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Aug. 24, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:15:00
2462 Environmentalism and The Sin of Breathing - A Conversation with Redmond Weissenberger
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Hello everyone and welcome to the next edition of the Austrian AV Club slash Stefan's super duper podcast.
Is that the new name you're going with these days, Stefan?
Well, just slash because that's my intellectual approach.
Hack and slash airstrike.
And interestingly, so I wanted to talk to you today about, I guess, environmentalism, the philosophy of environmentalism, I guess environmental, quote-unquote, ethics, if those, you know, if those can exist, you know, natural things and whatnot, because I think a little while ago, I guess you had discussed, there was this blog post entitled, what was it, like, 12 or 6 things that libertarians can't answer answered.
I think it was up on one of the libertarianism.org website.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, but go ahead with the questions.
I don't want to, people want to see that.
Yeah, yeah.
Sorry, man.
Yeah, anyways, in any case, it had come up that we were discussing sort of, you had discussed environmental issues, right?
Because there's these problems around environmental issues that supposedly libertarianism or, you know, freedom can't solve.
And I think you did, ended up doing a whole post about it, a whole talk, and I got into some discussions, some fights, you know, in the comments underneath.
Sort of wanting to know, well, you know, and essentially putting to these people, okay, well, what is environmentalism?
You know, what do you believe nature to be?
How do humans fit into nature?
And I think one of the fundamental points that I find with a lot of environmentalists is this split between nature and human beings, right?
Essentially, they say it's sort of one way or the other way.
If we're acting in ways that they wish us to act, essentially we're in harmony with nature or we are part of nature.
And if we're acting in ways that they do not like us to act, we're therefore no longer part of nature.
And where do you fall on this in terms of human beings being natural?
I think the idea of nature having anything to do with harmony can only arise from people who've lived deep in the heart of condos their whole life.
When I finished high school, I wanted to go to college, but I was dead broke and my family had no money.
I went to go and work.
I worked a total of 18 months in the bush.
Take a plane.
Take a seaplane or a plane that can land on a frozen lake and go live in a tent throughout the winter.
And that's real nature in your face.
And the idea that nature can be harmonized with or has anything to do with harmony is...
I mean, that's just people who've watched National Geographic specials from the comfort of a very plush Ottoman couch.
Nature is combat.
Nature is domination.
I mean, there's obviously cooperation in nature as well.
But, you know, we've evolved because we conquered everything that got in our way.
Now, of course, we can't survive without nature.
We can't survive without photosynthesis.
We can't survive without plants.
I mean, I get all of that.
We need clean water.
We need reasonably clean air and so on.
But just because we've driven nature out of cities, we can now afford to get sentimental.
You know, it's like some guy who had a relationship with an abusive woman who was really hot And then like 10 years later, he's like, wow, she was really hot, you know, and forgets all the abuse and just is all kinds of nostalgic for her.
Well, it's the same kind of thing.
People have nostalgia about, you know, like my family fled Ireland and all nostalgia.
Oh, the old sod, the old country is like, yeah, but there was nothing to eat, you know.
So I think that we get very sentimental about nature only because we've got a civilized distance away from it.
So I think nature needs to be protected.
We need to make sure there's cleanliness.
But this idea that we're going to be at one and in harmony with nature, I mean, Lord, I mean, nature produced lovely things like the smallpox virus and the Black Death and the Ice Age and asteroids raining down on the planet.
And here's the thing.
Yeah, but even then, I think to take that even a step further of what is nature, I mean, Humans being natural, therefore everything that humans do is natural.
A city is part of nature.
It's a beaver dam.
It's a beaver dam.
It's just a beaver dam with neon lights.
That's all it is.
Beavers alter their environment to make their own homes comfortable and the same thing is what human beings do.
Yeah, and see, and that's the thing I see fundamentally at the core of the environmental ethos or the environmental philosophy, a very anti-human sort of nihilistic, you know, sort of a nihilistic strain, right?
It's very misanthropic.
You know, if humans were truly to have zero impact, we would not exist.
If a human being, well, that's the thing, right?
And as you were saying, nature is fighting, nature is competing with each other.
And what is funny about that, too, is I find when you're talking about the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism, You know, in nature, well, quote-unquote, okay, in the non-human natural world, dogs do actually eat dogs, you know.
And this is what I mean.
I sense a nihilism and a misanthropy at the core of environmentalism.
Well, you know, I think any time you have a significant movement in human thought, you look for some previous, like some prior system that has just collapsed.
You know, like there's nothing new under sun and moon.
And what happens is when you see the rise of environmentalism in the late 60s, you saw the fall of organized religion at around the same time.
Certainly up here, as you know, in Quebec with the Quiet Revolution.
The dominance of the church in Western society was under great challenge from the relativists, the collectivists, the nihilists, and some of the rationalists of the 1960s.
And so whenever you have a big human edifice that falls away, the first thing you need to look at is something new that's going to arise in its place that's going to serve the same psychological need.
And there is great profit in telling people they are sinful for being alive.
And if they give you money, you will remove that sinfulness or you will forgive them for the sin of breathing.
And of course, in Catholicism, it's original sin and the fall of Adam and the story.
So you are sinful for being alive.
But hey, Redmond, if you give me money...
Lots of it for a long time and possibly even the foreskin of your firstborn.
If you give me lots of money for the rest of your life, don't worry Redmond, I'm going to use my magic.
I'm going to use my magic to make you not evil, to remove a curse that I have placed upon you myself.
And so the environmentalism serves the same thing.
We are sinful.
Why?
Because we consume and we produce and we reproduce.
In other words, we breathe.
Or we consume energy, or we manipulate nature, and that makes us evil.
But boy, if we give enough money and seed enough of our freedom to the high priests of environmentalism, they will lift this curse from us, and they will make us feel better about ourselves.
So to me, it's the same thing.
It's just original sin, except now it's breathing and being in disharmony with nature rather than You know, being the fruit of the loins of Adam and Eve.
It's the same ship, different pile, basically.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's exactly the way I see it.
It essentially is sort of an anti-human religion in some ways.
You know, it's a framework of seeing the world.
And what I find funny, too, is what I find entertaining about it as well is that oftentimes I'll have discussions with people about these sorts of things and they'll be making the argument for, you know, an old-growth forest or a particular A particular mix, and essentially what I'm pointing out to them is that, okay, what you're saying is that you know exactly what the perfect mix of animals is within a given geographical location, right?
You know, the whole concept of the environment of the natural world doesn't exist outside of the human mind.
Do you get what I'm getting at in that sense?
Yeah, that there's a balance that can be imposed through some sort of legislation or some sort of seizure of property.
Yeah, somehow that they understand the balance.
One of the things that's been truly disastrous for the environment is the car-dependent culture.
I think we can all accept that this is the production of cars, production of gasoline, huge amounts of political instability, wars are currently going on over this resource in the Middle East and elsewhere.
And, you know, it's really bad.
So my question is, why does it always lead to more state power?
This is the thing that bothers me the most, is that all roads lead to Rome.
All problems lead to more state power.
So environmentalists will come and say, oh, you know, well, we have this car-dependent culture.
It's like, well, why do you think we have a car-dependent culture?
Because the government's built the roads for free, you know, by deferring the cost of the roads in terms of bonds and debt and all of that to the future.
And so the fact that governments built roads everywhere and did not charge people for using them is one of the reasons why we spread and we've got this huge culture.
Who knows what society would look like if there were private toll roads.
It certainly wouldn't look anything like it does right now.
I mean, farms would be located closer to cities.
They say, oh, well, you should buy locally.
It's like, well, the only reason that you don't have to buy locally or why it's cheaper not to for some things is because of this incredible subsidy of roads.
So the other thing, too, is that people feel sentimental about forests.
It's like, for me, if you feel sentimental, go buy them.
You know, if we lived in a free market environment, go buy the forests.
Go get your friends together.
But they all want to feel good about protecting the environment without putting any of their own hard-earned dollars into the mix.
And that's usually the testament that someone's really committed.
Well, which is funny because when you look at a guy like Ted Turner, I don't know if you follow him at all, you know, founder of CNN, you know, Turner Broadcast Network.
Ex-husband of Jane Fonda.
Yes, ex-husband of Jane Fonda.
Of course, he is actually right now, I think he's probably the single largest private landowner in the United States at this time.
And he is personally, you know, he's taken his fortune.
And now he's got some terrible views on overpopulation, I think, you know, a lot.
I mean, I don't think that can exist.
But, you know, he's got some horrible views on those sorts of things.
You know, the planet should only have 500 million people on it.
But he's, you know, he's taking his wealth.
And, you know, he's purchasing land.
So he owns it privately.
And he's saying, I'm going to restock buffalo on this land.
And I think, you know, his sort of terrible views aside, I think he's doing the right thing in that way.
He is actually doing essentially putting his money where his mouth is.
Yeah, I mean, CNN, okay, so he got his money by being a status toady whore.
But nonetheless, if we forget about where his money came from, which is sucking out the end for his nipples, then, okay, at least he's putting his money and buying stuff.
Yeah, I think that's great.
If you care about the environment, go buy stuff.
Go do what you want to do.
I think that's great.
But, you know, like, again, of course, getting these endless arguments, which I don't really do that much anymore with global warming, And Bjorn Lomborg has a great book out called Cool It, where he goes into the solution to global warming, even if we accept that it's real, even if we accept that it's man-made, even if we accept that it's catastrophic.
The solution, which has been worked out by a number of scientists, some of whom are Nobel-winning experts in their field.
I can't remember the details, but it's like putting these huge tubes in the ocean that recycle the carbon dioxide or whatever.
And it's been estimated to cost, even as a government project, 80 to 100 million dollars.
Ah!
Chicken feed!
What's that?
Like nine teachers in upstate New York?
And so the fact is that this could be solved with a drop in the bucket, but you never hear about those solutions.
You know, what you hear is massive carbon tax trading and credits and all the stuff that's making Al Gore able to afford even more pasta.
And so, why does it all have to lead to state power?
Why can't we say the environment needs protecting and therefore the federal government should not own a third of the land in the United States?
Because federal bureaucrats don't give a rat's ass about the land that they're in charge of.
Yellowstone National Park was a complete disaster ecologically for most of its history.
I mean, and if you care about the environment, then you should be, of course, passionately anti-war.
I mean, war is one of the most destructive things in the environment in the immediate shrapnel in your face and in the long-term environmental degradation that occurs.
But a lot of that stuff is like...
Sorry to interrupt.
Governments are running all of this stuff.
Governments are running the roads.
Governments are controlling the land that's getting polluted.
Governments are the biggest polluters.
I mean, I've worked in the environmental field for over a decade.
Governments are insane as far as their pollution goes.
So the idea that governments are going to protect Your property is like saying, don't worry, Santa is going to give me the Heimlich when I choke on a fishbone, so I'll be fine.
Yeah, well, that was the interesting thing, of course.
If you might remember this, the big brouhaha about clear-cutting in Canada.
Remember, there used to be these news stories about how, well, you know, you can see these clear cuts from outer space.
Now, of course, all of that clear-cutting was occurring on Crown Land, of course.
It wasn't, you know, whereas when you look in Eastern Canada, where you've got the Irving, you know, sort of the Irving company and they run forests and, you know, paper mills and those sorts of things, you don't see any clear-cutting there.
You see them managing the forests because they privately own them and they want those resources to be usable over multiple generations.
Yeah, I mean, because out in the West Coast, they sold timber rights without land rights.
And of course, if you just sell timber rights without land rights, they're going to go scoop out all the timber and not replant.
Why would?
They don't own the land.
Why would you do that?
But it's the same thing with, you know, there are many more forest fires on government lands that are incredibly destructive than there are on privately owned lands.
Because in privately owned lands, they cut the swath between.
They also let forest fires burn sometimes on private lands because it's necessary to sort of clear out the undergrowth, clear out some of the dead trees and so on.
And so whenever you see massive forest fires, I always assume that they originate.
And if I get around to checking, it always is the case that they originate in public parks.
And they don't do any clear cutting.
They don't let the controlled fires burn themselves through.
And so you end up with these surface of the sun scenarios which are just catastrophic.
So it's just this weird idea that someone out there is going to care about something they don't own.
And this is one of the fundamental things that people don't really understand.
There's no entity out there like a deity or something who's going to care about a whole bunch of stuff that they don't own.
And if you lose your cat, you're out there putting pictures up all over the place.
If you hear about some missing cat, you're not doing all of that because it's not your cat.
You may care about it in an abstract sense.
But the idea that people care about something that they don't own, at least, I mean, I'm sure they do care in some way, an abstract way, like it would be nice if, but actually caring about something they don't own.
I mean, expecting the government to take care of the environment is like expecting people who rent cars to change the oil.
It's not going to happen.
They don't own it.
Yeah, and that's the interesting thing.
Of course, you know, I guess there's always been people who have, you know, sort of Given some sort of supernatural, I guess some sort of supernatural being is part of the environment, or it is, you know, Mother Earth, Gaia, whatever you want to call it.
And I guess the modern, you know, I guess the modern environmental movement, at least from the middle of the 19th century on, of course, moved along with these collectivist movements of socialism and these sorts of things, right?
If you look at one of the founding One of the founders of the modern environmental movement, a man named Ernst Haeckel, he essentially said that individuals don't actually exist, right?
Human individuals do not possess an individual consciousness, he said, because humans are only part of a greater whole.
And in 1866, Haeckel coined the term ecology, the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment.
And what's interesting to see is that movement of collectivism And environmentalism that went through, particularly in Germany, where you saw the Nazi government, a very totalitarian fascist government.
I might argue that a lot of what our modern governments are modeled on, that national socialist model, that fascist model today.
But of course, they were absolutely in love with the environment, the Blut and the Boden.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, one of the things people, and I only know this because I researched it for a novel I wrote once, but there's a huge back-to-the-land natural hippy-dippy movement.
There's almost no characteristic of the hippy movement in the 1930s in Germany that was not replicated in In the 1960s in America, you know, the drugs, the promiscuity, the back to the land, the unshaven, the natural look, the rejection of technology, the flight from cities, the communes.
They did all of that stuff before.
And this dissolution is the pendulum swinging this way, and then you get this vicious clamping down that is the response to it as well.
And yeah, Germans, you all think of this sort of jackbooted stuff, and that's all true.
But man, they've got a hippy-dippy side to them as well that is very 60s.
Yeah, definitely.
And, well, I mean, you see that even today in their somehow, I guess, self-destructive obsession with things like windmills and solar panels and all these sorts of things.
And what's interesting when you're talking about the idea that somehow government is going to solve these problems, you know, the Soviet Union, of course, and the Eastern Bloc had absolutely the worst environmental record, bar none, of the 20th century.
They were lakes that were burning for years.
I mean, they're just horrendous spills and toxic waste and so on.
I mean, it's mad.
And of course, we see this.
I mean, when the governments end up taking over neighborhoods because people have left those neighborhoods.
I mean, look at Detroit, where the government owns a whole bunch of houses and stuff.
How do those neighborhoods do?
Is the government in there, you know, cleaning things out, making sure there's no mildew, mowing the lawn?
Of course not.
Of course not.
There's nothing in it for them, fundamentally.
And even though they could, you could argue, would raise the value and they could then sell it and they'd get more property rights, there's something vaguely in it for them.
But as soon as the government owns a house, it immediately turns into a shit heap.
I mean, it's just natural.
And the idea that it's going to be different with some other piece of property or wealth is a fantasy.
Yeah, well, I think it's the, you know, and again, you end up with these knowledge problems, economic dislocations, of course.
The more centralized power is, you know, the more that, you know, this one remote will, which is quite distant from, you know, where the actual, you know, the actual people who might care about this land, who want to take care of this land, who wants to take care of this property, the more that you have a distant foreign entity trying to I think the more damage that's going to happen.
And that's what I find so dangerous about things like the UNIPCC and those aspects of the modern environmental movement.
Because essentially what I see in things such as the precautionary principle or sustainable development, these types of ideas, what I see them trying to do is they're trying to implement Essentially, a form of global central planning of the Earth's resources, right?
And I think this goes back to the argument that you make about slaves and cotton, right?
You have this common thing you bring, this example you bring up of, you know, well, what are we going to do without the slaves?
Well, did you know that in 100 years, you know, there'll be the cotton gin, there'll be these machines that are Harvesting it all.
And it's the same thing with sustainable development.
If we had had the concepts of sustainable development in the year 1900, we would have been thinking about, well, in seven generations, how much coal will they need for the ocean liners?
They're going to be continuing to bring people back and forth.
Or how many acres of land will we need in the year 2100 For the, you know, millions upon millions of horses that crowd our city streets.
You know, they simply...
How are we going to dispose of all that horse dung?
Yeah.
In a hundred years, how will we sustainably, you know, pollute our...
And I mean, you know, I do agree there's some issues with cars, but certainly Car exhaust is a far better thing to have to deal with than horse manure and horse piss.
And it's something, Redmond, that you hear a lot about how the free market or capitalism promotes this consumerist-based culture.
But when you really think about it, Governments in the moment, politicians in the moment, profit the most from consumerism.
And they work to promote consumerism in the here and now.
Well, why is it that governments want everyone to have a house?
Well, partly because it's like the dream, the middle class dream or whatever.
But also, the more economic activity that governments can stimulate, the more they will tax.
The more they will grant licenses.
The more they will tax the buying and selling of lumber and bricks and And all that kind of stuff.
So the more people that they can stimulate to do things, even if it's completely wasteful, like 10% of America's houses are uninhabited at the moment.
What a massive environmental catastrophe.
All of that energy, all of those resources poured into building these houses that are turning into feces on stilts, right?
And so governments have this, how do they measure GDP? It's not long-term sustainable productivity.
None of that is measured.
What is measured is economic activity.
Even if it's a giant tumor like sticking out of someone's head, they're like, hey, he's taller.
He must be healthier.
Right?
So there's this weird thing that governments profit enormously.
People feel wealthier when there's an economic boom on.
The governments get to tax like crazy.
And by the time there's the inevitable Austrian cycle collapse, the existing politicians are out of office.
So to me, if you look at government policies that are really designed to stimulate economic activity, to pump up the numbers, to gain short-term unemployment, I think, I mean obviously there's huge cost to capital and savings and human resources, but There's a huge cost to the environment as well, these booms and busts.
And somehow people think that that's the free market that's doing all this wild consumerism and spending and growth.
But government, through fiscal policy, through stimulation of various sectors of the economy, they just promote through deficit financing.
What is deficit financing?
But promoting consumption in the here and now, the expense of consumption in the future, which is great for governments, bad for the environment and bad for the future.
Well, exactly.
And the point I've been making recently to some people is that in some ways, you know, government is the ultimate tragedy of the commons.
Right.
Where it's being abused, it's being used to essentially favor one group, favor another group.
The people who nominally run it, you know, the bureaucrats and the politicians, they do their darndest, essentially they do their best to essentially completely dissolve or dispose of individual responsibility for their actions.
I mean, you live in Ontario with me here, and we can see that right now with the Green Energy Act and things like the $500 million that were blown on canceling some gas generation plants right now.
Supposedly, these were more environmentally friendly.
They were going to replace a coal-fired power plant.
Somehow, on the whim of a politician, at the last minute, they just get cancelled.
And who's responsible?
Nobody is responsible.
What were the resources that went into that?
Again, the politicians simply don't care, like you said, because they don't own it.
Yeah, and they get green votes for highly public things.
And the thing that bothers me too, and I think this is part of the anti-human, but I would say more specifically it's an anti-poor mentality that the Greens have, which I find particularly reprehensible.
As you're probably aware, I mean, after Rachel Carson's largely fictitious book, The Silent Spring, about how DDT is thinning out the eggs and the chicks are in the silent spring, there'll be no birds and all this sort of stuff, right?
I mean, the numbers were fictitious and the science was terrible.
But what happened was, in the hysteria of this and in the general momentum of this, no cost-benefit analysis is ever put forward for these things like a rational business or a caring human being would do.
This wave of hysteria went through the political landscape and they were like, let's ban DDT! Which has resulted in about 60 to 70 million deaths.
But see, they're in the third world, right?
They're not a concentrated group with, say, highly vocal entertainment skills like the Jews, who could have 6 million, of course.
Terrible tragedy.
It's 60 or 70 million people, but they don't do sitcoms.
So we don't know about it.
We don't find out about it.
And now they're beginning to put DDT back in because they recognize that it's really important.
Obviously, to keep malaria and mosquitoes and other biting insects away.
A little bit more effective for kids than, you know, these nettings that they have and all that.
And the people who say, well, let's restrict their energy use and so on.
I mean, God, have they never ever been to a country outside?
Have they ever been outside the first world?
If you cut electricity provision to poor people, what do they no longer need energy?
No, what they do is they burn wood, which gives them lung damage and smoke inhalation problems and asthma.
And they die like flies from that kind of situation.
So it's incredibly selfish that for people's vision of some sort of harmony with nature, loud, say, Hallmark card fantasy land of the Princess Bride unity with all that is, I mean, they're willing to literally sacrifice the lives of people who have almost nothing.
To live on, just for the sake of easing their own conscience.
I mean, these people need energy.
They need to live.
I mean, what if space aliens had come down and said, no, you can't have an agricultural revolution in the 17th century.
You can't have an industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th century.
Well, we'd still be dying like flies at about the age of 25 from tooth decay.
So it is...
Incredibly arrogant, insensitive, inhumane, unempathetic to want to assuage your own irrational conscience at the expense of literally, potentially hundreds of millions of lives around the world if the people who are, you know, for restricting energy based on global warming, if they get their way, I mean, people are going to die by the boatload.
Yeah, and it's an incredibly, and that's what I see too, it's an incredibly morally bankrupt movement, you know, and when you go back to people like Paul Ehrlich, of course, in the 19, you know, 1969.
Yeah, I mean, with Paul Ehrlich, and, you know, the population bomb, And the population bomb, of course.
And his prescription was, we should allow India to starve.
Do not feed them.
I mean, that was his prescription.
Yeah, I mean, the classic retort of people who say that the human population ought to be significantly reduced is to say, well, I can think of one person you can start with.
Do us all a favor.
Yeah, and on a slightly lighter note, I don't want it to be all down, but I want to touch on, and just showing the way that environmentalism has been affecting our lives.
But you can see this book, Do you know this book?
Yeah, I'm Richard Scarry.
I loved him when I was a kid.
What do people do all day?
I assume that this is a job about government bureaucrats because most of the times firefighters put out fires and cooks cook food and so on and podcasters flather on.
This one's wonderful.
Yeah, well, no, it's funny because I get the sense that he really had a sense of sound economics because he talks about the division of labor here, everyone's a worker.
And that sort of thing.
So anyways, of course, I wanted to get this book when I had children.
I wanted to get this book and sort of be able to read it to them.
And then when I was flipping, I noticed in the stores, the newer versions are called abridged.
They're the abridged version, right?
And lo and behold, what we have abridged all common sense that may have made its way into the narrative.
So what is entertaining about it, though, is that this is the section that they abridge.
It's all about how coal is dug up and is used to provide electricity for us.
There you go.
So expunged from the history books, expunged from children's literature, is the fact that we use coal to produce electricity.
Apparently they call it...
And also they don't want to normalize it.
They don't want kids to know, oh, that's how we get our electricity.
When they're older, people say it's bad.
They don't want to have that initial impression that it's necessary and useful.
Yeah, go ahead.
I was just going to say, by burning coal, we are able to make electricity work for us.
The electricity lights our homes.
That is why we call coal buried sunlight.
There you go.
I've never heard that before.
Well, my daughter was asking, she always wants to know what shows I'm doing, and she remembered who you were, because of course we met, and our kids have met.
And so she was saying, and she was trying to explain environmentalism, and I was saying, well, some people think that because there's some smoke that comes out of the back of cars that we shouldn't use cars.
We shouldn't use cars?
I mean...
But what if I need to go to hospital?
How are people going to bring our groceries?
I mean, all the things.
How am I going to get to my play center?
I think that was the most important one for her.
But she really got it.
How could our whole civilization currently work if we couldn't use cars?
And that the negative effects, even to our health and so on, of not being able to get to a hospital in a hurry would outweigh slightly fewer particulates in the air.
Sorry, go ahead.
Well, yeah, and that's the question, you know, when you look at these things like, say, the precautionary principle, they say, well, what are the potential effects of, you know, using X technology?
But, of course, to switch it around and turn around, what are the potential effects of not using this technology?
Right?
And we can see in the first world, you know, when you look at something like DDT, of course, we see in the first world, you and I did not suffer from malaria as children because a generation before we used DDT, you know?
And so we have this perfectly good technology.
We can use it to eliminate malaria, which is, you know, I think if there was any of the, you know, 99% of the species that have existed on the planet Earth have gone extinct.
You know, I think that nobody would miss mosquitoes.
Well, you don't have to eliminate mosquitoes.
You just have to keep them away from people.
I mean, any way you go in the woods, just keep them away from the people.
That's all.
Yeah.
And when that's what it is, and especially with malaria, it's simply, what's interesting about that, it's the human-to-human contact.
It's with a mosquito bites one human who's got malaria, they transmit it to the other human.
So as long as you can break that, if you break that sort of link, and what's interesting is now in Southern Europe, in certain places, malaria is actually starting to come back.
So, of course, you're going to start to see a push for DDT coming back again now that Europeans are starting to get malaria.
Oh, yes.
Well, of course.
I mean, we wouldn't want Europeans getting sick.
I mean, third world people, obviously, you know, just stack them with a fork.
But obviously, if Europeans get sick, we'll revisit it.
Oh, yeah.
And so it's once we have controlled nature and once, I mean, nature, when she's in charge, is a complete bitch.
I mean, it's just horrible.
And, you know, I mean, I was always, I had to get a gun around when I was, because there were bears and stuff, you know, you rip your scalp off and stuff.
I mean, it's some scary stuff that's out there.
And, you know, it's hard to feel at one with nature, you know, when you're being shattered by a shark while you're...
You know, while you're boarding or something like that.
So I think that once we've gone away from all of that, we can luxuriate in nature is pretty.
Because where do we build houses?
We build houses to look over nature where nature is pretty.
And we go hiking where nature is really pretty.
And we go swimming in beautiful lakes.
So when we have recreation, when we have recreational nature...
It's pretty.
It's beautiful.
And we don't stay.
We never stay, you know, or maybe we'll stay for a night or two and sleep with the tree trunk half upper ass because, you know, we got a tent or something.
But we don't stay.
And so we sort of bungee into the prettiest parts of nature and then we bungee back out and get into our air-conditioned SUVs.
And so because of that, we forget what nature is really all about.
It's like going to a beach in Jamaica and saying, but this place is paradise.
And then you go back, and it's like, well, you only saw the part that was carved out to look as good as possible, and you didn't see the slums, and you didn't see the drug machete attacks, and you didn't see the corruption, right?
Because you just bungee in and bungee out.
And we have to have the discipline to remember what nature is like when she's in charge, and to remember that we really do want to keep a pretty firm grip On where things are.
And if we are concerned about resource depletion, I mean, I wrote an essay years ago, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, about the cod industry in Newfoundland that sustained itself for 400 years of private consumption.
And then when the government took over the quotas, they wanted to get as much taxes as possible.
They wanted to make people feel as wealthy as possible.
They kept upping the quotas.
And the cod stocks have now been gone for, what, 15, 20 years?
And show no signs of returning.
It was one of the great natural resources of North America.
Well, and of course, another interesting thing about, you know, when you're talking about property rights and natural resource depletion, of course, the most important thing Is to have private property rights applied to natural resources so people will be incentivized to use them wisely, right?
You know, just speaking about fishing in general, you know, most water is quote-unquote international waters, right, which it's owned by nobody, so nobody cares about it.
So, you know, when you see these issues, I remember, you know, when they talk about this great Pacific gyre or something like that, where There's these plastic bits just floating around sort of in this one part of the Pacific because it sort of spins around.
Well, of course, no one owns it.
No one's interested in cleaning it up.
You know, they're saying, well, why couldn't we get somebody to clean it up?
Well, you know, if somebody did own that part of the ocean, I think that if we did have in some ways the guts to apply private property rights to the oceans, I think that a lot of those problems would be solved fairly quickly.
And even if you could own it, then charity.
Even if there was no economic value in it whatsoever, there would be sentimental value in just going to clean it up.
I mean, I'd donate some money towards doing that.
I don't like the idea of all this crap floating around in the ocean.
I'd be happy to pay for that.
So yeah, people, you know, if the environmentalism movement is strong enough to affect policy in a democratic society, then it is easily strong enough to achieve far more effective results in a free market.
Because obviously environmentalism is a big enough movement that, you know, you put green on your package, you triple your sales.
Because the company that I co-founded was an environmental company.
People wanted us to be in their stock portfolios because we were green, you know, and that mattered.
That counted.
The ethical stock investors and so on really cared about.
So there's no doubt that there's enough motive to get this stuff done and people will donate time, money, and energy to do all of this stuff.
But right now, there's just this big foggy borg in the way called the state that is interfering with all the creative solutions and all the genuine protection.
Of things, as you pointed out.
People say, well, there's a problem of the commons, which is that which is unowned is exploited by everyone.
So let's have a government.
And then you just create this magical exclusion from the problem of the commons called the government.
But the government is the entity most subject to the problem of the commons.
No one owns it.
They just rape and pillage its resources and move on.
Yeah.
And again, turning to resources and whatnot, what I find funny is that I work in sort of a design field as well, and I was designing lighting, sort of manufactured in China, shipped to North America and whatnot.
And one of these big things is about packaging and whatnot.
But when you look at something like packaging, of course, we as designers and people who were shipping products from place to place, we tried to find that perfect spot where we would use As little packaging as possible, so it would be as cheap as possible, but just so much That it would arrive at its destination safely, so it wouldn't be wasted.
We're always trying to find, and what was interesting, of course, and it's all motivated by the profit motive, because we were personally invested in creating a product that, A, used as little resources as possible, maybe in part so it could either be cheap or we could have a higher profit margin, and B, also, but would have enough packaging that it would survive from factory to end user's home.
It was just naturally what we did.
We didn't need the government to tell us to do this.
It's a funny sort of thing.
Let me tell you one other thing just to make sure that we get the requisite amount of hate mail that you deserve, I think, as original thinkers.
I feel if I'm not getting the hate mail, I just feel like I haven't done my job for the day.
But have you ever noticed, maybe this is just me, so tell me if this is, you know, way off base for you, but have you ever noticed how environmental problems always seem to be male?
You know, it's all the male-based things that are problematic.
So for instance, like, you go to a mall, right?
I mean, go to a mall.
So I go to a mall with my daughter, right?
Of the stores, I actually counted this up the other day, of the stores in the average mall, how many do you think are dedicated to guy stuff?
Three, maybe.
Bass Pro, you know, Bass Pro maybe.
About three.
There's, you know, in the mall that I went to, there's a Radio Shack.
Kind of guy stuff, right?
I mean, remote control cars and computers and stuff like that.
So kind of guy stuff.
And there was a Sony store, you know, okay, they had some pretty candy-colored laptops and all that stuff, you know, big giant flapping M&M-looking things.
But, you know, it's TV so big that they're visible from Mars.
And I assume that that's kind of guy stuff.
And, you know, one sporting goods store, which, you know, also sold a bunch of women's work.
But generally, it was, you know, three stores, maybe three and a half.
And then there was one or two stores which were just kids, you know, Toys R Us or whatever, right?
Everything else in the entire mall was focused.
Ever think about whether there's a patriarchy or just stand on the ground floor of a big department store and just take a look around.
It's perfume, it's makeup, it's shoes, it's handbags, it's just, I mean, you name it.
The amount of consumerism that goes on that is driven by women who, you know, women run 80% of domestic, like of household spending, 80% of it is run by women.
So to me, it's kind of weird that if you really cared about the environment, I mean, wouldn't you really focus on trying to curb the materialism of your average, not all, but your average woman and all the crap that she wants to buy that drives entire mall economies, like drives, I guess, 70% of the shipping that goes across the ocean, drives I don't know how many animal deaths to make shoes and purses, drives how much resource requirements to go and make whatever the crap they make this stuff out of, right?
I mean, it's insane.
Like, there's a store called, I can't remember, it was Claire's or something like that.
You know, my daughter and some friends would like to go in there.
No, no, it's...
And basically, there's a line in the movie, Despicable Me 2, where the main character says, you know, to his kids, go and buy some mall junk, you know, that girls like.
And you go into the store, and it's like little bracelets and...
Pens with floaty things in them and tufts on top and little makeup cases and stuff like that.
I think it's a tween store or something like that.
And it's like, dear God, there's not one functional thing you would ever need on a desert island or to survive a shark attack or to survive a sunburn.
There's nothing functional here.
It's all just colorful crap that you buy, you wear three times, it breaks, you throw it out.
I invite people interested in the environment.
I'll stop my rant now, but I just invite people who are interested in the environment Why can't we talk about women and this mindless consumerism that occurs, this sex in the city planet of wasted resources?
Why is it always the men stuff that is always focused on?
Anyway, that's the end of my rant.
I'm out of air anyway.
Because it's Mother Earth.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not Father Earth.
And the big drills of the men going into a terrible...
Oh, my God.
Watch that in slow motion.
This is what I would ask my...
Well, yeah.
I mean, that's what I asked.
I said, how do you rape the planet?
And it's only, you know, I don't understand.
Do I screw a knot hole in a tree or something like that?
I mean, you know, we're just talking about moving wrong.
Redmond, I have to say, challenge accepted.
I'm going to find this out.
I'm going to film it in slow-mo, and I'm going to send you a copy.
I'm going to figure this one out.
And I think it's going to have something to do with the mall drain.
Sorry?
Okay, so you're going to attempt to rape the planet.
You will make it happen, is what you're saying?
Well, no, because I've been challenged to learn more about the pickup artist industry, I am actually going to attempt to, you know, mind screw the planet into seductive submission.
So I'll just be out chatting up about Redwood after the show and telling it that it looks pretty, but a little fat.
So just really getting in tune with Mother Nature.
So you can, oh yes, so that she will submit to you.
No, I think we have to, I think we now have to refer to her.
Sorry, go ahead.
So that you can, she will submit to you so you can exploit her essentially, is what you're talking about.
I think that now we're going to have to refer to her as MILF Nature.
MILF! That's just the way it's going to have to go.
I apologize in advance.
Well, it's funny, right?
I only know that from weeds.
Anyway, go on.
It is, of course.
When you go to Sierra Club, Call to Action, Handbook for Ecology, Peace and Justice, the political and economic system that destroys the earth is the same system that exploits workers.
I.e.
capitalism.
And then, of course, we have that wonderful...
And it is kind of funny how environmentalism is mixed up with this anti-capitalistic mentality.
But as you point out, it's merely another kind of conspicuous consumption, right?
Which is completely irrational, even from their own measurements, right?
When you look at something like, I think, a British government a little while ago, Looked at things like plastic bags, right?
And they compared them to, you know, they compared them to, I guess, these quote-unquote reusable shopping bags.
And I think they found you would have to use something like, you know, 340 plastic bags or something like that to equate to one reusable bag.
Now, I don't know about your reusable bags, but now, you know, I've, over the years, have collected, I'd say, about 50 of them I threw out about 30 of them probably a couple months ago.
And even the ones I do own probably have only lasted maybe 25 uses, maybe 30 uses.
No, but that's good because, you know, one thing that's tough about the plastic bags is it's really hard to hide the life-threatening bacteria that you need for a very carbon-burning trip to emergency.
Because one of the things they found with these reusable bags is, you know, they've got, like, Bits and craps of strawberries jammed in the corners and Lord knows what.
And they're just like bacteria pits.
I mean, you know, you want to hit those with a flamethrower from about 50 yards, call in an airstrike.
I mean, they're biohazards.
And, you know, when you get sick, that's not very good for the environment either.
So, again, you just can't look at the full picture of how these things work.
It's just sentiment.
Well, plastic is bad and cloth is good and reusable is good.
But, you know, people get sick from this stuff.
Well, not only that, but when you look at the amount of resources, not to harp on cloth bags too much, but when you look at the amount of resources that goes to growing cotton, harvesting cotton, Keeping it from, you know, the amount of pesticides, the amount of fertilizers that go into creating this stuff, you know, then you've got to bleach it, you've got to color it, you've got to ship it, it's heavier, it's thicker.
As you said, and again, this is this whole precautionary principle thing, you know, there's sure that there's a cost to using, you know, plastic to wrap around your meat.
What is the cost of not using plastic to wrap around your meat?
What is the cost of...
Well, of course, then we shouldn't eat animals, but that's a whole other...
We could have a whole other discussion on animal rights.
Well, and if you remember this cash-filled clunkers, I think it was in Obama's first time he put in this cash-filled clunkers.
They've got to buy your old cars because old cars tend to burn dirtier than new cars.
And, oh man, I mean, I tried doing some research on this and I spent a couple of hours on it.
I could never find the facts that I needed.
But I wanted to find out how much energy and what kind of environmental damage it took to create a new car.
And then compare that to the difference in how they burn fuel.
And boy, I mean, you would have to drive an old car for approximately 900 billion years or something like that.
To overcome the economic damage, the environmental damage that is caused by a new car, right?
Like this, the Prius thing, right?
I've read an economist who tore apart the Prius thing.
Like, I mean, the amount of energy and toxicity it takes to create the battery that is then shipped over on a tanker that's very heavy from Japan to wherever they built it.
And, you know, all of that kind of stuff, right?
The amount of extra that you have to drive because you can't find a place to plug it in, that kind of stuff.
And he said, you know, Priuses are far worse than gas-burning cars.
And then the interviewer said, and what do you drive?
And he said, well, I drive a Prius because I'm not immune to social pressure, right?
Because if you're, you know, if you're a faculty, you have to, I mean, if you park in a gas panel, nobody's going to invite you to their soirees and so on, right?
And you might not get tenure if you're a coal-burning son of a bitch.
So...
So yeah, it's all just nonsense.
It's all sentiment.
I mean, the cost-benefit analysis, the rational analysis, the empathetic compassion for those who are still struggling out of poverty, I mean, none of that exists.
And also, I mean, if If you're supposed to grow locally and consume locally, why the hell do the governments keep shutting people down for growing their own vegetables?
I mean, that's mad, right?
I mean, these are the people who are going to save us from the planet.
They won't even let us grow half an ear of corn in our discarded toilet.
It's crazy.
Yeah, or drinking their own milk.
Well, it's a funny thing.
It's almost like a hatred of the division of labor, to some extent.
There is some nativism in that, and there's all sorts of issues rolled into that.
But I just wanted to point out, pick on one thing that you discussed.
Well, yeah.
Only one?
What am I? Not doing my job?
I'm sorry.
Well, no, in turning back to the feminism, I don't know if you remember this, but one of the first talks we ever had, you actually got in huge amounts of trouble for something you said about feminism.
That was, I remember the, I don't know if you remember that, the Marx, what was it?
Feminism is Marxism with panties, but...
No, socialism with panties.
Socialism with panties.
Yeah, and I did a follow-up video where I quoted massive amounts of feminists from the 50s and 60s, and You know, then of course, you know, when I actually provided the facts to back up, which of course is an argument, wasn't even an argument, it's just a statement, you back it up with facts and then people just go off and find somebody else to bother them.
Anyway.
Yeah, but anyways, but what I was going to say was, and actually, well, we could touch on this other talk you had a little while ago in a little bit, but when you talk about environmental damage, what again, what I find funny about the concept of environmental damage is that, again, The environment, you know, quote-unquote, I hate to use the term environment or whatever, but essentially, change is the only constant, right?
If we look at Canada today, say, you know, the geographical region known as Canada today, you know, 10,000, 12,000 years ago, there were no trees in Canada.
Zero.
None whatsoever, right?
Because, you know, we were covered in, what, five kilometers of ice?
Something like that in the last ice age?
Or was it just that the natives had a really tough immigration policy for non-mobile plant life?
It's really, don't compete with our totem poles, man.
We gotta be tallest.
Anyway, go on.
Well, but this is it, right?
I mean, it's, you know, you talk about quote-unquote damage, but everything is just constantly changing.
And this is another thing that I find about the environmental argument or the environmentalist argument.
Do they believe in some sort of stasis?
Stasis, yeah.
As in, before humans existed, was the Earth just static, right?
Before we decided to get all uppity and start burning fossil fuels, somehow it was static and great changes did not occur.
It seems to just, you know, it's just this, you know, that thing.
These two ideas that are opposing each other and blah, blah, blah.
And so, you know, damage...
I mean, what is damage?
I dig a hole in the ground, I get some gold out, or I'm able to build a building with some rock that I've dug out.
Maybe those quarries can actually look quite nice, and maybe Edward Burtynski Can go make a career photographing these very attractive marble quarries.
Well, and you know, I mean, if you're a mob boss, you can't hide bodies in a puddle.
You need abandoned quarries with a sufficient amount of water and darkness.
No, but look, there's a lot of people who love static societies.
You know, people...
People who aren't that smart, they like static societies.
Because otherwise, like, I love new stuff, I love to learn new stuff, new technology, new ideas.
That's what the great thing is about the job that I have, is I constantly get to research really cool new stuff that I've never heard about before that blows my mind on a regular basis.
But a lot of people don't like that.
They just, they want to go to work, do the same job for 20, 30, 40, 50 years and go home.
I mean, there's no way that societies like the Chinese society, which was static for thousands of years, could have possibly remained that way if nobody liked it.
I'm not calling the Chinese dumb.
I think statistically they're smarter than whites on average.
The IQ is higher for Orientals.
By a couple of points, at least that's the statistics that I've heard.
But societies that are stagnant, that don't change...
They serve the needs of highly anxious people or not very intelligent people who just either are stressed by change or don't want change and so on.
And so I think that there is a yearning.
To me the ideal always seems to be kind of medieval of the environmental movement.
Like when you farmed by hand and you had the simple life and you were Amish or whatever.
And of course you take these people nine feet from a cell phone and they burst into flames.
But I think that there is this idea that there's this static, repetitive, time-worn tradition rules and this kind of stuff where the footprint that humanity leaves on the planet is not growing every year as it kind of is these days.
And I kind of understand that yearning.
I mean, sometimes it would be nice to imagine, or it is nice to imagine there's sort of a simpler world that doesn't change, where You know what's coming and the way you teach your kids is exactly what your grandparents were taught and so on.
I mean, that's all, you know, unfortunately or unfortunately is sort of by the wayside these days.
But I think for some people, a static society is really nice.
I think it's something they can relax into because, you know, the hurly-burly of the modern world, I mean, we do have issues in the West with happiness, you know?
I mean, we are not ranked or rated very high.
Typically, the wealthier a society gets, the more mental health issues it has.
The wealthier a society gets, the unhappier it tends to get.
I don't think that's the fault of money.
I certainly don't think it's the fault of the free market.
But out of that, I think, does come a yearning for a simpler time.
You know, when you learned how to plow a field, then that's what you learned.
And that had value until you were dead.
You know, now people learn stuff and then it's obsolete.
And particularly in the computer field, you learn stuff, it's obsolete in sort of six to 18 months.
You know, I've been out of the computer field now for a couple of years.
I mean, I couldn't even imagine going back in and trying to learn all the new stuff.
So I just wanted to point out that there is, I think, a yearning among certain sections of the population for some sort of stasis, because I think they view this as a sort of moving sidewalk that just keeps getting faster and faster and they can't keep up.
Yeah, well, and it's also, what's interesting about that, too, is when you look back to the modern, the roots of the modern environmental movement, and you can see it with people such as Prince Charles, it was very much, and, you know, when you talk about hating the poor and whatnot, right, it was very much, it did very much come from the upper classes.
It came from the landed aristocracy, who, in a very real sense, had their place within society completely uprooted by capitalism.
Like Marxism, like Fabian socialism, like Marxism, like radical feminism, all of these isms all come from the wealthy and educated classes.
I would argue that the Industrial Revolution was a bottom-up.
Because people voted with their feet to go to the factories and escape the godforsaken life on the farms.
So one of the few movements has been the free market movement that really comes from the bottom up because it can't be imposed.
You cannot impose the free market from the top down.
All these other ideologies can be imposed from the top down, and this is why the wealthy classes tend to be Right.
So central in how they get inflicted.
But the free market is the aggregation, of course, of voluntary choices of all sections in society, and the poor outnumber the rich.
So it's one of the few truly democratic movements, as opposed to all this top-down, semi-fascistic stuff, which always leads to continual catastrophes.
Yeah.
And I mean, that's the thing, you know, like, I think a friend of mine down the street, I think he has, you know, his parents came from sort of...
Southern Italy, which, you know, after World War II was virtually a third world country, you know, my own relatives, my opa, I guess my grandfather who grew up in Hungary, he was an ethnic German within Hungary, I mean, they were really peasant farmers, right?
I mean, they lived by essentially scratching in the dirt, you know, my own roots and, you know, people I know.
It's not that far away from that sort of subsistence farming life, right?
And anybody, when you talk to these people, you know, they say, you know, people who idealize that never experienced it, you know what I mean?
And what is interesting now today is you still have almost this exact same dynamic going on where you have wealthy Westerners, essentially, you know, Europeans and whatnot, Going to Africa, literally going to Africa and saying, stay poor.
Do not work to improve your lives.
You don't want what we have.
And if you try to get it, we're going to stop you from getting it.
And that's exactly what goes on.
Oh my god.
And, you know, as a guy who spent some time in Africa, I gotta tell you, I mean, the Africans are not poor because of a choice.
Dear God in heaven, I mean, like, oh, you could have three cars in the garage and a swimming pool and a jacuzzi, but I really respect your choice to remain a child soldier.
I mean, Jesus Christ, how patronizing and condescending.
I mean, the Africans are poor because they have these psycho governments, and the psycho governments are propped up and armed by Western foreign aid.
No, it's absolutely wretched.
And this idea that, yeah, I mean, just go and stay.
I mean, they don't want to be poor.
They want to have exactly the same opportunities as the rest of us have been blessed by history and coincidence with.
And I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith who grew up on a farm.
And he said, you know, once you've worked on a farm, nothing else seems like work.
And I think that I've never worked on a farm, but I have done a fair amount of staking claims and prospecting all that.
That's some badass, backbreaking labor.
And, you know, there's a great book out by Charles Murray.
About the sort of failings of the middle class or failing middle class and he's got some questions for the elites and I'd like to actually I'm gonna try and get him on the show and ask him if I can reprint them but you know one of the questions he has for the elites who want to claim to be able to run society is have you ever had a job where any part of your body aches at the end of the day?
It's an interesting question because you know majority of a lot of people do he said and the other one was do you Do you know anyone who smokes?
Here's a tricky one.
Do you know what Branson is?
I didn't know this one at all.
No, not Richard Branson, but Branson, Missouri is one of the biggest tourist destinations in America, but it's all country and Western all the time.
And so, of course, the elites have no clue, but they get like six million people a year going through there listening to...
Nashville, I think, is more for recording.
This is more for performing.
And then he lists sort of the top 10 movies.
Have you seen any of these movies?
What do you think?
And so on.
And some of them are pretty cheesy and some of them are pretty good.
And he's got lots of questions about, have you ever lived for a year or more in a town of 10,000 or less people?
Because like a quarter of Americans do.
Do you know anyone who's ever done that?
So he's got lots of questions for the elites who claim to run society to try and gauge the degree to which they actually might have some understanding of the people whose lives they claim to want to organize for the better.
And of course, if you've had no experience living these kinds of lives, then how on earth could you claim to organize?
You're like a gentleman farmer, like somebody who doesn't have any idea which end of a cow the milk comes out of, but claims that he's a farmer.
I mean, it's embarrassing.
But yeah, so these kinds of questions, I think, are pretty important.
Yeah, definitely.
And then I think we'll probably bring it to a close, just because we've been going for about a minute now.
Oh, but let's make sure we pump the upcoming event.
Oh yeah, for sure.
But yeah, October.
But I just, I did actually want to talk, I just wanted to talk to you about, to some extent, the, do morals exist outside of human, human, essentially human existence, outside of the human mind, right?
Like, in terms of, yeah, like, and that's what I mean, but animals don't have more rules.
Yeah, the scientific method or higher mathematics don't exist in the absence of human consciousness.
It doesn't mean that they're subjective.
See, people think that because it's in your mind, it must be subjective.
But the scientific method doesn't exist in the real world, but that doesn't make it subjective.
Mathematics, you know, things exist in the world, but numbers don't.
That doesn't mean that numbers are subjective.
So no, I don't think that morals exist.
And I sort of try and make this point with annoying regularity in my book on ethics, but no, they don't exist.
But that doesn't mean that they're subjective.
Yeah, well, and that's an interesting point because oftentimes what you're What I find funny, too, is that oftentimes environmentalists are actually attempting to apply morals to the amoral world of animals and plants.
Again, it harkens back to this thing I was discussing with you about the fact that they know the perfect number and mix of animals that should be within a given location.
And they almost decide that it's a moral...
There's the proper moral and just amount of ice within the Arctic, right?
And there's the proper moral just number of spotted owls within the 500 square kilometers of this particular forest.
And this species must never be allowed to go extinct, no matter what room it may make for other species.
I mean, if the dinosaurs had never gone extinct, we sure as hell wouldn't be having this conversation.
Or if we would, it would be over a tasty carcass of brontosaurus meat with giant tyrannosaurus rex teeth.
Well, it's a funny thing, you know, just to explore these ideas.
And, you know, if, you know, let's say around a volcano, there's a particular number of species that are unique to that one particular area around this volcano.
How much resources should human beings expend to absolutely stop those species from ever becoming extinct, ever, even if it's a live volcano?
I mean, should we spend our entire resources to...
And the answer is, who knows?
But if you feel passionately about it, go make a case for it to the general public.
I'm passionate about philosophy.
So I go to make the case that people should subsidize at least one philosopher in the world, namely...
Big, chatty forehead.
And so I make that case.
I don't go around applying for government grants and telling people at gunpoint they have to fund me.
I go around saying I'd really like to continue doing what I'm doing.
I need some cash to do it.
Would you like to send some?
And that's how I make the case because I'm a civilized human being and I want the market to decide whether what I provide has value to people.
And so if you want to keep the, you know, the lesser spotted snail daughter alive, fantastic!
Go buy up the land.
If you don't have the land, go talk to people.
Go print up some pamphlets.
Oh, don't print up some pamphlets.
Sorry, it involves wood.
But go sky-write.
No, don't sky-write.
That involves planes.
Do sign language without consuming any oxygen or food.
Convince people to give you their money.
Convince people to get involved.
That's how civilized human beings get things done.
We don't just run off to Big Daddy Warbucks gunhead known as the state and point him at everyone and say, aha, look, I've had success.
No, you've just...
Martial violence to get your way.
And the market should decide what is important to people.
People should decide what is important to them.
And you can influence people.
You can...
And the sad thing is the environment would be far better protected without the state ordering everyone around.
And the amount of environmental waste that goes on with statist programs.
I mean, there's nothing...
The stuff that goes on in China, you know, these massive, damn-busting, giant-ass projects where they're building entire cities to be inhabited by the ghosts of Ghibli film animators or something.
I mean, there's nothing there.
And you look at the amount of environmental waste that goes into building stadiums that then fall into disuse.
So there's this whole, outside of Montreal, a friend of mine and I explored this many years ago, this Olympic village left over.
Oh, it was a village left over from the 67 Expo, for God's sakes.
It's still there, rotting apart.
There's lights flickering on in it somewhere.
This is all status stuff.
Look at these giant dams, these massive hydroelectric projects that go on in the third world, funded by foreign aid projects.
It's just about filling the pockets of contractors from here.
I mean, it's just massive waste.
And my God, we would find that we'd probably need less than half of the energy or a quarter of the energy if the government wasn't wasting it doing all of this stuff.
And with private property, things would be so much better.
It just bothers me that it seems lazy.
It's always to me lazy.
It's like somebody who says, well, I really want to go and help people, so I'm going to get down and pray.
Actually, that's not really helping people.
That's just easing your conscience.
And the people say, well, I really want to help the environment, so I'm just going to go get a law passed.
Ah, look, I got a law passed.
I helped the environment.
No, you didn't.
You actually harmed the environment by creating perverse disincentives for optimization of resources.
Anyway.
Yeah, well, and that's it.
And, you know, and when it comes down to it, you know, for all this, it's bipolar, you know, the hatred of capitalism or the, you know, or the free market or private property because it's, in some ways, they argue it's too efficient, right?
It's, oh, it doesn't care about other things.
Yet, if you want to help the environment, you should want to be efficient.
You should want to use...
And that's exactly what anybody who's involved in a profit-making enterprise is interested in, is interested in efficiency.
Anyways, so- Okay, so October.
October.
Give us the pitch.
Take off your shirt.
Sorry?
Yeah.
Good start.
I don't know.
Let me put the music on.
Well, I guess I got to start working on that, on the whole, what is it?
Putting the moves on Mother Earth, right?
Or MILF. MILF for Earth.
MILF for Earth.
Mother MILF. Okay, so...
October.
Yeah, okay, so again, so last year we ran the Liberty Now conference, which was very well received.
You were the keynote speaker, and I believe you're going to be coming back again.
I am.
It's my Back from the Dead tour.
I had to cancel all my speaking engagements in the summer for various treatments.
And so, yes, I will be, in fact, clawing my way out of a coffin as my opening act.
So, yes, I'm looking forward to being back in front of people.
Yeah, so we're looking at that.
So this is what, again, this is myself.
I'm working with guys from the Ontario Libertarian Party on that, the Institute for Liberal Studies.
We're sort of just organizing it.
Last year, we had gun rights people.
We had freedom of education people there.
We had a number of philosophers, economics.
We had media people talking about spreading the message of liberty, of individual rights, those sorts of things.
And so this year, again, I think we might be doing some focusing.
Actually, maybe you could speak to this.
And possibly, I'd love to get up that speaker or that person who you went and saw.
You just did that video on health care.
In the United States.
Oh yeah, those guys are great.
Lifesavers.
I loved what you had to say about refugees being a medical refugee.
I never thought I'd have to live my values so chillingly and explicitly.
There's nothing so expensive as that which comes for free.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, well, as I've said to people, I said, it's not free, you just, you simply don't know what it costs.
I mean, that's the real problem.
But, so we're looking at Liberty now, and then right now, I think we're, we may, we're in the very final stages, we may be bringing up Ron Paul for that event, for those of you who are interested in the, you know, Ron Paul and his message.
And it just so happens that Peter Schiff is going to be in town on the same day.
So we may be able to get Peter Schiff out to either Liberty Now or we'll be running a separate event with Peter Schiff.
It's tough though, you know, trying to get Peter up in front of a crowd.
I mean, he's so shy that it's not easy.
You might need some handlers and some people with some pretty heavy horse tranquilizers, but go on.
Oh yeah, for sure.
So we're looking at that.
So we're doing all that.
So that's going to be October 26th.
The website is libertynow.ca.
And that's going to be held on the University of Toronto campus downtown.
We had it at Victoria College last year, so we might be doing it again at that location.
And then the next weekend after that, we've got the Toronto Austrian Scholars Conference.
I don't know if you made it, I don't think you made it out to it last year, but this service is twinned up with what's going down in the United States.
No, I'd like to come and watch.
I love me some Austrian economists in the morning.
They smell like victory.
Yeah, it's excellent.
We had a very good turnout last year.
We almost had enough papers, and all these tenured profs, I don't know what to do with them, but trying to get them, it's like pulling teeth to get them to submit stuff, right?
They don't have to work anymore.
Just kidding, guys.
Please come to my conference.
But no, we had a great time.
We had papers.
We had a guy fly up from...
From the Caribbean.
We had a couple Americans come up.
We had Joe Salerno.
Wait, wait.
Guy leaves Caribbean in October to come to Canada?
Yeah.
I didn't know that he's that smart.
But anyway, go on.
Yeah.
But this year, we're going to be having...
What's his name?
Dave Howden, who is originally a Canadian.
He lives in Spain right now.
And he teaches at the University of St.
Louis Madrid campus.
And so he's going to be here Actually, no.
If he leaves Spain, doesn't it mean that nobody's working in Spain?
Doesn't he have the last job in Spain?
So that will change the numbers considerably.
I just really wanted to point that out.
Come back soon!
We need an economy!
Yeah, incidentally, of course, a large portion of the damage in Spain, in addition to the...
Of course, they had a massive housing bubble, just like the United States did.
But one of the other things that really trashed the Spanish economy was their massive malinvestment into windmills and solar panels.
I don't know if you know about that, but they just ravaged their economy, malinvesting these things.
Helpful to the environment, killed lots of condors and eagles.
So you know those top predators that are supposed to manage all that?
I mean, it's great.
They're just killing condors and eagles left and right.
Nobody's working.
So all those people, see, here you go, Stefan.
All those people, they're not working, so they're not consuming.
See, it's got this crazy logic.
No, no, but what is interesting is that I imagine that there's a fair number of we're really poor tensities emerging at the base.
Of these structures so that when the manna-from-heaven eagle bodies fall into the pot, you know, you already have dinner.
So, yay.
Progress.
Well, yes, exactly.
So they would fall into the pot.
And as well, to be perfectly sustainable, what they're doing is they're detaching these windmills from the grid and pulling their electricity right there.
So essentially...
Each household will now, each Spanish household will be assigned its own windmill that they can live below.
You see?
Don't you feel nostalgic, Redmond, for the days when Fight Club was like fiction?
I really missed that.
I really missed that.
Okay, so we'll put a link to the website.
It's October 26th.
I'll be speaking.
That'd be some great.
And I like to stay for dinner.
I like to chat.
So I'm not just going to be sort of bungeeing in and bungeeing out.
And you will be leading us, I guess we've got karaoke hosts for later in the evening, and I believe you do a pretty mean version of Britney Spears' Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman, if I remember rightly.
So obviously we'll be expecting the full outfit, not just the song.
It really needs to be a committed performance.
Yeah, well, given my line of work, I like to do, you know, Bon Jovi, living on a prayer, essentially.
All right.
Well, thanks, everyone.
It's great to chat with you again.
Let's make sure we get people out to this event.
Is it going to cost?
What's it going to cost people to come and get Illumination?
Well, here's the thing.
We got this weird situation.
Last year, we charged, I think, about 20 bucks or so, or 25, but we included lunch.
But the problem with that is that we couldn't account for people buying tickets at the door, so we may not do lunch this year, so it may be a lot cheaper.
But you've got to bring your own lunch.
But I think it will work out.
Good.
So basically what we can expect is a great set of speeches and cannibalism for the people who forget their own lunches.
I will actually arrive in a full Kevlar suit, just in case anybody wants to take a bite out of me, who I don't want to.
Campbellism, you know, it's very eco-friendly.
Very eco-friendly.
People don't understand.
And no better.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, yeah, think about it.
We'd eliminate that wasteful use of land.
There'd be no coffins being made.
We could grind the bones up.
I think we've hit upon something, Stephen.
Actually, I think I just might be like an owl and consume the whole person and just spit up the bones in a big pile later.
Because I really feel people would pay for that YouTube video.
All right, listen, just so we don't end up completely destroying any intellectual credibility we have with ridiculous jokes.
Like I said, it'll probably be around 20 bucks, but it's a full day of great talks, great people.
You're helping to support everything we do.
Donate to you.
Mises Canada is a government-suckling registered charity, so you'll get some tax money back if you donate to us.
And yeah, let's do this again soon, Stephan.
Yeah, I'm a CEO in October.
I'm freedomainradio.com.
Thanks again, Redman.
Take care.
Take care.
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