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Nov. 11, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:59
2028 Stefan Molyneux Interviewed at Libertopia
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Hello everyone, this is the Liberty Radio Hour presented by Liberty Coin and Precious Metals.
As a part of our Libertopia series, we're going to sit down with Stefan Molyneux for 10 or 15 minutes and ask him some questions.
First of which being, have you ever been to San Diego before, Stefan?
I have never been to San Diego before.
I've been to Los Angeles before on business.
I've been sort of up and down the Western California coast, but I've never been to San Diego before.
So you're familiar with this concrete island of Southern California.
Well, you see, you're going to say anything negative about San Diego, I'm going to compare it with Canada in October.
So a concrete island looks pretty damn good when you're looking at near zero temperatures up north.
I think you mentioned that yesterday when you said how we were saying it was a little bit cool here.
Yeah, it's a little bit cool here. It's a little bit cloudy here.
It's like, are you sticking to metal things?
No. I think some of the things we'd like to focus on is really the economic outlook in which we all find ourselves.
We've heard things from Economists such as David Friedman who believes that we might not experience hyperinflation or inflation any worse than it already is.
Not to put words into his mouth, but that's the impression I've got.
All the way to people who think that this is going to collapse at any time and they're in some third-world country, I guess under the assumption that since these countries are poor, they have a little bit less further to fall.
Where do you fall in on that spectrum?
I think the first and most important thing to recognize is that the rulers don't believe in the economics they teach to us, right?
So the rulers believe in Keynesianism not because it's intrinsically true, but because it gives them the power to increase spending.
I mean, governments love to increase spending.
That's how you, that's what power is.
It's, you know, stuff for free, you know, that's been stolen.
And so Keynesianism has become successful because it gives politicians additional power.
But I don't think that politicians genuinely believe that more debt creates more wealth.
I mean, nobody, Hussein, believes that, that if you go further into debt, you're somehow more wealthy.
So I think if we accept that the leaders are Austrians, so to speak, the Austrian economists, that they're more free market, that they understand the free market, then I think that we can understand that what we receive is propaganda.
I don't know if you've read 1984, but O'Brien takes sort of Winston Smith into the inner circle, and they realize that most of what the inner circle, they know that what they're saying is nonsense.
It's just useful. To the outer people.
And so if the people in power really do understand free markets and economics, and I believe that they do, because if they don't understand that, they're too dumb to be in power and be ruled by idiots, which makes us even more of an idiot.
So I think they understand it.
I think that they know that there are too many dependent tax livestock.
They've created too much dependence through the welfare state and through corporate welfare as well.
Libertarians often focus on the welfare like the poor, but statism is corporate welfare as much, if not more, as we saw with the bailouts.
Right, any government spending would be welfare.
Yeah, any government spending. It creates a kind of dependence and distorts the marketplace.
And so my particular belief is that this is all well known in the circles of power.
They've got, as Jefferson said about slavery, they have a wolf by the ears.
They can't beat it or let it go, so to speak.
So what's going to happen, in my opinion, I don't think we're going to hyperinflate our way out of debt.
I think there's going to be some inflation.
But hyperinflation is too well known as a strategy now.
Everybody's looking for it. Everybody knows that the government wants to hyperinflate out of the debt.
And so the moment that the government starts doing anything like that, people would just dump their bonds, which would cause catastrophic rises in interest rates, which would destroy the government's ability to even service its debt, let alone pay it off.
So I don't think that hyperinflation is an option.
This wasn't well understood in Weimar Germany.
It wasn't well understood in other places of hyperinflation.
But in the West, it's pretty well known in economics.
I mean, you don't have to be an Austrian to know that Printing money causes inflation.
That's well understood. So I think that they're not going to take that route.
There'll be some to sort of cushion it, but what they're going to do is start preaching austerity measures to people on fixed incomes, to people who are dependent upon the governments.
There's going to be a resurgence of Stand up for yourself and be an individual and don't be dependent on the government.
And when the government starts doing that, then the media will start following and then the movie makers and the artists will start following about self-reliance and don't be dependent.
And that's the whole there's going to be a whole cultural tidal wave of memes going through where it's going to become More shameful to be dependent on the government because everyone's then going to start picking up on that and reflecting it, and they're going to try and minimize their payouts to the dependent classes because they know that they've wrapped the productive classes too tight in regulations and taxes and control and debt, and they need to liberate the productive classes so they can begin the feast anew.
They don't want to go back to the Middle Ages.
They don't want to go the way of South America.
So I think they'll just turn on the dependent classes and Preach self-reliance and back to basics and values and let's eat cat food and live three to a room.
Go ahead. So what about the portion of that just becomes extremely difficult?
I mean, all these people now are dependent.
They're not going to like the fact that somehow you cut off their funds.
Well, sorry, I don't think that they'll not mail out the checks, but those checks are not going to increase.
They may diminish to some degree.
Look, if governments can get people to believe that there's a moral crusade somewhere, I mean, America, as we talked about at lunch, America gets involved in World War II. I mean, you've got millions of Americans shipped overseas, hundreds of thousands of Americans killed for a European war that had been going on basically for 2,000 years, right? But people did it because, and that was much more sacrifice than simply a reduction in your social security check.
If you can get people to believe that there's some sort of moral crusade and they'll bring up the children.
You know, we've been wasting the resources of our children.
We've been spending the future.
We've been selling off the unborn.
We have to stop. Mistakes were made.
We all have to pull together now to just get people to accept reduced circumstances.
If they can get the moral message believable across, like, you know, Nazism was about fighting the German tyranny and liberating our brothers in Europe and fight them over there or fight them over here and blah blah blah, right?
If they can get the moral argument across, the rest will follow easily.
The challenge is reversing This thing where the dependents have been seen as genuinely dependent and needy.
Now they're going to have to be reframed as greedy and lazy and incompetent and in need of a swift free market kick to the butt.
But people can do that. I mean, they switch this stuff around all the time.
And remember, the communists were our deadly enemies for year after year, decade after decade.
They wanted to, you know, rape our women and, you know, have sex with their dogs and stuff.
And now we go to the communists for debt.
They lend us money, right?
So you can switch this stuff around easy-beasy.
People have no sense of memory.
And people are so familiar with the Cold War as a proxy war, a hot proxy war after a hot proxy war, but what the IMF and the World Bank had done through their structural readjustments or their austerity measures in the poorer countries really offers us a Vibrant record of the way in which the power structure is able to restructure economies.
After the Vietnam War, of course, millions of lives lost during that hot war.
But from 75 until 80, what a lot of people don't realize is that the International Monetary Fund went in there and then waged a second war, an economic war.
And so that gives us sort of a model about what we might see come to the West.
It's been experimented with over and over again and perhaps dialed in a little bit.
And then you also have, as far as novel ways of bringing in austerity measures, with the environmental movement, you see obviously that the poor people have to tighten their belts, drive their cars less, whatever they're asking of us, when really the Department of Defense is probably the keystone polluter on the planet.
Yeah, I mean, if we count bombs as pollution, yeah.
We talk about acid rain, how about fragment rain?
But yeah, no, that's exactly right.
I mean, and the austerity measures that have been preached, I mean, this is a paradox that I can't believe that people in India and China aren't going insane because for years and years we've been told we need to help the poor, right?
Help the poor? And look how many people there are poor in China and India.
And so finally, the poor are helped, not through a government program, but through free market reforms that have occurred since the 90s in China and in India.
And now that the poor are finally got 50,000 people a month coming into the middle class, it's the greatest wealth increase and the greatest poverty reduction in history.
Are the people who care about the poor really happy about it?
Are they just, wow, this is the most wonderful?
No, because it's against the ideology.
This shouldn't be happening because of the free market.
So now that the poor are actually finally being helped, or rather they're helping themselves because people are not pointing guns at them for free trade and entrepreneurial activities, now all the leftists are saying, well, They're polluting.
See, we wanted the poor to become richer, but we didn't want them to use any energy.
We didn't want them to expand.
We didn't want them to build anything.
I mean, it's completely mental, and the fact that nobody points this out just shows you how crazy our society is.
A lot of people are under the impression that the Eastern powers are rising now.
We're going to see This new empire building in the East, and that it's time for their civilization to sort of have their time at the center of the world stage.
But it seems to me that the way in which things are structured, if the West collapses, you're going to essentially have depression or hyperinflationary episodes the world over.
Would you agree with that, or do you think that we will see the Eastern powers rise because of their fiscal policies, or what have you?
Well, fiscal policies and demographics, right?
I mean, you should look at birth rates, right?
No culture that I know of has ever sustained a birth rate as low as...
I mean, America is as high as...
I think it's a little over 2, 2.1, and so on.
But in most of the West, in Europe, it's 1.3, 1.5, 1.7.
In Canada, it's not even at 2.
And so that, of course, means dilution of Western culture through usually very foreign immigration, right?
Immigration is great, you know, lots of different, but the reality is that it does dilute the core culture, right?
I mean, a lot of people who come from India or from China, I mean, they're not going to have the same history with Western philosophy, Western culture, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and all of that kind of good stuff.
And they also won't have some of the bad stuff, right?
The hardcore socialism and collectivism that has been growing over the past 100, 150 years in the West.
So it's a mixed bag. But they just have a lot more kids, and we have a lot more of an aging population and fewer kids.
And, of course, the ratio of people who have to contribute to the maintenance of the age, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, is tiny relative to how it used to be.
So there's a lot of things that are contributing.
But, of course, the demographics do, to some degree, follow the policies, right?
I've said in my show that smart people don't breed well in captivity, and I think that's very true.
When you look at, if you're an intelligent guy, you guys are young, intelligent guys, right?
So you look at the part, I can have a family, I can have kids, and so on, right?
Well, most people say, well, that means two people working, which means you've got to get the kids up in the morning, you've got to drop them off at daycare.
That's a really stressful thing. Try getting a two- or three-year-old out of the house in less than an hour.
It's a challenge. And then someone else takes care of them all day, and it's very expensive, and then I get them home at night, and I've got to feed them, and I've got to bathe them, and I've got to put them to bed.
And of course, how does this person see the world who's going to be taking care of them?
Are they violent by nature?
What sort of traumas have they gone through in the past?
Yeah, so I think that most people look at having kids as not that great a deal because, I mean, the joy of kids, I say this as a stay-at-home dad, the joy of kids is all the little stuff that happens during the day, the great conversations you get into just spontaneously out of nowhere, the great insights they'll just drop in.
It can't be scheduled. It's just an experiential thing.
I think that because taxation has risen so much, I mean, this is the terrible thing, right?
Housewife, work couldn't be taxed, but women going to work can be taxed.
So this is one of the reasons the government's funded feminism so much, to get women out into the workforce so they could be taxed, which all that means is that you end up with two people working, trying to raise kids.
It's a stressful and difficult life.
And so I think a lot of smarter people are like, not so much no, but maybe later, you know, maybe.
And so you get this...
Diminishment of the birth rate, which is entirely related to government policies and so on.
So, yeah, it's a whole reason why the decline of the West is going to occur, I think.
I think the Federal Reserve policy of inflation contributes to that as well.
So, you know, we used to have to, it would be enough for one person in the household to be able to support the entire household.
But because of inflation, it's actually, you know, now two people need to work.
Again, I know that you're not necessarily a proponent of gold and silver specifically, but that there should be a free market of currencies and not a monopoly of force like the central bank, the Federal Reserve System.
Oh, I completely agree.
And I believe that if we were to eliminate central banking, I have no doubt that gold and silver would be the default position.
You know, would it last if entrepreneurs came up with other kinds of currencies?
Who knows? But it's hard to argue with 5,000 years of human history where gold and silver is the default currency.
I don't see any reason why that would in particular change, you know, next year or the year after if we got rid of the central bank.
So, yeah, gold and silver are essential things to have.
I mean, I'm with you guys as far as that goes.
I've just been buying a bunch of it myself.
I'm cognizant. I just was at one of the KC summits, When Money Dies, which was pretty much the takeaway in many ways was get yourself some gold.
Historically speaking, at the end of many fiat currency systems, if not all of them, you do have that default to gold and silver.
It's basically a transitory period.
But it may last. Maybe gold and silver is the most efficient way to do it.
Obviously, if you could have a currency without needing to extract it from the earth to refine it, There'd be less overhead as far as the creation of that currency goes.
But at the same time, if you have a currency that could be easily created, you're going to get inflation at one time or another.
So, you know, Bitcoin has its own way of doing it with sort of you have to put a lot of energy into creation of Bitcoins and it gets harder, the more to mined.
Nobody can predict it, but I do believe that gold and silver, definitely in the short to medium run, is the place to go, in my opinion, in terms of investment strategies.
I say this as a complete amateur idiot who knows nothing, so take that for what it's worth.
Joe and I have been pretty aggressive savers.
We believe in saving. We think that we have to.
Mark Faber said recently that Americans, among a number of things, are going to have to start saving.
How do you advise people to go about that?
Because we know we're going into some sort of crisis economically.
What options do you feel they have, families and individuals?
It's easy. Saving is so easy.
Just stop spending. No, I mean, it's like dieting.
Just stop eating. Just stop eating.
Put down the cheesecake and pick up a carrot.
That's as complicated as it gets.
I mean, I know that it's not you say it and it's done, but with spending, it's easy.
Of course, the problem with With saving and spending is that it's mostly dictated by interest rates.
So, of course, the idea is that when lots of people save it, then there's an excess of capital, which means that the interest rates go down because it's cheaper.
Whenever you have an excess, the price of it goes down, and interest is just the price of capital.
And so when lots of people save, interest rates should go down, which should encourage people to spend rather than save.
When lots of people are spending, there's less capital, so interest rates should go up, which should encourage people to save rather than spend.
It's supposed to balance out that way in the free market.
But because the government controls not only the money supply which everyone focuses on but the government control of the interest rates is incredibly destructive to the free market because all of those macroeconomic signals get completely messed up and bunged up so people have been saving because interest rates are so low and there's inflation so sorry people have been spending because interest rates are so low and there's inflation so why would you want to stick your money in the bank where you get a quarter point of interest when inflation is six percent I mean, you might as well just set fire your money year after year.
So people want to spend it and sort of put it into something fixed, whether it's a house or a car or just something that's tangible.
Which has created all these booms.
Yeah, which has created all of these booms and has starved entrepreneurs of capital, right?
I mean, it's terrible.
And until the free market takes over interest rates again, you're just going to keep getting these ridiculous cycles.
How do you feel about Max Keiser's Buy, Silver, Crash, J.P. Morgan campaign?
I'm all for that kind of activism because that's win-win.
If you win, you crash J.P. Morgan, and if you don't crash J.P. Morgan, you still have a bunch of silver.
It's not chain yourself to a cop car and get dragged 200 yards.
That entire campaign is based on the idea that J.P. Morgan has a bunch of shorts in the silver market, but of course because they have such manipulation over silver, From the paper market, they're able to crash the price and then cover those shorts and then go long and make money off that run.
But what you have seen over the last few years is you've seen the price of silver steadily rise and the price of the J.P. Morgan stock slowly go down.
And it's, as Kaiser refers to it, price propaganda, where when you see the silver price as the same as the J.P. Morgan price, that spells a negative outlook for the J.P. Morgan price and perhaps a positive one for silver.
I think first and foremost, silver is a nice hedge or savings account more than anything, because it's important to save, but where do you save is the main question.
But it is good to see that sort of activism, I agree.
Yeah, you save in stuff, you know, there's someone, I read this somewhere and it's very true, a really, really good suit costs about an ounce of gold about 100, 150 years ago, and you go all the way back, I'm sure it's about the same, and right now, Really good suit costs about an ounce of gold.
And that's the kind of continuity that you get with gold.
And if you look at other things like housing prices, it's a little bit different from the booms, but lots of ratios of goods can be measured in gold.
They're pretty constant. And so, yeah, I would much rather save in gold.
I think stocks are going to take a bit of a beating.
I think bonds are challenging.
And, of course, the government bonds are just, please tax me in the future.
I mean, that's all. But I think the interest is coming from the government doesn't make any money.
So, yeah, I think gold and silver are a pretty good place to go.
Any final comments on your experience here over the weekend or your own activism?
Oh, I love it. I love it. I think it's great.
I really, really enjoyed meeting you guys.
I've enjoyed meeting other people. I feel normal here.
You know, a lot of times you feel like you're kind of swimming against the current and, you know, in Canada it's a whole different kettle of fish.
I mean, we don't have much of a libertarian movement.
And so I really do enjoy coming here and just feeling like I'm with like minds.
You know, it's funny to see they say it's nice to be around people who think like us.
I don't quite agree with that.
I think it's just nice to be around people who think and who are open to new ideas.
So, you know, I highly recommend Libertopia and this whole experience has been great.
And how about you guys? We've had an excellent time.
We found out about the event about six months ago.
We decided that we would be a sponsor of it, and it's been everything we would have wanted and expected of it.
We've learned a lot. There's been, surprisingly, a multifarious arena of ideas where you don't have everyone thinking the same thing.
What you have Some people who are in some ways opposed, or for ideas that traditionally you might think are the dispositions of a statist, which has surprised me.
But that's alright, it takes time. You know, I was just saying as a speech, I got this ridiculous body, what's the difference between an anarchist and a libertarian?
A libertarian to anarchist, that transition?
About six or seven years if you're paying attention.
Absolutely. Which I think is a pretty good way of putting it.
Well, thank you so much for your time. Our pleasure, Stefan.
And if I repost this, do you want to give your guys a website?
Sure, that's no problem. This is Liberty Coin and Precious Metals.
Our website is at www.LibertyCPM.com and have a great day.
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