July 23, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:15:43
2171 The Colorado Shooting - An FBI Profiler Responds - Stefan Molyneux Hosts the Peter Schiff Radio Show
Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, dissects the Colorado shootings with a former FBI profiler, while hosting the Peter Schiff radio show. Also, will owning gold ever become illegal, how can we fight public sector unions, and thoughts on how to protect your self and your assets from the coming Western economic collapse with Jeff Berwick of http://www.dollarvigilante.com Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web, at http://www.freedomainradio.com Hear more Peter Schiff radio shows at http://www.schiffradio.com
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Good morning, good morning, everybody.
How are you doing?
It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio sitting in for Peter Schiff.
We are going to have a great, great show for you this morning.
We've got some callers lined up.
We're going to talk about some public sector unions and perhaps can gold ever become illegal?
Will they repossess your teeth?
We will find out in the Peter Schiff show this morning.
But first, let's talk about a rather somber but very important topic.
There has, of course, been one of the worst, if not the worst, shootings in US history that occurred since we last talked in Colorado, of course.
And I'm not going to go over many of the details.
I'm sure that you're all aware of it.
Some thoughts have been rolling around in my mind about this, and I'd like to talk about them with you.
If you have thoughts about this, please let us know.
Just after the half hour, we're going to talk to Jeff Bowick of The Dollar Vigilante about how to protect your assets and your freedom in the imminent fiscal challenges that will be facing the West and the U.S. in particular.
But let's talk a little bit about the Colorado shooting.
Now, what always goes through my mind when I hear about these unbelievably evil events is that these people don't pop out of nowhere.
You know, they're not just like jet-propelled gophers that come out of a hole that nobody can see coming.
So there were some signs ahead of time.
And I say this not so that you'll look for deranged killers under every rock.
But just to make a case, I'm going to make a case for intervention in these kinds of things if you see anything like this.
So there were actually two attempted murder sets on the night of the killing.
The first, of course, was in the theater where he set off his smoke bombs and gunned people down.
And the second was he had programmed really loud music to go off in his apartment at 12 o'clock, 12 midnight, the night that he went out to shoot all of these people.
This is according to reports.
They seem to be valid.
So he'd set all of this music to go off in the middle of the night, really, really loud, in the hopes, I suppose, that somebody would try and go into his apartment or cops would try and go in and so on.
And his apartment, of course, was rigged, was booby-trapped.
With incredibly intricate booby traps that were designed to kill whoever came into his apartment.
So it was really supposed to be a double murder set.
But fortunately, of course, nobody went into his apartment.
Now, of course, when the news of the shooter, his name came out, the media began calling anybody associated with it.
And according to ABC News, Arlene Holmes, who's the mother, She said that she was woken up.
Of course, the phone's ringing and the media is trying to get in touch with her about what happened with the shooting.
And what happened was she said, you have the right person.
She was, I guess, speaking on instinct.
I need to call the police.
I need to fly out to Colorado.
His mother knew the moment that anybody called that it was her son.
What did she know?
What evidence did she see?
I would really like to know these things.
I would really like to know these things.
I've got a video on YouTube called How to Make a Monster, which goes into the history of a mall shooter and what happened to him as a human being over his life.
The horrible childhood that he experienced, the sexual abuse.
And again, I don't know anything about what happened to this guy.
I don't think anybody does.
But these are always my first questions.
Here's another clue.
The owner of a gun range actually told the AP that last month the shooter applied to join his gun club, the club of the gun range.
So Holmes filled out this online form that said, I really want to join your gun range.
And the guy called him back and heard this guttural, he says it was bizarre, guttural, freakish at best, the outgoing message on Holmes's voicemail.
Something to do with a Batman movie, half guttural, half growling, a kind of satanic hellfest of syllables.
And the gun range owner told his staff to watch out for this guy at the July 1st orientation and not to accept him into the club.
He said, I've learned to trust my instincts.
There's that word again, instincts.
These are two indications.
The third indication, He set up an online dating profile.
He dyed his hair flaming orange and he said he was looking for casual sex with a woman who'd be willing to visit him in prison.
The guy had no online presence.
I don't know if this actually could be anyone who set up.
But he did seem to be dyeing his hair orange, which is of course As he talked about with the police, I'm the Joker and all this sort of nonsense.
But this is to me is all really, really important stuff.
This young man, this young mass murderer, he had a mother, he had a father, he had a sister, he had a pastor, he had a whole community of people.
And he had this really crazy, insane, frightening, outgoing voicemail message.
Who called him?
Did his friends call him?
Did his family call him?
Did they know what was happening?
His mother seemed to have known.
Did he get the help that he needed?
This doesn't excuse the evil of what he did.
But prevention is always better than punishment.
So I would like to make the case.
It's a very strong case to make, but I would like to make the case.
We're going to come back to this after the break.
I would like to make the case that if there was anything in this young man's childhood that damaged and broke him and there seems to be very strong scientific evidence not to do with this guy I don't know anything about this guy's childhood but in general there's very strong scientific evidence That neglected, traumatic or abused childhoods lead people down a very dark path.
Not everyone.
It's not, of course, a 100% predictor.
Most of the people who are in prison were abused as children, but not everyone who is abused as a child ends up in prison.
Most of the people that I've researched in this area of shootings have some things in common, difficult childhoods, psychotropic medications, which are well known to have as a potential side effect, homicidal rage, murderous fantasies, and so on.
If there are things in childhood that lead people to do these kinds of heinous crimes, then we need to recognize that childhood is everybody's business because in childhood things can happen which turn people dangerous as adults unless there is intervention, unless there is professional mental health help that is brought to bear.
We're going to talk about this coming back from the break.
I really want to hear your thoughts on this.
Stefan Molyneux for the Peter Schiff Show.
You're now enrolling in the Peter Schiff School of Advanced Economics.
Twice the education of a Harvard MBA. Four won one hundred sixty-eight thousandth the cost.
All right, we're back.
And we'll return back to the topic of the Colorado shooting.
But first I want to talk to the real brains of the outfit, the great Peter Schiff show callers.
Sanjay, do we have you on the line?
Hi, yes.
Hi Stefan.
Alright, so you had a comment about public sector unions.
Let's hear it.
Yeah, so I'm a student and I go to Cal Poly.
Apparently my school has a deal with the UAW union and they're local in Sacramento.
So what I found out was that I worked for a professor for one quarter.
I helped them grade papers and my position Already classified me as being in their union.
So basically, all the people who took my position as so-called these graders formed a union.
And now I'm being forced to pay these union dues when I'm not even a union member.
I've been paying dues for it while I've been doing this.
And so I challenged that.
I went and called them last week.
And, you know, government, I took six, seven tries.
I finally got through to them.
And...
They told me, hey, it was state law.
We're complying it with state law.
Our contract with the university says it's this.
Well, yeah, I know.
I can see that, but I'm just challenging it.
I don't think it's right that you can force me to pay when I don't even want your services.
When this contract was made before I was even there.
When I signed up to be this grader, To help my professor grade papers, that wasn't in my contract.
I didn't sign saying, I'll pay these union dues.
I didn't sign up for that.
Well, but of course, sorry, the union argument, and I'm just going to put on my unibrow hat for a moment, but the union argument is, look, if we're getting you great deals and we're getting you all of these wonderful benefits and pensions and pay and job security and all of that, then you have to be part of the union because we negotiate on everyone's behalf.
So don't be a free rider.
Pay your union dues because we're getting you all these great deals.
And how does that strike you?
Yeah, I mean, I can see that they would be saying that.
Yeah, I can hear them saying that.
Unfortunately, that's not always the case.
But I would challenge that for being a, like, they say one thing, the first thing on the bullet is job security.
Professors are lazy.
Most of the ones I know, they don't want to be spending their time grading papers.
Are they really going to fire students who are willing to grade papers for minimum wage?
I mean, that doesn't really make much sense to me.
Yeah, look, I mean, the public sector union thing is heinous on several levels.
I mean, look, I have no problem with unions, freedom of association, you can associate with who you want, everyone can join together, hands across the water, kumbaya, go on strike.
For better working conditions, there are, you know, jerkwad capitalists out there who don't treat their workers well, who don't understand that if you treat your workers well, you get a better and more productive workforce.
So I have no problem with unions.
Where I have a problem with, as usual in the ethical analysis, is the initiation of force.
I do not like unions that can force everyone to be part of them, not as part of their contract with the employer, but part of a law that is immoral.
And I also do not like Unions that have a legal monopoly On a particular service and of course degree-granting institutions and and professorships and so on it's kind of like a legal monopoly and certainly the professors the public are protected by a lot of laws of course there's you know this thing called tenure right a tenure is supposed to make sure that professors with unpopular views don't get fired but all that really means a generation later is that professors or potential professors
with unpopular views don't get hired because you know you can't fire them and And so it's really gone bass-ackwards when it comes to protecting workers' rights.
The more that you get money flowing into public sector unions, and the more pay and benefits these get, the more government has to print money to pay these people, which, of course, inflation is a hidden...
A horrible tax on the poor and the more it depresses other people's wages so it's predatory on the very working class that they're supposed to be protecting and so it's monstrous and the last thing of course is that when you force people to pay union dues and then you turn around and you give This money to particular political causes, then that is a complete violation of the democratic conscience of the people.
If you don't support the Democratic Party, and we all know that 90 plus percent of the money that goes to public sector unions goes to the Democratic Party, to be forced to pay union dues when there's a legal monopoly on the right to work, it's a shakedown, it's exactly on the waterfront with Marlon Brando, and then to be forced to pay for the privilege of working and for that money to go to a particular political Group that you may or may not agree with is a violation of freedom,
of association, of the right to work, and of the right to follow your conscience in the democratic process such as you can.
So I think it's monstrous on every level.
I appreciate you making the call to the union.
I certainly appreciate you bringing up the topic here, but I would not hold my breath to be released from this shakedown.
So there's no hope.
I mean, I submitted a case to, I don't know if you've heard of FIRE, but I've submitted a case to them because, I don't know, I just feel like it's, Mandates in general, unconstitutional, forcing me to give them my money.
That's a form of property, in a sense.
And especially, that wasn't in my contract.
Yeah, sorry, but look, I appreciate what you're saying.
I appreciate what you're saying.
I'm sure that you have the moral and contractual right on your side.
But my advice, I'm certainly no lawyer, but my advice is to recognize that the law is not like a magic book.
You know, like if you open it up and you point to the right law, that everybody has to follow the law.
Oh, okay, well, it's in the law book, so I guess the law is an excuse.
I think it's mostly just a cover to legitimize the predation of various people and groups on the public sector.
So even if you can find, oh, look, this is wrong, this is illegal, this is unconstitutional, whatever you can come up with, my belief is, and if you just look at the recent Obamacare ruling, where it's a tax and not a tax, and you can't get even any consensus among people well-schooled in the Constitution, It's just a bunch of nonsense.
So I wouldn't assume that if you could find the right magic spell in the law books that everybody's going to change their behavior.
And listen, I want to make sure we get to the next caller, but thank you so much for your time.
And I think we now have a question about could gold ever be illegal?
Mike, are you there?
Hi.
Hello?
Hi.
What was your question?
Yes, I have a lot of money invested in gold and silver, and my concern is that the government may, once again, make one or both of those illegal.
I'm just wondering what you think?
Yeah, look, it's a distinct possibility.
It's a distinct possibility.
Of course, this has happened a number of times before.
It's happened a number of times around the world.
It was FDR, I think 1933, made private ownership of gold illegal.
And then Nixon in 1971 closed the gold window completely.
And so I do think that it is a...
A risk.
I'm not particularly comfortable, you know, it's just my personal opinion.
I'm not really particularly comfortable with owning digital gold somewhere overseas.
I think if you're going to have it, you know, get a lockbox in the basement and keep it on site.
It could happen.
Now, the reason I think it's going to be less likely to happen is the moment that America makes gold I don't think there's going to be a wholesale grab of it all, but...
If there are concerns about the validity of the monopoly money called the Federal Reserve notes, then they may be asked to produce gold.
I've heard some rumors that there may be a little bit less gold in Fort Knox than may be assumed, in which case they may do a low-rent grab of all the low-hanging fruit of gold that may be available.
So I would keep it close to me.
But I don't know that it's imminent.
It would be such a signal to the world markets that the US was about to enter a very exciting zombie apocalypse when it came to fiat currency values.
So I think discretion is the better part of valor here and I would urge you to be cautious about it and keep it Keep it close.
That, I think, is important.
You know, they can't take what they don't really know about.
Of course, comply with the law in all situations, but I would say keep it close.
Does that make sense?
Yes, thank you.
You're very welcome.
And it is exciting.
You know, when I was down at Freedom Fest in Vegas recently, it was a lot of talk about how things are going to be a year from now.
Well, we're going to talk about that with Jeff Berwick of The Dollar Vigilante when we come back.
Stefan Molyneux from Peter Schiff.
We now return to The Peter Schiff Show.
Call in now, 855-4SHIFT. That's 855-472-4433.
The Peter Schiff Show.
All right, we are back, and we are going to be talking to Jeff Berwick of DollarVigilante.com.
Jeff, are you there?
Yes, I am.
How are you, Stefan?
I'm great.
How are you doing, man?
I'm doing good.
Alright, so dollar vigilante, if I understand it correctly, your approach to imminent US economics goes something like this.
Zombies are going to come and eat your fiat currency.
And I think I agree with you to a large degree.
So you, of course, run a website, the Dollar Vigilante, an Austrian economics site grounded.
You run a financial newsletter.
You cover economics and politics.
And you are focused on the demise of the fiat currency financial system.
And you hope, I think as we all do, likely return to something solid like gold as money.
So...
What's the case for where the dollar is heading and how imminent do you think a fiscal realignment might be?
I think everything has to start in 1971, August 15, 1971, when Richard Nixon took the gold backing away from the US dollar.
That was effectively the second bankruptcy of the US. The first one was in 1933 when they confiscated gold.
The U.S. government was bankrupt at that time.
That's why they had to devalue the dollar against gold.
In 1971, they were also bankrupt.
They would have ran out of gold within a few years if they would have kept that system alive.
So they went off that system.
And what that did was it put the entire world onto a fiat currency system.
So an absolutely nothing backing it system.
The entire world was on it for the first time ever.
And at the same time, all these fascist, socialistic, democratic nation-states all around the Western world, at least, were in full force.
So when you have governments like these having no backing behind their currency and have central banks that can print up as much money as they need, We end up in a situation which is where we're at today.
And this system actually almost collapsed in 1979, 1980 because they had already almost destroyed it.
But because the government only had 10 years at that point to build up debt, they still hadn't built up enough debt to actually collapse the system.
So what happened then was they allowed the interest rate to reach its natural market level, which they never do, but in that case they did, and it went to 18%.
And because of that stopped the inflation that was going on all over the place, But they can't do that anymore because now there's too much government debt.
The U.S. government has $16 trillion in total debt.
Their total debt in liabilities is over $75 trillion.
So even if they let the interest rates rise to 10% right now, every penny of U.S. government taxed revenue would go just to pay the interest on their debt.
So this system is debt.
George Soros said this just recently, and I never agree with him, but I agree with him in this one case.
He said that in 2008 the financial system died, and I agree with him, it did.
And all they're doing now is tapering it over and we'll eventually head into hyperinflation probably within a few years, maybe two, three, four years, and the entire system will collapse at that point.
And we're seeing all the evidence, all the symptoms of this going on around the world.
There's protests and rallies and things going on all over.
You look at the Eurozone.
It's in the state of collapse.
Everywhere it's in the state of collapse right now, and so people better get used to the fact that things are going to change dramatically.
Everything that we've seen for the last 40 years has been built on a bubble of debt, which was unnatural and a non-free market system, basically.
So what people need to understand is what happened for the last 40 years was not really all that real economically, and it's going to be a dramatic paradigm shift happening in the next few years.
Right.
And I mean, I agree with all of that, of course.
And one of the things that I really like about the work that you do, Jeff, is that there are lots of people who say we're doomed, but you have an escape tunnel, you are taking your way to freedom.
So what are the suggestions would you make for people, you know, given the knowledge that we have about the cycle of history and where things are going, the fact that Fiat currencies rarely last more than a generation.
So, you know, from 1971 to now, 40 odd years, it's not going to last.
What, oh what, oh what should people do?
Yeah, it's very interesting right now.
If you look back 100 years ago, a lot of people were coming from around the world to the US, the Ellis Islands, because of the freedom that was in the US and the opportunity that was in the US. And now it's the exact opposite.
People are fleeing the US, people are fleeing the Western world.
The people who live in Europe, many of them are going to South America for opportunities.
People in the U.S., you look at people like Edward Sovereign from Facebook, he left Singapore just recently last week.
Denise Rich left, she's a billionaire, she left Austria.
Many people are fleeing now and it's because the system is dying.
And it's quite important, I think, for people to realize It's not the entire world that's in that terrible shape.
It's really mostly just the Western world, because the Western world was the ones that really bought into the socialist, fascist, democratic nation-state system with central banking, and all based on that, all based on the Keynesian That you can actually be wealthier by printing money, which if that was the case, Zimbabweans would be the richest people on earth.
So it's really important for people to realize all this and open their eyes and to look at other opportunities.
I am originally from Canada, but I defected about 10 years ago.
I lived around the world.
I lived in Thailand.
I currently live in Mexico, which is by far the freest country in North America, and the safest, by the way.
All that media stuff is well overblown.
And so people need to look at things that are opportunities around the world.
And so some of the things we talk about at the Bella Vigilante are, and number one for Americans, if you have assets, if you have any sort of real money, which not many people do anymore thanks to the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government, but if you do, get a second passport.
It's incredibly crucial.
It's probably the most important thing you can have at this moment in time because it gives you some options I'm not many people realize, but Americans can't open a brokerage account anywhere outside of the U.S. because of the recently passed FATCA ruling.
Almost any bank outside of the U.S. will not accept American clients.
They accept North Koreans, they accept Iranians, they accept anyone except for Americans.
Americans at this point in time, Are the most globally enslaved people in history.
They really, once they leave their own borders, they can't do anything anymore.
So it's really important to, if you can, to get a second passport.
And that's one of the things we do.
One of the things we talk about a lot is how to get that, how to get a foreign residency, and even how to expatriate.
Right, right.
So, get assets, if you can, at least have the option to legally get your assets out.
Now, of course, getting a second passport seems like years of paperwork in bureaucracy.
It's not as bad as people think.
Would you agree with that?
Yeah, every country has different rules for how to get a passport.
You could even, if you have genetics, if your grandfather or your parents were from, for example, Poland or Ireland, you might be able to get a passport over there.
And that can happen very quickly.
As well, there's different countries that have different lengths of time.
We've actually been going around the world negotiating with governments because we see how important and how...
How time-sensitive this is for people to get this before the doors really close in the U.S. and I see them closing every day.
The U.S. government is doing stuff almost every day to close the doors for capital control and people control.
You just look at what they did with the Expatriation Act, Anti-Expatriation Act by Charles Schumer after Edward Sabroin left.
That was one of the Charles Schumer's prized-packed slave cows and he escaped.
Someone left a gate open and Charles Schumer almost lost his mind.
And he ceded the Anti-Expatriation Act.
That was the name of the act.
So basically they're saying they don't want to allow anyone to leave anymore.
And so it's really important.
Certain countries, you can get them in as quickly as six weeks in a place like Cambodia.
It's very expensive, but you can.
There's also a place like Dominica, St.
Kitts, where you can get it in a few months.
We know of opportunities in Paraguay to get it within eight months.
We've negotiated a deal with the Dominican Republic to do it within a year and a half.
So there's all sorts of options, and so people really should be taking a look at that if they can.
Yeah, it certainly is true that when the cows, when the tax livestock begin eyeing the fence, the government tends to up the voltage.
I was just thinking when you were talking about, you know, We're subject to all of these increasing socialism and Keynesianism.
To me, it's just a form of creeping state socialism and communism and all of this.
You know, one of the things that drives me in the work that I do to keep talking about the non-aggression principle, property rights and the evils of statism, I come from an aristocratic English-Irish background and you know the aristocracy yes it's true we had all the gold we could eat but we also had to fight all the wars and in my family you know masses of men were lost in the first world war my mother's side is sort of German and my father's side of course is English-Irish 40 million lives lost
in the second world war fighting socialism fighting communism And it's just horrible how so many lives were lost to fight this ideology which then squirted its way across the Atlantic and infected North America and continues to infect Europe.
I mean the only way that I know to best honor my family dead is to continue on the fight on an intellectual level that they couldn't achieve at a physical level.
So I just wanted to sort of share that with you because it is really tragic the degree to which the West fought all of these ideologies and then ended up swallowing them wholesale.
Yeah, I totally agree, Stefan.
And, you know, you look at the Vietnam War, all these wars, that was the reason they said they were having the wars.
But they weren't the actual reason.
The real reason is these nation-states and these central banks I really like war.
It's very profitable for them, especially the central banks, and gives them an excuse to print lots of money.
So they just make up excuses.
You just look at the Iraq war.
They just made up an excuse.
They made up a lie.
It's all admitted to now, and now George Bush just laughs and laughs at dinners about the WMDs that they can't find.
And they're still over there in Iraq, and there's people still dying every day, now under Barack the Obama Prince of Peace, Nobel Peace Prize winner who's drone bombing people around the world every day still.
So yeah, these concepts, they were mostly just things to get people to go off.
But they were all lies.
Almost every war the U.S. has been in for the last hundred years has been under the pretense of a lie.
Vietnam was under the—that's all been proven now, that the Gulf of Tonkin was a false flag attack upon their own ship to enter into that war.
The Iraq War was—WMD, that was all a lie.
And the Afghanistan War is all based on 9-11, which the official story is the craziest conspiracy theory I've ever heard.
So, you know, all of these things are all based on lies.
These states and central banks are a man's enemy.
They've killed, the nation states alone killed 260 million people last century.
And yet people still, because of their indoctrination, being sent off to 12 years of public indoctrination camps, they believe the state is good.
You know, it's just unbelievable.
All right.
Sorry to interrupt you, Jeff.
If you can hang on, we'll come back to you after the break.
This is Devan Molyneux for The Peter Schiff Show.
We will be right back.
You've heard of Karl Marx, right?
Well, now, meet his worst nightmare.
This is The Peter Schiff Show.
And we are back, ladies and gentlemen, with Jeff Bowick.
He of the eye patch with the dollar on front, the dollar vigilante.
So, Jeff, what case would you make about the urgency?
What are people going to face if they don't act to protect what assets that they have?
I think you really just, if you are paying attention to what's going on, every day now the U.S. government is doing something to close doors, to militarize the police.
They're trying to get as many people into the criminal system as possible, and that will make it so they can't travel or get a second passport.
There's 30% of people under the age of 23 have been arrested in the U.S. It's a complete criminal police state in the U.S. now.
They're trying to do everything to make sure that people can't get out at this point.
And, you know, if you even go to the airports, they have cash-snipping dogs at the international airports.
And as you walk down the jetway to the airplane, there'll be people there and they'll ask you how much money you have.
Right now they're just asking, but pretty soon they'll be saying you can't take it with you.
It'd be very easy for them to flip that switch.
So these things are happening every day.
People really need to wake up.
Stop listening to the mainstream media, which are all basically propaganda and lies.
Stop listening mostly to your government registered financial advisor, because they're not going to tell you too many of these things.
They're not going to tell you to get some of your money outside of the country.
Really, do your own research.
Go to sites like ours, dollarvigilante.com, or listen to many other people out there like yourself, Stefan, who are speaking the truth, and pay attention to what's going on.
This is going to be the biggest event in human history over the next few years, and they're not going to tell you or prepare you for what's going to happen.
So you have to do your own research.
What do you see on the other side of this?
The longer problems tend to last, the worse they tend to get at the end.
The longer you keep something that can't fly aloft, the harder it tends to fall.
What do you think?
I mean, I know libertarians and others are considered to be doomsayers a lot of times, but that doesn't mean that doom isn't coming.
What do you see on the other side?
Obviously, there would be significant restrictions on capital.
There may be significant restrictions on occupation.
There certainly will be, I think, significant restrictions on capital flights, increased taxes and so on.
What do you see on the other side?
What's it going to look like if and when the hammer comes down?
Well, first of all, I don't think we're pessimistic.
I think we're optimistic that we know the system's going to end.
This has been the worst system ever in human history.
It's killed more people.
It's impoverished more people than anything ever has in history.
Hundreds of millions dead, tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars destroyed through the wars brought on by states, which are all funded by the central banks.
You can't even have these wars without inflation brought on by central banks because people don't want to pay for them.
So it's really optimistic that this is going to end.
The problem is getting through to the other side, which I call the Great Transition.
It'll probably take a couple years.
It all depends, as you say, Stefan, on what the governments do.
If they go quietly, this could be over very quickly.
It doesn't have to be that difficult.
And very quickly, you can start to rebuild.
You just look at a place like Hong Kong, how quickly it grew from nothing.
It was a small fishing village just 50 years ago, and look at it today.
Look at Hiroshima, which was bombed into oblivion in World War II. It's now a glistening city, mostly because it's mostly free market.
These are the free markets at work.
They can do amazing things if they're allowed to function.
I'm actually optimistic because of the Internet.
I think without the Internet, I'd just go live on a seastead and I'd be waiting for my next ticket out to an utter space colony if I could get one.
But thanks to the internet, we have the opportunity to spread this information.
The more that people understand this and know this, the more prepared they'll be, the easier the transition will be.
But I really wouldn't want to be in a major city in the U.S. over the next few years.
Right.
Of course, the big danger of cities is interruptions in the food supply.
I mean, cities actually grew out of sort of 12th, 13th century when they finally figured out that they put a harness on the horse that didn't choke it and figured out how to do winter crops and rotate.
You actually got the excess food that was required for cities.
And cities can be tricky places to be in if there are interruptions in the food supply.
And when there are currency problems, there are usually interruptions in the food supply.
Again, not to sound like all kinds of tinfoil hattie, but I think it's worth getting a little bit of extra food in the basement.
I think it's worth checking out DollarVigilante.com or other places where you find good financial advice.
Thanks so much again for your time, Jeff, this morning.
It was a real pleasure.
Thank you, Stefan.
Keep up the great work.
Thanks.
Paul, my fellow Canuck, how are you, my friend?
I'm doing great.
I just had a comment about your first guest.
Like, he keeps saying how the powers that be or whatever are gonna keep suppressing gold and I don't think that's the case because gold's the only thing that can consolidate wealth without disrupting everything else, right?
Like, you can, if the gold price goes up to 20 grand an ounce, that isn't gonna affect gas or oil or food or anything, right?
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean.
Sorry, can you just explain to us?
So let's say that gold goes to $20,000 an ounce.
How would that affect things?
Well, I'm saying it would be better for all this money floating around to consolidate in gold than it would be to just go into other commodities and stuff, you know?
Like if all this wealth that's, say the Treasury bubble bursts, If all that money goes into oil and all these other speculations, that's going to just disrupt everything.
But if it all goes into gold and the gold price goes up, the average person ain't going to be affected.
And the reason...
Well, no, no, but gold is in effect, right?
So if fiat currency becomes less valuable, which would happen really basically if they're just printing money to pay off the debt, it's called a soft default.
It's when you don't have enough money to pay off your debt, And they can't drive interest rates down any further because they're effectively zero, at least in the US. So they just start printing money like crazy and you get hyperinflation.
So the $20,000 an ounce gold would be an effect of hyperinflation, which would be an effect of overprinting of the money supply.
And so that would have a huge effect on people on fixed incomes.
I mean, if you're getting $2,000 a month out of some annuity and your money is worth 10% of what it used to, you're down to $200.
That's going to have a massive catastrophic effect on people.
So, you know, a lot of people have money in gold.
And so it's going to give you a huge effect.
Listen, we've got to take a break.
We've got to take a break.
Hang on.
We'll see if we can talk to you after the break or maybe you can send a message another way.
But this is Stefan Molyneux for The Peter Schiff Show.
We'll be right back.
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So again, we see the giant laser of state propaganda pointing at the rich.
Don't get me wrong.
I think that there are two types of rich people in the world.
There are the type who have earned their way to decent wealth and fame and fortune by providing services in the free market to people and more power to them.
Their wealth is a reflection of the democracy of the dollar.
People like what they're doing and are willing to give them money to keep doing it.
There are the other type of rich people who have become rich because they know people in government, We do all of these kinds of saucy things, and those are the second-handers, as Ayn Rand used to call them, the parasitical class.
They are not quite as honorable as the rich who get there out of hard work and value in the free market.
But there is, of course, this fantasy that goes on in democracy.
Well, democracy itself is somewhat of a fantasy, but there's a particular fantasy, and that fantasy is...
That the rich are not paying.
You see, the rich are just not paying.
And we just need to get the rich to pay.
Close the loopholes!
And get them to shut down their Swiss bank accounts and stop paying.
Because, you know, the poor and the middle class are just sick and tired of paying all these taxes.
It's just not right.
And it's complete nonsense.
It's just, it's not true.
But it's nice to believe that it's true.
And, you know, that is the really dangerous thing about it.
So this idea, okay, let's imagine.
Let's imagine that we could get 100% tax.
100% tax.
And we define the rich as like the top 10% of people who file.
So these are people whose average annual household income is $114,000.
And let's look at the top 1% of taxpayers.
So these are people who've got like salaries dividends and capital gains about just a little under $400,000.
Well the top 1% of taxpayers pay 38% of taxes.
Let's hear that again, shall we?
The top 1% of taxpayers pay 38% of taxes.
And let's assume that you had some tax policy if you could take away all the taxable income of all the millionaires and billionaires that Mr.
Obama likes to single out.
Well, that doesn't even get you a trillion dollars.
It gets you about 938 billion dollars.
It is to the four trillion dollar budget and massive deficit and blah blah blah.
It's a sand.
It's a grain of sand on the beach.
And let's say you expand that to the top 10%, everyone with income over $114,000.
Well, the top 10% are already paying almost 70% of all total income taxes.
The top 5% pay more than all of the other 95%.
The top 5% of taxpayers pay more than all the other 95%.
And this is sort of important.
It's so incredibly lopsided at the moment that saying that there's a problem with not taxing the rich enough is pure demagoguery.
It is pure sophistry.
It is pure populism.
And if you increase taxes on the wealthy...
I mean, does it even need to be said?
If you increase taxes on the wealthy, they will find strategies to avoid it.
If you increase taxes on the wealthy, the wealthy have a lot more political power than you and I do.
Well, certainly more than I do because I'm from Canada, at least in the American system.
But if you start increasing taxes on the rich, the rich suddenly become very interested in politics and they start getting very involved in politics and they start gaming the political system to their favor.
There is no magic gun you can point at someone else and have them fund you for eternity.
You just can't do it.
But there is this fantasy that we can.
That fiction, government is that fiction by which everyone pretends to live at the expense of everyone else.
And given that the rich are paying the vast majority of taxes, more than 45% of US households didn't even owe federal income tax for 2010.
More than 45%, I hate to repeat myself, but the lies are repeated often enough that the truth can at least be repeated twice.
More than 45% of US households didn't even owe any federal income tax for 2010.
So that's actually quite important.
And there are calculations that show if you tax everything that you could conceivably get your hands on.
Tax all the profits in the movie industry.
You tax the entire income from the NBA and from the football franchises and you tax all the rich people and you tax all the corporations, all of their profits and so on.
You can't even cover government spending for one year.
You can't even cover government spending for one year.
The problem is not taxes.
The problem is spending.
And the problem with spending is associated with and strongly related to the problem of taxes.
We all know, come on, we all know how the system works.
We all know how the system works.
How does the system work?
You promise people something for nothing and they give you your vote.
And then the government bans bribery.
The irony.
It's like the government going up to the banks for fixing interest rates when that is the sole, well, one of the sole mandates of central banking, of government-controlled monopoly fiat currency in the West is to fix.
It's always so ridiculous.
It's like when the UN, a couple of years ago, tried to come up with a definition of terrorism.
They couldn't conceivably agree on one because there was no imperialist power who couldn't be defined as a terrorist under any definition they could come up with.
See, the crimes are crimes when the government doesn't do it, and they're sound social and fiscal policy when the government does it.
So, when banks fix interest rates, that is a heinous crime, and they will go after these people.
And when the government does it, it's sound fiscal policy.
1% of US currency is counterfeited, according to the government.
I would argue that 100% of US currency is counterfeited, because printing money out of nothing is counterfeiting if you and I do it, and it is sound fiscal policy if the government does it.
If you and I steal from other people, To pay for our children's education, that's theft.
If the government imposes property taxes to pay for terrible miseducation for our children, that is called sound social and fiscal policy.
This is what always happens.
The most convincing gang gets to the top and defines any competition to the evils that they do as immorality and criminality and define everything that they do that is illegal for everyone else to do as sound social and fiscal policy.
And it is a lie that doesn't work.
I sometimes genuinely believe that morality was invented to reduce competition.
Like, if you're the only thief in the world, you have a pretty easy time of it.
If you're the only thief in the world, no one's going to have any locks.
Everyone's going to just assume that they lost something or space aliens beamed it up for examination or something.
But if you're the only thief in the world, you have a pretty easy time of it.
And so if you're the first guy to come up with the idea of stealing you have a great deal of fun and you live pretty well until the next guy and the next guy and the next guy figure out that it's a really good idea to steal at which point you know people start taking protective measures and it becomes less valuable to be a thief.
And so I sometimes think that what we're taught of as moral is simply what would put us in competition with those in charge.
And therefore, they say, well, thou shalt not steal, because we want to steal.
Thou shalt not kill, because we like invading other countries.
Thou shalt not bear false witness, because we want to propagandize your children.
I think morality is invented so that we won't compete.
If we extend morality to the ruling classes, they're no longer rulers.
Stefan Molyneux for The Peter Schiff Show.
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All right, we're back, and we don't have any callers at the moment, which means the topics will be mine, all mine!
So this is Devan Molyneux for the Peter Schiff Show.
We're going to go back, we'll see if we can get an expert on the line about this shooting.
I know it's been on everyone's mind, it certainly has been on my mind.
So at the opening of the show, just for those who are tuning in, I just touched up briefly on a few things about signs and signals ahead of time.
So this...
Young man's mother, as soon as she was contacted by the media, who was searching for, you know, obviously family members, said, you've got the right person.
I need to call the police.
I need to fly out to Colorado.
So his mother knew right away.
The owner of a gun range refused to let him join the club because of a completely freaky and bizarre voicemail message that he got when he called the man back.
This man dyes his hair bright orange and green like the Joker, puts on a dating website that he's looking for a casual sex gal who would visit him in prison.
There's a fine, fine young man to be dating.
And I'm always curious.
Do you think it's possible?
I don't think it's possible.
Maybe you think it's possible.
Do you think it's possible that if you know someone well...
Look, and parents got to know their kids.
I mean, if parents don't...
I mean, I'm a stay-at-home dad, and I know when my daughter is even feeling slightly pensive or bemusedly resigned to something.
I mean, you can really tell these kinds of things.
Do you think it's possible For someone to be planning a mass slaughter and for no one to know what is going on.
For no one around, this is no mom, no dad, no siblings, no, he was, I guess he put down on the dating site that he was agnostic but he was raised Christian, went to church, his pastor knew him well and so on.
Now, I don't mean, when I say, do you think that people couldn't know, obviously they don't know what he's planning.
But do you think somebody can order 6,000 rounds of ammunition over the internet, as he's reported to have done, this alleged shooter, and to have booby-trapped his entire apartment, and to be obviously figuring out how to use these weapons and trying to join gun clubs and all that, do you think that someone can be planning this?
And this would have no effect.
No effect on how they behave with other people.
I can't imagine that that's true.
Malcolm Gladwell, in the book Blink, which I would highly recommend, really talks about how much we can process very, very quickly.
So he's got these experiments.
It's a great book to read, I would argue.
He's got these experiments where he fogs out someone's voice.
You can't even hear the words.
And people can tell the doctors who are going to end up getting sued.
They can tell how interesting a professor is with just a few seconds of muffled audio.
This gun club owner, this gun range owner, rejected this guy out of hand just on listening to a few seconds of a voicemail message.
How is it possible that nobody else knew it?
We've got some callers.
Jeff, what's on your mind?
Yeah, just wanted to point out a couple of things with the reaction to the shooting and the younger generation.
Two things that are the big question is terrorism and its definition.
So many young people, I notice, are trying to define this rather than a criminal act, that it is terrorism.
And so, well, Since we've got these angels in the government that are going to protect us, well, we can just ban guns for that so that this guy couldn't do it again.
So they're so brainwashed with what is terrorism if you can actually define it.
And second of all, well, you know, we've got these angels with this gigantic military that are going to defend us.
Right.
Yeah, look, I mean, this is nonsense.
I mean, not what you're saying, but these arguments.
Look, as you know, terrorism generally, and it's hard to come up with a specific definition, but generally terrorism is the attempt to achieve political change through violence or the threat thereof.
I mean, it's got to have a political goal, a political end, a political agenda.
This guy does not have, as far as I know, he doesn't have any kind of political agenda.
Now, the police report that he's lawyered up and he's clammed up, so he's not talking.
But it doesn't seem like there was any kind of...
I think the Norwegian shooter was probably a different matter, but this guy, it does not seem to have.
So this is not...
Terrorism by any stretch of the imagination.
This is a completely satanically evil mass murder, but this is not terrorism.
Now, of course, the idea that if we just ban the guns, that he won't be able to get a hold of them is, I mean, this is like saying, well, if we have a welfare state, we'll end poverty.
Poverty is now, in America, rising to its highest rate.
In 50 years, after trillions and trillions of dollars spent on poverty programs.
The war on drugs has failed.
How are government schools doing?
How's foreign policy going?
How is energy use going?
How is...
I mean, you just go on and on.
Everything that the government touches turns to extreme, craptastic nonsense.
And so the idea that we're just going to ban guns and that is how we're going to solve these kinds of problems is...
Guns prevent crime.
That's the reality.
Guns prevent crime.
What do you see as the mechanism to brainwashing our young people?
Is it just totally keeping them stupid to history?
People who don't have a sense of history are very easy to contain, very easy to control.
Right.
I don't know if you've ever seen, I was just talking about this with Jeff Tucker recently at Freedom Fest.
If you've ever seen the movie Memento, it's really, really worth watching.
It's about a guy who has no memory and he's used for evil ends and so on.
If you have no memory, then you can be completely manipulated.
So if people don't know the history of fiat currencies, if people don't know the history of guns and their role in preventing crime, if people don't know the history of the West, if people, I mean, Young people today, and I say this now as a guy who's in his 40s, so I can officially sit back on my old man, you know, rocking chair and whittle away and, you know, crush the, accidentally crush the tail of the cat.
But young people today do not have a sense of history.
And, I mean, I run a show, Free Domain Radio, talk to lots of young people, do a call-in show every Sunday at 2 p.m., I've
talked with some people in China And, you know, they say, well, guns are banned in China, and look at how things are getting so much better in China.
You don't need guns for your country to do well.
Yeah, of course.
Well, you know, China, what was it, 70 or 80 million people slaughtered by the government against a largely disarmed population?
You could really make the case.
I think it was the...
The Admiral of the Japanese Navy in the early 1940s said, you can't conceivably invade America because there's a gun behind every blade of grass.
How well would the Communist dictatorship have done against a well-armed population?
Well, I would submit that it wouldn't have done.
Look, the first thing all dictators do is take away the guns of the people.
Because then you can have your gulags, and you can have your collectivized marches, and you can have your forced communal farming, and you can, you know, people will just starve to death and all that.
The first thing you do is take away people's guns.
I would love a world without guns, but that's not where we live.
Right now we live in a place where there is violence.
If there'd be more people with guns in that theater, it might not have gone so badly.
We will be right back after the break.
Thank you so much for your comments.
This is Devan Molyneux for The Peter Schiff Show.
We now return to The Peter Schiff Show.
Call in now.
855-4SHIFT. That's 855-472-4433.
The Peter Schiff Show.
We're back, ladies and gentlemen, halfway through our second hour.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio sitting in, squatting in, doing tumbleweeds in for Peter Schiff.
And we've got a guest coming up, an expert in targeted violence, a former Secret Service agent who will be talking to us about the shooting.
But let me just make a very brief case before he comes on.
I said earlier in the show that childhood is everyone's business.
And this is a really, really important thing to understand.
We live in the world populated by people's childhoods.
You know, I think it was Wordsworth who said the child is the father of the man.
Childhood has an unbelievably powerful impact on adult personality.
To take a ridiculous metaphor, if you're in a neighborhood full of pitbulls that all run loose, it's kind of important how people treat their pitbulls, because if they treat them badly, that can make for a dangerous pitbull.
And there's nothing more dangerous than a human predator, whether in the private or political context.
So it is everyone's business how children are raised.
And we've got this isolation thing going on in modern society.
What goes on behind closed doors?
Each house in the suburbs is like a prison of isolation.
And we sort of feel like, well, because when I see children being mistreated in public, I... I'd say something.
I talk about it.
I say, listen, don't hit your children.
Spanking is bad for your children.
Listen, don't yell at your children.
Don't frighten your children.
Why?
Because I'm some saint?
Hell no.
It's because I have to live in the world.
My daughter's going to have to live in a world populated by these people.
And the better their childhoods are, the better the world will become.
That, I think, is a pretty basic and well-proven fact.
So, childhood is everyone's business.
If you know a child who's being mistreated, you owe it to the future, you owe it to yourself, you owe it to the world your children are going to have to live in to do something about it.
I don't know whether this guy was mistreated.
I don't know anything.
I mean, he's still the alleged shooter.
But what we can take out of this terrible tragedy is that if we know people who are going off the rails, if you know a cousin, a brother, a neighbor's kid, anyone, the lonely kid on the street corner who's always alone when the bus comes, you know, a few words, talk a little bit, try and get involved, just a little bit here and there.
That can make such a difference in the world.
But enough of my random ramblings.
Let's talk to an expert.
Dan, are you with us?
Yes, I am.
Thanks for having me.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
So, Dan, you're an expert in targeted violence, 17, you're in law enforcement, NYPD, and Secret Service.
You have a graduate degree in psychology.
I mean, let's forget my thoughts about it, because, you know, I always like to defer to the experts.
What are your thoughts about what's happened in Colorado, and how do you see it unfolding over the next few weeks as information comes out?
Well, there's a couple of things we should take from this.
The first, the Secret Service did an exhaustive study on what we call targeted premeditative violence.
In other words, not a Not a random act, not a street mugging, a target of opportunity, a pre-planned, which clearly this was an act of violence targeted by a group of people.
It's very similar to political assassinations.
That's where the nexus is to the Secret Service, and that's how they got involved.
And a number of things came up.
One, there's really no useful law enforcement proactive profile.
In other words, that's the fact that most of the shooters happen to be male and white, which really isn't useful from an investigative perspective.
There isn't much of a profile.
But, and here's the but, there usually is some signaling in advance, some behavioral indicators that something is wrong.
They told someone there's maybe not a history with weapons where someone all of a sudden starts going to the shooting range, practicing with weapons.
They've said something.
There's a gradual decline and a change which results in a break with reality and then a tragic incident like this.
And what were the signs?
Again, I know it's always easy to look back with 20-20 hindsight, but there seem to be some signs with this guide.
What would you say were the major signs with this guide that people could have maybe done something to intervene with ahead of time?
Sure.
A drastic change in behavior.
And this is where it's important that friends and family get involved.
Because drastic changes in behavior are typically not going to be noticed by just the regular, maybe a person in contact with casual, it's going to be the person you have the most intimate contact with.
So, like a drastic change in behavior, things like, in this case, it seems the mom knew right away when they called the mother, she said, yeah, something like that was my son.
That should have said to you that she saw some gradual decline, and then all of a sudden these changes in behavior, which would mean stop going to school, it appears in this case, or You know, maybe the person just tends to become more of a recluse, becomes kind of a loner, and just doesn't really have that contact with the external world they used to have.
These are the drastic changes in behavior I'm talking about.
Friends and family, you were just talking about it before I got on, have some responsibility to the rest of us in society to say something.
Contact a mental health professional.
In a litigious society, I think people are afraid of doing that.
But, you know, what's the worst that can happen?
You find out it was a slight overreaction.
On your part, the person doesn't need any kind of treatment.
You know, that's fine.
But in a case like this, I think some treatment, some maybe psychoactive medication could have prevented this.
Yeah, I mean, I'm myself not such a fan of the psychoactive medications.
I think talk therapy is the way to go.
But they do seem, I mean, yeah, he dyed his hair orange and green.
And, you know, I can't stop thinking about this, right?
So he has this outgoing message on his voicemail that's like some growling, creepy, guttural Batman stuff.
I mean, did his parents not call him for a couple of months and didn't notice, or did they just think that was a joke?
I mean, it just seems strange to me that somebody would think, oh yeah, well definitely, my son has obviously gone and killed some people now that you're calling.
I guess we won't know, and we may never know.
This was so frustrating, for me at least, is that I would like to know.
Right, and like you said, Monday morning quarterbacking, hindsight's 20-20.
Now looking back, it seems like, oh, how did we miss this?
How did we miss this?
But at the time, people tend to They tend to make attribution errors.
Well, they say, oh, well, maybe, and I don't know his academic history, oh, he got an F in his neuroscience class, he's suppressed, and people want to make excuses because they don't want to believe that evil acts like this are possible from people close to them.
The mother may have said, well, you know, that's my son, he's not capable of that, he's just upset, and that's a normal reaction given the emotional attachment to people.
But, again, it's your responsibility if you see these kind of things, like the voicemail you had spoken about, and the gun was at the target range, the gun range, where he had left some bizarre messages.
Well, it's your responsibility at some point to pass that on to someone, and if it turns out to be nothing, it turns out to be nothing.
That's fine.
But you really have to pass that on, so that way we're not having this conversation about, oh, how did we miss that?
You know, we do a lot of this.
It seems to happen all the time.
In the video, in the Columbine case, you go back to making videos, shooting, you know, weapons, high-powered weapons.
These are the kind of things that really should be picked up upon.
Yeah, I mean, there was a shooter in, I can't remember the state, he was a mall shooter who had an unbelievable history of mental health problems, suicide attempts, talking openly about shooting people and so on.
And it's like, I mean, these things are so rare, and it's important to remember how rare they are.
So to me, it's not like, well, so-and-so dyed his hair, he might be a shooter.
I mean, that's not the conclusion I think that either of us are suggesting that people come to.
But it's really, really important to just stay close to people.
Stay close to people.
Ask them how they're doing.
Stay in contact with people.
Particularly someone like this.
This is not a guy whose family was beamed up by space aliens and he came over in a cargo container and had no community.
This is a guy who was embedded in a community and it really troubles me.
That everybody in this community is saying, well, there was no way to know, even though the mom knew the moment the media called.
And there were lots of signs of strange and unusual behavior.
So I think that's, you know, nobody's saying, well, if your kid's acting erratically, he might be a shooter.
I mean, I don't want people to jump to that conclusion, but...
No matter what's happening, people can benefit from, you know, close, intimate conversations.
Perhaps, you know, I think therapy is a great idea for a lot of people, but just stay close to people.
It doesn't have to get this bad for it to be bad for them.
Sure, sure.
And that's the key point.
I think the responsibility is the family and the friends and the network.
It's not government surveillance.
You know, on another show I was on today, I was giving some commentary on it, and the topic came up Should the government be monitoring now ammunition purchases online?
Should the government be doing this?
Should the government be doing that?
The government is just us.
It's not some otherworldly being.
It's just us.
The responsibility is on us as a community.
Freedom is a fixed pie.
It's not like economics.
Freedom is very much the zero-sum game.
Economics isn't.
Freedom, when you start ceding more of your freedoms to bureaucrats, That's not necessarily the answer in this case.
We can have a common-sense conversation about, you know, sound gun regulations and things like that, but start talking about, you know, it was even mentioned that maybe we should monitor ammunition purchases online.
You know, I'm very cautious about things like that.
I don't want to sacrifice any more of my freedom.
anyone else well but but but this look but i would i would argue that this is just people once again wanting to the government to get involved because this they don't just feel like it you know it's it's like you know like we have a welfare state because people you know oh let's have the government deal with poverty because you know poor people sometimes smell bad or whatever let's just have the government handle it and then i don't have to get involved but this was this was not ted kaczynski living in the woods this is a guy you know with a sister with a mother with a father He had teachers all the way,
dozens of teachers all the way through high school.
He did his undergraduate.
I don't know if he did a master's.
He was in the first year of his PhD program.
He had people all around him, all the time.
All around him, all the time.
And the idea that somehow some government regulation is going to solve a problem That hundreds and hundreds of people had exposure to.
Church, congregation, hundreds, maybe thousands of people knew this guy over the course of his life.
And the idea that we're going to slough off the responsibility to some bureaucrat to solve this problem, I agree with you.
This is a communal problem.
This is a social problem.
We need to get involved with how people are doing.
And if we can do that, I think some of these things can be averted or prevented.
And if we don't do that, there's no amount of government regulation that will make us safe.
I could not agree with you more on you.
You brought up a good part with the welfare state.
You know, mutual aid society took care of the poor long before the government got involved, and now we have this feeling that you're elected to office, you somehow inherited these powers of reason normal people don't have.
You tend to say, oh, they'll take care of it.
My senator, my congressman, you know, and me running for office, I see it even now, and they say, well, what are you going to do for me?
It's not what I'm going to do for you.
It's what I'm going to do to get out of your way that matters.
All right, listen, listen.
I'm sorry.
We've got to take a break.
Hang on.
We'll come back right after the break.
I've got another few minutes if that's all right.
I really appreciate your time.
We'll be right back.
If knowledge is power, then the Peter Schiff Show is a uranium-enriched 10,000-megawatt nuclear reactor.
Stay plugged in.
Stay brilliant.
This is the Peter Schiff Show.
Oh, I need that guy's voice.
Sounds like you're just coming off a roller coaster with PCP in your system.
Stefan Molyneux, we're just here with Dan Bongino.
Dan, so tell me what happened to the American people?
What happened to the American psyche?
And I need to give you in a nutshell because I've got a call or two before the end of the show.
How is it that people gave up on community and started relying on the faceless bureaucrats of a distant government?
Well, we got away from a social safety net.
We made it a social safety thermo-rest mattress.
I'll give you an example.
Let me sum it up.
A quick little anecdote here.
When I was with the Secret Service, we used to be involved with the Toys for Tots program, the Marine Corps.
I had a person involved who told me, I don't do it anymore.
I said, why don't you do it?
I said, it's a great cause.
He said, because every house I would show up at had a brand new cell phone and a flat screen TV. And I thought to myself, well, that's it.
That's not the safety net.
That's the thermal risk.
Yes, there are people struggling.
No Republican or Democrat would deny that.
But the fact that we made the social safety net 47 million people receiving food stamp benefits, clearly that many Americans are not struggling to feed themselves.
There's obviously a level where people get frustrated and they say, you know what, I'm out.
If the government's going to do it, let them do it.
I'm not getting involved.
That's really the core of it right now.
That's what's wrong with our growing bureaucracy.
Yeah, they hold this treat out, this carrot out, which is, if you cede to us your liberty, we will take care of you.
And that, to me, is going back to infancy.
That is not a stout, mature, courageous group of people who are willing to trade their liberty for security, because, you know, as the old saying goes, when you trade your liberty for security, you end up with neither liberty nor security, which is where I think people are facing right now.
And I think it's really tragic.
You know, it was an incredibly vigorous and powerful experiment in teeny tiny government that really has gone completely off the rails.
A system that was designed in the 18th century to have the smallest government has now produced the largest government the history of the world has ever known, outstripping even the Roman Empire and the British Empire at its height.
And that is a really chilling instruction on the dangers of this sort of stuff.
Yeah, I mean, it was a freedman who said that You know, when you get a big growing bureaucracy like this, you know, your neighbor says, oh, I'm not worried, I'm spending my neighbor's tax money.
What they catch is, your neighbor's saying the same thing.
You know, that's the whole idea of, you know, concentrated interest but very diffuse costs.
It's very hard when that ball gets rolling towards a big nanny state to stop it because there's this perception that you're not spending real money and that real money's not yours.
Well, it is yours.
And the system you live in is going to collapse inevitably under the weight of itself.
It is a shame.
That's why I left my job.
And I think it's what happens when you violate the basic moral rules called thou shalt not steal.
Well listen, I really wanted to thank you for your time.
You can go to Dan Bongino, B-O-N-G-I-N-O dot com to check out more of Dan's work and to look at his Political ambitions.
Thank you so much for your time.
We really, really appreciate it.
And let's turn to, we have a caller on the line, Rich from Florida.
Are you on?
Yes, I'm here.
How are you?
I'm fine.
You're interesting.
You know, you were on, I think it was last month, and that was my first time I ever heard of you, so I really enjoyed you sitting in for Peter.
I'll have to listen to you on Sunday.
I brought up your call, your screener, and here's something to think about.
I just heard you mention your age a few minutes ago, and I'm a little older than you, but I don't know if you remember 35 plus years ago how every theater had an usher in it.
I'm just saying, you know what?
What would it be like if we had an usher in there in every one of those theaters and keeping track of who's exiting and coming in And, you know, back when minimum wage was, back 35 years ago, movie theaters could afford to have an usher in their book because they keep on raising minimum wage.
I mean, you can't have them.
You can't have an usher in every theater there.
So it's just something to think about.
That's a good point.
I mean, whether it prevented or not, I don't know.
But I think this is a larger portrait of things that have been lost in society.
I mean, look, when I was a kid, I mean, I got my first job when I was 11, and there's just no way that would be legal anymore.
And it was a great experience for me.
I worked in a bookstore, and I got free books, and it was just fantastic for me.
That stuff would not really be possible anymore.
I miss, I miss this stuff.
You know, I miss someone pumping my gas and cleaning my windshield.
I miss somebody bagging my groceries.
I miss, I just, I miss that kind of stuff.
That was one of my first jobs was pumping gas.
Yeah, first jobs.
You know, looking at the oil stick and those jobs are gone because they can't afford, I mean, the small business guy cannot afford to hire these guys at the gas stations.
And again, I'm just saying, what if there was a guy there watching the theater and then saw the guy exit the door?
The door was cracked.
Hey, this must be cracked.
Shuts the door and the guy doesn't come in.
You know, just something.
Yeah, no, look, it's tragic.
You know, the minimum wage is, I mean, this is one of the few things that all economists pretty much agree on.
You know, free trade is good and minimum wage is bad.
Minimum wage is racist because it targets minorities more so.
And the problem with...
With minimum wage, of course, is that it drives up the value of creating replacements, right?
So now, up in Canada, you've got a lot of stores that are getting rid of cashiers.
I mean, you've already got rid of a lot of bank tellers.
Why was that so valuable?
Because their wages kept going up, partly because they were unionized, a lot of them, or whatever.
But in Canada now, they're trying to get rid of cashiers by having you check yourself out and having you go through the scanners yourself and so on.
And so those jobs are never coming back.
And I think this is just particularly tragic.
And Minimum wage, you know, there's just a couple of things you need to do to get ahead in life, and they generally tend to happen when you're teenagers.
You finish high school, don't have a kid without being married, certainly try not to have a kid in your teens if at all possible, and get and hold a job for a year.
I mean, those are the three things that you need to do, right?
Finish high school, don't have a kid in your teens, at least without being married, and You know, do a year of work.
And as minimum wage goes up and as regulations go up, it's really, really hard for people to, it's really hard for people to just fulfill that third obligation, get some work experience.
And yeah, first jobs are crap.
I mean, they're junk.
Of course they are, because you don't work that much, because unfortunately you've been in government schools, they've added nothing to human economic capital.
But yeah, I think the opportunity for young people to get in the workforce, you know, it's really tough to adjust to that when you're in your sort of early to mid-20s after you've done a degree to start working there with no experience.
You know what's amazing is that the fact that we expect our children to come out of school out of 12, 13 years of public school education and we, you know, we expect them to earn 750 an hour.
Well, maybe they should be, our expectations should be a little higher from our public school system.
I mean, I mean, after 12-15 years of school, if they're not going to go to college, they should come out and have a trade or learn something, and that way they could earn more than 750 in an hour.
Well, I've done a whole series on why you're unemployed on YouTube and at freedomainradio.com.
Look, high school is a way that they cage up people who would compete with other people.
It's a way that young people will work for almost nothing, and they keep people in high school to keep them off the streets, to have free babysitting for the parents, and to make sure that they're not out there undercutting people with their hard work ethic and very low living expenses so I don't believe that high school has anything to do with educating people it's propagandizing them it's keeping them off the streets and it's keeping them from competing with people who want unjustly higher salaries so yeah I mean they don't teach you anything economically valuable we didn't know anything about economics entrepreneurship or anything like that so that's
just tragic anyway the music tells me I'm afraid my friend that our time here is done for the day thank you so much Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio sitting in for Peter Schiff thank you For the invite to the Peter Schiff show, I will hope to talk to you again soon.
