Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, is interviewed about the housing crisis, the responsibilities of voters, and whether America will become a Banana Republic on Wide Awake News
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| All right, guys. Welcome to Wide Awake Radio. | |
| I am your host, Charlie McGrath. | |
| It is the 29th day. | |
| That's the only time we'll have this day in the next four years of February, Wednesday. | |
| I'm very honored to have Steph on. | |
| I'm going to say the name wrong. I just asked him a minute ago how to say it. | |
| I'm not French background, so I'm Irish. | |
| It's hard for me to say anything more than two syllables. | |
| He's going to be our guest for the entire hour. | |
| He'll be coming on in just a minute. | |
| I want to make a couple of announcements first. | |
| First of all, the first and most important announcement I want to make is happy birthday to my son, who is a leap baby, and he's technically three years old, but in reality, he's 12 years old today, so I want to wish him a happy birthday. | |
| And give him a shout out because he has to deal with a dad who comes home and goes on the radio and complains about the government, complains about the financial system, complains about oppression, complains about freedom, complains about liberty. | |
| And he takes it all in stride and I greatly love him. | |
| I love him dearly and greatly appreciate the sacrifice he makes in order for me to come on here and do this program every night. | |
| So happy birthday, son. | |
| I love you. And another announcement I want to make, and this should make the folks in the chat extremely happy. | |
| We have finally secured a two-hour time slot. | |
| Jeff Rents has more than graciously, generously expanded the program from one to two hours. | |
| That will take place. | |
| So just a couple weeks away, we will be from the 5 p.m. | |
| West Coast to 7 p.m. | |
| West Coast time slot. | |
| And the schedule will reflect that at wideawakenews.com. | |
| You'll see right now there's a two-week looking forward schedule. | |
| We will expand that to have the both hours covered in there. | |
| And I'll be making announcements in the next few days. | |
| And who some of the co-hosts are going to be. | |
| I'm going to tap into Alternative Media and have some folks come on a couple days a week to fill one of those hour spots and bring their perspective and their guests to the program. | |
| So truly expanding the program. | |
| And I don't think it's a moment too soon. | |
| And I know a lot of you won't. | |
| We'll feel the same way. | |
| I know a lot of you won't care. | |
| No. I don't mean that. | |
| I know a lot of you will feel the exact same way. | |
| Alright, so we have over 100 people in the chat room right now. | |
| If you're listening on Rinse Radio and not in the chat room, get in the chat room. | |
| It's going to be, if nothing else, an entertaining program tonight. | |
| If you're wanting to watch me do this program live, we have... | |
| For some reason, we're getting kicked off of Justin TV, but I keep loading it back up. | |
| Right now, we have about 50 people watching there. | |
| You can access that feed through the chat room. | |
| Now, for those of you who are listening on Justin TV, I was talking to Stefan about trying to get my thoughts together. | |
| This is a big guess for us. | |
| I mean, Stefan is everywhere. | |
| Everybody knows him. He's got 40,000-plus. | |
| The police are looking for him. | |
| Everybody knows him. He's got 40,000-plus subscribers on YouTube. | |
| He's been on Max Keiser, Alex Jones. | |
| He's an author. Free Domain Radio, 25 million downloads. | |
| And there's specific things that I wanted to pick his brain about because he's just an absolutely outstanding philosopher. | |
| And I'm trying to write these down. | |
| I want to talk about markets. | |
| I want to talk about libertarian. | |
| I want to talk about perception of free market capitalism that we're all subjected to. | |
| But I'm so sidetracked. | |
| I'm so sidetracked by the very hubris nature of I'm sorry, | |
| for those who don't know, a Bernanke rant is a kind of rash that can be only treated by gold leaf. | |
| So you might want to just layer a little bit of that on you. | |
| It doesn't have to be 24 karat. | |
| 14 karat will do, and that tends to cure the fiat currency rash. | |
| The paper cuts off the monopoly money we call currency. | |
| Outstanding. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to use Silverleaf because I am a poor man, and it is the poor man's gold. | |
| Welcome to the program. It's an honor to finally speak to you. | |
| I'm a great big fan of your work. | |
| I love Free Domain Radio. | |
| I love what you do on YouTube. | |
| I love just about every position that you take. | |
| I agree with him. I'm very jealous that you can go out and do a commentary video. | |
| I've got labeled over the last couple of years as this guy who likes to come out here and rant. | |
| You come out and you do it, but you do it with style and grace and dignity. | |
| I'm very jealous of you of that. | |
| Stop it. I want you to be a little more angry from now on. | |
| Oh wait, sorry, let me not laugh at that. | |
| Okay, I'm ready. | |
| I just kicked a beam in my room and my toe is throbbing. | |
| I think I'm ready to roll. | |
| Let's get into it a little bit. | |
| You know, here we look at the world, right? | |
| You've been talking about this for a lot longer than I have, and I've been going ad nauseam on the obvious tyranny that's springing up in my country, and as well as yours. | |
| I've spent quite a bit of time in Canada over the last several months. | |
| And, you know, unfortunately, when I was there, and I told you before the program, not unfortunately, the people are absolutely wonderful. | |
| They remind me all of Midwestern United States folks. | |
| Real good folks. Real willing to sit and have a conversation with you. | |
| And truly, I would say from the people I've talked to there compared to here, awake to what's going on. | |
| I think it has something to do with 30 million versus 300 million. | |
| And whatever your big brother down south is doing is certainly affecting you. | |
| The things that I've seen in Canada in the last trip up that terrify me, especially for my friends in Canada, The path that they're going on, especially economically. | |
| My day job has always been in the housing sector for 20 years, and I see this expansion up there that is not sustainable. | |
| I have friends that are managers of very large companies buying house after house, trying to catch You know, trying to catch the next rise up and make a little money before they flip it. | |
| And I know what's coming, and it's coming just as clear as the nose on my face. | |
| There will be a bust in Canada, and these housing prices will do the exact same thing. | |
| If they're not already starting to, what we've seen here in the United States, which is a nosedive, and a lot of people will be left holding the bag up there, it probably won't be as bad because... | |
| You guys never quite got into the outrageous lending practices that we've had here, but I see the same trajectory there, and I wanted to get your take on that before we got into any other geopolitical topics. | |
| What do you see happening economically inside of Canada? | |
| Is it mirroring what happened here, or do you think it's taking a little better, smarter path? | |
| Well, I think that without a doubt, the economic indicators that Right before and predicated the US housing crash are almost all in place in Canada. | |
| I think that there's no doubt the percentage of GDP that's going into home payments, the debt to income ratios and so on, they're all similar. | |
| The continuing rise in house prices were overdue for a correction. | |
| In fact, in the Maclean's magazine that was just delivered to my house today, There's a big article basically like, now is the time to panic! | |
| Now, of course, you get that from the media every week, but I think that there's some compelling evidence that the Canadian housing market is going to crash, and... | |
| This is, of course, so tragic. | |
| It's so unnecessary. Why do people get into real estate as an investment? | |
| Because if you put money in the bank, the fiat currency printing press robs it of its value, whether you like it or not. | |
| If you put your money under your mattress, it vaporizes as well as the inflation, which is the effect of increased printing of money, causes the value of your money to erode. | |
| You can try putting it in the stock market, but that's a real roller coaster and not many people have the time or inclination or stomach to do that in any kind of regular basis. | |
| And so as wages have stagnated and declined over the past 20 or 30 or 40 years in various sectors, as particularly male unemployment has cratered, particularly in the manufacturing sectors, people have said, how are people sustaining these lifestyles? | |
| Well, you know, as they did in the US, they're turning their houses into ATMs on the mad fantasy that they're always will continue to go up in value. | |
| This is, you know, mathematically, that which cannot be sustained will end at some point. | |
| I think that point is close. | |
| And I think it's going to cause a significant... | |
| I mean, the bubble is illusion, fundamentally. | |
| The bubble is illusion. The illusion that a printing press has anything to do with real money. | |
| The illusion that something that is of fixed value, that erodes in value over time, like a house... | |
| Can increase in value indefinitely. | |
| The idea that the government can manage the economy, that pointing guns at people can make everyone richer, the idea that debt is the same as wealth. | |
| These are all the illusions that need to be punctured intellectually, philosophically, morally. | |
| These are the illusions that need to be punctured. | |
| Until they are, these economic illusions will merely be a byproduct of those central series of fantasies. | |
| And look how fast we've jumped from housing market to global fantasy, which is what we're dealing with here. | |
| And it's funny, it is funny to an extent, especially when we can sit around and you're awake and you see what's going on and you see the trajectory Canada's on, you see the trajectory that the United States is still on. | |
| We could joke about it, but what isn't funny about it is the fact that people are really suffering around this planet because of it. | |
| You can't turn on a computer or your television without seeing the latest propaganda piece coming out. | |
| It just happens to be Syria today. | |
| I have a piece on my website. | |
| Showing Syria, the U.S. is now concerned that the weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons inside of Syria, could be a real problem for U.S. troops if we go in there to provide the umbrella shield. | |
| Stefan, when is this? | |
| I mean... | |
| Well, sorry, of course they're going around sticking their sticks into various extremist hornets' nests around the world, because when you face economic instability at home, rather than have the people question the ethics and the efficacy of the self-destructing system that they're trapped in, rather than have the people question the ethics and the efficacy of the self-destructing system that they're trapped in, you have to go around poking all of these idiots overseas so that they'll come and cause lots This is what always happens in late empire. | |
| The economy collapses under the debt and money printing that occurs in late empire. | |
| It happened in England. It happened in Greece. | |
| It happened in the ancient world in the Roman Empire. | |
| And so you go and you try and start wars. | |
| This is how you get rid of excess populations. | |
| And this is how you create artificial unity within a collapsing system. | |
| So this is as predictable as sunrise. | |
| Well, let's run with that a little bit, because we can look at history in this country. | |
| We can look at the last depression. | |
| It was global, but it truly did exactly what you said. | |
| It unloaded masses amounts of debt. | |
| It unloaded millions and millions of people. | |
| And it set up the new empire. | |
| It set up the new empire, the new oceanic empire, as Warren Pollack said, which was the United States. | |
| We are the policemen of the world. | |
| But now we see this amount of debt Not even fathomable. | |
| You know, we look at the debt loads of the Great Depression, and when you still had a currency, even though we had the Federal Reserve System, we still had a currency that was backed by something. | |
| You couldn't print it forever. | |
| You could confiscate all the gold, change the value of it, print more money. | |
| That was money printing. But now we have debt loads that are impossible, mathematically impossible, to pay back. | |
| We have nations that are Willing to give up their sovereignty, at least their leadership is. | |
| We see that in Greece right now. | |
| We see a gun held to their head saying, if you don't give up your representative government, if you don't give up your sovereignty, we will pull you out of the euro and you will collapse. | |
| Well, they've already collapsed, but regardless of that, the so-called representation they have, have absolutely no problem stepping up and giving away everything of the nation in order to appease the bankers. | |
| My point is this. We've seen global depressions before, but never anything on this scale, never anything where mankind had the technology and the ability to completely and totally wipe out humanity as it sits. | |
| You know, how close are we to that tipping point, Stefan? | |
| Well, listen, you may find it in your generous heart to summon a little bit more sympathy for the average citizen than I can. | |
| Europe is facing, of course, the same thing that Europe and America and Canada has been inflicting on the third world for decades. | |
| For decades! Which is that you load them down with debt, and then somebody has to pay off that debt. | |
| Is it either going to be the bankers who take a haircut, who lose their shirt, or is it going to be the people? | |
| Well, the bankers want the people, and the people want the bankers. | |
| In Iceland, they actually happened to get the people didn't pay, the bankers did. | |
| But for most of the world, it's the people who suffer. | |
| If people have ignored the reality of international finance, the predations and the unbelievable horrors of what is called foreign aid, which is basically arms of money to dictators, and the enslavement of, say, South America, of Africa in endless debt through the IMF and through other international agencies, then... This has been played out overseas. | |
| It's been well reported in the Western media. | |
| And if people have ignored that and they're now shocked that it's being turned on them, well, I think it's sort of like you can, in 1930, you could receive some sympathy for not knowing that smoking was associated with lung cancer. | |
| Because, you know, it wasn't kind of common knowledge. | |
| Now your body is saying, I'm coughing up a piece of road and I can't climb a speed bump. | |
| And so maybe you have some idea, just on your own empirical physical experience, that smoking isn't that great for you. | |
| But people who say now, well, we didn't know that fiat currency was a problem. | |
| What do you mean national debt is a problem? | |
| National debt has been known about by everybody with an IQ over their shoe size for about 60 years. | |
| And so anybody who says, well, we didn't know this was a problem. | |
| I mean, Greece has been living high off the hog by leeching off the better credit ratings of countries like Germany for the past 20 years. | |
| And they knew it was ridiculous. | |
| They're not paying any taxes. They have retire at 50 on full pensions. | |
| I mean, everybody knows that's unsustainable. | |
| So I agree with you. People are suffering. | |
| But I find it hard. | |
| I find it hard. I try. | |
| It's like squeezing an old lemon sometimes, trying to get more sympathy out of my wizened, raisin heart. | |
| But I find it really hard to have a lot of sympathy for people to whom this coming disaster was repeatedly warned about by major economists who won the Nobel Prize, by basic math literacy, by the media, by any website you care to type in. | |
| It's really, really been evident for many, many, many years that this is going to happen. | |
| So people who are feigning surprise now, they just seem a little bit precious to me. | |
| Excellent point, and there's absolutely no doubt that we've seen this entitlement mentality. | |
| Nations have been lured into this, and maybe you'll fight offense with that word, but the fact of the matter is, when you have people that seem to have the ability to produce one entitlement after another, and it goes on for generations, and you're told the whole time, deficits don't matter, these Magnificent, multi-billion dollar deficits, now multi-truth. | |
| But it's the government who's telling you deficits don't matter. | |
| That's like going to the Philip Morris website and expecting the truth about tobacco. | |
| I mean, come on, let's be a little skeptical about the source here. | |
| These are people who wanted to jack up. | |
| It was at Rensfeld who said deficits don't matter. | |
| But these are the people who want to run up deficits to bribe their way into power. | |
| People who give you free stuff are always going to say that it's no problem. | |
| I mean, have some skepticism as to the sauce. | |
| It's like a public school teacher not being left of center. | |
| I mean, if they're a public school teacher, of course they're going to be left of center. | |
| I mean, let's put a little bit of a thinking cap on. | |
| We're not that brain dead that we don't have that little bit of responsibility anymore. | |
| Well, let me speak for a nation of 310 million when I say, yes, we are. | |
| I'm sorry, sorry. One guy just pinged me and said he disagrees with you, but I think the rest of them, so 310 minus one, you're all set. | |
| Let me play devil's advocate, because I love doing that. | |
| Let's say you go through, you believe the propaganda that you're immersed in, nonstop 24 hours a day, seven days a week, especially now, especially in the last 20 years. | |
| It's nonstop propaganda, and it's corporate-owned propaganda. | |
| So you grow up in this. You go through the school system. | |
| You go through the university system. | |
| You go and you live your adult life immersed in this propaganda, and you believe that deficits don't matter. | |
| You believe that we're really spreading, air quotes, democracy around the world. | |
| You believe that the people in the Middle East Want to come over here and steal your rights so it's important that we have this outrageous military spending and we police the world. | |
| We believe the garbage when we go to the theater and we have to endure a three-minute commercial telling me how the U.S. Navy is a global force for good. | |
| So we're immersed into this. | |
| You know, the nation is immersed. | |
| The world, the Western world, is immersed into this. | |
| So cutting some slack for being born into and raised in this nonstop propaganda environment, cutting some slack for some of that, but not cutting slack for looking at the last four or five years, where we have debt bombs going off globally. | |
| And we have the solution being more debt. | |
| But what we see in the last four years is more debt being created. | |
| But when we see the needle of sovereign debt, it pegs. | |
| It goes from $9 trillion in the United States to pointing at $16 trillion now announced. | |
| And we see the rest of the world going the same way. | |
| All this sovereign debt being added onto the balance sheet of the people of the nations. | |
| At the same time, the bankers who will not realize the loss are demanding more and more. | |
| I do not hold any I have a pity for the people in nations now, including my very own, including Canada or anywhere else in the world, who don't see the greatest crime, the greatest rip-off in the history of mankind occurring right now. | |
| And it's been at a full-on pedal-to-the-metal pace for the last three and a half, four years. | |
| So I do hold some sympathy for the people who are shaking off reality that they've grown up in. | |
| But you're right. The notion that the world can live without regard to spending indefinitely or invading indefinitely, that notion must come to an end. | |
| And if it doesn't, the end result will be what, Stefan? | |
| Well, let me grab your devil's advocate by the horns and put it someplace unmentionable, because I would argue that the Internet, and to some degree the Ron Paul campaigns from 2008 and the current year, Have taken the get out of jail free card out of people's hands. | |
| Look, there was no internet in 1914, 1915, 1916, and the anti-war movement in the US prior to Wilson putting the US into the war in 1917. | |
| It was huge. I mean, the leader of the Socialist Party, Eugene Debs, went to jail. | |
| Sick. Over 200,000 people were draft dodgers in America. | |
| And that was a war that was owned by the mainstream media of the time. | |
| And there were no alternatives. Look at the... | |
| There was no Internet of the 1960s. | |
| There was not even much of an alternative media. | |
| There was maybe some ham radio, but there was a massive and growing anti-war movement. | |
| And so people who say, well, you know, I've been immersed in this media, this... | |
| No. If you don't have a computer, there's a library down the street where internet access is free. | |
| And you say that you live, not you, but people say, oh, I live in a democracy, I vote. | |
| Well, if you vote, then you have the responsibility to learn about the candidates. | |
| Now that Ron Paul has been in the race, people have got to find out about it. | |
| They've got the access to information. | |
| There are no excuses left. | |
| No, you're absolutely right. | |
| I'm going to let you finish your point. Guys, we've got 121 people in the chat. | |
| We have 57 people watching on Justin TV. Hang out. | |
| We're going to be back with Stefan. More Wide Awake Radio in five and a half minutes. | |
| Hang tight. Hi, guys. | |
| Welcome back to Wide Awake Radio. I'm your host, Charlie McGrath. | |
| Let's get right back into it because I know this last half hour is going to absolutely fly by. | |
| Stefan, would you like to give your information out, website, freedomainradio.com, any other sites we can find your work at, which I'm sure everybody's already aware of. | |
| But in case there's one person listening who's not, how can we find your work? | |
| Sure. It's freedomainradio.com. | |
| You can also go to youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio for videos. | |
| It's all free. There's no ads. | |
| There's no ads on the website. | |
| There's no ads in the podcast because I have the business sense of cheese string. | |
| And so just the book, I've got a bunch of books there. | |
| They're all free. You can download whatever you want. | |
| If you like stuff, please feel free to donate. | |
| It's gratefully appreciated. | |
| But, you know, consume, consume, gorge at the buffet of philosophy. | |
| And if you burp up a few coins, we'll try and catch them. | |
| As he says, as we come out of commercial break. | |
| Hey, it's not everybody's business model. | |
| It just happens to be mine. My string cheese economics course is not quite complete yet. | |
| Let's get into it. We've established the fact that we are getting, in one way or another, what we deserve. | |
| We've had excess for decades on this planet, and now we're shocked when we find out that it's blowing up in our face. | |
| We talked during the break about, you know, the people are being asked to shoulder the burden for, you know, all this excess when the leadership and namely the banking cabal, global banking cabal, is not going to experience any of this loss. | |
| But I see a moment here, tipping point coming, and I want to get your take on this. | |
| We're going to hit a brick wall globally. | |
| And we're going to go one of a few ways. | |
| We'll have this realization that, you know what, I don't need this incredible, insane amount of legislation in order to govern my life. | |
| I don't need wars being fought in my name in order to secure energy. | |
| I don't need this. | |
| I don't need this being done. I don't need to see my kids into a sandbox that we've been in for two decades, and I don't need him to go over there and wipe out entire populations of people all in the name of some kind of a glorious crusade to spread supposed democracy around the world. | |
| Is humanity, do you see a point, right? | |
| You have to see an awakening occurring, especially over the last, let's say, five, six years. | |
| More and more people are realizing what's happening to them and what's being done in their name. | |
| Do you see a tipping point coming globally that, you know, enough is enough and we get some kind of real change that leads to a positive outcome for mankind? | |
| Or is it the neo-feudal serfdom? | |
| Well, that's up to people like you and I, and it's up to people in the chatroom, and it's up to people who listen to this. | |
| It's our choice about how the future goes. | |
| The people with knowledge, the people with reason, with evidence, with ethics, with consistency, it's our choice about how the world goes. | |
| The world goes the way of the most passionate and outspoken and The world will go the way that we want it to go. | |
| We are going to win in the long run because the truth always wins in the long run. | |
| It can be a hell of a time getting there and it can be a bit of a carnage, but the truth will always win. | |
| And that is what I hold for him to. | |
| And, you know, if the truth doesn't win in my lifetime, at least I can go to my grave content that I did everything that I conceivably could to move the world in a better direction. | |
| But as we were talking about in the break, you know, as far as People go. | |
| Everybody's going to want to claim victimhood status. | |
| And I think we need to be very clear. | |
| The young are not to blame. | |
| The young are not to blame. | |
| They were put in crappy schools. | |
| They were born into a system they never voted for. | |
| They were sold off like cattle. | |
| Their future productivity was sold off to foreigners like cattle. | |
| It was an auction of the unborn, which is why it's so ridiculous to me that the GOP says that they're concerned with the rights of the unborn while piling up the national debt on the very tiny backs of the unborn. | |
| But the young are not to blame. | |
| I think the boomers are heavily to blame. | |
| They had knowledge. They had accountability. | |
| And the boomers was the generation that, certainly to me and probably to you, preached accountability. | |
| My God, if you weren't prepared for that spelling bee when you were seven, you got an F. You knew the spelling bee was coming. | |
| We told you. You forgot to study. | |
| Too bad. Well, all I do is I say, okay, well, if a moral rule... | |
| It was applicable to me at seven, and I had to live with the consequences of those actions, then I think when you're 70, it's probably pretty much applicable as well. | |
| You can't have higher moral standards for a seven-year-old than you do for a 70-year-old. | |
| So yeah, I do hold the boomers and the people who've rejected I don't know how to care for anybody without giving them responsibility No, you're right. And what's unfortunate is we still have that set, right? | |
| The 11 million, we talked on the break, 11 million baby boomers in this country last year were looking for their check, their Social Security check. | |
| And there's nothing there. There's nothing there. | |
| People say, oh, it's funded until 2030. | |
| No, what's in The vault is IOUs that are dependent upon the children being enslaved. | |
| I mean, there's nothing there. | |
| This is the richest generation that the world has ever seen retiring on the backs of the least privileged generation that has been seen in the West for quite some time, which is the young people, as you say, 80% of them, moving back home after college because there's nothing for them in the workforce. | |
| These are the people that you want to feed your old age on because of the mistakes that you made as citizens and the government that you allowed to grow and the debt that you allowed to grow and the fight that you did not. | |
| Take, even though you had the example of the 60s radicals, and some of them were the 60s radicals, the fight that you did not take about restraining the power and the growth of the state. | |
| There are consequences, and they should not be on the backs of people who weren't even born when these terrible decisions were made or these confrontations were avoided. | |
| Yeah, and what do we have now? | |
| We have, you know, we're searching in the polls here, right, Santorum. | |
| His message, I watched a snippet of an interview from him two days ago, and standing behind him, his big message now, the big message is personal accountability. | |
| And it's maddening. | |
| I mean, here we have a system that has been built on, you know, this mantra of don't worry about what we're doing. | |
| Don't worry about what's being done in your name. | |
| Don't worry about the excess money we're spending. | |
| We'll hand out these trinkets and we'll hand out and we'll always have this handout available for you. | |
| But the sledgehammer reality, you know, it's here and we're going to feel it regardless. | |
| Personal accountability, my ass. | |
| 3,000 occupiers in jail. | |
| 3,000 occupiers in jail for putting tents up on grass. | |
| People who ripped off taxpayers and the unborn for trillions of dollars. | |
| How many of them are in jail? | |
| Zero! The idea that we talk about personal accountability in this society is so cognitive dissident that it's like a scene from Scanners. | |
| People in the future will look back through the tunnel of time and wonder if there was not crack in our Evian water. | |
| That we look at this world and can use the word with a straight face on a podium in a political context called personal accountability without running out to We indict these people who bribed, who stole, who defrauded, who robo-signed, who blew up property rights for houses and sold them all over the world, and they have the gall to foreclose on people that they tricked into signing these fraudulent... | |
| I mean, anyway, you could get me going for a while, but this idea of personal accountability, it's, you know, it's personal accountability for the helpless and the poor, not for the rich and the powerful. | |
| That's exactly right. And, in fact, you mentioned Ron Paul and that message getting out in 2008. | |
| He made the ballot in Montana in 2008. | |
| I voted for him then, and I'm going to, of course, vote for him now. | |
| And he's the only one that's out there talking about the condition of the nation, how the excesses got us here, how he would go in and cut a trillion dollars on day number one. | |
| And here we have Ben Bernanke coming out today saying, well, it's the excesses that have caused—we're heading for this financial cliff. | |
| I think we're good to go. | |
| Fiat-laden, shoddy banana republic where we just have old people destitute in the street. | |
| We'll still have the commercials running for getting your little rascal out so you can run down to Walmart and buy the latest imported good. | |
| But do you see us just falling into this banana republic state where we will be the labor of the world? | |
| Instead of using the Pacific Rim to build things for a buck a month, we turn into this new labor force of the world. | |
| No, I don't see that. The banana republics, they grew up in countries that never went through the Enlightenment. | |
| They never had a renaissance. They never had a separation of church and state. | |
| They did not have the Greek tradition and the Roman tradition of empiricism and the Socratic tradition of questioning and reason and evidence. | |
| So, in cultures which have been heavily religious and have not gone through those... | |
| You know, spasms of midwifery that births some capacity for rationality in the human soul, they end up as banana republics. | |
| No. America's not going to do that, and I don't think that even England is probably not going to do that. | |
| There's too meaty and sinewy a bone marrow of liberty and freedom. | |
| Liberty and freedom still means a lot in the United States. | |
| It still means a lot in Canada. | |
| We have too much of a tradition. | |
| You know, this experiment of the massive welfare nanny state It's a generation or two old. | |
| Before that, we had hundreds of years of small government, stable prices, with some pretty horrendous exceptions, such as slavery and so on. | |
| But that is a pretty long tradition that goes all the way back to the Magna Carta. | |
| That's a thousand-year tradition of trying to limit the state. | |
| Okay, it's like a big bar of slippery soap. | |
| It kind of got away from us. There, once we gave it the power to print its own money. | |
| But there's too strong a tradition. | |
| I don't think that we're going to go the way of some, you know, province in Venezuela. | |
| I think it's going to go the way of freedom, if we work, if we work hard to get the message out, and if we hold people accountable and do not give them the excuse of feigned ignorance as to why we've ended up in this situation. | |
| This has been talked about for decades, very loudly, And not even in like crazy crank conspiracy theory corners, but in mainstream economics. | |
| And so I don't think we're going to go banana republic. | |
| I think there's going to be a very strong and powerful revolution. | |
| There's going to be a great relaxation of the fantasy or the delusion that more and more violence, more and more social control, more and more laws, more and more debt, more and more imprisonment is ever going to do anything. | |
| Other than give us a temporary high followed by the inevitable crash. | |
| And I think that it's going to be like the drunk who wakes up, you know, missing his kidney, a wallet with the hooker's panties on his head in a Vegas ditch. | |
| He's going to be like, man, maybe it's time to quit my addiction. | |
| Yes, I believe if I woke up missing a kidney, I'd question some life choices there. | |
| Well, let me ask you this. | |
| We don't go the route of Banana Republic. | |
| Do we just fall into... | |
| I mean, at some point... | |
| The complete realization is there's going to be no more covering it over. | |
| There's going to be no more we're going to print money to cover it over. | |
| It's just not sustainable. | |
| Even Ron Paul today said that the Fed is going to crack under its own weight. | |
| Does that equate to we're going to go through this massive depression and then this awakening and this rebirth of liberty and these libertarian ideas are going to grab hold? | |
| Yeah, it's quick. | |
| I mean, you know, we can take this band-aid off slowly and painfully, or we could do it quick. | |
| You know, not many people know, and it's, you know, a pretty boring fact in isolation, but relative to the current context, there was a depression in 1920, right after the Second World War, that was much worse. | |
| The 1929 Depression, but it was done in less than 18 months, over in 18 months, and growth resumed. | |
| And that was right after a war that killed 10 million Europeans, that laid waste to France, that destroyed untold trillions of dollars worth of capital in the world, that stripped resources out of production by blowing them up repeatedly. | |
| So that was a very bad situation. | |
| That's not, wow, we've got a bunch of houses that are empty. | |
| That was like the decimation of the youth and the capital of the Western world. | |
| I mean, the First World War destroyed almost all the economic progress that had occurred over the past 100 years. | |
| 100 years. Europe was like a smoking crater. | |
| Or at least Western Europe. | |
| And so that was a huge readjustment. | |
| Everyone came home. And then you had the Spanish flu, which I think killed more. | |
| Yeah, 10 million people dead in the First World War, 20 million people dead from the Spanish flu, which was directly spread by the soldiers returning from the First World War. | |
| And so there, you're 30 million people dead, a smoking crater, and, you know, messed up a capital, right? | |
| And then the economy happened, recovery happened pretty quickly, even after a catastrophic depression or recession in 1920. | |
| So it can be... | |
| We're in much better shape than people were in 1919, 1920. | |
| That was over in 18 months. | |
| And if we simply were to, you know, screw our courage to the sticking place, as Macbeth says, steal our courage, steal our resolve, do what is necessary. | |
| Blow away regulations. | |
| Let people trade. Tear up contracts and let people negotiate in the free market without governments enforcing contracts in the public and private sector. | |
| Get rid of the minimum wage so the disadvantaged youth could not have an unemployment rate of higher than 30 or 40%. | |
| If we did all of that, it would be Eighteen months to two years, and we would be right as rain. | |
| And those would not be fun, but it could be that quick. | |
| But what's going to happen, of course, is there's a huge... | |
| Every interest group wants special treatment and exemption from the general rigidity of the rules. | |
| And so if we don't get a politician or a thinker or someone who's able to make that case clearly and concisively and powerful enough and to call on human beings' capacity for sacrifice, you know, capacity for sacrifice is a very untapped... | |
| A resource in society, because we've got kind of lazy and entitled, right? | |
| Human beings can make amazing sacrifices. | |
| New parents can stay up three days straight with a sick kid. | |
| Lots of people will volunteer or sign up for the draft to go to war and get their heads blown off. | |
| Human beings can make amazing sacrifices for causes that they believe in. | |
| It is our job to make that case, to make that cause so people will accept the jagged pill, the bitter pill, Take their medicine and let the world begin to heal. | |
| If we do that, we'll be fine. | |
| If we try and soften it, we're going to end up like Japan in a recession for, what are they, going over 20 years now. | |
| They've tried spending trillions of dollars in stimulus. | |
| They've tried regulating every aspect of the economy. | |
| And they've just ended up in this permanent recession. | |
| And if we try that, we'll have the same results. | |
| If we take the band-aid off quickly, we'll be up and walking before you know it. | |
| I agree with that, and I don't think we have to look at that 1920 depression. | |
| We can look back at that, 18 months, and we're back on a path of growth because we let free markets work. | |
| But even if we look at little microcosms, if we look at Iceland, Iceland told the banks to go to hell. | |
| We're not going to immerse ourselves further in debt so you don't realize a loss. | |
| And, you know, their currency imploded. | |
| They defaulted on their debt. | |
| But now, if you look at the unemployment rate in Iceland, I get called out on this sometimes because people say, well, Iceland's 300,000 people. | |
| It doesn't matter. You know, statistics are statistics. | |
| You have a lower unemployment rate in Iceland than you do here in the United States by far. | |
| You have a debt load that's gone. | |
| And within the next two years, they will have no deficit spending whatsoever. | |
| And you look at the exact... Yeah, you knew we couldn't pay it back. | |
| You've got a calculator or you've got enough fingers to count. | |
| Of course you knew we couldn't pay it back. | |
| Don't be ridiculous, right? Absolutely. | |
| But you see the tactic. | |
| If we can get Greece to go along... | |
| You know what? Sorry to interrupt. | |
| Maybe it's temperature related. | |
| Because Iceland is cold as a witch's teat, right? | |
| So maybe if you have to deal with the elements, you get a kind of toughness. | |
| So maybe the revolution is going to come from Minnesota. | |
| Maybe we should just go down to Minnesota and rile them up and they're like... | |
| Damn! Let's go get a more Alaska or something. | |
| Maybe it's not going to come from Florida. | |
| And maybe if you're sort of down there in the Mediterranean, it's kind of warm, it's kind of comfortable, you kind of get a little bit more lazy, you know? | |
| But maybe in the colder climates, you get that kind of Fargo revolution going on. | |
| Anyway, just a bit of a whimsy. | |
| I mean, look at the people in this awakening movement here. | |
| Most of them are in the mountain states or the Midwest because of the cold weather. | |
| It keeps our brain intact. | |
| When you get out to the warm weather, you just want to chill out on the beach and drink your wine and think it's never going to come to an end. | |
| But unfortunately, it is going to come to an end. | |
| The revolution will never be dreadlocked. | |
| Worst slogan ever. | |
| I just thought I would share it with you for a moment. | |
| Don't put that on a t-shirt. | |
| Do not put that on a t-shirt, absolutely. | |
| You'd have to put that on, I think, a three-piece suit, but anyway. | |
| You might have to. I see a path in Europe that is very, very bleak. | |
| I mean, we're going to see Europeans be straddled with this bailout for Greece. | |
| But, you know, Schobel was in Mexico over the weekend saying that it's contained. | |
| There's nothing further from the truth. | |
| There is no containment. Well, we're in this weird world where the only thing you know is true is the opposite of whatever anyone in power is saying. | |
| I say, oh, unemployment has gone down by two-tenths of a percent in America. | |
| It's like, well, that automatically you know that unemployment has gone up. | |
| And all that they're doing is they're no longer counting the people who've given up looking for work because they're no longer unemployed. | |
| You see, they vaporize. | |
| They've been shot into space. | |
| I don't know, right? And so they say, oh, the U.S. economy is improving. | |
| All you know is that it's getting worse and they're jigging the numbers. | |
| We're like an old-timey photographer who's got to judge the picture by looking at the negative. | |
| Everything's the opposite of what's being talked about. | |
| It's 1984. I mean, it's newspeak. | |
| It's newspeak is what it is. | |
| And you're right. You're absolutely right. | |
| That could be proven. You know, 8.3% unemployment, sure. | |
| You create 1.2 million non-persons, and then you can drop the participation rate. | |
| And magically, for the 2012 election, we'll get the numbers down to where they promised it would be if we spent a trillion dollars that we didn't have borrowing 40 cents of every dollar. | |
| Yeah, if you create a bunch of public works projects by printing up a bunch of money, you can lower the unemployment, but that's like getting rid of appendicitis by shooting cocaine directly into the wound. | |
| Okay, I feel better, but I don't think I'm going to do well in the long run. | |
| With only about two minutes left, I want to get your take on The lifespan on planet Earth of fiat currency, and I know it's going to die, 40 years is the usual time span of fiat currency. | |
| Do you see this fizzling out here, this experiment of Keynesian fiat money? | |
| I think they're going to do a lot to rescue the Federal Reserve notes. | |
| It is the world's reserve currency. | |
| I think they're basically going to start restricting the money supply and then we're going to get a depression. | |
| If they restrict the money supply to maintain the value of the dollar, we'll get a depression. | |
| And if they then liberalize the economy, we'll be out of it in 18 months. | |
| If they keep all of the rules, taxes, regulations, hundreds of thousands of new regs passed every year, and they increase the value of the currency by printing less, then we'll be in a permanent depression until we wake up. | |
| But I think there's a level of knowledge here at the moment, Charlie, that we didn't have in the past. | |
| The Austrian economics has done a great job of showing that inflation is always and forever a monetary phenomenon. | |
| The business cycle is well understood by, I think, any decent and honest economist. | |
| So I think we have a level of knowledge now. | |
| And remember, gas prices are so expensive. | |
| Only if you're talking about Federal Reserve notes. | |
| If you're talking about the price of gold, it's never been cheaper to buy gas with gold. | |
| So I think that people have enough knowledge now. | |
| There is enough knowledge out there in the world. | |
| There's enough ways to get access to that knowledge. | |
| That is cheap and easy through the internet and through shows like this, that I think we can turn it around. | |
| I think that we will heal this disastrous medieval experiment in returning to fascism, and I think we will have a peaceful and happy future. | |
| We've just got to work like hell, you know, roll like hell to turn this thing around before we go over the falls. | |
| I absolutely admire and enjoy your optimism. | |
| And I think you're right. | |
| I think that we will see it. | |
| I agree with you. | |
| Let's tear the Band-Aid off. | |
| Let's get this brief period of time. | |
| One girl a shriek and it's all done. | |
| That's right. If we'd have done this, if we'd have tore the Band-Aid in 2008, how much better world would we live in right now? | |
| We'd be all past it, yeah. | |
| Yeah, right. Stéphane Moulnet, thank you very much for joining me. | |
| Or as we say in the redneck part of the country, Stéphane Moulnouks. | |
| Yeah, we got her done. | |
| We got her. Thank you very much. | |
| I appreciate it. Freedomainradio.com. | |
| Guys, we've dropped the links into the chat room. | |
| I appreciate you coming on here. | |
| It's been too long. | |
| I've been watching you too long not to invite you before this. | |
| It will not be the last time. Thank you very much. |