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Nov. 28, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:47
2045 British Blood Unions Strike!

More examples of the impossibility and inevitable self-detonation of the devil called 'demoncracy'.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
Hope you're doing very well. If I may press upon your kindness briefly, you can go to freedomainradio.com forward slash donate to help support the cast of this show which has no ads and the books are all free.
We've had almost 40 million downloads and I hope that you can do a little bit to help out The pretty considerable cost of running the operation.
You can sign up for a $5 a month subscription.
What is that? Two coffees?
Two lattes a month would really help spread philosophy.
Anyway, enough said.
But if you could help out, I would hugely, hugely appreciate it.
So, people have written to ask me what I think of the strikes that are going on in England at the moment, which absolutely harken back to the 70s.
For me, I grew up in England in the 70s.
I was born in Ireland, and then I grew up in England in the 70s.
And remember, the coal strikes and the gas strikes, and Margaret Thatcher was our Ron Paul.
And if you've not run around the block a few times with these kinds of Salvation figures, I can understand how it's easier to believe in the next one, but I think it was she who famously said that socialism is a lot of fun until you run out of other people's money, and it always has to fail for that very reason.
But this is not news, right?
This is not news. It's like when you're 50 years old.
It's not news that if you live in Canada, November gets cold because you've seen it happen many many times before it's predicted it's known it's a cycle that's well understood now I'm going to tell you a little bit about something it's kind of technical but it's well worth understanding it's called social choice theory you've probably heard about it before but in particular there's this thing called Arrows impossibility theorem it's also called the general Possibility Theorem, or Arrow's Paradox.
And this is the theorem which mathematically proves that no voting system can be defined or put into practice that satisfies these three basic criteria of fairness.
One, if every voter prefers alternative X over alternative Y, then the group prefers X over Y. Two, if every voter's preference between X and Y remains unchanged, then the group's preference between X and Y would also remain unchanged, even if voters' preferences between other pairs, like X and Z, Y and Z, or Z and W, change.
And also that there is no dictator.
No single voter possesses the power to always determine the group's preferences.
Now, I know it's technical and kind of dull.
If you want to run through the math, please feel free to.
I'm sure you're better at it than I am.
I'm sort of like Barbie. I'm way too pretty to be good at math.
What this basically says is that there's no way, there's no conceivable mathematical way that you could implement a system of voting that can satisfy even the most basic standards of fairness.
And there's lots of reasons for this.
And this was originally published in 1951.
1951? It was more than half a century old.
It was 60 years old. Have you ever heard about it?
Well, if you've been in government schools, of course not, right?
Which is why it's so important to remember when you're talking to the philosophy muggles that you are dealing with, you know, brain-sparking pseudo-robots of incompetent pseudo-intellectualcy.
It's really, really important to understand that you're just not speaking the language of reason when you're talking to the majority of people about something as basic as politics and economics.
People still use public and private.
What they mean is violent and peaceful, right?
But you have to invent public and private to make a sort of equivalency, to make them sort of two sides of the same coin, rather than the opposite ends of a moral spectrum.
Public means that which is imposed in a monopoly sense by law, which means that competition will get you shot if you resist being thrown in jail or fined.
And so people talk about public and private, and what they're really referring to is violent and peaceful.
Coercive and voluntary, but you can't use those terms because people don't like things.
Define that clearly. It tends to make things a lot easier than people want them to be.
Everyone loves to create what they call in England a muddle.
Everybody loves to create a muddle because then you can imagine that it's too complicated and that you always got to have nuance.
But there's not a lot of nuance between there being a gun in the room and there not being a gun in the room.
That's sort of important. I just run through this very, very briefly.
This is some aspects of public choice theory.
So, pork barrel projects, right?
The sort of funding of companies to do stuff that people in general don't want.
Why does it happen? Well, because of the concentration of benefits and the diffusion of costs.
So the traditional example in Austrian theory is the sugar companies.
Sugar companies have protectionism where significant tariffs are enforced upon anybody who wants to import sugar, which allows sugar companies to raise their prices to whatever it is just shy of that tariff barrier.
And of course everybody wants that tariff barrier to go higher and higher who's in the sugar industry.
And the people in the sugar industry get millions and millions and millions of dollars from this.
Of free money.
As I've always said, government is free evil.
And if you ever want to make people become more and more evil, you just lower the cost of evil.
And philosophy is all about raising the cost of evil back to where they should be, which is why I talk about philosophy and values and voluntarism being the guide to personal relationships.
But the benefits to the sugar producers in America are huge.
Millions and millions of dollars.
Whereas the cost to the average consumer, 40, 50 bucks a year.
So the incentives for the people to lobby Congress to maintain and expand these tariffs are huge, massive.
Whereas the incentives for any individual consumer to oppose this particular tariff are tiny.
Which is why there's always this vicious imbalance in democracy.
Politicians, of course, like being able to hand out pork barrel projects because their ability to hand out pork barrel projects is why they get elected.
It's why people give money to politicians.
It's because they want the politicians to return to them some benefit, and particularly corporations get multiple, multiple times benefits of political handouts relative to what they spend on campaigns.
So that sort of makes sense.
And, you know, there's just a lot of fun, you know, with this sort of endless parade of begging, wheedling, cringing, state toady vermin coming in, kissing the ring of the Federal Reserve in order to drink from the, you know, massive...
Bloodhose of fiat currency stripped from the hide of the unborn.
So, they like that.
The local constituency might want it because there are jobs created and so on.
And what is the cost for these pork barrel projects?
Well, the guy's spending other people's money.
And in particular, when you're not even spending the money of people who live at the moment, but through deficit financing, you are spending the money of the future.
Or through inflation, you're spending the money of the poorest people, you know, in a couple of years from now, who have no idea why they're getting poorer.
I mean, it's irresistible.
I mean, it's absolutely irresistible.
It's funny, when we have this society that says, like all societies, we want to do good and not do evil, and we subsidize evil to the tune of trillions of dollars a year, and we penalize good or virtue to the tune of trillion dollars a year.
I mean, do you really want to know about society's ethics?
Look at the flow of its money, not at the flow of its rhetoric.
You know, almost always running in completely opposite directions.
And the taxpayer, of course, so everyone's behaving rationally.
Once you set an evil system at the center of your society, all rational actions serve to expand that evil at the center of your society.
So once you place a monopoly of people at the center of your society with the legal right and obligation to initiate the use of force against others, and you let them type whatever they want into their own bank accounts, You subsidize evil and you penalize virtue and The fact that this results in a worse and worse society is I mean the fact that it needs to be said simply shows how propagandized everyone is I mean if you've got a marathon runner at the top of his game who suddenly starts smoking a pack a day of unfiltered menthol cigarettes unfiltered cigarettes Is it news?
Marathon runner's performance is declining because...
It's not news.
And this is true of voters as well, right?
So the odds of your vote affecting anything significant are virtually nil.
But the cost of educating yourself about...
The ins and outs and theories and practice of political policies, economic policies and so on is huge.
It takes thousands of hours to become even remote.
I calculated a year or two ago, 35,000 hours into philosophy and economics and self-knowledge and so on.
It takes a long time to become good at anything.
It takes a long time just to learn another language.
And you're learning a language that everyone's yelling at you for learning called truth and reason and evidence.
So it's really hard to.
And what's the payoff?
Well, of course, the payoff when you learn anything about truth and reason and evidence is you tend to set yourself at odds against people in your own society.
And you tend to alienate yourself, you know, from the mindless zombie herd currently eating the brains of the unborn and the young.
The other thing, too, is that one of the things that public choice theory does is it takes the discipline of economics and then applies it to the government, which was relatively new in the 1950s and came up with something called rent-seeking.
Rent-seeking is that once you have political power, you have the capacity to bestow unjust and coerced economic benefits on particular individuals.
And that, you know, that's...
You know, the government is a big pile of shit.
The corporations are flies looking to bury themselves wings deep in the oog.
And that's inevitable.
And so they feed off each other, so to speak.
So... When you have a monopoly of something, and the monopoly can either be an absolute monopoly, like public schools, or it can be a relative monopoly, or a sort of graded monopoly, like people who receive benefits from high tariffs whilst around the country to borrow the entrance of goods.
And this could also be in the form of subsidies, which occur.
So if you are a farmer, you get subsidies.
And so it's called rent-seeking, which is that you want the government to provide you these unjust benefits.
Once you set that thing in motion, I mean, the end of the civilization is usually a matter of a generation or two away, which is what is playing out right now.
And this has been known for many years.
I mean, one of the things that is...
I don't know.
I mean, it's hard to say. It feels inevitable, but I still think people have a responsibility for it.
I mean, so let's get back to...
What is that? Only an 11-minute aside.
Hey, not bad for me.
But if we look at...
The British public sector workers, first of all, up to a third of them went on strike and service was virtually unaffected.
Hmm... That may tell you something about the necessity of these people.
But the British government is saying, look, we're not going to put any of these...
You know, they want them to pay...
They retire at 67 and they want them to pay more into their retirement plans.
Because these retirement plans were all set up a generation or two ago when people weren't living nearly as long and...
Also, they wanted to, right now, for the most part, the pension contributions are calculated in the last year of earnings, and they say, well, no, let's do the average of your whole time there, because none of these goodies are available in the private sector, so we have to start changing these things, because, you know, we don't have the money.
And, of course, the public sector unions say that this is unfair.
It's unfair. Well, of course, unfair is unfair.
I mean, it's a funny term because you could say, of course it feels unfair, absolutely.
People say, well, I signed up for this benefit and I took lower wages in the private sector, though you put wages, benefits, and job security in, and public sector workers earn 40% or more than private sector equivalents.
But they say, well, it's not fair.
I signed up for this and it changed.
The government has now changed things.
And that always strikes me as a curious argument.
I mean, when you hitch your star, so to speak, to, you know, the professional three-piece suit mafia called the state, the fact that they can change things arbitrarily, isn't that kind of what you wanted?
I mean, the fact that they can give you increases arbitrarily, the fact that they can Offer you gold-plated pensions 30 or 40 years down the road, which no private sector company can do.
The fact that they can do all of these things is because they can do things at the stroke of a pen.
So the fact that they can undo them at the stroke of a pen seems, well, that's part of the deal, right?
I mean, that's part of the Faustian bargain that you make with these kinds of organizations.
This stuff has been known for many, many, many years that there's going to be problems.
So it's sort of one of two possibilities when it comes to these public sector unions.
I mean, the members.
Either A, they have no idea that the government has been spending more than it's been taking in for decades.
They have no idea, in which case they have the right to be surprised But it simply means that they've taken no interest in the democracy, they've taken no interest in politics, they've taken no interest in even rudimentary economics, and they've been completely uninvolved in attempting to study even the tiniest bit of information about the entity that they have hitched their finances to.
Well, if I have a stock portfolio and I never open any of the statements after 20 years, can I claim to be surprised?
When I open the statements, then it's gone down by 10% or 20%.
I can claim to be surprised, but my surprise is my own fault for not opening the statements for 20 years.
So people have either ignored the knowledge that the governments are running higher and higher deficits, in which case, well...
You didn't study for the test called life, and so if you fail, you fail.
I mean, that's what was taught to me when I was five years old in school.
If I forgot about a test, well, I got an F. So, you know, if you didn't know any of this stuff, then ignorance is not bliss, always.
Or, they do know about it, but they have not spoken vociferously against it, right?
So, they do know that the government is running a deficit, but they haven't spoken against it.
Okay, so you knew about it, right?
And instead of studiously avoiding the issue, and you have to work pretty hard to avoid knowing that the government is running a deficit and is massively in debt.
Now, of course, what they do, and this is natural, right, is that they say, well, corporations are making more money and we should tax them and pay us and so on.
I mean, that's the standard infighting that occurs.
So why should the austerity measures be put upon the backs of the most vulnerable in society?
Well, of course, they're not the most vulnerable in society.
The most vulnerable in society in England are the children.
And how have they been treated over the past few generations?
Very badly. You know, people wonder when they look at the sociopathic predations occurring at the highest levels of finance and in the highest levels of the government.
And they say, well, gosh, where could this have come from?
If you're at all rational, the first place that you look when you see a society sliding further and further into corruption is you don't look at the laws and you don't look even at public choice theory or the logic of the system.
What you do is you look at the moral education of the young.
If people are behaving badly as a whole, the first place you look is to the moral education of the young.
And it can't conceivably be an accident or a coincidence that most of the people Almost all of the people who are currently praying like sharks on minnows upon the middle class through financial instruments, through debt, through leverage, through government corruption.
It can't be a coincidence that these people are exploiting financial advantage Exploiting the vulnerable for the sake of their own financial advantage.
Because they grew up in public schools where the teachers did exactly that.
The teachers in the public sector unions did exactly that.
Exploited the helplessness and dependence of children for the sake of their own financial advantage, for the sake of their summers off, for the sake of their pensions, for the sake of their job security.
Right? You understand that children are not Vessels which society is at all interested in pouring knowledge and wisdom into what they are is a kind of livestock that are penned up for the sake of the profits of the farmers and the farmers of the teachers and the public sector unions and the government and the intellectuals and all the people who are on the public slash coercive side of the equation and so The people who are preying upon those who have less power through government,
through finances, and so on, they're simply replicating, albeit on a slightly larger scale, the lessons of their childhood.
I mean, the great danger to societies that are corrupt, in other words, to societies, the great danger is not that children don't listen to society, The great danger is that children do listen to society and children who grew up knowing that they were being exploited and abused in schools and in churches and by their families at times Children who grow up say, okay, well, this is what you do in society.
I'm going to listen to the actions of society, which is what children really do, not to the words.
I'm going to listen to the actions of society, and my teachers are providing me shitty, boring, aggressive, abusive, caustic, humiliating pseudo-instruction, because they want to profit off of my dependence.
So what am I going to do?
Well, Like any budding sociopath, you're going to learn the lessons of power, which is if you have little to none, you will be exploited and abused.
And as you gain in power, you get to join the ranks of the exploiters and the abusers, which is what is taught to all children through government schools.
They then grow up, they get any semblance of power, and they turn and do back to society what society has done unto them.
I mean, in my opinion, all crimes against society arise from society refusing to acknowledge The hideous way it treats children.
If you want to get rid of adult crimes you have to first acknowledge the crimes against children.
Everything else flows out of that. And just sort of end up by saying that this stuff has all been talked about for many, many years.
You can't make democracy work.
You can't. It's not possible.
It's never been possible. It never will be possible.
The math is very clear.
Anybody who is a rational actor, and we assume that just about everybody who's this side of Prozac is a rational actor, anybody who's a rational actor is going to act in immediate self-interest.
And... When you have a government, when you have the ability to provide favors at will, when you have the ability to print money, you're simply going to set into events an inescapable, you know, brakes cut downhill truck off a cliff edge.
It's going to take society with it.
I mean, it's been predicted for...
Many, many centuries.
Anybody who studied ancient Rome knows that this is exactly what happened in ancient Rome.
The lessons have been around forever.
So anybody who doesn't know them is willfully avoiding knowledge.
It's really not hard to find out.
Libertarians have been telling everyone for years and years and years that, oh, the welfare state is going to create a permanent underclass.
Oh my goodness, the welfare state has created a permanent underclass, right?
That the gap between rich and poor is going to get wider as states become more powerful.
Oh my god, the gap is...
Everybody's pretending that this hasn't been told to them by me, by, you know, thousands of other people over the decades.
I've been telling this to people for...
Almost 30 years.
And the number of people who will listen is very few.
And it is sad but inevitable.
I mean, I wish we weren't all tied together on the same raft sometimes, but it's not news.
It's not news that the super committee failed to come up with budget cuts.
It's not news that the budget cuts that are supposed to automatically kick in are going to be repealed.
I mean, it's not news. So let me just mention something here.
It's an interesting book to read called The Myth of the Rational Voter.
There are four major myths that this writer has figured out that people fail to grasp.
One is called the make-work bias.
And the idea is that unemployment is the goal, right?
So more unemployment is the goal and anything which reduces, in the short run, reduces the amount that people are working is bad.
And this is, of course, nonsense.
We could get back to full unemployment tomorrow if we simply banned all farm machinery and all the farming had to be done by hand.
We'd have nothing but jobs for people.
They wouldn't be making much and the cities would half depopulate in a Khmer Rouge kind of way, but we'd end up with full employment.
That which eliminates labor adds value to the economy.
That which eliminates labor adds value to the economy.
Again, if you want more details about it, email me and maybe I'll do another show on that.
If you can make a worker produce twice as much as he used to under the same conditions, then there's going to be a number of lost jobs, but those lost jobs can now go and do other things in the economy that add value rather than being tied up in an unproductive area of the economy.
So, there's a make-work bias.
So, there's this belief...
Because when somebody loses a job due to outsourcing, everybody...
Like, he knows it. He's aware of it.
He's been laid off. He's unhappy.
The plant's been moved to Hong Kong or Mars or whatever.
And so, he's unhappy.
And he's like, oh my God, my job's been moved overseas.
And I get so many emails about this.
Oh, American manufacturing has been gutted because...
You know, jobs were moved overseas as if Mexico was not always available for people.
Why did it change?
Mexico has been on the border to the US for hundreds of years.
Why? Why has it changed just over the past generation?
Well, because of increased regulation, red tape, health and safety, pollution stuff.
I mean, it's wretched. This stuff was not allowed to be taken care of in the free market, but government fiat and dictates came over.
And so, that's what happens.
You decimate your manufacturing class, which means that the majority of men who are thrown out of work, and this is true of the last recession, it's the majority of people thrown out of work are men, which means the marriage rates drop as they have by 10%.
If the birth rate drops, it means you need to increase immigration, which dilutes the core culture.
I mean, it's just a big mess all around, but these things all get set in motion when you use violence to solve complicated social problems like resource allocation and environmental protection.
Whereas somebody who loses their job because a factory gets shipped overseas can point and say, aha, I lost my job because blah, blah, blah.
Somebody who got a job as the resulting efficiencies doesn't know that.
Doesn't know that at all.
And so this is where people's immediacy has always been the blindness.
It's always been the blindness of people's immediacy.
Our perspective is flawed.
Always. This is why we need science, math, and philosophy.
Our perspective is flawed. You know, from where we sit, the world looks flat, and it looks like the sun and the moon go around the world.
Only one of them does. The Sun and the Moon look about the same size, about the size of a dime held at arm's length, but they're not the same size at all.
And the Earth doesn't feel like it moves.
It looks like everything else moves.
That's not true. Our perspective is flawed.
And why philosophy?
Brownies taste good and broccoli taste bad, right?
But you've got to reverse those two things if you want a healthy life.
And so our perspective from within here, from where we are at five or six feet tall, is flawed.
It's terribly flawed. And that which we experience emotionally is terribly flawed, right?
When Michelle Reed tried to, I'd recommend this book called The Bee Eater, when Michelle Reed tried to reform the schools to actually care about the kids, well, a lot of black school teachers who were shitty lost their jobs.
And so the community went up and revolted because that was immediate, whereas the gains that would be made to the kids weren't going to show up for a long time.
So our perspective is flawed.
So you'll always hear lots of noise from people who lose their jobs because of a particular decision by a manufacturer.
You will not hear, you know, cheers going up from the more people who gain jobs because of that decision.
It's just not going to work. That's why you need principles, not perspective.
There's an anti-foreign bias.
It's just natural. This is just the result of, you know, brain-dead club tribalism.
I mean, it's brain-dead my club tribalism just, you know, well, that's bad if the jobs go over there.
Of course, it's not true.
I mean, money always comes back, right?
Money always comes back. It has to, otherwise you can't send it overseas, right?
If a French company buys American goods, then they have to use American dollars to buy it.
And so if we go and buy French goods, we pay for it with American or Canadian or New Zealand dollars, and that has to come back, because if it can't come back, nobody's going to use it.
If it's a one-way street, then they can't use it to buy back goods, right?
So it's always a round trip.
The trade dollar is always a round trip.
It doesn't matter whether somebody's next door or overseas.
There's an anti-market bias.
This is just natural. This is just natural.
People always underestimate the benefits of the free market because the creative destruction of the free market appears in the short run to create far more losers than winners.
This is just natural. This is just natural.
And because people lack the capacity to think in principles, because public schools cannot teach you to think in principles, government schools cannot teach you to think in principles, because governments and their schools are violations of all rational moral tenets.
Even irrational ones like thou shalt not steal.
Property taxes which you use to pay for it are the very definition of theft.
Government schools have to teach you that monopolies in the free market are bad, which is a complete violation of the basic reality that all public sector controls are monopolistic, right?
I mean, this is what's so funny about these, and tragic, really about these Wall Street protesters complaining about corporations.
Corporations have too much power.
Really? Really?
Really? So, if you could choose...
This is something that...
It's such a useful exercise to do.
Sorry, so many tangents. It's a very useful exercise to do.
In the 18th century in France, during the particular Age of Enlightenment that France was going through, in particular Voltaire, there was this great exercise which was used to crack the moral authority and rational sense of the monarchy, which was to describe French society as if you were a visitor from another world.
Or a visitor from the Congo or some completely foreign culture and say, well, isn't it weird that they do this?
And isn't it weird that they do that? If you want to make any sense of your society, you have to approach it as a space alien.
You have to approach it from a blank state.
You have to be like that big ghostly baby face looking at the Earth at the end of 2001.
You have to look at your culture and society...
From the outside, if you want to make any sense of it at all.
Otherwise you're just going to be tricked and ensnared by the winding taperworm snakes of propaganda that slither up into your brain and eat away most of its natural function.
So if you were to look at society and say, well, If you don't like monopolies and you don't like unjust or excessive power over others, where would you look?
Would you look at Starbucks or would you look at the monopoly that the government has over the indoctrination of the young?
If you're interested in monopolies, would you be concerned about a monopoly privilege that was granted to some degree by the state to a corporation, or would you look at the absolute near-perfect monopoly privilege granted to the educators of the young by the state?
Of course you would start with the violent sector, the public sector monopolies, because they're actually legally enforced.
But, you know, if you're educated by those, you can't be allowed to.
We've got this huge blind spot, right?
You can't see that.
You can't even see that you can't even see it.
And that's why you focus on all these monopolies over there.
It's a standard thing, right? The enemy is over there, says the enemy.
Thank you so much for your donations and your support.
This is a fantastic ride and I really appreciate everybody's input and emails and financial and emotional and practical support.
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