Stefan Molyneux, host of of Freedomain Radio and Jeffrey Tucker, editorial vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a think tank that espouses the Austrian School of economics, discuss current events. The anemic economic recovery, modern policing, the boredom of elections, and the hope of the internet.
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| So, how have you been? | |
| How was your week? Well, it was fine. | |
| It's been crazy. It's been very busy. | |
| You know, and I'm doing my best to kind of ignore all this insane Bin Laden stuff. | |
| You know, it's just theater and people fall for it every time. | |
| Yeah, it really is. It really is interesting to see the spectrum of responses that has been going on in the US, of course, and across the world from people who are sad but satisfied and the people who are elated and bloodthirsty and people who are skeptical and conspiratorial and just about every shade of human response in between. | |
| It's been really quite fascinating. | |
| There are certain events that You know, when you're in combat at night, you shoot up these flares or you have these flashes that give you an image of where the battlefield is and it's almost like these galvanizing events are like a big photo flash that illuminates the culture and where people are. | |
| And the New York Times had a very nice poll, a diagrammatic poll that showed where people really are on all this stuff. | |
| And it was very alarming to see it. | |
| I would say probably four out of five people had this kind of bloodthirsty attitude. | |
| It's almost like they're reviewing the news, like you would review a movie or something like that. | |
| Yeah, it had a lot of action and kept me interested. | |
| And yeah, it's great. | |
| And it makes me very optimistic and happy. | |
| This is, I guess, what people figure they're paying for when they pay their taxes. | |
| Some sort of happy, thrilling action. | |
| They're like, let's get the bad guy. | |
| The analysis is so simple-minded. | |
| The idea that one guy with a beard is somehow Killing him is going to make the world a safer place as if all of our problems with terrorism are rooted in one person. | |
| I guess it's the Hitler model of foreign politics or something. | |
| Yeah, and it's one causeless person. | |
| It's one person who Through some bizarre combination of ideology and brain damage and possession by some demon, woke up one day and just decided to attack the United States for no reason in particular whatsoever. | |
| It's that causeless attack. | |
| You know, here I was at home, never bothered anybody, and these guys come in through the window and set fire in my house. | |
| And that is, that causeless evil is something that It's very hard for people to penetrate, to look for the backstory, because then it feels like if you look for the root of evil or if you look for the causes of evil, that you're somehow saying that evil is okay or that evil is explained and therefore it's not evil. | |
| Which is crazy. It's like saying, if I look for the cause for cancer to actually cure it, I'm somehow pro-cancer. | |
| No, no, no, no. If you're actually looking for the cause of cancer to cure it, then you're very anti-cancer in a very much more effective way than the people who just say cancer has no cause and can't be cured. | |
| Right. Well, Stephanie, I don't know, being from Canada, I noticed a lot of people outside of the U.S. don't entirely understand just how completely naive Americans are about American foreign policy. | |
| I mean, most Americans just have no idea what we're doing around the world or that we're doing anything. | |
| I mean, most Americans have this conception of American life as being backyard barbecues and And, you know, baseball games with the kids and the local wonderful schools, and they don't have any sense of the U.S. as being an empire. | |
| So, when things like this happen, they don't have even the right data to connect cause and effect here at all. | |
| Well, of course, yeah. I mean, they get this comic book history. | |
| America saved the West from the Kaiser in the First World War. | |
| America tried its very best to bring about a reconciliatory peace at Versailles, but unfortunately it was thwarted by all the old world skullduggery of perfidious Albion and France and all of the other allies. | |
| And then America, you know, had this booming economy and then had a depression when you brought in benevolent socialism. | |
| And then America once more suited up to save the world from fascism in the Second World War and then suited up again to save the world from communism. | |
| So it all seems reactive and it all is comic book black and white. | |
| We good, they evil, and we have spent blood and treasure to keep the world free. | |
| I mean, the number of people who write to me... | |
| Who say, you only get to say what you're saying because other people have died to protect your freedoms. | |
| If you believe all of that, and if all of that is compelling enough a narrative, then looking for the bad side of America is like looking for the good side of Hitler. | |
| So he was a vegetarian, but he still killed 40 million people. | |
| So I think that narrative is so compelling to people that you almost can't conceive of stepping outside of it. | |
| No, and people don't even want to think about anything else. | |
| They can't even conceive of it. | |
| You can try this, actually, at a dinner party or a social group or whatever. | |
| Just kind of read the headlines of the morning and mention in passing, for example, the wedding party that the U.S. bombed in Afghanistan yesterday and killed 13 people, or the marketplace that got hit by bombs in Iraq last week, and just mention it in passing. | |
| It was really tragic to see all those innocent people killed. | |
| By the U.S. military in Afghanistan. | |
| And I tell you, if you say anything like that to any Americans, the bourgeoisie, they will just shut down. | |
| I mean, they're just speechless and shocked and quickly change the subject because it's like you're saying something that's almost like a taboo subject in the U.S. It is a taboo subject. | |
| But the narrative, the beauty of this kind of narrative is that if we are acting with the noblest and purest Of intentions. | |
| And if we are fighting a desperate and bottomless evil, then it's evil's fault if there's collateral damage. | |
| You know, it's like if the cop has to try and shoot someone who's going to push a nuclear weapon and accidentally shoots two people before he... | |
| then it's the guy's fault who's pushing the nuclear weapon. | |
| So if our virtue is so great and their evil is so great and our virtue is so reactive and their evil is so causeless, Then the narrative can absorb those bullets by saying, well, it just bounces right back and saying, well, you know, I mean, if they hadn't attacked us, then we wouldn't be over there. | |
| And this, you know, and of course, they don't have uniforms. | |
| And so they are blending in with the citizenry. | |
| And therefore, if there's collateral damage, it's The guy's fault who aren't putting big X's on them and going up against the biggest military the world has ever seen. | |
| Of course, which is exactly... | |
| It's not what... Americans certainly didn't do that in the revolution. | |
| They didn't wear uniforms. They did exactly what the insurgents are doing. | |
| It's got a long and noble tradition. | |
| When you're outflanked by a bigger military, you go off the grid as far as uniforms go. | |
| It's so embedded in our history and yet we don't understand it. | |
| But you're so right. I mean, the first step is, first of all, to deny the facts. | |
| Well, we don't kill innocent people. | |
| Well, yes, we do. I mean, here's the report, you know. | |
| Oh, well, that is completely justified in that case, for all the reasons you say, you know. | |
| In fact, there's hardly any evil that Americans can't justify based on our foreign policy priorities. | |
| There's a strange impulse to want to trust the government, you know, especially when they give us a good nationalistic show. | |
| Well, yes, but I would also say that trust in the government, I think, is the sort of shadow that's cast by the big statue of government power that is portrayed by the media, particularly on television. | |
| I read an analysis many years ago about somebody who was looking at cop shows. | |
| And they said, you know, the cops don't make mistakes. | |
| They don't arrest the wrong person. | |
| They don't send the wrong person to jail. | |
| You see the guy at the beginning committing the crime and then the cops go and question him and he's all like sweaty and, you know, twitchy and obviously guilty and they just have to find that one thing to put him away and then justice is served and the bad guy is put away. | |
| Now that's changed a little bit, I think, over the past five to ten years with shows like The Wire and other kinds of shows where the cops are portrayed as, you know, Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, went to criminal, decided to go to the criminal with the blue suit on instead. | |
| And so I think there's some change, but the amount of propaganda that people absorb about the noble, the heroes, the firefighters, the cops, the thin blue line, the dedicated guys who have sacrificed apparently every single marriage. | |
| All cops have to be drunk and divorced and all that kind of stuff. | |
| They've sacrificed their personal lives. | |
| Just to keep us safe because they're that noble and heroic. | |
| It's really hard for people to think outside of that. | |
| I mean, it's as foundational and compelling as the Soviet narrative of thin, mustachioed, evil, hook-hand capitalists eating the children of the poor and so on. | |
| It's really hard to break out of that stuff. | |
| And yet in the concrete, in people's real lives, they try to avoid the police. | |
| You know, they're speeding along the road and when they see the police, they slow down and go, oh good, the cop didn't catch me. | |
| Oh yeah. I always look at, you know, you see some cop along the road, he's pulled someone over. | |
| I almost always get the feeling that it's like, I feel like an antelope, you know, and the lion took down some other antelope and it's like, I really don't want to watch. | |
| I'm glad it wasn't me. I'm sorry, another antelope got eaten, but at least I can keep moving. | |
| It's funny, yeah. And people are very resentful when they get a ticket. | |
| They think, I don't know why this guy isn't going out catching real criminals. | |
| Why is he bothering me? | |
| Well, I'm sorry, this is their job. | |
| You know, my son goes to school with the... | |
| Well, one of his teachers is the wife of a cop. | |
| And she's bragging to all the kids. | |
| Wow, my husband yesterday arrested, you know, like 10, 15 drunk drivers. | |
| You know, it was just fantastic. | |
| It exceeded the quota. | |
| It's just so great. | |
| And, you know, he'll ask, were they actually any danger? | |
| Because the levels are very low here. | |
| Oh, well, I mean, well, the point is to catch people. | |
| It's not to actually, like... | |
| To make the place more safe, that's not the goal at all. | |
| The goal is to just kind of catch people in the web. | |
| I mean, this is like the business of being a policeman, is just to harass people all the time. | |
| And that's the main business of a policeman most of the time. | |
| It's not to catch actually dangerous criminals. | |
| I remember, let me tell you a quick story, Stephan, that permanently affected me, my attitude towards policemen. | |
| I got a phone call in the middle of the night, about 3 a.m., And they said, it was the police, they said, apparently somebody was broken into the Mises Institute. | |
| So, you know, I put on my house shoes and a robe or whatever, and I came up here, drove up to the office, and they said, well, it's apparently... | |
| It was a crime-fighting robe, I would assume. | |
| Yeah, no, right. Bulletproof with bat wings and lasers. | |
| Okay. So I was looking a little bit shabby, you know, really just very vulnerable. | |
| And I met the cop at the front door, and he said, well, the radar says that he's on the third floor. | |
| So I walked into the building with him, and he said, well, after you. | |
| Is it after you? Yeah, but he didn't ask me. | |
| I'm sitting here in this robe and these house shoes. | |
| You've got the bulletproof vest on and all the guns. | |
| Well, no, he's letting me go. | |
| Sorry, I also just have to confirm that you sleep in a bow tie as well. | |
| That was absolutely part of what was going on with the ensemble, I would assume. | |
| And again, it's rotating lasers and bulletproof and all that. | |
| It'll make you fly. So there's only one inches to the third floor, and so we walked. | |
| I'm still leading the way, turning on the lights as we go. | |
| It's pitch black. I was pretty scared, actually, because they said he's on the third floor. | |
| We get up to the stairs, the landing of the stairs. | |
| He's still making me go first. | |
| I get up to the top of the stairs. | |
| The door's shut, and I think, at this point, the cop is going to do the cop-like thing, right? | |
| He's going to jump in front of me, open the door, bring out his gun, and do that side-to-side thing they do on the television. | |
| No! I opened the door. | |
| I looked at him. He looked at me, and he's going... | |
| What's taking you so long? | |
| Well, sure enough, you know, I'm the one that's supposed to go in, you know? | |
| And I opened the door, turned on the light. | |
| It turned out there was no danger. | |
| My heart was beating like crazy. | |
| There was no danger. There was nobody there? | |
| Or was it just the ghost of Keene's doing some income redistribution? | |
| Well, a box had fallen down or something like that and caused the radar to go off. | |
| But, you know, I thought it was interesting. | |
| I learned a lesson from that. | |
| I thought, you know, from his point of view, he's more valuable than I am. | |
| You know, he's the cop protecting the public, you know? | |
| Yeah, but it's, you know, it's sort of analogous to, you get some horrible appendicitis or whatever, and you go into the surgery, and the guy hands you the knife and says, okay, listen, I'm just going to be having a smoke over here. | |
| You know, try not to grimace and please clean it up when you're done, if that's all right. | |
| I think this must be just police policy. | |
| I mean, they just, they consider themselves very valuable. | |
| Anytime they go into a scene of a crime, you're always protecting themselves, you know? | |
| First, that's the most important goal. | |
| And similarly, when a cop dies, there's got to be wailing and gnashing of teeth, and everybody's got to act like some national treasure has gone, passed from among us. | |
| Whereas the rest of us, we die all the time, and it never makes headlines. | |
| It's very strange, the way the state insists that we value the state. | |
| All the time. And we constantly keep in mind how valuable the state is. | |
| And don't you think that's what this Bin Laden thing is all about? | |
| A chance to remind us of just how valuable they are. | |
| You know, I mean, that without them, my God, there would be terrible terrorists running all over the world. | |
| Yeah, for sure. For sure. | |
| I think it's to... | |
| It's both to remind us or to get us to believe that they're doing great things and protecting us. | |
| But I think there's something also quite sinister in what happened with Bin Laden. | |
| I mean, I have no doubt that they could have taken him. | |
| I mean, why not just shoot a gas in to knock everybody out? | |
| Why not just, you know, I mean, at first they said he was armed and using his wife as a human shield. | |
| And you just know that's not true. | |
| I mean, it's like, yes, Pat Tillman was in there and was, you know, protecting him and... | |
| And so now it turns out that he wasn't armed and he wasn't using his wife as a human shield. | |
| His wife wasn't even shot. It was somebody else's wife. | |
| They got the wrong son that they reported on. | |
| So it was all pretty, pretty sketchy. | |
| And I'm sure that, you know, if the facts ever come out, it's going to be very different. | |
| But I mean, it is an out and out hit. | |
| And I think that there's something very sinister. | |
| It's very similar to what happened with Julian Assange when they were all baying like The hounds of the Baskerville for his blood, for his head to be on a stake. | |
| I mean, it's basically showing that the people on top have such homicidal tendencies that, you know, people want to know what they really think about the government. | |
| You know, turn off CSI, get a letter from the IRS and see how your heart feels when you, you know, when you hold that letter from the IRS. That's your relationship with the government when you see a cop in your rearview mirror. | |
| It's not what's on TV or what's in the newspaper. | |
| It's what's actually in your life. | |
| That's what really happens. | |
| I think that's right. I mean, there's all these things like nationalism and catching terrorists abroad and everything, or wars here and wars there. | |
| It's all abstractions to most people. | |
| And their opinions on it are unrelated to anything that they experience, really, in their daily lives. | |
| But I've been writing a lot recently about the way government has wrecked our home appliances, for example. | |
| Well, my mail that I get is 100% universally outraged at what they've done. | |
| To our washing machines, to our dishwasher. | |
| Well, these are things that people really use. | |
| And they have the competence to develop really valid opinions on these things. | |
| But how can a person really develop a valid opinion on who's right or wrong in the conflict in Afghanistan or Libya? | |
| It's all an abstraction. | |
| That's why I say it's almost like theater, I think. | |
| I think that's right. I've also often thought, Jeff, that it would be really great for the liberty movement if everybody had to be an entrepreneur for at least two years of their life. | |
| I mean, when you're an employee, you are shielded from so much of the muckety-muck that goes on in terms of, I mean, the bajillion and one regulations and financial reporting requirements and hazy rules that you're just terrified of at all times. | |
| And I really think that it would be such A move towards getting people to understand the true nature of government if they didn't have these corporate entities to shield them from everything that the government requires. | |
| And also then, if you're an entrepreneur, you're often not taking your salary as much. | |
| You're not getting deducted at source. | |
| So you've got to pay your taxes rather than live on the crumbs. | |
| And I think that would be very powerful. | |
| If you really want to see what the government's like, just try starting a business and see how long and then see how happy you are when the government calls To come by and inspect things and to verify things and to triple check things and how many lawyers and accountants you have to hire just to navigate this crazy maze, this soft fascism of strangling bureaucratic nooses. | |
| I mean, I think people would just really get a sense when they don't see it as much when they're students, when they're government workers, when they're employees as a whole, they don't see what goes on. | |
| about it from the businesses themselves because when a business has a chance to give a message out to the public, what do they want to say? | |
| They don't want to complain about the government, about the taxes, about the regulations. | |
| They want to advertise their products. | |
| Right. | |
| And they also don't want to annoy the government as well because there's that feeling that there's this, don't kick the cobra while it's sleeping, you know, just give it its pound of flesh and move on. | |
| Right? | |
| Well, I was intrigued the other day, talking to my local laundry about the problem that they're no longer allowed to use things that clean clothes as well as they used to. | |
| And I tried to get the guy to talk openly about it. | |
| He's very shy, very nervous to even talk about the fact that they can't use cleaning agents that actually work on clothes anymore. | |
| The major dry cleaning chemical is about to be banned in California and New York and probably around the rest of the country. | |
| He was sheepish and red-faced about this because it's a way he did not want to talk about it. | |
| I thought about it later. The reason he didn't want to talk about it is because it's a way of saying, I cannot do my business as well as I might otherwise. | |
| In other words, I'm not serving you as well as I might otherwise. | |
| He doesn't want the consumer to get that message. | |
| He doesn't want me to get that message, really. | |
| It's almost like business ends up slightly conspiring with... | |
| It's not a conspiracy. It's like they cover up for what government's doing to them because they don't want to distract consumers from the main message they want to give, which is my product is good, you know, my service is good. | |
| And it's just not part of their business plan to complain. | |
| I mean, they're part of... They're survivors. | |
| Entrepreneurs are survivors. And they're able to... | |
| Deal with amazing amounts of stuff. | |
| But the problem is it creates a dynamic here where a business is being put upon, they're being oppressed, they're being taxed, they're being practically driven out of business, and yet they're not somehow, they don't have the incentive to complain about it. | |
| Well, also, it's been a long time since I've watched cop shows on TV, but I remember there always used to be this scene where they'd go to some guy in like a Grungy pool hall or a restaurant or something and they'd need information from him, you know, where's Scabby the vermin guy that we want to get? | |
| And he'd be like, I don't know, man. | |
| And then they'd be like, well, maybe we just better check that all of your licenses and permits are in order. | |
| And he's like, okay, yeah, he's under that table, go. | |
| Something like that. And so the licensing and the requirements and the, you know, maybe we'll just audit you for 12 years straight, you know, destroy your peace of mind that way. | |
| These vague, just shadowy things that the government can do that can just make your life very difficult. | |
| And people just don't want to, you know, it's that old Japanese saying, you know, it's the nail that's sticking up that gets hammered down. | |
| And so I think people are just like, hey, you know, I don't really want to have people's attention on me any more than it already is for whatever reason. | |
| It's why I've studiously steered clear of any kind of licensing or some might say professional competence. | |
| But I think that is something that people are quite nervous about. | |
| Yeah, no, it's really true. | |
| Every business is vulnerable at every moment, right? | |
| I mean, to this kind of level of harassment. | |
| I think about this in the case of child labor, which is a very sad thing. | |
| Many, many businesses would right now be hiring young people, you know, but they're afraid to because the slightest look into that kind of thing would lead to potential calamity for them. | |
| Do you ever wonder, Stephan, how it is, sometimes I wonder, how does the business exist at all in this kind of climate? | |
| I mean, it's amazing in a way. | |
| I mean, sometimes I look at it, I go into gigantic department stores or Walmart or a big sports store and I think, how do you do business? | |
| You know, how is this possible? | |
| Well, I would argue that it's because they've outsourced the production of goods to cheaper regions. | |
| I mean, if it wasn't for China and India, the American economy would have collapsed probably 10 or 15 years ago. | |
| That's a good question. I mean, manufacturing has collapsed in the US in the last 10 or 15 years in a way that It has sent unbelievable shockwaves, not only through the economy, but through the class system as a whole. | |
| Because as you know, manual labor to unionized labor in the manufacturing business was the route to the middle class for most people. | |
| And then their kids would become professionals. | |
| And that's how the escalator of social mobility, that whole aspect has been entirely hollowed out of the industry. | |
| And now you have the people who have historical money who can Game the system by getting the correct licenses and the correct, you know, they know how to play that game. | |
| And then you have people who are stuck in now what is a massive section of the US economy is the service industry. | |
| And they're stuck at minimum wage or just above it. | |
| And this whole middle area has been completely hollowed out, along with middle tier home ownership, of course. | |
| And the economy would absolutely have collapsed, except that the price of goods, the price of computers and everything that can be manufactured overseas and shipped over It has gone so crushingly low that I can't imagine how the system would have survived if they hadn't been able to do that. | |
| It's not a sustainable way of doing it, but I think it has kept it going for another 10 or 15 years. | |
| Yeah, and none of this is revealed in the GDP statistics, of course. | |
| I mean, we've got a situation here where most everybody is being told again and again every day that, well, we're in a recovery state. | |
| Things are getting better and better. | |
| But you look around and it's just not true. | |
| Unemployment isn't as high as it was before, but a lot of the rehires are much lower salaries. | |
| There's massive unemployment among the people who during the boom times were doing very, very well for themselves. | |
| There's gigantic unemployment among the young. | |
| And business startups are nowhere near what they should be if this were really a real recovery. | |
| And business startups are the main source of new job growth, you know. | |
| Yeah, and of course, I mean, the banks are making a lot more money parking their money with the Fed. | |
| They're getting it lent out at virtually no interest and they park it in the Fed for a couple of points and that's their income. | |
| I mean, compared to lending to entrepreneurs in a very shaky recovery, I mean, good heavens! | |
| People get mad at the banks as if the banks aren't just rational actors attempting to maximize their resources in a crazy environment. | |
| You raise a very interesting point that I can't really wrap my brain around. | |
| Maybe you can shed some light on it. | |
| You know, the interest rates are so low right now, so low, that there's really no incentive for banks to lend or for anybody to save anything. | |
| I don't understand why it is that the Federal Reserve thinks this is a good policy for spurring recovery. | |
| I don't think that the Federal Reserve is interested in spurring recovery in the long run. | |
| I think that a fundamental change that occurred in 2008 was that everybody in the system got that it was not going to last past their careers. | |
| Remember, people act in very self-oriented, which is not always to say selfish, but in very self-oriented ways. | |
| So you will work to maintain a system that will last beyond your retirement. | |
| But if you're like 50 and you know the system isn't going to last for more than 10 or 15 years more, everything changes. | |
| You're no longer interested in sustaining the resource called government. | |
| What you're interested in doing is getting as much as you can out of it before it collapses. | |
| And I think that's the fundamental change as it could. | |
| The reason that the interest rates are held low is to stave off the national debt, like the interest payments on the national debt. | |
| I don't think it has anything to do with recovery because if the Fed was interested in recovery, it wouldn't be accepting deposits from banks and paying them a couple of percentage points above what it's lending them at because they know that's just circular, right? | |
| So all they're doing is they're maintaining demand for the US dollar and knowing that it can't conceivably Continue for much longer. | |
| And I think that fundamental issue is what is driving this feeding frenzy of moving as many resources as possible out of the government and into private hands, because it's simply not a sustainable scenario. | |
| So you've just got a feeding frenzy going on. | |
| Yeah, so it's not really Keynesianism in a classic sense. | |
| It's more just an institutional self-interest, just a survivability question. | |
| It's not really an intellectual error so much then. | |
| I've been sort of racking my brain over the last few weeks to try and think of a good metaphor for this. | |
| But yeah, when something is sustainable, then you will work to sustain it. | |
| But when everyone gets that it's not sustainable, it's just a real feeding frenzy. | |
| You know, this happened in Canada with the fish, right? | |
| The fish off the East Coast were, for 400 years, they were harvested by people who knew that it was a resource they had to protect in the long run because the whole culture was embedded around fishing for cod and halibut and other kinds of marine life. | |
| And then when the government came in and raised quotas just to get more taxes and to buy more votes, as soon as everybody got that the fishing industry was not going to last more than another few seasons, bam! | |
| Everybody just said, hey, if it's not going to last, I'm just going to yank every single piece of fish out that I can because there's no point. | |
| And it breaks that whole social restraint mechanism that had been working at a private level. | |
| For hundreds of years. So there is a real feeding frenzy that goes on when a resource can't be sustained, and I view that as occurring to government finances as a whole at the moment. | |
| It can't conceivably be sustained, so everybody's just grabbing as much treasure as they can. | |
| Yeah, and I suppose Hans Hoppe argues that this is an intrinsic feature of democracy, that it raises our time preferences and causes this massive over-utilization of resources, because all these people who are running our lives are kind of temporary managers and not really owners in some sense. | |
| Right. And the temporary managers will maintain the resource if they can pass it along as political favors, as something for their friends or their kids or something. | |
| But yeah, the moment they say, okay, well, it's only 10 years, then everybody starts acting so much that it goes 10, 9, 8. | |
| It really shrinks down from there. | |
| Yeah, yeah. No, it's very interesting. | |
| And of course, Americans are nowadays becoming obsessed once again with politics. | |
| Are they really? | |
| I haven't read it. I mean, I know that the media is talking about it. | |
| I guess there's consumers for it. | |
| I mean, do people really think that this is going to be true? | |
| Well, it comes in layers. I mean, so it grabs ever more people enrolled into the system as time goes on, as we approach more and more closer to the elections, and it's going to be required of you to take a position on who we want to be the next ruler, you know. | |
| So right now, maybe it's 15% of the population is interested, 20%, and then eventually everybody, like Totoko said, in five days before the election, everybody cares for the first time. | |
| But, you know, it's funny. | |
| My mind recalls back to a few years ago when Obama was first elected and the level of naivety on the part of people who were his biggest supporters that thought that somehow he was going to save us. | |
| And just the sheer absence of critical-mindedness to compare expectations with actual output of the state is surprising. | |
| It's almost like a religious commitment to the idea of That democracy is, that some person's going to ride in on a white horse and solve all of our problems again. | |
| Even though it never happens, people continue to believe it and they've believed it for like 200 years, you know? | |
| It just keeps coming back and back and back again. | |
| And once again, we're going to see massive billions and billions and billions of dollars wasted. | |
| You know, on these stupid elections, all of which just end up fueling these political machines that allow people to form themselves into parties and rah-rah-rahs, these collectivist entities, and wear uniforms and sing songs, and it's just despicable. | |
| I don't know how you feel about this, but it seems like, for me, with every election that goes by, I get more and more fed up with it. | |
| I mean, I'm less and less interested and more and more disgusted with it, you know. | |
| I remember my first big election that I really remember was about 1984, and I remember being vaguely involved in it, you know, like passing out flyers, you know, and that sort of thing. | |
| I can't even conceive of this now. | |
| Right. Well, we just had one up here, of course, in Canada. | |
| Yeah, and I understand that there's some good that came out of it, or no? | |
| No? I mean, democracy, as I've mentioned before, it's like changing the head-on on the car that's running you over. | |
| It really doesn't change the physics of the situation very much at all. | |
| I think that There's going to be less enthusiasm about Obama versus X in this coming election. | |
| And the reason being, and I talked about this a couple of years ago, so I'll just touch on it briefly, but Obama was such an enormous difference from George Bush. | |
| I mean, on every conceivable level, you know, his background was not typical, whereas George Bush, I mean, you know, in some ways was pretty typical, except for the wealth. | |
| His philosophy was very different. | |
| Of course, he had cultural and racial influences that George Bush never had. | |
| Obama was a fundamentally different animal than George Bush. | |
| And, of course, the prediction that I made at the time was, this won't change anything. | |
| You'll still have wars. | |
| You'll still have massive debt. | |
| Nothing fundamental is going to change. | |
| I think everybody gets that at an unconscious level. | |
| To me, it's always fascinating to look not so much at what people are saying, but what is actually occurring in the culture. | |
| There is no show like The West Wing. | |
| There is no show in politics that is talking about idealism. | |
| You can't find many. I think Geena Davis had one. | |
| I never watched it, but it kind of came in right pretty quickly. | |
| You can't find... There used to be... | |
| There was a movie called Dave, I think, with Kevin Kline about a guy who looked like the president who... | |
| He became the president and was an idealist. | |
| The Mr. Smith goes to Washington stuff doesn't exist anymore. | |
| It's been blown out of the water by the documentaries, by the facts, by Inside Job, by Fahrenheit 9-11, all that kind of stuff. | |
| And I think that reflects a fundamental despair about the system. | |
| And people do try and prop up their despair with a kind of manic hero worship. | |
| It really doesn't work. | |
| I just don't think it works that way. | |
| And of course, the media is going to try and pump it up as much as they can and inflate the differences and so on. | |
| But people, I think, can't help but see that you went from a pretty right wing conservative to a pretty liberal lefty kind of guy with a vastly different background and vastly different people in charge. | |
| And the course of the country did not change, it only accelerated it in the direction it was before. | |
| It's going to be really hard for people to find anybody as different as Obama and Bush. | |
| That's true. So I just think people fundamentally, they're going to have to pump themselves up, so it's going to be a bit more hysterical. | |
| But I don't think there's any genuine commitment to, because everybody gets that the system is just gained and screwed completely. | |
| Yeah, and I read H. L. Mencken the other day. | |
| He's one of my favorite authors. | |
| Great writer. Yeah. | |
| But he was talking about elections too in the 1920s and making similar observations. | |
| And this is what makes me worry because he was saying the same thing was true back then also. | |
| These big elections are just changing the veneer. | |
| Yeah, it's like trying to vote for a surfer who's on a wave, right? | |
| I mean, government has a logic. Public choice theory has a logic. | |
| Special interest groups have a fundamental economic logic. | |
| Fiat currency has a fundamental economic logic. | |
| All the people in politics are trying to ride the wave. | |
| And you might say, this guy should go left and this guy should go right. | |
| But you're not voting for the wave. | |
| You don't even see the wave. The wave is the fundamental logic of government. | |
| People voting for the surfer thinking that it's going to change the wave. | |
| No, the surfer is just riding the logic of the system. | |
| Yeah. And if you really believe in change, I mean, what a better way to bring about change than entering into a business or entrepreneurship or doing some kind of digital thing like you're doing, which is just dazzling. | |
| You know, in the digital world nowadays, which is why I've just... | |
| I've developed this love affair with, I don't know, you call it the internet, I don't know, but it's with software, with everything that goes on in this world, because every day I wake up and there's improvement, there's progress, there's development, you can see mankind making advances, you know, like every day, and it's beautiful, beautiful to see, and it's exciting to live in this world. | |
| Because everything's getting better all the time. | |
| And it's probably the way it should be and would be if we had a free society, if the rest of the physical world was free as the digital world. | |
| And the only thing that's standing between us, and that is this stupid state that's just chained up everything and everybody and prevented this kind of progress. | |
| Thank goodness we have this The example before us. | |
| And that's why I've fallen in love with it. | |
| That's why so many of the Mises Institute's operations have moved, actually, out of the physical world into the digital world. | |
| Because it's the place where you do see human progress. | |
| Yeah, I mean, it's that old phrase that Winston Smith got wrong in 1984. | |
| You know, if there is hope, it lies in the proletariat. | |
| It lies in the proles. And if there is hope for what we're doing, it lies in the digital world. | |
| There is no other place that can disseminate so many contrary and viewpoints so quickly, so effortlessly, and so permanently around the world. | |
| You know, there's that old statement that says the mind once changed by a new idea never regains its original shape. | |
| And the uniformity of media in the past was just, I mean, it was like three little boxes all saying the same thing around you. | |
| And now you can design a digital consuming experience that is as individual as your preferences in the moment. | |
| I mean, that's just astounding. | |
| And that is causing a great fragmentation, of course, as people tend to, I mean, I don't go read a lot of socialist sites. | |
| I'll sort of read the New York Times from time to time, just to remind myself what true brain goo looks like. | |
| Excuse me, but people go and try and find, like, people who are interested in free market economics will go to Mises.org or other places. | |
| Actually, there's no other place. Lou Rockwell and Mises.org are the two best places to go for that. | |
| And you then don't have to wade through all the crap that you just know is wrong. | |
| And so this is causing a fundamental fragmentation in the narrative of society. | |
| And they say, well, this is calling polarization in politics. | |
| No, it's... It's creating vigorous individuality in debate, which is called polarization by people who want to keep the herd of sheep all in the same place. | |
| But I think if there is hope, it lies in the digital world. | |
| Yeah, and what's interesting is we developed an expectation in the digital world that the newer thing is going to be the better thing, and it usually always is. | |
| When you get a newer computer, it's generally faster, it's larger, it does more great things than the old thing. | |
| In the physical world, it's almost becoming the opposite. | |
| If you buy a new dishwasher, it's going to be worse than the old dishwasher. | |
| You buy a new car, it might be worse than the old thing. | |
| You're going to buy a new clothes washing machine, it will be worse than the same. | |
| Practically, you know, so many, so many things in the physical world are actually getting worse. | |
| You know, it actually occurred to me, Stephan, I wonder if you remember the age of the Cold War. | |
| When we are asked constantly to think about the Soviet Union and life in the Soviet Union, I remember thinking, these poor people, what's wrong with them? | |
| Don't they see that they're getting poorer all the time and the cause of that is the state? | |
| How come they don't just rise up and overthrow these horrible people that are making their lives miserable? | |
| Look at these people. They're miserable. | |
| They're more miserable now than they were 10 years ago or 20 years ago, even 30 years ago. | |
| It's progressive poverty. | |
| Why don't they see it? Well, now... | |
| The same kind of thing is sort of happening to us in at least one sector of our lives, that which is totally managed by the state. | |
| And do we see it? | |
| Do we understand it? What are we doing about it? | |
| We put up with it because it kind of happens slowly and we adapt day by day to it. | |
| It's very intriguing to me. | |
| And it's, of course, heavily buffered by debt. | |
| I mean, if there was no debt, the system would have collapsed long ago. | |
| And this is the great danger of fiat currency is it's like taking heroin for a toothache. | |
| You'll feel better, but it's not like your tooth is getting any better. | |
| It's actually getting worse because you're not doing anything about it. | |
| And so people are shielded from the effects of statism through debt. | |
| And I think that's one of the most catastrophic things about debt. | |
| I mean, if there was such a thing as a rational status system, it could never, ever be allowed to accumulate debt. | |
| You can't have a democratic system without debt because you need to bribe people with other people's money from the future. | |
| Otherwise, the zero-sum game or the negative-sum game becomes very evident that you bribe someone, you say, take $1,000 in taxes and give them back $500 in services. | |
| They get that it's a negative-sum game. | |
| The only way you can give them more back in services than you're taking in taxes is through debt. | |
| So debt is foundational to any democratic system or any state of system in the long run, and that's why it will never sustain itself. | |
| Yeah, so the idea is that ever more debt means you get ever more stuff and you can believe that you're living a greater and greater life all the time. | |
| I mean, look, they bring in the welfare state and they start immediately borrowing. | |
| So everybody sees that the poor are getting lots of money. | |
| They don't see any negative effects on their own income or their own taxation. | |
| And so it's like, wow, the government is magic. | |
| You know, there is such a thing as a freelance. | |
| It's a magician. | |
| And so everybody says, well, this is a great system. | |
| But look at the price of education, for example. | |
| It's insane. It's crazy. | |
| I mean, at what point are people going to realize that it makes no sense to spend the amount of money that we tend to spend on college education? | |
| It's just not a payoff. And the same thing with healthcare. | |
| There's all these sectors that are very much bound up with the government that are getting ever and ever more expensive. | |
| And as you say, the only reason we can afford them at all is by going into massive debt. | |
| I mean, I just don't believe that this system can sustain itself. | |
| I mean, at some point, reality is going to hit. | |
| No, and I think it's going to hit very quickly and very suddenly. | |
| And, you know, we have a great answer now to the endless question of, well, what happens to the poor in the free society? | |
| And to me, now it's very evident to say, well, what happens to the poor in a state of society when you can't borrow anymore? | |
| I mean, that is, you know... | |
| I want to do a video this week because my voice is beginning to die again. | |
| You know how we're all into sustainable development when it comes to the environment, which I think is a fine idea, but they don't see that in terms of the capital of society, that the savings and the wealth of society is something that we need to be even more Concerned about preserving in terms of sustainable development because you set up a system like the welfare state or government-run education. | |
| What happens to the poor in a couple of years when the government can't pay welfare? | |
| What happens to the old when the government has taken all their money for Social Security and can't pay it out? | |
| You are so right about that. | |
| I mean, you've hit on one of the great mysteries to me of our time. | |
| Why is it that people are so concerned about the sustainability and health and happiness of fish or the plants or whatever, and just very little concern at all for the marginal elements of society, the poor, the aged people, human beings? | |
| I mean, it's amazing to me. | |
| I've been through this debate now this last week over this whole question of phosphates and detergent. | |
| And again and again, people say, well, we had to get these out of detergents because the fisher was making the fish unhappy or whatever that claim is, whether it's true or not, not how you measure fish happiness and health. | |
| I don't know. I don't know. I mean, apparently the debate is on all sides. | |
| But just a simple claim that a chemical is bad for some animal or some plant is considered to be a loan. | |
| That's enough to settle the debate. | |
| Well, what about the fact that our clothes aren't clean anymore? | |
| That we're risking disease. | |
| That we're ruining an entire industry. | |
| Or that people wash stuff twice, which wastes a lot of water. | |
| How do you balance that? | |
| The welfare of humanity is considered off the table. | |
| Why is this? What is going on? | |
| This wasn't always true. | |
| It's this weird thing that we have. | |
| We really need to start questioning this fundamentally. | |
| I'm going to be going on some television shows over the next couple of weeks on this question of detergent, and I'm really trying to think through what I'm going to say about this. | |
| I think given my hairstyle, I would probably be a better advocate for this as Mr. | |
| Clean. Just come in in a white t-shirt, big, big-ass smile, and that would be the way to go. | |
| That would be an idea for you to work with. | |
| Just one bow tie. Yeah. | |
| Well, I've actually thought about just dismissing the whole thing because I find it just preposterous, really, that humanity should sacrifice its well-being for the sake of some... | |
| Some trout or some guppies in a stream somewhere. | |
| I mean, I just don't understand this. | |
| It's like we've got our priorities all upside down. | |
| You know, I think if the case can be made that there's harm to the food system as a whole, I think we all understand that, you know, I'll go pee in the toilet rather than my bed because it's a little more sustainable to flush than to wash. | |
| That's right. So I think if the case can be made, but... | |
| That's not what they're talking about, really. | |
| It's the DDT argument, right? | |
| That the DDT was considered to be very bad and caused the death of 60 million people worldwide as a result of its ban when its negative impact on humanity was negligible compared to, right? | |
| It's always compared to what? Compared to what? | |
| That's always the fundamental question in philosophy and economics. | |
| In the case of trisodium phosphate, the stuff that's in detergent, I mean, apparently home use contributes virtually nothing to the supply that's in the water. | |
| It's a totally natural element, and its only effect is to cause things to grow. | |
| I mean, that's the worst possible thing that could happen is that, like, plants in lakes grow. | |
| That's the downside of phosphates entering into our lakes. | |
| And nobody can really settle whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing or whatever, but it's nothing remotely like injuring our food supply or endangering us. | |
| It has nothing to do with anything. | |
| Or when you compare the potential negative impact of that over many years with what's going to happen to the poor, the old and the sick when the government stops sending out checks, which is a mathematical certainty in the very short order. | |
| People who care about the poor should be fundamentally focused on that, not on let's tax the rich more or let's borrow more or let's whatever, right? | |
| Fundamentally, if this is not causing people to panic, About the poor and the sick and the old, I genuinely don't believe in their compassion, even slightly. | |
| Yeah, I agree with you. I don't believe it. | |
| I don't believe it either. I mean, why would you favor policies like the minimum wage, for example? | |
| I mean, it's very interesting to me. | |
| There is a research done recently about the minimum wage that, when it was first proposed, it was proposed as a device to exclude people from the workforce. | |
| Young and poor and blacks and anybody else who could underbid more comfortable middle-aged, often white people, yeah. | |
| Yeah, that's right. And so they knew it when it was first proposed, when it first came out. | |
| And we pretend as if we don't understand the effects of this legislation now? | |
| Come on. I mean, yeah, humanity's pretty stupid, but not that stupid. | |
| I mean, come on. Well, it's an argument. | |
| It's made the minimum wage to $1,000 an hour, and everyone's going to be a millionaire in three weeks. | |
| You know, Stephan, I was talking to a shopkeeper the other day, and I'm desperate to get my son a job. | |
| It's really pathetic how far the lengths I will go. | |
| And I walked up to him and I said, look, he's a strapping young man, a wonderful worker. | |
| And I can tell you, unfortunately, he's not worth $7.25 an hour. | |
| Tragically. I said this to the guy, he laughed. | |
| You know, he said, oh, so you get the problem. | |
| I said, yeah, I get the problem. | |
| But what if you work for free for a month? | |
| He said, well, that could be a problem with the law, you know. | |
| Yeah, they're kind of cracking down on internships now, unpaid internships, and the risk is always – I think the Huffington Post is being sued for massive amounts of money by people who did free blogging for them back five years ago, saying now they want to be paid because they sold the company. | |
| And it's like, but it's free blogging. I mean, there was no contract. | |
| There was no requirement. You never had to post. | |
| There was no salary. There was no contract. | |
| You just gave them a place for people to blog. | |
| And now they're saying, well, you've got to pay us, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars because, you know, we helped your company become a success. | |
| It's like, oh, man, how do you even talk about this stuff? | |
| I don't know about that case. | |
| Anyway, listen, I'm going to, just before I completely lose my voice, thanks so much for the chat as always. | |
| And I wonder if you just wanted to spend a minute or two talking about any upcoming Mises events. | |
| I know you guys got a lot of stuff going on in the South for high school students, if you just wanted to give people some... | |
| Yeah, we had these events for high school the other day. | |
| I don't know if you saw, I gave a speech there. | |
| And it was funny because I... I guess I forget, you know, I'm giving this talk to these kids and the next day it was on YouTube watched by people all over the world and it's just scary. | |
| But anyway, no, we have lots of high school events for high schools. | |
| They're listed there. | |
| Now, we're going to Vienna in October. | |
| I don't know if you know about that. | |
| And we're very excited about this because there's an Austrian movement developing in Vienna. | |
| We've got a book by a couple of very good Austrians there. | |
| So the idea is it's kind of a homecoming. | |
| So that's really going to be fun and we're very excited about that. | |
| And of course our summers are madness around here. | |
| We have students from all over the world coming to study the details of Austrian economics. | |
| We have lots of new resources for them this year, and we've expanded our building a little bit, so I'm excited about that. | |
| But summers are sheer madness around here. | |
| It's funny, during the fall and the spring, it's kind of like a monastic environment here. | |
| I really like it. | |
| The summers is a madhouse. | |
| But anyway, we're looking forward to it. | |
| But thank you, Stephan, for asking. | |
| That's very kind of you. | |
| Yeah, Mises.org, you can check out all of the great stuff. | |
| You can sign up for the newsletters, which particularly if you're a student are well worth getting. | |
| I mean, you've got great free books out there, and you've got Great free seminars and also very significantly reduced seminars for people who are students and highly, highly recommend getting into the room with these Brainiacs. | |
| It's well worth your time. Thank you so much, Stefan. | |
| It was great talking to you again. | |
| And again, I love visiting with you. | |
| It's like visiting with a friend or a brother or something like that. | |
| So thank you for calling. I appreciate that. |