Russell Brand recently spoke with Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman about economic inequality, how voting doesn't change anything, political apathy and revolution. Stefan Molyneux doesn't think he went far enough. Let's continue that conversation.
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| Hi Russell, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| I watched your interview tonight with that Pompous, pubic hair-faced British twerp. | |
| And I must say, that was incandescent. | |
| That was magnificent. | |
| And I just wanted to applaud you for your passion, your commitment, and your justified mammalian homicidal outrage at the way in which the underclasses are treated in the current system. | |
| I share, for what it's worth, your massive hostility and skepticism towards voting. | |
| It really is like voting for The man who doesn't get to bullet in the firing squad, you're going to end up with no head anyway, and it is a ridiculous farce to participate in. | |
| The only thing that I would say, and this may seem odd to those who've watched the video, is that my brother, you just... | |
| You just didn't go quite far enough. | |
| I wanted to point that out because, yeah, the entire system is a massive N-dimensional Mobius strip clusterfrag of the poor and particularly of the unborn through national debts. | |
| And it is a warmongering, hate-filled, deceptive, lying, manipulative, sociopathic system that we live in. | |
| But the temptation that I would invite you to look at is the temptation to believe that more power is going to solve the problem of great power. | |
| There is always this belief that if we just hit the gas a little more, that if we just take more power and give more power to control others into the hands of some angelic, godlike, unselfish, beautiful people, that we can make the world a paradise. | |
| But I think that history, facts and experience will show, if you think about it in a particular way, that's just not true. | |
| What is true, for instance, is that America has spent four to five trillion dollars, trillion dollars, over the past five years on the welfare state. | |
| And the poor are in a worse place. | |
| America has tried to get the poor into houses with a variety of beneficial schemes, which causes a massive housing crash. | |
| More power in the state won't work. | |
| More power to redistribute, more power to tax, more power to control, more power to fence in and box in all of the special interests that you see using the government to slowly club the poor into a proletariat bloody mass. | |
| More power will only attract more sociopaths. | |
| More power will only attract more evil. | |
| More taxation will only attract more exploiters. | |
| More control will only attract more controllers. | |
| The U.S. in the last five years has spent more money on the poor that probably existed for the first 10,000 years of human history. | |
| And the poor are worse off than they were before. | |
| Since the 1960s, your dream of tax the rich and control the corporations and give the money to the poor has been tried repeatedly, extravagantly, violently, viciously, bottomlessly, And it doesn't work. | |
| The nature of what you called for, the redistribution of income, which is completely understandable. | |
| Impulse. | |
| This man, his plate is so full of food he can't possibly finish it for five generations. | |
| This man is rail thin and starving and eating a constant buffet of his own fingernails. | |
| The desire to take a little bit of food or money or power from this man's plate and give it to this man is almost overwhelming and it is the greatest temptation and the greatest pit to fall into when you really want to change the world. | |
| The world does not suffer from a deficiency of power, my friend. | |
| The world does not suffer from a deficiency of income redistribution. | |
| In America, those who are on the receiving end of government handouts can't really outnumber those who are paying taxes, including those who are government workers, who you could argue is kind of in both camps. | |
| This is not because there hasn't been enough money. | |
| It's not because there hasn't been enough power. | |
| The dream of ending poverty has been pursued over the past 40 or 50 years with more resources than those who started the war on poverty under LBJ could have possibly dreamed of. | |
| The amount of wealth that has run through the government with the attempt and goal of trying to save the poor is more wealth than has been dreamt of by anyone who has ever wanted to help the poor. | |
| And the poor are worse off after all of that. | |
| You're not quite far enough. | |
| I say this with all humility and with all respect. | |
| I mean, again, your passion and your eloquence and the fiery dedication of your drive for equality and egalitarianism I find absolutely admirable. | |
| I actually had a full head of hair before watching the interview. | |
| But you're not going far enough. | |
| The problem, my friend, is the state. | |
| Whatever mechanism you want to put in place to do this redistribution, to achieve this change that you want, is going to be an agency of coercion. | |
| And it's going to have to have a monopoly on coercion. | |
| You want to increase taxes on the rich? | |
| Who's going to do that? | |
| The state. | |
| Who are the people most likely to inhabit the state? | |
| The rich. | |
| And the rich will use the state to enhance their own income, no matter what you ask the state to do. | |
| It is fallible, greedy, corruptible human beings who will inhabit Whatever sort of power you draw to behead your enemies will be seized by those enemies and used against your friends. | |
| This is the nature of power. | |
| This is the nature of violence. | |
| Whatever you want to do in the world that involves force and taxation is theft. | |
| Whatever you want to do in the world that involves force will require you to grant a monopoly of violence to a minority of people. | |
| And that will always and forever lead to the same thing. | |
| They will not attempt to solve the problem of poverty. | |
| They will attempt to create a permanent dependent class. | |
| This permanent underclass that you spoke of so beautifully in the interview is kept by the powers that be to justify the continued escalation of taxation and debt. | |
| A farmer who domesticates cattle keeps them domesticated. | |
| And if you set up a system wherein the power of the state relies upon the existence of the poor, the poor will be fenced in and controlled and kept as livestock to milk the tax cattle with by pointing out, do you care about the poor? | |
| Give me your goddamn money then. | |
| And anybody who questions that, well, you just don't care about the poor. | |
| The government... | |
| Does not care about the poor as anything other than hostages to shame and capture the guilt of the innocent and force them to hand over additional money, rights, and children to the government. | |
| The government is the most ancient of evils. | |
| It is the most predictable of evils and it is the most central of evils. | |
| The control that government has of money is central to the very thing that you're talking about. | |
| It's called regulatory capture or tax capture. | |
| Whatever rules you want to put in place to control the rich, the rich will simply use to control everybody else. | |
| Governments listen to small, concentrated, powerful people a lot more than they do to diffuse poor people. | |
| Whatever you put in place, The end result will be concentrated, omnipotent evil at the center of society, and that's what you're facing. | |
| So you're going to be guest editing a political magazine? | |
| I think that's fantastic. | |
| I think that your immense language skills should be put to the good of society, if that's your intention and your goal. | |
| I think you certainly have, in my humble opinion, the capacity. | |
| But make sure you target the right thing. | |
| The right thing is a violation of peace, known as the initiation of the use of force. | |
| It occurs at every level in society. | |
| It occurred against you when you were a child, when you were abused. | |
| It occurred against you when you were a child and you were sexually molested, which is, I would argue, the real source of drug addiction, not mere poverty. | |
| Drugs is so often what we use. | |
| To attempt to heal the open wound left by an evil that everyone refuses to see around us, and that has in fact penetrated us. | |
| But whenever you try to solve problems by giving more power to individuals to initiate the use of violence, you end up not with a sort of moonlight of evil, but with a laser of evil pointed at everyone's forehead. | |
| I think that's what you want to fight. | |
| Not the corporations. | |
| The corporations are the shadows cast by the evil of the state. | |
| They are creations of the state. | |
| And they're already taxed to fairly massive amounts anyway. | |
| You tax them more, all they'll do is further control the government and strangle the poor and the opportunities of the intelligent. | |
| So, thank you again for your passion, for your commitment. | |
| I absolutely applaud it for what that's worth. | |
| And come on my show. | |
| We'll chat. | |
| Operations at freedomainradio.com. | |
| Just came off Joe Rogan. | |
| Might as well chat with you. |