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April 21, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:25:52
2367 An Atheist's Guide to Political Freedom!
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Hello, and welcome to Skeptically Yours, where thinking is free.
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I don't think that's going to happen.
Well, you never know.
That's true.
They do like to tax the fuck out of us.
They're taxing our sex.
Not quite, but they are taxing us in the ass.
True that.
If your listener has ever been duped by anything that's been debunked on Snopes, welcome.
Your ordeal is over.
We're coming to you live from the second floor of the fabulous John Lovitz Comedy Club on the GoCast Network, high atop the hill of Universal City Walk in sunny Universal City, California.
In the Universal City tonight, we have Dean Cameron, John Rael, Ed Clinton coming to us via Skype, Stephan Molineux.
You know these guys from the world of reason!
What?
Hi, everybody!
Hi!
Is this my turn to talk?
I think I'm just going to yell my way through the whole thing, just to keep pace, because I imagine that you must have pretty much face-planted in a vat of cappuccinos to get that opening.
I'm only hoping that I can keep up in some manic fashion, so please.
Thank you so much for the invitation.
I wish that I could blame it on caffeine, but it's cocaine.
Ah, fair enough.
It was a curse something.
I could get that.
Welcome to the show, Mr.
Canadian.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
It's nice to be here.
Now, Dean, listen, Dean, I asked Dean if he would come on the show because John Rael and I have been wanting to do on the show, we've been wanting to talk about rights versus privilege.
And the hot button for that right now would be healthcare.
So it's not necessarily a big skeptic topic when you really break it down.
But at the end of the day, it sure feels like a skeptic topic to me.
And I'll tell you why.
Because the whole libertarian and the far right and the liberals...
There's a lot of shit being said that ain't accurate, isn't true, and it's just rhetoric.
And I think that fits right in the wheelhouse of skepticism.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it also deals with medicine, which is a whole other issue, because there's alternative medicine, which is people waving chicken bones and going woo-woo and breathing a blue light.
And that can become becomes part of this whole health care debate.
Right.
Because some people want that.
Yeah.
In their health care.
Now, when I asked you to be on the show.
Yeah.
I know that you are a staunch.
You don't like libertarians.
No, I frequent fight.
Now, listen, you and I hung out a couple of times, and we had big discussions on the libertarian viewpoint.
Right.
Now, why are you shying away from the word libertarian?
Well, because it's getting such a—like, someone just sent me this Bill Maher thing where he talked about what's wrong with libertarians.
So you're mad at Bill Maher?
I'm mad at Bill Maher.
And what libertarians are— I prefer libertarian as a verb, so that viewpoint, but not as a political party, because as a political party, it's a robot killer for me, because politics is a government program, and if you're sort of for small government or no government, being part of a government program makes no sense.
I love, but I've spent enough time with the Libertarian Party to know that I don't want to be part of it.
Well, that's kind of how I feel.
I mean, the Libertarian thing just seems...
It seems like the classic way too fucking extreme to be functional.
Well, no, it's not.
It's just the problem is that the representatives of Libertarian Party are often angry white guys screaming taxation is theft.
What do you mean by freedom fighter?
I want freedom.
I want freedom for all things.
For all things?
For all people?
All things and all people.
And can you pick your own nickname, though?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, okay.
As long as no one else is taking it.
So, Hitler's mine.
Sorry.
Already taken.
By me!
All right.
First of all, Bill Maher has long since called himself a libertarian.
I mean, he thinks of himself as a libertarian.
He kills my robot.
In what way?
What do you mean?
He's deeply established.
Okay.
When he, and this was just like last month, or this, no, it was April, early April.
Last month.
Goddammit!
You libertarians with your months.
When he spoke out against it, it didn't mean much to me.
Because Bill Maher, Bill Maher is an atheist who believes that the anti-vaxxers have a good argument.
He's not a great skeptic.
He's not a good skeptic at all.
And so I just think Bill Maher is pretty lackadaisical at everything except pot smoking.
Yeah, and like I told you earlier, I'd rather be on the hate end of anything Bill Maher has to say, you know?
Good.
It's like, I'm an atheist, and the minute he starts promoting atheism, I'm like, I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, that's the problem.
I mean, libertarians and atheists, it's, you know, the thing is we're herding cats, you know, because we're all individuals, and that's sort of the whole freedom thing.
So that's why I don't really like to be called a libertarian with a big L. Can't you be a libertarian and not be part of the libertarian party?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, every party has its radical fringe, except maybe the apolitical party.
That's the thing, it's not a radical group, because freedom doesn't seem...
We're in a country now where freedom is radical, and that seems crazy.
You're not on silent.
Well, freedom's not safe.
We've got to be protected, Pete.
Exactly.
But I do think that libertarianism is something that atheists and agnostics should really look into, because, well, for a couple of reasons, I mean, first of all, we don't like...
I looked deeply into it, Stefan.
Go ahead.
Okay.
So, I mean, we don't like, as atheists, we don't like magical solutions to complex problems.
You know, like, where did we come from?
God did it!
Where did the world come from?
God did it!
That's not an answer.
That's a barrier to exploring and getting a real answer.
And we have this kind of knee-jerk reaction these days.
Got a problem?
Pass the law.
Got a problem?
Write to Congress.
Got a problem?
Get the government to solve it.
This is magical thinking.
The government is not solving problems.
The government is generally making things worse.
The government is like the aforementioned cocaine.
In the short run, man, you'll feel great.
But in the long run, it just makes things generally worse because the government violates the non-aggression principle.
The government violates The respect for property rights, you know, not initiating force and respecting property rights.
If you all went to kindergarten, that's kind of an important lesson that you got there, but then suddenly we get to these big giant structures like guards and governments and we turn our moral rules upside down and we say, well, they can initiate force and they can counterfeit money and they can sell off the unborn through national debts and we'll call that a moral society.
But that's like looking at the Old Testament and saying, okay, yes, well, okay, Yahweh can blow up all of the world and, you know, he's just got mankind's best interest at heart.
You just create all these opposite moral rules, these massive moral structures, and I think that's a great concordance between atheism and at least, at least significant skepticism of the government.
But unfortunately, atheism has been tied with, you know, leftism, secularism, communism, and so on.
No, no, it's absolutely broken.
Do you consider yourself a libertarian?
No.
Okay.
Did you ever?
Yes.
I started around the age of 16 or so.
I read Ayn Rand and became a minarchist, which is like government is like law courts, police, and military, and that's it.
A government you can fit in your back pocket in a pair of ultra-tight jeans, and I tried.
It actually was.
So yeah, I was a minarchist for many, many years and then I just gave up the ghost and said, well, you can't create this square circle called voluntary taxation.
So I'm now like a no-state guy.
You could call it anarchist, voluntarist, whatever it is.
So I have crossed the Rubicon to complete consistency with non-aggression and respect for property.
So technically anarcho-capitalist to be distinguished from anarcho-communist.
I'm interested in exploring the idea of a world which can function beautifully, magnificently, without any of this primitive Stone Age superstition called the state, any more than we need religion to cure illness.
We don't need the state to cure social problems.
You know, praying just makes illness worse, usually, unless it's going to get better on its own.
But praying to the government in the form of voting really is surrendering yourself to a much more destructive pathogen than even a deity.
I was just going to say, it's funny he talks about a magic answer.
From a lot of libertarians, I hear like the one magic answer being the free market.
Right.
Like healthcare.
But there's no answer.
There is no answer.
I mean, trying to find an answer is...
Okay, so, I mean, just a very, very brief little analogy, right?
And then I'll withdraw.
I'll believe that when I hear it.
Believe!
I'll try.
Okay.
So people want to say, well, how does healthcare work in a free society?
How do you take care of the poor, the edgy?
Who built the roads?
Free society, this, that, and the other.
And fundamentally, it doesn't matter.
So when the abolitionists in the sort of 17th, 18th century were trying to end slavery around the world, of course there were lots of people who said, who will pick the cotton if we don't have the slaves?
And the answer is fundamentally, it doesn't matter.
Because the problem is that slavery is a model.
I think it's the Negroes.
Yeah.
Who will we lynch if we don't have the Negroes, right?
The Jews!
I'm for the Jews!
It doesn't matter, though.
The fundamental thing is that...
I mentioned I'm on cocaine, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, the problem is that it's immoral to own human beings.
It's immoral to own 100% of them in the form of slavery.
It's immoral to own 50% of them in the form of taxation.
And it's immoral to own 150% of them in terms of the unborn with the national debts going 150-200% of GDP. It's just wrong to do all of these things.
So what happens when we do the right thing doesn't matter nearly as much as just identifying and doing the right thing, which is to… To say, to admit, we're not done as a society.
We're not done.
We haven't solved all the problems.
This Stone Age behemoth of a state which we've inherited from the ancient Egyptians 8,000 years ago might not be the very best way to run things in a 21st century society.
It's just possible that we've got a better way of doing things.
I want to back you up a little bit.
When you compare slavery to taxation, I just have a lot of trouble with that.
I said to a good friend of mine, who is very much a libertarian and a proud one, he was making the argument, why shouldn't corporations be able to use their money to vote?
Why shouldn't they be treated equally in this way?
In the middle of this conversation, I finally realized something that just makes a lot of sense to me, and we're going to have to take a break, and I want you to explain it better, but here's where I'm going with this.
It's not the same when people vote for healthcare.
That is democracy at work, I think, and that doesn't make any sense to me.
Listen, and you're not going to get an argument out of me when it comes to the insanely awesome and awful pie That is the offense budget that we have in this country.
You know what I mean?
And I think that many, many Americans, in fact most Americans really, would gladly give up a massive amount of defense money to take care of the poor and to give us all health care so that we can have at least the bare minimums like so many other countries have.
And I think the problem is the horrible imbalance in how our taxes are being spent, not that we're being taxed.
That's my opinion.
And when we come back from this—we're going to take a break now.
When we come back from this break, we're going to see exactly what Bill Maher had to say.
Then we're going to have Mr.
Mollineau explain why I'm an idiot, because I'm pretty sure that I am.
You're listening to Skeptically Yours on the GoCast network, SkepticallyYours.net, and available at the iTunes store.
More after this insufferable interruption.
And now back to Skeptically Yours, where thinking is free.
We're talking with Dean Cameron, John Rahel, Edward Clint, and Stephan Mollignol.
Thanks again, Mr.
Molyneux, for being here.
I just left the discussion and went to break with the question, how are we comparing the democratic process, voting for taxation to slavery?
I just think that's so extreme.
What do you have to say?
Well, okay, there's a number of responses.
First of all, we agree that 100% ownership of somebody else's labor is slavery.
So we're talking about the difference between full slavery and half slavery, right?
Because you're down to 50%.
You take people's 50% by force.
Of course, there's more legal rights.
This is a far better system to live in than just about any system that has ever come before.
So I'm down for that.
We've made massive improvements.
But the reality, of course, is that...
Yeah, but the young don't have a choice, right?
I mean, people are born, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt by decisions people made in the past.
The government prints money to buy votes.
We all know that.
The Fed is currently pumping $80 billion a month into the economy, creating this massive bubble in the stock market and again in real estate, and it's just going to crash again.
I mean, this is hysteria.
If people actually wanted to get a benefit from the government and the government had to pay for it, the system would collapse.
I mean, this is why Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard in 1971 because they simply couldn't pay for the welfare warfare state, the Vietnam War and Johnson's Great Society at the same time.
Because if I said, well, some politician comes along and says, Steph, vote for me and you'll get $500 worth of benefits.
And then I vote for him and he immediately raises my taxes $750 to pay me the $500 and his overhead.
I'd be like, hey, wait a minute.
I'm down $250.
This system doesn't work at all.
But if you can borrow the money or print the money or, you know, find some other way to get it that doesn't impact my taxes immediately, then I'm kind of dragged into this belief that I'm getting something for nothing, which completely corrupts the body politic in the long run.
Do you think that there should be any health care, socialized health care at all?
Well, it depends what you mean by socialized.
Do you think that we should help the poor people?
Absolutely.
I'm a very charitable guy.
Of course we should.
You tell me what makes sense then.
Rather than pontificate on what I might have meant, tell me, is there any kind of socialized healthcare that makes sense to you?
Yes, there is.
Let me tell you, I've got a perfect historical example of incredibly functional socialized healthcare that did not involve the use of violence.
So, in the 19th century in America there were these things called friendly societies.
You still sort of see the vestiges of them in Shriners and so on, right?
And these friendly societies, like 25-30% of Americans were enrolled in these friendly societies and they all pooled their resources and they all hired doctors and you would pay, you won't believe this, a dollar or two a year to get unlimited access to healthcare.
And this was about one day's wages For the average lower-income American worker.
One day's wages got you as much healthcare as you could eat.
And of course this system worked really well until the doctors got really upset and decided to lobby the government to restrict doctors, to force the government to impose price restrictions, to force midwives out, to raise the price of healthcare so the doctors got more money.
And so we had a perfectly functional, wonderful healthcare system, you know, given the technology and so on that was available in the past.
Everything works until the government comes in and mucks it up.
I mean, as Harry Brown used to say, the government is good at only one thing, which is breaking your leg, handing you a crutch, and then saying, see, without the crutch, you wouldn't even be able to walk.
So, we've got tons of examples of wonderful healthcare systems in the past, which have all been mucked up by increasing government regulation and control.
And now you need the government to pay for healthcare because healthcare is becoming so insanely expensive because you've got huge amounts of lawsuits and so on all run by the government system.
You've got a massive restriction on who can supply medical services.
I mean anyone can go and be a computer programmer.
I mean if they do a good job and people like what they do, why is it that we have to have 12 years of training for somebody to say, oh you've got an infection?
Oh, here's some antibiotics.
Well, that's really complicated, isn't it?
So we've got tons of things that we could do to lower the cost of healthcare, but in order to do that, we have to break up the government monopolies on the provision of healthcare.
But rather than do that, we have to say, well, we need more government, more lending, more control, more power, more laws.
But this is how we got here in the first place.
More of the same is going to make it worse.
Okay.
Ed, would you like to – first of all, what's your position on all this?
Well, there's quite a lot to unpack in there.
He speaks very quickly.
I think it's not a nuanced view to look at this as more or less government.
There can be a lot of good government or a lot of bad.
You can't just say more or less is good or bad.
My immediate reaction is I really want to know what your empirical evidence is for your most basic claims that government mucks everything up, because I can name a few places that don't have government or places where states have collapsed.
Afghanistan used to be a state.
You can go to places that are non-state or pre-state, like Somalia.
These are not places I would like to spend 10 minutes, let alone my life, but if you have examples of a non-state paradise that I've never heard of, I would like to hear about that now.
Well, again, there's a lot of non-rebuttals to what I said, but we'll gloss over that and just focus on what you're saying.
First of all, Somalia has significantly lower infant mortality.
It has a greater life expectancy, and it has better telecommunications, better educational standards than it did when it had a government.
Of course, you're going to hear a lot of that.
You cut out.
I'm sorry.
Hold on.
Hold on, Stefan.
You cut out on that.
Sorry about that.
Somalia lived under a dictatorship from the Second World War period up until the 80s.
It lived under a dictatorship.
Somalia now, since the government collapsed, has lower infant mortality, better educational standards, more freedom from women, and a lower death rate because the government was killing people like crazy, as most African governments do.
Somalia can be favorably compared not only to when it had a government to But to almost all the governments around it, Somalia is doing better by almost every metric you can imagine.
They have the most advanced telecommunications systems in all of Africa.
So, of course, you're going to hear all this negative stuff about Somalia.
But so there is some revival. - Towards the future.
- Say that again, Ed. - That's the poster.
You could put Somalia on a poster towards the future That's the utopia that we can march towards.
Well, no, no, no.
But you don't compare Somalia, which is still a very primitive tribal society.
It's not like they've had the Greek philosophers, the Roman philosophers.
They've had no Renaissance.
They've had no Enlightenment.
They've had no Age of Science and Reason.
They haven't gone through the whole development of human thought that a lot of Western culture has.
So you don't compare Somalia to like...
Okay, Detroit.
Maybe that would be unfair to Detroit.
But you wouldn't compare Somalia to most Western countries.
You would compare Somalia to Somalia under a dictatorship, and you would compare Somalia to other countries around it, which it's doing a lot better than.
Any empirical evidence that this is really a better place to live in there?
There's no way I will believe that Somalia, even if it's better than the cruddy dictatorship that used to exist, it's not better than Denmark.
It's not better than Canada, where you live.
It's not on the whole better than any of those places.
So I want to know what place really proves that non-state is better than the state, despite all the flaws.
Well, sure.
I mean, there's a thousand years that Ireland actually had no government for about a thousand years and didn't have any particular wars and so on.
But again, these are all sort of very primitive societies.
But the case for a voluntary society can't be made empirically until people accept it.
So people say, well, you provide me evidence for a society where not having slaves is a good thing.
Well, if everybody believes that, you'll never have the evidence, right?
I mean, you have to make the faith based on ethics.
But I'm not buying your comparative.
I'm just not buying your comparative.
Which comparative?
The whole slavery comparative.
I was born into a country that is taxing me.
And so I don't disagree with you that we're overtaxed.
I can absolutely agree that we're overtaxed, and I think that there should be a lot of reform in what's going on with taxes and how they're spent.
I think there should be a lot of government reform.
There's no question we agree on those things.
What I don't understand is the extremist view that you seem to hold, the extremist comparison that you, Penn Jillette, and a lot of the other libertarians I know seem to think that— Dude, the word extremist is not an argument.
That's just an adjective.
You're not making an argument.
You're just slapping a label on a belief system and saying, well, it's extremist and thinking you're making a point.
The argument that taxation is theft.
No, no.
The argument that taxation is theft.
No, it's not an extreme comparison.
It's not an extreme comparison at all.
No, let me make the case.
Just calling it an extreme comparison is not making an argument, my friend.
You have to learn how to debate if you're going to deal with the big ideas.
Okay, so let me make the case.
You made your case.
I thought you made your case.
I didn't make the case that taxation is theft.
You said that can't we agree that to take 100% of somebody's work, labor, is slavery.
I agree with that.
So to take 50% of it is not slavery, and for the record, I don't believe that most people are having 50% taken, either.
That's the other thing.
No, it's more than 50%.
It's more than 50% because you have to count national debts, deficits, and unfunded liabilities, which is the promises that governments have made to people in the future that they have no capacity to pay for, which is upwards of $80 trillion for the U.S. economy.
Ed, is half of your pay going to taxes, John?
I don't think it is, but Dean, do you want to jump in on this?
You're not looking at it the right way.
I'm sorry, in what way, in what way will I think that half of my taxes, I'm sorry, half of my pay are going to taxes?
Maybe you could be making him more money.
Well, maybe I could be making, I couldn't agree more with that.
And for the record, when Lewis Black, Became, I'm assuming, a millionaire.
He was stunned at how much less percentage he was paying suddenly.
How much less percentage.
And he was horrified.
And he's talked publicly about how awful it is that the wealthy aren't even paying anything.
That you just hire a good Jew and all of a sudden you're not paying taxes.
So it doesn't quite work that way.
I think they're overtaxing the poor to be sure, and certainly the middle class they're overtaxing, but it's not 50% of the price.
No, they're certainly not overtaxing the poor.
I mean, come on.
I mean, what is it, like 8% of the poor pay taxes?
I mean, it's crazy how little the poor are taxed.
I'm not saying they should be.
be.
I'm on the side of the poor here.
But to count your tax burden, you don't just look at what's taken off your paycheck.
I mean, we all know that, right?
I mean, you have to count the deficits, you have to count the national debt, and you have to count the unfunded liabilities, which are the promises governments have made to pay off retirees' benefits, give them free health care until they reach age 300 and so on.
Dude, am I going to get a chance to finish a sentence in this debate here?
You have dominated this fucking discussion!
I'm just asking.
I just waited to let you guys finish your point, but if you're not going to let me finish a sentence, it's just not going to be as much fun.
That's all I'm saying.
Maybe it won't be as much fun from here forward because you say so many fucking things that I'm having trouble having a reasoned discussion with you.
So if you'll allow me once in a while to try and jump into a point rather than filibuster, I really would appreciate it.
So I'm going to ask you to accept the fact that...
Dude, this is not a filibuster, but go ahead.
Okay.
So, yes, I am going to, on occasion, interrupt you, and I'm going to ask you to clarify, or I'm going to say that I don't agree with the premise, rather than have you run on down the highway where I don't even remember the seven things that I disagreed with.
So, please, bear with me.
Okay, and let's just do one at a time, then.
Tell me one thing you disagree with, and I'll back down if I'm wrong, or I'll try to clarify if I can.
One of the things that I disagree with, fundamentally, is the rolling together the national deficit, the debt, all of those really complex issues.
Again, most of which you won't get much of an argument from me on.
You just won't.
I think that the government is out of fucking control with spending.
I tried to become a libertarian.
I mean, I tried like a motherfucker.
I sat down with friends and I said, help me understand this.
And it just isn't working for me because of the kinds of arguments I'm hearing here.
They don't fucking add up.
They just don't make sense.
So if you want to talk about taxation, then we should talk about the percentage.
I mean, you just said that 8% of the poor pay taxes.
By the way, I don't think that's accurate.
The poor are taxed at the fucking cash register to the hilt, and it's getting worse and worse and worse.
Especially in California, New York, places like that.
So the poor are paying a massive amount in taxes, comparatively, percentage-wise, to their incomes.
Let me ask a specific question.
Why is it, and I'm not an expert in these things, so I'm just asking the question, all of the periods following intensive deregulation, lower government, reducing of rules, the laissez-faire government of, you know, Policies of the early 20th century, the last 20 years, they were immediately followed by corruption, rising costs of health care, and everything else, and general economic depression, not to mention complete criminal activity by those corporations leading to collapses of markets.
Why does that always seem to happen?
Okay, let me just – I didn't want to rudely sort of look away and type while you were talking.
Let me clarify.
I can't remember.
There's a low percentage of the poor who actually pay sort of federal taxes.
You're right.
Tax at the cash register, tax on gasoline.
I get all of that.
So I really want to clarify that.
To say that they don't pay any taxes is not accurate at all.
So, you know, definitely wrong about that.
But this idea that there's this period of deregulation followed by corruption – I think it's pretty much...
I just did a video on this, so I won't go into the arguments in great detail, but I think to argue that the financial system is about the most heavily regulated industry on the planet in the United States, and the regulations go into the thousands and thousands of pages.
The government controls the entire money supply through the Federal Reserve.
The government controls interest rates, which is fundamental to a free market.
So you have price fixing in terms of interest rates, which really messes things up for anybody trying to make long-term business decisions.
Totally agree with me.
And the entire financial industry is incredibly shepherded and herded by the government because there are so many, like tens or probably hundreds of millions of people in the West who don't want to be in the stock market, but they're forced to be in the stock market.
Because they have to put their 401k plans or they're in government pension plans or you name it.
There's some way that the government is forcing them to put their money into the stock market.
People don't want to be there.
And so what happens is – and I actually was part of a company that went public when I was an entrepreneur.
So it's a crazy environment because there's this short-term gains that you can make massive amounts of money just by jigging things around because there's so much money sloshing around the stock market looking for any kind of profit because it shouldn't – money shouldn't be there.
We shouldn't be forced to invest in companies just to avoid the tax man.
And corporations, I mean corporations are almost a completely government-created beast.
I mean corporations, I mean a legal personhood for a fictional company that has legal immunity for people who do bad things at the top.
It's a terrible system.
Stefan, hold on now.
Ed wants clarification here.
I don't know what this has to do with my question.
What you described, you're making some good points, but those are always true things as far as I know.
Every year, I mean, that's the case.
My question was, why do periods where clearly there is deregulation in the sense of lowering of rules, lowering of restrictions, more hands-off government being followed by corruption and economic devastation?
Wait, wait, wait.
I was answering because I was saying there was not deregulation.
Stephan, Stephan, Stephan, we have to take a break.
I apologize.
I'm not trying to be addicted.
Dean wants to chime in on this one, too.
We're going to come back to that question right after this commercial interruption.
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More after this insufferable disruption.
And now back to Skeptical, yours where thinking is free.
We're talking with Dean Cameron, John Royale, Edward Clint, and via Skype it's Stefan Molyneux.
Stefan, can you hear us still?
Yes, I certainly can.
Okay, great.
Repose your question again, Ed, and we're going to go first to Dean Cameron, then we'll let Stefan clear up how Dean fucks it up.
I think there's some consensus that historically, in the early 20th century and Deregulation has led almost immediately to corruption and to economic devastation.
No.
Not for me.
Go ahead.
What examples can you offer, Ed?
Okay, so early 20th century, laissez-faire economics.
Government was very hands-off.
Many believe this led inexorably to the Great Depression because there was stock fraud and everything else.
Upton Sinclair wrote about the conditions in the factories and the slaughterhouses.
Fiction.
That's fiction.
Right, but those were real conditions, the things that happened there.
He's saying that the connection is fictional.
But it was yellow journalism and fiction and propaganda, and it did exactly what he wanted to do, which was get more laws passed.
In the last couple of decades.
But that doesn't mean deregulation is bad.
Because Upton Sinclair wrote a really cool novel.
I love that book.
It's a great book, The Jungle.
But let's talk about the Civil Aeronautics Board.
Okay, go.
Go.
...ruled the airlines and gave monopoly to all these airlines for years and years and years.
And when people thought, you know what, let's try to deregulate that.
Reagan era?
Everyone was saying, planes are going to fall from the skies.
People are going to die.
The world is going to end.
Southwest Airlines spearheaded a wonderful thing, which their slogan was, you are now free to move about the country.
And what happened was, in the 60s, 15% of Americans—I looked up a statistic—15% of Americans— You hate statistics!
I do.
15% of Americans flew a commercial flight.
This year, it's 85% of Americans have flown a commercial flight.
And what that means is that we are giving more—this service, this is a very important service that has been not even completely deregulated, but just a lot of regulation was removed from that industry.
And now there are That flights are safer, that they're cheaper, and more people are using it.
Well, let me jump in.
We can apply that to medicine.
Let me jump in.
Wouldn't that be a wonderful thing if we want more people to suffer cheaper and better?
I have a problem with your premise.
Okay.
Okay.
The statistic that 50 percent—one of the reasons— Fifteen.
Fifteen percent.
I thought you said fifty.
The statistic that fifteen percent more people after deregulation— No, no.
Fifteen percent of Americans— Yes?
—in the sixties could afford to fly on a commercial airline.
Okay.
Go on.
I think he's saying it's gotten cheaper and more accessible.
It's gotten cheaper and cheaper and more accessible and safer.
Okay.
And it's somewhat deregulated, not even completely deregulated.
Okay, first of all, just off the top of my head, and I'm not an expert in this at all, but the scientist in me says, wait a minute, I'm not convinced, based on what you're telling me, that the deregulation is what What caused, what made it possible for 85 percent versus 15 percent to fly?
We're talking about a product that, this happens with or without deregulation.
The more planes that are made, the more companies that compete with one another, the lower the price goes.
There were no companies competing with each other.
The government decided what airlines flew where, what the routes were, And they actually said, if one airline can get one more passenger, take one more passenger from another airline, we're not going to approve that route.
There were 79 applications, and not one of them was approved.
Okay, that's bad regulation.
Yeah, and so— Do you think all regulation is bad?
Listen, you asked for— No, no, no, I understand you did.
I'm just trying to—this is an example of something being a little bit deregulated, and more people are able to use it.
When I was a kid, I flew from—my dad lived in California, I lived in Oklahoma, and he had to pay for a plane.
Because my parents were divorced for me to go from Oklahoma to California.
That plane ticket cost $2,500 round trip.
Now it costs, what, $150 to fly from Oklahoma City to LA? Yeah, and the first...
All I want to say to this, and I'm a fucking lay moron, okay?
So I'll admit up front, maybe I'm out of my head here, but Texas Instruments made a $200 calculator I can buy for 15 cents now.
That has nothing to do with regulation.
Yeah, because the government has nothing to do with Texas Instruments calculators.
They never did.
Exactly.
Then why were they $200?
No, why were they $200 the first one ever made or even more?
I think we may be getting into a bit too heavy amount of detail.
I just want to jump in for a sec just to point out that the idea that the free market produced the Great Depression has actually been repudiated by the very Federal Reserve economists.
The Federal Reserve economists have recently admitted, and actually Ben Bernanke was quite famous for a paper on this, Barry Rothbard has proven it, that it was monetary policies in the 1920s.
You know, they expanded the money supply, then they cut the money supply down by 40%.
Then they put all this incredibly heavy socialist machinery on top of the economy that dragged this recession out, the Depression out for 13 years.
And then after the end of the Second World War, all of this stuff is blown away, which is why you had the sort of 50s renaissance of the U.S. economy and manufacturing.
So the idea that somehow the free market produced the great stock rising in the 20s and then the crash and then maintained – this is all – this is not even mainstream economics anymore.
This is just high school textbooks.
This is just the government telling you, oh, we screwed things up, but we're going to blame the free market because that's easier.
We've got you scapegoat right over here.
So, Stefan, what do you say to the housing bubble that just blew up in our face?
What do you think caused that?
Total statism.
Total statism.
Explain.
Yeah, what happened was the government produced so much money.
So much money went into the economy.
Basically starting in the 90s, it was the Greenspan put.
Every time the economy ran into any kind of problems, he printed huge amounts of money, cut interest rates.
What does that do?
Well, it gives people the illusion that houses, which are a consumption good, are actually an investment.
So they put money into their houses, and there's, you know, trillions of dollars of misallocated capital into the housing market, which means everybody's skill set goes and follows that, you know, like the The housing market moves and everybody's like, oh, I'll be a construction worker.
Oh, I'll be an architect.
Oh, I'll be a plumber, an electrician.
Everybody goes and trains to all that stuff.
And it turns out that this is completely unsustainable.
And the government tried to wallpaper it up.
Nobody in the government predicted the housing crash.
There were a few on the Austrian economic side, the libertarian economic side like Peter Schiff and so on who predicted it.
With some modesty, I had a little bit of predictions in there as well.
But these bubbles are all created by the government pumping massive amounts of money into the economy, that money chasing a whole bunch of stuff and making it look like it's appreciating in value when it's not, and then the bottom falls out of it, and the government then makes even more mistakes.
They came to my grandfather's house.
They convinced him to refinance his house, I think on two different occasions, and got him into a payment plan that eventually ballooned out of fucking control, and he couldn't keep up his payments.
Who didn't do that?
I mean, it was the government that did that?
Oh, it wasn't the government.
It was the assholes who were financing him.
And some regulation makes sense to me when I know situations like that.
So, what am I missing?
Stephan or Gene?
Well, no, no.
Sorry, go ahead.
Let me let me interrupt.
I was going to say I'd like to talk a little philosophically because I don't know the ins and outs of the housing market.
But I would say as far as regulation is concerned, I'm just thinking philosophically the more rules, the more regulation you put on people, the more motivation you're giving them to cheat, to cut corners.
That's a really valid argument.
It's one of my favorite libertarian arguments.
Yeah, I've talked to a lot of people, like, in the real estate market, like, during that peak of houses, and they're like, dude, we would forge signatures.
We would cut contracts.
We would, you know, just snip things out that we didn't like.
We would just repaste it later and put it back in.
And, you know, like, all these dirty, dirty schemes that they're doing.
By the way, these are guys writing a screenplay where they turn out to be the heroes somehow in their own mind.
Anyway, real crooks, real thieves.
They tried to get my mom to illegally sign another agreement after Grandpa was dead with a wink and a nod.
They tried to do that.
And my mom was like, I know I can't sign my dead dad's name to this.
So it seems to me, I'm not sure, and I agree completely that we're talking about putting a horse before the cart or vice versa.
Just because there are regulations doesn't mean that we have, that's not a reason to excuse illegal behaviors, is it?
No, but sometimes if there's too much regulations, we're going to have to cheat.
I mean, sometimes, like, you know, it's like you had so many laws, eventually you're breaking the law.
Right.
Well, yeah, there's a book.
Someone wrote a book about how the government is trying to make us all operate underneath the law.
They get more control that way.
Stephan?
Look, okay, so let's talk about your granddad and your grandma.
It's a horrible situation.
Fuck my grandma.
She was a psycho bitch.
We'll just talk about grandpa.
Okay, grandpa.
Okay.
But this is a terrible situation.
Let's look at, very briefly, let's look at the hand of the government in all of this, right?
Because you think this is, you know, just maybe people think it's a bank and some guy, right?
Okay, so the government educated this guy.
Did they ever educate him on finance, on economics, on how all this stuff works, on how money works?
No, of course not.
I mean, all you get is, you know, the battle at 1812 and then capitalism caused the Great Depression and we won the Vietnam War.
Anyway, so you get all this nonsense from the government education, right?
So he was not educated in this kind of stuff.
The government had regulators crawling all over the financial industry.
And the government has thousands of pages of regulation of the financial industry.
And the government was creating the money.
The government was creating the money supply.
The government was forcing the banks, literally forcing the banks, to make high-risk, low-income loans.
They weren't doing that just because they were greedy.
Greed has been around forever.
Why did it suddenly change in the 2000s?
Because...
People really got a strong mandate from government to raise high risk lending mostly to minorities and this is what they had to do in order to retain their licenses.
This is what they had to do in order to get government business.
So the government is everywhere in that transaction and what has happened since?
The people who ripped off taxpayers and citizens Directly through these robo-signing forms.
What's happened to them?
Did they go to jail?
No.
The jails are full of the people in the Occupy Wall Street protests.
3,000 of them got jailed.
How many bankers got jailed?
Zero!
This is a moral outrage.
Zero of them got—what did they—they didn't even not get jailed.
They got bailed out.
They got bailed out to trillions of dollars, which is only going to reinforce it.
So how this can even remotely be viewed as anywhere in the proximity of any kind of solution to this is incomprehensible to me.
Why should they be jailed?
They just said the government forced them to do it.
They're victims in all this.
All right, more after this.
You're listening to Skeptically Yours on the GoCast network, SkepticallyYours.net, and available at the iTunes store.
More after this intolerable intermission.
And now back to Skeptically Yours, where thinking is free.
We're talking with Dean Cameron, John Rayel, Edward Clint, and Stefan Mollignot.
I hope I'm saying that right.
Am I saying that right?
So, where were we?
I had a non-sequitur.
Oh, yeah?
What's that?
Monkeys!
Monkeys!
This is something that happened a couple years ago.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, current affairs people, but there was a couple cities in America whose government shut down because they ran out of money.
Wasn't that like a libertarian utopia?
I mean, how did things run in these cities?
Does anybody know?
Any feedback on this?
I'm sure Stefan knows.
The guy seems to know everything.
What happened to these cities?
Stefan, which cities are we talking about here?
He doesn't know.
There were cities in America that ran out of money.
Their governments had to shut down for a period of time before they could go up and running again.
I'm just wondering, how did that work out?
That happened in New York in the 70s.
Did it?
Oh, I don't.
Look, I mean, come on.
This is not a libertarian experiment when governments drive an economy into the ground.
That's like saying a church fell down and everyone walked out an atheist.
I mean...
To actually be libertarian understanding means you've got to understand the first principles.
You've got to go through the whole arguments.
You know, we're just touching on some of the effects here, but it's the non-initiation of course and all that.
So just because a government collapses like it did in Somalia or governments run out of money, you don't suddenly end up with a libertarian paradise.
I mean, because the whole configuration of the city is messed up and you've got a whole bunch of people who become dependent on the city in a wide variety of ways.
And this is rich, rich and poor.
I mean, the rich welfare whores are almost, I think, worse than the poor.
Welfare whores, because the rich welfare whores tend to get rich through doing things like running wars, which is a lot worse than just collecting a paycheck, maybe, or collecting a welfare check that you don't necessarily need.
So you've got this whole social configuration that happens when you have an ever-growing government.
When that government collapses or can't pay its bills, you get generally chaos.
But that's got nothing to do with a libertarian society.
I'm just wondering if we can get chaos.
I mean, did the private sector kick in and run things?
No.
No, I mean...
Was it allowed...
Right, right.
I don't think it would be allowed to.
I think that the—they don't shut down the police force.
And that's another libertarian claim, and I think holds some water.
Whenever—listen, if you don't pay your taxes, they will either put you in jail or force you to.
I mean, that's what they do.
They will take it right out of your fucking account.
So no one gets to argue that the libertarian view that they use force is wrong, and that's an actual truth, I think.
I think that's an accurate...
It's the truth of all government on Earth.
That's how it works.
Yeah.
That's not...
I mean, that's right, but...
Yeah, force is bad.
Yeah, force is bad.
Forcing people to do something is bad.
Is there...
Well, except, you know, in an extremity of self-defense, I think force is fine.
If some guy's coming at you wielding two flaming chainsaws, sure, release your attack killer rodents at his knees.
I have no doubt about that.
But the initiation of force is a problem.
Here's a question that I've always wanted clarification on.
What percentage of taxes for infrastructure makes sense?
Where's the line for the libertarian view?
It's a confusing thing.
Well, let's first clear a couple of misconceptions away, right?
You all know that none of your income tax goes to pay for anything the government does, right?
I didn't know that.
Yeah, it all goes to pay interest on the debt which is created by you having money, right?
Because we have this ridiculous fiat paper asswipe monopoly money currency system.
So none of the income tax that you pay actually goes to provide any government services or pay anyone.
It all goes into the hands of Of bankers around the world, and it all goes into the hands of people who've lent money to the American government or other governments.
So first of all, I mean, if we didn't have this ridiculous system...
State taxes?
I mean, there was no...
Income tax.
I mean, income tax as a whole.
All the stuff the IRS bugs you for.
Well, we have two here.
We have the state that we pay to, and we have the federal that we pay to.
And I believe you're talking about the federal money must go toward what you're saying, if what you're saying is accurate.
But the taxes that we pay to the state, I think, go to state infrastructure.
Yeah, I'm pretty certain of the federal one, but I'm not convinced of the state one, so I leave that open to people to look into.
But look into that very skeptically because, of course, in 1913, there was no income tax, and there were roads, and there were schools, and there was an army, and there was national defense, and there was no income tax.
And there were public schools even back then, God help us, right?
So the fact is that the income tax is not necessary to provide any kind of basic government services.
Okay, Stephen, clarification.
What paid for these things?
Well, it was duties and customs taxes and so on that, you know, people buy and sell stuff.
Stuff gets imported.
There was customs and excise duties on stuff that paid for that.
But there was no income tax at all.
That was brought in.
After they got their Monopoly bank, right, after they got the Federal Reserve, then it was, I think, 1970.
The Federal Reserve was 1913-2013.
In 1917 was the income tax raised as a short-term, desperate war measure to be ended in just a moment.
Of course, the war, as we know, has continued, First World War, for about 100 years now.
But any moment now, they're going to be relinquishing that income tax as a temporary measure.
I feel it.
It's in the air tonight.
When income tax was instated, or when they began it, it was said that they would not do this forever.
There was a cutoff date, right?
I mean, that was part of the deal, right?
Yeah, it's a temporary measure for the war, yeah.
Well, that's one story about income tax, but as far as I know, income tax also existed like every industrialized nation in the world.
I think it didn't just, it wasn't our idea, like other people came up with it and it seems to work other places in the world besides here.
Well, we were fleeing a country that was overtaxing.
I mean, isn't that part of what—that and religious, I think, are why we got the hell out of there?
Well, yeah, with that representation, I mean, I think that's an important part.
Sorry, to be a little more clear, the immigrants mostly wanted economic opportunity, which they could only get with the relative free market of the United States, where, in the 19th century, prices declined for 100 years.
Can you imagine prices going down for 100 years?
All we know is the dollar has lost 97% of its value in the last 100 years.
If prices actually went down, like if everything was like computers getting better and faster and cheaper, that's the best way to help the poor.
Compelling argument.
Yes, technology makes all of us equal.
Speaking of that kind of equality, gun rights.
Anybody?
Anybody?
Isn't that kind of why we're here?
You'll get my pipe bomb when you pry it from my dead, cold, severed hand!
Yeah, we haven't said anything about the bombing.
I assume you've heard about the bombing, Stefan.
Oh yeah, just horrible, horrible stuff.
I doubt that it's a result of over-regulation, though.
I don't know.
Look, honestly, it's most likely the result of government.
I mean, I hate to sound like a one-drum pony, but look, I mean, this is all rumor.
This is all rumor and speculation, but they have a Saudi national who's in custody.
Now, he's saying he didn't do it, but they're questioning him and so on.
If it does turn out to be a Saudi national, then it's similar to the 9-11 thing.
I mean, it's a horrible, wretched, murderous blowback.
For having armies all over the world, it's the same thing that happened to the Romans, same thing that happened to the British, same thing that happened to the Germans, same thing that happened to the Dutch.
Whenever you have an empire, you get blowback.
This is just one of these horrible truths of history that seems very hard for people to learn.
And so if it was, and again, this is all rank speculation that might be complete bullshit by this time Next hour, but if there is some foreign connection, then it's going to be the result of blowing people up and aiding dictatorships overseas.
I have a question for you about government and atheism.
As atheists, we always get this question.
I have one minute.
We have to get this question.
Where do you get your morality?
You're not kidding, right?
You get it all the time.
But you made this leap when you decided to reject religion and embrace the fact that there is no God, that you make your own, and you'll take care of people, and you'll do good stuff, and you don't need a guy in the sky.
Why can't you make that leap without government?
Well, first of all, this is something you and I have spent hours talking about, and I always enjoy talking to you about it.
Honestly, my direct answer is, I don't believe That we can trust corporations, not the actions of those who run corporations.
Is that the better sentence?
Well, I'm not a big corporation guy.
I'm with you on corporations.
I don't think that they're to be trusted.
And I think the government should stand at our border, and if somebody fucking shoots at us, shoot back.
I don't think we should be overseas fighting, so we all probably agree about that.
We want the ships pointing their guns outward.
That's exactly right.
And I agree with that.
I don't think that letting the free market just do whatever the free market would do will result— In moral behavior, and the reason I think that—and I also don't buy the argument that the corporations take advantage of us because they're being controlled by government.
I just don't buy that pitch at all!
I think the corporations— Corporations, they can't force you to do anything.
Microsoft is a corporation.
What can Microsoft force you to do?
What can they force you to do?
First of all, I'll tell you what.
When you work in a particular industry, corporations do a really great job at controlling your life, at underpaying you, at getting as much work out of you as they can.
That's a voluntary transaction.
You want to work there, then go work there.
If you don't, go work somewhere else.
Nobody's forcing you.
It's not as simple as that.
When you become a professional comedian, for example, and you're making $1,500 a week, and all of a sudden all the club owners start to fucking collude and go, you know, we can get away with paying these headliners $900 a week, and they cut your fucking pay in half, and the cost of living is tripling!
Come on, that's a ridiculous argument here, remember?
It happened to comics from the 80s to the 90s.
That happened to strippers, actually.
It happens to strippers.
Wait, so you're due an income because you want to be a comedian?
No, no.
I think that there needs to be a system in place.
Absolutely needs to be a system in place.
Wait, no.
Let's talk about you being a comedian.
What about?
What about Dane Cook?
What about him?
He makes millions and millions of dollars because people like to see him.
We know what the rules are.
We know there's no guarantee.
I agree with that.
So what are you talking about?
Well, I moved away from that particular line of work because it was killing people.
Yeah, it's voluntary.
I think there needs to be some...
The minimum wage at the bare minimum should be fucking...
Some protection for comedians.
No, some protection for all workers, because...
I'm aware.
Some protection for all...
Minimum wage is just a...
It's a racist measure.
measure.
It was put in by white unions to keep black competitors out of the marketplace.
We're going to talk about how it takes the minimum wage is in the premium version, because that's it for the free version of episode 33.
Don't go anywhere.
We'll be back with the premium in a moment.
Another show that went off without a hitch.
We miss you, Hitch.
We will be making the full 90 minutes available to our premium subscribers later tonight.
If you'd like to hear the full 90-minute show, please go to skepticallyyours.net forward slash premium and subscribe.
I want to thank our guest, Dean Cameron, John Rael.
So, and Edwards and Stefan Molyneux.
I'm not forcing them.
$10 a fucking month.
I also want to thank my co-host Heather Henderson.
Tune in next week when our guests...
Hey, hey, let me put a plug in.
You never mentioned my show, Freedom Aid Radio.
Tune in next week when our guests will be...
Wait, Tom Cruise?
Well, not really Tom Cruise.
Why are we claiming that Tom Cruise is going to be on the show?
Just to see how skeptical our listeners really are.
And we will be talking about why Emery's a liar.
That seems fair.
Thanks to our audio engineer, Jansen Lefebvre, our theme music courtesy of The Sound, editor of The Aristocrats, Eric Wilson, and special thanks to our Skeptic Tank moderator, Joseph Libertarier-Swam, and our digital publicist and web guru, Cameron Liber...
What is that?
Liberace in winter.
You've been listening to Skeptically Yours on SkepticallyYours.net.
I'm your host, Emery Emery.
And I'm Heather Henderson.
And we are Skeptically Yours.
Skeptically Yours is a product of an ever-expanding universe.
So, Stefan, why is it racist to have a minimum wage?
Well, it's not racist to have a minimum wage, but the minimum wage came in because the poor workers, who were largely minorities, were underbidding the white contractors.
And so one of the reasons that unions love a minimum wage is it eliminates the people who are willing to charge less.
It also gives them a good excuse to raise their own wages, saying, well, we've got to be above the minimum wage kind of thing.
So it – and if you look back into the history of it, it was very much couched in keep the darkies out of the market.
I mean it was pretty wretched stuff.
And as you can see now, of course, I mean tragically because the government is controlling the education, the rich and poor gap is increasing, right?
The whole point of the welfare state was supposed to be to narrow the gap between rich and poor.
Violence generally achieves the opposite of what you want.
Snap this woman until she loves me is not going to get you any Hallmark cards from her anytime soon.
And so, you know, we have this terrible situation now where, you know, you're getting this real permanent underclass in the United States.
You've got, you know, the rich and increasingly gated communities.
I mean, it's pretty wretched, and it was the opposite of what was intended.
And a lot of it has to do with public school education.
A lot of it has to do with the amount of regulation and control that eliminates the poor and the young from competing with the sort of rich, satisfied, older people.
And the dynamism of the free market, the continuous shifting of resources to the most productive elements is really interfered with by huge amounts of government controls.
And it is really causing huge problems in the black and Hispanic communities.
And I don't buy it.
For one thing, the poor class in America has never been majority.
Minority, if you take my name.
There have always been a lot of poor white people, and there have always been more of those in the minorities.
Now, the minorities are definitely poor, but there's more poor white people in America right now than there are poor any other kind of people by far.
I just don't buy that distinction at all.
Stephen?
Well, yes.
I mean, I'm no expert on American demographics, but my understanding is that the poor underclass that is minority in America, the blacks and Hispanics, tend to be concentrated more in the cities, at least in the north, whereas in the south it tends to be more rural.
And it's in the north that you see a lot of this competition with the unions and so on.
So that would be my sort of guess.
But certainly, as we know, poverty is heavily concentrated on minorities, which is something that You know, after trillions of dollars of welfare spending, income redistribution, government programs and jobs programs and government education is a problem that seems only to be getting worse.
I mean, just look at the unemployment figures for minorities.
It's just staggering.
And wretched.
And so, again, it's just my contention that we should look at possibly other alternatives than, you know, somebody was saying earlier, well, let's just get the money from the military and put it into healthcare.
And, you know, but this is a magical thinking akin to, you know, let's pray for the cancer to go away from a little girl.
Why is that magical thinking, Stephan?
Why is it magical thinking?
Because you create...
Let me finish the argument.
Why is it magical thinking to say the percentage of...
The amount of federal money spent, let's say, for the sake of this discussion, and I think it's probably not far from this, is 80% of the government's budgets going toward what they call defense, I call offense.
Why is it magical thinking to say, why don't we take 20% of that and move that to social programs?
Why is that magical?
Because you don't control the government.
The voters are supposed to control the government, so if we could get enough people elected who agree with that concept, where's the fucking magic?
I think that's just voting.
If you prayed hard enough, if you really believed, then the cancer would go away.
I'm saying that we need government reform, absolutely.
I'm saying that we need tax reform, absolutely.
And I'm saying that I'd like to see some people voted in who would aggressively go after this.
It's not magical thinking.
It's fucking Democratic thinking.
But I know – No, it is magical.
You can't create – you can't give a small minority of people all the guns in the world and then have them indoctrinate the young on the virtues of having these tiny group of people have all the guns in the world and then somehow think that you're going to be able to control these small group of people, largely sociopaths, who have all the guns in the world and can print all the – they can type whatever they want into their own bank account.
They can pass whatever whims they want into laws, which armed thugs will go out and enforce whoever they point out.
They can go and invade countries.
They can sell off the unborn.
They can magically tinker with the complex economic decisions and social and moral decisions of hundreds of billions of people.
They're living man gods immune from conscience and you think you can control them by ticking something in a box?
It's never gonna happen.
Well, I'm gonna kill myself.
Why is it more fanciful to believe that we could have a government that's less repressive and more functional than the one we have, but it's not fanciful to believe there's going to be this non-state market system that solves all these problems and does everything better that has never existed, but you're saying could exist and will?
In other words...
Well...
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, no, I mean, in other words, it seems like magical thinking.
We have so much evidence of the productivity and the wealth generation of the free market.
I mean, just look at the last 200 years.
If you look at the GDP of human societies from the ancient Egyptians through till about 1780, it's flatlined.
I mean, it was starvation, it was disease, it was death, plague, war, pestilence, you name it.
People like average life expectancy in Rome was like 20 years old and that's if you survived your first toothache for God's sake.
I mean, Is it so bad to die sexy, though?
Honestly.
With one tooth left.
What's that pickup line in Alabama?
Nice tooth!
So what you're saying is that when you compare life today, for example, to life in ancient Rome when the life expectancy was 20, obviously we've come a long way, baby.
Is that what you're saying right now, Stefan?
Well, no.
What I'm saying is that we've had governments the whole time, but what changed was actually allowing people to make their own economic decisions, to follow their own economic bliss, their own career bliss, to invent, to create, to keep the fruits of their labors.
All of that changed sort of the late 18th century through to the 19th century.
The free market really had its first opportunity to fundamentally be allowed to work.
In the Middle Ages, if you had a guild and you were sort of next to somebody else, You made shoes and somebody else made horseshoes.
You both made horseshoes.
If you sneezed when someone – you could be arrested because then you were soliciting business.
You couldn't even sneeze because then someone would say, well, bless you, and now you could sell them a horseshoe and the other guy couldn't.
He could bring you up on charges.
It was that controlled, that restricted the market.
And so we've actually allowed over the last few hundred years as a society for people to be able to make their own economic decisions.
And the amount of human productivity that has unleashed, the wealth that has unleashed, the technology that has unleashed is astounding.
So to say it's magical thinking I think is to ignore the fact that we've had governments the whole time and life was shit.
It was just like face down and it's like that scene from Monty Python.
He must be a king.
Why?
Well, he hasn't got shit all over him.
Well, that's human history for most of it.
I'd rather be a poor guy now than a rich guy 300 years ago.
All of that's happened because of the free market.
It's not magical thinking to say if we continue to allow the free market to operate, it's going to produce even more goodies because it tends to accelerate in its progress.
It's going to produce even more goodies.
It's going to bring down the price of things even more.
I mean, the poor now have TVs.
You just left the rails, Stephan.
You left the rails.
All of that happened under government.
Governments are continuing...
No, that happened despite government.
No, it didn't happen despite government.
I don't agree with you.
I'm sorry, I just miss your claim.
Are you saying there were no government for the last 5,000 years?
Didn't you just hear the argument?
No, I heard the argument.
You just claimed there's been this amazing free market renaissance.
All of this has taken place that you're describing under government.
And government released their stronghold on people.
Even that small release, we stopped having tiny little coffins.
When government just released a little bit, productivity increased, our lives got better.
Okay, I don't disagree with that.
And I get that thinking, but that is the kind of thinking like, well, if two drinks made me feel good...
Right.
Ten drinks will make me feel...
It is that thinking.
I think we belong somewhere in the middle.
Somewhere...
Life-saving technology is not the same as a glass of whiskey.
Come on.
Well, all I'm saying is that somewhere in the middle there is...
I need to find LOD's thing on Wikipedia and read it, because I think he's got it figured out.
Everybody has some great ideas.
The GOP has a few tiny ones, maybe.
But the rest of them all have some really good ideas, and everyone goes a little bit too far.
And I think that that's what this is.
I think you're just...
That's what I was saying earlier about libertarianism.
Why is freedom too far?
I'll tell you exactly why.
Individual freedom?
You and I will fucking hug and kiss each other until the end of the day.
Everybody should be able to smoke pot.
Everybody should be able to take their own life.
Everybody, honestly, everybody should be able to do any harm they want to themselves.
You know where I draw the fucking line?
When what you're doing is harming others.
And if you're fucking spilling oil into the Gulf, you're harming others and you're harming their productivity.
And that guy should be fucking watched, regulated, and fucking at gunpoint should not be allowed to fucking poison my planet!
Period!
Right.
You shouldn't be given a license to do that by the government.
Yeah, well, listen.
Right?
No, no.
Giving a license to someone to go out into the...
To politicize.
No, no.
Giving a license to somebody to go out there and drill means, in theory, in theory...
On the private property.
In theory, giving them a license means that they're being regulated, they're being watched, they're being told, here's what you have to do.
And this is how much you can pollute.
What do you mean?
That's part of the license.
Again, I'm not going to disagree that we need to reform.
But who you're asking to regulate, just get this.
I don't mean to sound condescending.
I really apologize for this, but really understand this.
The people you're asking to regulate, the people who are sailing the oil ships around, Are the same people who have just shot uranium casing shells into a rack that are poisoning kids and everyone, causing massive increases in cancer and leukemia, that have a half-life of billions of years.
That shit is going to be toxic until the planet is gone.
These are the people that you're crossing your fingers and hoping they're really going to clean up and keep the environment clean.
Look at Iraq.
That's what they're doing there for nothing.
I agree with that.
These are not people who are going to save you.
If you've ever been to Juarez, you can stand on our side, on the US side of Juarez, and you can look across, and you can see.
I was standing there once with a guy who owns a business, and I go, Look at the fucking filth in the air.
Look at the filth on the shoreline of the river.
And you look over there, and I'm looking right into Mexico, and it's fucking awful.
It's just filthy.
And it's clearly, there's no regulations on what they're doing over there whatsoever.
And the guy standing next to me goes, yeah, you know who's doing that?
American businesses.
There are American businesses that are going across the river where there aren't any regulations whatsoever and poisoning...
I don't know.
Governments allow it and governments own the land.
Governments are responsible for enforcing it and governments own the land, so it doesn't work.
We have to find other solutions.
Public property stuff is disgusting.
It's never good.
And also, talking about politicians...
You don't think that regulations...
Listen, regulations on this side keep American businesses from doing what they're doing over there.
How is...
Am I missing something here?
How are you guys on a different page than me on this?
Hold on, I'm just re-balling here, or whatever.
The show takes a turn.
But is it the regulations that keep things going here?
Or is it sort of the market, the competition?
Like, well, those guys really fucked up, so I'm not going to buy their stuff anymore.
Let's buy these guys.
American companies go to other lands where there aren't laws that keep them from poisoning the rivers and they poison the rivers.
That's a fact.
Or they can control the laws.
Because the rivers aren't owned.
The rivers aren't owned by anyone.
Those are Mexican lands, and the Mexican government, which is completely corrupt, like most governments, gives people permits to do whatever the fuck they want.
So you're saying that the problem with the difference between the two borders, the US border and that border, is that the government over in Mexico isn't corrupt.
I mean, is corrupt.
More corrupt than we are.
More visibly corrupt than we are.
Okay.
So it's the government corruption that lets that land just be completely ravaged by American companies.
It is.
That's it.
And the fact that the governments prevent other solutions from coming into being.
And in no way, shape, or form do you think that it's a problem that a corporation from the US would go over there and do that?
You don't see a problem with that, guys?
I'm sorry.
I'm fucking off here.
It's a huge problem.
These are people who are poisoning other people because they're allowed to.
How do you not see that the free market is a fucking nightmare if you let it just run it back?
It is a free market!
That guy can go over there and dump his fucking poison!
Stefan just said it!
Stefan just said that there's these guys, but Stefan, you're saying it's the government that's poisoning these people with this uranium?
Let me ask a hypothetical.
What would the free market do?
Sorry, the US military is shooting this uranium into the Iraqis.
You're talking past me.
I'm unaware of the situation.
Let me ask a hypothetical.
What would the free market do differently?
Okay.
What would the free market do in the case of, man, these guys are running amok?
Do you want an answer from me or somebody else?
Anybody.
Anybody.
What would the free market do differently?
Okay, so let's say that you have a...
Let's say there was no government.
No government at all, right?
And you've got a problem with pollution.
So let's just talk about air pollution.
So you buy a house.
The first thing you want to do is you want to buy some air pollution insurance.
Of course, right?
Because you don't want someone to build a factory and coat your house in soot, right?
Right.
So you buy this insurance, and what this insurance says is that if anybody pollutes the air around your house, we're going to pay you $5 million to move, to relocate, whatever it is going to be, right?
And then this company, who's got all these insurance policies, it has a huge financial incentive to keep the air clean, because if the air isn't clean, they owe all these people all this money.
So they're going to be actively policing for their own economic interests, for their own profits.
They're going to make sure that people don't build horrible stuff around these people where they have all this insurance.
And there's tons of different ways you can solve it.
There's just one possible way of doing it.
But that's a way of making sure that you have somebody who has...
Governments have no economic interest.
They have no economic self-interest in policing things correctly.
Because nobody gets fired if it doesn't work.
Nobody gets fired if the...
If the river goes up in fire, nobody in the government ever gets fired.
You need people who have clear economic interest in things, and that's why insurance is a great way to do these kinds of things when you protect the environment that way.
...
about keeping the air clean.
Well, they don't have interest in keeping it clean.
They have an interest in, instead of paying the $5 million or whatever, bribing the officials that do the measurements, bribing anybody else involved.
And there's no laws, there's no rules, so there's nothing wrong with them just bribing whoever they need to, and you get your air polluted anyway.
Well, bribery is only going to work so long until everybody finds out.
Go ahead, Stephen.
Nobody's going to do business with you then.
Of course they will.
It's in their interest to do business with me.
If they want my product, they'll have to buy it from me.
No, customers won't buy it from you if you cheat them.
I don't see any...
I mean, just look at eBay.
Look at eBay.
I mean, if you cheat people, you go out of business very quickly.
I mean, eBay, there's no government to resolve disputes in eBay.
All you've got to do is keep the cause and effect separate psychologically for your customer.
People will gladly buy the iPhone from the Foxconn factory in China where people are flinging themselves out of building and killing themselves as long as they don't have to know about it.
That's a fact.
Right, and the Chinese government is responsible for that.
If you try to start a union in a Chinese factory, you get 12 years in prison for God's sakes.
This is a government problem, not a market problem.
But on that, there have been a lot of exposés on shitty conditions in foreign factories where companies like Nike and Walmart have kind of turned around and they're like, guess what?
We're going to pay them more.
Guess what?
Their conditions are going to be better.
And China is still a hellscape for workers by any measure.
But what's the alternative?
Yeah, I'd rather work for an American company if I lived in China, in China, than a Chinese company in China.
My point is that the corruption is just as easy in the example you just gave as it is in government.
It's just as easy to bribe people, just as easy to hide the evidence to have people look the other way.
It's not.
The evidence comes to life in government, though.
It's like, oh, I'm just going to step out of this office and go to another.
But in companies, they lose their business.
GEICO, State Farm, Farmers Insurance.
Those three compete with one another.
There's competition.
Do we agree on this?
Yeah, I'd say so.
Okay.
But not in a free market.
But not in a free market.
Right, right, right.
I'm scared to death.
No, it's not.
Look, insurance and finance in the U.S. is not even close to a free market.
It's like healthcare.
This is the circular thing that is the argument that is the free market versus what we have.
There's just no examples.
That make me convinced that in a truly free market, that the same fucking thing or worse wouldn't happen.
There's microcosms.
I mean, there's eBay, there's Wikipedia, there's, you know, little micro-libertarian utopias.
Bitcoin, PayPal, yeah.
But as far as a big, like, my whole life is in the libertarian bubble, I don't know anything.
Yeah.
So the libertarian argument is that I can't even offer that my mom got the shit fucked out of her when she broke her leg.
I don't mean literally.
It's been years.
My mom...
Mom got her ass handed to her when she broke her femur, and the insurance decided to just completely just fuck her over.
I mean, fuck her over.
She has massive bills.
She's got coverage, but she has massive bills that fucked her over.
And I don't know the names.
She's got two or three different...
People that are a tier that she had to...
One of them is...
There's a government system involved here, too, like Medicare or Medicaid, because of her age.
I know that that's part of the equation.
But they put her in a shithole, and I couldn't get them with fucking cockroaches, and I tried to get her moved in a different shithole where they...
Psychotic treatment was bad.
So the healthcare system is fucked.
The insurance system is fucked.
So...
The libertarian view is that's because it's government.
If you just let them do whatever they want to do, that would never happen.
That's the libertarian view.
There would be fraud.
There would be bad stuff going on.
Les?
We think so.
You think so?
I have no idea why.
Well, look, first of all, the government rejects...
I'm ready to try it.
Don't get me wrong.
Let's give it a try.
Stefan, go ahead.
I just had this debate with a lawyer, so I just had this fact on my head.
But the government actually rejects three times the amount of insurance claims than private insurance companies do, so there's not really much of a solution there.
And the question is, why is this stuff so expensive to begin with?
I mean, why is everything that the government doesn't touch going down in price, right?
The computer industry, hardware industry, technology industry is the least regulated industry, and it's the one where you get the greatest improvements in quality and the greatest reductions in price.
The areas where the government is muckety-mucketing about with insane amounts of regulations and tort problems, legal problems, malpractice problems.
The government spends more than 50 cents on the dollar in the healthcare.
It controls the supply of doctors.
It controls licensure.
It bans people from coming into the industry.
And this is why prices are going up so high.
I mean, communism didn't work for producing bread.
How on earth do we think crony capitalism is going to work to produce high-tech medical solutions?
The more complex things are, the less you need guns waving around to get things done.
That's what makes this discussion so difficult because we don't disagree on so much of what's wrong.
I mean, we really do meet right there at the same place.
Most of us.
The solution.
And we want the same things.
We do.
We want clean air.
We want clean water.
We want health care for people.
We want great education.
We definitely want all the same things.
I actually do have an argument in favor of government money, and it's the one Neil deGrasse Tyson always is a fan of presenting, which is that You know, without government money, there would have never been NASA, because there's no return on that.
There's no return on sending a rocket into space.
There's just not.
But we see the economic ripple effect.
We see how much money came from the scientists- How much technology came.
Massive amount.
And so that would be- Yeah, well- Stefan?
What's the answer?
He's a fine scientist, but he's no economist.
And neither am I, but the reality is it's easy to look at, hey, we have Tang!
You don't say, well, that was worth $20 billion an hour, right?
But the reality is, look at all the...
Whoa, bullshit.
I'm sorry, brother.
It's nice to meet you.
Tang is not the fucking...
It's not all we got from...
And do you think that money went out to space?
Did we shoot the money out?
Let me make a joke, for Christ's sake.
Of course I know we got more than Tang.
No, no, but look.
My apologies.
I missed the punch.
It's easy.
Look, let me finish the point.
It'll take a sec.
It's easy to look.
The whole trick of economics is not looking at the visible gains, but looking at the hidden losses.
So absolutely, you can look at a lot of things that came out.
I mean, the internet came out of the national defense.
The defense budget wanted to survive a nuclear attack.
So you can look at all the things that came out of the space program and you can trace all of those back to the space program and so what?
I mean, if the government spends a billion dollars, it can create a whole bunch of jobs.
And you can look at those jobs and say, well, those jobs wouldn't be there and therefore we're up those jobs.
But the reality is the government had to take that billion dollars from somewhere and all those other jobs didn't get created.
All the shit that the engineers created by going into NASA, they didn't create doing something else.
All of the money that was spent there was not spent creating something else.
So looking at the visible gains without seeing all the craters, all the losses, everything that wasn't created that could have been way cooler is, you know, sort of pointless.
I mean, you're just pointing at the thing that's there.
What's your response to the fundamental complaint?
And that is that without government, We never even would have bothered to try to get into space because it wasn't something that would have had a return.
You don't know that.
Well, no, no, no.
I'm asking him to answer.
I don't know either.
I'm not making the argument.
I'm just saying...
It would have gone the same way everything does, which is, you know, the first calculator is $10,000, and now, I mean, you can't give them away.
So, of course, people want to go into space.
My God, I would love to go into space.
Penn Jillette's got this great chapter in his last book about stripping in space.
I mean, I think that would be a hilarious thing to do.
What a huge amount of fun.
A little out of my price range, but, you know, the rich pay for all of this stuff, and...
And then it goes down in price as it gets more commercialized because we all want cool new experiences and my god, zero gravity seeing a sunrise over the whole planet?
I mean, who wouldn't kill to do something like that?
It would be fantastic.
So there's a huge return on it.
It's just that the government sucked up so much money that nobody can afford space travel anymore.
Yeah.
I don't know that I figured anything out today.
I really don't.
You made a thing, and what I was talking about with someone today is all my answers are just going to be LASIK. Any questions is going to be answered with LASIK. I was going to ask you.
Let's clarify.
LASIK, LASIK. Let's clarify the LASIK. It's the one thing that insurance companies wouldn't cover, and what happened?
The prices dropped.
It got more efficient.
It got safer.
I got a Groupon.
Somebody sent me a Groupon for LASIK. A fucking Groupon.
For laser surgery that's going to cut stuff in my fucking corneas.
For a Groupon.
For a discount.
Okay.
That's insane.
So why couldn't we do that for other things in our bodies?
Let's make sure we're clear on this.
700,000 LASIK surgeries happen every year.
Okay.
And I'm going to sound like a nut here, but let's say the media might be sort of prone to...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If LASIK was bad, don't you think they'd be jumping on that?
No, I don't think it's bad.
No, but I mean, if there were some botched LASIK surgeries, don't you think we'd be hearing how horrible LASIK is and it's this free market thing that insurance is deregulated and it's awful?
It's not really bad.
So LASIK is this wonderful example of what can happen in medicine.
Okay.
So, and I've heard the argument before that LASIK is, you can get two eyes done for what, $700 or $300?
Depends on what you're doing.
How good was your Groupon deal?
It was okay.
It was okay.
I have really bad astigmatism.
So you used the Groupon deal?
No, I'm not going to use it because...
I'll still have to wear glasses.
Did you check into it?
Yeah.
Has anybody else had LASIK? My neighbors had LASIK. Do you know what you paid?
$4,800.
You paid $4,800.
When?
And is it that cheap?
It was $1,700 an eye.
$1,700 an eye.
And you paid yourself because insurance didn't cover it.
Why is insurance not covering LASIK? Do we know the answer to that?
It's considered optional.
You can just wear glasses.
It's cosmetic, basically.
Okay.
So the reason that it's so cheap is because the insurance companies refuse to pay for it.
And therefore, the doctors...
The doctors want to ensure that it's really safe and really good.
Okay.
And they have to, for once, figure out how much.
And they have to compete with each other, so they can't collude on price.
Okay.
Because there's not going to be this other entity that's going to pay for it.
Okay.
You know, when my wife and I, when we have our...
Don't these doctors have high insurance they have to pay?
Yeah, and that's probably part of the reason why it's still...
It's expensive.
I mean, $1,700 a night is not cheap.
Yeah, I was about to make that point.
But it's cheaper than it used to be.
And that's what's happening.
The price is going down.
There's no reason to think the price is not going to go down further.
It may not be a dollar, but it's going to get cheaper.
Okay.
You think it's going to get cheaper?
Absolutely.
How much was it when it started?
Do we know the answer to this?
I don't know, but if I told you 30 years that there's an operation that they're going to use a laser to cut into my corneas to make my eyes better, what would you say?
That's a million dollars.
No, I wouldn't.
I'd say $100,000.
I mean, if you just imagine that.
If you imagine that 30 years ago, and I said, there's a laser surgery they're going to do on my eyes to make my eyesight better.
I mean, how much are boobs?
Any technology, submission.
The best ones, there's a doctor in Utah, he's the best one, he got $5,000.
Any technology sufficiently advanced enough looks like magic.
So your example plays on that.
If you said to me 30 years ago that they're going to use lasers to correct vision, I'm going to be honest with you and tell you, I would be surprised if that cost more than a few hundred dollars.
And here's the reason.
Because I would presume, and I could be wrong about this, I would presume that the machine that is doing the work, you're not cutting with a scalpel, and we have a machine that...
Yeah, but it sounds like science fiction.
That's my point.
Go on.
My point is that sounds like science fiction.
30 years ago.
You're thinking grocery scanner.
No, I'm not.
I would have thought that.
I'm thinking, I presume they lock your head down and the machine does all the work.
Work does.
And then they fucking, I'm guessing that they clockwork orangea.
And then they, right?
And then they go in with a laser.
Wait, wait, wait.
There's many counterexamples of procedures that have gotten very, very cheap over the years that are heavily regulated, right?
And I don't want to have to drop a controversial issue.
Can you give me one?
Abortion.
Abortion?
Super cheap.
Yeah.
Super cheap.
It used to be very expensive, much more invasive, much more complicated than anything else.
You can really get it done free.
I mean, and by the way, when they say hanger, they don't mean the plastic one.
But that's not covered by insurance either.
That's not covered by insurance either.
Okay.
So you're saying that...
So I think that's actually in line with the LASIK argument.
It is heavily regulated.
It's heavily regulated, but not covered by insurance.
Okay.
I think that it's...
Which means there's competition on price.
That's all we're talking about.
Competition.
I disagree with you.
I think that most of the people I know that have gotten abortions went into Planned Parenthood where both government and private money are paying for it.
And that's what really has driven down the price, isn't it?
Or has that played a role in it?
Am I wrong?
I know I'm not an economist, but...
Well, I know that personally if abortion was made illegal that I would I wish we could clear all this up.
No, we have another show waiting to get in here, and I've gone over.
That's it for Premium Episode 33.
I want to thank everybody, by the way.
Thank you so much for subscribing.
Another show that went off without a hitch.
We miss you, Hitch.
I also want to thank our guests, Dean Cameron, Jean-Rael, Edward Clint, and Stefan Molyneux.
Stefan, thank you for being here, man.
Thank you, Stefan.
Thanks.
I just want to mention the show I run is Free Domain Radio at freedomainradio.com.
And thank you guys so much.
It was a really enjoyable discussion.
I really appreciate the time.
Okay.
Free Domain Radio is great.
Free Domain Radio is great.
Say it again.
Freedomainradio.com.
Freedomainradio.com.
Tune in next week when our guest will be...
Tom Cruise.
Wait a minute.
Tom Cruise.
Well, not really Tom Cruise.
Why are we claiming that Tom Cruise is going to be on the show?
Just to see how skeptical the listeners really are.
I guess we'll be talking about why Emery's a liar.
Seems fair.
Thanks to our audio engineer, Jensen Lefebvre.
Our theme music courtesy of the sound editor of The Aristocrats, Eric Wilson.
And special thanks to our Skeptic Tank moderator, Joseph Libertarier, Swam, and our digital publicist, web guru, Cameron Liberachian, Winters.
Makes him gay there.
You've been listening to Skeptically Yours on SkepticallyYours.net.
I'm your host, Emory Amory.
And I'm Heather Henderson.
And we are Skeptically Yours.
Skeptically Yours is a product of an ever-expanding universe.
I want to take the last couple of seconds to say that our thoughts...
Go out to all of the folks in Boston who are suffering this awful, awful event.
Hang in there.
A marathon?
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