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Aug. 20, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

52:40

2458 Countdown to Financial Collapse - A Conversation with G. Edward Griffin

Stefan Molyneux and G. Edward Griffin discuss the basics of the central banking scheme, past examples of honest banking, theft through inflation, monetarily enabling the military industrial complex, false patriotism and how long it will be until the collapse of the current system.

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	Hi, everybody.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
	I am overjoyed and excited to have finally cornered in his walnut-flavored lair G. Edward Griffin, who is the author of a book I am not even going to request, but I'm going to hunt you down and insist repeatedly that you read The Creature from Jekyll Island.
	And the link will be below the video and in the podcast.
	I actually had heard about the book for many years, but I thought it was a 1950s horror movie.
	But it turns out it's a horror movie for the ages and a horror movie for all time.
	So thank you so much for taking the time today.
	Really appreciate it.
	Well, thank you for inviting me, Stephan.
	Appreciate it.
	Okay, so I'm going to do a bit, as we talked about before the show, a bit of an introduction to Central Central banking, the Federal Reserve, these are all terms for a fairly humanitarian predatory cartel, people by, you know, creepy crawly tentacle based sociopaths, in my opinion.
	And I was just wondering if we could talk a little bit about What central banking is?
	The degree to which people don't know about this, I've got a friend from college, he's got two PhDs, one of the smartest guys I've ever known, and he was as innocent as a little lamb when it came to this stuff when he was beginning to ask me about currency.
	He had no idea, never heard about it in any of his educational capacities.
	So what is central banking?
	Why should we even care about what goes on in these star chambers of counterfeiting?
	Well, those are all good observations, Stephan.
	You know, not only your friend with a couple of PhDs is in the dark, but you'd be surprised how many professional bankers are in the dark.
	I get letters all the time from people.
	In fact, there's one that was so good we had to put it on the back cover of my book as a promotional blurb.
	Marilyn Barnwell, who actually ran a bank consulting service.
	She was one of the people that taught bankers how to run their business.
	She sent this letter and she said, you know, I didn't understand anything at all about how money came into existence at the Federal Reserve level.
	She said, this has changed my complete outlook on the career that I've spent my life with.
	So it's not surprising.
	They don't teach the real nitty gritties of it in school.
	I was perhaps fortunate Because I didn't study it in school.
	So I had nothing to unlearn.
	My slate was completely clear.
	But even so, it's a very confusing thing.
	There's a lot of terminology that you have to master.
	But at some point early on, if you're really perceptive about it, you realize that, wait a minute, there's some hocus-pocus here, too, that really what is going on is very simple.
	And the best way to describe it is to call it a scam.
	Once you realize that something that we have been thinking of all of our lives as a great institution, a very conservative, you know, business, bankers always are dressed well and their buildings are always, you know, have the finest decorations and so forth and they're always talking about conservative banking practices and all that sort of thing.
	Once you realize that most of that is just like a The output from a con artist, and I say, oh, I see.
	It's really not complicated at all.
	It's quite simple.
	Well, anyway, as background, that aha, that moment, that epiphany, it comes to most people that really delve into it.
	Once you get that understood, then it's really quite...
	Quite easy to understand and just put all those words and all the banking terminology aside.
	And understand that we're dealing here, and you used the word a moment ago, with a cartel.
	The Federal Reserve System is as simple as can be a cartel.
	It's no different than a banana cartel, an oil cartel, a peanut cartel.
	It's a banking cartel.
	And like any other cartel, it has one primary objective, and that is to advance the advantage of the members of the cartel, period.
	To be even a little bit more clear to the audience, a cartel is a government-sanctioned and granted monopoly to a business.
	Because some people confuse it and they think that it's a bunch of private companies getting together.
	That never really works and that never succeeds in the long run because there's too much incentive to cut price for each of the individuals.
	You need that sort of state box around you where you have that enforced.
	That's correct, and it's the difference between an efficient cartel and an inefficient cartel.
	They're all cartels, but as you correctly pointed out, the smart boys understand that unless there's some way to coerce the members of the cartel to stick by their agreements, They will wander away.
	And so all of these price-fixing agreements and sharing of patents and divisions of territories and so forth, that tends to get corrupted after time unless you have some way of disciplining all the members and keeping them to their agreement.
	So that's why with almost every cartel that has ever been created, Members of the cartel go to their respective governments and say, hey guys, let's take this cartel agreement and pass it into law.
	No, we don't have to worry about enforcing it because you, the government, will enforce it.
	Any deviation from our agreement will now be illegal, so we can rely on the police forces and the The armies of the governments to enforce the cartel agreements.
	It's a very important point that most people forget.
	But anyway, put that aside, we're dealing with a banking cartel that has done exactly that.
	They met in secret back in 1910 on an island called Jekyll Island.
	That's the reason for the title of the book.
	It's a real island.
	It's off the coast of Georgia and was privately owned back in those days by a small group of billionaires.
	People like J.P. Morgan and William Rockefeller and their business associates.
	It's a place where their families went during the cold winter months.
	Down there in Georgia, nice balmy temperatures.
	And they had beautiful mansions there and a big clubhouse.
	And so that is where they went to get away from the prying eyes of newspaper reporters and journalists.
	And certainly they didn't go to Washington, D.C. They went to this private island under conditions of great secrecy because they knew That if anyone had picked up on the fact that a law to control banking was being written by the bankers themselves, well, of course, the scam, as I called it before, would be out in the open.
	And so that was the reason for such tremendous secrecy that took place at the founding meeting.
	So in a nutshell, a central bank, and that's the basic question we started with, what is a central bank?
	It's just a couple of words that have been It's been accepted over more than a couple of decades, a couple of centuries really, as describing a partnership between private banks and governments.
	The central bank is merely the banking, this partnership between governments and the private banks of their respective countries or regions.
	And it's a partnership which benefits both groups in some very specific ways.
	As far as the government is concerned, they're happy to be able to Hide behind the facade of a banking business, because then this issue of creating money out of nothing, which they previously had to do simply by running the printing presses, that's pretty obvious procedures.
	Where did the government get all this money?
	Well, did you hear that sound last night, guys?
	Those are the printing presses, ran all night, you know?
	That is pretty easy to understand and the people say, well, they're just printing money.
	That doesn't sound right to me.
	How come they get to print money and I don't?
	They put me in jail for doing what they do all the time.
	So the banks and the governments get together because the governments now can hide behind the banking industry and let the banks Print the money, but they don't print it on the printing presses.
	They create it now as credits in banking accounts, digits in computers.
	It's all very confusing.
	The process is exactly the same as printing them on paper, but it's now done in Inkwells and paper and ledgers and computers.
	And so the average person says, I don't get it.
	Maybe I should just go back to what I understand and let the experts take care of this.
	It's a beautiful arrangement for that kind of hiding behind that kind of thing.
	The governments love it because they can now call on their friends in the banking cartel to create any amount of money that they desire for any purpose.
	And by obligation the central banks will create that money out of nothing.
	So you can see why the governments would like this arrangement.
	Now the banks themselves In return, for performing this service for the governments, they have a nice little plum, too.
	Because now they are writing the rules for the economy.
	They're writing the rules for their own business.
	They're writing the rules for the banking industry.
	They're writing the rules for who gets credit.
	What's the amount of interest that you can charge?
	What are the deals?
	What companies will get the credit?
	And which ones are being denied?
	They're in total control of the economy.
	Nice spot to be in.
	Now the banks, because they're writing their own rules, now are able, they authorize themselves now, to also create money out of nothing and they do this at the commercial level.
	So when you go into the bank and you want to borrow, you know, $9,000 or $10,000 for a used car or something like that, you think that somebody put that money in an account and they're lending it to you.
	Not so!
	Somebody put maybe $1,000 into an account, but by their own rules now, they said, we can take that $1,000 deposit, and on top of that, if we just call that a reserve, we'll put a name on that $1,000.
	We'll put it in a column on my books here in the bank, and we'll call it reserve.
	So we got $1,000 reserve.
	We wrote the rules.
	The rules say that for every $1,000 in reserve, you can lend up to an additional $9,000.
	Of which you don't have.
	The banks loan money that they do not have.
	And they charge interest on nothing.
	Now this is the secret, the dirty little secret of the scam called the banking industry.
	They create money out of nothing and charge interest on nothing.
	Now, if that isn't something that should whip you up a little bit and say, wait a minute, how come they're not telling we the people about this?
	Think about it for a minute.
	They're not telling you about it because they don't want you to know about it.
	If you knew about that, if the average person knew that this scam was actually going on, well, there'd be some kind of a revolution probably by morning.
	So that's the reason.
	And it is important that people understand it because this process of creating money out of nothing, charging interest on nothing, expanding the money supply, Results in this hidden tax called inflation.
	It means we are paying for it because prices are going up and up and up.
	The same commodities, a loaf of bread every year gets more and more expensive because the value of those monetary units are going down because they're creating so many of them.
	After you get so many grains of sand on the beach, you don't care about the sand anymore.
	There's just too much of it.
	That's what happens to monetary systems after they have so many dollars or yen or rubles or whatever it is they're creating.
	Finally, it's all worthless.
	It's about as valuable as a grain of sand on the beach.
	And that happens to all countries that have this central bank mechanism.
	And it's exactly what's happening to the United States today.
	Now, let's compare What we have now, and I remember when I first found out that basically banks can type whatever they want into their own bank account, it made getting up in the morning and going to work seem like kind of a fool's game.
	Like, why don't I just take up typing?
	I mean, that seems like a pretty lucrative occupation.
	But let's compare it to what was going on prior to central banking because I'm sort of concerned that our modern culture is like that old man in the bar in George Orwell's 1984 when Winston Smith comes in and says, what was life like before the revolution?
	And he can barely remember anything.
	I mean, who alive has seen a different kind of currency?
	I mean, with the ending of the convertibility to gold in 71 and under FDR, you know, further restricting gold ownership and so on.
	I don't think people really even remember what money used to be.
	We just have this funny paper, as the Beatles called it.
	So what did it look like in the 19th century before this came along?
	You're quite right.
	People don't remember.
	And that's part of the strategy, I believe.
	It might not be thought through, but it certainly is advantageous to the cartel to gradually erode the purchasing power and the value of the monetary system so that there is no abrupt change.
	You know the old saying that you put a frog in a pan of water and turn up the heat gradually.
	Allow himself to be boiled, but if you drop him into a hot pail, he'll jump right out.
	Well, whether that's true or not, I don't know.
	I've never tried it, but it's certainly true in the human experience that you get used to things if it's gradual.
	And so I think that one of the advantages that the cartel has had is that they've diluted the value of the money slowly over many, many decades.
	And so with the passage of each generation, as you're quite right, nobody remembers what it was like before.
	Well, I know what it was like before.
	I'm older than most.
	Not because I saw it, because by the time I started taking an interest In money, I wanted to earn money.
	It was already well past the point of no return, really, because the Federal Reserve System had already been put into place, and I knew nothing about that.
	But going back in front of that, the record is quite clear.
	The history books are very clear on that, and it makes fascinating reading.
	One of the reasons that the Federal Reserve System was sold And successfully sold to the gullible public was on the theory that it would put an end to these terrible bank runs and the bankruptcies of banks and the losing of people's savings.
	And therefore, if we just have more government control, we can put an end to that.
	And people said, yeah, yeah, we don't want any more of that.
	Well, the fact of the matter is that the reason there were bank runs...
	And bankruptcies in the banks and all that sort of thing is because those banks already were monopolized by the state governments.
	The same deal that the Federal Reserve is operating now, prior to the Federal Reserve, was being operated by all the various states.
	They had their own little central banks.
	They all had charters from the state government.
	They were all given special privileges.
	They were allowed to do things which basically were crooked, but it was all now written into law, so it's legal.
	And that was the reason there were bank runs and there were booms and busts and everything.
	So instead of getting rid of the cause, which was the fact that banks were allowed to create money out of nothing and all that sort of thing, instead of getting rid of the cause, they said, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to take all of these crooked systems and we'll put them into one.
	We'll make it bigger.
	And now that'll solve the problem.
	Wait, are you saying that governments actually double down on evil?
	They never do that.
	They always say they notice a problem, they make it smaller.
	I mean, they never double down on that stuff.
	I mean, fundamentally, there's so much...
	So much that is incredibly hostile to human life that is made possible by this stuff.
	People think it's a loaf of bread and so on, but we're talking war and enslavement and murderous foreign policy, all of which has to be paid for somehow.
	And people don't want to.
	I mean, if you actually had to directly pay for the evils that your governments do rather than get all this funny money and stuff, boy, our whole political landscape would be vastly different.
	Sorry, I don't want to take you off on a tangent, but there's just something I wanted.
	It's more important than the life of the president.
	Well, yeah, it's a very good tangent.
	In fact, it's perhaps even more important than where we were going because maybe we started on the tangent and you just came back to the main nerve there.
	Yeah, if people understood They had to pay and understood that it was coming out of their lifestyle, of their standard of living to pay for all of these wars and the welfare programs and interference with other countries.
	If they understood what it cost them, maybe there would be more of a rebellion.
	In fact, I'm sure there would be.
	But anyway, back to the main point is that you've got to go back in history even before the creation of the Federal Reserve.
	You have to go back Actually, before the creation of the United States, to find any little examples of honest banking in the world, because it started out as a corrupt business.
	It started out on the theory, what they call it, fractional reserve banking is the technical name they give to it.
	But when you unscramble what that means, it merely means that they will lend money that they don't have.
	And they'll write out little pieces of paper and say this is an IOU and this is as good as money and nothing behind it of course, but we're the bankers and the government says it's okay so you have to accept this as money.
	It all started with that, but there were a few examples like in Scotland.
	The Scottish banks for a period, I've forgotten the exact number, but I think it was about 100 years, actually did not follow that practice.
	Money was based on gold or silver, and even though it was paper money, it was backed by gold or silver, and they really meant it.
	If you had that certificate and said it's good for one ounce of gold or one ounce of silver, you could take it to the bank and buy, golly, they had the gold in the vault.
	All of it.
	If all of the paper money came in and everybody wanted their gold or silver back, they had it in the vault.
	They could have done it.
	Well, one little piece out of history, there's another period that goes back even further to the Netherlands and so forth, but they're little pieces of history.
	They're exceptions because from the very beginning, banking had It's birth in corruption because of the temptation, the possibility, the opportunity was so great.
	Here you're sitting on this huge supply of gold in your vault and you're giving out paper receipts for this gold and nobody ever comes and asks for all the gold and you think, that's silly, why don't I just give out more receipts than I actually have and charge interest on the receipts and that's how the whole system was born.
	I guess your question is, is it possible to have an honest banking system?
	Well, yes, it's possible.
	And I'm tempted to be a little bit sarcastic and say, yeah, but we ain't never tried it, you know?
	And it's not sarcasm, really.
	It's historical.
	I'd like to see...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I would just like to see an awareness come out of this crisis that we're now in.
	I think the literature now is sufficiently ample and rich with historical evidence that now, the next cycle, maybe we will see truly honest banking where monetary units are firmly backed by something like gold or silver.
	Yeah.
	Now, I mean, from my perspective, and I certainly defer to your expertise, I don't see any problem with fractional reserve banking as long as it's not enforced by the state.
	Because if you want to get a higher rate of return on your deposits, you're going to have to let the bank do some flexibility.
	Instead of it being cash on demand, as you point out in the book, it's going to be 30 or 60 days to get your money.
	And, of course, because they're lending out multiples, right?
	I mean, I know in the recent financial crisis, some of the investment banks were leveraged like 30 times, which means that a 3% shift in price can wipe you out completely.
	So you can let them do all this fractional reserve banking as long as it's honest and upfront and you recognize that you're basically playing a casino game rather than putting your money into a vault.
	Yeah, very astute.
	That's true.
	And those of us who believe in freedom of choice and the bare minimum of state intervention or coercion, we would say, yeah, people want to be stupid.
	Let them be stupid, but let them know that they're being stupid.
	And then they make their choices.
	But it's not necessarily stupid either because, as you pointed out, you do get a higher interest.
	So, yes, I believe that if we got rid of the legal tender laws, for example, which require under force of pain of punishment, imprisonment, that you accept the government's money or you go to prison, if they got rid of that, you can say, well, I'll accept the government's money, but since they're printing so much of it, I don't think it's worth what it says, so I'll discount it, you know?
	Right.
	I think government money would be discounted tremendously if there was also circulating some really sound money alongside of it.
	Then the fiat money would be discounted and the money backed by gold or silver or Disneyland rides or whatever they want to back them with, something that you could use.
	Why then?
	I think the comparison would be so great that the fiat money would just simply drop off the radar.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	I mean, people have said, well, why isn't the US dollar falling relative to other currencies?
	My example is sort of saying, well, if we all jump out of the airplane, none of us look like we're falling to each other.
	We just look like we're falling relative to the ground because all of the currencies in the world are fiat currencies.
	So they're all in free fall.
	So relative to each other, they're going up and down a bit.
	But I mean, relative to the real value of stuff, they're all collapsing.
	Yeah, it gives me sort of a chuckle when I see or hear on the radio.
	Well, the dollar gained against the euro today.
	It strengthened, I think.
	The dollar strengthened against the euro today.
	And as you pointed out, it merely means it's losing less rapidly than the euro.
	But they're both losing or just falling.
	That's one of the realities that people don't understand.
	And if they understood money a little bit better, it wouldn't be so easy to fool them.
	Right.
	Now, One of the things that I think is also a particular genius of the system is to call something the Federal Reserve when, as many people have pointed out, has about as much in common with the federal government as Federal Express.
	I think the government really likes to have a veneer of the free market so that they have a scapegoat for when their inevitable disastrous policies go awry.
	So they're inflating the currency and everyone gets mad at the grocer for upping the price of, you know, or the gas station for upping the price of whatever they're providing.
	So they love having this veneer because then everybody goes and attacks the wrong thing.
	They go and attack the shadow thinking that they're attacking the statue.
	So do you think that's part of a conscious plan or is it just the way that it worked out to have this sort of veneer of something shiny that people can get upset at other than the real system itself?
	Well, it's just an opinion.
	My opinion is that it's probably one of the unexpected benefits they discovered because their primary motive was just to have control over the system and create money, as we've been talking about, in this very advantageous way.
	But I don't know that they sat down and said, you know, if we do this, then we'll be able to hide behind the near of the free market.
	I don't know that that's the case, but it might be.
	It doesn't make any difference.
	In fact, they do hide behind the veneer of the free market today, whether it was planned or not.
	Yeah.
	Now, I think a very big topic that I'm going to, you know, get, I mean, lean back and get comfortable to give you a chance to really expand on it, which is how would the political landscape change If we had honest free market competing asset-based currencies,
	whether it was gold or some other basket of commodities, oil or something like that, if we had currency that was a true reflection of tangible, non-reproducible, non-copiable materials or commodities, What do you think would happen to our political process if it just, you know, we got our wish and got a real currency tomorrow and the government couldn't rely on all this smoke and mirrors nonsense and this debt-based consumer-driven economy?
	What do you think would happen to the whole political system as we know it?
	It's a great question, Stefan.
	I think that before I could even attempt to answer that, I'd have to make some assumptions.
	And the primary assumption is that before such a thing could happen, there'd have to be quite a groundswell of awakening and awareness on the part of the American people.
	Any people that should undertake this sensible path.
	They'd have to understand money so they wouldn't be fooled by the side effects of such a change.
	Because if they didn't understand it, if they just said, okay, well, let's try this and see how it works, I don't think they'd be prepared to pay the price of transition.
	There would be a price of transition.
	And it would hurt some people, no doubt.
	When you're getting off of A binge.
	You got a hangover.
	And in order to break a serious drug habit, you have to go through rehabilitation.
	It could be very painful.
	And I think that That analogy probably applies to us.
	We'd have to go through a rather uncomfortable, if not painful, transition.
	So unless people understood where they were headed and that it was all worth it, that they would come out the other side much, much better, well then they would say, oh no, no, this hurts, and they would go back.
	So if we put into the question the assumption That the American people did understand that we were heading for a better place and that this was simply something we had to go through to get there.
	Then I think what we would find is we would get there and what we would find when we got there is that the expansion of the economy would probably be considerably slower than it has been in the boom cycles of the past.
	But considerably faster than it has been in the bust cycles of the past.
	In other words, what I'm saying is that the booms and busts of the past would be leveled out.
	And what you would have is a steady growth and it would be in net, in my view.
	In net, it would be much better than the past of the booms and busts.
	You put them all in, average them out.
	I think the price we pay in the bust cycles is too great.
	But when economists try to answer your question, they only look at the boom part of the cycle and say, well, we could never achieve these great boom periods of history if we had stable money because we couldn't just create credit and give it to everybody easily.
	And so they just want to compare the good part and ignore the bad part.
	So just to say it one more time, I think that the boom bust cycles would be practically eliminated, if not completely eliminated, and the net effect would be a steady growth that would be much better for the economy and we produce.
	Everybody would be happier.
	It would be such a paradise.
	In fact, I hope maybe somebody who listens to this interview who is a writer would like to write the great novel.
	We don't have the utopian model.
	The utopian novel for the freedom model.
	There have been lots of utopian novels written about the glories of socialism and collectivism, how wonderful it would be.
	They were all over the place.
	But no one has ever written the novel about how great it would be and could be if we really had the absence of coercion in our lives.
	Well, it's interesting.
	Yeah, it just when you said that the highs wouldn't be as high, but the lows wouldn't be as low.
	I mean, that's like someone on heroin.
	You get them off heroin.
	You say, look, your path to happiness is going to be slow but steady.
	You're not going to have the, oh, my God, I'm high on heroin.
	I have the best thing ever.
	Oh, my God, I don't want to get out of bed kind of thing.
	And when someone has, like, manic depression, I mean, we try, you know, I think the doctors try and smooth that out.
	That's sort of the point of getting some sort of stable growth or something like that.
	So, I mean, it's something that it's so hard to trace.
	You know, even for great economists, it's hard to trace.
	So, you know, everybody had this bloodlust in 2003 for the invasion of Iraq, which, you know, is one of the great unjust, cruel, and violent invasions in history, at least in my opinion.
	And yet one of the reasons they were able to be these baying bloodhounds is because they weren't going to be getting a bill for $500 per head of the household to pay for this war.
	And so we indulge the worst, if not the most satanic aspects of our natures because the consequences are so dulled.
	Like if somebody would say, okay, well you can be a bloodlusting, warmongering, invasion guy cheering and yay, let's go invade these guys.
	But unfortunately your house is going to lose 40% of its value in eight and a half years.
	People would be like, well, that doesn't make any sense, right?
	But these are sort of the effects that happen from this very convoluted, murky, hard-to-steer-through system.
	The cause and effect are so removed, even professionals have a tough time with it, and the average person on the street can't make those connections.
	Yeah.
	Well, I was thinking absolutely right that there seems to be a lot of warmongering going on, primarily because I don't think people realize two things.
	Number one, they don't realize the cost of it.
	But more significant, I think, than that is that most people would say Maybe I should drop the word most.
	Many people would say that it makes no difference what the cost is.
	This is a crusade for freedom.
	They really believe that.
	They believe that we're fighting terrorism.
	And who cares what it costs?
	We're saving lives and we're saving people's freedom.
	So it's that mindset that is also at work too.
	But that doesn't detract from the fact that people have no idea what they're paying for this.
	I consider it to be false patriotism, but in their minds it's not.
	I think it's a patriotism that has been kind of implanted in them and it's not based on reality.
	Well, I, you know, I think I started this fantasy.
	I'm against the use of drugs.
	I think they sort of cloud people's reality.
	But I'm against the drug war even more because I don't think violence is the solution.
	I've also sort of had this fantasy that if you're for the drug war, then, you know, sign a piece of paper and then your taxes go to pay for it.
	And if you're against the drug war, then your taxes don't...
	I'd like to see just how long it would take for people to follow blessed are the peacemakers and find tolerance for people who want to smoke pot.
	The more people who crossed over, the last guy gets the bill for like $20 billion a month or something, he's not too happy.
	I think if people actually had those consequences, they would probably shift over pretty quickly.
	Yeah, and in your case here, the drug war, I think it would certainly be more clear than it is on this so-called patriotic level where we're defending the country, you know.
	If you want to take it one step down further, I mean, how many people would say, yeah, I think...
	The city ought to have an airport, you know, because we need commerce here, and we need flights, and it'd be good for business.
	However, if the deal was that everybody that wants an airport run by the city had to chip in $9,000 on April 15, I think all of a sudden the enthusiasm...
	An airport might drop considerably.
	You don't understand.
	I'm just talking.
	I don't want to actually, you know, how well would professional sports do if people had to pay for their own stadiums rather than shop the next generation with bills unpaid?
	Lordy.
	I think Detroit, they're building $240 million stadium at the moment.
	I mean, it's complete madness.
	The whole city's bankrupt.
	Maybe they're going to have gladiators or something like that.
	The last welfare check, something horrible, right?
	And so we've talked a little bit about war as well, and that there's I think welfare is something that's important to talk about as well.
	And I get criticized sometimes, and I think it's quite fair, that we generally think of the welfare state as being aimed at the poor.
	But boy, I mean, I think you make a fantastic case in The Creature from Jekyll Island.
	Read it, buy it, become it, absorb it, get it tattooed on your head.
	There's enough room on mine, there could be enough room on yours.
	But you make a great case that welfare is quite often firing, well, it's generally firing wealth at the rich from the poor through inflation, which hits those who are poorest the hardest, but also through these bailouts and these shielding from competition and the too big to fail, which harms smaller banks, of course, and benefits larger banks, causing this massive consolidation in the industry.
	The degree to which Wealth just flows back and forth and people don't even really notice it.
	I mean, how much money gets spent on these bailouts?
	And again, people's taxes don't rise right away.
	It's so diluted for people and so convoluted to figure out what's going on that pretty much it feels like politicians can do just about anything they want because the effects are so obscure and down the road that nobody—and they're out of office usually by then anyway— Nobody can trace these things.
	I mean, they say there's no accountability for politicians.
	They can lie and they don't ever get caught on it.
	They don't ever go to jail for it.
	But I think the lack of accountability at a fiscal level is even more fundamental for our system.
	I certainly agree with everything that you've said.
	How do you grapple with a topic like that in the sense of coming to an understanding of what can be done about it?
	You can grumble a lot and complain like we all do.
	And for good reason.
	There's plenty to complain about.
	But why do we waste our time complaining about it if we don't have some kind of a concept of, well, can we ever change this?
	Are we doomed to live in this kind of a system forever?
	And I don't think we are.
	As I mentioned a moment ago, I think we're coming through a period of history now where all of these issues are becoming so well recognized.
	They started off small.
	Collectivism as such really is only a couple of centuries old.
	Prior to that it was just military might.
	You've got a conqueror, you've got an emperor, you've got a king, and that was it.
	You know?
	You go along with the rules set by the ruler or off with your head.
	Never understood that.
	It was pretty simple.
	But starting with the Magna Carta and then evolving through the evolution of democracies, the word popped into the language for the first time, and with the French Revolution, and then the American Revolution was the big step.
	And since that time, everybody in the world is thinking in terms of, hey, maybe the people should have some voice in their own political destiny.
	And from that point forward, the whole landscape changed where the rulers and the despots began to use other tools other than the sword.
	They began to use psychology.
	They began to use propaganda.
	They began to use education.
	They began to use the news media to control and convolute the thinking of their subjects so that they would be happy being subjected, you know?
	And this is a new art, so to speak.
	Well, now, that's about played its course, and of course it's still underway, but I think we've finally come to sufficiently deep into that cycle.
	It is possible for people to step back and say, hey, this is what is happening.
	Books are being written about it.
	Documentaries are being produced on it.
	People are coming to understand it now.
	Once you understand this technique of psychological control, it's then possible to build a defense against it and expose it.
	It's possible.
	That doesn't mean it's easy because you still have to break those mechanisms that are forcing it at the young people.
	But it's possible.
	And I'm kind of optimistic because I'd like to think that we're coming to the end of that cycle, maybe in the next generation or two.
	From that point forward, I think it's going to be we will have broken free from the old tyrannies, we will have broken free from the new tyrannies, the tyrannies of the mind, and we'll finally come into a world where it's possible for people to understand all these past errors and build a truly new system based on the fundamental principles of individualism and freedom.
	Well, and who would have imagined, I think you wrote your book in the early 80s, who would have imagined this incredible digital Gutenberg press of the internet where we can have these kinds of conversations?
	I've had like over 50 million shows downloaded, which, I mean, incomprehensible in the past.
	I mean, the possibility of illumination is insane.
	The stars are so close together now that it's like a new sun.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Of course, that's the reason that the democratic tyrants are doing everything they can to get control of this medium, and they are trying to scare everybody with, well, we've got to get rid of pornography on the internet and terrorism on the internet and crime on the internet and drugs on the internet.
	We've got to control the internet for you folks, you see.
	And a lot of people are going, yeah, that's a good idea.
	But still, I think that's coming to a head now.
	More and more people are beginning to say, hey, I think that's a scam.
	And once we come to that point, we'll be well on our way to victory.
	Yes, well, of course, there's no better way to rouse young men to social activism than for the government to get between them and their porn.
	But let me ask you another question.
	I've heard...
	Do you want to take a moment to enjoy that?
	I've heard rumors, and I have not confirmed them, and perhaps you know more about it.
	I've heard rumors that there have been various attempts by governments throughout the world, particularly in the Middle East, there have been various attempts to get on a gold standard or to get on a basket of commodity standard.
	And that one of the ways in which you can tell where the sort of giant laser of imperialism is going to land is look at any country that is attempting to reform its way out of central banking or out of fiat currency land.
	Have you heard anything about that?
	Does that strike you as a credible theory that places like Iraq and Libya and so on were looking at getting out of the fiat currency game?
	And if anybody did, of course, everybody else's worthless currency would be revealed very quickly relative to that more stable currency.
	Yes, I think that's very realistic.
	And we know that the smaller countries are considering that.
	In fact, they've already taken some steps to issue coins, which are official currency of those nations.
	It hasn't really taken the main center stage yet, but it's already started.
	And I think that the motivation there is to It's to gain an advantage in the world trading centers and to build a sort of self-centered motivation, which is alright, because we all should be self-centered.
	We want to do what is best for us and for our country and so forth.
	There's nothing wrong with that.
	But then you look to the bigger countries like Russia and China, and they of course are making loud noises right now about issuing currencies backed by gold and silver.
	In those cases, I don't think it's quite the same motive.
	I think both Russia and China are considering doing that as a A weapon against the United States.
	I think they're both looking for a chance to really bring the United States the rest of the way down to its knees.
	And they know that the United States is vulnerable right now because its currency is so worthless.
	And I think, this is just my analysis, is that they said, aha, this is how we can strike the death blow to the United States, is through their weak currencies.
	And so they're starting to collect and gather gold in massive amounts, and they'll come out at the end of this and they'll have the weapon in their hands, the economic weapon, and the United States will have practically nothing to do except military opposition.
	Well, this is, I don't think, a very admirable motive for building gold-backed currency, but they're doing it nonetheless.
	Well, certainly once foreign governments give up on redeeming or getting anything back from the bonds they've bought, I mean, basically their incentive is to remove the United States as an imperial power by destroying the currency.
	Like once you give up getting paid back, then you might as well toast the local thug lord, right?
	So I think that's probably something that could happen for sure.
	Yeah, I think that's definitely part of the plan.
	And there are even people within our system that are not really opposed to that strategy because they're looking beyond the present role of the United States as a dominant voice in world affairs.
	They're looking to the point where the United States will simply be merged along with all of the other countries in this so-called new world order.
	Their vision is beyond the United States.
	Even though they may have a U.S. citizenship doesn't mean that they think of themselves as Americans.
	They think of themselves as world citizens.
	And if necessary for the benefit of the world, if it's necessary to diminish the prominence of the United States to benefit the world, they're all for it, you see, because that's a higher goal, you know, a higher path in their mind.
	So, yeah, I think the people all over...
	The bigger the government, the greater the bureaucracy, the more places there are to hide errors and bury bodies and put skeletons in the closet and so on.
	I mean, you can see that happen with the European Union.
	A massive new layer of bureaucracy with which idiots can hide out and control other people superior to themselves.
	Now, let's turn, if we can, to the most dangerous part of the interview, really the dangerous part.
	Now, the dangerous part is the prognostication hat.
	So, I guess you're old enough to remember the old Johnny Carson routine.
	He'd tap his head and get the card, you know, and he'd have the answer before the question even came.
	It was actually pretty funny.
	But where do you think...
	Things are going to go over the next sort of five to ten years and I fully recognize that this is you know Smoke him if you've got a mad hatter time because nobody can really predict and you and I certainly don't have Privileged or we're not privy to the information that that people behind the scenes have but if you had to you know if I sort of cornered you and said oh Ed, tell me, what's going to happen?
	How do you think it's going to play out over the next little while, particularly for America, which I think certainly a lot of my listeners are based there, and given that it's the world's reserve currency, it's pretty important to everyone else.
	You're right.
	That's a dangerous topic.
	Mainly because if you address it honestly, you have to be somewhat pessimistic.
	And people do not want to hear pessimism.
	They want the good news.
	They want me to say and you to say, don't worry about it.
	It's going to be rough, but we'll get through it okay.
	And in my honest opinion, I think we're headed in some very, very, very hard times ahead.
	Let me preface it by saying that where we're headed depends to a large extent on the degree to which the awakening that you and I are participating in right now, the spreading of information.
	How far that will go?
	How many more people can we reach with the truth in the next year or two?
	Will they be the right people?
	Will they not just run into the streets and say, we want a revolution and let's meet the enemy with guns and violence, you know?
	Or will it be an intellectual revolution?
	Will it be a revolution of people who say, well, let's try and recapture the system.
	It might be impossible, but let's at least try.
	Let's see if we can, you know, If we can change this instead of confronting the system and trying to tear it down, maybe we can grapple with it and turn it a little bit.
	It depends on those things.
	Okay, back to the main question.
	What do I think is going to happen?
	I think that our movement is going to grow and I don't think it's going to grow fast enough though to avert a really bad point where the economy will be Much worse than it is now.
	We'll have more enemies worldwide than we now do.
	We'll have very powerful groups, nations, regions, who will hate us so much.
	See us beaten into the dust.
	They want revenge.
	I see that happening all the time.
	We're creating enemies like that every day by sending our troops around and bombing people.
	We're creating enemies.
	The best enemies money can buy.
	I see all these forces building at the same time that our own awareness movement is building.
	I see them coming to a head.
	Which is going to be on top?
	I don't know.
	But we're going to know in the next generation.
	We will know how this will turn out.
	And I have a feeling that we're going to be right there at the dark point where it could go either way.
	Now which way will it go?
	I don't know.
	That's why I'm working like heck, to get as much information out as I can.
	I'm not just saying, oh, it's all over.
	If you just say it's all over and stop trying, then you know which way it's going to go.
	As long as we have a chance.
	As long as we have a chance, we've got to keep our shoulder to the wheel and do everything we can, because I'd like to see it tipped the other way, where we can unwind some of this evil and return Not just return to where we were, but move to a higher ground based on the principles of freedom and liberty and economic sanity that we're now learning.
	I mean, we're learning these lessons in the crucible of experience.
	And these lessons, you know, lessons are hard.
	Sometimes they're painful.
	But when you're through with them, you've learned them and you think, thank God I learned that lesson.
	I'm not going to make that mistake again.
	So that's kind of where I think we're going to be.
	We're going to be at the point where there'll be a lot of suffering, a lot of Very unhappy people.
	There will be a lot of innocent people who will think That you and I are the cause of all this because we rocked the boat.
	They will come after us.
	They'll say, you are the greedy ones.
	You didn't cooperate.
	You weren't part of the collective.
	You didn't support our leaders totally when they needed you most.
	Those would be the arguments and there would be people out there who will say, yeah, like in every other country that has fallen to the To the totalitarian, especially the collectivists, the collectivist rabble-rousers who convinced the mobs that everybody that had property needs to die, because they're the landholders, they're the rich capitalists, they're the ones that caused all this problem.
	We're going to go through some of that, I'm afraid.
	But the point is, we will come out the other side of it.
	Carrying these hard-earned lessons on the backs of our children and our grandchildren, they will know.
	And it's kind of encouraging to think that we're participating in something now that we'll build.
	I think it's come to the point now where you can't stop it.
	Now, we're going to go through some hard times, as I've said, but still, you cannot stop.
	These seeds of knowledge and information and ideas are planted.
	And they're growing as we speak.
	And they will continue to grow as far into the future as you can see.
	Yeah.
	It's one of the great tragedies.
	It's a quote from the Bible that he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
	One of the things that's always tragic about being a libertarian is just hating being right.
	You know that the welfare state is going to cause poverty.
	You know that central banking is going to cause inflation and war and predation and imperialism.
	And then when it all plays out that way, you just hate being right.
	You know, it's like being a lung doctor and saying to someone, don't smoke, don't smoke.
	And then you hate being right when they get really sick.
	So yeah, it is a tragic thing.
	It's hard to lead in a very positive way when you know where the disasters of society are accumulating.
	Because of course, everybody wants to follow the Pied Piper and the charismatic politician who says, Yes, we can.
	Change is just over the horizon.
	Let's build that bridge to the 21st century.
	All meaningless soap bubble nonsense that has people fall into the canyons of history.
	So yeah, the grim people who know that disaster is coming who say, listen, you really should stop smoking that crack because your teeth are going to fall out.
	And the other guy is saying, hey, crack's great for you.
	Who cares, right?
	They always want to follow that idiot rather than the wise people who are saying disaster comes and people either learn like because cultures and people that either learn through reason or they learn through bitter experience and I think you're right I think we have an unprecedented opportunity to educate people when people ask me What's the future going to be like one of the things I say is well How do you want it to be because it's really is going to be in the long run defined by the energies and intelligence of good men and women But it definitely,
	I think there's so much invested and the society is so conformed and power structures have so conformed to this easy spigot of infinite currency that I think that they're not going to give it up voluntarily and there are too many dependent classes that would go through too much suffering if it changed quickly.
	So I think there will be a dark period, but hopefully that we'll steer our way out of it from the lights that we're all casting into the sky.
	Yes, well, so we're in total agreement on our analysis and on our hopes.
	I think it was Bastia that said it so well in his treatise, The Law.
	He said when you tell people that the government will take care of them and provide all of their needs, and then all of their needs are not provided for and they're suffering, they're going to blame the government, naturally, because they've been told that that's their job is to take care of them.
	So when that happens, they turn against the government and there's a revolution.
	And the whole system comes crashing down.
	Well, I think that's kind of what we're talking about.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	Now, where can people, I mean, we'll put links to your books below this.
	Where can people find you on the web?
	What are your upcoming projects?
	Are you going to be gracing a stage with a microphone and backup dancers anytime soon?
	What are you up to these days?
	Well, I'm spending most of my time, routine time, generating a weekly news service called Unfiltered News.
	And so this is my opportunity to invite any of your subscribers or watchers to subscribe to our Unfiltered News.
	It's free.
	I spend a lot of time on it, trying to analyze the news and condense it down into a couple of sentences.
	So if you're in a big hurry and you don't have time to read 20 or 30 big long articles every week, at least you can see the capsules of it and really understand what's going on.
	So if you just go to our website, by the way, it's called RealityZone.com.
	That's easy to remember, realityzone.com.
	If you go there, you'll see a little opportunity to sign up for a free subscription to Unfiltered News.
	So, that's it.
	Unfiltered News is our news service.
	Reality Zone is our commercial site.
	We have about a hundred different books and recordings on similar topics to this.
	And then for those who want to really get into the analysis and the long-range view of what can we do about it, we have an organization called Freedom Force International.
	And that's our think tank organization, our website.
	So if you want to think about solving this problem, I urge you to look that one up.
	It's freedomforceinternational.org.
	And be prepared to spend some time because there's a lot of material there.
	So that's it.
	If you want to do something, it's Freedom Force.
	If you want to read about it and learn about it, it's Reality Zone.
	And if you want to keep up with the news, it's Unfiltered News.
	Well, fantastic.
	Thank you so much for a hugely enjoyable conversation.
	I hope we can do it again sometime.
	And thank you so much for everything that you've done.
	And please, go read this man's books.
	He's a great writer.
	You know, I always try to compliment people who are trying to put forward challenging ideas in a generally accessible format.
	And I think you did a wonderful job.
	I mean, it's a big book, but it's just beautifully written.
	And that's something that you don't even notice it's so well written.
	I don't want to point that out.
	So thank you, everything that you've been doing, and I hope we can do this again.
	Thank you, Stephen.
	My pleasure.
	I'm looking forward to it.

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