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Nov. 21, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

22:46

2040 The Guilty Conscience of the Aged Is the Secret Physics of the World

Why is nobody asking the simple, basic question: why are all the Western democracies so deeply in debt? Because the answer is too horrible for words.

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	You know, one of the most brilliant things in Atlas Shrugged, the book, and maybe the movie, we'll find out in time, It's when Ayn Rand talks about how when the world is falling to pieces, faster than a shit sandwich fed us backwards into a blender, she says that you could only ever figure out in the world what was going on through denials or evasions.
	It was sort of like a negative blacklight map of the moral fissures and catastrophes of that world.
	So you could only find out that there was a problem with gasoline production because they said there's no problem with gasoline production.
	You said I had to... or whatever topic was completely ignored.
	Debt is something that falls into this category so strongly at the moment.
	The stock market has been taking this massive tumble and it looks like...
	I mean, the euro is simply not going to last.
	And And I've scoured the media for this.
	It's part of my job, if you can call it a job, is to have a look at the media every day.
	And all of the Western countries are horrifically in debt and face astounding levels of unfunded liabilities, right?
	All the stuff that has been promised to people either on the verge of retirement or It's pensions or benefits in other situations or circumstances that run into the God knows how many hundreds of trillions of dollars, all completely unpayable.
	So the current levels of debt are unsustainable and the current levels of deficit are unsustainable.
	But the unfunded liabilities is where you really see the true collapse of the Western economy.
	It's going to be like a trembling sandcastle under a tsunami.
	And one of the things that you'd think would be the media's main focus is to ask, why are all these countries in debt?
	Why are all these countries in debt at the moment?
	Why is this so common across all of these various cultures and language and so on?
	Why are all these governments in debt?
	And you won't ever see that question asked, at least in the mainstream media.
	I've not seen any special or series or even brief article or mention about why all these countries are in debt.
	And the answer is very, very simple.
	These countries are in debt because of democracy.
	There's no doubt about it.
	I mean, anybody takes a moment's thought.
	It's funny because as a philosophical anarchist, I spend a good deal of time answering questions like, well, what about this outlandish situation in an anarchic society, in a free society?
	What if you have a house and somebody builds a road all the way around your house and then charges you a million dollars to drive across it?
	I mean, these are all kind of funny.
	It's kind of funny to me because it's sort of like this.
	It's like... You see a guy, you're a doctor, and you see a guy walking into the emergency room, and one of his eyeballs is hanging out, and his tongue is jammed through a hole in the side of his cheek.
	He's holding one arm in his hand, and his toes have all fallen off, and he's a complete wreck.
	And you rush up to him, and you start to bark out your orders about how to save this guy's life.
	And someone... Comes up to you and stops you and says, what if he develops a hangnail in 20 years?
	I mean, this is the level of...
	Madness that you face when you think, you know, clearly and rationally and argue your position.
	Well, I think I do.
	But this is the madness you come up with, right?
	I mean, we are facing an entire crack, fissure and collapse of the Western fascist, mercantilist, corporatist, socialist, statist economic paradigm.
	And it's been incredibly rapid.
	It's been 40, 45 years, a little longer perhaps, that the socialist welfare state and the gold standard elimination fiat currency state came into existence.
	It's been incredibly rapid, the deterioration and destruction of the Western economies.
	And so to me, when people say, well, what about this outlandish possibility in some future free society?
	It's like someone comes up and says, you know, when you're dying of cancer and says, well, I can make you well, but it's going to hurt like hell.
	And then you say, no, I'm going to stick with the cancer because, you know, if you make me well, in a couple of decades, I might be hunting for a remote control in a darkened room and really stub my toe.
	I want to take that chance.
	I mean, this is what you face when you're any kind of clear thinker in the world.
	I mean, why are the Western economies in debt?
	Because debt is the foundation of statism.
	Debt is the foundation of statism.
	Because statism is all about taking money from people and giving it to other people.
	Taking money from people and giving it to other people.
	That's what the government does.
	That's what the government is.
	And, of course, that's going to give you debt.
	Because if you have, you know, a hundred dollars, if you have two people who you both want to please, and they both have fifty dollars, and you steal $10 from one and give it to the other guy.
	So one guy has $40, now one guy has $60.
	Well, the guy with $60 is going to be happier, and the guy with $40 is going to be unhappy.
	So it doesn't work if there's a fixed amount of money in the system.
	And let's say, of course, being the government, being the redistributor of wealth, you understand that the majority of wealth that the government redistributes is to itself.
	So like... Only 20% or 15% of the money that's supposed to go to the poor through the state actually gets to the poor.
	The redistribution of income is to the state, and then it'll hand out these little drabs and drips for people to stay dependent upon the state.
	I mean, it's like you see a guy dying in the desert of thirst, and you give some guy saying, my God, give him this water, and he goes...
	Drinks, you know, 80-90% of it and then gives a couple of drops to the guy.
	I mean, it's like, well, then just hand it to him yourself.
	I don't know. People think that the government is like a force of nature or a physical law that operates without human intervention and human corruption.
	I mean, I guess because it's the modern God, right?
	I mean, as religion declined, the faith in the state went up because Lord knows we can't live without a master of some kind.
	But You can't take from Peter and give to Paul if you want to please both Peter and Paul.
	And if you've got a public sector union that is demanding 10% more money in a city, then you can give them 10% more money.
	But if you're in a zero-sum game, or if you're in a sort of fixed amount of money game, then you have to raise everyone's taxes by 15%.
	Because you've got to have your overhead to administer the transfer of money, right?
	And that's a big problem.
	Because then you've made the Public Sexual Union happy.
	But you've pissed off all of the people who pay for that, right?
	I mean, there was this thing, I remember this New York thing, they were, I think it was the garbage man there years ago, they were just demanding more money, more money from the people, and we're going to go on strike if we don't get it.
	If I was in politics, I'd just say, hey, you know, we will give you a mailing list.
	And you can, you know, if you want more money from your customers, then you go and ask them for donations.
	You go and ask them for money.
	Say, you know, if you could leave out ten bucks with your garbage, we'd be really happy.
	Don't talk to me. If you want money from the people, go talk to the people and ask them to set up a PayPal account, set up a website, set up donations, ask for money, set up a little change box by the cash register of the local Grand& Toy.
	That's how you can get your money if you want it.
	But, of course, you can't do that.
	So, yeah, if you want to give the Public Secretary of the Union 10% more, you've got to raise property taxes by 15%, you're out of power, right?
	And if you say no to the public sector union for their 10% raise, then they go on strike and everyone hates you.
	Or if you legislate them back to work, they've got millions and millions and millions of dollars from their war chest and forced union-induced donations.
	They've got millions of dollars to spend on defeating you in the next election.
	So you can't win if you are in a fixed income situation.
	If you don't have free money To play with, right?
	Satan's fart shits of fiat currency is all you need to survive.
	You can't survive without it.
	So, of course they're in debt.
	Because if you can borrow the money to give the public sector union a 10% raise and you don't have to raise taxes, or you only have to raise them a tiny little bit, then you're ahead of the game.
	I mean, this is how you win. And anyone who comes up With any rational idea or thought and says, well, you know, here are the facts, right?
	If we want to give these people 10%, we've got to raise your taxes by 15%.
	Can't work, right?
	The other thing, of course, is that the public sector union guys live in the same city.
	So, to give them a 10% raise, you have to raise everyone's property taxes by 15%.
	They get that they're not really getting a raise, right?
	You understand, right?
	Because they've got to pay the extra property taxes, too.
	We're not getting much of a raise.
	And we're just talking about raises in the moment, right?
	The big issue in Wisconsin, under Walker, was that he said, look, I mean, we've got to stop paying the public sector unions off with contracts that give them retirement benefits in 20 years or 30 years, because those people who are going to pay for those benefits aren't even damn well born yet.
	And no taxation without representation, right?
	And so the other thing you want to do, and this is what happened in most of the Western countries, starting from the sort of 80s, mid to late 80s and onwards, is the governments were running out of the power to borrow and bribe the local governments.
	And so what they did was they said, okay, well, instead of giving you a 10% raise, we're going to give you a 3% raise, but we're going to give you 20% more retirement benefits when you retire, or we're going to claw your retirement age back by five years so you can retire 55 instead of 60 or 50 instead of 55.
	So, That's how they did it.
	They simply kicked the can down the road.
	And that's how they bribed everyone to stay in power, right?
	I mean, remember... Being a politician, it's like trying to tread water in a big vat of soap bubbles.
	You've always got to be clawing your way up.
	You've always got to be bribing people everywhere here and there and bribing everyone all the time.
	And you've got to make up money to get that.
	You've got to manufacture money, which either means debt or money.
	Fiat currency money printing.
	And if you're a local government, you don't have the power to fiat currency money print.
	Of course, you beg up to the federal government who will then do it on your behalf and rain it down on you.
	But I mean, it's clear this is why everyone's in debt.
	But I've been talking about this for 12 minutes.
	Without tangents, you could probably explain this in about 90 seconds.
	You get it? I mean, it would be a couple of paragraphs.
	Completely obvious. No, this is not hard to understand.
	A five-year-old would understand this.
	I bet you I'll sit down my daughter, who's not even three yet.
	I could sit her down with candy as an example, and her dolls as the voters, and she could understand this before the age of three.
	No doubt about it. I mean, she's great with math.
	She's great with concepts.
	She could get it. So why isn't this being talked about?
	Well, you know, The basic reality, I think...
	Oh, this is a theory.
	I think... I think that the world really runs on bad consciences.
	On bad consciences. I think the elder generation...
	And I know, I know.
	For some of you out there, when I'm talking about the elder generation, I'm talking about people even older than the current baldy cryptkeeper, murmuring in your ear at the moment.
	But I think the elder generation has a really bad conscience.
	And they have a bad conscience for two fundamental reasons.
	The first is that they lectured so appallingly, inevitably, and grindingly slowly about Morality.
	Ah, the moral lectures that I remember receiving.
	I mean, I went to school, gosh, all the places.
	I went to a private boarding school when I was six in England, then to a public school, to another public school in England.
	Took tests to go to school in Scotland.
	Came to Canada. Was in grade 8.
	Was put back in grade 6 because my math skills went up to scratch.
	So they said. And went to a variety of schools here in Canada.
	National Theatre School.
	Went to York University, McGill University, University of Toronto.
	I mean, did a lot of education in a lot of different places.
	And even took exams to go to school in...
	South Africa. Anyway.
	The moral lectures that I received about...
	I remember a friend of mine When we were 13 or so, he later became an architect and was a great drawer and he was so bored.
	I mean, we all had, I think, pretty fertile minds and we were stuck in this oxygen-empty space station mirror bubble of empty, distracted propaganda filth.
	For year after year. And he got bored and he was doodling in his book.
	And oh my god, the teacher took it from him.
	The book was crap.
	I mean, it was the spine had fallen off and half the pages were missing because that's the shit that you get when you don't vote.
	The teacher held it up in front of him and this went on and on.
	Lecturing him about the need to respect property.
	The need to respect property.
	I got a similar lecture when I was in the boarding school.
	We would, you know, like all caged animals, we went through our St.
	Vitus dance rages and mad-herd tulip mania, South Sea bubble mania, massive flows of obsessive distractions.
	Like, we'd be into marbles, and everybody would be obsessed with marbles, and then we'd be into conquerors, which is hitting chestnut to chestnut.
	Ah, what do you care? But we would go through these manias, and one of the manias was...
	Paper airplanes. And I had a Guinness Book of World Records my mom had gotten for me and I took out a page of some topic I wasn't interested in at all.
	It was about Roman coins. And I made a paper airplane because I couldn't get a hold of any paper because there was such a shortage because of the mania.
	And that was, you know, when this was found out, I was holed up in front of class and I think I was six or seven and lectured to about the need to respect property, the need to respect property.
	Of course, I just felt it was...
	I felt it was bullshit at the time.
	This isn't too personal. I think it's interesting.
	I felt it was bullshit at the time.
	Because people are more important than property, and I was not being treated well in these schools.
	I mean, I was... I would get...
	I was caned in this boarding school.
	I was caned with a cane on my butt for climbing over a wall to get a ball, to get a soccer ball or football that had gone over the wall.
	And so I always thought, well...
	I mean, if you showed half the respect for my ass that I'm supposed to show for this little piece of paper with some pictures of old Roman coins on it, I think the world would be a lot better.
	And it's so funny to think, of course, that my friend who was lectured mercilessly and grindingly and cruelly about the need to respect people's property was being lectured by...
	Like was being lectured on the sanctity of property by a woman whose salary was paid for through theft, through aggression against people in the form of property tax.
	So you have to respect a shitty old half-torn-up schoolbook full of empty, gooey, sticky propaganda.
	It was so sticky with propaganda you could barely get the pages apart.
	You're supposed to respect that property, but the $10,000 that was forcibly extracted per year per student from the surrounding families at gunpoint, well, that was just virtuous, you see, because human beings don't matter, right?
	Pieces of paper with pictures of Roman coins, they matter.
	And shitty old propaganda half-wrecked up textbooks, they matter.
	But human beings that you point guns at to, they don't matter.
	So there's a guilty conscience about not only the lecturing of morality, you know, responsibility, right?
	So how many people, when they were kids, would spend their allowance too soon and then see something they wanted later in the week and would get long lectures about living within your means and long lectures about deferral of gratification and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Not to mention you have your dessert after you eat your vegetables because you've got to do the right thing and then you get to do the fun thing.
	I mean, all of this, all of this lecturing about fiscal responsibility, the deferral of gratification, responsibility as a whole, and the need to respect property, respect persons and property.
	And this is the same generation that for decades I was bringing up, the fact that they...
	I mean, how much more wretched, parasitical scumbaggery can infest The void where a human soul used to hang than stealing from the unborn by writing their future in the pig blood of debt.
	I mean, that's about as deep a level of profit-breaking piratical scumbaggery that you could imagine.
	So they have a guilty conscience.
	I mean, they dumped us in shitty schools.
	Terrible schools. And, you know, piously and pompously defended this system, praised this system, that was based on a violation of all the moral rules that they so repetitively and so heavily and seriously inflicted upon.
	Children. And I think that's really important.
	You know, for the elder generation to say, you know, we've really fucked up.
	Man, we've really fucked up badly.
	And not only did we fuck up badly, but we had no excuse for it.
	We had no excuse for it because we lectured you all about property, respect for property, and respect for persons.
	Don't bully, don't hit, don't use force to get your way.
	And so we have no right to now defend a system.
	I mean, people can change if what comes to them is genuinely new information.
	That's my long and hard-won experience.
	People can change When it's genuinely new information to them.
	But if it's information that they've known about all along and have rejected and refused and profited from the denunciation and denial of, change ain't gonna happen.
	You can... I mean, you can turn yourself around if restitution is possible.
	But if restitution is impossible, then people just stick to their guns and go down in flames.
	So I think it's really important.
	It's a good mental exercise that I strongly, strongly suggest.
	It's a good mental exercise to say to what degree There's bad conscience.
	And the slithery, slimy Garden of Eden snake up the leg profiteering that comes from having ignored a guilty conscience for many decades.
	To what degree is that actually the secret physics of the world we live in?
	You don't have to take any of my word for this.
	You can simply perform the Socratic examination of curiosity on your elders.
	And ask them the questions about whether they thought that the respect for property and personhood was so important.
	And if they did, what they now think of a system and what they thought of the system at the time that so clearly and destructively violates persons and property, both current and future.

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