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Nov. 5, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:12:07
2248 Moral Hysteria and Environmental Genocide (Speech)
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Time Text
So hello everyone.
I'd just like to thank you all very much for coming to Liberty Now.
When we decided to launch this thing about, I don't know, six, eight months ago, we were like, hey, let's do something.
Let's see if there's anybody out there who's actually interested in these ideas.
And it seems there are.
So again, a round of applause for yourselves.
Sir, first I leave.
This is one of the first large sort of, like, have you ever been to an event like this in Canada yet?
So there you go.
Land, liberty, home of the brave, brave, and all that kind of jazz.
So if you want to do something afterwards, we're trying to figure that out.
We might just stand here and get pizzas and keep talking.
Yeah, or we might just see if we can find a bar or something like that.
The alcoholics on that side.
Yeah, I don't know.
Everything gets a lot easier.
Anyways, and just a quick little thing, so we are, this will be a yearly event, and hopefully this can be the beginning of, you know, sort of starting to spread these ideas in a great way across the country.
So anybody after these events are over, I'm going to email everybody if everybody wants to just help out.
Anybody can help out with spreading these ideas, helping to organize these things.
Talking to people you know, all these sorts of things that we can just get going on this.
And then next week we've got the Toronto Austrian Scholars Conference is coming up.
Also this is the first event in Canada that's going to be focused on specifically the Austrian School of Economics.
It's going to be held here at the University of Toronto again.
The tickets are, and we're going to have Joe Salerno, who is the academic vice president of the Mises Institute down in Auburn, Alabama, is going to be here speaking.
We're going to have Cal Kelly as well.
He's a financial sort of guru guy.
He's going to be talking about monetary mechanics and these sorts of things.
They'll explain to you why you can't ever buy a house, ever, ever, ever, ever.
I'm just going to explain to you.
And otherwise, we've managed to get out of the woodwork all of the, at least the ones we could find, all of the Austrian school economists in Canada.
Who knew they were here?
You know what I mean?
They're sitting around.
They're suffering under the Marxism.
Yeah, so I think that's about it.
And then otherwise, I guess we'd just like to obviously introduce Stefan Molyneux, who, funnily enough, I found this guy, and I was like, this guy's Canadian?
I was like, what's going on?
Who knew?
You know what I mean?
And speaking all over the United States, and of course he sort of told me that, I guess there was a personal anecdote, that he was going to all these library conferences in the United States and saying, you know, hey, I'm going to be in Canada.
Canada?
So I'll let him tell it himself.
It's a real, real pleasure.
Thank you, everybody, so much for coming out.
And, Redmond, thank you so much for putting this together.
I've run a conference or two in my life.
Can we just get a little hand?
Alright, so I have a new theory.
And I wanted to run it by you, and you can tell me what you think.
Now, you know, we all had our carbs.
It's afternoon.
I know we're all propped up a little bit with coffee, but I'm trying to keep it lively.
So if you have questions or comments as I go through, I throw myself off all the time, so don't worry about disrupting the train of thought.
So let's try and keep it as a dialogue.
But I'll tell you...
I'll tell you the theory.
It's quite an interesting one.
And I'm going to do with reference to three things.
I'm sorry I tried to get as much CanCon as I could, but this is with reference to DDT, FDA, and the Cuyahoga River.
We're going to tie it all together in one lovely bundle.
So my theory is something like this.
In the Middle Ages, you didn't get a lot of complaints about child labor.
Like, if you read, I did this whole course on medieval literature because I have no sense of economic value.
And...
And in it, we read a whole bunch of stuff about the Middle Ages, as you would expect.
And I don't remember one theologian or political scientist or writer ever talking about how terrible it was that the five-year-old children had to labor in the fields.
Does anyone have a guess as to why it was not?
And now, of course, we remember how the government saved us all from having child labor, because there was no government in the Middle Ages, interestingly enough.
Why do you think they never talked about child labor?
Yes, sir?
Because of the ones who provided me at every hand.
Yes, that's valid.
I'm sorry, just because I don't know your names, I'm going to refer to you as celebrities.
So I think Robertson Davies is actually correct in the back there.
It's because there was absolutely no alternative.
Right?
Everybody had to work.
I mean, in the European population in the Middle Ages, like, 10% of the population in any given year would die of starvation.
You could have, like, plenty here, and literally 10 miles away, people could be starving to death.
There's no trade.
The medieval guilds controlled everything, and there's a terrible system, and the serfs were bought and sold with the land.
Terrible system overall.
So they didn't talk about child labor because it wasn't an issue.
So if somebody now lives to be 100, we say, what a great, ripe old life he had.
You know, that's good.
Now imagine there's some pill that we can take that makes us live to 300.
Some guy dies at 100, we're like, oh man, that guy died, yeah.
When you change the scope, something that was not a problem before now becomes a problem.
And to make the case, this is a foundational problem of statism, that is exacerbated by statism.
So, child labor, of course, only became an issue in the sort of mid to late 19th century, right?
Dickens and, you know, there was this general sentimentality around not stuffing your six-year-olds up chimneys and so on, for reasonable reasons.
But it only became an issue because it was possible for children to not work because of the accumulated wealth.
That was gathered in Europe in the 19th century, ended the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the start of World War I. In 1914, with the exception of some Prussian nonsense, there was no war in Western Europe, which had never occurred before.
And then, brainiacs as they were, they took the entire accumulated wealth of the Industrial Revolution and blew it up in France in the First World War.
Do you know, almost to a dollar, all the wealth that was created in the 19th century was destroyed in the First World War.
It was the most fundamental catastrophe because it laid the stage for everything that came after.
So when enough wealth had been gathered that it was no longer necessary for children to work, and of course parents generally are quite favorably disposed towards their children and like them not being in chimneys breathing black smoke.
So when it was possible to take kids out of the factories and out of the chimneys, then suddenly it became an issue because it was possible.
And this, I think, is a very interesting phenomenon.
When you look at poverty, right, after the Second World War...
Okay, my first tangent, first official tangent.
Do you know that this myth, right?
We can all recite this in our sleep, right?
What caused the crash of 1929?
No, that's the old idea.
The free market exuberance, right, and irrational greed and all that, you know, caused the crash of 1929, and then the free market was unable to solve.
It somehow was able to solve the crash of 1920, which was actually even worse, but it was not able to solve it, and then the government came in and then tried to rescue everything.
And finally, what ended the Great Depression for the free market and made everything okay again?
The war!
Because we all know that blowing stuff up makes you so rich.
I used to have this fantasy.
I'm not recommending you do it.
I had an economics professor who was talking a lot about, you know, the broken window fallacy.
We all know it.
He's like, you know, war is good for the economy because you've got to rebuild stuff.
I just wanted to go.
I didn't, but I wanted to go out in the parking lot of the key, find his car, and give him a raise like this.
Squee!
He'd come out and say, what are you doing?
I'm donating to your...
Actually, I mean, because in the post-war period, a lot of the fascistic and socialistic and Marxist controls that were put in in the 1930s were done.
They were gone.
And, you know, this Marshall Plan is credited with rescuing Because every government program takes success for voluntarism, right?
But they were credited with rescuing Europe at the end of the Second World War.
It's nonsense.
The economic recovery was already way underway before any of that money was met, right?
It's always a day late and a dollar short with every government program no demand.
And Germany, of course, had the good luck to have an incredibly free market finance minister who was dedicated to Hayekian and just liberalized everything, which is why Germany is now paying off Greece, because freedom makes you change when there's a state around, right?
And so after the Second World War, when all of these status controls were taken away, poverty was...
I mean, the ancient dream of mankind.
You look in the Bible, they're like, oh, the poor will always be with us.
Always underfoot, always hanging on to your leg, begging for money.
At the end of the Second World War, you could see it declining.
And these are even by government statistics.
One percentage point every single year, poverty was being eliminated.
It was incredible.
And so suddenly, poverty became a huge problem that needed to be solved by the state, right?
Because the free market was solving...
We were within probably about 20 years of having no involuntary poverty.
It could be a monk or a student or a podcaster, but you...
That's in order of descending wealth.
But we were within like 20 years of actually not having poverty for the first time ever in human history.
Statistically, it was going to be done.
And so suddenly, everybody thinks that poverty needs to be eliminated.
And this is where we get the big social programs that come in in the 1960s, right?
LBJ's Great Society, Massive Income Redistribution, Socialized Medicine in Canada...
You know what bugs me most about the socialized medicine thing is that the first generation of socialized medicine got such an incredible deal.
They didn't have to pay any taxes because it was all funded through debt and all that.
And they inherited a free market system paid for by the government.
That's the best.
Because it takes about a generation for things to get crappy.
Because, you know, you've got a bunch of doctors they're used to caring for their patients and stuff, right?
House calls and all that kind of stuff.
And they're not just, oh, government's taking over, I'm going to just not do it anymore, right?
You remember NASA, they sent a man to the moon?
What did it take them, eight years to do that?
I think from when Kennedy first talked about it in the early 60s to 69.
It's just an incredible technological feat.
Why?
Because these guys were all pillaged from the free market, the engineers, right?
And what happened since then?
There's a meme that's floating around the internet, which is like, technology in 1980, and then a cell phone the size of an ottoman, that you actually had to stand outside and point at the satellite and follow them while you talk.
And they had a computer that went from one of these monster brick things to something you can sew in your eyeball or something like that.
And then they had a picture of the space shuttle, and then they had a picture of the space shuttle.
I think it changed, right?
Because once, like, for the first generation, this is why statism is so addictive.
Because that first generation, their taxes don't go up because they're all funded through debt and deficits and printing money and so on.
And they inherit all of the expertise and the resource allocation precision of the free market where prices and ambition and entrepreneurship drove everything.
And it's like watching a movie and it slowly goes out of focus.
You know, the first half of the movie is great and it's like, whoa...
What the hell?
And then at the end, you can't see a thing.
But that's what happens with the socialized stuff.
This is why it works so well for the first generation.
And then later on, it's like, what kind of dunghill was this?
Why did anyone vote this?
Well, because for them, I mean, it was super cool.
It was fantastic.
Free market.
No money.
Woo!
But see, in America too, and I don't know what the name of it is here, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, what is the, you should know this.
Yeah, okay, so they're really interested in industrial accidents because they really want to protect their citizens.
This came in in the 1960s, early 1970s, when they were still drafting people.
Really worried about industrial accidents, we're sending you to Vietnam.
Only in a state of society could that make any sense at all.
We don't want you trussed by machinery, we'd rather have you blown up by landmines.
But of course, industrial accidents were going down hugely before this stuff came in.
And it only became a problem because it was being solved.
Does this make any sense at all?
Good.
Okay, three nods.
I'll take that.
Yes, sir.
Would it be possible to send these, like, something to substantiate these with so that we can have these?
I'm sorry, substantiation?
No, I work on the internet.
Okay.
No, if you try to substantiate the internet, you go back to the Pony Express.
That's what we have to do next.
Sorry, go.
So my point was just like, one of these things I've heard is that I can't cite a conference that I went to.
And I often find that people just don't believe that I can't believe it.
Oh, that accidents were declining?
I mean...
Or like that...
I'll tell you what, I will create a...
I've got this slide, so I'll create a slide show.
I'll send it to everyone through Redmond after the show.
So you, yeah, send it because...
Yeah.
No, I've just got to make up some data.
Anyway, I'll do it.
So much easier.
So I recently had a debate with this guy, Sam Seder.
Did anyone?
He's a nice guy in some ways.
An unfortunate voice.
He sounds a little bit like the Swedish chef.
A nice guy, but he's such a statist, he doesn't even know that there's such a thing as the word statist.
And he brought up this Cuyahoga River.
Did you guys know this story?
The river was on fire, there were songs about it, and then they had to have the EPA because, right?
So there are three things that you know when you hear about a huge failure like this, right?
The river was on fire.
Okay, so here's the audience.
What's the first thing you know when somebody brings up that example?
I actually brought it up in the debate.
When there's collective pollution, let's say.
What's the first thing you know?
Government owns the river.
Government owns the river.
Which means nobody owns the river.
Right?
Now, let's say that's one.
and what's the second one?
Sorry?
I think that's another way of saying what he says.
The free market polluted it.
The free market polluted it?
That's your second guess?
Yeah, okay.
I wouldn't necessarily guess that.
Certainly if the government owns it, right, then they would, you know, probably would be easier to pollute it.
The second thing that you know is that illegal remedies were not permitted to operate.
Right?
Is that clear?
I'll give you some examples.
I do have a fact.
I brought one.
Oh no, that's my name.
Fact free from here on in!
Yay!
Here's my tearaway pants.
Come on now.
Sorry.
Sorry for the image.
Take a moment.
Mentally scrubbed right here.
So the second thing you know is that the legal remedies are being blocked by the state.
Because, you know, somebody...
It puts oil on your beach.
You sue them for property damage, right?
That's common law as old as ancient Rome.
So you know that the common law is not being allowed to operate.
And I would argue the third thing you know is that the problem is much less bad than it used to be.
Because it's now a problem.
I read this article the other day where they said cancer rates have tripled since 1900.
Which is great news.
It is.
Because cancer only usually hits you when you're old.
Which means that they're saying when you had a lifespan of, what, 45 in 1900, you didn't get cancer as much as a population because you didn't live long enough to get it.
Cancer is a sign of health.
It's weird.
Statistically, it's true, right?
I mean, most cancers...
If you die 40, you don't get cancer.
You die 80, you might be right.
So, cancer is a problem because we're doing well.
Right?
So, I did some research to test this theory, right?
I thought, why not try it first?
And so, I did some research in the Cuyahoga River.
So, it's in Cleveland.
Anyone ever been to Cleveland?
What?
What?
What are you doing in Cleveland?
Baseball.
Baseball?
Okay, so that's your little status patriotism shot in the side.
Guilty pleasure.
Okay, got it.
Anyone else?
Why?
Well, okay, so...
From Cleveland, I can understand.
I mean, you don't know where you are when the stalk drops.
It's just what happens, right?
Rock Hall of Fame?
Yeah, all right.
I've never been there, so naturally I consider it completely unimportant.
Sorry?
I should go, it's very nice.
Really?
Lots of places to go in the world.
Are you really saying I should put Cleveland right up there?
Mount Vesuvius, Asian Rome, Tahiti, Bali, Cleveland?
Really, that's where I'm going.
Okay, so just give me their names and I'll go.
Because if it's a recommendation, I want to pay for a hotel.
So in Cleveland, believe it or not, pretty much the river was always on fire.
No, seriously, since the mid-19th century, fires were constant on the Cuyahoga River.
And, like, bad fires.
So then in 1969, there was a fire, and it got national news.
Everybody just went insane.
The rivers are burning!
Sorry?
No, no, that's another status lie, and we'll get to that another time.
And it was a pretty bad fire, right?
So this debris caught fire under a bridge, and apparently flames shot five stories into the air, which gave me an idea for the opening of my presentation, but Redmond's all like fire cones, man.
Fascist!
Come on, you don't need your eyebrows the first three rows.
Anyway, so we went with confetti cannons.
They'll come later.
So there was this constant fire on Cuyahoga River.
There was one in 1952 that cost like a million and a half dollars worth of property damage and all that.
It went insane.
Like, we've got to clean this river up.
It's crazy.
Now, when time ran the story in 1969 about the fire on the Cuyahoga River, I know this is going to take a moment to re-orange yourself, they completely misrepresented it.
The fire was out so quickly, it was out within half an hour, so there were no photographs there.
Nobody got there in time, because it was pretty minor.
I mean, it flared up and they put it out and all was fine, right?
So they ended up printing a picture of the 1952 fire, which was huge and terrifying, and saying, fire on the Cuyahoga just last week.
Of course, you know, it's the wrong picture and all that kind of stuff.
But everybody kind of went insane, and it's like there's a huge problem to be solved.
And so there you get the EPA. This is credited with, this is what my debate partner in this conversation was talking about, that this was responsible for the EPA. And the Clean Water Act of 1972 and so on.
So...
The Kinehoga River was much cleaner than it used to be.
The fires were diminishing considerably.
In fact, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, don't you love that name?
I love that name of the newspaper.
That I would give Cleveland credit for because that is a very great name.
So the Cleveland Plain Dealer had a whole article rejoicing the return of fish to the river in like 1960 or something like that, like almost 10 years before this fire.
So it was really, really being cleaned up.
But why was it taking so long?
Why was it so slow?
Oh yes, what's the fourth thing you know when there's an environmental catastrophe?
The government is most likely the biggest polluter.
So who runs sewage in Cleveland?
Government, right?
It goes straight in.
So the government is the biggest polluter.
The Army Corps of Engineers also would just, I don't know, just open up gangrenous bags of filth over the river on a regular basis and all that.
And so the government was the biggest polluter.
They interfered with the operation of common law in a very easy way.
And so if you were a polluter in Cleveland in the 1960s, you would apply to the state for a permit.
Because for every law, you have to create an exception.
If you can't create an exception, what's the point of passing a law?
You can't sell the law to people.
You can sell exemptions to people.
Remember Obamacare went in?
What's the first thing the Democratic Party started doing?
Handing out exemptions and waivers and you don't have to comply.
Thousands of them all strangely clustered around Democratic holdings.
It's a weird coincidence of that.
And so what happened is the state would grant permits to people to pollute.
And the permits were, like, crazy.
Like, basically, if there was one part of water in your oil, you were fine.
And the permits had a little waiver.
The waiver was, if you comply with this permit, you cannot be sued for any public nuisance.
Immunity from law through government waivering.
But it's a free market problem, you see.
So the government grants people the right to...
It's a permit to pollute.
And it grants you immunity from any common law remedy for polluting this river.
And so the idea that the Cuyahoga River was some sort of a justification for an expansion of state power is ridiculous.
The government owned it.
The government controlled it.
There was, in fact, a law that went in that said it was illegal to discharge oil into the Cuyahoga River, which, of course, they also classified as an industrial waste pond rather than a public waterway so that it could escape the feds.
Anyone guess what the fine was for dumping oil into the Cuyahoga River?
Ten bucks?
You are a genius.
It is in fact $10.
And this is back when $10 meant...
Logical.
It was $10.
Now, in the 60s, of course, $10 was like $4,000 or something like that.
But not a lot for an industrial concern.
So this is an important thing.
You know, I know I'm sort of chasing the horse a little bit here, but I wanted to sort of point out that the pollution was getting much, much better.
As Redmond mentioned, right, I mean, we start worrying about pollution when we're not worrying about cholera.
You know, when we're not worrying about infant mortality, we start worrying about pollution.
And also we start worrying about pollution when we live long enough for the effects of pollution to make a difference, right?
I mean, if everyone dies at 30 from a toothache, who cares about black lung that kills you when you're 50?
You want to get your teeth fixed or something like that.
So you have to live long enough for the accumulated toxins to be important to you.
So you have to extend longevity before pollution becomes something you're really that concerned about.
Again, we all want clean air, clean water, but we also want stuff.
So the two can sometimes be a little bit in opposition.
So I think the illustration of the Cuyahoga River is an illustration of how when things get better, suddenly there's considered to be a huge problem.
And I'll give you...
Do you have any questions about that so far?
Comments?
Criticism?
Can you think of any other examples of where things are getting much better and suddenly they become a big problem that justifies state attention?
Anybody, anybody.
All together now.
Okay, sorry, you were saying?
Or about bullying?
Bullying?
We don't protect the children.
We'll let the internet out.
Do you think you just part of why they're out with the brides?
Yes, we care so much about the children and we will sell them off to the Chinese for the sake of getting a couple of won to bribe voters in the here and now.
But we're really concerned about the children's well-being.
We'll sell them off with national debts and so on and we'll put them in these terrible public schools where the 50% dropout rate even in Canada and where they learn nothing but propaganda and they get no economic value whatsoever.
We keep them locked in there so they don't compete with older people for jobs that could be done But we're really concerned about bullying.
Well, of course, my first suggestion would be stop forcing them to go into schools, stop making their parents pay for those schools at gunpoint, and stop having crap teachers, you know, teachers almost universally, I think with the exception of the guy's wife who we talked about earlier.
Oh, he's working the crowd, baby.
They come from like the bottom 20% of all students.
It's like, oh, I'm a teacher.
You just carve that bottom 10%.
Ooh, they become teachers, right?
Which is the exact opposite of one of the best people teaching, not the worst.
So, yeah, I mean, if we were really concerned about bullying, then we'd look at all this kind of stuff.
And of course, you know, as I mentioned before, 80-90% of parents hitting their children, maybe we could focus on that rather than, I got a bad text message or something.
But, yeah, there is this hysteria, and it's used to, you know, scare the parents, control the...
Internet and all that kind of stuff.
And I would say that the treatment of children, of course, has gotten measurably better in many measures over time.
So, of course, this now is a big problem because things are generally getting better.
Oh, I almost ran out of air.
Next, we have some other...
I think Canada.
That may be a bit broad.
Canada is a problem that was almost solved in there.
Terrorism.
Terrorism, right.
Terrorism, of course, is...
Well, I mean, you know, the statistics are pretty clear that between 20 and 30 million people across the world have died as a result of U.S. imperialism since the end of the Second World War.
That's a lot.
That's almost a whole World War II right there.
You know, that's six to eight times the Holocaust.
And yet, you know, it's this crazy stuff that people fly on planes and all that.
There's law enforcement guidelines in the US now that include on the terrorist watch list military veterans and people who support the Constitution.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't doubt that at all.
In fact, yeah, I think that if you find somebody who quotes the Constitution when you pull them over, you are, you know, take the safety off.
That's what they're approaching.
He may know his rights.
Watch out for him.
Yeah, if he doesn't say anything other than, he's in trouble, right?
Sorry, car safety.
Car safety.
Oh, I love that one.
Seatbelt laws.
One of the most dangerous things that we put in place.
Anybody know the story?
It's not a tangent.
It's not a tangent.
It's an audience question.
Seatbelt laws.
Do you know there's an economist who argues that the best way to have traffic safety is to build cars with a giant spike.
Coming right out of the steering wheel.
And the argument for that is that you put seatbelts in the cars, and what do people do?
Drive faster.
Drive faster!
Woohoo!
I'm invulnerable!
I'm in a tank!
So what they do is they drive faster, and it hasn't reduced mortality among motorists, but who pays the price for people driving faster?
Pedestrians, cyclists, a squirrel.
So, yeah, I mean, it's very bad for all this kind of stuff.
And, of course, what's happened is because the government has mandated all these mileage things, too, cars have basically become eggshells, right?
So there's a lot more danger of being in a car now.
I mean, I remember driving in cars with kids.
I mean, it really felt like you could take Normandy with these things, you know?
You slam the door and the...
They were cool.
But now you're basically riding around in a soap bubble on wheels that can go 400 miles an hour.
I mean, it's crazy.
So yeah, I mean, and of course car safety was getting much better as a result of consumer demand.
And so then it became a big problem that had to be solved by the government.
And then, of course, what happens is when the government steps in to solve a problem that's almost solved is it makes it intractable.
Right?
I mean, with poverty, right?
Post-war period up until the 1960s, 10-15% reduction in the real poverty rate, not like relative, like it didn't go down to 10-15%.
It went down a percentage point in absolute terms.
And then...
Socialized nonsense comes in.
And, you know, everybody, I can't believe people think it's cool or modern or hip to be left.
You know, they always get this, it's this city TV thing.
Does anyone, you know, they all like the little home-rimmed glasses, you know, the funky weird shoes and the flappy shirts.
They're like, I'm on the left, man.
I'm hip.
It's like, dude, you know in King Lear there's a line that says, ah, the best society or something like that, that distribution should undo excess and each man have enough.
You know, we've got a bunch of people at a table, and these people have too much food.
These people have too little food.
One scoop here, and everybody's got enough.
If Shakespeare was writing about it in the 16th century, not hip anymore.
That's old school.
So...
I'd like to, any other questions or comments or examples?
Workplace safety.
Workplace safety.
Poverty and poverty.
Yeah, poverty programs for sure.
Workplace safety for sure.
Broadband internet.
Broadband internet.
Yeah, they're talking about all these people in rural communities must have broadband internet which didn't exist in 10 years ago.
Hey, they deserve their porn too.
It's tough out there on the sticks.
I mean, at least for the sake of the cows.
Let's not get down a little faster.
That's all I'm saying.
Anybody here from the country?
I'm sorry.
That's such a...
Well, okay, so...
Sorry.
Chris Christopherson, I apologize.
No, yeah, so it's almost being solved, right?
Although Canada has got...
I think they were chastised recently, the Canadian government, for providing third-world levels of access.
I mean, it's ridiculously slow.
Mike was saying how fast was your internet?
Oh, it's like five up and...
Yeah, five megs a second up and 25 megs a second, 30 megs a second download.
I mean, you basically have to stand in front of a computer with a catcher's mitt.
It's so fast.
And here, I mean, you're struggling to get a third of that.
It's crazy.
Okay, so any other questions?
Government's got another example.
Yeah, affordable housing.
Yeah, and it's weird, you know, because the government says that it wants affordable housing.
Do you know that the square footage property tax on an apartment is higher than a house?
Development charges.
And what does that mean?
They charge the developer.
But is it like permits and taxes?
No, this is on top of all the permits.
Oh, on top of all the permits?
Yes.
No, the charge is $5,000 for a retirement home with just one mortgage, up to $50,000 for a single mortgage.
And what's it called?
It's called a development charge.
A development charge.
You do developing, we'll do the charging.
That sounds about right.
Because the developer is just sitting on a mound of money.
They don't want the prices of the house to drop.
Right, yeah, because people don't know so much about that, right?
I mean, the government has a huge investment or interest in raising the price of housing because that ups the property taxes, right?
And do you know also, I mentioned this at the last Mises event, I mean, I think it's interesting, you know, there's a lot of issues around U.S. housing.
Do you know a lot of people, they weren't just stupid and couldn't read, okay, they've gone to government schools, but they weren't just stupid and couldn't read, like, the fine print, but they actually were getting into very expensive houses not out of breed, but because that's where the good schools were.
Right?
So people think you get sort of free public schools, but you have to buy your way, you have to bribe your way into getting to those decent public schools to your kids by buying houses way outside your possible homes.
Yes, sir?
I think the funniest thing is when people on the left actually recognize that, they don't see that as the problem.
They see the problem, like the pre-market, the best example being Elizabeth Warren, who actually has that.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
I know.
She actually says there's a problem with education in the U.S. because people have to buy the more expensive houses, more expensive.
You have to think about it.
Who's subsidizing your mortgage?
And who's running the schools?
And you're talking about the problem of free market causing inequality to the poor.
Yeah, at a pretty personal level, she really gives me the creeps.
She seems like somebody who's super nice up front and then goes home and sticks forks in her can.
She seems to me that kind of person.
It's way too pleasant to demean her up front for that to be any core-to-core thing.
She's really creepy.
Alright, so sorry, y'all.
Useful so far?
Okay, so here's another example of...
Okay.
What percentage...
Let's take a bit of a turn here.
What percentage of human diseases are caused by mosquitoes and other airborne maschids?
In a state of nature, like prior to DDT, it was 80%.
80% of illnesses came from this guy.
No, 80% of illnesses came to our patient zero.
Anyway.
Say that again?
80%.
Actually, let me read you the direct quote, because it's not a word here I'm not too familiar with.
80% of all infectious diseases affecting humans are carried by insects or other small arthropods.
What the hell is an arthropod?
I could have just said N-Sex, right?
It's the internet.
Dumb it down a little.
It said, these scorches, which have killed billions of people, include bubonic plague, yellow fever, typhus, dengue fever, chagas disease, anyone?
Does that make you paint in a very abstract way?
I don't know.
No, sorry, let's check out.
African sleeping sickness.
Elephantiasis.
I assume that's...
Tripanosomiasis.
I don't know what that is, but I feel dirty.
Viral encephalitis.
That's not good, right?
Leishmaniasis.
Phylariasis, and most deadly of all, malaria.
Insects also cause or contribute mass starvation by eating approximately, in an untreated agricultural environment, approximately 40% of your crops are going to be eaten or destroyed by insects.
So, magical stuff, DDT, first synthesized by a grad student in the 19th century, finally made available through the development of its commercial potential in the 1930s.
I mean, I don't think anyone here is old enough to know or recognize what it was like beforehand.
But, I mean, malaria is just an ungodly affliction of mankind.
I mean, in the South, in the US, at 10% per year, people would be afflicted by malaria.
It was devastating to the economy.
That's why they had to slaves.
Too tired to make it.
Go do it.
And with the introduction of DDT, you know, you spray just a little bit.
Six months, your house is free of insects.
Two cases per year would show up after they did this.
Of course in Europe got rid of it and in Africa and in Asia and so on.
It was an unbelievable change that occurred with DDT. I mean there's nothing that compares to it in terms of its ability to just keep insects at bay.
So who was the sworn enemy of DDT? Who here listens to it?
Joni Mitchell.
Sorry?
Rachel Carson.
Rachel Carson, right, the silent spring lady.
I won't sing it, but you know that song from, is it Big Yellow Taxi?
Yeah.
How does it go?
Hey, paradise.
Yeah, there's just, hey, farmer, put away your DDT now.
Leave me the spots.
Oh, give me the spots on the apples, but leave me the birds and the bees.
Because you really want to go for your environmental information to somebody who smokes.
Yeah.
But so, of course, the myth is out there that says, oh, when you see, without DDT, there's just a few little spots in your apple, but all the birds will die.
All the birds.
Right, so Rachel Carson put forward this book.
She tried to sell it to a magazine, and they wouldn't.
And so, unfortunately, she had to go through no fact-checking, because magazines have a legal response to the fact-check.
So she got the book published full of wildly inaccurate information, misinformation.
And...
I mean, I haven't read it because I try not to put my face into evil too much.
At least, like, welds and blotches and stuff.
But the book is unholy.
I mean, the lies.
It talks about, you know, it's a subtle carcinogen that worms its way into your body and causes subtle destruction.
I think she was actually just referring to her prose.
But...
She also said that it thinned out the eggs of birds and that she had this whole fictional fairy tale of a town with no spring because the birds couldn't sing.
I mean, it was all nonsense.
There's no carcinogenic aspects that have ever been proven.
What they do is they load the dice, right?
I mean, if you feed rats enough of anything, they'll get sick, right?
And so what they did was they, you know, pumped DDT up the asses of rats until the rats exploded and they said, oh my god, it's bad for you.
Which is like saying, I dropped a brick on your mouse and your mouse died so your house is out to kill you.
Makes no sense at all.
And they also said that if you put DDT in water, it'll destroy the capacity of life to regenerate itself.
It's a cataclysmic world.
It kills photosynthesis.
The algae will die with the algae.
The fish, the sharks, us, everything.
The moon explodes and we're all running.
You may remember this from the global warming predictions.
And so they put all of this stuff out there, and of course it was all nonsense.
The guy who actually did...
Actually, let me give you the facts here, because the guy who did the experiment on DDT... So yeah, he said, the maximum solubility of DDT in seawater is only 1.2 parts per billion.
And he says, but at 500 parts per billion, bad things can happen.
I mean, it's 400 times what could possibly be dissolved.
So in order to get this, he had to not use seawater, but saltwater and alcohol, because you could dissolve more into alcohol, including your liver if forever gets its way later.
But...
So, Carson claimed that DDT was doing all of this stuff, but it's not, none of it was true.
So, the government's banned DDT, right?
Because, you know, whenever there's a moral hysteria, you always know that something good is about to get crushed.
You know, that's always, you know, in the stories, they're always chasing an ogre.
They're not.
They're chasing some beautiful dancer, you know, who's helping humanity with fairy dust, and they're just going to put a big giant stegosaurus foot in their head.
Um...
Yeah, so in Ceylon, DDT had cut malaria cases from millions per year in the 1940s down to 17 cases.
I mean, and malaria is seriously bad stuff.
I mean, obviously it kills, it debilitates, it stays with you forever.
In a little, okay, I mean these figures blow my mind, mostly because we don't know, at least I did.
So, in two decades, right, from the sort of 1940s to the 1960s, how many guests, guess how many deaths the EDC has estimated by independent studies to prevent them?
Tens of millions.
It's like in the hundreds of billions.
500 million.
500 million deaths.
Twelve World War IIs.
Right?
89 holocausts.
I mean, it's half a billion people.
I mean, that's as many people as died by governments in the 20th century.
So there's twice as many now.
Um...
And so, there was a whole court case about this, and this Judge Sweeney, he wrote, he said, the uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a dilatorious effect on freshwater fish, estuary organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife.
DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man.
DDT is not a mutagenic or tetragenic hazard to man.
I think that means they don't change into robots with lasers.
I'm not a scientist.
And around the, of course, So they ban it in America.
And why did they ban it in America?
Because malaria is not a problem.
See?
As soon as you solve the problem, there's moral hysteria.
Moral hysteria means they're about to crush something wonderful and the problem has always been solved.
Moral hysteria about poverty means that we're about to eradicate poverty.
Moral hysteria about child labor means we're about to eradicate child labor.
Moral hysteria about workplace injuries means that workplace injuries are seriously declining and about to be eliminated.
It's like there are so many people who feed off screwing up the human condition that if you take away screw ups in the human condition, they're out of the market.
So it's like Comey.
This is 36 years ago, and then all of a sudden there's Comey 2012.
Is that guy back?
The filmmaker?
No, no.
Because he pounded the bishop on a sidewalk or something like that?
Well, you know, it's pretty stressful.
You know, the cold eye of the media comes on you.
It's not always the most pleasant thing in the world.
But yeah, so whatever a problem, and this is really important, right?
Because if we understand that moral hysteria means a problem is about to be solved, that's an indicator.
Because right now, we, not we, but most people think that when there's moral hysteria, it's because there's a big problem that really needs our attention.
What it means is that somebody's income is about to go out.
Right?
Any questions about this?
I just want to finish.
Go ahead.
The interesting thing is they replaced DDT with much more highly toxic chemicals that actually go up blocks of birth at a time.
That is the first time I think this ever happened with a Gamma Brooklyn.
They make it open.
So the government program comes up with more dangerous questions.
For how U.S. wind farms wipe out 400,000 birds a year.
Right.
Right.
And actually the pesticides being banned has caused the researches of bed bugs throughout Manhattan.
Yeah, a lot of lefties don't mind DDT when they've got lice in their bed, right?
There's some issue with yellow rice in Asia.
It's killing children because India doesn't dare to introduce genetically modified rice.
Right.
Yeah, the stuff that's resistant to pesticides, right?
They're afraid that they can't treat it.
The birds are boatery, right?
The birds are boatery, right?
Right, birds are voters.
And interestingly enough, when they did a study, right, so the whole decade, from the 40s to the 60s, the bird population in the U.S. increased at the time of Rachel...
See, this is how weird it is.
This is how we live in language, not in reality.
Rachel Carson can write this compelling, you know, obviously a very good, evil writer.
She wrote this whole book about how bird populations are going to get decimated.
Nobody notices that it's like Alfred Hitchcock movie out there, right?
I mean, it's like birds flying along.
They must be faking it with mirrors.
Smart little bastards.
LAUGHTER At the same time, if I understand your point, it's worth it to use DDT if it saves half a million lives, but it did result in the decline of all equal of penguins.
Well, and that's debatable.
Let's talk about the trade-off.
Yeah, okay.
So he says eggshell thinning.
Is that what you mean?
Yes.
So eggshell thinning is a potential problem.
This is from a couple of different articles.
If you find different stuff, let me know and I'll put it out there.
But it should not be overstated.
The levels of DDT required for malaria control are much less than those required for crop testing, as practiced in the 1950s.
Furthermore, the problem does not affect every bird species.
Indeed, for some species, there is reason to believe that DDT has an overall beneficial effect by protecting them from the insect-borne diseases that are the primary cause of bird mortality.
In fact, dogs doused with DDT were healthier because the parasites were removed from their innards and so on.
So, I agree.
Don't panic and bring in worse stuff, but it's not...
We don't acknowledge reality.
Do you know what I mean?
No, I agree.
That's what I'm saying.
The thinning of the eggshells is not inconsequential.
But if it's just used for, not crop dusting, but just for the malaria control, it's going to have no effect on the birds.
That's what the science says.
Because the American, let's see here, I've got a pretty good quote here.
Oh, yes.
So, in 1970, the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. issued a report, because they were trying to not have it banned, right?
Because they're like, oh, my God, this is going to be catastrophic, right?
And this is what they said.
I'll just read a short paragraph.
It's really important.
To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT, and it has contributed to the great increase in agricultural productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably, perhaps, scrub typhus and malaria.
Indeed, it is estimated that in little more than two decades, the DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria than would otherwise have been inevitable.
Abandonment of this valuable insecticide should be undertaken only at such time and in such places as it is evident that the prospective gain to humanity exceeds the...
Component of the consummate losses.
As of this writing, all available substitutes for DDT are both more expensive for crop year and decidedly, as your point goes, more hazardous.
So there is no magic solution.
There are trade-offs, right?
So the question is that how did the U.S. and other countries...
You could ban DDT in the U.S. because malaria was done, right?
So it's like, hey, we're done with it.
You know, like how we get all mad at India and China for having smokestacks.
Did you see the 19th century?
So how did they get everyone else to stop using it?
I mean, so you're in Ceylon and you're saving a million lives a year with DDT. What do you care if American bands in?
They bribe their governments.
You've got it!
What do they have?
Forced and stolen money.
How noble.
Yes, they bribe the governments.
Isn't it through the international and the US government's control war that they exercise their life with a UN organization?
So U.S. drug policy, U.S. health policy is enforced to them.
I'm no international legal expert, but, I mean, Portugal legalized drugs.
The U.S. can't do squat about it.
It's not through that.
It is through the foreign aid program.
That's the reason they did not legalize.
No, they basically...
But at least according to this, you could only get the foreign aid if you weren't going to use DDT. Now, of course, any reasonable leader would say, screw the foreign aid, my people's lives are more important.
But since those remain largely fictional, they took the money and people started dying again.
Estimated is that since the DDT ban, 100 million more people have died in Africa than otherwise would have lived.
A hundred million more people have died that otherwise would have lived.
We don't hear about that.
And the opportunity costs of all of those people, and I mean, this is one of the reasons Africa remained mired, because it's not just, I mean, it's not just, it's all of the pathogens that get carried by these insects and othropods.
They are all incredibly dangerous, and It's just something you don't hear about.
I don't know if it's because they're a foreign country or of a different color or something like that, but it's just, this is invisible.
I guess nobody can fight Jenny Mitchell on this.
She's a superhero.
So I guess what you're saying is the Nazis weren't subtle enough and couldn't write glitchy little books.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, if you really want to do cognitive humanity, be a good artist with a lack of knowledge and weirdly driven emotional pathologies.
I mean, who writes the history of the 19th century?
Industrialism is Charles Dickens, right?
I mean, that's what people go to for facts.
I mean, people were in factories.
The children were in factories, not in the ground.
But all people think is that.
There's this weird thing.
What's my time?
I know this is a, I'm sort of a newish dad.
My daughter's three.
And how many people here?
Parents?
I mean, half parents.
Okay.
So, do you notice this weird thing?
Like, so when you're reading stories to your daughter, everything is backwards.
Right?
So, nature is fluffy.
You know, nature is cuddly.
Nature is, you know, like, round, apple-cheeked little bunnies hopping in, playing with the tigers and stuff like that, right?
The three little bears.
The three little pigs and all this.
And, you know, the bears are all cute and cuddly and, you know, put out oatmeal because that's what bears eat.
And I really think that when you look at the irrationality of environmentalism, which is different from wanting nice and clean stuff, I think it has a lot to do with just the way kids...
I think if you don't outgrow that kind of stuff...
So my daughter was starting to go out into nature rather than just read about it in books and start to explain things about her.
It's like, Daddy, why do the frogs jump away when we come close?
It's because they're afraid we're going to peck them and eat their eyes out and swallow them whole.
I don't quite put it that way.
What I do is I grab a stuffed animal.
But we have this, and it's got this other book where this bear, he wants to hug trees.
That's his thing.
He wants to hug trees, and then a man comes along, and the man wants to cut the tree down and kill the tree.
And so the bear goes up and gives a hug to the man, and I'm afraid to turn the next page.
LAUGHTER It's like a pop-up with the head flying around.
And then he ripped his entire scalp off.
And you know, the irony.
When you get any kind of brains in your head, you can't, you know, it's like, it's printed on paper!
You have to cut down the paper to...
It's not an e-book.
Anyway, so we get this weird distorted view, right?
So the people are always not so good, but nature is so kind and gentle and fluffy and so on, and there's just this weird thing, and it's all, I'm trying to give my daughter a more realistic, you know, I'm saying this is a fun story, but they actually believe each other.
I mean, nature's a bitch, and nature's horrible.
You know, nature, we talk about pollution, man.
The Middle Ages were pollution.
You know, I mean, you're not enough to eat.
You've got the bubonic plague.
I mean, it's horrible, right?
That's pollution.
You know, what we've got now?
I'll take it.
But we have these weird, distorted ideas of nature and our relationship, too.
And I think a lot of it just really comes from just people being read all this cute, cuddly nonsense when they're kids and somehow growing up with this idea that...
You know, animals cooperate and they like to play together and, you know, they all go out with a tea.
You know, it's just like, no, they're all just hunting and killing.
They're just monsters.
They're little sociopaths.
I mean, nature is just one long serial killer documentary.
All right, so let's just end up with this last example of how, when things are getting better, there's moral hysteria and then The solutions are blocked, are stopped, and the problem usually becomes centralized and worse.
Poverty is declining.
Great society programs come in.
Poverty stabilizes, but in fact it's getting worse because you've got a permanent underclass.
Now poverty used to be more like this.
Now you're stuck, right?
And also if you include the national debt, the poor are really badly off because they're in an unstable situation.
When the bottom falls down, they can't pay the bills.
You've got a whole bunch of people unprepared for change who are going to have to adapt very quickly.
So, FDF. Sorry, this is the big non-Canadian example, but we have mosquitoes.
I know that.
I went up north.
Alright.
According to, this is a lady who's been on my show, Dr.
Mary Ruar, makes my name look easy.
Okay, so as many as one out of three people who've died from disease in the last 40 years has died unnecessarily, according to her research, because of a law passed by Congress in 1962.
So, does anybody remember the big health scary, panicky thing in the early 1960s?
They're pregnant, right?
Okay, so what's the story?
What's the story with thalidomide?
Morning sickness.
Right.
So, yeah, because you've got morning sickness, so then you would take this drug, and unfortunately, for some small percentage of babies, they would be born with deformed limbs and so on.
The number was, I think, About 12,000 babies born in Europe, where this drug was.
In America and in Canada, it was only, like, you know, the doctor will give you a few samples.
They only had samples, so it really wasn't a couple hundred, I think it was, in the U.S., and probably a much smaller number here in Canada, of babies who were born with this.
And, of course, it's tragic and it's horrible and so on.
The science of how medicines affected a growing fetus was...
Dare I say, in its infancy back then.
And so it really wasn't known.
It wasn't like this was, you know, they didn't change or cheat, you know, like they do with psychotropic drugs now, right?
You know this thing where the FDA says, if you can run as many tests as you want, just submit the two best ones to us.
By that rule, I'm a gambler who never loses.
Because I can go gamble a hundred times, twice I win.
I'm infallible!
According to the bell curve, you're eventually going to come up with something that says something that's not true.
They put all these rules in place to vet and triple vet and quadruple vet all of these drugs.
And, you know, the whole challenge of economic thinking is the hidden costs, right?
It's what goes on behind the curtain that's important, right?
So you all know this thing where the government has created a thousand jobs, right?
Everyone's like, ooh, a thousand more jobs.
We're plus a thousand, right?
And all those people who get those jobs are really happy.
I have a job.
Government did me good, right?
But what's missing?
No.
The 10,000 jobs that otherwise would have been created.
And the people who didn't get a job, they can't say, those bastard government goons stole my job.
Because they don't know.
You can't trace that back, right?
And it's the same thing.
So people say, well, you see, we're really vetting our drugs thoroughly now.
Because, you know, since then there have been no recalls.
It's wonderful.
But the opportunity costs are catastrophic, right?
So she's done some research, some pretty serious, and you can Google her and you can talk to her.
She's very, very happy to talk about this kind of stuff.
So these amendments to the drug approval process to go from lab to market went from four and a half years to fourteen and a half years.
Why is that so significant?
I mean, other than the extra cost of development.
The people you would have saved.
Well, the people you would have saved, there's something else too.
Well, yeah, of course, there's no show.
They're going to need a hundred million dollars to develop a drug.
You can't, you know.
What else?
What are the other costs?
You deter R&D.
You deter R&D, yeah.
So for smaller populations of sick people, for cancer, sure, right?
But for people who've got some obscure liver ailment, there's no possible way to cuss justify it.
It cuts into your patent.
It's a huge, huge problem.
If it takes you 15 years, on average it could be longer.
You don't know ahead of time.
That's the problem.
It could be 20.
If you've got a 25-year drug patent, it's going to take you 20 years after you've patented to get it to market.
That's going to affect your spreadsheet quite a bit, right?
Which is why you get boner pills.
No, seriously.
I mean, you know, so apparently there's a big issue.
And so you get boner pills, but you don't get stuff which heals more obscure liver ailments.
In fact, this woman, she was working on cures for liver ailments, affected 100,000 people every year.
The guy at the FDA was saying, come on, give me this stuff.
We've got nothing to offer these people.
But then she went and tried calculating the numbers with the business people, and there's no way that they could make it work.
Sorry, you were going to say?
Yeah, they'll have to be more expensive to improve the cost.
And also you would then have to have a big legal department to prosecute the knockoffs and so on.
So, the amendments, they've tried to calculate how many drugs were prevented from going into a market that later proved dangerous in other areas, and they've saved 7,000 lives since 1962.
Now, to those 7,000 people, that's not so insignificant, right?
Now, what about the numbers?
So 7,000.
7,000 up.
What kind of poll are we looking at, do you think, of people who were denied drugs that are legal and safe to use in other countries but were denied in North America?
100,000.
Millions.
Millions.
4.7 million.
Now, I would argue that for a government program, that's not bad.
No, no, no.
There's something on the plus side.
It's 4.7 million minus 7,000.
Usually you don't get the minus 7,000, so this is hugely successful as far as government programs go.
But that's not all of it.
There have also been estimates based upon the amount of R&D that was occurring before this, and the amount of R&D that's not occurring after this, and the amount of R&D that resulted in life-saving medications being available...
This is just the calculations of known drugs that were denied to people through the government action.
Anyone want to guess about the R&D loss and its effects upon mortality?
Fifteen million people.
One five.
Fifteen million people.
Again, we're talking about half of World War II. The problem is, of course, that people, they don't know this, right?
I mean, if you take a drug and your arm falls off, you're like, shit.
I'm glad I have speed done.
But if you don't get a medicine because of some legislation that was passed 20 years ago, you don't know that.
There's no alternate universe that you can compare it to.
This is why the state is so dangerous.
One of the many reasons why it's so dangerous.
Now, of course, drug safety was vastly improving.
This is how you know when the moral hysteria hits.
It's because the problem is almost solved.
And people are going to step into blank block.
Whatever solution is coming in, because they're dependent upon.
When drug safety was improving, the FDA is running out of things to do.
So how do you make drugs more dangerous?
Well, you raise the regulatory requirements.
This provokes regulatory capture.
You all know this phrase, right?
When you start making things more difficult for pharmaceutical companies, pharmaceutical companies will start to run your organization and have it bend to their will.
And then they use it.
There's no bigger fan of statism than a large corporation.
So they use this then to block other entrants to the market, create a monopoly, and you've got the revolving door between the regulators and the...
Companies, right.
So like in the whole financial mess, right?
I mean, the SEC. Do you ever watch Wall Street?
You know, that old movie from the 90s, was it?
80s or 90s?
80s.
80s, right?
I just remember there was this one scene where there was this guy from the SEC who was walking out, he was like 350 pounds, he was walking out with some spreadsheet waving it around, right?
The really smart guys in the financial industry don't go into the SEC, right?
I mean, it's the bottom 10% again, right?
They're either going to be teachers or regulators.
And can they outsmart the super genius math computer brain heads who are out there?
Of course not, right?
And also they have no incentive to, right?
The Bernie Mandoff scandal was, what, 10 years ahead of time?
They were telling this is impossible, he can't possibly do this, it's a Ponzi scheme.
It's like, oh, we'll get to that.
But right now, you know, I've got to try and get some more conflict of interest to pay raises.
So, sorry, so...
They've restricted their access to porn?
See I'd like to give free porn to all government regulators I'll even do it.
I'll make it.
It's a kinky subset.
Libertarian ballporn surgery.
No, I would, because that would give them something to do other than regulating.
I mean, that would be great.
You know, just keep your hands frizzy.
Don't die.
Don't interfere with us.
You know, I'll give you a ballporn biosphere if you need.
Just stay out of my place.
I mean, in the U.S., it is here too, right?
I mean, it's really chilling, right?
So the cancer patients, you know, obviously facing the Grim Reaper coming down the escalator, they wanted the right to purchase a drug.
A drug that had great promise was in development, right?
I mean, you know, this is how we think there are lots of comedians who talk about, you know, when they're giving a guy the death penalty injection, they're giving an alcohol swab.
Only in the government.
It's a regulation.
No one will get an infection.
That's a close conscience.
But so, like, because the government is saying, well, the drug might be dangerous.
It's like, but the cancer is more dangerous for me.
It's like...
Anyway, so they tried.
They tried to go to federal government and say, look, it's a free market exchange.
We want to buy this drug.
We'll sign every word you want.
I'm going to be dead in six months, according to my doctorate.
This thing is going to give me a 30% chance of survival.
It showed reasonable signs of either slowing the progression of their illness or putting their cancer into remission altogether.
The court ruled that these individuals had no constitutional right to purchase a drug on the free market that could possibly save them.
The Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
I mean, status and kills.
I mean, I've given you some numbers I hope that are pretty horrifying because we all know the numbers of the wars, right?
There's a guy in Hawaii, a professor in Hawaii who runs a website tracking deaths by status called democide, usually democracy, right?
And he calculates the...
Famines, the concentration camps, the forced marches.
He doesn't even include wars.
It's 260 million over the 20th century.
Throw in wars, even half billion.
Another half billion for DDT. I mean, soon we're starting to talk about some serious numbers.
Right?
So, I think it's really important to understand that the numbers that we're talking about are, they stagger the imagination.
What is it Stalin, I think, said?
Because it's always good to quote Stalin to libertarian.
He said that, you know, a single death is a tragedy.
A million deaths is a Statistic, right?
But we're talking about hundreds of millions of lives.
I mean, all people, all like you and I, all facing the same fear of death, the same desire, thirst for life.
And this is all winked out.
And what's so frustrating, to me at least, is when you look at the numbers.
This stuff is being solved by freedom, mutualism, trade, entrepreneurship, our delight in human ingenuity and win-win negotiations.
And whenever we're about to solve a goddamn problem, people step in and screw up the solution.
It's so...
It's like the myth of Sisyphus, you know, that Camus wrote about, this old thing, guy's trying to roll the rock up the hill and every time he gets to the top...
It comes back down again.
It's like we keep trying to solve these foundational problems within human society.
Poverty, disease, opportunity, education.
Do you know what the literacy rate was in America, in Massachusetts, before government schools?
Yeah, 96-97%.
Because there were still some people running for office they didn't know how to write, but everyone else.
And if you look at the books in the 19th century in America, I mean, try to make your way through Moby Dick without a shot of caffeine to the eyeball, that's tough.
It's a big book.
It's a tough book.
Thomas Paine's books were incredible.
I mean, that stuff is complicated.
They've eaten this stuff up.
I mean, people sort of fade out after Archie comics these days.
No, seriously.
The American literacy rate has plummeted.
I mean, even if you count government literacy standards, you can just look at the internet to see what kind of tests they were given to people in grade six.
A hundred years ago.
I mean, it's crazy how much they're doing.
This is when they were learning Latin and Klingon and Elvish.
It was the internet.
I'm not sure how good the sources are, but it seems incredible to me.
And so it's like every time, oh, look, we've solved the problem of literacy.
Let's get government schools in.
Oh, we're just about to solve the problem of poverty.
Let's get a poverty program in.
Oh, we've solved the problem of peace.
We've had a hundred years of peace in Western Europe for the first time in human history.
The largest continental area without war ever in human history.
Government solved that, right?
World War I. Yes?
Aragorn, go ahead, get some sun.
Here's a fun question, and I thought I had an example until the latest Let's Regulate the Internet Out of Distance efforts.
But are there really good examples of problems we've almost solved that the government didn't interfere in, that then did get solved, that we can point to, for the counter-example that sort of shows it?
And I thought we had, we had...
That's a great question.
Largely voluntary regulation by means of, hey, here's a good protocol.
If you want to use it, you can too.
Everybody gets...
Oh yeah, TCPIP, the internet, all of the data exchanges that go to large...
It's exactly like that.
There was no government...
In terms of enforcing that standard.
And then now you start to have laws in place to make sure there are holes in it, to make sure encryption is not sufficiently in place.
So I thought we had an example and maybe we didn't.
But if it's important for us to know about, the government will have screwed it up.
Or if you look at the rating system on eBay.
People say, how could you have a society without a government?
It's like eBay has 350,000 people making their job off it.
It's basically the biggest single employer in the free market in the world.
And there's no government.
There's no court system.
Nobody's going to adjudicate over 50 bucks with a government court.
Or Visa is an incredible dispute resolution organization.
I was talking to a guy.
I was speaking in Vegas.
Because, you know, it's a tough job.
I was speaking in Vegas, and a lawyer was talking about how he went to South America, and they said, oh, it's half price.
And then he said, oh, it was two minutes past five.
They charged him full price for some big meal he went to.
And so what's he going to do?
Get back to the States and call the Bolivian cops and say, listen, you know, I went to a restaurant.
And nothing's going to happen, right?
But he went, call phone Visa.
And Visa dealt with the restaurant and ended up refunding him his money.
Done.
One phone call.
Have you ever tried to get justice from the government with one phone call?
Years and years and years, right?
So there's tons of examples of how these things are resolved without coercion, without compulsion.
I mean, they really go on and on forever.
But yeah, something like the development of the internet is something that there's no email standard.
Or how about cell phone providers carrying each other's data?
The government doesn't order them how to do that or whether to do that.
They do that because it's profitable.
So there's lots of examples of this kind of spontaneous order.
I was talking to someone just before we came in about how, you know, people say anarchy, it means no rules.
And that's true, except for one letter.
It just means no rulers.
It's one R. Take that out.
You get rules.
It doesn't mean no rules.
It means no rulers.
Because when you have rulers, you have no rulers.
You have no rules.
There are no rules in a state of society.
There's books out there that say basically you commit three felonies a day whether you know it or not.
There are no rules.
They can get you for anything they want at any time.
It's chaos, right?
Ayn Rand said this too, right?
A dictatorship is not with brutal rules.
It's with no rules.
That's the problem.
You don't know what the system is.
So a common law, of course, another example of spontaneously developed legal systems and so on.
There's lots of examples of that, but if it's important and it's about to solve a significant human problem, The government will step in, like folic acid, right?
Who here has been pregnant?
Yeah.
Pregnant, of course.
But, you know, it was illegal to advertise that folic acid was good for fetuses.
Because a vitamin manufacturer is not going to pay $100 million.
To sell some vitamins, which the moment they do, since they have no patent of the folic acid, everyone else can do it too.
So when vitamin companies try to save pregnant women, this will reduce, what is it, spina bifida?
Yeah, spina bifida, I think.
This will reduce, or eliminate, right?
Tens of thousands of children born with this terrible disease because the government would not let vitamin manufacturers tell pregnant women about something so easy, so cheap, and so essential to the health of their child.
So, you get problems that are about to be solved.
There's a moral hysteria that comes up.
And I don't know, and it's hard to track where it comes from, right?
But there's this moral hysteria that comes up.
Oh my God, the Cuyahoga River's on fire!
It's like, but yes, but less than it used to be.
Look at the bright spots, you know?
Because occasionally we can see the shore.
Um...
But as soon as the problem...
So I just really want to point out that as soon as you see moral hysteria in society, I can almost guarantee you, please, email me, host at freedomainradio.com.
Any counter-examples, whatever, we'll try and shoehorn them into the theory or change the theory.
But when you see moral hysteria, look for a problem that's about to be solved.
And look for who's bringing the hysteria up.
Because, remember...
When problems are solved, government logically should diminish.
So how interested is government in solving problems?
Is your local security force, alarm force, whatever, are they hugely dedicated to eliminating crime?
Of course not.
You don't see a lot of ads for books on TV. Because nobody can read them anymore.
40% of college grads will never read another book in their life.
It's true.
It's true.
It's astounding.
Our un-literacy is, and of course, you know, the internet or whatever, right?
But it's amazing.
Sorry, somebody had a question?
Oh, I was going to say, I think we solved the acid rain that re-subtype, but that's a huge problem.
Yeah, and there were some hippies in the States who were like, yeah, man!
I love it!
Sorry, cheesy joke.
Cheesy joke.
It's better with a rainbow wig or something like that.
But yeah, you'll see, so, I mean, the constant keeping us in a state of anxiety and fear is why you can't actually solve these problems.
Right?
If we run out of poor people, huge sections of the government have to close in.
Well, but that's what the poverty programs do, right?
They are, in fact, poverty programs.
Yes?
Yes.
So they're coming up with potential problems.
There's so many problems we've never had.
We have a subway station near my place, and there's never been a fire, and if there was, there's only one exit, but the tunnel was also the exit.
But it's been open for 56 years, never had a problem.
So they used eminent domain and took two people's houses to make Yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, the manufacturer...
I remember there was a brief moment of respite between the end of the Cold War and the War on Terrorism.
Remember that?
Three weeks or so, and I was like, ooh, I like this planet.
How much time?
So I was chatting with a woman once on a plane, and I think she was like 16 or whatever.
We were talking about when I was growing up or whatever, because it's good to be that age.
And I was saying we were really scared of nuclear war or whatever, and she was like, yeah, you know, we're scared of Y2K. Wow, that's some hype man.
Global Fuminocular War.
Misprinted subway tickets.
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