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June 11, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

13:03

1933 True News: Vancouver Riots, Greek Austerity and Bitcoin Thefts

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Just a few items of true news.
	I hope you're doing very well. Some people wrote to ask me about my thoughts about the recent riots in Vancouver at the conclusion of a hockey game where the Vancouver team did not do very well.
	Is this the simmering Lord of the Flies cauldron of human irrationality just below the surface of civilization?
	You could put it that way, I'm sure.
	Some people seem to have. To me, it's much more simple.
	There is an unholy bargain that your country and your culture will offer you in that they will provide you substitutes for self-esteem, substitutes for self-regard, substitutes for authenticity and self-actualization.
	And one of those substitutes is cheer for your bullshit sports team.
	It's natural. It's a form of gambling with your nervous system so that if your team wins you're very happy and if your team loses then you're very unhappy.
	It's Russian roulette of adrenaline or depression and people offer that to you in return for control over you and money.
	Most sports teams take liberally from the public purse either directly or through the funding of sports stadiums so it's a rip-off.
	And people will offer you this costume of falsehood, this costume of false identity.
	Which is you cheer for the guys in this costume, you don't cheer for the guys in this costume because they're bad and we're good.
	All of this sports, of course, historically, and I'm talking about, you know, organized public sports, not I like to play squash tennis, which I do, but sports as a whole has been for ever and a day sponsored by the state because it is a good preparation for war, because it tells you that your geographically accidental local team is good.
	And the geographically distant accidental team is bad.
	This is a rehearsal for loving your country over others, your local rulers over other rulers who may in fact liberate you should they take over.
	So sports has historically been a rehearsal for war, which is why it has been so funded and controlled and subsidized.
	by the state. So if you end up sacrificing your control over your own emotions, your control over your own responses to the random accidents of rip-off sports players, then the natural result is that you will end up surrendering to mob mentality because you fundamentally lack an identity of your own.
	Your identity is painted on you like the ridiculous people who cover up their bulging bellies In green paint to celebrate some green costume team.
	You sacrifice your own identity, you sacrifice your own reality, you sacrifice your own self, who you are as a human being, in order to trail after the tidbits of Hyped up and pumped up players paid for through violence against your own pocket.
	And so that results.
	It's very sad. It's very tragic.
	And it just shows you how far we have to go as a species when people will no longer strike out like sad little fish at the bait of a false identity with the hook of social control from others and a loss of control over one's own emotions.
	At some point, people will stop doing that, but that point is not imminent, and the results of these sports addictions, these very sad sports addictions, are very clear for everyone to see.
	So that's the first thing.
	The second thing is there are escalating riots in Greece, and it's called a debt crisis, which is not true.
	It is not true. Debt is merely the shadow of the spending crisis, and they call this stuff austerity measures.
	That austerity measures are being implemented In Europe and in other countries.
	So this is a madness of anti-conceptual language.
	This is not austerity.
	I mean, if a man weighs 500 pounds and is eating 10,000 calories a day and somebody says, hey, you should go down to 9,500 calories a day, do we call that starvation rations?
	No, of course not. This is not austerity.
	Refusing to bribe people madly or at least de-escalating the bribes to some small degree is not austerity.
	And so, what is going on?
	Well, You understand, democracy is just some anonymous Nigerian who emails you with offers of something for nothing.
	That's all democracy is. Democracy is a system of bribery.
	And the only way that a system of bribery of the general population can work, here's something for nothing, here's free schools, here's free healthcare, here's free pensions, here's free roads, here's...
	The only way that this can ever work is through debt.
	It's through debt. The only way that democracy can even remotely appear to function is through debt.
	And so this is why all democracies are in debt.
	Democracy is debt.
	Democracy is predation on the unborn and the non-voting.
	And so if you're going to bribe people with their own money, it doesn't work, right?
	If I say to you, give me $1,000, I'll keep $500 for myself and bribe you back $500, you know right away That you're $500 down.
	So the only way that I can do it is I say, you give me $1,000, I will use this.
	As collateral to borrow another $1,000, so now I have $2,000.
	I'm going to give you back $1,500 and keep $500 for myself.
	I profit, you profit, the future loses.
	This is the only way that democracy can work.
	This is why every single democracy is facing exactly the same issues.
	And you will see, of course, with the US arguments about the debt ceiling, that democracy Ceases to work fundamentally when bribery, when you run out of other people's money, when you run out of the unborn's money, when you run out of other people's money, when the amount of debt and interest payments that you have accumulated have become so vast and so great that people now hesitate to lend to you.
	Democracy ceases to work.
	When you make a population addicted to free stuff, when you can no longer bribe them, With the money of their children, then the whole system will have to change.
	It, of course, is the hope of every rational and decent human being in the world that the system will change towards something more rational, more peaceful, less predatory, less pillaging of the future and towards something more rational.
	So this is not a debt crisis.
	This is the inevitable and natural results of the coercive bribery known as democracy, where the only way that you can get people's votes is by appealing to their sleaziest and basest instincts to get something for nothing.
	This is why democracies don't teach economics in schools, because economics would put lie to the pretense that you can get something for nothing.
	So once you run out of being able to bribe people and appeal to their sleaziest and greediest impulses, Then the system collapses.
	Of course, this is inevitable. It's been predicted for, I mean, since Mises wrote in the 1920s and even before that, I mean, this is perfectly predictable.
	It is like a rock rolling down a hill.
	You may not know exactly which direction it's going to go, but you sure as heck know it ain't going to end up at the top of the hill again.
	So this is just the way things go.
	Democracy is bribery.
	Bribery is debt. And debt collapses.
	If you want to have a democracy without debt, then you want something that never has been and never will be.
	Once you choose democracy, you get debt.
	And people say, well, the government favors the bankers.
	Well, of course the government favors the bankers.
	Because it's the lending of the bankers on the future collateral of the unborn that allows for the existing population to be bribed in a democracy.
	Of course the government is going to do what the bankers want, because without the bankers lending them money, they can't bribe the population in order to get into power.
	So people who complain that bankers run the government simply don't understand what democracy is.
	Democracy is bribery.
	Bribery is borrowing. Borrowing is debt.
	When you have a system based on borrowing and debt, the bankers are going to end up in control of the system, because they are the enablers.
	of the system. This is what happens when you have taxation and democracy.
	The taxation is taken in.
	Tax money is taken from the people.
	It's used as collateral to put future generations in debt, to bribe the existing population to vote for politicians.
	Everybody knows this. Everybody's known about this for years.
	When I was 13 years old, my friends and I sat around once we first found out about the Canada pension plan here.
	We sat around and we absolutely giggled at the idea that it was ever going to be then when we retired.
	13-year-old kids knew this decades ago.
	This is all perfectly predictable.
	Anybody who expresses shock about it is I mean, just lying to themselves, lying to others, or has an IQ too low to be measured.
	So it's not a problem of borrowing.
	It's not a problem of debt. It's not a problem even of future liabilities.
	The problem is democracy. The problem is the state.
	Once you give a small monopoly of people the power to rob and bribe at will, the system will inevitably collapse.
	No question about that. Now, I've also had some comments and questions about Bitcoin and I'm a fan of Bitcoin.
	I think it's great. Why do I think it's great?
	Because it's non-coercive and it's voluntary.
	It's non-violent and it's voluntary.
	You really can't get a great big hate-on for stuff that is non-violent and voluntary.
	So, I think it's great. Has there been a theft of Bitcoins?
	Absolutely there has been. Some guy left his computer completely unprotected and someone came in and snagged his Bitcoin data.
	If you leave a pile of gold on the front of your house when you go on vacation and someone takes it, nobody thinks that's a problem with the gold standard.
	If you don't secure your valuables, they may be stolen.
	There's an asshole tax on everything because as soon as something has any value, assholes will come along and try and steal it.
	Unfortunately, the world is just full of assholes.
	Frankly. And it's like looking at a billion tiny brown suns all around you forever.
	The world is full of assholes and they like to steal stuff.
	And so you have to secure your stuff.
	This stuff, and then somebody else hacked into somebody else's account, released a bunch of Bitcoins onto the market for sale, which drove the price down, and those transactions.
	You can't reverse transactions in Bitcoin, but the money's being voluntarily returned, which is great.
	The interesting thing is not that this stuff happened and that that invalidates or discredits Bitcoin.
	I mean, they're assholes. Assholes steal stuff.
	It doesn't invalidate having stuff.
	What is very interesting, though, about Bitcoin scandal, so to speak, is how people are going to respond to it.
	My guess is people are going to start offering your Bitcoin wallet in the cloud with six million layers of security and that's going to be a service which people provide and it will be very cheap of course because it will be almost entirely automated and that's how people are going to respond to this.
	The important thing is not what happens when our souls gather around something that has value for the first time It's how the free market, how voluntary entrepreneurs respond to it.
	I think it's going to be very interesting to see what happens to it.
	This is going to be true of any currency, all currencies.
	You will get assholes faking gold.
	You will get assholes hacking into everything that can be found.
	This is just the way of the world.
	You know, it's this million tiny brown sun surrounding you.
	It's just the reality of the world.
	What I do think is very interesting is to see the degree of pillaging that occurs even in a fledgling currency which has uncertain value.
	If that's what happens in a fledgling currency of uncertain value, imagine, imagine, imagine what is happening to the Federal Reserve and other kinds of fiat currency.
	The amount of pillaging that is going on there is truly staggering.
	So I think that's a really important thing to remember.
	It's not a damnation of Bitcoin that someone tried to stole it.
	All that means is that Bitcoins have value and it means that entrepreneurs are now going to Step in just the same way that, oh, someone got stolen, someone got something stolen on the house, so let's all buy locks, so let's all buy chains, so let's all buy security cameras, so let's all buy alarm systems.
	I mean, this is just what happens when assholes start to flock around things that have value, is that other people will step in to protect them.
	It's like saying because their spam email is a disaster.
	No, you just get spam filters or whatever it is that you can do to keep the assholes out of your life.
	So I hope that this helps.
	Thank you so much. Please remember that Free Domain Radio is entirely listener-supported.
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