Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, interviews Redmond Weissenberger about Canadian current events, the foreign funding of Canadian environmental groups, global warming and radical feminism.
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| I have Redmond Weisenberger, who is the President, CEO, and Chief Nabob of Mises Canada, which interestingly enough, and I think this was actually von Mises' suggestion himself, it's one of the few Mises organizations, the leadership of which is secured by a combat to the death, or was it a dance-off? | |
| You told me all about this, so no matter whether it was a dance-off karaoke or biting your opponent's ear off, congratulations on your new post. | |
| Actually, that's where the... | |
| That's where Kramer, that's where Seinfeld got the Festivus, and the Battle of Strength was actually from von Mises. | |
| Oh yeah, I can see that. Yeah, because von Mises actually was going to originally settle in Canada, and then he went, holy crap, it's MF cold here, and headed south. | |
| That's a loose translation from the original German. | |
| So thank you so much. | |
| So you're the president of Mises Canada, mises.ca. | |
| Just before we jump into the latest and greatest in Canadian news, can you tell me a little bit about the organization? | |
| Yeah, so I formed the organization in 2010. | |
| It was very organic. | |
| I just called up Jeff Tucker and Doug French down at Mises USA and threw it by them and said, would you guys mind if I start this organization? | |
| And they said it wasn't a problem. | |
| I felt it was necessary to bring the Austrian school up to Canada So that we could start doing basically research, start analyzing Canadian history from an Austrian perspective, look at the Canadian economic situation from an Austrian perspective. | |
| Because with the push of nationalism, sometimes people won't read something. | |
| I guess there's just some idea that an idea can work in one country, but it won't work in another. | |
| Some people don't understand that we have a Bank of Canada that operates just in the same way that the Federal Reserve does down in the United States. | |
| And also, I might say, operates without an aesthetic. | |
| Sorry, go on. Yeah, definitely. | |
| It's not as nice a building as the Fed. | |
| I don't know if you've ever seen the photos of what it actually looks like in the Fed, but it is monumental. | |
| It truly is. | |
| I do believe that they reached deep down into the back of their couches, dug out some spare change, and managed to spruce the old place up a little. | |
| Of course, it was originally an outhouse because they are taking a slow dump on a modern economy, but they felt that was too obvious a metaphor. | |
| So let's turn to Canadian news, much to the shock of my listeners who are used to a bit of a southerly perspective. | |
| We focus on Venezuela and Nicaragua, of course. | |
| So what's going on that's grabbing your interest in the Canadian political and economic scene these days? | |
| Well, these days, I think an interesting thing when you're looking at environmental issues and specifically sort of this whole, you know, global warming movement that, you know, I regard the green movement as one of the biggest threats to freedom and liberty, you know, to come around in a long time, you know, in terms of... | |
| Stick a fork in green and it bleeds red. | |
| It's just Marxism with nature instead of the state. | |
| Yeah, exactly. If you look at the state coming into our lives and pushing into our lives, the environmental movement and the green movement through things like restricting energy production and various sorts of things, this is where all the largest subsidies are going right now. | |
| That is where the state is really pushing into our lives to a great extent. | |
| Sorry, it's not a hugely organic movement. | |
| People don't really understand that too much. | |
| Much like radical feminism, the radical environmental movement is funded through the state or funded, as has recently come to light through the National Post. | |
| Some of the Canadian green movement has been funded as a form of economic warfare by foreign competitors who seek to slow down the production of Canadian natural resources in order to reduce competition. | |
| They fund green movements here to block the development of natural resources. | |
| And it's competitors, but it's also... | |
| It's independent foundations as well, right? | |
| It's charitable foundations in the United States. | |
| You've got the Moore Foundation, the foundation that was created by the founders of Hewlett Packard is founding it, is funding it, Sierra Club, the Tides Foundation. | |
| There's a woman named Vivian Krauss who has actually figured out that about $300 million has been poured into environmental activism And a great amount of it specifically focused on things like the oil sands, pipeline development, all these sorts of various projects. | |
| Right, and it's actually, this is, Bill Gairdner had calculated, a Canadian writer had calculated that it was about 300 million that had gone into feminist groups in Canada here as well. | |
| So it's really important to understand this is not, you know, a guy with a can on a corner who's reflecting people's genuine interests, but it is reflecting pretty heavily moneyed interests, and there's, of course, a huge amount at stake economically. | |
| Oh, yeah, certainly. | |
| And, you know, whether it's, I mean, you could go into the, you know, It's funny when people talk about things like peak oil. | |
| I don't believe in the concept of peak oil to begin with, but it's almost like they're trying to manufacture peak oil. | |
| The United States restricts oil exploration across It's almost impossible to get oil exploration going in many parts of the United States. | |
| The best geography off the coast of Alaska is basically off limits. | |
| It's the same thing in the Gulf of Mexico. | |
| You're just not allowed to drill for oil in the United States. | |
| Well, and this, of course, is partly driven by the military-industrial complex because if America became more self-sufficient on oil, there'd be far less reasons to have ridiculous amounts of weaponry, soldiers, and navies, and air forces out there in the Middle East and all these other kinds of exciting places in the world. | |
| There'd be far less excuse for foreign intervention, for Funding and UN involvement in all of these oil-drenched hot spots. | |
| So it really doesn't have, I think, much to do with the environment, just a way of keeping green boots on the ground overseas, which funds a lot of people and keeps the population scared. | |
| Yeah, and then I think also when you look at the sort of the subsidiation, you know, a lot of governments also were looking for their next subsidy project, right? | |
| This was obviously one that they could really sink their teeth into. | |
| You know, pour money into green energy projects. | |
| Of course, they get to greenwash their appearance, make it appear that they're doing something for the environment. | |
| All these various things that they like to do. | |
| And one of the things that I always ask myself, I mean, as you and I are sort of part of a radical fringe group of thinkers as well, so I don't mind that people are called radical or fringe or whatever. | |
| But my concern is always whether they're actually concerned with their gold or not. | |
| So I was just reading, this is sort of tangential, but I think it's related. | |
| I was just reading an interview with Meryl Streep, who plays Margaret Thatcher in a new film, which, of course, is never going to deal with her politics or her philosophy, but rather deals with her chatting with her dead husband because that's moving rather than informative. | |
| And she said that she, you know, because she was a big feminist, of course, in the 80s. | |
| And she said, well, you know, I admired Margaret Thatcher for becoming one of the first heads of a Western democracy, but she was on the right and I was on the left and we could never cross that over. | |
| So I could never actually really genuinely admire her. | |
| In other words, she wasn't a feminist, she was a leftist. | |
| And that's something that I've always sort of said, that feminism is just socialism with panties. | |
| The same thing I think is true for environmentalism because any intelligent environmentalist would understand that human beings are going to need to use energy and resources, but if they were really interested in getting the most bang for their buck, in having the greatest maximization of the efficient use of resources, then they should be entirely for the free market. | |
| Nothing wastes resources like the government. | |
| Nothing pollutes like the government. | |
| Whereas the free market, whoever wins, is the person who can use the fewest resources to produce the greatest goods. | |
| And that is something which you don't really see. | |
| Bjorn Lomborg sort of half and half. | |
| He straddles between the sort of left and the right. | |
| But there are not a lot of genuine free market environmentalists, which to me seems that, again, it's just socialism with a different suit on. | |
| Yeah, well, there's... | |
| I mean, that... That's a good point to make. | |
| The absolute worst environmental degradation and destruction that occurred in the century occurred within the Eastern Bloc. | |
| I'll have conversations with people where they might say, well, what if somebody was polluting the river or a lake? | |
| How would that work if it was private? | |
| What they don't seem to understand is that within Canada, say, Every single body of water is owned by the government, right? | |
| It claims ownership over every single... | |
| There is not a private, you know, liter of water in Canada, essentially. | |
| So right now, if something is being polluted, it means that the government is allowing that to happen, right? | |
| I mean, it's granted the rights, and it is not, you know, it's granted the rights of the polluters to pollute the water. | |
| Now, of course, we've seen... | |
| These sorts of things start to pull back. | |
| Some might say that, well, it's because of environmental protection laws that these things happened. | |
| But if you look at the long history of it, air pollution and water pollution has been going down greatly since, basically, essentially the Industrial Revolution. | |
| When we were actually able to create enough wealth so that we could start to invest in things like cleaning water or Yeah, | |
| I mean, and there's no question that the best way to ensure environmental protection is to move as much property as possible into the hands of private citizens, because then they have that property, they want to maintain the value of that property, Anything which damages or diminishes the value of that property is going to be met with some sort of lawsuit or some sort of criminal charges. | |
| You, of course, would have insurance companies who would set up insurance for environmental protections. | |
| And so to get property into the hands of the private citizens is the best way to ensure that things won't get polluted. | |
| There's this weird idea that if you just – it's like this giant catapult with all society's problems. | |
| You just wad them up and you put them in this giant catapult and you launch them over this wall into this big mysterious land of Mordor called the state. | |
| And then you just assume that it's been solved. | |
| Hey, we've passed some laws. | |
| Hey, we've got the government to own some lands. | |
| Hey, we've created an environmental protection agency. | |
| And somehow you think that the problems have been solved. | |
| It really is... It's just... | |
| It's a primitive belief in magic. | |
| You may as well be doing rain dances hoping for a downpour. | |
| Yeah. Well, that's an interesting thing. | |
| Walter Block has done a lot of writing on environmentalism. | |
| He used... And when he had a... | |
| He used to be with the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, and he put out a book called Environment and the Economy Reconciliation. | |
| And within it, he talks about the fact that previously, in the 19th century, there were things known as nuisance suits, right? | |
| And so you actually had a situation where if a If somebody had a house and a factory was polluting, soot was coming out of that factory, and it damaged a woman's clothes that were on the line drying, They would go and sue, and it would be a nuisance suit. | |
| And this would be like small claims, so you wouldn't need to have a lot of money. | |
| You'd just go, you know, write a couple of pages, pay a couple of bucks. | |
| So it would be a sort of death by mosquito bites for these sorts of companies, because lots of people, they wouldn't need... | |
| Well, when we think of lawsuits now, we think, of course, of massive amounts of time and money, but this wasn't the case, of course, prior to government helping us out by taking over the common law system. | |
| Yeah, essentially people would bring suit against the offending company. | |
| And it also worked with railroads, because back in the day you would have coal-fired and wood-fired steam engines, and what would happen is that they would say, light the bales of hay in a farmer's field on fire. | |
| And again, the person could sue, and then the railroad company would have to make the decision, well, are we going to innovate? | |
| Are we going to come up with some type of technology that is going to allow us to not have this problem? | |
| Or we're going to pay the suits or take the risk and be able to pay off what... | |
| They make their own decision about it. | |
| Now, what's interesting is that, though, in the late 19th century, essentially what happened was the judgments actually started coming in and saying that, look, for the greater good, these people are allowed to pollute. | |
| So essentially what happened was the state, I guess, through the power of the judiciary, began essentially ignoring people's private property, right? | |
| Right, because the railway companies were paying a lot more taxes and had a lot more political influence than some farmer in a field in Idaho. | |
| Well, yeah, exactly. So essentially, a lot of these environmental problems came actually from the ignorance or the people not respecting property rights. | |
| And you do have situations in England where there are privately owned rivers, where various fishing clubs have actually owned rivers. | |
| And they In that case where pollution did come down through that river, you would say they would sue and the pollution would stop. | |
| And the same case would be with a river that was going by a town. | |
| And if the town or people within that town owned portions of the river, they would have it tested on a regular basis. | |
| If a factory is set up, It's some area above and wanted to use the water resources. | |
| They would have to negotiate with the people who owned those rights. | |
| Right, so when people say there's a problem with pollution, the first place, at least the first place that I look and in, oh, decades upon decade of looking, I've not found a single example to the contrary. | |
| When people say, well, there's market failure, you see pollution, you've got a problem, there's the problem of the commons and so on. | |
| The first place to look is how the government has actively prevented the free market or the common law system from solving the problem. | |
| Because that's why the problem usually, almost inevitably, that's why the problem exists in the first place. | |
| So people say, you know, with the OSHA stuff that came out out of Rachel Carson's entirely false silent spring book out of the late 60s, all of this stuff that sprang up was the result of many, many years, decades, in fact, of the government actively siding with large corporations against smaller concerns for simple reasons, a political pull and of the government actively siding with large corporations against smaller concerns for And so the common law system, which had dealt with damages to property and persons through pollution, had simply been throttled and not allowed to operate. | |
| And then you say, oh, I see there's this big problem with the pollution. | |
| We need the government to solve it. | |
| But it's only there because the government has prevented the solutions, the historical solutions from coming into play. | |
| Now, as well, though, you know, to a caveat to that, I mean, I mean, you also have to wonder. | |
| you also have to question what is pollution, right? | |
| I think, I mean, that's a whole other discussion, but when you've got a situation where you've got, you know, green organizations and the government working with them to state that the fundamental building block of all life on this planet, carbon dioxide, | |
| can be termed a pollutant, you know, and all of a sudden you can You can essentially control everyone's life through the control of the emission of carbon dioxide, which I don't think is a pollutant at all. | |
| It's plant food. Then you have to wonder, because there are other types of Well, there's constant scare mongering. | |
| Just for funsies, let's run through a few of the false scare scenarios that we have experienced over the course of our lives. | |
| Global cooling was one. | |
| We knew Ice Age was going to happen. | |
| Running out of food, water and oil by 1980. | |
| I remember that as part of my childhood. | |
| That was a pretty big prediction. | |
| As a brain, if you remember, holes in the ozone layer. | |
| What have you got? Oh, well, yeah, I mean, I was around for all those. | |
| Well, one, of course, was the whales. | |
| The whales are always in trouble. | |
| Yes, the whales are always in trouble. | |
| Which, of course, is an interesting, and of course, the story of whales, you know, the way Murray Rothbard puts it, he said, in the 19th century, there was whale communism, right? | |
| The problem with fish is that we're still in the hunter and gathering state. | |
| There's no property of rights applied to fish or to vast amounts of the ocean. | |
| There's no property rights there. And so you have everybody attempting. | |
| It's a tragedy of the commons. | |
| Everyone is trying to get the fish before everybody else, because if they can't get them, then somebody else gets it and makes profit, right? | |
| Now, whales, in one case, they were actually nearly hunted to extinction. | |
| Because, one, there was whale communism. | |
| Two, they were used for oil, right? | |
| The whale oil was one of the main ways of creating lighting within houses. | |
| Now, what, of course, solved the whale problem? | |
| The kerosene lamp. The kerosene lamp. | |
| The oil industry, big oil, and I mean, the Rockefellers aren't doing much good now, but, you know, the Rockefellers, the Rockefeller oil company, Standard Oil, essentially saved the whales. | |
| You know, like, this is the thing. | |
| The whales were saved by technological, you know, within the laissez-faire late 19th century when there was radical improvements in oil technology, kerosene. | |
| I think they took it from somewhere $10 a gallon down to $0.10 a gallon within 15 years. | |
| And it completely replaced the whale oil industry. | |
| And you would see that the whale population was recovering from that point. | |
| You know, by the time the 60s came around and, you know, Greenpeace was jumping in its boats, whales were already on the comeback. | |
| And of course, if you know, as everybody who sits next to you at a dinner party hopes, if you know anything about the history of Card in Newfoundland, it's the same story. | |
| 400 years! So 400 years! | |
| These people were able to hang on to their cod and to milk these stocks in a perfectly wonderful way. | |
| And then the government gets in and starts setting quotas, and within 10 to 15 years, the cod is stripped bare and the entire industry has collapsed. | |
| Because if you're the guy... | |
| It's like a farmer. There's a reason farmers don't over... | |
| Overplant their crops. It's the reason farmers leave their fields fallow sometimes so as not to exhaust the soil, because you want to keep planting in it. | |
| And if you're a fisherman, you've grown up around the fish, you want to fish cod, and you want to hand that business off to your son, you just don't overfish. | |
| And communities can find fabulous ways of dealing with this. | |
| Through ostracism, through setting internal quotas that everybody meets, social pressures, all these kinds of things. | |
| That's how you deal with resource. | |
| You make sure that the people who are dependent on that resource in the long term are the ones who have the most direct stake in controlling it. | |
| When the government comes in and starts setting all these quotas, then they have an incentive to set quotas as high as possible, to get as many votes, and then everybody hands over their moral responsibility to the state, and next thing you know, the cupboard is bare and doesn't look like those fish are ever coming back. | |
| Yeah, well, I mean, you know, Russia, just before the Soviet Revolution, fed itself and exported wheat. | |
| You know, within five years of the Soviet Union being formed and the communists taking over, they could not feed themselves, right? | |
| They were importing grain. | |
| And what I think is interesting, too, though, you know, when you start looking at it from that point of view, in fact, the In fact, the sort of policies that the Greens would like to put in, you know, and the sort of the UN, IPCC, and the global warming movement would like to put in, would actually lead to starvation, right? | |
| This is the problem. And then you can go and get into the discussion of their Malthusian worldview. | |
| You know, they've been wrong. | |
| You know, the Malthusians have been wrong for 2,000 years, but it doesn't stop them. | |
| Well, and if I were a green guy, and I consider myself fairly green, it's an industry I worked in for about 10 years, so I consider myself fairly green. | |
| Let's say that I was looking at big environmental problems. | |
| Well, a huge environmental problem is housing bubbles. | |
| Huge, huge, huge environmental problem, housing bubbles. | |
| I mean, think of the amount of energy it takes to create a house. | |
| All of the natural resources, the human labor, the driving everything everywhere and putting it all together, the energy that it then consumes. | |
| To create a house, there's a massive, massive negative impact in many ways on the environment. | |
| With 10% of US houses standing vacant at the moment and 25% or 30% in danger of foreclosure, I would say, well, look at the amount of energy that was caused by this housing boom and bust, the amount of energy wastage, the amount of environmental, all these trees cut down and all this. | |
| And I'd say, okay, well, so what was it that caused the housing boom? | |
| You'd go straight to central fiat currency, right? | |
| You'd go straight to government policies, and you'd go to fiat currency. | |
| And if you really wanted to, if the only thing that guided you was actually saving the environment, you'd look at something like the housing boom, you'd drive it to its source, and you'd become a radical gold bug. | |
| But this is not where these people go, because that's not where the funding comes from. | |
| Well, no, you see, gold doesn't work because you'd have to mine it, right? | |
| And then, you know, those rocks have rights, essentially. | |
| Still, it's cheaper to mine gold than it is to build houses all over the place. | |
| Well, you know what's funny about that, though? | |
| Just a small anecdote. I was running for city council last year, and I ran into a guy who was campaigning at the same time for the Toronto Environmental Organization, right? | |
| And he was an actual Keynesian. | |
| I couldn't believe it. I'd actually met somebody who said he was a Keynesian. | |
| But then I started talking about the environment. | |
| I said, you do realize that this massive malinvestment that goes on wastes resources monumentally. | |
| Think about the environmental problems that essentially most people can identify with or that they think is a problem. | |
| It's essentially wasted resources. | |
| For an example, If you want to look at resources at a city level, the recycling programs, especially the recycling programs of municipalities, are some of the most wasteful programs around. | |
| You can do that just through a simple Misesian price calculation. | |
| If nobody is coming to pay you 20 bucks to pick up your garbage or 10 bucks or even a penny, if nobody's coming to do that, to recycle it, you know, without any further research at all, assuming a free market situation, you know that it's costing more energy to recycle than it is to throw it out. | |
| Otherwise, people would be coming by to pick it up. | |
| Absolutely. Well, that's what I always note, right, is that... | |
| Whenever you put out a big piece of metal with the garbage, the next morning it's always gone. | |
| Seriously, somebody's driving around with their pickup truck. | |
| They pick it up because it is worth their time, the cost of that car, the cost of their gas, to go around on garbage night, pick up all the metal, and bring it to the recycling department. | |
| Here's another one that environmentalists should look at if they wanted to be taken at all seriously. | |
| I mean, the radical environmentalists. | |
| It's very clear that debt is bad for resource consumption because debt allows you to consume more than you're producing, which means that you're going to be less careful about resource allocation. | |
| So there is misallocation and there's also more resource consumption than you're producing, which is a net loss to the environment as a whole. | |
| So national debts should be something that environmentalists should be fanatically against. | |
| They should be for, at the very least, ironclad balanced budgets, because otherwise the government's borrowing and spending a whole bunch of stuff, pumping up the money supply, people are buying stuff they don't need, which causes a massive environmental degradation. | |
| This is what intelligent environmentalists who weren't ideological would be about. | |
| They would set... | |
| You know, the happy, contented, breastmilk-serping sigh of Mother Gaia as their sole northern star, and they would sail there no matter what. | |
| But that really... You never hear environmentalists talking about national debts and fiat currency because they're not that interested in the environment. | |
| They're interested in self-righteousness. | |
| They're interested in government funding. | |
| They're interested in blocking the progress of humanity. | |
| They're not particularly interested in the poor. | |
| It's like all of these idiots who said we should boycott apartheid or we should boycott Saddam Hussein, as if boycotts don't just... | |
| Strip the poor of, you know, it's fine to lose 20% of your income if you're rich. | |
| It's not so much if you're living on two bucks a day. | |
| So it's just people who are doing moral posturing rather than actually working from first principles to solve problems. | |
| Sorry, that's the end of my rant. Oh, no, not a problem. | |
| Well, but a lot of the, and it was funny on YouTube, or no, on Facebook, just somebody, you know, somebody years ago posted something that Hellman's Hellman's have put together because a lot of the environmental calls You know, especially around food, let's say. | |
| You know, they start talking about these things like, you know, 100-mile radius. | |
| They start talking about... | |
| A lot of it factors in... | |
| Oh, is this where you... Sorry, but you get your food from the local... | |
| Well, yeah, yeah. | |
| You know, buy local, the whole local board movement, right? | |
| Because it wraps in protectionism, right? | |
| It wraps in... | |
| You know, it was saying straight in the video, it said, you know, Alberta now imports $70 million worth of fruit. | |
| Like, well... Six months of the year, Alberta is frozen solid. | |
| We should look at the fact that we're trading with these other countries. | |
| And our ice banana trees are still not producing everything that we want. | |
| It's tragic. I mean, that's what it is, right? | |
| And that's the problem, is that a lot of, under this green umbrella that has been created by the environmental movement, you can throw in every sort of collectivist, statist, protectionist, bigoted Yeah, they should be for the very least government involvement in the economy. | |
| They should be for sound currency. | |
| They should be all of these things which are actually valuable. | |
| They, of course, should be for the privatization of schools because the amount of resources that are poured into keeping schools heated and running for 12 years of a child's life when you really, really do not need that much education. | |
| If all you want is a government education, you know, it's six weeks in a six-pack, And if you want a real education, it might be a little bit longer, but it certainly wouldn't be. | |
| But this is the kind of stuff which, you know, to minimize resources, you simply need to privatize as much as possible to minimize resources. | |
| But they're not interested in that, because it's just that same old, same old, what is the excuse for more power over the people that's same old, same old? | |
| They're fine with tyranny. | |
| They just want to be the ones controlling it, right? | |
| They have no problem with tyranny. | |
| They have no problem with massive government intervention into the economy. | |
| What was hilarious, too, is I used to, back when I had more time on my hands, I used to debate with this one particular guy about these issues. | |
| He was kind of funny, because he was sort of an environmentalist, but he was for incinerators, right? | |
| He was for what? Incinerators, you know, waste to energy, where you burn... | |
| He thought recycling was stupid, too, but he said we should be burning it all, which is, in fact, in Europe, Where they actually don't have any extra land sitting around. | |
| They actually have been incinerating their waste for years. | |
| They've been pulling energy from it. | |
| But here, of course, it's a no-go. | |
| It's a non-starter. You can talk about that. | |
| But Europe is not quite as radically socialist as Canada is. | |
| No, it's true. It's true. | |
| I mean, everybody looks at Europe as the big socialist melting pot, but, you know, a lot of the countries like Portugal and the Netherlands have legalized drugs. | |
| They have incinerators. | |
| They have private delivery of healthcare, which of course is unthinkable here. | |
| In Canada, but of course Canada's socialist legacy comes more from people like Castro and Marx and less from the Fabian socialists of George Bernard Shaw on the ilk of the early 20th century. | |
| So it's a much more radical socialism that has occurred here in Canada in many ways than could be conceived of in Europe. | |
| Oh yeah, well, I mean the CCF, if you look at the CCF's foundational document, the Regina Manifesto or the Winnipeg Manifesto. | |
| CCF means... The pre-NDP guys, right? | |
| Oh, the CCF was your... | |
| Yeah, the Cooperative Credit I'm sorry, I'm blanking. | |
| I see, you know, the nerves of being interviewed by Ben Molina. | |
| It's so stressful. So stressful. | |
| But there's the guys who drove the movement towards the socialization of healthcare, and they're the ones who drove towards the welfare state, and then they morphed into the New Democratic Party, which is our equivalent of the public sector serving wing of the Democratic Party in the U.S., Yeah, well, the CCF, basically their manifesto of what it reads, it's almost word for word, the Communist Manifesto. | |
| I mean, no joke. I mean, it is. | |
| It really is. You know, abolishing the party, all these sorts of things. | |
| And then when you start to look more deeply at some of these people who were the key motivators behind some of these policies, you look at a guy like Tommy Douglas, he was very much in favor of eugenics, forced sterilization, putting unfit people into work camps, all these sorts of things. | |
| I mean, we could do a whole other talk on the Canadian level. | |
| Well, that comes just by the by. | |
| This is one of the great tragedies of World War II, is that the martial law was won, but the philosophical war was completely lost. | |
| A lot of the people who'd created the totalitarian hells within Europe escaped the collapsing dictatorships and took up residence educating people in North America. | |
| And it was like, this is where the hippie movement and all that sort of mysticism of the 60s came from. | |
| So you had a whole bunch of people who came back from fighting socialism, took the GI Bill, went to university and were taught by ex-socialists on how to destroy their own economy now. | |
| Anyway. Well, you had the, I think it was the Frankfurt School, right? | |
| Or the people who called themselves the Frankfurt School came over from Nazi Germany in the 30s to the United States. | |
| And what they did was they called it, quote unquote, the Frankfurt School as sort of a dodge. | |
| And so whenever they were quoting, saying, talk about the Frankfurt School, they were actually talking about Hardcore socialism, communism, whatever you want to call it. | |
| Marxism. They're essentially saying they're Marxists. | |
| These people are constantly setting up these tottering, destructive hellholes, and then just before they come out, they escape to some new hall of freedom and start that termite-biting, rodent-burrowing society collapsing process all over again. | |
| It's undermining the foundations of the free market. | |
| If you look at this guy, Antonio Gramsci, he sort of set out the What he called it was the long march through the institutions. | |
| He didn't think that you could just have a radical overthrow of the government. | |
| He essentially said that you had to step by step go through the universities, the governments, all these sorts of different things, educating people, In these views, right? | |
| And the way I see it, many people are essentially Marxists, but they just don't even know it. | |
| Well, no, see, this is the interesting thing. | |
| I would change that a little bit to say that there are Marxists in the general social sphere. | |
| But they are anarchists in their private sphere. | |
| So if there was a law saying to people, here's how you have to marry, here's the job that you have to take, here's the education that you have to follow through in, and here's where you have to live, people would be like, oh my god, that's Marxism, that's totalitarianism, that's fascism, I'll fight it to the death. | |
| But as long as it's around broad social categories called other people or the poor or the sick or the old, they're perfectly happy with totalitarianism as long as it's removed from them. | |
| And of course, it's double removed. | |
| A, it's politics, and B, it's all funded through debt so that taxes don't go up immediately to pay for it anyway. | |
| But if you ever try to put the same principles that they worship in the state in place in their own personal lives, their career lives, their romantic lives, their parenting lives, people would go ape. | |
| So I think all that the free market people are saying is, hey, you know that stuff you really like in your personal life? | |
| What if that was just life? | |
| What if that was just everyone? If you fight it, like, to the death in your personal life, why not, you know, fight it, at least break half a drop of sweat fighting it in the public sphere? | |
| Yeah, well, William Gairdner, again, going back to him, he views a guy like Trudeau, you know, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, you know, who's one of the most popular... | |
| Castro's pet. Yeah, by the way, I have to go pick up my son soon. | |
| Yes, yeah, we can stop in a few minutes. | |
| Just let me know. Pretty much now. | |
| But anyways, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, he calls him a libertarian socialist, right? | |
| So what Pierre Elliott Trudeau did, he said, I've got to get the government out of the nation's bedrooms. | |
| But then he stuck it everywhere else. | |
| Yeah, the government has no place in the bedrooms of the nations but rifling through your bank accounts, your internet service providers, your pocketbook, and all over your children's education, just not in the bedroom. | |
| And this is the sad thing. It's like Canadians traded civil liberties for kinky sex permissions. | |
| I mean, it's just completely bizarre. | |
| What a bad deal. You get the kinky sex and you can keep your personal liberties so you don't have to do a trade of one or the other. | |
| That was the promise of the 60s though, right? | |
| I mean, it was hedonism in the flesh and enslavement in the economy and that was just a wretched, wretched deal. | |
| Yeah, well, I mean, the thing is, without economic freedom, you can pretty much kiss a lot of your other freedoms goodbye. | |
| I mean, if you don't have economic freedom, there isn't a lot more that you can do than hang around it. | |
| Yeah, because if you don't have control of your property, and particularly the property called the South, you don't have any freedom, and the degree to which the government infringes on that is the degree to which it all becomes academic. | |
| Yeah. So listen, you're going to go, but let's give people your website again just to make sure you've got meetups, you're running conferences, and you've got great resources on your website. | |
| It's mises.ca. Did you want to mention about anything coming up that you'd like people to know about? | |
| Yeah, I mean, depending on when this goes out, I've got our Mises meets in Toronto and Ottawa. | |
| You can find those on Facebook and on the website, mises.ca. | |
| I'm going to be at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference from the We're going to be doing a lot more of that, reaching out into those sectors. | |
| And then, yeah, we're looking also this summer, we're looking to put together a Mises University Canada or Mises Canada U. And we're going to be bringing teachers up from the States. | |
| We're going to be bringing teachers in from, you know, from various parts of Canada. | |
| And educating people from around the world on the Austrian School of Economics. | |
| Well, fantastic Redmond. | |
| It's very impressive. I hope people will go and visit the site and we will talk again soon. |