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Oct. 9, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:34:02

2502 The Demise of the US Dollar: Timeline and Obituary

Stefan Molyneux discusses how long we have until the collapse of the dollar and outlines the scenario he sees unfolding when economic reality hits the United States.

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux for your main radio.
	Listener question.
	Listening to Peter Schiff makes one think the dollar is going to collapse before Obama is finished with his presidency.
	But I heard an interview you did with Dr.
	Mark Skousen and he seemed to feel it's at least 20 years away.
	I know you don't have a crystal ball, but how much time do you think we have to buy our gold?
	How likely will it be made illegal?
	And this is a fine question.
	I naturally have no crystal ball, but I do have two squishy ones, so I will be happy to plunge into the fray and tell you my thoughts about what is going to occur with the economy.
	So, of course, you know, all the disclosures in the world.
	I'm no financial expert.
	These are all just hypotheses and suppositions and things like that.
	But I will tell you what I think.
	So, the first thing to understand about the economy, and particularly we'll talk about the American economy, although a lot of this, of course, will also apply to the European economy, is that So here's the first thing that I think is very important to understand about the economy.
	Now, the economy is surrounded by so many lies and so many self-interested and self-motivated liars that finding out the truth about the economy, and I'm just talking not even the moral truth about what we call the economy, but Even the factual truth about the economy is not easy.
	And for the general population, it's impossible, functionally impossible, to find out any kind of truth about the economy as a whole.
	So let's just run sort of quickly through not even the full list of people whose self-interest it is to lie to you.
	Now, I'm not talking like misrepresent the economy or stretch the truth.
	I mean just outright lie.
	Perform the kind of numerical and accounting tricks that would be completely illegal in any free society, or at least would be severely punished in a free society.
	Outright lies.
	So, first and foremost, of course, governments.
	Now, the typical arc of a political campaign...
	The sort of famous question that every challenger asks about every incumbent is, are you better off now than you were four years ago?
	And what happens is, the economy is generally getting worse, and it's not specific to any presidency.
	The machinery of decline in the economy is not party-specific, it's not president-specific.
	But what happens is, Obama will say stuff like, well, You know, George Bush was really bad for the economy, we need to rein in the debt, we need to cut our spending, we need to become more efficient, we need to disengage from wars, we need to do all these kinds of things, right?
	And he says that, and then of course, so he blames the bad economy on the decisions of the incumbent, the challenger, right?
	And he says all the things he's going to do differently.
	And then when he gets into power, he doesn't do anything differently.
	But for the first term, he blames the economy on the actions of his predecessor.
	Well, I inherited a mess from my predecessor.
	And that gets him elected to his second term.
	And once he's in his second term, I mean, the president doesn't give a shit, really, basically, about what you think, because he can't run for a third term anyway.
	So...
	I mean, whoever's going to replace him on the Democrat or Republican side has to come up with some other story as to why the economy is still so bad.
	You know, they'll blame banks, they'll blame the international stuff, and whatever it is that they'll do, they'll never blame government policies.
	It's not possible, right?
	It's not in the narrative.
	Now, the government's main interest is to pretend that economic indicators are different or better than what they actually are in reality.
	Unemployment, of course, is a famous example.
	I mean, if they calculate an unemployment like they did in the 80s or 90s, early 90s, unemployment would be in the double digits, and, you know, it's 15% or 16%.
	And it's functionally closer to 20% to 25%.
	percent.
	Because, of course, they do all this nonsense like the people who drop out of the workforce are considered employed, or at least not counted in the unemployed roles.
	People who take early retirement and live on dog food because they can't find work are classified as not unemployed.
	People who lost a $75,000 a year job and then end up with part-time work at Starbucks are considered as employed at Starbucks part-time as they were at a $75,000 a year job.
	So, I mean, the number of tricks are just sort of endless and boring and Who cares, right?
	I mean, the official unemployment rate.
	It's just lies.
	They're too self-interested.
	Their motives are too ridiculously slanted for there to be any truth coming out of this.
	When they say the economy has grown without reference to the money supply...
	Then that's like saying to your therapist, I'm happier without reference to your cocaine use right before the therapy session.
	I feel great!
	I'm cured, baby!
	I got my heel on!
	Talking about the economy without talking about the money supply is boring.
	I don't even follow this stuff anymore because it's just too silly.
	And the money supply is now hidden from view.
	They won't even tell you how much money they're printing.
	I mean, we do know that the Fed is buying up, what, $85 billion worth of bonds every week, and that, of course, is to maintain the bond price in the absence of demand.
	So what you need to do is recognize that everything the government is telling you about the economy is a lie.
	And everything that most financial people, gurus, experts, some notable exceptions, Woody O'Brien, Peter Schiff, Jeff Berwick, Doug Casey, some notable exceptions, Mark Skousen is really, really good.
	And there's some other people, a lot of them I've interviewed, Brian Kaplan.
	I think is good.
	And there's lots of people that you can look at, certainly through the list of people I've interviewed.
	Obviously, I think they're good, unless I challenge them directly in the show.
	Mark Faber, people like that, I think they are well worth listening to.
	But most financial experts, well, what are they invested in?
	Well, they're invested in stocks and bonds, and it's to some degree in gold, but mostly they're invested in stocks and bonds.
	Now, stocks, for those who don't know, are just, you know, chunks of a company, tiny bits of ownership of a company without legal exposure, like if the company goes bankrupt, you're not responsible for any debts as a stockholder, and you buy the stock for two reasons.
	Hopefully, the stock goes up in price, and you can sell it at a profit, or you get dividends, which is a share of the company profits paid out proportional to your ownership as a shareholder.
	And bonds are just instruments that will pay interest or some sort of annuity.
	I mean, companies issue bonds, but mostly it's largely a government market.
	Governments issue bonds.
	And what are bonds?
	Well, bonds are uncertainties of massive future tax increases.
	That is what a government...
	Bond is.
	So government bond, you know, let's say they say, well, we'll give you a five-year bond at 5% a year.
	I guess it's kind of high these days, but it's a five-year bond.
	Well, how are they going to pay your interest?
	They don't make any money, right?
	The government doesn't have any money, doesn't make any money.
	So they pay your interest by raising taxes.
	All you're doing is guaranteeing yourself a 10% tax increase or 10% deflation because they may print the money to pay you off.
	All you're doing is guaranteeing yourself Either an explicit or implicit, i.e.
	tax increase or inflation tax increase, right?
	And this is what's so funny.
	So people say, well, I need to buy bonds because there's inflation.
	And then when you buy bonds, you fuel inflation because the government has to pay off the bonds and it does that by printing money.
	So it's kind of a vicious, truly vicious circle.
	And stocks aren't going to give you a guaranteed rate of return and bonds...
	Usually do give you a rate of return.
	Now, of course, businesses use bonds when they want to expand their businesses, but they don't want to dilute their ownership, right?
	You sell stocks, you start diluting your ownership.
	But if you sell bonds, you don't.
	And bonds don't give you ownership in the company.
	And in return for not having ownership in the company, and in return for there are not going to be wild swings in the price of a bond, unlike a stock, right?
	If a company doubles in value, I mean, the bond is more secure in that they're going to be able to pay their 5%, much more likely, but the bond isn't going to double in value because it's capped at 5% paying off.
	Whereas a stock, if a company doubles in value, then your stock can more than double in value, right?
	Because stocks are generally...
	Companies are generally valued at sort of 10 to 20 times earnings, and so if a company doubles...
	Your share of the company doesn't increase, but the value of your share doubles because the value of the company has doubled.
	And so you're not going to get wild increases in bonds, but you get stable.
	As long as the company remains in business, you get stable payouts.
	But with stocks, you can get wild increases or decreases in the stock price.
	So you trade stability for volatility.
	Volatility is not a bad thing if you feel like, you know, volatility...
	In your horizontal position to the earth is a good thing if you like roller coasters, and it's a bad thing if you don't.
	So, people who ski moguls like volatility in the height of the snow.
	But anyway, so volatility is just a way of saying, you know, can go up or down extremely, and lots of people, of course, when you're young, generally you tend to prefer volatility.
	When you're older, you generally, assuming you have money, You generally tend to prefer a more conservative rate of return because you need to plan your retirement and so on.
	So, the people who it's invested, they're invested in stocks and bonds.
	You know, I'm talking about the big major investment houses who regularly send their experts on TV and who regularly pressure governments to do X, Y, and Z. Well, If they are invested in government bonds, then they have a massive incentive to say that government bonds are good.
	Why?
	Because they're invested in government bonds, right?
	And so they want other people to keep buying government bonds, right?
	If you bought a government bond last year, I mean, it's a complete Ponzi scheme, right?
	I mean, it's sort of an insult to a Ponzi scheme, because Ponzi schemes, at least you have to voluntarily get involved.
	You're all involved in government bonds, no matter what.
	But if you bought a whole bunch of government bonds last year, Then you want to really tell people to go buy government bonds this year.
	Right?
	Of course.
	Of course you do.
	Because it's a Ponzi scheme.
	How are you going to get paid your 3% or 4% on your government bond?
	Well, because the government's getting money from people buying new government bonds.
	I mean, if you're in a Ponzi scheme, you need to get new people into the Ponzi scheme.
	So touting the value of government bonds is a really great way to make sure you're going to get paid.
	The interest on the government bonds you bought previously.
	So anybody who talks about the value and stability of government bonds who has themselves previously invested in government bonds is simply part of the Ponzi scheme and have no credibility and are telling you no truth whatsoever.
	Now, if they're invested in stocks, then they still have a massive incentive to tout government involvement in the economy for a number of reasons.
	First of all, I mean, the big financial companies are massively connected to government.
	I mean, there's a very good argument that says that Obama only won the presidency because his largest single contributors were from the financial services and finance industry, which has gone from like 5% of the U.S. economy to over a quarter of the U.S. economy.
	I mean, it's a tumor.
	It's grown proportional to the government because the government and the financial sector are, you know, evil twins, basically.
	Two sides of the same coin.
	Money and power.
	Money and power.
	Power and money.
	It's the same deal.
	So, like the Goldman Sachs and all that, heavily connected to government, as we know, they trade CEOs with the Treasury and trade CEOs with the Fed, and, I mean, it's all just ridiculous, right?
	I mean, there's a Paulson...
	Approved a bailout as part of the government that went to the company that he was the former CEO of, Goldman Sachs.
	I mean, it's all just vile.
	And the usual, right?
	I mean, it's the...
	I mean, welfare for the rich, which in many ways dwarfs the welfare for the poor.
	It certainly dwarfs it in terms of the money, not necessarily the budget as a whole, but it certainly dwarfs the amount of money.
	The amount of money that goes to the rich through corporate welfare vastly dwarfs the amount of money that ends up in the hands of the poor.
	Through the welfare state.
	And, I mean, if you count the military-industrial complexes I do as part of corporate welfare, it gets even worse.
	So, the financial services sector is also, or the finance sector, is also highly motivated to hide the realities, the Austrian realities of the money supply.
	The Austrian economics, sorry.
	Austrian economics basically says that money supply It's foundational to the health or disasters of an economy, and that money supply is the foundation of the boom-bust cycle.
	I've done podcasts on this before, but you can check out if you want and go into more details.
	But they need money flowing into the stock market.
	They need money flowing into the stock market.
	The stock market is pretty catastrophic.
	It's just been terrible over the last 20 or 30 years.
	And So, if they have stocks, they want the stocks to increase.
	And if they want the stocks to increase, that means that they have to pretend, or maybe it's true at times that a company is doing really well, and they also need a huge amount of demand for stocks.
	Now, how do financial companies stimulate demand for stocks?
	Well, what they do is they try to get the government to put as much money in the stock market as possible, which is why there are so many government laws herding money into the stock market.
	I mean, as soon as you pour massive amounts of money into the stock market, then you increase demand for stocks enormously.
	I mean, like 401k plans and particularly retirement pension schemes and so on, which are all vastly underfunded and, you know, a financial catastrophe waiting to behead the retirements of tens of millions of public sector workers.
	If you can get, you know, massive retirement schemes set up and you can get 401k plans or retirement schemes where people are sort of forced to put their money into the stock market.
	And I've got a presentation called the Supercharged Stock Market, which you can check out on YouTube or on the podcast feed for more about this.
	So they want to herd as much money into the stock market.
	And the general reality is most people don't want to be in the stock market and most people shouldn't be in the stock market.
	I mean, we know that vastly fewer people want to be in the stock market than are in the stock market because they have to be forced to put their money into the stock market.
	In other words, you have to invest in the stock market And there are some exceptions to this, right?
	So there are apparently some.
	You can buy gold as part of your 401k.
	So people have clarified this for me, and I want to sort of pass that along.
	But for the vast majority of people, you have to put your money into some sort of stock portfolio, some sort of market portfolio, give it to a hedge fund manager or money manager.
	Otherwise, the government will take it from you by force.
	So it's like invest or lose it.
	Well, of course, people will choose to invest rather than have it stolen from them.
	You know, if a guy comes up to a slot machine in Vegas and says, you know, put five bucks in the slot machine, or I'm going to take your money anyway, you're going to put it in the slot machine.
	Of course, why not put the money in the slot machine?
	Stock machine, pretty much the same these days.
	And so, when you drive huge amounts of dollars into the stock market through the power of the state, And you do this sort of explicitly by getting the state to force people to buy stocks or steal their money, or force people to contribute to pensions rather than have their own pensions.
	Well, what happens?
	The price of the stocks rises because there's a huge amount of money clamoring for the stocks and people are always looking to find some way to invest.
	And so the growth in the stock market...
	It's not real.
	And, of course, there's been precious little growth in the stock market of the last long while.
	But the growth in the stock market is entirely artificial.
	I mean, the stock market as a whole is a bubble.
	Because we don't know what the actual price of stocks would be if people weren't forced to buy them.
	If people weren't forced to buy them, we don't know.
	But we know that it would be vastly lower.
	Vastly lower.
	I mean, the whole stock indices, the variety of stock indices would be like Dow Jones and NASDAQ. I mean, they would be vastly lower if people weren't forced into it.
	Now, of course, so there's direct ways in which people are forced into the stock market, and there are indirect ways in which people are forced into the stock market, too.
	The indirect ways are inflation.
	Inflation, and Lord knows you get a quarter point on a savings account, it doesn't do you any good at all.
	So inflation gives people the need to invest.
	I mean, if your money was gaining in value by 3% or 4% or 5% every year, just sitting in the bank account or sitting under your mattress or sitting in a deposit box or something, a safety box, if your money was just gaining in value, I mean, you would never...
	I shouldn't say you would never.
	You would be much less likely to invest.
	There'd be some people who would want to invest and say, I'd like to take some of my mad money and invest and see if I can get 10-15%.
	But most people, they might invest in bonds, but they would be very unlikely to invest in stocks.
	Investing in stocks, it's a complicated business.
	You've got to know a lot.
	You've got to know a lot about the company and the business you're investing in.
	Or you've got to hand it over to someone who is going to take some portion of your income and roll the dice for you.
	And, I mean, they've done study after study that says a monkey throwing darts at a newspaper with stocks on it is going to do about as well as any money manager does.
	You can't outperform the market.
	I mean, you just can't.
	So, People might buy sort of a big bag of stocks and just sort of hold it or buy, you know, where you cycle in and out of the top 50 of the Fortune 500 companies, you know, as companies cycle in and out, you buy and sell stocks and so on.
	People might do that kind of stuff for sure, but the vast majority of people who are currently in the stock market would very likely not be in the stock market in a free society because their money would be gaining value anyway.
	Because prices would be going down.
	I mean, the freest sector of the economy is the computer sector, and what happens to features and prices?
	A relatively free sector is the telecom sector, telecommunications sector.
	What happens to the features and prices of your cell phones?
	Well, features go up, prices go down.
	Think of your ISP bandwidth.
	When I first started this podcast in 2005, I think it was, eight years ago, I mean, bandwidth was brutal.
	The early podcasts, I could encode them...
	At 32k, but that was pretty rough.
	That's like AM radio.
	So I would actually encode it at 40k per second, which didn't cost me a huge amount more on bandwidth, but sounded sort of better.
	But bandwidth now is insane.
	I mean, I was lucky to get 100 megs a month when I started, and now I get 20 terabytes a month.
	Oh yeah, 20 terabytes a month.
	I mean, it's crazy.
	I bought a second server, I think in 2007 or 2008, and I couldn't have more than 100 people connected at a time.
	But that's the reality as your price goes down and your feature set just keeps going up and up and up.
	So, would you be in the stock market?
	If you knew when you were 25 or 20 or whenever you started working that you stock away, you know, 10% of your income, you don't even have to invest it in anything.
	You can invest in some bonds.
	Of course, bonds would never be perfect in a free market society because there'd be no government.
	And so, in a free society, for you to invest in bonds, let's say you wanted to start working at 25, retire at 65, you would have to invest in bonds financially.
	for the whole time period for a company that you knew would be in existence and still profitable, or at least profitable enough to pay off the bonds in 40 years.
	Companies that last 40 years are not hugely common.
	Like of the Fortune 500 from 100 years ago, like five or six are in business still today.
	So bonds would be more risky in a free market society because there would be no government bonds, right?
	Government wouldn't have the power to do that sort of nonsense.
	And so, if you could cycle in short bonds, like five-year bonds or whatever, but if the company goes bankrupt, you'd be in the list of people to be paid, but probably wouldn't be that high on the list of people to be paid.
	So, bonds have some level of risk associated with them, which is what happens when you get the extra interest.
	Extra interest means extra risk.
	Otherwise, it wouldn't make any sense at all, right?
	So if you just knew that your money was going to grow in value by 5% a year or 4% a year or 6% a year, then you would just put your money under your mattress or in a safety deposit box or keep it in some encrypted thumb drive or something, and that would be your retirement plan.
	You wouldn't need any of the ridiculously expensive and Lucrative, though, relatively evil overhead of the existing financial services industry, financial industry.
	So, I think that's really important to understand as well, that, you know, people like Goldman Sachs, groups like Goldman Sachs invested in bonds.
	Well, they need you to keep buying bonds, so they're going to pump the value of bonds and not talk about any risks associated with bonds.
	Government bonds, ironclad.
	Really?
	Really?
	Ironclad!
	So no government's ever defaulted on bonds in history, in the past?
	Government's debts have always been made good.
	I beg to differ, and I can think of at least 100 cases off the top of my head where this has not worked.
	And there's no recourse there.
	So, they are going to want you to buy bonds, and they are going to want to have the value of their stocks increase.
	So why is the Federal Reserve buying $85 billion worth of bonds and to some degree mortgage securities every month?
	Well, for the simple reason that financial services companies who hold bonds and mortgage securities as assets have to report the value of those assets.
	And if the value of those assets declines, then their lending, I mean, I know that they're not a bank, but in general, in the financial industry, you can lend based upon the amount of assets that you have.
	And it's a multiple of the assets that you have.
	And if the value of your assets shrinks, then the value of what you can lend shrinks by a much more significant portion.
	So if you can lend at 9 to 1, you get $1,000 in assets, you can lend out $9,000. dollars.
	Thank you.
	Then if the value of your asset shrinks to $500, then you can lend out $4,500, which means that you have to call in or collapse or sell half your loans.
	$4,500 worth of loans, suddenly you can't have them.
	And so the government is propping up the value Of these instruments are just, you know, some sort of financial thumb jiggery.
	It's propping up the value of these things because if the value drops, then the amount of credit available in the economy drops catastrophically as well, and this will cause a depression, and possibly even worse.
	So, that's really...
	I mean, governments need to borrow, which means that they need to maintain the asset value of lending institutions, right?
	Or change the rules, which make it obvious that they're over-leveraged, right?
	In other words, if you say, well, now you can do 20 to 1, everybody knows that the government needs more money than it previously allowed them to lend through lending.
	This multiplier of assets which allows you to lend.
	They say, well, it used to be 10 to 1, now we're making it 20 to 1.
	Everybody knows that this is a precursor to a collapse.
	So rather than do that, they're maintaining or maybe even increasing the value of the assets that the financial companies have by buying them.
	And what that means is that there's not enough of a market to support the fractional reserve lending policies of the banks.
	So, once you force a woman to have sex with you, it's not a date anymore.
	You understand?
	It's not a date.
	Now, it's a crime.
	It's not a date anymore.
	And once you force people to buy something, you're saying that it's functionally worth less.
	Because you're forcing people.
	Now, does that mean it's absolutely worth zero in the absence of forcing people?
	Well, who knows?
	But when you force someone to buy something, you are certainly, without a doubt, saying that you believe there's no way they would pay that much for it voluntarily.
	Right?
	I mean, the moment a man forces a woman to have sex with her, he's saying either he doesn't want to voluntarily have her have sex with him or she wouldn't do it if he wasn't forcing her.
	Right?
	I mean, if you knew for sure that if you walked up to a guy and said, hey, can I have your Maserati?
	If you knew for sure, he would say, absolutely, here you go.
	Here are the keys.
	Enjoy.
	Then you would do that rather than steal it.
	So when you steal a car, you know, like the only thing we know about the car thief for absolute certain is that he does not believe that he would be given it for free.
	And the one thing we know for certain, if somebody forces you to buy something at $100, we know for sure that the person forcing you to buy it does not believe it's worth $100.
	We don't know for sure that it's not worth $100, because maybe if they stop forcing you to buy it, that it would be worth $100, but that is ridiculously unlikely.
	If you forced a million people to buy a government bond at $100, and then suddenly you say, you don't have to have that anymore, there'd be a lot of selling.
	Well, of course, the problem is, of course, that everyone who then sold would lose money because everybody would be selling at once.
	Which is why, when you artificially raise the price of something, not through price controls, but through forcing people to buy it, you really kind of have to stick with it, right?
	I mean, you really can't stop that.
	So, if you suddenly stopped, say, the 401k laws, right?
	If you suddenly said to people, you no longer have to hand your money over to the financial services industry, you can just hang on to it yourself, we're not going to tax it, you can spend it, you can do whatever you want with it, but you're not forced to buy stocks and bonds and other crap.
	You're not forced to hand it over to money managers.
	You can do whatever you want with it.
	And we're not going to tax you for taking money out of your 401k.
	What would happen?
	Well, people would stop handing money over to financial service managers, to hedge fund managers, and they would likely, if not for certain, some of them would withdraw money from their 401k accounts.
	Without a doubt.
	Now, let's say that 50% of people stop contributing to 401ks if they're forced to.
	Well, that means more or less a 50% drop in the amount of money available to financial services, to stocks, to bonds, to all that kind of crap, right?
	Well, what's that going to do?
	Well, it's going to halve the purchasing demand for stocks and bonds, right?
	What happens if you halve the demand for something?
	The price is going to collapse.
	Now, if the price collapses, then lending collapses at like a 10 to 1 ratio.
	If lending collapses at a 10 to 1 ratio, If stock price goes down by 50%, because there are half as many people, half fewer people buying stocks, if stock prices go down 50%, lending goes down 95%.
	I apologize for the ridiculously precise and specific nature of these made-up numbers while I'm driving.
	It doesn't matter fundamentally whether it's 40% or 50% or 60%.
	Stock price declines enormously, and as a result, lending...
	Virtually dries up.
	When lending dries up, then companies have to sell assets to cover costs that they formerly hoped to borrow, which means that the price of various goods is going to decline.
	Because if a whole bunch of companies need to sell off printing presses, then the market for new printing presses goes down, which means that the companies who sell printing presses, their stock price is going to further decline.
	As their stock price further declines, then the assets of banks who hold those stocks or whoever who holds those stocks also declines, which further crushes down lending, right?
	And so this is why the government...
	We'll do almost anything it can to maintain and increase the value of stocks and bonds and other mortgage-backed securities and other sorts of things.
	The government is highly invested in maintaining the asset value of lending and financial institutions.
	Let me say this again.
	The government...
	It's actually...
	It's more than that.
	The government's survival, very survival, depends upon it maintaining the asset value of financial and lending institutions.
	If the value of those institutions' assets declines significantly, the government will collapse.
	Which is why there is such...
	An incestuous, fascistic, Siamese twin rape of the general population known as the two-headed hydra of politics and finance.
	And it is why politicians will listen to a lot more.
	They will listen to the head of Goldman Sachs a whole lot more than they will listen to you.
	I mean, this is really important to understand.
	The government has no interest in And what you want, because they don't depend upon you for their survival.
	But they depend upon the financial services and sector and lending institutions for their survival.
	And this is why you have to be forced to put money into the stock market.
	And this is why you have to be forced to buy bonds to maintain the value, to maintain the asset value of these lending and financial institutions.
	I mean, it's horrible.
	But it's vile.
	And then, of course, people insult the free market by saying this has something to do with the free market.
	My goodness.
	My goodness.
	It's like saying that a kidnapped and forcibly held harem has something to do with dating.
	It's actually quite the opposite of dating.
	And what we see manifested all around us I mean, it's the exact opposite of a free market.
	I mean, there are some still free market elements and there's a great veneer.
	You know, one of the things that governments have gotten a whole lot better at over the years is camouflage.
	And of course, I talk about this in the story of your enslavement.
	Governments have become wonderfully good at camouflaging what they're up to.
	I mean, you almost never see a naked gun anymore.
	They're really, really good at camouflaging what they're up to.
	I mean, they drape themselves in the...
	Vestiges of the free market.
	They drape themselves in the vestiges of financial instruments like government bonds and so on.
	But, I mean, government bonds, they're slave bonds.
	They're literally slave bonds.
	I mean, I think in the eastern provinces in Canada here, they're selling 75-year bonds.
	75-year bonds.
	Which means that children who aren't even born yet, or children who are being born today, will be 10 years into retirement when they have to pay for the money being spent while they're still in the womb.
	I mean, we're literally enslaving the unborn elderly at the moment.
	We're literally enslaving the unborn elderly.
	This is how predatory and vile this system has become.
	Now, as to my predictions, well, seven or eight years ago, I said it was going to be five to 15 years.
	I think we're kind of on schedule for that.
	I actually still pretty much stand by that.
	So, if it was eight years ago, I said five to 15 years, then, you know, the recession hit pretty hard.
	2008, 2009, so that was sort of Five years after my first prediction.
	And I think...
	I still think...
	I don't think it's going to be within Obama's presidency.
	There's just...
	There are too many people whose wealth is too invested in maintaining the illusions.
	And I mean, the newspapers are involved in this as well.
	The media is involved in this as well.
	I mean, the media relies on advertisers.
	And advertisers are companies who don't want the economy to...
	If there's a TV station or network that's out there that actually starts to reveal all of this stuff and actually has any kind of real effect, well, the economy is going to suffer, so to speak.
	I mean, as it should, right?
	And advertisers are not going to be pleased with that.
	Advertisers want to maintain consumer confidence so that consumers will buy their stuff.
	And so networks which continually show all of this stuff and reveal it all and really drill into it, well, they're going to suffer a bit of an advertiser backlash.
	Now, that's not true for all advertisers.
	So if you listen to something like the Alex Jones show...
	Or Mark Stevens' show.
	Then you'll see that the advertisers are people who will make profits from financial catastrophes.
	So the people who will sell you...
	You can turn your toilet water into drinking water with this thing.
	You've got emergency food and shelter and lights and generators.
	So those are the advertisers who are...
	But you see, those guys aren't going to advertise in the mainstream media because the mainstream media is attempting to prop all of this stuff up so they can get the big advertising dollars.
	From people who want to sell crap to overconfident idiots.
	So, how is it going to shake down?
	I don't believe that there is any particular reason to think that the dollar is going to collapse.
	I don't.
	I think it's going to be a brutal, soft landing.
	And by brutal, what I mean is that they don't want to maintain the value of any particular stock.
	They want to maintain the value of their income as best they can.
	And of course, at some point, it's going to become pretty obvious that it's just, I mean, just can't do it.
	And so, what's going to happen?
	Well, what's going to happen is the...
	And it won't even be the most expensive sector of the economy, but those who have the least concentrated power will suffer the most.
	So those who have the least concentrated power will suffer the most, which is generally the poor and the disenfranchised, and the retirees.
	Now, that's counterbalanced by the fact that Those people vote a lot, right?
	And poor people vote for welfare, old people vote for social security, and so on, right?
	So they have a lot of political power, right?
	And so that's going to influence what they do.
	But they don't have a lot of concentrated power.
	So each individual doesn't have a lot of concentrated power.
	So in order to get elected...
	Politicians need campaign contributions.
	Now, the left, the Democrats in the U.S., generally get their campaign contributions from governments, unions, and other leftist organizations.
	And the right generally gets their donations from individuals.
	So the right, the Republicans, tend to get smaller donations from individuals, and the left get big-ticket donations from Hollywood celebrities, and they get...
	Huge donations from government unions and so on.
	And other unions who need to maintain the tax base.
	And so it sort of depends who's in power.
	But the wonderful thing about the population, the general population at least from the standpoint of the rulers, is how ridiculously malleable They are.
	I mean, my God, it's absurd how malleable they are.
	So, I mean, Woodrow Wilson in the First World War in America gets into power specifically by saying, we're going to stay out of the European War.
	Never going to go to the European War.
	We ain't have nothing to do with that European War.
	That European War and us, not even in the same hemisphere, no way, no how, gets elected.
	Bingo, bango, bongo.
	Hey, look, we're going into the war.
	Now, it's true the 200,000 American men did try and avoid and escape the draft.
	And they just went along with it.
	I mean, Russia is our ally in the Second World War, and then Russia is our enemy.
	I mean, they just, they don't even stampede back and forth.
	It's like they're teleported back and forth to various positions simply through the power of propaganda.
	People are just ridiculously malleable that way.
	And so, you know, our sort of concern and care for the poor, this can be changed in about a week or two with the right propaganda.
	And suddenly, you know, the noble public servants who are serving society at great sacrifice to themselves can be transformed into, you know, greedy, ungrateful, undeserving, parasitical leeches in a week or two with the right amount of concentrated propaganda.
	And so I think that's really important to understand that there's no particular standard in society that cannot be manipulated because people have no principles.
	And they will simply go along with the flow.
	And the government and the media and academia, they all determine the flow.
	And...
	I think it's really important to understand that there's no safe group in society.
	There can be a group that gains the protection of the media and the praise of the media and academia, but the moment that that group then threatens the ruling class's survival, then that group will be demonized and people will turn against them.
	That is ridiculously easy.
	And it is one of the pretty embarrassing aspects of being a carbon-based biped with speech abilities.
	It is horrible to see just how much and how quickly all of this stuff, all of these transitions can occur.
	And so right now, of course, the single moms and the public sector unions and so on and the poor, they're all praised and so on.
	And that's because praising them serves the interests of the ruling classes, right?
	Because we give up our rights and our money to protect and help these people, and the military-industrial complex and the soldiers are all noble and so on.
	I mean, but this can change.
	I mean, the moment that the poor are no longer useful to political power but a threat to political power, in other words, the demands of the poor outstrip the capacity of the economic system to survive by paying them off, then they will simply just be demonized.
	And...
	That demonization will occur very rapidly, and the people who were sort of clinging to government power will find themselves incredibly rapidly just thrown into the walls, thrown to the jackals.
	And all of their former friends will be revealed as, you know, hateful, horrible people who are only out to shaft them in one way or another, right?
	I mean, this horrible is tragic.
	And it's going to be incredibly ugly, and naturally, of course, libertarians will be blamed for it.
	I mean, the punishment of the innocent is essential to the survival of statism, right?
	The reward of the guilty of the punishment, not only of the innocent, but of those who will help the most.
	But the moment that the poor, I mean, the ruling class do not care about the poor, except as a means to further their political power.
	So the people who say, well, we should reduce taxes, the governments hold up the poor as an example of why we can't reduce taxes, you see, because the poor are dependent on the government and so on.
	And they are reliable vote-getters.
	But the moment there are too many poor to sustain the state...
	Then the state will very quickly and very easily, and it would be shocking to those of us with any sense of moral continuity, but it will be invisible to the rest of the population.
	The state will simply and very easily begin to demonize the poor.
	So instead of the poor, you know, noble, struggling single moms being portrayed in the media, you will start to see relentlessly negative portrayals of the poor, You know, the people who applied for disability pensions who were out there playing golf and snorkeling and so on, you would just start to see those.
	Those will now be characterized as the poor and, you know, the lazy, good-for-nothings.
	I mean, they'd just be portrayed.
	Now, it'd be a Victorian portrayal of the lazy poor rather than a socialist portrayal of the noble and deserving poor.
	And there's really not much that can be done about that, and people will simply swing over to that.
	The resentments against the poor will be stoked in the same way that resentments against the rich is evoked now.
	And the poor will be seen as undeserving of charity, and charity will in fact be viewed as something which keeps them down.
	And suddenly you will see a narrative which is, welfare is really bad for the poor, welfare has killed the initiative of the poor, welfare has changed the incentives of the poor, Welfare is exacerbating poverty.
	And then you will see this massive drive to cut welfare.
	And the poor will be shocked, and the poor will be appalled, and they'll say to the media, but you were our friends!
	What are you doing to us?
	Right?
	And they will be shocked that their friends turned on them.
	But of course, they were only the, quote, friends of the poor, right?
	The media and the government were only friends of the poor, insofar as the poor served their needs.
	And when the poor no longer serve their needs, they will...
	They will change over.
	And the poor will now have a different narrative.
	In the same way that...
	This happens with war as well, right?
	So in the same way that with war...
	With war, when the government wants to start a war, then, you know, they talk about how noble the war is and how necessary the war is and how dangerous it is if we don't have the war.
	And then when the government wants to end the war, because the war is becoming too expensive and interfering with the ability of the government, then the war is bad and we're in pieces, right?
	I mean, it's all such nonsense.
	And people, I mean, we have no moral spine.
	I mean, we as a group, we have no moral spine.
	And...
	How could we?
	I mean, we're moral relativists, and being religious does not solve the problem of moral relativism, because if you're religious, you can pick and choose from the Bible that which serves your particular moral preferences.
	But almost nobody has to subjugate themselves to some moral standard that's uncomfortable for them.
	Because you're a moral relativist, you can pick and choose what you want, or you can have God back you up on your moral relativism by picking and choosing that from the Bible which you like and want.
	So you'll see this coming up I would say between one and three years from now, you will start to see a swing in the way that the government views and discusses the dependent classes.
	So, for instance, what will happen is the government will start Performing internal audits and reviews of various government programs, and lo and behold, lo and behold, you'll never imagine, you'll never guess, you'll never ever guess what they might find.
	What they'll find, my friends, is that there's a lot of fraud and waste in these programs.
	And you will see the kind of reporting.
	So John Stossel did a report recently on waste in a food stamps program, right?
	So they had this Raspy voice Billy Bob Thornton character who was a surfer who was on food stamps who used it to buy sushi and lobster and stuff like that.
	And you'll see more of this kind of stuff.
	And the poor will no longer be portrayed as the noble underprivileged struggling to keep body and soul together, but...
	The poor will then be portrayed as lazy, greedy, layabouts, and so on.
	Now, of course, neither is particularly true, but it all depends on what you want to focus on.
	You can find lots of nice benevolent Jews, you can find lots of greedy grasping Jews, just as you can in any community.
	It just depends which one you want to focus on to make whatever ideological point you're trying to make.
	So, the degree to which the ruling classes can turn on the classes they're dependent on is shocking and staggering.
	And it shows you how few principles and little continuity there is in people's thinking.
	I mean, the Weimar Republic in Germany was incredibly dependent upon the financial classes.
	Which, in Germany at the time, were associated with Judaism, of course.
	And they were incredibly dependent.
	It was a borrowing, money-printing, deficit-financing culture dependent upon the financial sector.
	When Hitler got in, of course, railed against the financial sector, turned people against the Jews.
	So, the degree to which the state can turn upon the source of its power or the source of its influence or supposed legitimacy is really quite astounding when you see it.
	And what's even more astounding is the degree to which people are like, hey, meet the new enemy.
	No different from the old enemy, right?
	I mean, we are now at war with East Asia.
	We've always been at war with East Asia and so on.
	So that will happen when it comes time to unwind the empire.
	I mean, the same kind of process generally occurs.
	You know, the American sphere of influence and maintaining world order and peace among nations and being the world's policeman and so on.
	These are all the virtues that are portrayed when the government wants to expand an empire.
	And anybody who says, let's not go and involve ourselves in foreign entanglements is called an isolationist.
	An isolationist.
	Because, you see, isolation is a bad thing.
	It's lonely.
	It's lonely.
	And isolationism is clearly the desire to have everyone be dateless on a Saturday night.
	Isolationist.
	You're a global warming denier.
	You're a climate change denier.
	In other words, you saying that climate never changes.
	Uh-huh.
	Denier.
	Denier of the facts.
	Denier of reality.
	I mean, this is the sad level at which...
	Government is...
	Debates about violence in the state are devolved here, right?
	And so when the empire needs to be wound down, in other words, when there's greater profit from winding down the empire than there is from growing the empire, then suddenly massive amounts of waste and fraud in the military will show up.
	The government will reveal that The governments which they are now supporting were governments that have done great evil and all the darker side of the alliances will be revealed and the popular clamor will then be to, hey, let's unwind these alliances with these bad people.
	I mean, this propaganda literally only takes weeks.
	It literally only takes weeks.
	Maybe a month or two if it's a significant shift.
	And the few lonely voices crying out that The opposite now is being planned, that was before praised, that everything which is good is now bad, and everything that was bad is now good, will be viewed as an irrational nitpicker, tragically removed from the necessary flow of an indignantly self-righteous society.
	Fraud and waste in the military-industrial complex will be revealed!
	And of course the media will trot along, as they always do, because it's a lot cheaper and easier for lazy reporters to simply repackage government press releases or news releases, which is the opposite of news, and press only on your throat with the twin fingers of propaganda and evil self-interest.
	Twin thumbs?
	Thumbs, I think, is better.
	The media will simply go along.
	I mean, it's funny to me now how Hollywood, media leaders and the media moguls and the studio executives in Hollywood are crying out that they're losing a huge amount of business to other locations media leaders and the media moguls and the studio executives in Hollywood are crying out that they're losing a huge amount of business to other locations in the U.S. and even overseas that
	I remember when the dollar was cheaper.
	The Canadian dollar was a lot cheaper to buy.
	There was lots and lots of stuff going on in Vancouver and all that kind of stuff.
	It's so much cheaper.
	Even Michael Moore, the beluga-shaped hypocrite of the left, talks about the need for taxes for a civilized society, the need for taxes to help the poor.
	He takes advantage of every conceivable tax break that you could possibly get and has huge amounts of non-union workers.
	That's so as predictable as, you know, finding a donut juice in his ear.
	It's hard to hit when you throw in a whole plateful, right?
	I guess they probably end up orbiting him slowly.
	Boston cream moon.
	Yummies!
	Keeps all the anorexic reporters at bay anyway.
	Let me not delve too much into the metaphor that I am constructing here.
	It's just funny to me that incredibly leftist, anti-free market, pro-tax Hollywood now has problems in that it can't compete with lower tax districts and is complaining about About all that.
	You know, you lie down with the dogs, you wake up with the fleas.
	Don't get mad!
	Get even!
	So the government will need to cut spending, and cut spending it will.
	And cut spending it will.
	The poor are being subsidized, and when the subsidies are cut, economic value changes for the leaders, for the ruling classes.
	So the propaganda will turn against the poor.
	It will turn against the recipients of state charity, so to speak, in both the rich and the poor.
	And the ruling classes know as well as you and I do that what is needed to grow the economy is economic freedom.
	What is needed to grow politics is economic unfreedom.
	This is the fundamental battle between the free market and the state.
	Political power grows at the expense of market power.
	Not coincidentally, but causally.
	Not in correlation, but in causal reality.
	In order for state power to grow, it must provide benefits to those who at courts must provide benefits.
	Now, the only way the state can provide a benefit is through force, because the only thing the state is is an agency of violence.
	And so, the only way it can provide benefits to people It's to use violence to interfere with and, quote, adjust otherwise free economic interactions.
	If the state cannot interfere in economic transactions, then the state has nothing to offer people.
	It has nothing with which to bribe special interest groups.
	Favorable legislation, which is the forcible interference in the free market, is all that the state has to offer, and therefore political power grows, At the expense of the free market.
	Now, if the political power grows too big, then of course the free market collapses and takes political power with it.
	At least in its current incarnation.
	And takes a massive amount of wealth with it too.
	And the government now requires that the free market be kept alive, particularly the tax sector.
	It's no accident that the government doesn't interfere in the tax sector very much.
	It's because the government needs all the goodies from the tax sector in order to spy on and control its citizens.
	I mean, the government will interfere, say, in the housing market because it doesn't use houses to control and spy on its citizens.
	But it knows that if it were to, say, require licensing for programmers and require licensing and business degrees for business owners and so on, that the innovation in the tech sector would collapse.
	Collapse.
	And governments can't compete with other governments that have access to a freer tax sector.
	So, there's just no way that governments can interfere in the tax sector.
	So, they're willing to grant freedom where freedom is beneficial to them.
	Now, what's happened generally is that the middle class have been eviscerated in order to pay for welfare for the poor and for the rich, which is why the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the middle class diminishes, right?
	Because when you have a welfare state, that what you subsidize increases, and what you subsidize is not the poor, but a production of the poor, right?
	And so the government has a huge...
	Government agencies and educational facilities have a huge incentive to produce the poor, and certainly the poor are captive customers of the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy has every incentive to keep and gain the poor, like a crop.
	Farmers don't willfully burn their own fields that they've spent a lot of time planting and...
	Putting manure into and so on.
	They don't just willfully go and torch their own fields and people don't work hard to buy a new car and then push it off a cliff.
	In the same way, government bureaucracies that rely on having poor for their funding don't cure poverty.
	I mean, of course not.
	It would be ridiculous to think otherwise.
	So the middle class has been eviscerated because the middle class can't directly see What is happening?
	Because they're not economically literate.
	Oh, I lost my job.
	Well, that sucks.
	My job must have been shipped overseas because there's been too much free trade with poorer countries.
	And so they blame free trade, which is just delightful.
	As you increase regulations and legislation and so on, a heap more controls and more union goodies on American businesses...
	Then those businesses will flee overseas and somehow, well not somehow, of course it's portrayed in the media, what you see is your business going overseas and you lose your job and therefore you blame competition from overseas.
	Which is...
	It makes about as much sense as a man who beats his wife and then she leaves him for a peaceful man, blaming the peaceful man rather than his own beatings for causing this.
	He's a symptom.
	He's not the cause.
	The symptom of hyperregulation in the domestic market is the shipping of particularly manufacturing capacity overseas.
	But I tell you, it's not because of free trade at all.
	And the governments in power quite like the shipping of manufacturing jobs overseas because it creates more people dependent upon the state, right?
	Because unemployment insurance, welfare recipients, social security, disability recipients, and so on.
	It creates more people dependent on the state, which means that you've got guaranteed voting blocks for the increase of state power.
	In the same way that in the massive expansion of the state that occurred in the 1960s in America, right?
	Under the Great Society, LBJ's Great Society programs and other programs, this also started under JFK. They knew that they had to shift immigration policy because if you get too many whitey European Westerners coming in, they're used to small government.
	Governments in the 1960s were less than one-fifth the size that they are now.
	And people who were educated, who were able to emigrate in the 1960s, grew up in the 1930s, 1940s, When governments were even smaller, you know, despite the massive programs put in under FDR to supposedly try and combat the Great Depression, which only ended up exacerbating it for 13 years, resulting in an almost suicide of the West European War.
	Well, World War.
	But they had to change immigration policy, because if you have too many tidy-whitey Westerners coming in, they're not going to vote for big governments.
	But if you get a bunch of third world guys coming in, third world guys, I mean, by definition, come from non-Western traditions, traditions without a skepticism of the state, and traditions without reverence for the free market that really came out of the Enlightenment philosophy and Adam Smith and Bastiat and others like them in the 18th century.
	And so those people will vote for a big government, because for them, government is way too small, right?
	They're used to having Handouts and, you know, tribalism and all that kind of crap, right?
	So, they had to change immigration from Europe to the Third World in order to get pro-statist voters.
	Otherwise, they would have had to fight against the tide of skepticism against the state that comes out of the Western tradition.
	And this, of course, just creates monstrous problems down the road.
	Not least of which, for reasons that I certainly don't claim to fully understand, but study after study after study shows that multicultural neighborhoods score far lower in almost every significant metric of social happiness.
	Cohesion, friendliness, unity, and so on.
	It just doesn't work from a...
	From a neighborhood standpoint, whether that's due to racism or other factors, I don't know.
	But nonetheless, it may not be a problem to be cured.
	Like all these things, they are merely problems to be explored.
	So, this process of creating dependence on the state serves political power until political power is threatened by over-dependence on the state, at which case the narrative changes That the poor are not helpless,
	needy, noble recipients of just charity, but rather, you know, lazy, greedy, lying, fraudulent, scum, you know, leeching off the productive in society and so on, which, I mean, the shift can be made incredibly quickly.
	And the military, they're not noble, heroic defenders of truth, beauty, freedom, Superman, and the American way, They, you know, are a bunch of...
	I mean, you can never really go for the soldiers, but you could go for the leadership, say, well, there's corruption, there's trillions of dollars missing, there's overcharging, there's favoritism, there's subcontracting, nepotism, all that kind of stuff, right?
	And all of the obligations that America has around the world, as I mentioned, will be reframed not as Helping noble freedom fighters stand up to oppressive regimes, but spending money to support regimes that are doing great harm and great evil, and any of the freedom fighters that are fighting against them will be reframed as another mafia group trying to gain control of the state, and obligations will be accordingly wound down.
	The age of retirement will be erased and, of course, the narrative will be something like this, that, well, of course, when 65, as the retirement age was put in, most people did manual labor and didn't live even to 65.
	I mean, I don't think they even lived to 61 or 62, right?
	So everybody did manual labor, so the need to retire from manual labor was reserved for the few who made it that far.
	And, you know, the ratio of, you know, 60 to 1 or 50 to 1 or 40 to 1 or whatever the ratio was when it first came in.
	Well, we tried it out and then it's going to be 5 to 1, 3 to 1, 2 to 1 of workers to retirees and so on.
	And, of course, you will see endless media articles about, you know, very fit and athletic 65-year-olds retiring so that they can scuba dive and mountain climb and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	And the unspoken Ponzi scheme of Social Security, which is that there was never any money in it, it's simply a transfer of wealth from the younger generation and generally the poorest, to the older generation, that all the taxes that are collected for Social Security are never used on Social Security, at least not specifically.
	They are used to...
	For general purposes, right?
	All the money collected from Social Security goes for general purposes of the government.
	And what's put in their place are bonds, IOUs, worthless pieces of paper that confer nothing but the chains of obligation to the unborn.
	And so the actual accounting of Social Security will be revealed and will be endlessly hammered upon.
	The fit, healthy, productive...
	65 year olds will be endlessly highlighted and then the retirement age will be raised to 70 or 72 or 69 or something like that.
	And it will go into place relatively quickly.
	And the most effective and important thing that will occur during this time of propagandistic transition will be that a general state of crisis and emergency We'll be invoked.
	Repeatedly, you know, we've kicked the car, we've kicked the car, we've kicked the can far enough down the road.
	The chickens have come home to roost.
	We have lived beyond our mean, lo these many years.
	And it will take a new president, and it will likely have to be a democratic president, a democrat president.
	Only Nixon can go to China.
	And it was the leftist liberals here who crushed government spending by 30 or 40 percent in the 90s here, when Canada was spending 35 to 40 percent of its tax revenue just on interest payments on the debt.
	And they really cut like crazy.
	So, the general state of crisis will be portrayed.
	That, you know, basically our country hangs by a balance.
	The bill has come due.
	We have...
	I've done this terrible, ridiculous overspending for so long, and now we are in a crisis.
	Now, the wonderful thing about a crisis for the government, and this also occurs in personal relationships, it really is the essence of religion, but one of the great things about a crisis for the government is when there is a general crisis, anyone who complains about specific remedies will be immediately portrayed as selfish.
	So, for instance, The government doesn't care about the unborn, of course, right?
	And I mean, it permits and subsidizes abortion and national debt and all that.
	So the government doesn't care about the unborn.
	But suddenly, the environmental metaphors will be used for the economy.
	You know, just as we must leave the planet a better place than we left it for our children, we must...
	Swallow the bitter pill, take responsibility for our own debts, and not enslave our children, and not leave our children shackled to endless chains of debt.
	We must be responsible, we must be good parents, good citizens, good adults, and not rely on the predation against our children to fund our current extravagances, right?
	And again, the wonderful thing about replacing it, then anybody who resists cost-cutting Then becomes somebody who's selfish and greedy and stealing from children.
	There's a great scene in an old movie, I guess by now, called The Piano, which I saw when it first came out.
	It's a good film.
	And...
	Gosh, what's his name?
	Sam O'Neill, the Jurassic Park guy, plays a nasty husband.
	And...
	When he wants to sell his wife's treasured piano, he says, you know, we all must make sacrifices.
	And you will see that phrase, or some variation, or many variations there are, repeated endlessly.
	Crisis is upon us.
	We must all make sacrifices.
	Sacrifice is one of these programmed words that turns people into self-abdicating, self-samurai-ing, harikari-based robots.
	As soon as the call for sacrifice goes out, Then people will willingly give up their greatest treasures and will also, in a very feral manner, attack those who resist the necessary and noble and self-created absolute of sacrifice.
	And so, it's a time of crisis.
	We have massive unfunded liabilities.
	We have lived beyond our means.
	We have put off the day of reckoning.
	But now, my friends, the day of reckoning is upon us.
	And we must all tighten our belts.
	We must all make sacrifices.
	We must all pull together to dig ourselves out of the hole that the extravagance of the past has got us into.
	And then, specific remedies will be proposed.
	And it will be about...
	I think they will liberalize...
	The healthcare system, because they know they just need to crush costs.
	The best way to do it is to liberalize it.
	And they will cut pensions for retirees.
	They will cut Social Security.
	They will cut payments to the military-industrial complex.
	They will cut the military in general.
	They will collapse the empire.
	They will cut teachers' benefits.
	They will cut teachers and make teachers work, you know, something approaching real hours for their money.
	And they will fire massive amounts of government workers, and at the same time, they will Loosen the shackles on what's left of the private economy to absorb the workers and so on.
	I mean, all of these kinds of things will occur.
	And anyone or any group who resists this will be like...
	They will be portrayed as a kid who wants a third serving of dessert.
	You know, as petulant, as greedy, as...
	Stealing from the unborn, taking from the future as selfish, as grasping, all of this kind of stuff, right?
	Right now, the greed of the unions is fighting for the rights of workers.
	But the greed of the unions is going to be, well, every dollar that you demand is a dollar that's stolen from the children.
	You have had your way with the economy for...
	A hundred years plus, and this is where we are.
	And your refusal to pull together, to tighten your belts, to make the sacrifices that everyone is making is petulant and selfish and so on, right?
	And the media will relentlessly echo this, and movies will change, the zeitgeist will be recognized, and movies will change so that...
	The poor will then be caricatured and the sort of rich, greedy public sector union heads and union recipients and so on will be portrayed as selfish and greedy.
	And how the free market rich are portrayed now is how the entitled poor and middle class public sector workers and pension recipients and the rich military-industrial complex, I mean, you simply slide out one stereotype and insert another one.
	It is not now those who generate wealth, but those who receive unjust amounts of wealth who are the problem.
	And as the movies come out and the TV shows come out and the videos are portrayed and this is all worked into children's programming and teen programming and it's all endlessly portrayed in the media and all that kind of stuff.
	The public perception and support, you'll see it.
	It will be astounding to those who just don't understand how all this stuff works.
	The support for public sector unions will literally drop by like 20% within a month or two once a really concentrated, upper-ruling class, well-orchestrated propaganda effort goes into place.
	Investigators, you know, documents will be leaked to the media showing the degree of corruption in the public sector unions and private sector unions and the degree of funding received by the Democrats from the unions and so on.
	All of this information, which is of course now closely guarded, and since it's not part of the zeitgeist, even if it were leaked, it will not show up in the mainstream media, which is overwhelmingly leftist.
	But this will all be leaked, and the media will understand.
	I mean, the media is not left or right-wing, they just do that which is most profitable for them.
	Once they get the zeitgeist, then all of this stuff will be revealed.
	And of course, right-wing radio, which is one of these massive influences on American society that is barely seen by anybody outside of the right-wing, well, this will of course, ah, we've been right, and all this kind of stuff.
	And union leaders will be portrayed as, you know, greedy, fat, lazy, you know, whatever, right?
	And the union workers will be entitled and, hey, it's five o'clock, it's quitting time, you know?
	So can't we just do a little more work?
	And they will be seen as attacking those who want to be more productive and conservative and ugly.
	And they'll get ugly, smoking, fat actors to play all the bad guys just so they don't actually have to make a moral argument.
	They just have to go off our basic level of animalistic aesthetics and they will hire all the chisel-jawed, attractive...
	Thick-haired men to portray all of the noble, heroic, struggling working people.
	I mean, really working, not the working classes, but really working.
	And the single mom thing will be exploded because, you know, the single mom thing is...
	I mean, it's one of the main reasons we have a welfare state.
	I mean, if marriage had remained at 1970 levels, we'd have almost no welfare state.
	Almost all the growth in the welfare state has been the growth in single motherhood, which is currently venerated.
	But which will then change.
	The narrative will change, and single mothers will be demonized, and of course they are neither saints nor devils, but it doesn't matter to the narrative.
	It'll swing from one extreme to the other, and smoking, selfish, cursing, ugly, vicious, child-beating single moms will then become the staple.
	So all of this stuff will be cut, And the free market will be liberalized.
	I mean, the ruling classes are smarter now than they used to be, and of course they have more opportunities, but they know now what generates the wealth that they feed, right?
	You know, like, imagine a mafia, there's some casino, and if the mafia starts taking too much money from the casino, then someone in the mafia...
	You know, shoots whoever's decided to take too much and return some of the money to the casino because they don't want to kill the goose that lays the gold neck, right?
	They don't want to drive the casino out of business, right?
	They want to take enough that they're satisfied, but not so much that the casino can't survive.
	Because if the casino closes down, then they're...
	In the same way that the farmer...
	Rotates his crops and lets certain fields lie fallow because he doesn't want to exhaust the soil and end up with no farm at all.
	I mean, if he owns it or if there's not massive subsidies for him over farming.
	And so they know that the private sector has become too regulated, too taxed.
	And they also know that the dependent classes have become too dependent and are threatening to overwhelm and destroy what's left of the free market.
	So they're just cut and the emotional narrative will shift to change and all this and that.
	Now, out of this I think will come some just lovely stuff.
	Lovely, lovely, lovely stuff.
	One of the things that government involvement does is it destroys community.
	It destroys community.
	And it destroys niceness.
	It destroys niceness.
	So, a lot of people really like me, and a lot of people really say that they love me, which is very nice, and I appreciate that.
	I love you all back.
	Kiss, kiss.
	But a lot of people like me and send me money.
	And when I announced that I had cancer and I had to battle it, a lot of people sent me more money, which, of course, I hugely appreciate.
	And so, I don't...
	Obviously, I would never take, nor do I want, government subsidies, or I could apply for artistic grants from the government for what it is that I'm doing and so on.
	I never want to do it, right?
	And I don't need to because I'm popular, because people like what I say, they like how I say it, they disagree with me quite often, which is great, so do I, but they enjoy the intellectual stimulation of what I have pondered over these many years.
	So I don't need welfare.
	I have unemployment insurance.
	It's called donations.
	And if you are in a community, one of the things that you do, like say you're in a neighborhood, one of the things that you do is you join some neighborhood group and you make friends with people and you are charitable.
	And partly we do that because it feels good, it's nice to help people and so on.
	I'm overjoyed at the fact that I may receive charity, but I'm far more charitable than Then in the reception of charity, for the simple reason that all my podcasts are charity, and I gave them away for free long before I received any donations and so on.
	All my books are free and all of that.
	So I give away all of my work, which is very charitable, particularly to those who are intellectually hungry but can't afford to buy them.
	And so you make friends with people.
	You get involved in communities.
	You join your church.
	You join your Lions Club.
	You join your Rotary Society.
	You join the Shriners.
	I mean, whatever.
	What they used to be called friendly societies, which you can sort of look up.
	Rod Long.
	Not the porn star.
	Well, the other porn star.
	Rod Long.
	A professor, I think, at Auburn.
	No?
	Professor.
	Anyway, he's a professor.
	He's got some great stuff on friendly societies.
	So you join up with a community.
	And why do you do that?
	Well, because...
	Bad things happen.
	Bad things happen to you.
	Bad things happen to other people.
	And the way in which we cushion bad things happening is through friendly relationships with others, through supportive and affectionate relationships with others.
	And to be fair, it is really only the church so far that has been able to add this kind of social capital on a regular basis.
	Atheists and libertarians as yet don't really do it.
	Right?
	Don't really do it.
	Which is just, it's not that it can't be done, it's just that's something to note, that the social capital and support for those going through hard times generally comes from religion and as yet has not come from atheism.
	Now, I would argue that that's because religion evolved prior to the welfare state and atheism evolved after the welfare state and so on, but nonetheless, I mean, and also atheists tend to be younger and libertarians tend to be younger and therefore they Feel invincible and they don't feel the need for social relationships that will help support them in times of crisis.
	Not married, don't have kids, haven't had the inevitable ailments and complaints of middle and late age and so on.
	But the reality is that the welfare state is not for the poor, it's for the unpopular.
	Social security, I've made this argument before, I'll just touch on it briefly here.
	It's not for the poor, it's for the unpopular.
	Basically, welfare is charity for assholes.
	I mean, that sounds like a strong statement.
	I can make a case for it, though.
	Hopefully, you'll let me know if it makes sense to you.
	But I'm not going to need welfare because I receive charity because I provide value to people.
	And if you don't provide value to anyone, like if you shun the...
	If you have overtures of your neighbors and you shun the overtures of whatever group or groups are around in your society that are there for social support, and if you snarl at kids on your lawn and you're generally disliked by everyone in the neighborhood, then if you fall on hard times, people are much less likely to pass their hat around.
	They might, but they're less likely to do so.
	Whereas if you're some beloved grandmother who's constantly baking cookies for kids and bringing lemonade out to people who are working in the neighborhood and...
	You know, invite kids to come and play, installs a swing set on her front lawn for everyone to enjoy, and goes and visits the sick and the destitute and so on.
	Then, if you fall on hard times, then you are a beloved fixture of the neighborhood, and you will receive charity.
	Charity is the payback for popularity, and popularity is the measure of value provided in a community.
	So this is very important to understand.
	So before welfare, you had to be nice to get charity.
	And if you were a misanthropic asshole who snartled at people and was weird and didn't keep his lawn up and scared people and so on, if you were the kind of boo-radley that kids threw eggs at the window because you were just so freaky and unpleasant...
	Then you could have the indulgence of being freaky and unpleasant, and one of the costs of that would be a lack of social support when you fell on hard times.
	But if you're loving and positive and affectionate and caring and giving and so on, it's the same thing with Social Security.
	So with Social Security, I mean, of course, what used to happen, there were two ways that people used to deal with financial problems in their old age.
	The first is that they'd have children, and those children would then support them when they got old.
	Now, why would the children support them?
	Because they got old.
	Because...
	Because they love their parents.
	Because their parents didn't be great to them and loved them and so on, right?
	Now, if you're an asshole parent, you know, if you snarl at, drink, beat your kids, whatever, right?
	Then when you get old, your kids are much less likely to be there for you.
	Why?
	Because they don't like you.
	Because you're an asshole to them.
	And so that's one of the prices you pay.
	Knowing that, parenting used to be better, I believe.
	The assumption that kids are just going to be there for their parents are back when parenting was better, when at least one parent stayed home and really dedicated herself, usually herself, to the children.
	Now, if you're a dick parent...
	Named Richard.
	And, you know, you dump your kids in daycare, you go and work, you're barely there, and when you're there, you're tired and snappy, or you hit your kids, or you drink, or you molest your kids, or you verbally abuse your kids, or, you know, you're just basically an asshole parent, then your kids aren't going to want to be there for you when you get older.
	I mean, you might be able to guilt them into this, that, and the other, but they're just not going to be there for you in the same way as if you'd been a wonderful, loving, kind, nurturing, virtuous parent.
	And so, Social Security is for people whose children don't like them.
	We say, ah, well, what if you don't have children?
	Well, okay, well, if you don't have children, then you've saved a couple of hundred thousand dollars per kid.
	Right?
	If you don't have three kids, if you have no kids rather than three kids, then you have saved, you know, half a million, six hundred thousand dollars.
	So, you should have, of course, put that aside for your retirement.
	Right?
	Right?
	If you didn't spend the money on kids, save the goddamn money for your retirement.
	Now, if you didn't have kids and blew money on travel and expensive crap that is worthless now and all this kind of stuff, well then, sorry, too bad.
	You know, if you don't save the money, you don't have the money.
	Now, what you can do is you can become a loving bachelor or fixture in your neighborhood and And you can take the money you would have spent on children and spend it on building parks and throwing children's parties and becoming heavily involved in your neighborhood in a positive way.
	And then, by golly, people will take care of you when you retire because you'll be a loving fixture of the neighborhood, blah, blah, blah.
	But if you're just kind of selfish and you don't invest in your community and you don't have children and you don't save any of your money, well...
	Then what you want when you want Social Security is you want the benefits as if you had saved your money when you haven't, which means other people got to pay.
	So, I mean, the welfare state-destroying community is such a truism, it barely even needs repeating here, but it's worth mentioning that with the diminishing of the welfare state will be a return of economic self-interest for benevolent and virtuous behavior.
	Oh, God Almighty, wouldn't we love it?
	You can't make a lot of intellectual arguments as to why people should be good.
	I think they should be good.
	I think you should be good.
	Got good arguments for it.
	But the diminishing of the dependent classes, the culling of the dependent classes, will be the reanimation of the social classes.
	People's need for support doesn't vanish when government support vanishes.
	It simply shifts itself.
	And so people will have to be nicer.
	Now, if people want to still be just misanthropic, nasty, bad-tempered, and don't want to confront other issues, and don't want to go to therapy, and don't want to become better or nicer people, that's fine.
	You can be as big an asshole as you want, but then you pay the taxes called people don't want to support you.
	People don't want to help you.
	People won't help you put your barn up, right?
	They won't bring you food if you break your leg.
	They won't come and mow your lawn if you've got a really bad sunburn, right?
	Right?
	I mean, the arsehole tax is a way of diminishing arseholery, and the virtue subsidy is a way of encouraging virtue, and both of those take place in voluntary communities.
	When the government steps in, arseholery is subsidized and virtue is punished, to the point where virtue and social cohesion wither, and isolation and bad temper increases.
	And so I yearn for the return of social cohesion.
	I yearn for that.
	I think that there's a wonderful, beautiful, and delicious thing which only serves the interests of philosophy and virtue.
	Because virtue, kindness, being there for others, giving, generosity, all of that is richly rewarded and you don't have to wait for Jesus to tap you on the head and give you a crown of gold for you to receive that.
	You receive that in the here and now.
	You receive that from your community.
	And, you know, isolated assholes, yeah, I mean, they should pay the price.
	Because once they pay the price, they can change.
	Like, once they recognize the price, they can change.
	I genuinely believe my mother could be a much nicer person if the state had not given her all this money all these years, while taking no interest in the improvement of her soul.
	It's subsidizing isolation.
	It's subsidizing vindictiveness.
	It's all of that.
	And it causes the atrophying of these skills and this social investment.
	It causes the atrophying of these at the great expense of the virtue and happiness of the individual.
	So I long and yearn for the return of the communities which tax negativity and reward positivity.
	Because through price, you get signals about resource allocation.
	And if the price for being an asshole accrues to the asshole, he's more likely to change his ways.
	Especially when he sees the happy community support that surrounds the person who is benevolent and generous and kind and all that kind of good stuff, right?
	Who offers to babysit in a pinch and...
	Waters people's plants and walks their dogs when they're away and stuff like that.
	All the little nice social gestures which bind people together in a positive communal support system.
	Well, yes, I think that the cost of nasty behavior should accrue to nasty people and the cost of virtuous behavior, the rewards of virtuous behavior should accrue to the virtuous.
	By refusing to let bad people or nasty people hit bottom, the government anesthetizes their Thank you so much, everyone.
	I hope that this was somewhat useful.
	I gave a few timeframes and a few things that I think will happen.
	I could be wrong, but this is the way that I see it playing out.
	Let me know what you think.
	Email operations at freedomainradio.com if you'd like.
	Email mailbag at freedomainradio.com.
	If you have an interest in having questions answered, run through the chattering head of staff.
	And, of course, as always, fdrurl.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out the spread of this kind of philosophy.
	We've had, what, we've passed 19 million video views and 90,000 plus subscribers.
	Subscriptions are always a little bit more welcome other than massive one-time donations.
	So thank you so much, everyone.
	Have a wonderful, wonderful day.
	I'll talk to you soon.

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