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Nov. 5, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:54
2247 Moral Hysteria and Environmental Genocide (prep)
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Preparation for the speech in Toronto at Liberty Now, 9.30am, November 3rd, 2012.
I'd like to propose a theory of government growth and also a theory of moral hysteria.
Because, as you may or may not have noticed, moral hysteria is pretty much foundational to the growth of government.
I mean, it's the growth of other things.
Sexual hysteria is the growth of the advertising, the basis of the advertising.
Industry, but moral hysteria is the basis of the growth of government.
And to give you sort of just one example, I'm sorry for the U.S. examples.
I'll try to work as much KenCon in.
But one U.S. example, the FDA, Food and Drug Administration, vastly expanded its powers in the early 1960s as a result of the thalidomide scare.
The thalidomide scare was that there was an anti-anxiety medication that was handed out Sort of like candy in Europe, which resulted in about 12,000 babies being born deformed, with deformed limbs.
The science was not exactly clear or specific on how susceptible fetuses were to chemical agents in the bloodstream and in the amniotic sac.
And it was not very prevalent in the US or North America.
In the US, it was mostly handed out as samples.
And so it was a few hundred, I think.
So because of that, and there was a, you know, a huge amount of moral hysteria about this, you know, our babies are coming out deformed, had a lot more, I think, to do with generalized fears of nuclear war and radiation.
I remember, I mean, for those who are old enough, I remember this, the nuclear war fear was huge.
There was actually, I went to school in Don Mills, I remember quite vividly in the bathroom, there was a piece of graffiti that said, mutate now before the post-war rush.
And, of course, for those people, I mean, for those moms who were born with these deformities, I mean, it was absolutely devastating.
But the challenge, of course, of being a rational thinker is not to look at the obvious, but to look at the unseen, right?
So we all know this example of the government spends money to create jobs.
Oh, look, we have a thousand jobs, and everybody thinks that jobs have been created, and probably not more than one person in a hundred.
knows about or thinks about the fact that those thousand jobs were paid for through inflation, through the printing of money, or through borrowing, or through increasing taxes, or through cutting spending.
Well, maybe not the latter, at least not often.
And therefore, there were a whole bunch of jobs that weren't created.
Inflation pushes up wages, devalues the dollar, which pushes up prices, which means that fewer goods are bought, less demand, So on.
Raising taxes transfers money from people who are actually creating...
It's funny, you know, because transferring taxes transfers money from people who are paid through taxes.
You know, weird kind of Mobius strip black hole of economic delusion.
But...
Very few people think of all the jobs that are lost.
When you count the jobs that are gained, a few people think of the jobs that were lost or the jobs that never came into being.
And in any society where you have a centralized coercive agency, i.e.
a state, the people who have gained or who stand to gain will always, of course, have a huge incentive.
Huge incentive.
To lobby the state.
So all the people who are going to get those thousand jobs, all the unions who are going to get the union dues, all of them.
But the people who didn't get jobs because of this, they don't even know what their loss is.
All the people who lost their jobs can't trace it back directly to government action.
I mean, we know it's there.
Smoking probably caused lung cancer.
We don't know which cigarette it was exactly that pushed you over the cliff, so to speak.
And so looking at...
The hidden costs, not the visible benefits, is really the essence of intelligent thinking about society.
Alright, here's where I pause because I went on a tangent and cannot find my way back.
This is why we do rehearsals.
So, with the FDA, because of a few hundred birth defects, massive testing procedures were put in place for drugs.
And drug testing went from about 10% of the cost of a drug to 70 or 80%.
And the waiting period went from a couple of years to 13, 14, 15 years.
And the cost, it's like $100 million to get a drug approved.
And so everyone kind of gets that the drugs that came out of that process or the drugs that come out of that process should be safe enough.
Of course, if you look at the number of recalls and so on, it's highly debatable that they are.
And if you look at the whole lie around antidepressants and SSRIs and psychotropic meds of every kind, you find that it's all cooked up nonsense, right?
So the FDA says you can run as many tests as you want, and if you find two that correlate with positive outcomes, you can submit those.
It's like, what nonsense is that?
I mean, by that logic, I never lose at gambling, because I gamble 30 times.
If I've won twice, look, I'm batting 1,000.
You can have as many hits as you want in baseball, and you just have to take the one that's really good for you.
Well, that would not be much of a sport.
Now, does anyone know the estimates of what has changed as a result of this?
We'll get into it a bit more later.
4.7 million to 14 to 15 million people have died as a result of these delays.
But you see, those are...
Hidden costs.
I mean, they're certainly not hidden costs to the people themselves or those who love them, but they're hidden costs to society as a whole.
And that's a very important thing to understand.
People who died because...
I had this lady on the show, Dr.
Mary Ruart, who was...
I think at Upjohn, she was a researcher and she was looking into a liver disease...
100,000 people a year were getting it.
It was very bad for them.
They had nothing.
But it was not cost-effective to go through the whole FDA process.
And so people who could have got medication...
They don't know.
There's no hole in the pharmacy shelf that says, this medication that would have saved your life was denied to you through government fiat, through government hysteria, through the moral hysteria of your peers and runaway regulatory system.
So people don't even know.
It's like, oh, I'm sorry, there's no cure for what you've got.
Why is there no cure?
Well, I guess no one's developed one.
Oh, those selfish drug companies.
So very few people can trace back.
And of course, even if you could trace back, What does it matter?
You still don't have the cure, and you're not going to overturn the regulatory.
Because, of course, this regulatory captures a well-known phenomenon.
Companies that you regulate will often initially fight that regulation, but then once that regulation is in place, they adapt their business model to it, and they then use it as rent-seeking, as a barrier to entry for smaller and more nimble companies.
Anyway, so...
So this phenomenon is very interesting.
I'll sort of put forward a thesis or a theory as to what's going on as a whole.
But this phenomenon is very interesting.
And the phenomenon is this.
So how many people have ever read...
This is an obscure question, but, you know, just in case we have any medieval-ophiles in the audience.
How many people have read medieval writers, theologians, sociologists, politicians...
Have read the statement or anything to do with...
Child labor in the Middle Ages was a huge problem.
Terrible problem.
Where was the Charles Dickens of the medieval child labor?
People have this weird idea.
I think actually a lot of people get this idea of the world through the books they're read to as kids.
Kids' books are terrible this way.
I mean, in kids' books, the idea is that Nature is cuddly and cute.
And people are the problem.
Which, of course, is kind of the opposite of the truth.
Nature is a bitch.
Nature is a hell on wheels.
I sort of have to explain...
And, you know, you don't want to, but I don't want my daughter to get the wrong impression, right?
So, you know, why do the frogs run away when we try to catch them?
Because they're afraid we're going to stuff them in our beak and eat them.
Because that's what animals do to each other.
They try to eat each other all the time.
That's a constant battle.
And when we go to the store, we don't eat the cashier.
You know, we trade.
Human beings trade.
We reason with each other.
We may have disagreements, but we don't eat each other.
But when animals, they can't trade.
They're not smart enough.
They can't trade, so they eat each other.
I mean, it's brutal.
It's horrible.
The entire natural world is one long serial killer movie with no police and no jail and nothing.
It just goes on and on.
Every animal is Hannibal Lecter to his prey, and nature is brutal in the extreme.
But of course, we like to give these cuddly pictures of animals playing and gambling in the forest, and everyone's getting along, and there are butterflies and ladybugs and so on.
It's all super cute.
So I think people genuinely are informed, or rather misinformed, by kids' books.
Something you sort of notice as a parent, you know, where are the books on trade?
They don't exist.
The books are on cuddly animals and people who come and chop down trees, which makes the bears cry.
We'll get to why that is in just a sec, but that's an important thing to understand.
So there was no mention of child labor in the Middle Ages that I'm aware of.
Maybe there was, but it certainly was not a big issue.
And child labor becomes a big topic in the mid to late 19th century.
Well, why?
Well, because fewer children had to work.
I don't have to accept that.
I'm going to make the case for it.
Fewer kids had to work.
And that had a lot to do with it.
So enough wealth had been created in the 19th century.
And, you know, the Industrial Revolution had a lot to do with it, of course, right?
But the other thing that...
It had a lot to do with it, was the fact there was no war in Western Europe for 100 years, for the first time since ever.
And that, of course, was...
It allowed...
Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, 1815 to the beginning of the First World War in 1914, there were no...
I mean, there was the Prussian War on the eastern end, but there were no wars in Western Europe, right?
Because, as the old...
I think it was Bastet who said when...
When trade stops flowing across borders, soldiers will inevitably cross borders.
It's the other way around, right?
When you're embedded in trade, you don't really have as many wars.
Because it's to the profit of the state to not have a war, right?
Because they're taxing the transfer of goods and sales and economic activity, so they don't profit from war.
And when states don't profit from war, lo and behold, they magically find their blessed peacemakers within, and everything's hunky-dory.
So you had enough wealth generation, infant mortality declined, calorie count rose, starvation became virtually unheard of in Europe because of trade as well.
In the Middle Ages, you know, 5, 10, 15% of the population starved to death every year and you could have plenty 10 miles away from starvation and nobody would know because there was no particular trade because the medieval guilds controlled everything so tightly.
It was just brutal.
So, in the 19th century, enough wealth began to be accumulated that parents stopped putting their children up chimneys.
I mean, it wasn't first on their list, right?
It's like, let's have a baby so we can put it up a chimney.
That's not...
I don't think...
No, no Hallmark cards have that on...
Congratulations on your flu stuffer.
It's not...
So, as soon as parents could have the economic means to not have their children...
Get black lung by the age of 12, they would...
I mean, they stopped doing it.
That was pretty important for them.
And so, because it wasn't a constant, child labor was not absolute, right?
So, in the Middle Ages, I mean, children just worked all the time on the farms and so on.
They just...
It was brutal labor.
They had to.
When you've got a whole bunch of people starving every year, you kind of can't have kids learning their ABCs instead of planting seeds.
And so, as the phenomenon of child labor began to decline, child labor became a big problem.
A big, quote, problem to be solved in the legislation, like the eight-hour work weeks and so on, all of this was put into place.
But it's because the problem was being solved.
Let me give sort of one example.
Now, another example is poverty.
Blessed are the poor, says Jesus, because if you've got nothing to eat, you might as well think you're going to get a supernatural reward after you're dead.
And poverty, the poor will always be with us.
Poverty was considered to be the natural state of almost all of humanity, and it was because of original sin or because Satan or whatever it was.
But it was just an intractable problem.
And it's true that they did try some redistribution.
Spenumland was the big one.
I talked about this when I hosted the Peter Schiff show once.
Spenumland was a big issue.
And what they did was redistributed income and caused all the usual problems and corrupted for generations the work ethic, the usual thing.
But they were not...
There were massive entrenched poverty programs, particularly in Canada and the U.S. in the 19th century.
People relied on charity churches, communities, friendly societies, and so on.
And then in the post-war period, there was a lot of deregulations, and people don't get that, right?
I mean, the lie, of course, I mean, we all know this, we can recite it in our sleep, is that capitalism caused the Great Depression, but government intervention and the war solved the problems for capitalism, because we all know how wealthy you get when you blow the living crap out of half the planet.
You know, just go key some economics professor's car and he gets upset, say, no, no, no, I'm giving you a raise.
Not a lot of Ben Bernanke rubbing his hands about the recent storm saying, woohoo, 3% GDP, here we come, right?
But the reality, of course, was that there was a huge amount of deregulation.
I mean, Germany had the great fortune to have a, I mean, the sort of West German economic miracle after the Second World War, where they rebuilt an entire country and carried the backs of Eastern Europe for some time, which is one reason why they're not so keen to carry Greece now.
They know.
It doesn't work.
The finance minister was a Hayekian.
He was an absolute laissez-faire capitalist dude.
And so he just deregulated the living crap out of things.
And this is one of the reasons why Germany's economies remain strained and why they're strong and why they've not been tempted by war again, right?
After all the socialist experiments of the first half of the 20th century, culminating in national socialism, they deregulated their economy.
They allowed free trade to operate and to work.
And they were...
Well, on their way to recovery, people sort of say, well, it was the Marshall Plan that saved Europe.
It's nonsense.
The European recovery was considerably underway before the Marshall Plan came along.
Government always takes credit for pretending to fix what had already broken.
And so there was a huge amount of deregulation and a repeal.
So the government takes over the economy in the Second World War, and then when it It took off.
It repealed.
I did a video on this, Lawrence Reed's The Myths of the Great Depression.
It repealed a huge amount of regulations after the Second World War and controls and all that sort of stuff.
And what happened was poverty began to decline.
You see this sort of going down a ladder.
1% a year.
1% a year!
Doesn't that just make you crazy about all the human history?
1% a year could have been done.
So what happened was as poverty began to decline, people began to get That there was a problem with poverty, right?
This is really important to understand.
Like, you know, the picture that you always see, some sad-eyed, shaggy-haired fellow in a little cardboard box, and behind him are these huge skyscrapers, and there's this idea of, you know, how could poverty continue to exist in the midst of such plenty?
But that's pretty easy to say.
I mean, would you rather be the king of France in the 18th century or...
A very poor American in the 21st century.
Well, it's not too hard to answer, of course.
What's called poor now is, you know, a third of them have a car, 90% of them have microwaves, 60% of them have computers, internet access.
I mean, it's crazy.
What's called poor now?
But poverty was being solved after the Second World War, deregulation, free trade.
And, I mean, the demilitarization occurred, with the exception of the U.S., And the Soviet Union, I mean, there was largely a demilitarization which freed up budgets and so on.
And the governments didn't just eat up the budgets elsewhere.
I think it was Hayek who talked about that there was a huge government program to find jobs for people, but there was so much bickering about it that when all the people came back from the war, all these American servicemen came back from the war, they all had jobs before the program was even completed in theory.
And so they just shelved it.
Poverty was being solved.
But as poverty is being solved, the remaining poverty becomes much more visible.
It becomes a problem.
It's similar to if, you know, some guy dies at 100, we say, wow, that dude had a long life.
Good for him.
But if we suddenly had some way to extend human life to 300 years, someone dies at 100, it'd be like, oh, he died really young.
Right?
Right?
As the standards change, things that were formerly normal get thrown into high relief.
Right?
So, I was reading some website, some article the other day, it said, oh, cancer rates have increased.
So much percentage point since the 1900s.
And it's like, well, yeah, that's fantastic.
Cancer is a great problem to have because cancer is associated with longevity.
I mean, if you die at 40, not many people live to get cancer.
Cancer is a great problem to have, so to speak, because it means that you're not dying at 40, that you're living to 70 or 80 or 90 years old.
So rather than having a toothache that kills you when you're 42, You now have a cancer that kills you when you're 75.
Cancer is great from that standpoint.
So poverty is being solved.
And then, this is the terrible thing.
This is the terrible, terrible thing.
And for now, I'm just going to assume that the people who are in government programs actually want to solve...
Problems in the economy.
Let's just assume that, you know, there's lots of arguments against that.
I think it's more of a power grab with the poor as a human moral shield.
But let's just say that they really want to, and we know they don't actually want to solve the problem of poverty, because when the problem of poverty isn't solved by their programs, they expand their programs.
It's a power grab.
But let's pretend that they really, I mean, there must be some people in there who really want to solve the problem of poverty, just like there must be some public school teachers who really want to educate kids about freedom, reason, evidence, truth, rather than Government curriculum.
Curriculae?
Curriculae?
Curriculae.
Anyway.
What happens is there's a bunch of people who say, well, look, the rising tide is not lifting all boats.
There are people who are really, really, really poor.
And they get terribly impatient.
Terribly impatient.
So, the poor become visible when they're not universal.
Right?
Like, there's no shadows at nighttime.
Really.
Right?
The shadows are there in daytime, right?
So when there's a contrast, then you notice the shadows in the middle of a room.
If you're in a room at night, pitch black, there's no shadows.
You turn the light on, there's shadows.
So as soon as there's a contrast, there's a difference.
You notice things that you didn't notice before.
And you want to fix them.
I mean, I lost about 20, 25 pounds or something a couple of years ago.
And, you know, I knew this was, because I know this theory, I knew this was going to happen.
Part of me was like, hey, I lost some weight.
Let's have a celebratory cheesecake dinner.
No, no, no, no, no.
Because it was not having the cheesecake.
So there's this temptation that the problem of poverty is acute because it's not present as much.
And so people want to just, you know, the fire's almost out.
You know, let's just put it out.
And then they set events in motion that stop everything.
Stop everything from being solved, from working.
That's a big problem.
And put the poverty programs in, boom!
Poverty stops.
And, you know, the official statistics are sort of flatlined.
Poverty is doing sort of a horizontal jiggy.
I would disagree with that.
I would disagree with that.
I mean, if you go to your accountant, you know, let's say you lost your job and you go to your accountant and you say, you know, my spending has remained the same.
He's going to say, well, where are you getting your money?
He's going to say, well, I'm putting it on my credit card.
He's going to say, well, that's a problem.
Your income is actually declining.
Your spending may remain the same, but your income, you're actually spending yourself into a hole.
And the poverty programs have made the poor poorer because poverty used to be more of a temporary phenomenon.
Now it's a permanent, it's a Roach Motel.
Check in, you can't check out.
And, of course, the national debt and deficit spending and so on, inflation, these have all harmed the poor.
So I would actually argue that the poor are in much worse of a position now than they were in the 1960s.
It's become entrenched.
Their education is much worse because, of course, the public sector unions took over the teaching position in the 1960s.
In the late 1960s, they could no longer fire teachers.
So, quality of education has vastly declined.
Job opportunities have declined for the poor because of hyper-regulation and minimum wages and all.
And so, they're worse educated, fewer opportunities, much greater debt.
So, I would argue that even though the rate of poverty has remained kind of constant, the poor are in a much worse shape now.
Because when the government runs out of money and these programs have to radically shift, it's going to be a very challenging time for the poor.
more.
So people get impatient.
They're like, oh, you know, we've got all this money that's helping people get out of poverty.
So let's just take it in a sort of amoral pragmatism from hell kind of way.
It makes a weird kind of sense, you know?
You know, there are five people at the table.
You know, four of them have too much food and one guy is hungry.
So just scoop a little and put it there.
Done.
Of course...
That's not the hell you unleash when you invoke state power, but this is what people sort of feel.
Let distribution undo excess, and each man have enough.
From King Lear.
One of the good guys said that.
And it is very tempting.
And in the zero-sum game of medieval agriculture, that was kind of how it had to work.
And this occurs in other areas as well.
Moral hysteria is a sign of progress.
In a state of society, everything's backwards, right?
You can't read everything backwards.
But in a state of society, moral hysteria is a sign of progress.
So, let's take another example.
The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.
I just had a debate with this statist.
Such a statist, he doesn't even know that there's a word called statist.
You know, it's like someone in the KKK. It's not a fair analogy, but someone in the KKK does not know that there's such a thing as racism.
You know, it's like gravity.
And he pulled out this argument about the Cuyahoga River, which in 1969, in Cleveland, it caught fire, and it was so terrible that the EPA had to be invoked, had to be created, and the Clean Water Act in 1972 was passed, and And so on, right?
So what are three things you know when you hear that a river is on fire?
Number one, you know that the river is much less on fire than it used to be, because otherwise people wouldn't notice it.
There's no news stories that say, water's still wet, right?
Water dry?
Well, that's different, right?
So if the river's on fire every day, it's not news.
And the Cuyahoga River had regularly been on fire for the past 100, 150 years.
So you know that it's not on fire as much as it used to be.
That's the first thing you know.
And the second thing you know is that either the river is unowned or...
Common law, like public nuisance suits, are not allowed to operate.
I mean, either way, it's the same sort of thing, right?
So, if the government owns the lake, or the river, or the pond, or whatever, then the government is not going to sue itself.
And there's nobody who has a financial interest in maintaining the value of the waterway, or whatever it is.
So, either it's publicly owned, or if there are some or all of it that is privately owned, that...
The legal system is prevented from operating.
And the third that you know is that it's most likely that the government is the major polluter.
And these all turn out to be true.
You know, I always get surprised by stuff.
I couldn't do the research in the time.
But the Cuyahoga River had been regularly on fire, and because Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, I think, had come out a year or two earlier, there was all this hysteria about the environment.
Now, what do you know about the environment when there's hysteria?
Well, you know that it's getting better.
See, the Middle Ages, medieval times, ancient times, you could really complain about pollution in the environment because the environment was incredibly inhospitable to human life.
You know, oil on the water is not pleasant, right?
Bubonic plague on the rats is really unpleasant.
That's pollution.
That's pollution.
Crows that eat all your food.
Bugs that carry malaria, which we'll get to more in a sec.
Now that, that's pollution.
Smoking the air is a pain in the neck.
Pain in the lungs, really.
And it's not good.
It needs to be dealt with.
Privately, of course, and interested parties, sustainably.
But...
I mean, it's hard to believe that pollution is an ever-increasing problem because human lifespan keeps increasing.
In the Roman era, the average lifespan was 21.
Now that's pollution.
That's harmful stuff to human life.
And so you know that the Cuyahoga River used to be on fire more, and now it's more rare, and also that it's being cleaned up, because that's why people are noticing.
And this, of course, turned out to be true.
That the Cayuga River had been...
That this river had been...
The cleanup efforts had been occurring.
$30 million had been assigned for waste treatment plants.
That there was a sewage system that was producing a huge amount of the mess.
The Army Corps of Engineers was producing a huge amount of the mess.
And how had the common law system been prevented from dealing with the problem?
Well, because the city had sort of local jurisdiction over the water, but the state granted pollution permits.
The state, the government, granted the pollution permits.
And once you had a pollution permit, you were immune from a lawsuit.
You could not be sued for polluting if you met the levels that were put forward in the pollution permit.
And the pollution permits, of course, I mean...
Now, there were laws, of course, that weren't enforced.
People have this weird idea that the law is like some independent entity...
You pass the law and suddenly it's going to get...
Laws books, I mean, there's thousands of laws that nobody ever bothers with.
There was actually a law in Cleveland that said you can't dump oil into the river.
It was almost never enforced and the fine was $10.
By which you could actually just pour oil in the river and light the fire with a $10 bill and it matched.
And, I mean...
False flag operation, you hear this all the time, but it was, you know, largely nonsense.
The actual 1969 fire, while it was pretty dramatic, and flames were reported to a shoot as high as five stories, it was out in 30 minutes, and it was actually no big deal, and it did only a tiny bit of damage to, I think, $50,000 worth of damage to the bridge that it started under.
Whereas there was one in 1952 that caused millions of dollars worth of damage, raged for an incredible amount of time and was really hard to put out.
But there was no news story about that because it was so common.
And when things become rarer, they become newsworthy.
And this is a very important thing to remember.
Whenever you hear about a problem in a state of society, you can be virtually assured that the problem is close to being solved.
I mean, there's no...
Smallpox is news now.
It was not news in the 16th century.
It's news now because it's almost none.
I think it's gone, pretty much.
Malaria used to affect 10% of the population in the southern U.S. And then they got the magic of DDT, which we'll get to in a sec.
And, lo and behold, malaria is now news.
So all of these are very important things to remember.
This is what is so frustrating about a state of society.
In 1962, the Cleveland Plain Dealer is actually one of my favorite names for a newspaper.
I just think it's fantastic.
I mean, newspapers as a whole, I'm not a big fan of.
I'm pretty much about...
I go with Mark Twain on this.
If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed.
If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed.
But the Cleveland Plain Dealer was rejoicing at the return of fish to the Cuyahoga River in 1962.
So significant progress had been made.
I mean, nobody measured this stuff.
I mean, nobody even measured this stuff.
And they were, you know, in the past, more concerned with things like cholera than they were with debris in the river.
Typhus.
See, there's this weird thing.
A government is always excluded from the moral calculations.
I mean, the moment you make a moral commandment, you make an exception.
That's almost without exception in human history.
Ayn Rand did it, right?
She supported taxation through the funding of a state, but also said no one can initiate force.
Taxation is the initiation of force.
She creates a rule, creates an exception, much less egregious than most.
But you create a rule and you create an exception, right?
You pass Obamacare and immediately start handing out waivers to people so that they don't have to obey it, to your friends and so on.
They're all clustered around Nancy Pelosi's district, I think.
And so people say, well, people are driven by the profit motive and therefore they don't want to invest in pollution controls because it interferes with their profits.
They make less money.
Now, this fundamentally is a consumer issue, right?
I mean, if consumers get outraged about it and won't buy the products of people who pollute, then they will obviously invest and so on, right?
But people then somehow assume that governments are, like, weirdly immune to To this situation.
So, I mean, you may know this.
I think Mario Rothbard writes about this.
The apple orchard farmers in the 19th century, right?
They were suing, through the common law, the factories producing all the soot, the crap, and all over their apples, ruining their harvest.
They were suing for damages.
But the government basically, I mean, the court ruled against them.
And one of the main reasons for that was, I would assume, was because they were getting a lot more tax money I mean, governments try to get businesses to come to their location and one of the ways they do that is to make it cheaper for them to operate businesses there.
What is it in Delaware?
There are more corporations than people because it's so cheap to incorporate and other reasons.
And yet, so weirdly, people think that the government is not concerned with protecting its tax base, right?
I mean, if you put in pollution controls, businesses might leave.
They will lobby against you.
They will lobby to get you voted out of office.
They will, you know, all this kind of stuff.
So, it's somehow capitalists want to keep their income and their power and their jobs, but politicians don't.
The difference, of course, is that entrepreneurs and capitalists are subjected to the preferences of the marketplace, whereas politicians' edicts are enforced at the point of a gun, and therefore they're really less responsive as a whole.
But it's kind of weird.
They've got this magic wand called the government, which is supposed to solve all these problems.
This is the argument, right?
Wow!
It solves all these problems.
And, of course, it doesn't.
It doesn't solve these problems.
You've just got this magic word called the law.
Oh, we passed the law, therefore the problem is solved.
And you do that by creating a separate category of human beings.
So people are motivated by greed.
Politicians and bureaucrats are not.
It's like, well, no.
They're human beings.
Whatever you say about people, you say about people.
All these animals that suckle their young and are warm-blooded and give birth to live young, they're all mammals.
Except for this one penguin I would call the government.
It's like, well, why is that penguin different?
Because I want him to be.
Because I need him to be.
Because my theory demands that he be.
It's like, well, no, you just made a universal statement and now you're excluding everyone who conforms to this universal statement.
So creating this magical world...
Where problems get solved because human beings who are exactly the same as everyone else have completely opposite motives.
I mean, it doesn't work.
So, we'll talk just a little bit about DDT and then we will do some Q&A. DDT is...
I mean, what do most people know about DDT? Oh, farmer, farmer, put away your DDT now.
Leave me the spots.
Leave me...
I'll take the spots on the apples.
Leave me the birds and the bees, please!
Right?
Joni Mitchell's song, right?
DDT is a problem, and the only benefit that DDT has is it makes the apples look nicer.
It's the only benefit it has, and to make the apples look a little nicer, they're willing to destroy all of the birds in the world.
Well, she's a singer.
As you can hear from my rendition, she knows as much about DDT as I do about good singing.
And DDT is almost without doubt one of the greatest biochemical benefits to the human race that can be conceived of.
That has ever been.
Right, so 80% of human illnesses are born by insects or other anthropods.
Arthropods, sorry.
80% of human illnesses are born by these insects, and DDT keeps them at bay.
40% of human crops are eaten by junk, food, birds, insects, whatever, and DDT keeps them safe.
So that's really important to understand.
Now, DDT wiped out malaria.
In fact, malaria was on its way to becoming smallpox.
It wiped out malaria in the south of the U.S., where it was a huge problem, like a murderous genocidal problem in terms of death count and so on, and the debilitation count.
And throughout the third world, it was transforming, right?
I mean, it was eliminating.
Just a little dusting on it keeps your house free of mosquitoes for like six months.
And so what they did was they waived the everything is carcinogenic wand by feeding massive amounts, like more than human beings could possibly tolerate, feeding massive amounts of To animals and so on, and then they found, oh my goodness, right?
In high enough doses, it's bad for you.
It's like, well, yes.
And if you drop a brick on a mouse, it will kill it.
That doesn't mean that your house is out to get you.
Peanuts, same peanuts for a carcinogen in high enough doses.
So, Rachel Carson had all these hysterias, right?
That there was this secret poison that was going to harm human life.
And I think she was actually referring to her own book, not DDT. But people believed this, right?
And the reason that people believed this is that, you know, they'd forgotten about DDT, right?
They'd forgotten about malaria, right?
So, it was all like the northern cities, the environmentalist movement, and the cities themselves, and the fact that people were in cities, right?
It was a huge blow against malaria because cities are not hospitable to insects, to mosquitoes, and therefore, right?
So once the memory of DDT and malaria begins to fade, right, then people, and you all move into cities where it's not an issue, then people just think, oh my god, DDT. Like, they forget about what a great boon it was, which is, of course, really tragic.
So they then start to ban it.
Now, banning DDT in the first world wasn't such a big deal because malaria had been largely dealt with.
But malaria in the third world was a huge problem.
So, how on earth does a ban in the first world translate to a ban in the third world?
Well, it translates because of foreign aid.
So, one of the dangling participles of foreign aid contracts was, we'll give you the money, but you can't be using any DDT. And, of course, the politicians would rather have money than DDT because they live in cities, like in the third world, so it's not so dangerous for them.
And so they take that.
And that's just a big, messy, ugly problem.
DDT is conservatively...
Sorry, the ban on DDT is conservatively estimated to have cost 100 million lives.
100 million lives.
That's two and a half World War IIs.
And you can tell the concern of the average Western liberals to the Third World victims of their policies by the degree to which this is talked about.
No, no, no, they're too busy talking about McCarthyism as the real horror of society, not a genocide 15 times bigger than the Holocaust for a substance that is incredibly beneficial and has not been shown to cause any problems whatsoever.
All right, so I better stop.
I think that's going to be the gist of the speech.
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