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March 20, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:05:15
2114 The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and the History of Tomorrow

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, is interviewd on the paradimeshift show.

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Welcome to ParadigmShift.org.
We're joined today by the legendary host of Free Domain Radio, Stefan Molyneux.
Hi, Stefan. Hello, hello, hello.
Very pleased to meet you. How are you doing?
We're doing great. We're glad to have you with us today.
So, Stefan, I want to take us back in time to the dark days just after 9-11 and the introduction of the Patriot Act.
Now, this was a bill that was rushed through Congress and signed On October 26th, a little over a month after the terrorist attacks, and it included many provisions which a lot of people on Capitol Hill have been trying to get pushed through for a number of years.
And really, it enshrined, and a lot of people on the left, in their mind, George W. Bush as the poster boy for the right-wing crackdown on freedoms.
So, of course, in 2008, we saw Barack Obama Come to power on a hopium-fueled campaign and there was a lot of change and change we could believe in and change two times the amount of change for the price of one and all sorts of things like that.
But of course, you know, just recently we've learned that President Obama went ahead and signed the ACTA Act, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
And he actually went ahead and signed up by executive order, bypassing all of that constitutional nonsense that Americans seem to get so upset about.
But tell us a little bit about what does this act mean, and how does it compare to SOPA and PIPA, which were so popular in the media recently?
Well, I mean, I first wanted to compliment Barack Obama on sticking to his campaign Pledge and promise, because he promised change.
And if your truck is heading towards a cliff and you hit the gas, Thelma and Louise style, you do actually have a change.
It's a change in acceleration towards catastrophe.
So he is actually hitting the gas in the car that has been driven, really, I would argue, been driven by statist inevitabilities and to some degree demographics, right?
So the governments are facing, governments of the West, but particularly in the US, are facing some pretty considerable challenges at the moment.
The Tea Party is largely being driven by older people whose retirement savings got airstriked through the financial crisis, and that's sort of one aspect.
The other aspect is young people who face very little opportunity in the workforce will go the way that all underemployed youth goes, which is towards radicalization and Crying out for change and that's where the Occupy Wall Street movement comes from.
So you've got this kind of intergenerational sandwich of old people who've been ripped off from their retirement and young people who've been ripped off from their future who are both looking for significant changes in the system.
The older people tend to be more towards the free market.
The younger people tend to be more socialist.
That's kind of inevitable. When you come out of the amniotic sack of academia, it's natural that you're going to want to feel that socialism is the way to go.
As Churchill, I think, said, if you're not a socialist when you're 20, you haven't got a heart.
If you're not a conservative when you're 40, you haven't got a head.
And so these issues are significant and there is no money to bribe anybody anymore with.
I mean, the dollar is so stretched and so extended and so hyperinflated that if it wasn't for the government's strict control of interest rates, we'd probably be in a situation of significant inflation at the moment.
And that's what's happening domestically.
Overseas, of course, you have the threat which is becoming increasingly manifest.
And Libya, of course, is one of the aspects of that.
But it's also China and India and Russia are all looking to go off the dollar for oil trades and to either go to gold or some other kind of currency.
The euro is looking increasingly shaky as the giant sucking financial vacuum called Greece pulls everything else into it.
And so it is an unprecedented conflagration or coincidence of tragedies and catastrophes and the people in the government can see all of these things coalescing together and so naturally what they're doing is they're trying to grab as much power as possible and they want to grab as much power as possible over the resources which is why the government is sort of nationalizing or potentially nationalizing All food supplies,
all industries, everyone who's of value to the government, all skilled personnel can be impressed into the government's cause during wartime or in peacetime to prepare for wartime.
And really that does kind of cover all the bases.
If you are preparing for war or at war or in peacetime, then you've pretty much got a 360 degree impressment or A kind of grabbing together of all the resources in the country.
This, of course, is typical corporate fascism.
And so, given all of these wrecking balls coming towards the existing system, governments do what they always do whenever they're faced with threats.
It's that they try to get as much power as possible during a time It's not, to me, coincidental that as the Iraq and Afghan wars are beginning, they're wind down.
They're never fully wind down. I mean, America's still in Japan 65 years after the end of World War.
Two, but this is a problem, right?
So there's less of a demand for government power.
These wars are winding down, so naturally they have to...
It's like a balloon. You push in one end, the other end comes out.
They're going to have to grab power from other areas.
Power over the Internet, of course.
That's SOPA. And, you know, the government ownership of the media industry is so significant.
It's why you never see any libertarian or anti-state messages in movies, because they're so beholden to the state.
And so, control over the media, control over the internet, control over the resources, this is natural, because the existing system simply cannot conceivably, mathematically, demographically, particularly in Europe, which has a ridiculously low birth rate among the domestic population, it can't sustain itself.
And so, given that there's a huge change coming, the government wants as much power over as many fields as possible as it can get now, so that it will be ready for when the change occurs.
Sorry for that, hopefully not too long an answer, but that's sort of my perspective on it.
No, that's awesome.
And what we're going to do is kind of delve into a lot of those points that you raised and kind of explore them and help people understand how that's actually going to impact them on a day-to-day basis.
Now, you mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course there's no denying that those were two wars or engagements that President Obama inherited from his predecessor.
We're broadcasting today from Dublin, Ireland, and over here in Europe, when President Bush was in office, there were massive protests against the warmongering and, you know, what was viewed as illegal invasions of sovereign nations.
Now, recently, President Obama came to Dublin and was greeted in imagery that was reminiscent of John F. Kennedy coming here in the 60s, and it was just a wonderful festival of pro-Americanism.
And I was struck by it because I looked and I thought, okay, yes, he inherited Iraq and Afghanistan, and he has talked about winding down, as you mentioned, in Iraq by moving the troops 100 miles to the south into Kuwait, which I guess that's going to completely cool off the tensions.
But in Afghanistan, Obama has gone in and he's got Osama bin Laden.
The Taliban have been routed.
They're out of government. We've got some Democratic elections going on.
But there's no mention of anything winding down there.
In fact, Obama now, he went into Libya.
Being led by Cameron and Sarkozy, leading from behind, I think he referred to it as.
But he was involved there in the overthrow of another leader of a country in order to free the people.
We're looking to go into Syria next.
There's talk about attacks on Iran.
It seems like Obama took the warmongering or the foreign policy of George W. Bush and injected a massive amount of steroids into it.
So are we looking at, in a possible Obama second term, are we looking at the fourth term of George W. Bush?
Well... I mean, I would argue that this is a policy that has been part of American politics for 150 years.
I mean, there's this constant meddling.
I mean, you look, Puerto Rico and...
I mean, you go through the list.
And just off the top of my head, you could go on and on, right?
I mean, Puerto Rico and Hawaii and the First World War and then getting involved in the Second World War.
And then you've got Korea and Vietnam and Grenada.
And under Clinton, you had the Balkans.
You've got the Middle East. It's been going on forever.
You know, give narcissistic, megalomaniacal, evil guys weapons, military, and an infinite fiat currency budget, they're gonna go and play chess.
They're gonna go and play chess with human lives.
That is inevitable. This has been going on since the beginning of human history.
A statism as a philosophy, the idea that you have that society can only be functionally run and controlled and operated with an elite monopoly of force concentrated in the hands of a very few individuals at the expense of everyone else.
This, you know, most ancient of belief systems, which really just evolved from a completely bloody Stone Age kind of feudalism, This belief is going to constantly require and demand and it's going to be inevitable that people are going to go in and use this power overseas.
What's the point of having an army if you don't use it?
And statism as a whole requires societies to be in a state of perpetual crisis.
I mean, I don't know how old you are.
I'm in my mid-40s and I cannot remember a time when Western society was not in crisis.
It was not in crisis. Over the 19th century, when governments were very small in Canada and America, governments were much less in crisis.
But just think back. I mean, governments have been perpetually in crisis ever since I can remember.
I mean, you've got the Cold War giving away to the war on Ontario giving away to war over resources, giving away to bringing democracy to the Middle East and other countries, giving away to financial crises and hyperinflations and bubbles and busts and national debts and, you know, the Social Security cupboard being bare.
We have become addicted to the adrenaline of persistent crisis and until people sort of wake up and shake their heads and awaken as if from a mad nightmare and say to themselves, is this the way society has to be?
Do we have to constantly be lurching?
From one disaster to another, from one crisis to another?
And the answer, of course, is no, we don't.
But as long as we have this violent monopoly in the center of our society, as long as we are embedded in an abusive relationship with a violent institution, we are forever going to live in a state of crisis.
I mean, it's like getting married to a drunken, gambling addict, sexaholic wife-beater.
Your life is going to be in a constant state of crisis.
We've got this abuse at the center of our society.
It ripples outwards forever.
And it's never going to stop unless we change society fundamentally.
Now, you're quite right.
You mentioned that, you know, for the past over 50 years, Western economies have been on the verge of collapse because of their massive deficits spending, you know, the guns-and-butter approach to economics.
Now, the average citizen of a Western country, we'll say, for example, the United States, they just now assume that their government is there, they're in place, To protect them, to keep them safe, and to take care of them.
So the whole idea of the social safety net.
And they can't even conceive of any other type of reality.
So what would you propose?
What are the alternatives?
What is a free society?
Well, a free society is exactly the same globally or nationally as it is personally.
You simply reject the use of violence to achieve your goals.
I mean, I wish I was smart enough to make it more complicated than that.
I really do wish it was more complicated.
But we need to put down the gun when dealing with each other.
We need to commit to negotiation.
We need to commit to non-violence.
We need to commit to non-exploitation.
of each other as individuals.
That's really all it comes down to.
There's nothing magical about the state.
There's nothing magical about a country.
There's nothing magical about President Obama or Sarkozy or Merkel or Cameron or any of these people.
There's nothing magical. They're just human beings.
And there's nothing magical about the borders of one country.
All we need to do is look at each other in the eye and say that we are going to now commit to rejecting the use of violence in Interacting with each other, whether it's voter to government, government to citizen, government to criminal, just individual to individual.
We must, must, must reject the use of violence.
We have 21st century technology from military hardware, from electronics and all these kinds of things.
And we're still running society with the paradigm of a top-down violent monopoly hierarchy that we inherited from hundreds of thousands of years ago through the development of our species and in its current form is thousands of years old.
And it really is like putting Fred Flintstone at the helm of the space shuttle with no training.
I mean, of course he's going to crash it because it's way too primitive for the technology involved.
We need to evolve our morality to keep pace with our technology.
And I would argue, of course, morality is just another kind of technology, but we need to make that commitment to stop using violence to achieve our ends.
If you're worried about poor people, fantastic.
Go help them. I think that's wonderful.
I like to as well. I'm a very charitable guy.
I give all my stuff away for free.
And donate to charity. I think that's wonderful.
But if you're worried about the poor, the last thing you ever want to do if you really want to help them is have the government point guns, print money, throw people in jail for tax evasion, and then take 80% of the money for themselves and trickle down just enough to keep the poor dependent on a system that's going to collapse and leave the poor without skills or opportunities.
If you care about education, the last thing you want to do is give a violent monopoly Control over your children's education and you can see all of the catastrophes that have come out of that.
People fundamentally unable to think.
I get hundreds of emails and messages every single day and I genuinely believe having done this now for over half a decade and having argued philosophy for more than a quarter century, not one person in a thousand actually knows how to think and I can guarantee you they did not get that from government schools.
So we simply have to recognize that governments are forced.
Law is an opinion with a gun.
We need to stop calling upon the airstrike of violence to solve these complex social problems like poverty, like ignorance, like abuse.
And all of these things need to be dealt with voluntarily.
Otherwise, the violence is simply going to spread until it consumes us all.
So, as we travel around and talk with people in various different countries, generally in the Western nations, it seems like a lot of people are very dissatisfied with their government and the people in government.
But quite often, when we're discussing with people about their individual representative, they seem to be quite happy with how that person is performing for their community.
Maybe a little bit disingenuous for people to try and hoist all of the blame onto this small group of individuals called government and say, oh, well, it's really all their fault.
Are we maybe seeing in Western societies a general decay in morals and accountability?
And are people ultimately getting the type of government that they both want and deserve?
I'm trying to figure out if there's more ways you can pack more questions into one question.
Look, first of all, local politicians, people are more satisfied with local politicians because local politicians get them government money.
I mean, that's the point of local politicians is to go to the government and get you grants and money and jobs and all of that kind of stuff.
I mean, even Ron Paul does it, who's against that kind of stuff.
So, yeah, of course people are happy with their local politicians.
So, yeah, I mean, but, you know, the use of violence to solve problems doesn't work at any level.
And the fact that you can profit from your local politician It's not an excuse to justify the use of violence as a whole.
I mean, the government really is a kind of mafia.
It's a criminal organization. And I've yet to see a sane human being who says, oh, do we have a lot of problems with poverty?
Let's give all of our money to the local crime lords.
Let's give all of our money to the local drug dealers.
Let's give all of our money to the local racketeers.
They're going to solve the problem, I'm sure.
And so, you know, of course people educated by the government don't have, they're not taught how to think, they're not taught the true nature of government, they're not taught the true nature of violence within the society they live in.
And so I don't think that we can really blame people for being statists.
It's sort of like blaming people for being Marxist if they were indoctrinated under Stalinist education camps and schools in the 1950s in Russia.
I mean, they're not really Marxists because they've never thought it through and they've never been presented with an alternative and the true moral nature of their system remains invisible to them.
So, I can't really put the moral blame on people.
Now, once you're exposed to ideas and the internet makes it a lot easier and so on, the excuse factor goes down considerably.
But I can't find it in my heart to blame soldiers, to blame policemen, to blame voters and so on because This is all they've been taught.
This is all they know. It is considered as ridiculous and silly an idea to get rid of governments and have voluntary peaceful human interactions work on these problems.
As for me to say, I think that we should repeal gravity and all jump to the moon.
I mean, people just look at me like you're barking mad.
But this, of course, is the power of uniform propaganda and the mistake of assuming that the future has to be like the past, which everyone who's profiting from past structures is going to try and get you to believe, of course.
So I don't think people get the governments they deserve because they're just not taught any differently.
I mean, I don't spend a lot of time wondering whether slavery is moral or immoral.
I figure that's a question that's already been settled, and I think for good reason.
It's immoral. And people don't sit there and say, well, maybe we shouldn't have a government.
That's just considered to be an idea that's settled.
And so, for a lot of people, what's the profit of putting time into thinking about it?
So, we're coming up to a new election in the United States, and on the Democratic ticket, we're going to have President Barack Obama running for a second term, and it's looking more and more likely that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is going to be the front-runner, or the candidate for the Republicans.
So, are we seeing change that we can believe in being proposed by the Republicans, or is it simply going to be another case of a new face with the same message moving forward?
The precedents are irrelevant.
I mean, if anybody who hasn't understood that after seeing Obama get in, and I did this video years ago when Obama first got in, predicting everything that's come true.
And it's because the system has a logic.
It's like expecting that the new guy in communism is going to make communism work.
No, communism has a logic.
You know, the centralization of power that inevitably results from the universal violation of property rights for the vast majority of the population has a logic to it.
You know, if you get rid of prices, you can't allocate goods effectively.
You have to substitute human judgment, which is going to be corrupted by special interests and favors, and that's why communism is so destructive.
And so expecting that the new head of the mafia is going to turn the mafia into the United Way is to completely misunderstand the realities of the system.
People get into power because they get campaign contributions.
And they get campaign contributions from people who want more out of the government than they're putting into campaign contributions.
And the statistics are very clear.
For every dollar many corporations in the U.S. spend in lobbying, they get over $200 of political benefits.
That's a pretty good ROI.
As far as returns on investment goes, that's pretty damn good.
And you really can't beat that.
So, of course, where does the extra money come from?
Well, it comes from debts. It comes from raising taxes on other people.
It comes from import quotas and tariffs, which raises the price of goods for domestic people.
It comes out of special tax breaks, which either add to the national debt or add to the fiat currency money supply and therefore inflation, which specifically attacks the poor and the old for the most part.
And so it's at everybody's expense and it's diluted and the concentration of benefits is for the favorable few.
That is the logic of the system.
You can't have it.
And why would anyone care about an election if the government, if whoever was in power did not have the power to grant favors to his friends and to punish his enemies?
That's the only reason we care about these things.
And so imagining that that basic logic of the system is going to change when one idiot cycles in and another idiot cycles out is the height of naivety.
It's like saying, I don't know, this guy has cancer, so let's put a Hawaiian shirt on him instead of a bathrobe.
Let's give him a little vitamin D pill, and he's going to be as healthy as a guy in the prime of his youth on vacation in Hawaii.
Changing the shirt doesn't change the sickness, and changing the cap doesn't make me...
Any area. So, it is the logic of the system that people need to look at.
The charisma and the presentability and the reasonableness of the people up front or in charge is just like that kid who bumps into you so that you are disoriented when the other guy picks your pocket.
You know, don't look at...
You know, important magic is the art of the redirection, right?
Do not look at the potential leaders.
Do not look at the speeches of those in charge.
Look at the inherent logic that the system runs on.
And you have a system that runs on violence, you have a system that runs on debt, you have a system that has to promise more to people that it can possibly provide, and therefore debt is built into the system, predation is built into the system, corruption is built into the system.
When you have violence, you cannot get positive results in the long run.
You cannot beat a woman into loving you, and you cannot government a society into productivity and peace.
Now, you mentioned earlier how most people are, to a degree, the creations of the environment and the education system that they have received.
Do you think if most people were aware of the history of public education and the methods that are employed there, that they'd be a little bit more skeptical about sending their children into a public education style system?
Yeah, I know what you mean.
I've wrestled with this question literally for decades, and I have come to some tentative conclusions, which is that it is not a lack of information that causes people to remain in the matrix or to remain embedded in the delusions of the existing madness we call a system.
It is not a lack of information.
It is not a lack of moral understanding.
Because if it was a lack of information, then when people got the information, they would change their minds.
So if you say, you know, which way is it?
To Exeter. And I say, well, it's down that road.
You'd go, well, thank you very much. And you'd go down that road.
You wouldn't start screaming at me.
You wouldn't yell at me. You wouldn't go the exact opposite way and say you were still going to go to Exeter.
And so, in my experience, and, you know, my show has had almost 40 million downloads.
The vast majority of people listen to the moral reality of our existing system and recoil as if you were, you know, throwing a poisonous snake at them covered in breeding poisonous spiders and calling in a lightning strike on their dog.
And so it's not a lack of information because when you present the information to people they recoil, they get upset, they get angry, they get defensive, they get abusive, they get distant, they, you know, they recoil.
So, I don't think it's a lack of information.
I don't think more knowledge of the history of the world is going to save the future.
The science seems to be quite clear.
The way that most people, pretty strong psychological studies on this, people can check out fdurl.com forward slash bib.
That's sort of my video series on this with interviews with some subject matter experts.
What happens is, People have an emotional response and then they create reasons after the fact as to justify that emotional response.
So people are running on emotion and afterwards they're putting quote reasoned arguments to cover up the emotion, to justify the emotion.
So when people hear about the horrors of the system, that is, about the potential piece of a system that could be They recoil emotionally and then they come up with reasons after the fact.
People do not look at the facts and then draw conclusions.
People have emotional conclusions and then whatever quote facts they can find to have those conclusions remain.
And so I think and the reasons for this seem to have to do with the fact that very few people are taught how to think when their children and of course most people are punished for thinking as children either in their church or in their family or particularly of course in their schools.
And so the only thing that I've been able to find that we can do that I think is verifiable, that's productive, is to really work on peaceful parenting, parenting without spanking, yelling, intimidation, aggression, punishment, and so on.
And that will have human minds grow up with the potential, the potential to look at reason and evidence and draw logical conclusions from what is.
Because right now, all you're getting in terms of, quote, arguments on the web is, you know, it's just, it's the It's just sparks coming off a broken brain that's attempting to justify its own shattering.
And that, of course, is never going to work.
This is why I say it's a multi-generational change.
We have to raise children so peacefully that they can think rationally.
We have to teach them how to think rationally, although I find, as a parent myself, you don't have to teach your kid to think rationally.
And then reason will win out.
But right now, reason is a language that most people simply refuse or are incapable of speaking.
Now, Stefan, I've lived in the United States on and off for about the past 10 years.
And, you know, it's always been quite interesting to me that, you know, for so many years, the American people were terrified of the threat of communism, you know, the Red Scare.
And they were taught and led to believe that communism was the greatest threat to American society.
And what we're seeing is definitely a growth in what you're calling statism and a more – a larger influence of the state and the lives of the individual.
But it doesn't appear to be heading down the communist route.
I mean I don't anticipate Americans all driving the same kind of car, only eating the same hamburger.
You know, watching a movie on the same television.
I just don't anticipate the American people accepting that.
But it seems like what we're seeing more and more is not so much the takeover of the free market and corporations by the state, but rather almost like a merger between the state and corporations.
Talk a little bit about that.
What kind of model does that conjure up and what are the effects for the individual?
Well, I mean, without wanting to use words that are too volatile, this is national socialism.
It's fascism, right?
I mean, one of the things that you can be guaranteed of is that all violence achieves the opposite of its stated goals.
And so when you have a government that, or you have a series of governments in the West that burn up the lives of 40 million people fighting something called fascism and national socialism, you can be guaranteed that within a generation or two you will see in those same governments fascism and national socialism.
And this of course is exactly what's happened.
The fundamental mistake of communism, in terms of economic productivity, it's all evil and all, but in terms of economic productivity, is that it nationalizes people.
And that's not economically productive.
What you want to do, if you want to be a good evil leader, is you want to nationalize people's production.
You want to nationalize their money.
You don't want to nationalize them themselves.
So in communism, you really couldn't choose much of your own profession, and your life was run by the government.
And that makes people kind of inert and depressed and non-functional economically.
The genius of the livestock management model of the Western pseudo-democracies is that they allow people's lives to be private, right?
So you can choose your education, you can choose your career and so on, but they socialize the profits of that.
And that, of course, is much more productive and that, of course, means that governments can use that potential collateral, sorry, that potential income as collateral for additional debt.
So, in the Western model, What happens, and this of course was laid out in Italy in the 20s and Germany in the 30s, is the government will nationalize the industries and the profits from the industries, not each individual.
And this is of course this kind of corporatism.
It's weird, you know, and it takes a little bit of thinking, and I understand why this is hard.
It takes a little bit of thinking to figure this out.
Because people assume that corporations have something to do with the free market.
But anytime that the cold, clammy, mummy, rotting, dead hand of government laws touches something, it is no longer part of the free market.
Corporations are legal fictions created by the state.
They are not free market institutions.
They are created by the state in order to legally shield executives of corporations from legal responsibility for their actions.
So in the US, a bunch of banks have recently coughed up tens of millions of dollars to cover potential liability from these robo-signing scandals and fraud on mortgages and all that kind of stuff.
Well, the executives who made this, they're not paying a penny.
They can't actually legally be compelled to pay a penny.
Although they profited from all these decisions, they don't have to give a penny back from their profits because it all comes out of this legal fiction called the corporation.
It's like if I had a little hand puppet and I went to rob a bank and the hand puppet held the little gun and told people to hand over all the money and the hand puppet grabbed the money and ran out and then I got caught.
And I handed the hand puppet over to the police, and then the police tried the hand puppet, put the hand puppet in jail for bank robbery, and I get to keep all the money.
We would look at that as a completely insane system.
But that's exactly what corporations do.
That's exactly what the concept of corporatism is designed to do, is to shield corporate owners from illegal liability.
You can never go after their personal property.
Although, so it's a one-way street, right?
You can take money out of the corporation and personally profit from it.
But if the corporation, but if you do wrong under the umbrella of that corporation, it is the corporation which pays.
And what that means, it is the employees who pay through reduced wages and opportunities.
It is the customers who pay through increased costs, right?
So everyone's like, yeah, let's go get those banks because the banks stole all our money and the banks are taking people's houses and the banks blew up the economy.
Let's go get the banks! But you can't get the banks in a corporate fascistic state.
You can't. So it's like, yeah, we got those banks to pay all those fines.
It's like, but there's no such thing as a bank.
Bank's just a legal fiction. Who's actually paying the fines?
Hey, we got all the banks. They're paying.
Hey, wait a minute. All of my ATM fees have gone up.
Damn. I guess I'm paying again, right?
So, yeah, it's completely monstrous.
And, you know, as long as we have this monstrosity called corporations, they're going to unduly influence the government.
They're going to get all the special favors in the universe and everybody else, the poor and those on fixed incomes and the old and the sick are forever going to pay for these bastards, frankly, who make all of this money and get this magic get-out-of-jail-free card of legal immunity from the evils that they do.
Now, whenever we talk about fascism, you know, the imagery that was brought to mind, that we learned all about in school, is National Socialists, SS walking around in black uniforms and concentration camps and all that kind of stuff.
And that's generally for most people where an understanding of that history stops, right?
They were bad guys. We went over there and we killed them and we're the good guys.
Rarely do people get educated about the economic aspects of fascism, that it's actually an economic philosophy just as much as it is a political philosophy.
Now, without wanting to go too far down into the conspiratorial line of reasoning, let's put our tinfoil hats on for just a moment.
Is it quite possible that in order to get a mode of government such as fascism approved, that The American people or the Western societies were so scared into thinking that communism was the real threat that actually slipping into a mode of fascism or corporatism was actually relatively easy.
Well, but that's, I mean, I don't think that we have to be conspiratorial about that, because that's all that history ever talks about, is you create fake enemies, and then you inflict whatever dangers you threaten the enemy on the population, you then inflict those themselves.
How did Hitler rise to power so quickly?
Well, because everybody was terrified of communism, right?
Because the communists took over in Russia and killed all of the Kulaks, you know, 10-20 million of them were killed.
And the perception in Germany at the time was that communism was a Jewish phenomenon.
There were Jewish leaders, and this is true.
I mean, Churchill wrote about this.
There were disproportionate numbers of Jews.
And so they went and killed all the Christians.
And so everybody in Germany was terrified that the communists were going to take over and kill everyone.
And so the brown shirts came along.
The Hitler's guard came along and said, we're going to save you from the communists.
And there was these massive pitched street battles between the fascists and the communists.
And, of course, you know, the communists are going to take away all your freedoms.
The communists are going to get you all killed.
And then, of course, Hitler gets into power and what does he do?
He takes away all their freedoms and gets them all killed.
And so that is inevitable.
I mean, what do they say about the war on terror?
Well, you know, they're going to harm you.
They're going to get you killed.
They're going to come blow you up and so on.
And so what we have to do is we have to harm you.
We have to put you in harm's way. We have to blow up the economy.
We have to... Go and stick more sticks into the hornet's nest called Middle Eastern fundamentalist radicalism and the freedoms that it's claimed that Al-Qaeda hates so much are just taken away anyway.
So yeah, Al-Qaeda hates your freedoms and they want to take them away.
So in order to protect you from Al-Qaeda who hates your freedoms and wants to take them away, we have to take away all your freedoms.
You know, if you want to know what is going to happen the day after tomorrow, look at The enemies that are being put in front of you today, that is exactly what is going to happen to you the day after tomorrow.
That is so inevitable that to not see that means that you've just never cracked a history book with any eyes to see or brains to think.
Now, whenever a person hears the term or the phrase war on terror, it's almost as if they're hearing a very concise, specific phrase.
You know, war on terror, okay, I know what that means.
That means we were attacked by bad people And so we're going to go and fight the bad people.
It's very simple. It's very straightforward.
But of course, it's actually the complete opposite of that.
It's a very, very nebulous phrase because, as you mentioned, who attacked us?
Why did they attack us?
What were the reasons behind it?
And who are we going to go get?
You know, terror is an emotion.
So how do you actually go and fight an emotion?
You know, for me personally, it kind of reminds me of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty in the 1960s.
You know, he approached this giant complex issue of poverty and said, okay, we're going to have a war on poverty as if poverty was one individual or group that you could, you know, drop a bomb on and all of a sudden, great, poverty's been solved.
And of course it was a complete disaster.
It was a complete failure. So do you think the war on terror is going to suffer the same fate?
Well, it's inevitable because what people want to do is they want to substitute any phrase that they can for people.
So they say, well, you need a war on drugs.
You can't fight a war on drugs.
What are you going to do? Round up all the little cocaine powder with a razor blade and a mirror and throw it in a big bag in jail?
You can't wage a war on drugs because drugs are inanimate.
You can only wage a war on people.
We want to wage a war on illiteracy.
Well, illiteracy is a state of mind.
It's an absence of knowledge. You can't wage war against a state of mind.
You can't take somebody's illiteracy out through their nose with a pair of pliers and throw it in the stocks.
So it's always and forever. It's a war on people.
The war on poverty. is a war on people.
In other words, if you disagree with the government's solution to the war on poverty, we're going to throw your ass in jail.
In other words, if you don't want to fund how the government is approaching the war on poverty, or the war on illiteracy, or the war on drugs, or the war on terror, if you don't want to fund it, we're going to throw your ass in jail.
And if you resist us, we're going to place a gun to your neck.
And if you continue to resist it, we are going to pull that trigger and blow your jugular out your ass.
That is the reality. Always and forever, it is a war on people.
It is not a war on Iraq.
It is a war on Iraqis.
It is not a war on drugs.
It is a war on peaceful consumers of mind-altering substances.
Caffeine excluded, nicotine excluded, alcohol excluded, and so on and so on, and oxycontin excluded.
And so you can't ever have a war except a gun pressed to the neck of someone or a bomb falling on someone and blowing them into their component atoms.
And it is testament to our moral sensitivity as a species That we need euphemisms.
You know, in the past, you didn't need euphemisms.
You know, you look at old-styly warrior beowulf stuff from the...
I mean, they just, you know, we're going to go and chew his jugular out and spit it in his eyeball.
You know, we're going to go and eat his heart to get more warrior strength.
You know, we're going to stick his head up on a spike in the French Revolution.
He stuck all the priest's heads on spikes and predated them through the streets.
They didn't need euphemisms.
They didn't say... We need a war on religion, they said.
We're going to go and strangle, stab, kill, murder, mutilate, and guillotine all the priests we can get our hands on.
They didn't need euphemisms.
It's actually amazing and wonderful progress in human moral development that now we need euphemisms.
Now they can't say, we need a war on people.
Now they say, well, we need a war on adjectives.
We need a war on inanimate substances.
It's wonderful.
I mean, It's incredible progress.
All we have to do is help people to understand why they need those euphemisms, and then we can stop having these wars altogether.
Now, over the last few days here in the States, of course, we've seen some of the consequences of this so-called war on terror.
The images of a three-year-old boy sitting in a wheelchair being frisked down by a burly TSA agent has been splashed all over the newspapers and the media.
And people are starting to ask, hey, has this gone a little too far?
which in and of itself is a sad social commentary.
But I'm sure when people heard about the Patriot Act 10 years ago, over 10 years ago, they had in their mind, okay, again, we're just going to go get the bad guys as a result of this.
But of course, the Patriot Act has now been interpreted as being anybody who wants to travel in their own country without a criminal record is now potentially a terrorist.
Well, are we seeing, is this a case of, you know, the horse is already bolted from the stable and this thing is only going to get bigger and broader and even more nebulous as it goes forward?
through.
Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, the airlines, I mean, this is stuff that I've heard.
And, you know, please, people who are listening, feel free to verify this.
I've not verified all of this. I think it's true, though, from the little information that I've gotten.
But one of the reasons why it was so easy for the government to put the TSA in is because they put the TSA in in return for legal immunity for the airlines.
The airlines had been bugged for years to put lockable, sealable cockpit doors on their airplanes, and they had not done so because of the cost, I would assume.
And so what would happen is after 9-11 the airlines would have gotten sued.
And what happens is companies who are threatened with legal action, legal action in the US as in every Western country, has gone so far from the common law sensible restitution reality that originated these kinds of dispute resolutions to this ridiculous multi-year, multi-million dollar Cluster frack of feeding lawyers until they burst.
And so companies really don't want that.
So what companies are concerned about is if some private sector organization were to continue to run the checkpoints and there was another hijacking, then those people would be sued.
Whereas if the government runs it, nobody's going to sue the government.
It's no point, right? It's never going to happen.
And so you get this ridiculous situation coming in where the TSA agents, I mean, I'm guessing, this is sort of what I would do if I were in the logic of that situation, is they are going to pick the people who least look like terrorists in order to pat them down.
Why? Well, because they have to fulfill the quota of the number of people they pat down.
And if they choose some swarthy-looking Middle Eastern guy in a turban, he might get really angry.
And make their lives very difficult by suing harassment and racial discrimination and this and that.
So they actually have to avoid people to make their own jobs easier.
They have to avoid the people who look like terrorists and go for all the people who don't.
Some 90-year-old woman can conceivably claim racial discrimination, right, if she's some old waspy grandmother.
And some three-year-old kid is never going to do that either.
So they have to actually avoid the people who would be the most logical candidates for terrorism to pursue those who don't.
This is the inevitable result.
Of these kinds of systems.
Everything that you put in place goes the opposite way.
Violence is at the roots. You think that the gun of the state goes off at your enemies.
No, it misses your enemies and goes off in your own face until people realize that they're just going to keep reloading and take off another eyebrow, another nose, another tip of the ear.
Now, of course, one of the lessons that we learn about statism or fascism from history is that it promotes the elevation of the rights of the state and the benefits of the state above those of the individual.
And in fact, the individual is suppressed into a giant populace in favor of actually having the state It might be the supreme symbol of productivity and all that is good about a nation.
And this inevitably leads to a rise in nationalism and national spirit.
And when you have that, it's always very beneficial to have an enemy or a person or a group to blame for all of the state's problems.
Now, we mentioned the drug war, and in the U.S., the drug war is inevitably always tied to the border with Mexico and the illegal immigrants.
Now, in a recent presidential debate, Congressman Ron Paul was practically laughed off the stage when he warned that all of this talk about building one, two, three, ten fences along the border and having armed guards patrol them with machine guns and drones and all of that kind of stuff,
Might be a little bit rash, and we should be very careful about rushing into a situation like that, because when economies collapse, governments start to introduce things like capital controls and population controls, and the people just simply laughed at it, and they said this is the stuff of conspiracy theories and the tinfoil hat groups.
But I wanted to reference something that happened, and it practically went unmentioned over in Europe, when Greece was toying with the idea of possibly holding a referendum on another bailout.
And one of the options that they were talking about was actually leaving the euro.
And the British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, in responding to this, said that if Greece was to leave the euro, that certain Population and capital controls were going to have to be put in place by other members of the EMU to prevent Greeks from traveling through Europe and flooding Europe with all of their euros.
And so this doesn't seem to be as far-fetched as possibly Ron Paul's audience believed it to be.
Is this something that, you know, as the US economy continues to deteriorate, could possibly start to happen here in the US? Well, I mean, could start to happen.
I mean, try traveling with large amounts of money.
Try traveling with large amounts of gold.
Try taking large amounts of money out of the country.
It's not good.
It's a dangerous situation.
Everyone assumes that the walls that are put up and the machine guns that are put on the walls are always and forever only going to be pointed outwards.
And historically, that's just not true.
That's just not true. How many German citizens followed the Jews and the intellectuals and the homosexuals into the Nazi concentration camps?
How many former supporters of the Soviet communist model ended up in the gulags with Solzhenitsyn and friends?
I mean, the idea that there's going to be this huge apparatus of control and power and funding and coercion, that that is not going to outlast any possible immediate use for it.
In other words, let's say that you put all these borders up and you hired 100,000 border guards, mostly from ex-military types and so on, Minyan.
And then let's say that now, tomorrow, all of the illegal immigration stops.
Well, what's going to happen? Are they just going to disband?
Of course not. They're going to be around.
They're going to find some use for them.
Every time you add someone to the government payroll, that person is going to have a job pretty much forever.
I mean, some exceptions, but mostly pretty much forever.
I mean, the number of children, because the baby bust, right?
The number of kids in schools has gone down enormously from the height of the baby boom.
Have we seen a coincidental fall?
In the number of teachers and schools?
No, of course not. Because people are almost impossible to fire.
And so everybody you add to the government for an immediate problem is going to stay with that government forever.
And it's going to find ways, if their original purpose goes unfulfilled or falls by the wayside, they can find other ways to make your life more difficult.
So, you know, adding, it's just like shipping arms to the mafia in the hopes that they'll take out some rival gang.
Well, all that you end up with, no matter what happens, is a better armed, more populated mafia.
And that's not going to be good for you, no matter what happens.
Now, this week we had the tragedy in Toulouse, France, where a teacher and some young students at a Jewish school were gunned down by an anonymous attacker.
President Sarkozy was quick to come out and then declared that it was a national tragedy and that he was thoroughly sorrowful for what had happened.
Is there a slight issue there?
I mean, you know, when I'm listening to that, I think, of course, this is a tragedy.
This is terrible. These are young, innocent children.
This is a man just going to work and they're gunned down for no apparent reason.
But, you know, I look at people like Nicolas Sarkozy.
I look at David Cameron and President Obama and I think, OK, These are the gentlemen, these are the leaders of nations that thought that it was perfectly fine to have one million Iraqi children die as a result of sanctions and bombings during the 90s and early part of 2003.
We've seen that a lot of children, a lot of innocent civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, sometimes while attending funerals or wedding receptions.
In Libya, a lot of civilians were killed during the bombing of Tripoli by NATO forces.
We don't seem to hear about the same emotive response, the same amount of pathos about this.
Is there a little bit of insincerity when the killing of civilians is a tragedy under certain circumstances, but under other circumstances, it's just simply collateral damage?
Well, I mean, a little bit of inconsistency is a nice way of saying genocidal hypocrisy, in my opinion.
Yeah, I mean, look, this is what I will say to people who consider themselves loyal citizens of their state.
If you really want to know how your leaders think of you, think of how you think about Iraqis or think of how you think about Afghanis.
If you feel kind of, well, you know, they're people and it'd be nice if they were doing better, but, you know, If they threaten our interests, we're just going to blow them up and you lose a wink of sleep at night.
They're very abstract.
They're kind of non-people.
They're the other. They're just kind of out there, distant background figures in a where's Waldo cartoon.
Well, that's exactly how your leaders think of you.
You are tax cattle.
You are expendable.
And we know that. This is not conspiratorial.
This is simply factual.
You are expendable.
If you cross your leaders, if you disobey their laws, they will throw your ass in jail.
Forever, whether they have a pretext or not.
And if they want to create some new war on drugs or they want to create a war on left-handed people, they'll pass those laws and you'll be running for your life, my friend.
This is how they look at you.
You are collateral. And the degree to which you serve their interests, in other words, you shut up, you smile, you nod, you wave your flag, and you pay your damn taxes is the degree to which they will praise you.
But the moment you cross them, you are...
You are wanted. You are toast in the process of becoming toastier.
And so we can't get to a place of common humanity until we have empathy horizontally.
You know, people feel like they have more in common with Obama than they do with some poor guy over there in Iraq.
You and the guy in Iraq, you Mr.
Citizen and the guy in Iraq are both subject to the armed force and might of the US government.
Barack Obama is not.
So you have much more in common, in terms of your life experience and your susceptibility to threat, you have much more in common with the guy over there in Afghanistan than you do with somebody like Barack Obama.
But what the leaders want is for us to have an emotional loyalty to them and to dehumanize other people that we actually have much more in common with.
And that, of course, is tragic.
If we fall for that ploy, if we feel that we somehow have more in common with our leaders than with those they are oppressing domestically and abroad, then we've just fallen into the oldest pit of nationalism, which is to morally identify with those who use power and force and violence over us and sell off our children and the unborn to national debts and wage war in our name and expose us to the inevitable retaliations thereof.
To bond with your abuser is the Stockholm Syndrome, and that's the true name for nationalism.
Now, in the mainstream media, practically every evening, we're seeing horrific images from Syria.
There's no doubt that there's a very brutal, violent conflict going on there, which can't be described any other way than a civil war.
There's a lot of pressure from Western nations, the U.S., France, Germany, the U.K., to To intervene there in some way.
Again, how they would like to intervene hasn't really been laid out specifically, which I'm sure is probably by design.
But I look at this and I say, okay, there's no doubt that in Syria we have a terrible situation.
But we had a very similar situation about a year ago in Bahrain, where they were actually invaded by their neighbor, Saudi Arabia.
And a lot of people were...
We're cut down in the streets and there was just an awful situation going on there, but yet we didn't hear anything about it from the mainstream media.
In fact, most people aren't even aware of what happened.
But Saudi Arabia is an ally. They have lots of oil, right?
I mean, they're friends. So, I mean, it's not moral, right?
As you say, people just make up moral excuses for their initial impulses.
You know, I'll try and keep this brief because I know we don't have a huge amount of time, but Look, this is the basic reality of politics.
Do you know what the number one murder capital in the U.S. is, in terms of the cities?
I would probably say Washington D.C. maybe?
Washington D.C. Do you know what are some of the worst performing schools in the entire western world?
I'm just going to be consistent and say Washington D.C. again.
Right. See, if you want to bring freedom and peace and tranquility and productivity and liberty and all of these kinds of good things to people, you don't really have to have a 20-hour flight on a rickety army bomber to go and do good.
All the Washington D.C. guys have to do, all the politicians have to do, is look out the damn window and fix what's in their own backyard.
I mean, my argument is that, look, if a guy can't lift five pounds, he sure as hell isn't going to lift 500 pounds.
And you have, as a politician in America, infinitely more control over Washington DC than you do over Libya or Syria or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia or Iraq or Afghanistan or any of these places or South America or Mexico or the border.
You have infinitely more control over the issues which cause dysfunction In Washington, D.C., than you do overseas.
If they can't fix...
I mean, this is so obvious, it's embarrassing to even mention it, but it's something that is just not talked about, except on wonderful shows like this.
If the politicians cannot fix Washington, then they cannot lift five pounds.
And so for them to say, well, we're now going to bench press the 500 pounds called...
Remaking countries overseas in cultures we barely understand in languages we don't speak in histories we've never studied among people we don't understand in a religion that we find contemptible.
It's ridiculous. It is like Woody Allen promising to lift 500 pounds if you give him a million dollars.
Well, I don't know, maybe he does have robot arms.
I don't know, but it seems to me he's got these little T-Rex arms and he's not going to be able to lift 500 pounds.
And if you give him five pounds and he drops to the floor and he pulls out his back, then the idea that he's going to lift 500 pounds is ridiculous.
So the test of statism, if you want to have a look at a pragmatic test, the moral test of statism is it violates both property rights and the non-aggression principle, bingo, bango, bongo, you're done.
But if you want to put it to a pragmatic test, all you do is say, hey, how are the politicians doing in Washington?
Oh, number one, murder capital.
Oh dear, very high weights of poverty and welfare state.
Oh my goodness, that's just terrible.
Oh, how's their infrastructure doing?
Well, it's crap. Oh, how's their education doing?
Well, half the kids don't even graduate high school and those who do have ridiculously low entrance rates to college courses and then if they do go to college, they have to go to remedial courses to teach them how to spell their own names.
So that is what they're doing where they have the most power.
So the idea that they're going to fly off overseas and fix other countries is unbelievably absurd.
And it doesn't take more than a moment's thought to realize that, but it takes a lifetime of propaganda to not see it.
You know, one of the things that's really always been a little bit confusing to me is, you know, and I should state that I'm coming from the background where I feel very strongly that political choice in modern America is a little bit of an illusion.
It's kind of more bread and circuses than it is actual real choice.
But, you know, we have, for example, the Republican Party and they are, you know, the conservative choice, the small government, fiscal restraint, things like that.
And they're very opposed to this whole idea of spreading the wealth.
On a domestic level, okay?
They don't want to be taking money from Warren Buffet and giving it to, you know, Joe the plumber.
But when it comes to actual foreign policy, it seems like the Republican Party are the biggest champions of spreading the wealth, right?
They want to give aid to Israel.
They want to go up to all these countries and use U.S. taxpayer money to fight wars and free people and spread democracy.
Why can't Americans see that inconsistency?
What is it that...
That allows the Republicans to get away with that.
Well, a long time ago, I saw a pretty bad fantasy movie called Kroll.
Okay, this is going to be relevant, I promise.
And in the movie Kroll, there was a giant, I believe played by Andre the Giant, or maybe that was the Princess Bride.
Anyway, there was a giant, a centaur, and one of the tragedies of the centaur's existence in this movie was that they knew the day of their own deaths, and they could not change it.
Right? And so, this was, you know, everybody thinks that, oh, would I like to know the day of my own death?
You know, sure, Sherlock, it's going to come.
Would I actually want to know when it is?
And most people probably say, well, no, I don't want to know when it is because I want to live with the mystery and maybe think I'll live longer than that and so on.
And, of course, if you knew the day of it, you'd probably change your behavior and so on, right?
Oh, I get to live to be 100.
I'm going to smoke and drink like crazy, in which case you might change it.
And so, the question is, why do people not see The ridiculously limited nature of the pseudo choices they're given.
Well, you can't change the political system.
So why would you want to understand its horrors?
Wouldn't that be like knowing the day of your own death?
It would not add anything to your life.
It would really take things away.
I mean, people like you and I, you know, pop out of the matrix sometimes voluntarily.
Sometimes I feel like, you know, the fist of humanity squeezed me out like a soap in a shower and I just flew through the air.
But the vast majority of people, they avoid knowing the truth about politics because they can't change it.
And why would you want to awaken to the horrors of the tax farm that you're currently enslaved in?
I mean, why? Why would you want to?
Why don't you stay in the matrix of patriotism and nationalism and wave the flags and support our troops and the noble cats in blue who keep the The thin blue line who keep the red tide of violence away from your house and the noble public school teachers who are just there to help the kids.
I mean, why would you want to step out of that Soviet propaganda poster into the real world, which politically resembles a lot more like Munch's scream painting than anything else?
Why would you want to expose yourself to knowing a horror which you could not conceivably change?
I think that's one of the reasons that that stays the way it does.
Well, your Krull reference was actually amazingly relevant because the Cyclops in that movie was actually played by fellow Irishman Liam Neeson.
And my final question...
Was it really? No, no, really?
I believe so. Yeah, I believe that's the case.
You know, he really expanded his repertoire, his potential roles when he did grow that second eye.
So, you know, kudos on him for making that aesthetic choice as an actor.
Absolutely, absolutely. And my final question is on Ireland.
As I mentioned, we're broadcasting from Ireland this week, and the Irish people are now being asked by their government to fork over what they're calling a household charge of 100 euros per household.
And out of the potential 1.6 million households that are eligible for this charge, a little over 200,000 households have registered to pay, and there's threats of mass civil disobedience on this front.
and the government has actually come out and had to admit that this is actually a property tax on top of the existing property tax and that not only is it going to be here forever but it's only going to start out at 100 and then gradually increase next year it's going to be about 200 euro and then on and on and on so austerity measures are something that we're hearing about again and again all over Europe and people are very very familiar Again,
it's the person at the bottom of the totem pole is getting taxed for the mistakes and the recklessness of the too big to fails up the chain.
It's the transfer of private debts to the public balance sheet.
Now, is this something that we're going to start seeing more and more stateside?
Are people going to start Feeling the impact, particularly as the economy begins to get worse, as inflation starts to become more and more obvious outside of just the pump.
Should Americans start to prepare for austerity measures?
Yeah, I mean again, it's always hard to know what the right word is.
It's just theft, right? But of course, yeah, the government's not asking.
The government never asks you to do a damn thing.
The government only tells you to. But I would invite people to Embark with me on a journey to an alternate dimension called the thought experiment.
If you could snap your fingers and have all the spare change that's fallen down behind people's couches suddenly show up in your bank account, I mean, you'd be a billionaire.
And would people miss the couple of quarters of nickels, dimes and pennies and shillings and whatever that were down?
I guess depending on how old the couch is, Roman penny farthings, I don't know.
Would they miss that? Not really, no.
I mean, a tiny minor inconvenience for people might even help them.
But you'd be a billionaire. And if people, you know, would you snap your fingers and have all the spare change?
And most people, I think, would say, well, yeah, that would be pretty damn tempting.
Yeah, technically it's theft, but man, I get to make a billion dollars, which is great for me.
You know, I'll give some to charity.
I'll do all kinds of good with it. Don't worry.
And other people will barely even miss the spare change that's vanished.
That's the life of a banker.
If you have the government on your side and the government is offering you billions of dollars of free money with no legal repercussions, Would you take it?
Of course you would. Because you've worked your whole life to become a head banker.
And if you don't take it, you'll get fired.
Because if there's free money to be had and you're not taking it, that's business 101.
Pick up free money if it's legal.
And so if the government is offering you this, then you're going to take it.
Because if you don't take it, you'll be fired.
Because your shareholders want returns on their investment because they've lost money everywhere else.
And so that is the logic of the system.
Once the money passes through the veil of blood called theft, what happens to it afterwards doesn't really matter, but it's never going to be any particular good.
So empathize with the bankers.
I think that's really important.
Understand that you would do the same thing in their position.
And you would do the same thing if you were in Barack Obama's position.
And you would do the same thing if you were in David Cameron's position.
And you would do the same thing if you were an Irish banker.
And you would do the same thing if you were the head of...
Of the Greek system. And you would do the same thing if you were a bondholder of a Greek debt.
You would do the same thing. This is not to say that it's all moral and fine and good and we should go give bankers a hug, but it is to understand that it is not through personal immorality that the system is dying.
It is not through the personal immorality of any particular head of a communist organization that communism fails.
It is through the immorality of the system as a whole.
If we can all understand that we would do exactly the same thing if we were in the position of those to benefit from state power, we would do that thing.
We would do that thing.
I mean, if you're a Greek civil service worker and somebody offers you a retirement at the age of 50 for 40 years with free healthcare and a massive pension and 13 months pay a year, of course you're going to take it.
You're going to take it and you're going to spend it.
And the next thing you're going to do is you're going to create all of these imaginary moral and legal and And ethical obligations on everyone else to sustain you in this unjust booty.
The system as a whole is corrupt.
The individuals are not responsible for it.
It doesn't mean that we don't have any moral choices to make in the system and so on.
Empathize with the bankers and then we won't hate the bankers, we'll hate the system.
And that means real change.
Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Thanks for joining us today.
Thank you. And I guess a shout out to, I don't know if you knew, I'm actually born in Ireland.
I was born in Athlone in the middle of Southern Ireland and spent a good deal of summers there.
And so, hello to my fellow sod-dwellers.
Well, we appreciate that and we look forward to having you back on sometime soon.
Thank you so much all the time.
And great, great questions. I really appreciate that.
And freedomainradio.com, for my listeners as well, for people who want to listen to you more, where should they go?
They can join us on paradigmshiftorg.blogspot.com and we post all of our podcasts on there.
Paradigm Shift. Because shift happens.
Thank you so much. I'll take care.
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