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July 11, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:04
2429 Human Livestock Management! - Stefan Molyneux on the Nomad Capitalist Report
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This is the Nomad Capitalist Report.
We're talking about the concept of your slavery to the government.
You're being owned by the ruling class.
It's been happening since the dawn of government thousands of years ago.
Stefan Molyneux is the proprietor at Free Domain Radio and a frequent speaker on the Liberty Circuit.
Hey, Stefan, thanks for being on the show to discuss these topics.
My pleasure, Andrew.
Thank you so much for the invitation.
My pleasure.
I'm glad to hear that you're feeling well.
You have talked to your flock about some health issues that you've been having, and so I want to touch on that.
But you've also been very vocal about, from the Liberty perspective, where you live in Canada, it is one of the three countries on Earth where you can't even have your own health insurance.
you're basically a slave to the state health care system.
They will decide if you live or die.
They will decide what kind of care you get.
Talk to us about that experience from Canada.
I mean, so we joined the unholy trinity of Cuba and North Korea as one of the only places where you can't bypass the government gatekeepers to take care of your own health, which is one of the most incredibly frustrating things.
It's one of these things that's really hard to change in society because healthy people don't know how bad the system is because they're not involved in it.
And sick people are too busy trying to get well to fight the system.
And once you are well, you just want to get as far away from the system as you can and take care of your own health as best you can.
But yeah, it's a terrible system.
I mean, I was misdiagnosed, there were massive delays, and I ended up having to spend my own money in after-tax income, which is, you know, leftover scraps for dogs in Canada.
I had to end up spending my own money to fly down to America to pay privately.
And to go to surgery to have a lump removed from my neck in Oklahoma and to recuperate there and then fly all the way back.
So my healthcare became a lot more expensive and inconvenient and I had to recover without the assistance of friends and family because I had to flee this terrible juggernaut where over a million people in Canada are waiting for some pretty significant surgeries because the system is just so...
Unbelievably inefficient as you would expect from a small slice of leftover communism.
Actually a very large slice of leftover communism here in Canada.
I want to...
Focus on two parts.
A, I travel around and I see so many places that are moving towards, and some are doing it much better than others obviously, this whole concept of medical tourism.
Because I think that you're gonna see more of what you're experiencing in Canada just explode around the world.
More governments are gonna pick up on this.
More governments are gonna wanna put more shackles around you and restrict your freedom.
It's gonna come to your health.
And I think that the rest of the world, these places that are trying to plant their flag and build themselves up, are going to be looking to attract those kinds of people.
Do you agree on one or both of those points?
Well, yeah, except the accurate term is not...
Medical tourist, that makes it sound like I'm shopping around for a damn nose job.
The accurate term is medical refugee, because you are a refugee from some massively incompetent, entirely badly incentivized system.
And so this happens, of course, in Canada, where you simply can't get the care.
Unless you know someone, unless you're on the inn, unless your brother-in-law is a doctor, unless you can, you know, you can't get a scan in less than a month or two in Canada, unless you happen to be a golden retriever, in which case you can go to the veterinary service, which is private, and get a CAT scan the next day, or unless you happen to be somebody who's in the national hospital.
Hockey League, in which case the team in Canada, each player has their own MRI scan, you know, just to make sure that they don't have any inflammation, to make sure they don't have any problems.
So if you are, you know, if you know someone, if you're a politician, then you go to the front of the queue.
If you're an elite athlete, you go to, I mean, it's Soviet fundamentally, and so people are fleeing.
This kind of system and, you know, spending massive amounts of time, money, energy, and recuperating far away from loved ones as best they can because this, you know, just giant grinding government mess is just chewing everyone up.
And it's as true in the U.S. in some ways as it is Here in Canada, where you have massive and perverse incentives to up the cost of surgeries.
For instance, when I got a lump removed from my neck, they gave it a biopsy, and I was originally sent a bill for $4,400.
For the biopsy.
And, you know, through negotiating, said, no, no, no, I'm not insured.
I pay privately.
And they wrote back and they said, oh, oh, okay, well then it's only $400.
And then we negotiated down from there.
I mean, this is how perverse and ridiculous it is.
Would I have negotiated hard if I had been some insurance person?
Like, if I had insurance?
No, probably not.
I would have just said, okay, well, here you go, Mr.
Insurance Company, this is the bill.
And these kinds of massive and perverse incentives are built all the way into the system, from restricting people to be able to practice medicine, From restricting machinery to be able to operate in most places in the United States, you actually have to prove that there's a need for machinery.
We used to have something which was around this called the price system.
Are people willing to pay for it?
Oh, look, there's a need for it.
And that would be dealt with that way.
But all the people who have machines don't want other machines in there competing like MRIs or...
FMRIs or whatever.
So you have to beg government permission to put a machine in which further restricts people's access.
It's horrible.
It's horrible.
And you have to fly to other countries where there are lower standards of living.
You may have language issues.
There could be questionable hygiene issues.
Although as far as I understand it, most of the people who cater to medical refugees are actually quite good.
And certainly I had a great experience in the U.S. But no, it's wretched.
I mean, this is the kind of thing that shouldn't be happening.
Better places.
I think that, I mean, places like Dubai, places like the Philippines realize this is a way to stake their claim and to get back at some of the countries that are just taking away freedoms.
You don't have to like those places.
But it's interesting, Stefan, because you mentioned the word Soviet, and everyone bristles when you say that because, you know, when you say propaganda or tyranny or Soviet, they jump up out of their chair and say, how dare you?
The United States is the best country on earth, and how dare you?
You speak ill against the land of the free.
Yet you look at what happens just north in Canada, which many people have said, hey, they're going in the right direction.
They're better than the U.S. Look at all their freedom.
Look at their currency.
It's so wonderful.
But then this is what happens.
Oh, if you know someone, if you have the end, if you're a government person, if you're in the Gestapo, you can come to the front of the line.
How is that not the new Soviet Union?
We rail against in every other country.
How is it we rail against Ecuador?
We rail against Venezuela?
All these places, they're so corrupt.
What is that?
Well, you know, one day, you know, for shites and giggles, you should sit down and read the platform of the National Socialist Party in Germany, the Nazi Party in the 1930s, or you should read the Communist Manifesto and the 10 major blanks that they had.
The vast majority of what the totalitarian regimes wanted to enact, and in fact did enact, in Europe in the 20th century, in Russia and Germany, and in Italy as well.
Have been enacted by Western governments after, you know, a massive multi-hundred million dollar, sorry, multi-hundred billion, multi-hundred million body pileup of attempting to stop the spread of centralized, coercive totalitarianism in the 20th century in the West.
What has happened?
Well, we have basically said, look, we won the fight against National Socialism, so let's make us all socialist.
Oh, look, we won the Cold War, so let's make sure the government controls the banking industry, the finance industry, vast sections of healthcare, the entire educational industry.
I mean, we are more totalitarian than free and heading in the wrong direction faster and faster, it seems like, every single day.
No, it is interesting when you read, and I would tell everyone, absolutely, go and get the Communist Manifesto.
Go and understand how these things work.
But what is interesting, one of the topics you've talked about, Stephen Molyneux from Free Domain Radio...
uh...
is government has improved over time uh...
you go back thousands and thousands of years and they said hey listen we're going to enslave you and uh...
you're part of the peon class so you go and build pyramids and that'll be great and then over time they've given you more and more freedoms and the auspices of hey this is a better system of of government a better system of tyranny but in reality it's just painting this better whitewash Over the broken fence and making the broken system look better because you're right.
The things that they have railed against are now being adopted, but we have a better system to sell it to people based on this history that, hey, we used to be a free country, or at least we've convinced you we were.
So now we're even more free with these new great things we're doing for you.
Isn't it just a sales job?
Yeah, look, I mean, farmers want to put cows in as small a stall as possible, right?
Because each stall is additional expense and heating and all that, right?
But the problem is if you put cows in stalls that are too small, they beat their heads against the wall until they get infections or die or get concussions or something like that or go mad.
And so, you know, when they try and cram them in as small as possible, and then what happens is they go, oh, wow, they're getting infections, beating their heads again, so we're going to widen, we're going to widen their stall.
And I'm sure there are a whole bunch of cows in there who are like, woohoo, look, we're getting freedom, freedom!
You know, we're free, because look, we're widening, they're widening our pens, so now we can move our heads around and this and that.
And then sometimes they even go as far as saying, well, let's put them in a paddock, you know, put them in a field.
So they can walk around.
We call it organic and we'll charge a premium on that.
And people are like, woohoo, look, we're out of the stalls, man.
We're in the open air.
There's rain.
There's sunshine.
There's grass.
But you're still in a farm and the end result is that you're still going to get a huge bolt through your head and you're going to be ground up for a hamburger.
And you're going to be kept on a steady diet of hormones so that your females can give milk from here to eternity.
So these different styles of livestock management which we have, you know, the old one, as you mentioned, slavery, direct ownership, wasn't very profitable.
You couldn't get much value out of people.
They upgraded to serfdom, which is where you had a little tract of land and you just had to pay taxes to the local lord and you were bought and sold with the land.
You couldn't change your occupation or anything like that.
And then they upgraded a little bit more and a little bit more and eventually they figured out that if you let the serfs choose their own jobs and just tax the fruits of their labors, then you get a lot of motivated serfs and they become these industrial workers.
You have to make sure you keep control of the education though to make sure they don't ever question the system.
But you know, set them free in what's called a free market.
They can choose their own occupations, where they go to school, they can choose where they're going to live.
This gives them a really big stall, but the end result is still the same.
In fact, it ends up being worse more quickly because Free-range serfs, which is kind of what we are, we get to choose our own occupations for the most part within government licensing restrictions and so on, we're incredibly productive relative to the past.
But what that means is the government can use all that excess productivity as collateral to borrow against our labor, to borrow against our children and these days our great-grandchildren's labor.
So the more productive we are, we're not any closer to freedom.
In fact, we're further away because the productivity is used as collateral to further enslave us in debt.
Stephan Molyneux, freedomainradio.com is the website.
We'll come back talking about your freedom and your slavery to the government.
We're going to come back.
I want to ask Stephan about who owns your citizenship.
We talk about it at nomadcapitalist.com.
That's next on the Nomad Capitalist Report.
I'm Andrew Henderson, NomadCapitalist.com.
This is the Nomad Capitalist Report.
Stefan Molyneux from FreeDomainRadio.com is my guest.
He's one of the top proponents of liberty and really a student of history.
Understanding, as we talk about, that the world can be our teacher and history can be our guide.
And we have to look to the past and understand how these things have come to pass.
Stefan, let me ask you, though.
We talk a lot at NomadCapitalist.com.
About the concept of who owns your citizenship.
If you're in the US, especially if you're in Canada, you go and get a passport.
They have any number of ways to reject you.
Some pretty silly ones.
They have any number of ways to cancel your passport.
The White House has been talking about that not long ago.
So this concept that we are born on this patch of dirt between some squiggly lines that a ruling class decided is their patch of dirt, and now if we decide to speak out against them or a traitor, if we decide to leave, that's a bad thing.
Talk about this concept of citizenship.
We can go back to the ancient Rome days and see how it was used just as another tool to extract money from people and gain control, no?
Yeah, I mean, your citizenship is your branding.
I mean, this tests who you're owned by.
A passport is exactly the same as a cattle brand in the Wild West, which says who owns what livestock.
And you are, yes, you are allowed to travel.
And why are you allowed to travel?
Well, for two reasons.
Fundamentally, you're allowed to travel because governments profit from the division of labor that comes from having you trade with other people.
You know, Canada can't grow oranges and Florida doesn't produce a lot of maple syrup so we can, you know, exchange these two things.
And government gets to tax international trade and government gets to grow the GDP, which is kind of what it wants to do because, you know, that means that it has more money to bribe the cattle with their own money with.
So, yeah, you're allowed to travel for trade, and that's important.
The other reason you're allowed to travel is if you're not allowed to travel, then you recognize that your stall is getting smaller.
You always have to worry with the problem of depression.
Depression in livestock is a huge problem for all farmers, but particularly for tax farmers, and you can see this really going on heavily in the United States, where I think, what is it, 25% of women are currently munching antidepressants, mental illnesses, so-called, is at an all-time high.
Because when people realize that they're screwed by the system, when they realize they can't get ahead, so for sort of lower income, middle income wages have stagnated towards the middle and have fallen by about 30% in real dollars over the last 30 years.
So this is a system that can't be sustained.
And so when people recognize the system can't be sustained, when you have students graduating with an estimated $1 trillion in student debt with very little chance to pay it off, When you have an entire culture and civilization, as you see at the moment, consuming its own seed capital, consuming its savings, consuming everything that it's saved up for in order to make it through the next lurching economic crisis, you have huge problems with depression.
So yeah, they'll let you travel so that you don't get too depressed, but even that isn't working so well anymore.
And people say, well, if you don't like it, you can leave.
But it's ridiculous.
You can't leave.
All you can do is go to another tax farm.
I mean, the US specifically said you cannot travel unless you are the subject of some state or another.
We will not allow you to travel unless you are subject to some state.
So it's like saying, well, you can go to some other cage in the damn zoo.
You can't give up the brand until you have another brand, or else will make your life very miserable.
What's interesting in the United States, though, Stefan, is how they like to export their bad ideas.
They like to go to China.
Guys from the Treasury Department go to places like China, which has the highest One of the highest savings rates in the world and say, why are you guys doing this?
Why aren't you spending all of your money?
Why aren't you out responding to TV commercials selling you fashionable clothing and all these things?
Why save 52% of your income?
Because I think that they know that when you travel, You do make some observations.
Many don't, but some will.
And let's talk about this then.
Taxes being the price that we pay for civilization.
I go out and I say, hey, I go to countries with no tax, countries with low tax.
Somehow they're pretty civilized, some of them.
But the word hasn't gotten back to people in the United States or other places that that argument doesn't always fly.
Yeah.
Well, remember, of course, the United States has a vested interest in weakening everyone else's dollar.
So if you've got a whole – weakening everyone else's currency.
So if you have a country like China that's saving a lot, then that means the Chinese currency is going to end up stronger than the U.S. currency, which is not good for the U.S. trade balance and so on.
So this is one issue that is huge.
People say, well, you know, this currency is doing well relative to this currency is doing badly relative to this currency, but to me, they're all like a bunch of people who've been thrown out of a plane.
All these currencies that are in freefall, now you might be falling out of a plane and there's some guy who's falling, you know, 5% slower and you say, wow, look, that guy's doing great.
He's only falling 5%, but the end result is all going to be the same.
It's all going to be a thwack on concrete and a big mess for the future to clean up.
I mean, giving government control over currency is second only to giving government control over children in terms of guaranteeing future enslavement, because not one person in a thousand can trace back, or 10,000 usually, can trace back current economic disasters to monetary policies of the past.
It's too abstract.
and too weird but what happens is of course when the government controls the currency for long enough people then say well without the government there'd be no currency you know if government controls education for long enough well without the government the children wouldn't get educated and so on so it gains a monopoly of the concept in people's minds rather than the practical or impractical enactment of it in the world and that's really dangerous because then people assume that without the government there's no such thing as civilization government is the opposite of civilization civilization is what you and I doing a free exchange of ideas without coercion the government is always and forever The initiation of force
in a geographical area and that is the opposite of civilization.
Well, what's so intriguing is the idea that Anyone who does come out with alternative currency, anyone who is the Liberty Reserve or the Bitcoin or whatever it is, they're going to be branded a domestic terrorist.
They're going to have the stamp, the propaganda stamp, put against them so that all the sheep who don't pay attention, all the people who believe that the lie that taxes are the price we pay for civilization without government, everything just disintegrates.
These people will buy into the idea that, hey, this guy who's making a dollar that's backed by gold, He is a fraudulent guy and you only have to rely on us, Stefan.
All you have to do is put your faith in us and everything will be fine.
Well, remember though that the government, the politicians in particular desperately need to protect the existing financial industry because that's where they get most of their campaign donations.
I mean, this is why Obama is the president.
I mean, there's talk of race and socialism and it doesn't matter.
I mean, the whole reason he's president is that he got by far the largest donations from the financial sector.
So the idea that the financial sector, which is bankrolling all of the politicians, is somehow going to be restrained or controlled by those politicians is completely ridiculous.
I mean, that's like asking for the ad agency that Coca-Cola pays to inform everyone about the dangers of Coca-Cola.
I mean, it's never, ever going to happen with the existing system.
It can't self-regulate because it's called, you know, I mean, they just go in and buy out whoever's regulating them and make sure that it's as cozy as possible.
And all it's used then is to keep smaller, more nimble competitors out of the marketplace.
So, yeah, I mean, they're going to try and control the currency system, which is really the underpinning of the financial system, because without that, they just can't get any donations, at least not the kind of volume that they want.
And you can make fun of.
People can say, hey, Andrew, I don't want to go to these countries you're going to.
I don't want to go to Cambodia, because what about the quality of the food?
Well, that's great.
You've got the FDA in the United States that is spending their effort going after guys who are making natural health supplements.
They're raiding raw milk.
Community farmers with guns and shutting them down and freezing their bank accounts.
This is what they're doing.
Meanwhile, you're right, they approve the drugs that have killed people.
Vioxx?
I don't know.
Okay, that's great.
But you want to have unpasteurized milk?
We need to come in and stop you at gunpoint.
Well, of course, yeah.
It's much worse everywhere else, Stefan.
I mean, you don't have to put drugs in the food if you can turn food into a drug.
And, you know, one of the primary things that happens is the government, largely the government-sponsored hysteria against fat in food, produced this, you know, oh, it's fat-free and so on.
And they found that fat-free and sugar-free food largely tastes like, like processed food largely tastes like cardboard.
So what do they do instead?
Well, they start putting this god-awful stuff in this high-fructose corn syrup into the food, which is, I mean, as far as I end up, I'm no nutritionist, It seems from the people I've had on the show, it's pretty monstrously toxic stuff and really bad for people and promotes obesity and so on.
And then, you know, they take away your athletics in school so that basically you're tanked up on sugar and high fructose corn syrup even at breakfast.
Try and find a breakfast beer without this stuff in it.
It's impossible.
So yeah, you're hopped up on sugar, you're dazed from lack of exercise, you're hyper-stimulated from reality TV video games, you're stuck in incredibly boring schools, and this is a way that they keep you all in line.
I mean, it's well known that you drug anybody who is in your direct service as best you can.
This is why the soldiers in the imperialistic wars are munching these antidepressants by the handfuls and probably permanently shrinking their brain masses.
So yeah, I mean, we have a long way to fight to even free our bodies, let alone our minds from these horrible things.
As long as Stefan and Andrew are branded domestic terrorists and extremists by the people who are content to watch the Kardashians, I guess all will be well with the world.
Stefan Molyneux, freedomainradio.com, and one of the top guys advocating for real liberty from a historical perspective.
Hey, Stefan, thanks for coming on the show.
My pleasure.
And for my listeners, where can they find your show?
Absolutely.
Go to nomadcapitalist.com and hear all the radio shows right here in the Nomad Capitalist Report.
Also get our free white paper, Learn My Seven Steps, for total global freedom at nomadcapitalist.com.
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