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May 2, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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2138 The Students Are Revolting! Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio talks to Mises Canada

Redmond Weisenberger of Mises Canada discusses the Quebec student riots with Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio. www.mises.ca

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	Hello, my name is Redmond Weisenberger and welcome to the next edition of the Austrian AV Club slash, what, Real News?
	What are we calling it?
	What's your main thing?
	True News.
	True News.
	Sort of Stefan's Funhouse.
	We'll call it that.
	So yeah, today we wanted to discuss, there's something that's been going on for the last little while here in Canada.
	For those of us, I know that we have a lot of American viewers on occasion, or people from around the world, basically...
	You know, the same sort of austerity, not necessarily austerity, but in Canada, we face the same budgetary problems that the Western social democratic states do around the world.
	Effectively, we're going bankrupt slowly.
	And one of the things that, sorry, Canada has a higher debt percentage of GDP, sorry, almost as high as as Greece.
	This is not something that you know.
	I mean, of course, we've got natural resources, not just the tax livestock, but the tax livestock.
	but the natural kind.
	And so it's not quite as dire, but it's pretty horrendous.
	Oh, yeah, no, for sure.
	But even with those natural resources, there has to be the will to actually allow something to happen.
	And that's sort of the problem, right, as opposed to just locking everything down.
	But basically what's happened here is that Quebec is probably the most bankrupt of our provinces, and they, for many years now, they've had also, on top of that, well, of course, because of that, or as a result of They're a very large welfare state, right?
	They have $7 a day daycare, which nobody can get into.
	It's actually bad for kids.
	It actually reduces IQ points according to more recent studies.
	Well, see, the thing is though, of course, Quebec is also very statist in its nature and they actively want the children to be in state-run daycare.
	Correct.
	Oh no, but they do specifically so they can control what the children are exposed to.
	Like, apparently they're not allowed, you know, absolutely no religion of any sort is allowed to be discussed in these classes.
	You know, they can say, well, X, this thing is, you know, politically correct and that's not politically correct.
	You know, students...
	Students are critiqued or punished if they're heard speaking English in the classes.
	We could just talk about that.
	More particularly, Quebec students have had the lowest tuition in all of Canada for pretty much forever.
	I remember when my friends were going to university back in the day, I think their tuitions were a good thousand dollars less Can I share a story?
	Because I went to school in Quebec for four years.
	I did two years at the National Theatre School, and then I did two years finishing off a history degree at McGill.
	And at NTS, my tuition was $1,200 a year.
	I think it's a little bit more.
	Now, this is the 90s, so it's a bit back in the day.
	But it was significantly low.
	I mean, as far as covering the cost, it probably wasn't more than 5% to 8% of the actual cost of my education.
	Now, the cost of my education, as you know, is bloated.
	There's this weird thing.
	People think if the government gives more to universities, the universities will lower tuition.
	or will keep the prices low.
	And this is the same thing that's going on in the US.
	Of course, it's not true.
	When you give more money, more government money to institutions, they bloat, they start to get bureaucracies, they start to get fiefdoms, they start to pay superstars outrageous money.
	And you start to get, you know, 160, 180, $200,000 for a professor to teach three hours a week.
	This is you just waste money.
	It's like giving somebody a lottery, a winning lottery and expecting that they're going to somehow No, they just go hog wild and it's the same thing.
	And then, of course, the universities have built up all these debts, the governments have built up all these debts, and one of the ways that they've sustained all of this is obviously through debt and through bribing the professors with state money, bribing the bureaucracies, and bribing, of course, the students, and usually at the expense of the TAs who are paid Malaysian wages.
	Yeah.
	So what's been happening is that the Quebec government facing, I mean, basically Quebec is the California of Canada, right?
	I mean, we've just got, you know, it's just a wreckage.
	You know, Quebec has been destroying its economy for about 40 years now.
	The province has said, you know, over the next four or five years, we're going to raise your tuition by $325 a year.
	And the students have taken to the streets.
	You know, what they've been...
	Effectively, they say they're on strike.
	Now, of course, they're paying to go to class.
	So really, you know, it's sort of cutting off their nose to spite their face.
	But there's a long culture in Quebec of this sort of socialist, whatever you want to call it, this sort of, you know, radical student protest movement.
	Right.
	And whether it was complaining about sovereignty in the 1960s and 1970s.
	And now it's complaining about the fact that they might have to pay a little bit more, essentially the equivalent of a coffee cup a day per year, you know.
	year, you know, to.
	Yes.
	Sorry.
	Yes.
	Sorry.
	Just just to be clear, though, it increases 375 per year.
	Just just to be clear, though, it increases 375 per year.
	So it ends up being about 75 percent more for tuition after five years.
	So it ends up being about 75 percent more for tuition after five years.
	I don't want to be clear about that.
	I don't want to be clear about that.
	But but look, this is what people do in a democracy.
	But but look, this is what people do in a democracy.
	If you have a beef, you you get a mob and you have a tantrum.
	If you have a beef, you you get a mob and you have a tantrum.
	And whether that's the case in the public sector with with teachers, I mean, the teachers were going on strike half the time I was growing up to see workers go out on strike.
	They have tantrums.
	They beat up scab workers.
	The same thing happens with the garbage pick up people.
	They they dump garbage all over the city.
	They they beat up scabs.
	I mean, the idea that this is somehow confined to the young is an astounding hypocrisy.
	You know, the great the great danger of society is not that the young fail to understand the lessons of their society, the moral lessons in particular, but that they do understand them.
	Join a mob and have a tantrum.
	That's exactly how you get what you want in this infantile system we have.
	Yeah, and what's interesting is that I had sort of this Twitter debate with this guy who commented on something, and I started going back and forth with him, and I just said, well, look, you're saying that...
	You know, the cost of tuition is very high.
	And I said, okay, listen, if you want to understand why the cost of something is high, what you do is you look at the input costs, right?
	So if I'm selling a pair of shoes for $5 to 100 bucks, you know, it probably cost me 50 bucks to make the shoes or something like that.
	And this is the key when you're looking at Along with everything else in our society, since we went off gold and started inflating everything, the salaries of professors has gone up year over year over year.
	I mean, I've got this little graph.
	I don't know how well it's going to show up sort of on your little thing here.
	But you can see from 1982, from the 1980s, where it's showing there, The average price, average salary of full-time professors, Quebec and other regions of Canada, in 1980, there were around $40,000, somewhere between $35,000 to $45,000.
	$0405,000, now this is $0405,000.
	I know it's even higher now.
	It's just under $100,000 a year, right?
	Is that at constant dollars?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Oh, actually, that's a good point.
	I don't know if it takes into account inflation.
	But essentially, what you've got now is a system...
	Sorry, this is at a time where the real average wages of the average worker has actually declined.
	Yes.
	So they've definitely gone up considerably, even relative to inflation.
	And of course, they've gotten more benefits, right?
	And what I think is interesting, because you sort of talked about this, and what I think is funny with this especially, is that you get some of these professors who are in school, or professors who are supporting their students in sort of taking to the streets.
	Stopping other students from going to their classes, right?
	I think one person tweeted something.
	She said she decried the fascist state, which is paying her over $100,000 a year, and Giving her a sabbatical once every four years, allowing her to teach three hours.
	It's sort of like you had a great talk where you discussed the ring of police that surround this one professor who was complaining about police who were, you know, sticking it to some students, you know, and she sort of says, I want to tell all my students who are arrested that I love them all and that they are changing the history of Quebec.
	And she's, you know, one of the reasons why there aren't as many jobs within the university system is because we've instituted tenure for the baby boomers.
	And I've had discussions with people who are teaching, say, at the University of Guelph.
	And he specifically says, we've got these, you know, highly paid tenured professors who basically don't work.
	And because they're there, We can't hire anybody new.
	Well, and just to point out, I mean, of course, the lie that was used to sell tenure, it came about, of course, largely as a result of the communist hysteria, which was not entirely misplaced in the McCarthy era in the 1960s.
	But the lie was, they said, well, you see, we don't want to fire people for unpopular views, and so they have to have tenure.
	It was everybody who was afraid of getting fired for being socialist right after they fought a war against national socialism.
	And it turned out that large numbers of intellectuals and people who worked in the State Department and the government department who were part of negotiating teams in foreign policy were all avowed communists.
	So, you know, and so they put this thing in.
	And, of course, the inevitable result is that they say, well, we can't fire people with unpopular views.
	So what happens is we're going to hire people who entirely conform to what we know.
	Nobody who has different or unusual or original ideas will ever now get hired in the university system.
	It produces this unbelievable vanilla, white, red, bland, slightly left of center conformity within the academic community, which is incredibly rigid.
	it.
	And I mean, I say this having beat my head against the wall of academia in three at York University, at McGill University, doing a master's degree at U of T.
	You say something that's outside the box.
	The professors just look at you like you've opened up a 9000 watt searchlight directly into their eyeballs.
	You just wish they'd water a little bit.
	But it's just like, ah, it does not compute.
	You can see them almost shake their head, you know, like Keanu Reeves in the Parenthood movie, like, oh, it doesn't compute.
	And they would literally just gloss right over whatever I would say, and just go right back to whatever it is that they were saying.
	And this is absolutely chilling, and it's a ridiculous travesty of intellectual inquiry.
	Well, and this is the funny thing, right?
	If you look at this, and of course the number of students who are protesting, it's not the majority of students who are complaining about this, right?
	Yeah.
	And some of the things that even the university professors are saying, I mean, personally, I think it's in part because they know that they're the ones who are in part raising the cost of education, right?
	I mean, it's not simply, you know, the government has granted Well, the government created a state monopoly of education, and the professors are directly benefiting off that system, right?
	Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but if this woman stands in love and solidarity with her students, then why the hell doesn't she teach, just say, six hours a week rather than three, and not take an increase in pay?
	Just three hours more a week, lady.
	That's all you have to do.
	Stop trumpeting your solidarity and do something practical.
	That would do something to lower the cost of education.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	We must stand and wave signs and scream and talk about our solidarity.
	But I'm not going to give up one thin dime of my unjust benefits.
	Yeah, well, there's a funny guy, this guy Denis Belil, a professor here.
	Speaking on CBC Radio, this is the Quebec Federation of Professors.
	They're angry that the government and university administrators are forcing professors to teach their courses despite the continuation of the student strike.
	Terrifying to see a police state.
	Oh, terrifying to see police enforcing the injunction on his campus.
	And the injunction was for...
	The ability of other students to go to class who wanted to continue learning.
	And he said, he said, but Leo was asked if it was fair to deny students who do not support the strike access to the classroom, even if it jeopardizes their academic year.
	This is a very serious battle going on right now.
	And this, and this might have some negative temporary effects on individuals, he said, but in the long run, all of society will benefit from it.
	Okay, let's just take a step back here for a sec, though, because, you know, one of the things that I've argued for many years is that whenever you put the guns of the state around any particular thing, you know, whether it's education or a particular industry or whatever, it kind of stops in time.
	It's no longer subject to the creative destruction of market forces.
	It no longer has to innovate.
	It no longer has to adapt.
	And it no longer has to win customers because it's either protected or subsidized or whatever.
	So my question is, why do we still have a university system that looks pretty much the same now as it did like 100 years ago?
	Or more.
	You know, where you've got a bunch of people have to go and spend four years sitting in classrooms for, you know, a dozen hours a week, writing essays and papers, getting graded and all that.
	And why?
	Because the sensible thing to do is to have, you know, industry apprenticeships, right?
	This is how my dad got his PhD.
	He, you know, got his PhD in return for...
	Committing to work for a company for a certain number of years after he got his PhD and he could buy his way out if he wanted and they paid for his PhD.
	And so this would be a pull scenario where it would be a matching of industry with applicants.
	Now there wouldn't be a lot of demand for art history basket weaving.
	And I say this as a guy who did a degree in the history of philosophy, so there wouldn't be a lot of call for that, but that would be a pull scenario, and it would be as efficient as humanly possible.
	Right now, it wouldn't be, what, the average takes seven years to get a PhD?
	I mean, dear lord, unless you're actually figuring out how to turn pyrite into real gold, I cannot see how seven years of education is required for any kind of payoff.
	In society, but it would be back to apprenticeships.
	It would be back to learning while you work or at least e-learning or stuff like that.
	There is really no fundamental need in the market for this stuff.
	What it is needed for is to get students into debt, which puts them on the treadmill.
	It is needed to further indoctrinate the most intelligent who might have escaped a few cobwebs from high school, so they got a good quarter century of indoctrination to To chase the last brain cells out of their nose.
	It is needed for all these status purposes and it is of course needed to create this Shangri-La for educators, for professors and intellectuals so that they're going to praise the state and stay and keep, as soon as you get people to benefit from the gun in the room, blinders go down, they can no longer see the gun in the room and they will never ever admit to it being there because it's so shameful for them deep down.
	But my question is why does it even look like this anymore?
	It's only because of state protection as far as I can see.
	Yeah, well, I mean, that's – but essentially that's what it's – overall it's trying to do that.
	What they're trying to do is keep everything locked into a sort of stasis so that they can, you know, whatever you want to say, keep control, make sure that things are – like bribe the population to go along with what they want to do.
	I mean – If you look at Quebec itself, it is the main beneficiary in Canada of the federal transfer system, right?
	And so now you've got a situation where Quebec has been getting in equalization payments since 2008-09, $8 billion, $8 billion, $8 billion, $7 billion, $7 billion.
	It's basically like a giant welfare state system.
	So the entire province of Quebec, you know, through its government, is living off of the productive members of the rest of Canada.
	And how many, sorry, just for those who don't know, this is an interprovincial transfer system where there's a variety of calculations, and if you fall below a certain threshold, then you get these massive payments that are taken from, I think it's Alberta and Ontario are the only two left.
	I think BC recently sank under the water as well.
	It used to be, well, no, Ontario is a have-nought province too now.
	Ontario's gone down.
	So is it just Alberta left?
	Yeah.
	I mean, this is like the last four pages of Atlas Shrugged.
	So is it Alberta that's the only one left?
	Yeah, I think Alberta, maybe Newfoundland.
	Newfoundland, apparently, they stopped fishing and they started developing their oil resources and gas resources.
	So they're not doing that either.
	But what this also does is it keeps voting blocks in a certain place, right?
	Because right now we've got a situation where...
	You've got, Alberta needs more workers, right?
	And so, but say the people out in Eastern Canada, there's a certain percentage who are involved in fishing, and that's a seasonal activity, so they get welfare, they get EI payments for six months of the year, so they have no incentive to actually go to Alberta, you know, sort of make more money, Get a job, improve their lives, have a better life for their children, not have to get OSAP to go to school.
	Can I tell you, sorry, when I was there, of course I never pursued any of this myself, but OSAP, which is the Ontario Student Application Program?
	Assistance Program.
	Assistance.
	Yeah, Ontario Student Assistance Program was, when I was younger, it was called the Ontario Stereo Acquisition Plan because people would take their money.
	And anyway, go on.
	Well, it's true.
	I mean, you know, but essentially, you know, we've got the situation where the, so the people don't want to move from Nova Scotia to Alberta where their jobs are.
	And so we have this problem.
	We need workers.
	So they say, oh, well, let's bring over 100,000 people from From Ireland or something like that, you know, just so we can keep this voting bloc so, you know, the liberals will still get this number of votes in the next election.
	I mean, that's what it's really all about.
	Well, the people who don't work are profit centers for the politicians because the more people they have who don't work, the larger their transfer payments.
	So they're kind of like a crop that you plant in the ground that reaps this evil reward of blood money.
	Yeah.
	Well, I'll tell you, I mean, we just wrote an article about it on Mises Canada, and somebody just wrote in.
	I'll read you her comment.
	She said, I was waiting impatiently for an article to be written about this.
	As a university student, I've been through some unfair treatment for not being part of the movement and not boycotting class.
	My department voted on a motion that allowed all students who had been striking to be exempted from assignments from March 5th until the end of the semester.
	Yes, all the hours spent on my final assignments were worthless.
	She said, I tried to instruct my classmates on the subject, but I gave up.
	It's what's taught to them from the cradle.
	So right there.
	So this woman, this person who's worked hard, she's...
	She wants to sort of achieve and sort of do something good for herself and make her life better.
	She's being shot in the foot by these sort of selfless students who are merely protesting to give her a better life.
	I don't know.
	I'm not terribly impressed with that.
	Yeah, and I mean, what's happened, of course, is because this is something that is relatively cheap and the costs of it in terms of deferred income don't really show up.
	For people, I have a friend who's an economics teacher who reminds his students, you know, if they're sort of not paying attention or, you know, it's like, you know, he takes them through the math.
	You know, this is going to be four years.
	Let's say you had a job averaging out at 50K a year.
	That's $200,000, you know, that you're paying.
	Just to be here.
	And, you know, plus the tuition, plus the books, plus the living expenses, you know, which might be cheaper elsewhere.
	And you're giving up all of this.
	And, you know, it works out to like, I don't know, over a quarter million, three hundred thousand dollars or more just to get a college degree.
	And, you know, people just like, I'm going to go drink my head off, you know, they don't see it.
	And what, I can't think what wouldn't, if somebody wanted a job, you know, being an advertisement guy or marketer or whatever it is that these sort of soft skills that artist degrees are supposed to help you with, or in a newspaper, why, you know, why wouldn't you spend four years apprenticing in a newspaper or at a marketing company or whatever, you know, get real world job experience, get your contacts, you know, you develop whatever skills you need, you're making money.
	I mean, that to me is a net positive, this weird thing where you run through this slow motion process You know, barrier of four years of education and massive amounts of debt just to get an entry-level job somewhere, particularly in a non-professional field.
	And the professions, of course, is another topic entirely guided by the state.
	But it's a weird thing, and it's become something that is expected, as we all know, like a A BA is now what a high school diploma used to be, and now a master's is something that's going to become like what a BA is.
	And this is something that people, they don't question.
	They can't really, why not quit and be an entrepreneur?
	I mean, that's a fun thing to do, and lots of people are very successful that way.
	But we can't think like that anymore.
	We've just got to follow these train tracks.
	Well, this is the interesting thing.
	Because now, of course, with the Great Recession of 2008, which to me is unfolding into a new Great Depression, really, we've got a situation where kids are graduating out of school and there simply aren't jobs.
	So not only are they going to school for four years, ending up in massive debt, if you want to look at what our future is going to be, if the state doesn't start pulling back, you look at Greece and Spain, where under 25, 50% unemployment.
	You know, and a new, there was just in the National Post, or the Financial Post, this little poll, and it was looking at what are the top places where students want to go when they graduate, and this is even business students, when they graduate, where they want to go work.
	Within the top four, the Government of Canada and the Bank of Canada.
	And what I see is that slowly the state is undermining the real economy, undermining society.
	Well, it's displacing it.
	It's like a cancer that grows and pushes out the healthy cells.
	It displaces it.
	Now, the free market is so chaotic.
	I'll tell you, I spent a lot of years as an entrepreneur in the free market and as an employee in the free market.
	It's nuts.
	I started in the 90s and rode the whole tech boom and then there was a crash and I ended up taking about a year and a half off and then I started working again.
	And there was just all these crazy rules.
	Oh, the dollar is up.
	The dollar is down.
	Oh, there's a strike from this company and this company is doing really well.
	The resource is shifting over here.
	You're basically just chasing a bunch of butterflies all over the place and the butterflies are on coke and you're on acid.
	You know, it's really, really tough to do anything predictable and sustainable in the free market because there's so much chaos that's going on.
	And there is a tendency to be drawn towards government contracts and government work because the standards are much lower and the payment is guaranteed.
	Well, but the thing is that I don't necessarily think the chaos is, but the chaos isn't driven by the nature of voluntary transactions.
	No, no, no.
	It's all state policies.
	Inflation and currency manipulations and laws coming in and out and taxes changing and deductions changing.
	And no, I agree with you.
	It's all to do with just this, you know, one, two punches of n-dimensional Mike Tyson's pounding your brain from every direction you can conceive of with all of these changes in regulations and policies.
	Yeah, well, because essentially with the, you know, coming back to fiat currency, I mean, essentially the government is just spraying this hose of money around.
	And wherever it happens to land, you know, bang.
	So, like you said, it was a tip bubble.
	And it's sucking it up from somewhere else, right?
	I mean, not only do you get the rain, but you also get the desert where it's coming from.
	Well, this is what I sort of find funny about also the...
	I sort of went to the website of the class, is what they call themselves, or ASSE. And they were talking about...
	They had a little piece here on...
	This is the sort of website that the protesting students are centered around.
	And they had a piece on free education, right?
	And they said, well, is it possible?
	Now...
	This is the thing.
	They don't quite understand.
	They say free education is a total care cost of education of the state.
	The policy requires a major reinvestment in education of the state.
	They're not opposing the state.
	They don't seem to understand, as far as I can tell, the reasons why their life is getting progressively harder.
	They're supporting...
	You know, they don't understand that when, you know, the more the state makes something quote-unquote free, in fact, the less they're actually going to get in the long run.
	Well, and this is what I would say, because I hold this kind of thinking in almost bottomless contempt, which is they want education to be free.
	Great.
	That's just great.
	What you need to do then is, you guys are more educated than junior high school students, so what you need to do is go and offer free tutoring to junior high students.
	Just, you know, take a break from your drinking and your partying and doing jello shots off the cheerleaders and go and give yourself some free education.
	You set up.
	You think education would be free?
	You go and give your free education to the young who really need it.
	Some immigrants, go teach them English.
	Do something that's useful.
	But you know what's interesting?
	It's the only people that I know who are giving real free quality education are the capitalists and the anarchists and the free market people.
	People like yourself, people like myself, the Mises Institute, I mean, the Rockwell, these people all give great, you know, massive amounts of books and educational materials and all that all out for free.
	I'm not sure I see these guys making trigonometry videos and submitting them to the Khan Academy or wherever they'd get them out to show how free education could work.
	No, no, it's we want free education.
	Then go do it, you're adults, go do it.
	No, no, no, it's me, me, me, take, take, take, I, I, I. It's like, oh, I want free stuff for me.
	I never want to contribute anything free to society.
	Yeah, well, and this is the point, is that they're saying that, I had a discussion, I was just having a debate with somebody about this, and he said, you know, he was saying, well, the state should, you know, the state should provide this, the state should provide that, and he said, well, no, you don't really want the state, you don't want, what you're really asking for You're not asking for voluntary,
	you're asking for essentially the state to expropriate somebody, to take by force resources from somewhere else, and then redistribute them according to your own personal preferences.
	Don't these people care about the poor at all?
	I mean, where do they think this money is going to come from?
	It's going to come from two places, fundamentally, debt and inflation.
	Because they can't raise taxes anymore.
	Debt and inflation hit the poor the hardest.
	And that is something that I don't think people understand.
	I mean, obviously, debt increases the price of interest rates and so on, which hits those on a fixed income, i.e.
	the poor.
	Inflation hits those on a fixed income the worst because you don't have ways of hedging against it or having offshore accounts or whatever.
	So it's like, I want all of this stuff, but weirdly enough, they're all socialists.
	And so they're all like, I really care about the poor, but I'm going to rip a few dollars out of their hide to satisfy my own middle class aspirations.
	It's like, God, will you think about the poor just a little bit, the opportunities they don't have because of what you're taking?
	Well, and this is the thing is that what I sort of find funny about this...
	What I've been saying to some people, you know, like I would go to these students and I would say, well, essentially, you guys, you already have socialism.
	Like, this is it.
	You know, you've been the Quebec, the real push for this sort of independence and socialism within Quebec, you know, started around the late 1960s.
	You know, for now, 40 years, they've been chasing business, private business, out of their city.
	In fact, I was in Montreal a little while ago, and I had people coming up to me and saying, hey, I think Toronto's a great city.
	There's a lot going on there.
	There's so many things happening.
	And I'm like, well, yeah, because you chased all the business out of your city.
	I mean, you know, people are dirt poor there.
	And then they say, And when you look at Quebec, it's disintegrating, right?
	They're chasing over the scraps of, you know, they're saying, well, we want free education.
	But meanwhile, bridges are falling down.
	Oh, their infrastructure is, you know, I used to work for a company that analyzed public infrastructure.
	I mean, the infrastructure across Canada as a whole is a complete disaster, as it is in the U.S., but in Quebec, it's just unbelievable.
	Yeah, they regularly have to close bridges because stuff is falling off them.
	Oh yeah, no, people were crushed by bridges falling down.
	And this is what I mean, is that...
	For so long and this is what was funny is because you often get these people who say oh well you know that wasn't socialism in the Soviet Union or that wasn't socialism in China the Eastern Bloc you know every single country that was socialist during the 20th century you know you now get the people who were I guess radical social they were socialists leading up to up to the 1990s and then they say well I mean socialism still works I mean they would do they just weren't doing it right and I've got a situation where You know,
	the Québécois have had socialism for 40 years, essentially, now.
	And it's all starting to fall apart.
	But they're still fighting over the scraps.
	And it's just sort of, I mean, it's kind of a sad thing to see.
	But at the same time, I'm like, well, I mean, you know, you've been voting for these policies for 40 years now.
	I mean, you're reaping what you sow.
	So what do you think should happen?
	Who should pay?
	Or should anyone pay for all of this debt?
	Ah, you mean in terms of...
	Well, the rich, obviously, Stefan.
	Let's go find the one rich guy left in Canada who still works in the private sector and go through his pockets.
	Well, I think Murray Rothbard had a good point about this.
	He said, you know, the governments have contracted for this debt without the consent of the governed, right?
	I mean, the debts that have risen, the debts that have been incurred up to this point, You know, when I was 14 or so, my mother got me a social insurance card.
	I wasn't an adult.
	I didn't consent to any of the debt that was built up.
	What do they call it?
	The original sin.
	Anyway, go ahead.
	Yeah, the original sin.
	And so, I mean, as within Europe, what we're facing, I mean, the best thing to do would be to default on the debt, I think.
	You're going to see a radical...
	I mean, we're entering a strange period of time where education is really going to start to change because it's not working for anybody anymore in a large sense.
	When you've got 50% of people unemployed, simply people are going to take a look and they're going to say, well, I could go to school for four years and get $100,000 worth of debt and then not get a job.
	Or I can, you know, go online and learn and work my way through school and educate myself and get back to the place, get back to a time when you could work your way through school.
	But I mean, in terms of student debt, of provincial debt, of federal debt, I mean, really...
	We've built these bubbles all over the place, and I think the best bet is to accelerate the popping process and get rid of that debt as fast as possible.
	I mean, I could be more technical, but...
	Yeah, I mean, obviously, I mean, repudiation is the only just situation.
	I can't buy a car on somebody else's behalf and expect them to pay the bill.
	So, yeah, no, I agree.
	And I think that, I mean, I remember working three jobs to get through college at times and certainly worked all the summers and all of that.
	And all of that's still possible.
	But I would suspect what a lot of people are going to do is they're going to go into, you know, is it a third of the world economy now is running on the black market or the gray market.
	And what people are going to do is they're simply going to abandon the, you know, the Gestapo Kremlin of the modern socialist economy and go towards the weird Somalia underworld of the gray market or black market.
	And it's kind of weird.
	You know, people say, well, anarchy can't work or whatever.
	But anarchy works pretty well, even in the gray and black market, even though it's completely underground and it can't have any sort of open contracts.
	So even when the government tries to prevent a free system of exchange from working in the world, it's a very good thing.
	It still works really well, even if you can't have contract, even if you can't do all the things you would be able to do in a truly free society, it still works.
	Again, it's just another point, but I think that's where a lot of people are going to disappear to, and I think that's a real tragedy.
	Well, I mean, and that's the thing.
	Already, I said a while ago, a carpenter who accepts cash for a job You know, I think that person's a hero in some ways, right?
	I mean, but again, like you said, they're forced to do that, right?
	They're forced to sort of work within this black market or gray market.
	And as you said, that's two consenting adults coming together, forming a contract and, you know, exchanging for services.
	Everybody benefits, yet somehow the, you know, the...
	And I think what's going to happen is as we see this shift towards the black and gray markets, I think you're just going to have a situation where the government's going to try to squeeze more and more out of the people who still are existing within that market or within the sort of government legal market.
	And Gary North said this a little while ago.
	He said, you know, the political battles of the next 20 years are going to be fought over who gets the old made.
	Who's stuck with the bill?
	Who's stuck with the slowly declining government services?
	Who's going to pay the piper for the massive debt that's been built up over the last 50 years or 60 years?
	And the reality is that nobody can cut this debt within the existing system.
	Let's say you fire half the government workers.
	Well, all they do is they go on unemployment insurance, and you haven't saved yourself a penny.
	And then they go on welfare, and then they apply for job retraining.
	You'd have to cut government workers' welfare, job retraining, unemployment insurance, subsidized housing.
	There would be a year, probably, of unbelievably wrenching and challenging change, and then we'd be through it.
	But democracy is the kind of drug that makes nobody want to take that band-aid off quickly.
	You know, hair by hair, agony by agony.
	It's just going to go on and on.
	We've been inured to the necessary pain of change because we've had this weird drug of suppressing the symptoms of problems called debt so that now everybody thinks that we can somehow continue to coast on these, you know, these hallucinogenic fumes of debt delusion and it's simply not going to be the case.
	And the longer we go on, the harder we're going to hit.
	Yeah.
	Well, and that's the thing is that...
	You look at the United States right now.
	You had the situation of the 99ers.
	We haven't had the crash in the way the United States did in 2008.
	So you had people who were sitting on welfare or sitting on unemployment benefits for 99 weeks.
	And all that did for them, all it did was it made them sit there and try to believe, try to believe that they could stay in their house, try to believe that they could still continue to have the lifestyle they did.
	And it doesn't enable people to sort of adapt to reality and move on with their lives.
	It's like those Obama's administration put these things in which were supposed to reduce people's payments for their mortgages so they could stay in their house.
	And I think like 5% of people have ever gotten it.
	But what it has done is it got people mired into this multi-year process of trying to get this to work while continuing to pay or go into debt or whatever.
	Whereas if you know you can't afford it, you just stop.
	But if you've got this illusion that just right over the hill is the water and it just turns out to be more I mean, there's a lot about remediating this stuff that is designed to just, I mean, I think unemployment insurance, I think that, I would probably side with the radical Marxist on this and say that it is a way of just preventing necessary change and rebellion within society.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	But it's, but like you said, but the other thing that would be necessary is not only to cut the government roles of, you know, cut the government roles of Of hiring and people working for government, but at the same time, enormous amounts of legislation will have to be repealed.
	And just the books, you know, you look at the Federal Register in the United States, it's up to something over 75,000 pages.
	Here in Canada, you know, I ran for city council and I would say to people, I said, well, at what point do we have enough laws?
	No, but seriously, there must be an optimal point when we have the number of laws that is necessary to function as a society.
	But year after year, additional layers of laws are put in place.
	And I think the danger is that we do get to a point where we become like the old Soviet Union, and one day it just all falls apart.
	And I think that's the real danger, that we get to this point where we're sort of past the point of no return.
	And there's so many...
	Incentives built in to keep this system going that, bang, you know, just one day the plug will be pulled and, you know, it will also...
	Yeah, and people are so used to, you know, we've graduated from the...
	Sort of the mob of the late Roman Empire and the French Revolution to the point where we're not sticking people's heads on spikes.
	But if I suffer, I have a tantrum.
	If I suffer, it must be somebody else's fault.
	If I suffer, I must clamor for the state to use its force to relieve my suffering.
	You see this with people who, you know, they've overeaten all their lives, they've got diabetes, and now they're You know, screaming for resources.
	It's like, you ate too much?
	I mean, sorry, but, you know?
	I mean, there's this huge problem in that the fruits of virtue can be redistributed, but the fruits of vice can't be.
	Like, if I work hard and get a degree while having a day job or whatever, and then I go and work and I save and I get a house and I invest, I end up with resources and someone can come along, scoop up those resources and take them away.
	My neighbor, who parties all weekend and works some minimum wage job half the week and so on, 20 years later, I can't go and scoop all the fun he had and transfer it to me.
	Because that's all dead and gone in time.
	If somebody eats too much, gets fat and gets diabetes, they can take my money to pay for their treatments.
	I can't go back in time and have half their chocolate cake now in the present.
	So the fruits of virtue, they can be taken from you.
	And you are vulnerable because you are virtuous, whereas the fruits of vice can't be transferred.
	And this is the fundamental imbalance, one of the main reasons why statism can never work.
	Well, and this was the funny thing.
	With this debate I was having with this guy on Twitter, just cutting back to...
	Making decisions, rational decisions about where to allocate your resources.
	You know, he was saying, oh, well, you know, university costs X amount a year.
	And he said, and I said, he said, well, it costs $8,000 a year, $10,000 a year.
	And I said, okay, well, what's the tuition cost?
	And he said, $5,000.
	I said, well, do you live at home with your parents?
	You know, do you?
	I mean, even within the structure we have, there's a culture of entitlement that I should be entitled not only to a free education, I should be entitled to go to the university of my choice, you know, in a city that's far away from me, and it should be free, and you know, and this is the problem with, as you're talking about, the band-aid, the heroin that gets injected.
	Once you get into that trap of forever asking for these things being given to you or whatever, it sort of doesn't stop.
	Where do you draw the line?
	I was joking with a buddy of mine.
	I said, why do I work?
	If I'm able to have the lifestyle, if I lower my preference for a giant screen TV and a really nice car, I could be completely happy living in the kind of house, a one-bedroom home, and these sorts of things.
	Because they're not taught to think in any kind of economically sophisticated way, in fact, they're kind of barred from it.
	The students don't realize that by far the best thing that could happen to them economically is for the tuition to go up.
	The tuition should go up to like $10,000 a year.
	The reason for that is that then they would be making a much more sensible economic calculation about whether to go to school or not.
	And then because so few people would be able to go to school relative to now.
	I think it's now is what like a third of people get a BA. It's insane.
	And so what would happen is then people would find alternative ways to figure out whether you're valuable or not rather than just saying, well, you have to have this four-year degree, right?
	That'd be like written tests or, you know, like an hour-long exam before you got a job at a newspaper or an ad agency or whatever.
	And so you could just study and, you know, do it on your own time and your own merits.
	And because, you know, like only 5% of the population would have a degree, but they still need 25% of skilled middle management or white-collar workers, all that would happen is I think?
	So they don't understand that there's huge value in the tuition fees going up because then there'll be a way to bypass this whole mess.
	But as long as they stay low, everyone has to go to college and that's incredibly expensive for the individual and society.
	But not only that, I mean, nobody would go And then about two years later, the cost of tuition would drop to about a tenth of what it had been because they would say, we need to get people into this.
	We need to make money.
	The professors would say, I need to make a living.
	The state isn't just...
	I'm not just shooting up on the vein.
	I've got to go and figure out how I can produce value and offer something to people that they value and are willing to exchange with me the things I need for my life.
	Well, sorry, but that would be to assume that government spending is depending on the number of customers.
	That usually is not the case, right?
	It's upwardly sticky.
	Remember, they expanded all these schools and hired all these teachers.
	Because of the baby boomers.
	And then when it really declined, the spending didn't really go down that much, if at all.
	And so it certainly would be the case in the long run.
	But, I mean, in the short run, it would be advantageous.
	Although, of course, people halfway through their degrees would definitely...
	I faced a bit of a challenge.
	And I'm not saying that's a perfect solution, but what I'm saying is that they never look at the upside of this kind of stuff and say, wow, you know, if the intuition goes up so high, people will find some other ways to validate my skills other than waiting for everyone to have a degree who won't have it anymore.
	What a great opportunity that would be.
	Or think that there's, you know, why don't they think of becoming entrepreneurs and figuring out how they can get companies to figure out people's skill sets without a BA or without, you know, whatever it is that they say they need now to bypass that.
	And this is the thing is that, you know, If you've ever worked a job and you realize that pretty much all the skills you need, you learn on that job, right?
	Like what you and I are doing right now.
	And with this whole sort of, you know, this mass education system, I mean, I've gotten the sense that it's progressively gotten worse over time.
	I mean, I've been talking to my mother.
	She actually, you know, speaking of leeching off the state, my mother teaches university up in Sault Ste.
	Marie.
	And she's been teaching on an offer.
	I mean, you know, it's their first full-time ever position.
	Even in the 1980s, it was very hard to get.
	You know, a full tenured position.
	But she was saying that, yeah, like over the last 20 years, definitely the, you know, the quality of English literacy coming out of high schools has definitely been coming down in quality, right?
	And so it's almost like as the state It's almost like it's making school more and more mandatory.
	You just have to keep going and going and going.
	And even now, you get out of university and I talk to people and they say, I basically have to retrain people once they get to this job.
	But in any case, I think I've got to go soon.
	Let's wrap up.
	Just give my listeners your webdentials, your credentials on the web.
	Make sure they can find the wonderful stuff that you guys are putting out.
	Yeah, so we're Mises Institute of Canada, www.mises.a.
	And again, like you, we function only on donations.
	We've also got our...
	Feed me!
	I'm going to get a sandwich to come down from some listener.
	I'll go up like a jumping frog trying to get a mosquito.
	Otherwise, we're looking on putting together, we've got Liberty Fest, Toronto, November 3rd.
	I think you're going to be working with us on that.
	Absolutely.
	For any university students out there, we're looking at putting together an Austrian scholars conference this fall.
	And also you can check out our own YouTube channel.
	I think it's YouTube slash Redomondo.
	R-E-D-O-M-O-N-D-O. It was my own personal one and I didn't want to get a new one.
	So there you go.
	Redomondo is our YouTube channel.
	All right.
	And I'm at youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio, freedomainradio.com.
	Redmond.
	And thanks for having me out for the talk last week.
	It was a lot of fun.
	It was great to meet everyone.
	And I'm really shocked that my daughter stayed quiet.
	But she did tell me that she really did not enjoy me talking to the people.
	Because it really did interfere with our hide-and-go-seek.
	So that was a challenge.
	But worth it, I think.
	Thanks again.
	Okay.
	Great to talk to you, Stefan.
	All right.
	Take care, man.
	Okay, bye.
	So there, how did we...
	Good.
	I think we did all right.
	Yeah, I think we ended up doing...
	We went longer than 20 minutes, certainly.
	All right.
	It'll probably come down to 45 once we take the intro out, but I'll let you know when it's posted.
	Which is great, man.
	Yeah, thanks a lot.
	Did we get some good stuff there?
	We sort of went all over the place.
	No, I liked it.
	I think it was good stuff.
	So I don't think it needs any editing.
	Okay, great, man.

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