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March 27, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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2353 Bitcoin Versus the Euro! Stefan Molyneux on Blacklisted Radio

Stefan Molyneux, Host of Freedomain Radio, talks with Doug Owen of Blacklisted Radio about the failures of the euro, the end of fiat currency, and the dead-end of no more war.

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	This is Blacklisted News Radio.
	My name is Doug Owen and today our guest is Stephan Molyneux.
	He will be joining us here to talk about central government planning and how well it's going for Europe and what it means for us here across the pond.
	Of course, if you're not familiar, he is the host of Free Domain Radio.
	His website is freedomainradio.com.
	He's a philosopher.
	He's into economics.
	He's got degrees and he's got opinions.
	Great!
	videos and his podcast over four million downloads I listen to it often he doesn't have a lot of time and I'm very appreciative for him to make some for myself and the listeners Stefan welcome to the show Thank you, thank you.
	I don't mean to sound insecure to inflate the numbers, but it's actually over 50 million downloads at the moment.
	50 million downloads?
	Wow.
	50 million downloads.
	It's nutty, but great.
	Well, thank you very much for the invitation.
	It's always a pleasure to chat.
	What's on your mind, my brother?
	Well, you know, a year and a half ago, I think it's been over 18 months since we last talked, and this is the second time we've interviewed Stefan Molyneux.
	The world was much different back then.
	We didn't have all the catastrophes that we're seeing today.
	We didn't have banks stealing money out of accounts in banks in the European Union.
	And I think people felt a lot more confidence in the banking system and in government as a whole.
	So I was looking at one of the videos released in January and it broke down just about every socioeconomic demographic that you can look at and all the failures from the mid-1950s forward with social justice and the redistribution of wealth.
	And so we're in a much different place than we were back then.
	Let's just talk about Cyprus.
	It's a great starting point and it's created a lot of confidence crisis in the Euro and in European nations.
	So what are your thoughts on this mood shift?
	I think it's wonderful.
	I think it is sunrise in the planet of freedom.
	I think it's fantastic because finally, finally after 6,000 years, governments have to be honest about what they're doing, right?
	So what would Cyprus or any European country normally do?
	Well, they have two remedies for financial collapse.
	The first is to print money like crazy, and the second is to go to war.
	Well, the euro has rendered null and void the first option because no individual country has control over the printing press.
	So they can't just print and steal money from people through inflation.
	They actually have to do it in an obvious way rather than a subtle way.
	So that's good because that means that people are seeing what the state is, what the government is actually doing.
	Without the fog of inflation and confusion and a lack of economic sophistication.
	Because when inflation hits, people get mad at the shopkeeper, not at the central bankers and the governments, right?
	Because what do they know and why should they know it?
	So here we have...
	Outright, wonderful, delicious, above-the-board, straight-on pickpocket theft.
	I mean, they're going to be armed guards to make sure no money leaves, not too much money leaves the bank, no money is allowed to leave the island.
	Look, people, this is what the reality of the system is.
	So that's beautiful.
	Now, the second remedy for a financial collapse, as we saw in the past, is to go to war.
	Now, nuclear weapons and all that has made that pretty much impossible for at least European countries, if not countries around the world.
	Wasn't it amazing after thousands of years of bloodshed, along come nuclear weapons and suddenly, blessed are the peacemakers.
	So it's wonderful.
	They're out of lies.
	They're out of war fever.
	They're out of printing presses.
	So the actual system is being revealed for what it is, which I think will wake up as many people as can be woken.
	Well, you mentioned mutually assured destruction and how that creates peace.
	I think that when you look at where I live in Texas, you don't have nearly as much crime as you do in places like Chicago and that is because you know the potential for people to be armed is much greater and so people are more polite and so these kind of things unfortunately I think kind of make up for the lack of dignity that humans have but you have mutually assured destruction through interdependence and through the euro and this debt creation via the IMF
	and the Troika so People are very upset, especially the people in Cyprus and the Russian oligarchs as well, in some of the decisions that are being made by the IMF. And if you look at what happened in Cyprus, I was just mentioning this before you came on, the reason that these banks are in trouble is because the IMF forced Greece, which they were heavily invested into, To actually depreciate those bonds.
	So this is actually a problem that was created by central government, though the mainstream media and others tried to point more criminality towards the Russians with this.
	But this is actually bad central banking planning.
	Oh yeah, the Russians are the least powerful criminal gang in this entire equation.
	I mean, good heavens.
	I mean, to worry about the Russians and all of the illicit money they've gotten, as opposed to what the central bankers are doing as a whole.
	You know, people don't learn about stuff until it becomes important to them.
	Most people.
	I mean, people like you and I, idiots who spend their time researching esoteric stuff that we can't possibly change because we have a thirst for knowledge and virtue and change.
	But, you know, when do you learn about cancer?
	Well, when you get cancer.
	I mean, why else would you study it?
	You become an expert immediately.
	Yeah, you become an expert immediately.
	So now we have a delicious, delightful, wonderful opportunity.
	For people to begin to educate themselves about the society that they live in.
	And unfortunately, because we have been shouting into the wind, lo these many decades collectively, if not centuries, people haven't been listening and people have mocked us and they've scorned us and they spit on us and they've called us conspiracy buffs and paranoid lunatics and idiots who don't care about the poor and You know, so it's like any addict.
	If you don't learn through reason, if you don't listen to experts, then you have to learn by hard and bitter experience.
	But learn you will, one way or another.
	So, you know, I mean, this is the inevitable result of people failing to heed the warnings of free market economists, of libertarians, of objectivists, of anarchists, of all the people who've said, there's a storm coming, and it ain't gonna be pretty, and here's what's happening.
	And here's why it's happening and, you know, here's what you need to do to wake up.
	Well, if you don't prepare for the hurricane and you find yourself in a slowly turning Volvo in your underwear, well, you can't say you weren't warned.
	And so this is a wonderful opportunity for people to really begin to learn what kind of matrix they've really been stuck in all this time.
	And you can't, you know, you can't tell an addict to stop his drug when he's on the high.
	You have to wait for the crash.
	And so the crash is here.
	The crash is unfolding.
	They've now, of course, threatened all of the depositors and savers In Spain and Italy, Portugal, other countries, yeah, they're coming for your money because your willingness to work, contribute intellectually, morally, and financially into the system, your willingness to support the system is the only reason it exists.
	So learn about it, withdraw your support, and let's end this nightmarish experiment of hell and get onto something productive.
	Well, I think that a lot of people are doing that.
	In Greece, you're seeing time banks.
	You're seeing a lot of creative...
	Accounting coming out of, well, not only the government, but people as well.
	I mean, ways of creating a value with other mechanisms besides debt.
	And so I just wanted to ask you real quickly, what do you think about Bitcoin?
	A lot of people are saying that's a great way to kind of...
	Make a peer-to-peer system and get some of the central banks out of our transactions and providing a little bit more anonymity.
	We'll pick that up on the other side.
	We're going to take a quick break.
	Our guest is Stefan Molyneux.
	His website is freedomainradio.com.
	Check it out.
	We'll be back in three minutes.
	Welcome back.
	It's Blacklisted News Radio.
	Stefan Molyneux is our guest.
	And before the break, I asked him about Bitcoin.
	I'm a little bit skeptical, but I want to get your thoughts on this cryptographic currency and what it means for people in Cyprus or in places like Greece as an alternative to their own government-created debt.
	Well, I'm a huge, huge fan of bitcoins, and I think that people should really educate themselves about it.
	I mean, first of all, it's a free, transaction-free, anonymous way of transferring value.
	I mean, what an amazing thing.
	What an incredible use of internet technology.
	I mean, I think it's fantastic.
	It's a way of creating these Bitcoins based upon progressively harder to solve mathematical problems that use up electricity and your graphics processor for the most part.
	So it is limited in how much you can create.
	And I think, as you can see, the spike in Bitcoin value up to $60, $70 recently has been very important.
	I mean, the people are voting with their keyboards and they're trying to find ways to get money out of Bitcoin.
	The fiat currency.
	Now, Bitcoin can't be inflated.
	It cannot be inflated.
	Because as more Bitcoins are created, the methodology for creating them becomes progressively more challenging and more time consuming.
	So it can't be inflated.
	And so what you have is a remarkable example of a currency.
	Oh, dear God, doesn't it make you want to lie down and put a cold compress on your forehead?
	We have a remarkable example of a currency that is actually gaining in value.
	Do you know how our entire planet would change if we had a currency that gained in value?
	As, say, for instance, the US dollar did throughout most of the 19th century.
	It gained value.
	I mean, if your currency was safe and your currency gained in value, You wouldn't even need a bank.
	You wouldn't need to put your money in a bank.
	You wouldn't need to hand it over to these predators.
	Can you imagine?
	You just put it under your mattress, metaphorically speaking, and it continues to increase in value and what you do with your money is anonymous.
	I mean, you all see these shows on TV where the cops are on the trail of some guy, he used an ATM in Idaho, you know, we're on him, you know, he's at a payphone, he's got a cell phone, he's, good heavens, just imagine, imagine if what you did with your money was private, and it gained in value over time.
	I mean, it's an astonishing thing, and people should, I think people should really look into it, educate themselves about it.
	It's an amazing phenomenon.
	Well, yeah, and of course it begs all the questions.
	Why is it gaining value?
	And what is it based upon?
	And it's scarcity.
	And so I think that it philosophically answers a lot of questions.
	People debate from economic philosophies, and I'm sure that you have thoughts on all of them, but Austrian economics, it kind of challenges a lot of the things that I have learned over the last 10 years or so.
	And I think it's really interesting because Really what gives it so much value is the want and the desire to be anonymous.
	And so that's real value in this big brother matrix society that we live in today.
	Yeah, no, I think there is obviously a value in that.
	You know, people say, well, there should be a gold standard.
	And yeah, fine.
	I mean, if the market has chosen gold historically, but the market chose, you know, carry pigeons to deliver messages before we had the internet.
	I mean, what the market chose historically doesn't have much relevance to a wired world.
	And yeah, okay, it's true that the amount of gold in the world grows by, you know, a couple of percentage points every year as it's sort of found and so on.
	But you can have disruptions in gold that are much harder to have in Bitcoin.
	I mean, you can have, I mean, just the Spanish in the sort of 17th century discovered the new world and they imported all of this gold and destroyed their economy for actually 400 years.
	It's amazing how powerful currency is in this kind of stuff.
	And so, you know, I would really just suggest people look into it.
	It is a fascinating thing.
	If there was not a government, then there would be Bitcoin, there would be Digipurse or whatever it is, there'd be lots of competing currencies, all trying to give you the best value, all trying to give you predictability.
	I mean, the Bitcoin oscillations are to do with its being compared to and it's being traded based upon the wild oscillations in the value or projected value of fiat currencies around the world.
	So it's not really sort of fair to say, well, there's a free market currency and it's not stable either.
	You know, that's like saying, well, you know, we tied a child on the back of a bucking bronco and the child is fidgeting.
	No, the child is just wrapped to the back of this highly mobile thing.
	People are charging in and out of this kind of stuff because of the terrifying fluctuations and uncertainties.
	I think the world as a whole, certainly the West, is facing for the first time in economic history, I think, outside of war in the Middle Ages, it's facing regime uncertainty, you know, when people are paralyzed because they don't know what the governments are going to do next.
	Why are corporations sitting on so much money, refusing to invest it, refusing to spend it, refusing to hire?
	Because they literally have no idea what crazy notion is going to come charging down the pipe, armed to the teeth to make them do X, Y, and Z. And they need to adjust to the 30 plus percent increases in premiums that have come out of the Affordable Health Care Act.
	What's it going to do?
	Make health care unaffordable.
	Of course, they just put the antonym in front of any government program and you get the actual effects.
	No, I think people should really look into it.
	It's a very important moment in history.
	It's never been done before, to my knowledge.
	And you'd see more people migrating.
	Of course, you're forced to use the fiat currencies because you have to pay your taxes in the fiat currencies.
	And so, I mean, if people could get out of them, they would.
	But there's so many people lashed to that particular mast.
	Well, I mean, if you look at what the BRIC nations are doing, they're trying to build a rival to the World Bank, and they are going to be doing that with gold.
	That's why they're appropriating tons and tons and tons of it, metric tons.
	But you have really a huge shift in U.S. domestic politics as far as monetary policy.
	Rick Perry wants to build a bullion gold vault, and he wants to take the gold out of the Federal Reserve's cars.
	Now, these kind of things, I mean, it really shows you there's some X factors in this political equation.
	And though this is nothing new, the idea that this is popular rhetoric for politicians really kind of, you know, shows you where the people are, at least where they're gauging and where they believe the people are.
	Same thing in Montana.
	You got Arizona looking at making gold and silver legal tender.
	And those are things that five years ago I never thought I would see or hear of in the mainstream media or report on.
	Yeah, and of course, Germany recently, I think it was January, transferred almost 700 tons of gold back from Paris to its vaults in Frankfurt.
	That's $36 billion worth of gold.
	They just went and scooped it up.
	Why are they doing that?
	I mean, people need to ask these questions.
	The earth is shifting underneath our feet, and don't wait till the cracks open up between your toes.
	By then it might be too late.
	People really need to educate themselves on this modern...
	This modern vampire, this modern zombie-based abomination called fiat currency.
	It is what controls your life.
	It is what enslaves your children.
	It is what starves you when you can't afford the ever-escalating price of food.
	And it is just such a slippery, gas-soaked...
	Volatile anaconda closing itself around our throats that people really need to educate themselves on this stuff.
	I know it may not be the most exciting topic in the world, but man alive, people really need to wake up because if they don't, things just get progressively worse until people do wake up.
	Being a libertarian means always being sorry that you're right.
	This stuff has been predicted.
	The whole roadmap was put out in the 50s with Atlas Shrugged, and it's been predicted by Nobel economics prize winners and so on for decades, if not hundreds of years.
	Frederick Bastiat was talking about this hundreds of years ago, that we live in a state of a war of all against all.
	As soon as men can figure out that they can live at the expense of their neighbors, it just turns into this We're feeding frenzy with a bunch of titular figureheads at the helm.
	Our society is not going to work.
	It's not going to continue to work.
	We have not reached the pinnacle of human development.
	There's always more to go, always more to do, and we need to start pulling apart What you've got to do is you've got to get something like Walmart where you can just get a gift card and make it a gift card, wink, wink.
	Stefan, let's take a quick break and we'll wrap it up on the other side.
	We'll talk more about solutions.
	People are becoming more and more aware of these obvious issues, so we'll talk about that in three.
	Don't go anywhere.
	It's Blacklisted Newsradio.
	A perfect bumper.
	Innocence burned live on the steak.
	We were just talking during the break briefly and looking to the people that are so vested in this system they just can't let go of it.
	Just like all the old people that still believe that you smoking a joint somehow It is, you know, destroying America.
	You know, people that are just kind of delusional.
	But not many of them are that innocent either.
	And so it's hard for a lot of people that know what's going on to really turn their back on the beast.
	And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact, Stephan, that we have this Stockholm Syndrome.
	We're used to the The fact that government does things that we don't like, because that kind of happens, I think, in your early childhood.
	Probably one of the more controversial topics that you tackle is spanking and coercion through pain, compliance, and violence towards others.
	And I think that it's fair to say that you are a voluntarist, and so Why don't you speak about that a little bit?
	Because I think that there's a huge correlation between allowing government to overstep its balance because we learn that.
	Yeah, I mean, government is such a strange institution when you look at it objectively.
	You know, like, Voltaire in the 18th century used to write these sort of stories of what would happen if some foreigner, you know, some savage from the New World, so to speak, came and looked at the Court of Versailles.
	Completely incomprehensible.
	If you look at your own society not from within but from without, things look completely bizarre.
	And the question is, why don't they look bizarre to more people?
	So, for instance, when you say to someone, taxation is theft, Then they usually have a very strong emotional reaction to it.
	Well, why is that?
	Well, because we are not strangers to inventing words to obscure aggression.
	I mean, this is, Orwell talked about this many times, of course, this problem of mendacity, mendacity of language, the degree to which we just invent words to cover up aggression.
	So we don't say theft, we say taxation, we don't say counterfeiting, we say central banking, and so on.
	And, you know, we don't say torture.
	We say waterboarding or enhanced interrogation.
	It's all this kind of nonsense.
	And instead of hitting, we say spanking.
	But no, it's hitting.
	And the fact that we have to invent another word for it should make us immediately suspicious of what we're doing.
	You know, if you can't call a thing by its proper name, then you're probably not doing something you're very proud of.
	So when I say, well, spanking is hitting...
	People are like, no, it's lovingly applied discipline.
	It's like, no, spanking is hitting.
	I mean, what are you doing?
	You're striking a child.
	It's not in self-defense.
	Child's not attacking you.
	The child is doing something you don't like or you don't want.
	But...
	Man alive!
	There are billions of people in the world who do things I don't want and I don't like.
	I don't get to put them over my knee and spank them in a creepily quasi-sexual manner.
	I mean, it's just horrible.
	So, I mean, the fact that parents are still so wedded...
	You know, there's a recent study that said that two-thirds of American moms...
	Admit to hitting children six years old and under three times a week.
	Three times.
	It's over 150 hits from a caregiver every single year.
	Do we not think this has any effect on how people perceive authority, aggression, coercion, and the fact that parents say, well, it's the only thing that can be done to keep children from going crazy, from running off into the street and trying to juggle exploding pineapples and take baths in Yeah,
	I mean, it's exactly the same thing.
	And what happens in the family...
	So fundamentally conditions how we view society, and anybody who tries to change society without examining the family is trying to push a shadow without moving a statue.
	It's a futile, ridiculous thing to do once you see it.
	So, yeah, I'm into the non-aggression principle.
	I'm a stay-at-home dad.
	And I have never yelled at my daughter.
	I've never hit her.
	I've never threatened her.
	I don't punish her.
	We reason.
	And she's four and she's damn good at it.
	In fact, she'll reason me in circles sometimes because she's unprejudiced and I have had the infliction of culture put on me.
	You reason with your children, you don't hit them, and that is the most revolutionary thing.
	We can't have a free society until we have free families.
	We can't have a voluntary society until we have voluntary families.
	We cannot have a rational society until we have rational families.
	And so, I mean, I love me some politics, but the most important thing to do is to recognize the non-initiation of force within your own life, within your own family.
	That is the only foundation to build a freer future.
	Everything else is just static.
	Well, and the static, of course, gives you more reasons to look at why the world is the way it is and why we allow things to happen.
	Like you said, if you look at not only your family, but maybe your government, your country from a different set of eyes, it probably seems that a lot of things just don't make sense.
	I see it all the time.
	I have friends of mine that have I'm always critical.
	I'm like, you cannot raise your children.
	Not that I would say that, because I'm a nice person, but I think that.
	Oh no, say it.
	It is not nice to refrain from protecting the innocent and the helpless.
	That is, I think, a false form of niceness.
	Well, no, I mean, they don't want to crap out their kids or anything like that.
	I just think that, you know, you could probably pay more attention or that there's better.
	I mean, we're all critics.
	Yeah, I know.
	And I think that I certainly open myself up to criticism from other parents.
	I've had shows where I've really learned a lot from parents who are more enlightened than me in some areas.
	So I think that to be open to criticism, there's nothing more important that we do, you know, other than sort of taking care of our own health.
	There's nothing more important that we do than the raising of children.
	And This is something we should be engaged in collectively.
	We should keep returning to science.
	The science of spanking is very clear.
	Every time you get lost, you pull out some science, and it usually sets you in the right way.
	Spanking casts three to five IQ points from children permanently.
	Spanking creates a tendency towards social problems, mental health problems, To sexual problems in the future, to oppositional defiant problems.
	It doesn't work, which is why 40% of kids in high school are still being spanked.
	And so violence does not work.
	It will not achieve respect for the parent.
	All it does is it achieves compliance.
	Out of fear of pain in the short run.
	Is that really the best we can do as parents?
	Is threaten our children with pain, with punishment, with harshness?
	It is not the best we can do.
	And children are like these wonderful open flowers.
	They just want to receive the reign of our care, tenderness, and love.
	They do not want to be ruled over and punished and hit and herded and incarcerated in their rooms and punished with threats.
	And this is such an act of desperation.
	It is such an act of admitting that you don't know what you're doing.
	I mean, we all understand that a guy who starts punching out employees has really lost it as a manager.
	And a parent who starts hitting children, at least employees can quit.
	Children can't quit.
	They got no place to go.
	So they need to be the recipients of our greatest and most tender care.
	And yet, in general, in society, they are the recipients of our most careless and brutal care.
	Yeah, well, I agree wholeheartedly.
	And I don't have any children, so I really do wholeheartedly want to put this to test.
	And I do want a family at some point.
	And so those are things that I do think about.
	Breed, man!
	Breed!
	If we can't convert them, we'll outbreed them!
	Come on!
	I'll send you some images.
	It's not a personal choice issue at this moment.
	It's a responsibility to the cause.
	Mitosis is the essence of the revolutionary growth path.
	We must breed for the cause.
	If you're a fan of free markets, all you have to do is think of the Iron Lady.
	Think of Margaret Thatcher in a string bikini, and if that doesn't get your free market juices flowing, I simply don't know what will.
	Or, you know, Ayn Rand shrouded in smoke and speaking like Barry White with a sore throat.
	I think you can tell a lot of listeners, including myself here, Stefan.
	That's right.
	I am now going to be a monk.
	That's it.
	Well, we've got about two minutes here, so for the people not familiar, tell them a little bit about what you have at your website, your books, your podcast, and your show, and what you do.
	Freedom porn!
	No, actually, I have none of that on my website.
	It's freedomainradio.com.
	I do podcasts.
	I've done some TV, lots of radio.
	I've hosted the Peter Schiff Show a couple of times.
	I'll be speaking throughout the summer at a variety of places in New York.
	April 21st, I will be speaking.
	I just came back from Liberty in the Pines, where I spoke with the great Jeff Tucker and the great Steph Kinsella, and I'll be at the Master of Ceremonies at Libertopia on Labor Day weekend out in San Diego, libertopia.org.
	I will be at Dana Martin's unschooling conference, RethinkingEverything.net, in August, and some others I'm Probably forgetting.
	Oh yes!
	I will be in Las Vegas for Freedom Fest in the summer and also at Capitalism Morality 2.
	I will be debating Walter Block on the value of political action.
	That will be in Vancouver.
	So yeah, people can find me all over the place talking.
	Love to press flesh, kiss babies, do all that general non-political stuff.
	And yeah, free books, free podcasts, no ads, and lots of great guests I have on my shows.
	So I hope I'm going to do a Sunday show at 10 o'clock on Sunday mornings, Eastern Standard.
	People can check it out.
	And a documentary's coming out sometime soon.
	Yeah, I saw the teaser.
	It's great.
	I imagine you're spending a lot of time on that.
	It, you know, it is a bit of a black hole, but it's very satisfying to, you know, it's a game of inches with documentaries.
	Ooh, I have another frame!
	Woo!
	There goes my weekend.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It can't be like that, but it's worthwhile.
	Well, thank you so much, Devin, for coming on the show today and making time for us.
	Hope to do it in the very near future.
	Check out freedomainradio.com.
	You can find all of the event and all the great things that he is doing over there and with the podcast and all of the works.

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