2141 Stefan Molyneux - You Are a Debt Slave and You Don't Even Know It!
Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, interviewed by Kerry Lutz on the Financial Survival Network. Description: Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio visited with us today. Stefan's an early pioneer in getting the freedom message out to the world; he's been doing it since 2005. Millions of people have visited his site and downloaded his numerous philosophical and economic discussions. Stefan and I talked about the proper role of a citizen and what types of powers the government should wield and why. We both agree the world is heading for an economic reset, voluntarily or involuntarily; it's going to take place. You need to be prepared for this. Stefan and I also discussed the administration's Julia ad, which is a shocking display of the government's attempt to make you more and more dependent. This type of thinking has led to the expansion and the ultimate failure of the socialistic, fascistic and unjust system. The idea that most people cannot take care of themselves is anathema to the prin iples of the founding fathers. Eliminating the risk of failure means the ability to succeed will be greatly diminished. Free markets are the greatest guarantor of success the world has ever known. Therefore, governmental paternalism greatly undermines your ability to provide for yourself and your family, which is why it's failure is assured.
You're listening to the Financial Survival Network.
And so many times, well, put it this way, as Janis Joplin said, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
But my next guest thinks that freedom is a whole lot more than that.
And that's why you need to be concerned about it.
Stefan Molyneux, he is the head of Free Domain Radio, real popular site, and he's on the show now.
Stefan, welcome.
Oh, thanks.
It's great to be here.
I appreciate the invitation.
And we are really happy to hear you.
We're really happy to have you on the show because what's happening now is the shifting of consciousness, of awareness.
And I think you've been doing this since 2005.
What have you noticed about the impact that shows like yours and mine are having at the present time?
Well, I think that the impact is important.
I think, though, that we are aligning ourselves.
I feel like a surfer on a wave.
You know, without the wave, you really can't get anywhere.
And if there's a wave with no surfer, the wave really has no purpose.
And what I have found is that there's this wave which is the growing understanding of the degree to which the existing system does not work and doesn't work in a really catastrophic way.
And people are really, really recognizing that.
And so you can lecture someone as long as you want about not smoking or whatever, but as soon as they clutch at their heart while climbing some stairs, then they may listen to you a little bit more.
People who don't listen to reason always end up having to listen through bitter experience.
And I think we've, you know, libertarians and voluntarists, we've been talking about this stuff for literally hundreds of years, ever since Adam Smith.
You could even go back to the pre-Socratics 2,500 years ago, 150 years since the classical liberals, 40 years at the libertarian party.
We've been hammering the same message.
The initiation of force does not work.
Violations of property rights do not work in the long run.
And now the practice is catching up with the disasters predicted by the theory, which means that people are able to listen to the theory.
So what I say and what you say and what others are saying is amplified enormously by the clear events of the present day, the massive debts, the endless wars, the devaluation of the currency.
What's the U.S. now?
Down to 2% of its original value since the Fed came in in 1913.
The high price of gold, massive unemployment, a permanent underclass in the welfare state, crumbling schools, crumbling infrastructure.
Everything is going wrong and so those of us who predicted it, our voices are amplified by current events, if that makes any sense.
It makes a lot of sense.
And perhaps the guy who's at the top of the wave, although I can't really picture him on a surfboard, is Dr.
Ron Paul because he's so out there.
And even though the mainstream media, and I don't even consider them to be media any longer, they're just a propagandistic organ of the state.
But even they have had to take notice of him, if not to do anything else but to marginalize him.
And what's your feelings on Dr.
Ron Paul?
I mean, as a human being, as a thinker, I mean, he's got more expertise on one subject in his little finger than I probably have on all my subjects in my whole body.
I mean, to be a doctor and a reasonably knowledgeable economist and a skilled politician and a good public speaker and, I think, a good writer.
I've read some of his books.
I mean, he's a whole load of, you know, compact talent in a silver-haired frame.
So, from that standpoint, I admire him.
I do not believe That politics is how we're going to achieve freedom.
I think it's an exit on the highway to real freedom that I think gets a lot of people caught up in politics.
It's far too late for politics.
So there's too many constituents dependent on the state.
If the Libertarian Party and libertarianism itself couldn't tame the state in 1970 when it was about 15% of its current size, there's just no way it's going to be able to do it now.
A man who can't lift 15 pounds isn't going to be able to lift 150 pounds.
So I think, you know, as far as education goes, fantastic.
You know, break the matrix, bring some alternate ideas in.
I'm sure that he and I, if he would care to, would completely agree on the economics of the situation.
And I believe that he is into the non-initi- like banning the initiation of force, the non-aggression principle, respect for property rights.
But the path is, I'm very skeptical of the path through politics.
I think it consumes a lot of resources and not only has the political approach taken by freedom advocates, it's not only failed to shrink the size of the state, I don't even see how it's possible to argue that it stopped its acceleration.
So I think a lot of talent and energy gets wasted in that area where it could be more beneficially applied to other areas.
I'm definitely in agreement with you there.
I think he's significant because he's prominent.
And he's out there and people have connected with him, especially the younger people who experienced the corruption of this system firsthand.
Look at student loan debt.
We have, in the United States, created a generation of debt slaves.
You can't get rid of the debt in bankruptcy.
You really can't get rid of it.
There's no statute of limitations.
They can steal your tax refunds forever, suspend your licenses, whatever they want.
And God forbid you want to go get a copy of your college transcript and you're in default on your student loans?
No transcript for you.
Right.
Well, of course, the government...
It's a pretty retarded entity.
And it's not that everyone in the government is retarded.
It's just – it's kind of stupid because it's such an obvious violation of basic moral principles.
We all – this is a kindergarten ethics.
You know, as a philosopher, I wish philosophy were tougher, you know, so that you could claim to be some genius for solving problems.
But it's really simple.
I mean, all we have to do is close our eyes, go back to our – Tidy-whities and remember that horn-rimmed glasses farsight character lecturing us in kindergarten.
Don't push, don't hit, don't steal, don't take stuff that doesn't belong to you.
And that's really the sum of the moral instruction we get when we're four or five years old.
And if all we did is carry that forward into our adult lives and into society as a whole, there would be no war, there would be almost no imprisonment, there'd be almost no crime.
So it's just kindergarten ethics.
And that is what is so hard for people to remember.
They create this massive, complicated bunch of nonsense.
It's called the state and the law and the country and patriotism and all this sort of nonsense.
But all we're basically doing is allowing a small group of people, we're giving them all the guns in the world, we're allowing them to violate The non-aggression principle at will, and then we wonder why things go bad.
Well, I mean, violence doesn't work, and giving people a monopoly on violence doesn't work either.
I think people are beginning to glimmer that.
When you see people in the media talk about Ron Paul, you know, because they come across as digital, I almost expect them to dissolve briefly into a kind of incoherent static, like their physical form, not even just their voice, like that they themselves will sort of reformulate in The Matrix.
So when he starts talking about The gold standard, the non-aggression principle, the evils of fiat currency, I don't know if he's mentioned this, I'm sure you know.
There are literally thousands of examples of fiat currency that have gone the way of toilet paper throughout the history of humankind.
There's been no exceptions except, you could argue, for the pound sterling, which has been around 300 years, having lost about 97% of its value.
But you see these people, it's like, I don't understand these talking points.
This isn't about a scandal.
This isn't about sympathy for the poor.
This isn't about the imagination that we can give free stuff to everyone and call ourselves virtuous.
When he starts talking about moral principles and the reality of state aggression, And the evils of foreign policy and blowback, you can see these people.
It's like, I can't compute.
I expect their eyeballs to start rotating all the way around their head, not just in their eye sockets, actually drifting all the way over their head.
And they're going to dissolve into static and reformulate and thus be called reptilian overlords by some.
But it is really so funny to watch this.
They really cannot compute it because society doesn't teach you how to think.
Sorry, that was a long ramble to the original point.
The government has a problem with intelligent people and so it needs to ensnare intelligent people so that the intelligent people don't tell the truth about the government.
And the best way to do that is to hold out a lot of candy apples at the end of the road called higher education.
You know, tenure, working three to five hours a week as a professor every fourth year off for sabbaticals, great conferences in sunny locations.
I mean, so if they can hold that candy out I think?
Not put me in the category of the most intelligent.
That's the general pattern, I think.
You know, the world is run by C students.
You know, they have all the money, not the A students.
And there's a reason for that.
And that brings us to the life of Julia, which is a current ad...
I'm put on by the Obama propaganda machine and understand, Stefan, that I don't usually discuss politics at all because, to me, politics is the cause of the whole problem.
It stops people from thinking in terms of solutions and from using reason because it's like two ball teams.
Football team A and football team B, and they're arch rivals, and you just have people who are cheering sections who aren't thinking anything about, well, gee, that was a real dirty tackle there.
Shouldn't a penalty have been called?
It's like, no, our team scored, and that's all they care about.
So we look...
At the life of Julia and it starts out, take a look at how President Obama's policies help one woman over her lifetime and how Mitt Romney would change her story, which I don't believe that he would, but this seems to be their premise.
And then what happens next?
She's enrolled in Head Start, which is proven to be a failure.
The program has wasted billions and billions of dollars and Doesn't help the kids once they get into school.
Yeah, I think there's a very short burst of increased test scores, and then they just decline back to normal.
So basically, it's like cocaine for a toothache.
Hey, I feel better, but my rot is getting worse.
Yeah, and then this kid goes off to college.
Oh, sorry, but just before we break out of the Head Start thing, there's so many falsehoods, and we could spend a ridiculous amount of time on each sentence, but...
They talk something interesting.
He says, under the Romney-Ryan budget, it would cut programs like Head Start by 20%.
And that means, says this ad, that the program would offer 200,000 fewer slots per year.
This is the great lie of the government, that if the government cuts any program by 20%, then it absolutely has to cut all of the enrollments by 20%.
In other words, there's zero overhead.
There's no bureaucracies.
There's no waste whatsoever.
There's no excessive ownership.
There's no lack of buildings.
There's no ridiculously expensive get-togethers.
There's no abusive expense accounts.
It's so cut lean to the bone that if we cut one penny, that's one penny less that has to go to a child.
And that is, to me, actually, that's just called taking children hostage.
Say, you cut my bill, I'm going to cut things to the children.
Everybody knows the government could be cut 20%.
And things would function.
50%.
50%, easy.
I would actually go to 100%.
Absolutely.
If you cut the government spending by about 20%, That would put the government back to about 2005.
If I remember rightly, in 2005, the world was not an apocalyptic wasteland of guys cruising around with flamethrowers and Mel Gibson in a sidecar.
This is not how society is.
If you say, well, we're going to cut the government by 80%, that would put you back to about 1969 when they were still lending a man on the moon, Medicare, Medicaid, Great Society programs and all of that.
All of that was still there.
So the idea that if you cut this spending, you have to cut the placement for kids is just completely insane.
And anybody with any sense of, you know, who can do math without taking off their shoes would be able to figure that out.
Yeah, I mean, it's so true.
There's never a discussion of how the government...
Much better.
The government could do its job with less people, less resources, soaking up less stuff, taking out productivity from the economy.
But the fact is, before the Federal Reserve was created, before the Income Tax Amendment was passed, the federal government lived on about five to seven percent of GDP, and the United States never had I've
never had a period of growth like that since.
I mean, that's not a long time.
That's just a couple of decades.
So, yeah.
And there's this weird thing.
People think if you give the government more money, it's going to do its job better.
That's like saying, if I win the lottery, my spending is going to become more sensible.
No.
If I get massive amounts of more money, I'm just going to...
They blow it on silly things, of course.
I mean, that's exactly what happens.
So people say, well, why has higher education become so expensive?
It's become so expensive because the government's giving lots of subsidies to higher education, which means they can hire tons of people, they can have their fiefdoms, their bureaucracies, their parties, they can pay professors more.
But it doesn't have anything to do.
If you give 50% of an operating budget for a university, if you give that from the government to the university, they don't drop student tuition by 50%.
They just start spending 50% more, which means eventually with debt and all that, they have to raise tuitions.
Subsidies breed price increases, what people don't understand.
Totally true.
And you know what it's like, Stefan?
It's like you have this guy, a whale in Vegas, and a whale is somebody who's a high roller.
And he's a million bucks in hock.
And the casino knows that he can't pay it.
So what do they do?
Instead of cutting him off, they raise his line of credit to five million in the hopes that he's going to win and pay off the million that they owe, that he owes them.
And that kind of stuff just can't work.
It's just a recipe for failure.
We see it over and over again.
And this concept that all prosperity...
And all good things in life are somehow courtesy of the government really is what messes these kids up and gives them a bad foundation for what's really going on now and how they're going to survive when the ultimate collapse occurs.
And I think we both agree that the ultimate collapse is going to be here sooner rather than later.
Well, it's certainly a reconfiguration.
And it drives me a little nuts when I hear...
People say the government just needs a little bit more money.
And to me, it's like, how the hell much is enough?
You know, when you first put these programs in place, I guess Social Security came in in the 30s, along with some unemployment insurance, and then with the big Great Society programs under LBJ in the 60s, they had an operating budget, about 10% of what they have now.
And they said, we can solve the problem with 10% of the money that we have now.
And now they've got 10 times the money that they had when the programs were first put in to solve the problem, and they still say it's not enough money.
I mean, anybody who doesn't see that is so unbelievably irresponsible.
And Paul Krugman and people like that are talking, well, the stimulus package needed to be bigger.
It's like the U.S. government is the government that has the most access to capital, to weaponry, to power, to technology, to monitoring.
It has the most power...
I mean, George Orwell's O'Brien would have a wetgasm about the size of the state that's been handed to the modern administrations in the 21st century under the U.S. Constitution or what's left of it.
And yet they say, well, a little bit more power, a little bit more money, and we'll solve all of these problems.
It's like, hey, if you said you could solve it with 10% of the money and you can't solve it with 10 times the money, I don't believe you're ever going to solve it.
In fact, every time they try to solve poverty, they just make it worse.
What was it?
Will Rogers said, every time the Congress makes a joke, it becomes a law.
And every time they make a law, it's a joke.
The opposite of pro is con, and the opposite of Congress is progress.
Yeah.
And that's really what we're dealing with.
And it all comes down to a lack of knowledge and understanding by most people, most citizens.
Whether it's intentional dumbing down or whether this is just the natural progression of public education, we could debate that.
But the fact is, public education is not giving these kids the tools to be critical thinkers, to be problem solvers.
And if you look at Julia, going back to her, At the end, she's putting her little Zachary on the bus, and he's starting the next generation of dependency.
And it's really kind of sickening.
Well, what's chilling about this Julia thing as well is that she's so unbelievably isolated, right?
So she wants to go to college.
Everybody's 17 here says, well, there's...
You know, they'll give her some access to college or whatever, and they give her money for college.
It's like, well, why haven't her parents saved up some money for college?
Like, she exists like, she's like a tadpole or something.
Like, no parents.
She's like an amphibian.
No parents, no community, no scholarships, no charities, no church.
No one's gonna help her out.
She hasn't, as I did, saved money from when she started working at 11 to go to college.
She just exists like an atom.
And this is the chilling thing about the state.
And later when it says, I think quite hilariously, it says, And literally, this is the quote, under Barack Obama, Julia decides to have a baby.
I guess we know which position they were using.
I see a DNA test in Obama's future, you know?
John Edwards, I could understand.
Barack Obama, maybe not so much.
But it's like, she decides to have a baby.
It's like, well, wait a minute.
Why is this not a decision that she and her husband are making?
Because if she and her husband are making this decision, that's a very different matter.
But here she's completely isolated.
The government has to pay for her to go to school because she has no parents, no community, no friends who can help her, no extended family who can help her out.
When she decides to have a baby, the first thing she has to look to is what resources is the government going to give me?
How are they going to take care of my kid?
How are they going to give me free health care and this and that?
It's nothing to do with she and her husband.
This is a direct appeal.
To single moms.
This whole thing is a direct appeal to single moms.
And also, why do you need to go to college to be a web designer?
I have no idea whatsoever.
I mean, can you open Notepad?
Can you learn a couple of codes?
But the most chilling thing, and this is what Barack Obama is very smart about, is that there's this huge contingent of single moms who absolutely need the state because they have taken the father out of the equation and they have had to replace it with the state.
When you take the dad out of the equation in a family, it doesn't stop the need for resources.
That need to be applied to the family.
It just means it creates a vacuum and inrushes the state.
And as the state rushes in, more fathers get displaced.
So the welfare state, we call it for the poor.
It's not for the poor.
The welfare state is almost exclusively for single moms.
90% of welfare payments go to single mothers.
And single mothers have the worst outcomes for their children of any other single factor.
You can choose to be poor or black or even have special needs.
The outcome predictor for bad results from when you're born is to have a single mom.
It's worse than anything else.
And so we've got this whole system where the nuclear family in the final, you know, orgiastic culmination of the Marxist fantasy of destroying the bourgeois family.
We have radical programs that have destroyed the family that have created, as you can see with this Julia thing, huge generations and particularly of women who simply the first place they look to for resources in their life is the state.
Not to their husband, not to their family, not to their friends, not to their community.
And that's a very isolated experience.
You know, to get good things from a community, you actually need to be part of that community.
You need to give good things to that community.
You need to be there for people so that they'll be there for you.
Writing an application and getting a check in the mail, getting free stuff, quote free stuff.
That's very isolating.
It's very atomistic.
And the more that the government separates us from each other, the more we become dependent on all of the stuff that comes raining down from the debt factories of the state.
And that, I think, is particularly tragic, how isolated we've become as communities.
Yeah, it's just a horror show.
And in the final slide here, the second to last slide, It's saying Julia's retired.
Now, honestly, I didn't know that Julia ever worked other than being a freelance web designer who probably didn't pay taxes anyway and didn't pay into Social Security.
But now she's going to get Social Security so she can have a comfortable retirement.
And the fact is, this program is not going to exist It's going to implode.
It's imploding now before our very eyes.
Like you said, reset.
All of these entitlement programs are going to be reset.
A lot of them are going to be done away with, and all the beneficiaries of these programs are going to be left to scramble and to rely upon their own initiative and drive, and yet the states help them suppress it their whole lives.
How are they going to survive after this reset?
Well, I'm not so much worried about the adults.
I think that most adults, and one thing we do know about human nature is human beings are incredibly adaptable to new circumstances.
I mean, it's true, we do, you know, if you win the lottery, you might sit around and get kind of lazy for a while, but then if your lottery winnings vanish, you'll go get a job.
I mean, so I'm not so much worried about the adults, because I think the adults can adapt pretty quickly to what is necessary.
I mean, they'll create a lot of fuss and they'll scream and they'll have a tantrum.
But then when you push through that and people recognize, well, my tantrum isn't going to get me what I want, then they're like any toddler.
They'll just calm down and deal with the reality of the situation.
They'll try all the emotional bullying and when that doesn't work, they'll do the right thing.
It's not so much the adults that I'm worried about.
It's always the children that I'm worried about.
People have made appallingly bad decisions to have kids outside of wedlock, to have kids without a dad.
And it's mostly single moms.
To point the crosshairs at them, these are just the facts of the situation.
And so they can make the adaptation, but a single mom with three kids, when the government runs out of money to send to the welfare officer to send to her, I mean, literally, what is she going to do?
I mean, this is like Dust Bowl, Steinbeck, Oklahoma, living in tents.
I mean, this is this kind of situation that we're dealing with.
And the awful thing about that is that those of us who have been beating the drums in the deep jungles of the future, telling everyone exactly how this is going to play out, I bet you we're the ones who are going to be blamed.
In other words, it's going to somehow be blamed on the free market.
And those of us who said violence doesn't work, statism doesn't work, welfare doesn't work, these things are terrible, they're going to create long-term problems for the poor.
We're always told, you know, libertarians, we're always told that we don't care about the poor.
And yet the people who get the poor addicted to an unsustainable flow of debt currency, of fiat currency that is going to collapse and take their entire structured lives with them, they're somehow considered to be Helping the poor, like the guy who keeps giving the drugs to the drug addict.
He's considered to be the nice guy because he's not causing any discomfort in the drug addict.
But those of us who say, listen, we've got to wean these people off.
This is not good.
I mean, this is really bad for them.
You're making the drug addict uncomfortable.
You're a bad person.
And that's such immature and ridiculous thinking that we would never apply to any other situation in our life.
I mean, if our kid is going through the second bag of cookies and we take it away, he might scream.
But that's kind of what we got to do anyway.
And it would be bad parenting not to.
So it's just you know what's going to happen.
It's those of us who predicted it, those of us whose if our advice had been followed, this all would have been prevented or at least would have been a much softer landing.
When the hard landing comes and the abrupt change occurs and, you know, the bus turns so quickly that people are thrown out the windows.
We're going to be told that we are the ones at the wheel and we caused this.
This is the inevitable.
I'm not even going to be upset by it because it's so predictable.
Yeah, it's a foregone conclusion because every bad thing that happens in the economy is always blamed on the market.
And you see it here where they said, well, they decontrolled these banks.
There was too much capitalism.
It's a failure of capitalism.
And yet you and I know that these banks, their very existence is a function of the state.
The state must have these banks because there is no other way the state can fund its existence other than through a captive financial section, segment of the economy.
There's no other way.
There is no free market when the government controls currency and the interest rates.
I ask them to repeat this sometimes, repeat back to me.
When the government controls the currency, there is no such thing as the free market because the free market requires stability, objectivity, and reliability in the currency, which you never get when currency is politically manipulated and controlled by the state for its own interests.
As the result of the government controlling currency, I'm sure as you know and as your listeners know, it then has to control interest rates because it has to control the inflation that results from The overprinting of currency, which it uses to bribe those most closely connected to the political process.
And so when the government controls currency and the government controls interest rates, you can call it a free market, but you're just completely wrong.
It's like being a biologist going to a zoo and thinking that you're studying animals in their natural habitat.
You know, you're studying animals in a zoo.
You are studying a captive-controlled fascistic economy when the government controls the currency and the government controls the interest rates.
Everything else is just after-the-fact nonsense.
Absolutely.
No question.
He who controls the money controls everything.
Rothschild said that a hundred-something years ago.
It's truer today than it ever has been.
So, Stefan, we've got to wrap up.
People want to learn more about you and Free Domain Radio.
Where did they go?
Well, it's freedomainradio.com.
Mild pitch.
It's all free.
Free.
Gorge yourself on the buffet of philosophy as you see fit.
Stuff your face till philosophy comes at your ears.
It's freedomainradio.com.
There are free books, free podcasts.
I do a Sunday show every 2 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time on Sundays.
I will be speaking at Freedom Fest.
I will be speaking at the Libertarian Convention in Texas.
I'll be speaking in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
I'm going to be the MC for Libertopia.
I'll be at the Porcupine Freedom Festival.
There's a Liberty Cruise in November.
I will be speaking at a private island you can come and attend to in January of next year.
So lots of chances to come and speak.
40 million downloads for the show.
It's the biggest philosophy show around.
I hope that people will check it out.
I think that The root of the problems we have in our system are fundamentally moral.
And it's all about violations of the non-aggression principle and property rights.
Everything can be traced back to that.
So I hope people will come and check it out.
I think it's very useful stuff.
Yeah, it's definitely useful.
And if people want to listen to this interview again...
Financialsurvivalnetwork.com.
We've got tons of stuff on there.
Sign up, get the Financial Survival Toolkit newsletter.
We're really getting so much interest here.
I feel like you're right.
This wave, it hasn't even nearly crested, but it's getting higher and higher and higher, and hopefully it will eventually descend upon the ruling elite and sweep them out of their glorified positions and their ivory towers.
Hey Stefan, it's been a pleasure and we will see you at Freedom Fest.
Like I said, I'm gonna have a booth there and hopefully you'll team up with me there and we'll really cover it properly so that the word can get out to more and more people.
