That's our show. Thanks for tuning in to Adam vs.
The Man. Please check out our awesome new website at adamvsttheman.com to vote on guests and topics and find me on Facebook and Twitter.
You can catch this broadcast live as it airs at rt.com slash USA and on YouTube.
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