Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world, discusses the imminent Greek bailout, referendum and default - and insists that society admit that libertarians were right all along. http://www.freedomainradio.com
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| So what happened? | |
| What happened? Papandreou in Greece has decided to submit the decision about whether to stay in the eurozone and receive the bailouts But continue with the austerity measures that are fundamentally being imposed by markets and politics in Europe, or to break from the Euro, resume trading the drachma, I guess it was, and continue on their merry way, effectively defaulting on their debts. | |
| And we can see how the quasi-fascistic, mercantilist, state-sucking, crony-capitalist traders have responded to the barest whiff of listening to the voice of the people, how they're responding to that. | |
| Markets crash around the world. | |
| Everybody's predicting disaster because, my God, if the will of the people is shown in any significant way or even in an insignificant way, everybody has to run screaming. | |
| It tells you a lot. about the system that we're in and imagine how cornered you have to be as a politician how desperate how on the ropes how down and out how eight nine is counting the referee in the ring before you actually have to have a referendum and turn to the will of the people my god the man must be desperate to actually ask the people to have a voice in this decision now Something which is not often talked about in democracy is the degree to which there's a massive conflict of interest. | |
| People who are receiving massive benefits from the state, should they really be allowed to vote on public policy? | |
| Well, it's hard to argue that they should. | |
| There's a clear conflict of interest. | |
| They can't be objective because they're not judging policy. | |
| They're judging income. | |
| It's a very, very different thing, right? | |
| I mean, if a doctor is being paid $5,000 for every prescription he writes for pill X and he prescribes to you pill X, you kind of want to know about the five grand, right? | |
| Because maybe he's not prescribing for health. | |
| He's prescribing for income. | |
| The same thing is true when it comes to voting in what we quaintly call democracy these days, which is that people are voting for income. | |
| So if you're getting $100 million in state contracts, should you really be allowed to vote for whoever is giving you those state contracts? | |
| Well, of course not, because your objectivity is completely compromised by the money that's rolling in. | |
| Can people who are on unemployment insurance objectively evaluate the pros and cons of unemployment insurance or social security or government schools if you're a teacher or an administrator? | |
| Can you objectively judge policy and what is best for the health of the group or the nation or the collective or whatever you want to call it? | |
| Can you really judge that? | |
| If your income and your security and your retirement and your health care and your pensions are all dependent upon very particular state policies, you can't be objective. | |
| You can't do it. | |
| And this is something that is not talked about. | |
| It used to be talked about. | |
| In the 19th century, there were income or property restrictions on voting. | |
| We had to be sort of middle class to vote because the argument was, well, If you give everyone the vote, the poor will vote to take away the property of the rich, and everyone will end up broke. | |
| Well... But this is the funny thing about society these days. | |
| You know, there are so many things that I genuinely, deeply, and sincerely hate to be right about. | |
| I hate being right about the fact that Social welfare for the rich and the poor widens income disparities, creates a permanent underclass at both ends of the political spectrum. | |
| Like an underclass on the poor, of people who are badly educated by public schools, who have few opportunities for low-wage jobs because government controls restrictions, taxation has driven them all overseas, and they're just hosed, really, boxed in and cornered for the most part from day one. | |
| It's a terrible, terrible, wretched situation. | |
| Entirely predicted. By libertarians and market anarchists, free thinkers of every stripe and hue, predicted this. | |
| Charles Murray predicted it. Ayn Rand predicted it. | |
| Von Mises predicted it. | |
| Go back to Ricardo would predict these kinds of things. | |
| Look up Spenumland if you want to know how this all worked out in England, and I think it was the 17th century. | |
| It's all been so predicted. | |
| And one of the things that's sadly true about human nature, for the most part, at least in the present, is that When people have been repeatedly warned about the disasters of using the state to achieve their goals, of using the coercive power, | |
| the violent might of the state, to achieve their goals, people have been warned repeatedly that this is going to lead to disaster, that disaster is now upon us, and nobody is acknowledging that they were warned. | |
| There are a number of acid tests, if people are interested, I don't know, but there are a number of acid tests that I have When I interact with somebody who claims to be a thinker or claims to be original and so on. | |
| And the first thing, of course, is I want to know, like, do they know that libertarians predicted this? | |
| Do they know that this was, I mean, down to almost the last detail, that the current catastrophes, the widening gap between rich and poor, the accumulation of debt, the growing miseducation of children to the point where their brains are, you know, pretty much now Nintendo consuming turnips in their head. | |
| That all of this was predicted decades ago and sometimes centuries ago. | |
| Do they know that all of this was predicted? | |
| And if they don't know that all of this was predicted, then I know that they're never going to understand how a free society works. | |
| If you really want to know how a free society works, buck the mainstream. | |
| Buck the mainstream. | |
| Go against the trends. Go against culture. | |
| Go against tradition. | |
| And you will see how seamlessly society lines up and prevents people from coming in, prevents them from having a voice, prevents them from getting their word out to the willing ears. | |
| Well, until the digital Gutenberg we call the internet came along, of course. | |
| But... People don't understand how social rules are enforced if they're always obeying social rules. | |
| And I just mean social rules of discourse and so on, right? | |
| So if you actually think for yourself, you very quickly realize just how seamlessly society will put up a wall, how seamlessly people will wish you away or snarl you away or slander you away or whatever. | |
| It's amazing. It's beautiful. | |
| It's a wonderful organism. | |
| The social safety net of self-protection of lies we call culture. | |
| Once you've really gone against social convention, you realize how almost all rules are enforced through social convention and how powerful that is. | |
| And people who say anarchism doesn't work are just people I know that they've only swung with the current their whole lives. | |
| People who say free society or libertarianism, if they say it won't work, well, first of all, I know that they've not studied any history, at least not any history that is even remotely different from the mainstream history that nonsense you get taught about, you know, how the government... | |
| Lincoln ended slavery, and the government saved America and the Western world from the predations of rancid, coke-infested capitalism in the 1920s, and then capitalism failed and the state tried throughout the whole 30s, and it wasn't until the war, World War II, that saved capitalism and blah blah blah blah. | |
| And racism, you see, segregation. | |
| The government had to step in and break the segregation of the private companies who just wanted to segregate because they really enjoyed offending the poor who were their main customers. | |
| Anyway, I mean, so I simply know that somebody's only read mainstream stuff and they've never really thought for themselves. | |
| They've never really gone against the trend. | |
| Because until you go against the trend, you just don't realize. | |
| How powerful social opinion is and how unconscious and purposeful social opinion is. | |
| I mean, I'll give you a tiny example. | |
| Tiny example. You can come up with millions. | |
| Here's a tiny example. Is there a law that says that American publications or British publications, is there a law which says you cannot publish pictures of Iraqi or Afghani dead? | |
| Is there a law? No, there's no law. | |
| But it never happens. No law, but it never happens. | |
| That's the foundation of a free society. | |
| There's no law, but it never happens. | |
| Because people act in concert. | |
| People do that which serves them in the moment, and they don't want to go against social convention, and so they don't publish that. | |
| Do you think no journalist has ever suggested, look, let's show the other side of the story? | |
| You know, we've got, what, a million Iraqi dead? | |
| Can we show three of them over the past ten years? | |
| Or eight years? | |
| No, you can't. You see, you can't. | |
| Everybody knows that. Everybody knows. | |
| These are how rules are really enforced in society. | |
| You don't need guns. You don't need a state. | |
| You don't need prisons. You don't need any of that stuff. | |
| People think you do. But you don't. | |
| And there's tons of examples. | |
| I mean, I get so many emails every day. | |
| People say, well, I've tried to share a philosophy. | |
| I've tried to share maybe this video of yours or something about that. | |
| And I just, you know, blank wall comes down. | |
| People reject. They stonewall. | |
| They don't want to talk about it. They avoid. | |
| They go back to sports. They talk about the weather. | |
| It's like pushing two powerful opposing magnets together. | |
| You can't do it. Well, that's the genius of how rules are actually enforced in society. | |
| That's how it works. | |
| And so if people don't understand how a free society works, I know they're not thinking, I know they've not read anything outside the mainstream, and I also know that they've never bucked any significant trend in their life. | |
| They've never faced down the wall of social opposition, the caustic Foggy, cyst-like defense of the pulp sack of fiction that lies at the heart of modern society. | |
| They've just never gone up against that. | |
| So they don't understand how society can run without rules because they've never tried to break those rules. | |
| And this is what happens if you step outside the bichromatic rainbow that is the left and right spectrum of politics or the Republican Democrat or the Tory liberal or whatever. | |
| If you step outside of that, people can't think, they can't understand, they can't follow. | |
| And so the first thing that I expect any reasonably intelligent person to acknowledge about these current disasters that we see is that You know, we were right. | |
| We were right. We've been right. | |
| I mean, I've been doing this for almost 30 years. | |
| Almost 30 years. | |
| People say, oh, Steph, you're so eloquent. | |
| I appreciate that, but it's practice, you know? | |
| I've been doing this for 30 years. | |
| What's this, that old joke? | |
| Guy comes up to someone in New York and says, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? | |
| Man in New York says, practice. | |
| It's no magic. | |
| But People need to acknowledge that libertarians have been right. | |
| If that is ignored, if that is passed over, if that is glossed over, if that is pretended to not exist, then nothing intelligent can come out of that. | |
| So you can lead with that and say, do you understand that objectivists and libertarians and market anarchists and the Austrian school of economics, that we were right? | |
| That all of this was predicted, almost down to the last detail. | |
| And that we have been hurling our flaming thunderbolt-y rocks of truth to light up the sky for many, many, many years. | |
| And all the villagers in the valleys below pretend that nothing is flying overhead, that no truth is landing among them, scattering any sparks of thought. | |
| Into their wet logs of social convention, people pretend that nothing has been said. | |
| I was never warned. | |
| I didn't know. | |
| Libertarianism is kooky. | |
| It's all about selfishness. | |
| Ayn Rand liked kooky sex. | |
| It's all nonsense. | |
| Until society admits That it was warned for many, many, many, many years. | |
| And until people admit that they have known at least one libertarian who tried to speak or shake some shreds of sense into the Kavanagh's vacuum of empty repetition we call the revolving orbit of social decay, Until people acknowledge that libertarians have spoken for many years, |