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Dec. 10, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:19:48
2554 Mandela, Obamacare and Intellectual Property - Peter Schiff Radio Show December 10th, 2013
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The Peter Schiff Show.
Good morning, everybody.
This is Devan Molyneux sitting in for the one and the only Peter Schiff.
We've got a great, great show for you this morning.
We have my brother from another mother, Stephan Kinsella, who is a patent attorney, founder and executive editor of Libertarian Papers, author of Against Intellectual Property.
He's going to come in and tell us that the galactic clastifrac, known as Obamacare, still fails any reasonable legal test.
We're going to talk about patents and take a swing at the deceptive mirage of profit known as intellectual property.
And we have time for callers later on in the show if you'd like to call in.
I do a show basically which is philosophy, which means that I'm too lazy to limit my topics.
So we can talk about anything that is on your mind and see if there are any valuable intellectual ideas which can be brought to bear on whatever challenges you're facing.
So This morning, I thought, why not start with something mildly challenging and controversial?
Ooh, yes, that sounds good to me.
So, I'd like to talk a little bit about Nelson Mandela.
Of course, he's in the news, and he's in the news because he died, and also because of the way that he lived.
And I want to provide a little bit of a counterbalance to some of the The hagiography, the veneration that is going on in the mainstream media.
I'm not trying to say he's a terrible, bad, evil guy, but there's some things which are sort of conveniently left out of the narrative, which I think are worth talking about.
I spent some time in South Africa.
I'm certainly no expert, but I've had sort of direct experience of the country, and I think there are some things that you need To know.
The general narrative, which I'll touch on very briefly, you know it, I'm sure like the back of your hand, is this noble freedom fighter, struggled against apartheid, was jailed for 27 years, led his people to freedom, was the first elected, I guess, globally elected leader of South Africa in 94, and then left, which is unusual for African leaders, after only one term.
Which is, you know, somewhat true.
I mean, obviously he was in jail for 27 years.
But a lot of people forget or don't know or have never been informed why he went to jail.
Just as a general principle, it's usually a good idea to be skeptical of people who are venerated based on adjectives.
He was noble.
He was kind.
He was humble.
He was, well, that's all nice, you know?
I mean, and maybe he had a nice mustache at one time in his life.
But we philosophers, we thinkers, like to look at the facts.
We like to look at reason and evidence to evaluate people.
And you'll see that there are precious few facts in the narrative of Nelson Mandela.
So what are the facts?
Well, in the early 60s, Nelson Mandela was the head of Umkonto Wissizwe, which was the terrorist wing of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.
I know I'm speaking to a largely American audience, so the word communism is often accompanied with a robust spit to one side, like communism, which I think is perfectly valid and fair.
Communism was a massive mental virus unleashed on the world that caused over a hundred million deaths.
It was far worse than Nazism.
So when I hear That somebody is a communist, to me that's like Nazism on steroids in terms of death count and destruction to humanity.
And he was.
He was a committed communist.
He wrote, when he was young, a treatise, how to be a good And that is something he denied during his life.
Now it's been revealed that he was, in fact, a communist member of the Communist Party.
And so that automatically makes him troubling to a pretty large degree, in my mind, and I think in the minds of anybody who knows what communism has done to the human race throughout history.
Why was he put in prison?
He was not a prisoner of conscience.
He was not a prisoner of conscience.
In fact, Amnesty International refused to represent him or to take his case.
The reason for that is that at his trial, he pleaded guilty to 156 acts of public violence, including mobilizing terrorist bombing campaigns.
Now, his particular approach was to try and bomb facilities and power plants and so on, to try and find a way to change the obviously immoral Apartheid system through sabotage.
And so his aim at that time was not to take human life, but he was very clear.
He was very clear.
He said, if this does not work, we're going to escalate to murder.
When he was caught, he was found with over 50,000 anti-personnel landmines that came from Soviet Russia.
And this is somewhat destabilizing to the powers that be.
Now, Of course, we can disagree, and rightly so, with the ethics of the South African government and the policy of apartheid.
But nonetheless, there is no country in the world that I know of that allows disagreement with policy to be expressed in terrorism.
So he went to jail for blowing things up.
And that's kind of important.
Again, what your evaluation of that is, is your business.
I just would like to give you the facts.
Now, the terrorist wing of the ANC was called the MK, and admittedly after he left, and when he was put in prison, I mean, he was really saying he got one letter every six months that he could send and receive, so there wasn't any chance, I think, that he could be controlling everything from prison.
But what he founded and what he ran, this MK group, went on to plant bombs in public places, including the Johannesburg Railway Station, shopping complexes, 23rd December 1985, right before Christmas, pick-and-pay shopping complex, magistrates, court, you name it.
And the victims were men, women, and children.
Now, if you have a disagreement, and there are many that we can have with the powers that be, surely blowing our children is not any rational or moral way to express those disagreements.
And this is what went on with the group that he founded.
He was not in charge of it at this time, but to my knowledge, he did not condemn the group afterwards.
He was offered release from jail.
President of Boerter, came down to talk to him and said if you renounce violence if you renounce violence and at this time I mean the violence of his group was extraordinary he said if you renounce violence we will let you out of prison and Mandela would not do that would not renounce violence and naturally if you have somebody who's blown up a lot of things and I don't know about the death count of the bombings that occurred while he was in charge
I haven't been able to find out that information But certainly the group that he founded went on to blow up a lot of people.
If anyone who commits a crime in the eyes of the state refuses to renounce that crime and promises to commit more of those crimes and to escalate those crimes, well then, by golly, they're really not going to get out of jail.
You know, you go for parole and you say, yep, I'm going to go out and kill more people if I have to, and I'm not going to renounce violence as the way of getting things done, then you're just not going to be let out of prison.
So I think this is really important stuff To understand.
Now we can look at apartheid, of course it was an immoral system, but it was tragically common at that time.
It wasn't only South Africa that had apartheid starting in 1948 and onwards it ended in the early 90s.
I mean at that time, and continuing now, you have the caste system in India, you had segregation in the south of the United States, and in Canada, which is where I currently live, Native Canadian children were taken at gunpoint from their parents and forced into these residential schools where they suffered the most atrocious, inhuman and hellish child abuse.
This kind of segregation was occurring all over the world.
It was particularly targeted in South Africa for a variety of reasons, some to do with legitimate moral outrage, another to do with somewhat more politically correct motivations.
And we may agree, we may disagree with what Nelson Mandela did.
I don't particularly agree with that.
I think the way you make a case for the better world is through reason, passion, evidence, and your capacity to convince people through the power of your language.
I think that's the best way to do it.
But still, the facts are not really being talked about.
Like in America, he was put on a terrorist watch because he was a self-admitted, willing to escalate, willing to take human life, committed terrorist.
I mean, by any international definition, the terrorism is the use of violence to achieve political ends, and he was, by that definition, a terrorist.
Again, you may quibble with the definition, but those are the facts.
And people say, well, isn't it ridiculous that he was put on this kindly, saintly old man who loved the Spice Girls?
Apparently he did.
Isn't it crazy that he was on a terrorist watch?
Well, no.
I mean, this was the legal reality of what he was doing.
He was married three times.
His second wife, Winnie Mandela, was a completely evil nutcase who was implicated in the torture and murder of a 14-year-old boy.
That doesn't mean that he did it, Nelson Mandela, but I think to some degree the old adage that you can judge a man by the company he keeps is not wildly out of place in this context.
She was a torturer and murderer.
We'll talk a little bit more about the effects of his rule when we come back from the break.
And right after that, we'll be talking to Steph Kinsella.
Hold your calls.
We'd love to talk to you soon.
This is Stefan Molyneux for The Peter Schiff Show.
Since The Peter Schiff Show was last on the air, the national debt added another $7.89 million. dollars.
Luckily, Peter's intelligence is growing twice as fast.
That's incredible!
Welcome back to your source of sanity in an insane world.
It's the Peter Schiff Show.
Good morning, Stefan Molyneux.
In for Peter Schiff, we are talking about the after effects of Nelson Mandela's rule.
In Africa.
Now, I am a fact-based, reason-based lifeform, so I enjoy a good, tasty adjective salad as much as the next guy.
And it's really great to hear just how nice and wonderful and warm a fellow he was.
But if you sort of pierce through the veil, you go outside the cave and you look at the actual facts, then there are a few things to be a little bit concerned about with Nelson Mandela and his one-term rule.
In South Africa.
So, right now, tragically, I mean, apartheid was a monstrous and evil system.
Right now, 60% of South Africans feel that the country was better run under apartheid, with both blacks and whites rating the current government less trustworthy, more corrupt, less able to enforce the law, and less able to deliver government services than its predecessor.
Transparency International released a 2013 Global Corruption Barometer report found South Africa to be among the most corrupt countries in the world.
83% of South Africans believe that the police force is corrupt.
I believe that the remaining 17% are in the police force.
And 36% admit to paying at least one bribe to the police.
2010 Medical Research Foundation survey found that more than 37% Of South African men have admitted to raping at least one woman.
Seven percent said they had participated in gang rape.
Every day, every day.
Imagine waking up to this.
Every day in South Africa, there are 59 murders, reported murders.
We can't imagine what the actual number is.
145 rapes, 752 serious assaults.
A new crime wave is the rape of babies.
Why?
Because some of the witch doctors, some of the local shamans, are telling people that the cure for AIDS is having sex with a virgin.
And 12% of South Africa's population is HIV-positive.
But President Mbeki says that HIV cannot cause AIDS. In response to the growing violence, South Africa's Minister of Safety and Security says, we can't police this.
There's nothing more we can do.
South Africa's currency, the Rand, has fallen about 70% since the African National Congress came to power in 1994.
Emigration from South Africa is now at the highest level ever.
The National Bureau of Economic Research found that the average income of all races in South Africa dropped 40%, not 14, 40% between 1995 and 2000.
A year after Mandela came into power, Five years later, 40% drop.
Well, one thing you may have noticed is that when communists get into power, international business tends to leave.
Because there is, as was predicted, and as was he said he was going to do, there was a wave of nationalizations, which is obviously basically government theft, of a wide variety of industries, nationalized banks, nationalized resource corporations, and so on.
The UN2006 Human Development Report found that over the last three decades Africa has had a virtual reversal of human development.
South Africa has dropped 38 places on the Human Development Index since 1994.
The country of the world's first heart transplant, which actually occurred in 1967, is now the rape and murder capital of the world.
The rape and murder capital of the world.
In the decades prior to the official policy of apartheid, 1948, the average life expectancy of African South Africans was only 38 years.
A 38-year life expectancy, which is, frankly, medieval.
During the last decade of apartheid, the average life expectancy of African South Africans had risen from 38 years to 64 years, which was on a par with Europe's average life expectancy.
Now they still had infant mortality that was higher and so on.
But that's astonishing if you look at some of the other countries.
China and India have lifted millions of people out of poverty over the past 20 years.
Nigeria has pushed 71 million people below the poverty line.
A UN report said that Africa was the only continent where poverty had increased over the past 20 years.
South Africa's Human Development Index figure was much higher in 1995, after nearly 50 years of apartheid, than it was in 2010, after 16 years of ANC rule, and the trend continues downward.
This is a human-engineered socialist catastrophe.
It is astonishing how often we seem to need to learn these lessons.
Being a white farmer in South Africa is actually the most dangerous occupation in the world.
The murder rate is 99 per 100,000.
The murder rate in South Africa is 20 times the murder rate of Canada, 27 times the rate in the United Kingdom, and more than 30 times the rate in Australia or New Zealand.
South Africa's murder rate is almost twice as high as Rwanda, not company you want to be keeping statistically, Chad, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe.
So when socialists get into power, Human misery explodes.
This is the lesson we need to keep learning and this is what we need to remember when the world sees the largest funeral since Churchill with Nelson Mandela that we must look at the facts of the legacy and not the intentions and not the kindly smile and not the adjectives.
We must pierce through to get to the facts of what the man did and the misery that his policies have engendered and it will probably be another generation or two as it was in the Raj After Gandhi, that they will be going with their socialist hell before they finally realize that the free market, freedom, economic opportunity, the freedom to trade, the freedom to invest, the freedom to save, stable currency, all the magic of the free market will come to them.
But there is a lot of misery before that.
So we can only hope to continue to talk to everyone in the world about the power and value and productivity of the free market and remind them that communism and socialism always leads to the same ash heap, to the same murders, to the same disasters.
Well, after this stirringly depressing introduction to the show, we are going to move on to another topic after the break.
But coming back after the break, we have the one and only Stefan Kinsella, who will be telling you a little bit about the Keystone Cops Madcap implementation of Obamacare and some of the legal challenges, shall we say nicely, that it will be facing.
So hang around!
We now return to The Peter Schiff Show.
Call in now, 855-4SHIFT. That's 855-472-4433.
The Peter Schiff Show.
Hello, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio sitting in for Peter Schiff.
Hope you're doing well this fine morning.
We are going to be talking about, oh, it's a more exciting topic than it sounds, perhaps, which is the libertarian challenge or the rational legal challenges to Obamacare.
I am joined by the one and only Stefan Kinsella.
Stefan, are you on?
Hi, Stefan.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
How are you doing?
I'm doing wonderful.
Glad to be here.
Well, let me tell you, so looking at this implementation from outside the country is really quite fascinating.
I mean, I have all sort of my libertarian perspectives and so on, but even by government standards, this just seems to be an entirely mad implementation.
It's like the plane is leaving the runway and they're still trying to stick on the wings with glue, duct tape and prayer.
So what is going on and why can we expect some significant legal challenges to the implementation of Obamacare?
Can you hear?
I can hear.
Sorry about the technical difficulties.
No problem at all.
So, yeah, what can we expect in terms of legal challenges to the implementation?
Why is this thing so chaotic?
Well, it's chaotic because it's a piece of legislation.
It's gargantuan.
And, I mean, it's virtually impossible to get a piece of legislation like this written, much less enacted, without some kind of internal contradictions or inconsistencies or gaps.
One of those was dealt with already in the earlier challenge of the legislation where Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts defected and went to the other side and basically said that this power to make people pay a penalty if they don't purchase Obamacare is covered by the taxing power.
I think we may have lost him again.
Stephen, are you there?
I'm here.
Can you not hear me?
Well, until he comes back, I wanted to mention a few things that I think are particularly exciting about Welcome
to my show!
In the site that are not there.
But the legal complications and challenges still exist.
Steph, are we still connected?
I'm here now.
Sorry about that.
So yeah, if we can go on with the legal challenges.
Yeah, so the current legal challenge is one brought by a guy, Attorney General of Oklahoma, Pruitt.
And his challenge is that the The way the legislation is written, it only – so Obamacare set up – it permitted the state to set up these exchanges, but it couldn't compel them to do so because of our federalism issues.
So it tried to give them an incentive to do that by providing subsidies to people who sign up through the state exchanges.
And also it penalizes you through the IRS if you don't sign up through the exchanges.
Can you hear me?
Yes, go ahead.
Okay, and so – The law apparently did not provide for any kind of subsidies or even penalties for the federal exchange.
It was sort of a backstop.
Well, what's happened is only about 16 of the states have signed on so far.
So about 34 states do not have state exchanges.
So right now the whole plan is resting upon the federal exchanges.
But the IRS is trying to...
We'll apply the subsidies and the penalties to people through the federal exchanges, even though it's not provided for in the face of the legislation.
So this lawsuit is trying to say, listen, it's actually illegal for there to be a subsidy or a penalty to people through the federal exchange provision.
And if this happens, it could be like a $700 billion hit to the entire program, and it could gut it and make Obamacare even less workable than it would have been anyway.
Yeah, and I think another challenge that is going to occur is they obviously require what they call the young invincibles, and don't we all think we're invincible when we're young?
But the young invincibles are required to sign up, and they're, well, pretty much not, because they recognize it's a direct subsidy to the older and the sicker members of society.
And so they're not signing up.
So it seems to me that the law, as written, has provided certain penalties, but those penalties, I think, are going to have to increase for this thing to remain remotely solvent.
What are your thoughts on that?
I think they're going to have to increase the subsidies.
It's going to get more and more draconian.
Obviously, I think the rates are going to start rising because you're basically forcing insurance companies to cover things that they wouldn't have otherwise covered and to cover people with pre-existing conditions.
So there's no way that it's going to happen without an increase in rates.
And when the rates increase, then people have less of an incentive to even acquire insurance.
So you're going to have to increase the penalties to force people to sign up for it in the first place.
Right.
And those are two sides of the same coin.
I mean, insurance in its most...
Essential form has to be a gamble.
It has to be a gamble.
You cannot buy fire insurance for your house when it is currently on fire.
The whole point is you have to have the veil of ignorance.
You have to not know what is going to happen in order for insurance to work.
So the idea that you can wait until you get sick To buy insurance is why now everyone has to be forced to buy it.
It's one of these classic situations where one set of government rules creates distortions in what's left of the market requiring yet another set, yet another set, yet another set of government rules.
The moment you say to people you can apply for health insurance when you're sick, a lot of people will simply wait till they get sick and then apply for insurance, which means that insurance costs go sky high.
So you then have to start forcing people to join these exchanges simply because you have these coverings.
What do you think of that?
No, I agree completely.
And this shows the problem.
What we're really doing here is we have a huge intervention and a big swath of the biggest economy in the world.
And it's being done totally by legislated law, right?
Which is an arbitrary set of laws, which is why we have the dispute over it.
No one really knows exactly what these words mean.
It shows the pitfalls of the very idea of making law by legislation.
So you and I could discuss forever how would the Supreme Court rule, how would they interpret this provision of this huge 100-page statute of the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare.
But the only question is one of grammar, really, or interpretation.
What does the word mean?
It has nothing to do with justice.
We think of courts as doing justice, trying to find the right solution to a dispute between people, trying to do the right thing, trying to have the fair result.
So the courts in the old days were conceived of as trying to do justice, trying to award the right – find the right result.
Courts now don't try to do justice.
They just try to interpret words written by congressmen.
So it's really just one of lexicography and then a battle over these kinds of issues.
So when you have that, there's no way you're going to have a just result.
You're just going to have some final result of the way words written on paper by a bunch of politicians are going to be interpreted for the time being.
Right, which leads you to all of the problems of unpredictability and randomness and so on.
And I think this comes out of a fundamental shift in the law, which I would argue sort of occurred over the past couple of generations.
Before the sort of rise of the welfare state and the nanny state and the welfare warfare state and so on, you basically had a state that sat around And waited for a complaint.
You know, hey, some guy cheated me in a contract, or some guy stole my bike, or some guy dinged my horse and buggy, or something like that.
The government basically sat around, the law system sat around, passively waiting for a complaint, and then it would attempt to resolve its complaint according to sort of common law traditions and hopefully clear interpretation of legalese in contracts and so on.
But it was kind of passive.
Now you have these massive proactive social engineering topics.
We're going to end poverty among the old.
We're going to make the sick well again.
And we're going to go forward, stride forward, and go in like the Borg, like all these infinite tentacles of language.
And we're going to make the world a better place.
The government has become massively proactive.
And it seems to me that the law as a reactive thing is small, compact, and easy to understand, something that you can fit into your pocket.
But the law as a proactive, massive social engineering behemoth seems to be something that can grow literally without limit.
Yeah, I think what's happened is the state takes over institutions that are natural and they have their own justification because they serve a purpose in civil society.
And the state gradually takes them over and co-op them for their own purpose like roads and transportation and education and law.
And the things that the government takes over, the state takes over.
In fact, the state has taken over the government itself, the governing institutions of society.
And they take them over so that over time, people identify these institutions with the state.
So for example, if you mention a road now, most people – Imagine a road built by the state, and some of them have trouble even imagining non-state-built roads.
Of course, the government and the state did not come up with roads, and the same thing with law.
So – and the government borrowed the prestige of these things.
So law had prestige and value in the eyes of the people because it was customary.
It was traditional.
It arose from voluntary interactions and a private attempt to solve disputes.
And when the government takes this over and infiltrates it and makes it institutionalized, starts passing laws and legislation, gradually corrupting the natural private body of law with all these artificial rules passed by congressmen and regulatory agencies and the edicts of executives like the president, they're basically borrowing the prestige of the way law used to work.
But over time, it becomes apparent to the people That these laws are not just.
I don't think most people now think they're doing something immoral if they fail to do exactly the right thing on an income tax return or if they break a speeding law or some other arbitrary immigration-type law.
They try to comply with it because there's a threat there, but the connection between morality and law is gradually being lost because the government It's exercising more and more naked power under the false label of what used to be called law.
And that is particularly tragic because people often tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
When you have a lot of irrational regulations and controls that people become hostile to or indifferent towards, there tends to be a general respect, a disrespect for the law that grows, which is a shame because, I mean, I think there are good rules, good laws.
I kind of like the thou shalt not kill, steal, murder, and rape.
But I do actually have some problems with this hyper-regulation situation and now the implementation, even from a cash standpoint, is completely mad.
So recently they've said that we can't tell the insurance companies, we can't tell them exactly how much That we need to pay you.
We can't tell you how much we need to pay you because we can't process the data.
So just send us a bill for what you think we might owe you and we'll kind of sort it out later.
So from that standpoint, things are getting really, really dicey and I think it's either going to have to roll back or it's going to be the end of the remnants of the free market.
In healthcare.
Steph, we're going to have a quick break.
If you can stick around afterwards, we're going to talk IP. And if you can stick around even more after that, we'll take some calls.
But thanks so much.
This is Stefan Molyneux for The Peter Schiff Show.
We will be back after the break.
The Peter Schiff Show. - Friend,
friend. - You've heard friend. - You've heard of Karl Marx, right?
Well now, meet his worst nightmare.
This is The Peter Schiff Show.
Hello, hello, everybody.
This is Savannah Molyneux sitting in for Peter Schiff.
I have the other Steph.
I think there's only two of us in the whole world.
Stephan Kinsella, a lawyer, and a specialist in IP. So we're going to switch gears from Obamacare a little bit and let's talk about Apple and Samsung.
Can I tell you how disappointed I was, Steph, when I found out that Samsung had not in fact paid Apple over a billion dollars in nickels?
That to me was a story that should have been true.
Tragically, it wasn't.
But what is going on with these two...
And what are some alternatives to patent trolls, patent wars, and all of the, you know, makes lawyers rich, makes entrepreneurs cry, and makes consumers poorer?
What's going on with these two companies?
What lessons can we learn?
And what are some options that we can have instead of the current system?
So what's going on is you have these large companies who are taking advantage of the The existing patent law system, which is spread around the globe.
It exists in all the modern industrial countries.
And they're using the patent law system for what it was designed for, which was to stop competition.
And that's what it does.
It allows these large companies to acquire massive arsenals of patents, which they can use to stop small, upstart competitors from even competing with them.
And they can have big wars with the big guys.
And they can pay millions and millions of dollars of fees to patent law firms to engage in these little skirmishes and battles.
And at the end, they settle.
They pay each other a royalty or something like that.
They raise prices.
They reduce innovation because they don't have to compete anymore because they have a patent they can rely on.
And they pass the cost on to the consumers in the form of increased prices.
And they keep the new entrants out.
So basically, the patent system creates We have a small number of very powerful protected companies behind a big walled garden of patents.
So the solution is not what is being proposed in Congress as we speak, which is this innovation bill, the so-called innovation bill, which is aimed at slightly reducing some of the excesses of the patent troll problem.
The Apple, Samsung, the smartphone patent wars problem has got almost nothing to do with patent trolls because most of the players that are suing each other are actually making smartphones.
They're actually just trying to protect their own turf.
So the patent troll problem would not address this at all.
The patent troll problem is just someone who has a patent problem.
On a product they don't make or manufacture, and they just go out and they try to collect a little toll from people to keep making this.
They sue them to get a little piece of the action.
Actually, patent trolls, in my view, are not as harmful as the Apple etc.
players because these guys want to prevent competition and kill off their big competitors if they can.
Patent trolls just want a little – they're like the mafia.
They just want a little taste.
There are actually a lot less damaging.
The current pending legislation is so minor, and yet the patent industry is fighting it so hard, it shows that the prospect of real patent reform is almost zero.
The real solution is to just go around the patent system by using 3D printing and encryption and just cheating and piracy.
That's really the only way to get around it, to ignore the state and to find a way to get around the state.
The current bill will only make it slightly harder for so-called trolls to initiate lawsuits in some cases.
An analogy would be to the current marijuana, cocaine, drug war that we have in the U.S., a law saying that if you're convicted of a cocaine or marijuana offense, we're going to give you a nice, sealy, posturpedic pillow to sleep on in the jail cell.
I mean, it's a...
That's basically what this law would do in the patent term.
It would do almost nothing to solve the real problem of patents.
Now, most people think when you talk about patents and you say, well, maybe we could find some way around patents.
I love classical music.
We actually would not have our classical music tradition if we'd had copyrights and patents back in the day when people were freely adapting each other to other people's music and so on.
And we know that actually quite factually because countries where there was no copyright and patent law had by far the greatest proliferation of musicians and have provided really the canon of Western classical musical tradition.
But when you say about, well, maybe we could have a life without patents, and of course people immediately say, like they think, if the government doesn't build the roads, we're all just going to fall into deep Trenches in the ground.
People say, well, then there'll be no innovation.
How are people going to get paid for their intellectual achievements and inventions and so on?
Why would people invest in anything if they couldn't monopolize the products and so on?
And I know you've talked about responses to these objections.
And what would you say to people who would raise that?
I mean, some of the typical examples that they have raised in the past and they're raised now, like Tang is a good example.
They'll say that, you know, NASA and all the billions that the United States invested in the space program, people will say, what did we get out of it?
And they'll say, well, we developed tanks for the astronauts to drink in outer space, some kind of sugary powdered orange drink, you know?
It's just ridiculous.
Or even more substantial innovations, of course, they're not counting the cost of the money that went into that innovation.
It could have been spent in the private economy if it had not been taxed away from its owners.
It could have been spent on either consumer goods or development or business innovation or other things.
So you can never tell what innovation you've lost because of the taxing power of the state and the regulatory power of the state.
The idea that we need the government to help us innovate Is transparently absurd.
The government is good at a couple of things.
They're good at finding wicked weapons like the Moab, mother of all bombs, or the nuclear bomb, and then using them against innocent people.
So the government is good at a couple of things.
They're good at destruction and death and misery and propagandizing the population, but I don't know if that's the kind of innovation we want to be in favor of.
Yeah, better evil is not really the tagline that we want.
So there is a challenge which I'd like to get from the listeners.
If you'd like to call in, you can ask questions as you like.
We've got a course going into the second hour.
We'll be back in six minutes.
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Stefan Molyneux sitting in for Peter Schiff.
Talk to me, planet!
855-4-SHIFT, as you heard, 855-472-4433.
Hit me with whatever is on your mind, and we will see if we can put our heads together and reason.
So, something I think is very interesting...
There's something that people can learn from studying economics or economic ways of thinking.
There are a few books that I would try and force people to read.
Well, there's no books that I would actually force anyone to read.
But Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt is a classic that should be going through everybody's neofrontal cortex cheese grater at some point in your life.
Economics, I mean, sort of revolves around two principles, and we'll sort of talk about how much money we could have if these principles had been understood and followed.
I mean, the first is that human desires are infinite, but resources are finite, right?
Resources are limited, human desires are infinite.
You know, things are never fast enough.
You never live long enough.
You never have enough hours in the day.
Your cell phone never has enough features.
We are a restless species, my friends, which is good.
I mean, so it can make us a little bit frustrated, but it does get us out of the caves, so that's a good thing.
We have this kind of habit as a species of we get something good, we want something better.
Or I have a four-year-old daughter, and I picked her up.
I picked up a little sort of donut the other day, or Timbit, and I gave her half the Timbits, a little piece of donut.
And then she said, I want more!
And then she started to get upset.
And I said, well, you got a surprise half a donut.
So you should be happy about that.
And now we have like a principle where we say if she gets upset about not having more when she gets a surprise, I say, never be unhappy about half a donut.
And I think that would be a great bumper sticker.
But it would make everyone hungry.
So we can't do that.
So that's the first principle.
Second principle, of course.
is when looking at economic policies or economic decisions, particularly those in the government, we must, must, must train ourselves not to look at the visible benefits, but to look at the hidden costs.
The challenge of economic thinking is not to look at the short-term gains that are obvious, but to look at the long-term losses that are not obvious.
So the classical example, of course, is the government spends $100 million, and I think at the current rate creates about eight jobs.
It seems to be how it's going right now, most of them in green factories, which then close.
Now, the eight people who get those jobs, they're like, yay, government program, we love it, kiss the ring, couldn't be better.
And so those are people who are vocal and you can put them in front of a camera, you can take the picture and you can say, look at this wonderful government program that's producing all these jobs.
That is the short-term visible benefit.
The challenge, my friends, occurs when we look at the long-term hidden costs.
That's the challenge.
It's the stuff you can't see.
The $100 million that was used to create these eight jobs is gone from the economy.
Now, it's gone from the economy in a wide variety of ways.
Either, very unlikely, they tax, in which case they take $100 million from people.
Those $100 million cannot be then spent or saved by those people on goods and services that they prefer, that they want, which will create other jobs and create other innovation.
That money will be available for new products, which would have been created if the money hadn't been taken.
The money might be taken through debt, which creates a future liability.
Also, when the government carves up and swallows up a whole bunch of capital, that capital is then not available to entrepreneurs to start their own businesses, to grow, to invest in the kind of capital improvements that really make an economy grow.
How do you make an economy grow?
Well, it all comes down to worker productivity.
It sounds like a reductio ad absurdum argument, but it all comes down to worker productivity, which has been stagnating in the U.S. for many years, which is why average incomes have really shifted nowhere over the past 30, 35 years.
Or it prints.
Oh, yes, it prints.
Don't you just wish you had that monopoly money Printing press in your, uh, in your basement so that you could type whatever you wanted into your own bank account.
Or, as my daughter said the other day, I think when I grow up I will work for the government because I can then make whatever money I want and it sure beats working for a living.
And, uh, We can understand that from a four-year-old.
I'm not sure it's as easy to understand from older people.
If the government prints the money, what happens?
Well, inflation we commonly think of as rising prices.
No, inflation is rising money supply.
Rising prices is an effect of rising money supply, right?
More money chasing fewer goods results in more money required per good and service, which is inflation.
Which hits the poor, those on fixed incomes, harder.
Inflation is just soft theft, right?
It is a poisoning rather than a stabbing.
So let's look at a couple of hidden costs.
Let's look at one.
I want to get one because I read this statistic and it blew my mind.
So let's look at this.
In a research paper that appears in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Economic Growth, now with pull-outs, Titled Federal Regulation and Aggregate Economic Growth, economist John Dawson, Appalachian State University, and John Cedar, North Carolina State University, examine the relationship between the growth in regulations, measured by the pages of federal regulations since 1949, and economic performance measured by real gross domestic product growth.
Just by the by, brief, annoying footnote.
GDP is one of these annoying things where, you know, someone gets sick and pays to get better.
That is increased GDP. Somebody breaks a window, pays to replace it.
That's increased GDP. Crime goes up.
People take defensive measures, buying stuff, alarm systems, dogs, you name it.
So I have a problem with the metric as a whole, but let's just take it at face value.
Fine, right?
So here's part of the conclusion that they came up with.
Federal regulations added over the past 50 years have reduced real output growth by about two percentage points on average annually between the period 1949 to 2005.
Now, if you remember 1949, it was not an apocalyptic Mel Gibson alcohol-fueled wasteland, pretty much a functional society.
That reduction in growth rate has led to an accumulated reduction in GDP of about $38.8 trillion as of the end of 2011.
That is, the GDP, gross domestic product, of the United States at the end of 2011 would have been $53.9 trillion instead of $15.1 trillion if regulations had remained at the 1949 level.
Isn't that astounding?
It would be more than three times higher.
Now, average wages, average income in the U.S., roughly $25,000, $26,000.
Which means we're talking over $100,000 that the average income would be in real dollars if government regulations had remained at 1949 levels.
Again, not an apocalyptic wasteland, not a war of all against all, no aliens invading, no dogs living with cats.
So, we are making less than a quarter what we could have made if government regulation has stayed small.
This is the slow strangulation of potential.
Would we be helping the poor if we all had more than four times our income?
Of course, Americans are the most generous people on earth.
They give hundreds of billions of dollars a year to charity.
Imagine if that were trillions.
Would we have enough money to help the sick?
Would we have enough money to educate people?
Would we have enough money to help anybody who needed it?
We certainly would.
We certainly would.
This is what we lose with the power of the state.
This is the great tragedy of it all.
So we will be coming back right after the break.
We'll be happy to take your calls.
This is Stefan Molyneux for The Peter Schiff Show.
The Peter Schiff Show.
The Peter Schiff Show.
You've heard of Karl Marx, right?
Well now, meet his worst nightmare.
This is The Peter Schiff Show.
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux sitting in for Peter Schiff and please feel free to call 855-472-4433.
We do have a caller.
John, are you on the line?
Hey, thanks Stefan.
Thanks for taking my call.
I've been a big fan of yours for a few years now.
Well, thank you.
So, what's on your mind today?
I've heard your thoughts a couple times on incorporating businesses.
And I certainly don't want to involve the state in my work.
However, I'm developing what I'll call a satire product with writing and cartoons.
And I'm trying to figure out, without incorporating, is there any way to protect my personal assets from a frivolous lawsuit, say, by a big bully like a Monsanto.
Right, right.
Well, you know, with all the caveats, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an accountant, I'm, you know, seat-of-the-pants guy, amateur fool on the net.
But I will tell you that, to my knowledge, you can get insurance, media insurance or other kinds of insurance, which will pay legal fees in the event of things like copyright infringement or lawsuits or slander or libel or anything that may get you bound up in which will pay legal fees in the event of things like copyright infringement or lawsuits or slander So you can buy insurance, you know, you can put stuff in trust, you can put stuff in your wife's name.
Of course, you know, sit down with a lawyer and an accountant and so on.
There's things that you can do to shield assets.
Because, you know, it's ridiculously easy to figure out what people have these days, right?
But you can find ways to protect assets and to buy insurance.
Because, I mean, you know, everybody who speaks in the public sphere has that concern, right?
I mean, that you could say something, and even if you don't know, I mean, who knows what all the laws are all the way around the world?
There's no possible way to know.
So, incorporation, I mean, as you know, is a legal shield, legal fiction, really.
And people associate corporations with the free market, and really nothing could be further from the truth.
Corporations are a legal shield invented to generally benefit the rich insofar as when the corporation makes money, you can take the money out.
When the corporation loses money, you don't have to put any money back in.
And it is a way of keeping people at the top of corporations, usually, Free from negative repercussions of what the corporation does.
Now it's true sometimes you can pierce that veil and sometimes people get dinged, but you know, 2,500 protesters at the Wall Street protests got arrested and zero bankers for some of the most egregious and theft-ridden frauds in the history of the human race.
In the recent crisis where there was robo-signing, there was false declarations put forward, there were politically motivated Credit ratings that were given by various credit rating agencies, all kinds of terrible stuff that happened.
And, you know, when people say, well, they had to pay a fine of $100 million, and somehow you think that's coming out of the pockets of the people in charge.
I mean, usually not.
It costs to pass along to consumers.
People don't get as many raises.
You don't hire as many people.
But it is a great legal shield.
But it is the way that you have to do business these days.
You know, we were talking a little bit earlier about Apple and Samsung.
Well, actually, Apple and Microsoft themselves didn't care about patents really that much until they started getting hit with all these patent trolls and then they ended up having to sort of get involved.
This is how you have to do business in the current environment.
Does that help at all?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, I haven't heard the sort of an insurance option, so that could be a possibility.
But I might wind up just incorporating as well, so I'm just kind of weighing the options now.
Thanks.
Oh, you're very welcome.
And this mistaking of corporations for the free market is really interesting.
Do you know, way back in the day, not my day, even before my day, actually, no, my audience is generally younger, but I think this audience is a tad more time-robust, I guess we could say.
But way back in the day, if you were in charge of a financial company and something went badly, you ended up being personally liable, and that's when they were very careful with their money.
Now, not so much.
So, Joe, calling from Belgium, where they've had no parliament for over two years.
Joe, are you on the line?
I am on the line.
It's Joe, actually.
Oh, Joe.
Okay, good.
That sounded a little bit less not-Belgish.
Yeah.
So, what's on your mind?
What's on your mind?
Okay, my question is, the initial goal of patents and consequence is that it blocks competition, it prevents innovation, and it does nothing else to give someone a monopoly.
At the same time, if someone invents a product, we know that he invests his time, money, and labor in order to invent something new.
So what do you suggest as a solution?
In order to keep the market free, do you suggest for an inventor to keep the idea just for himself, release a product on the market and not say anything, which is one way he could keep his position secure?
Or do you have something else which would enable competition?
How do you go about that?
Right.
No, these are great questions.
We do have some historical examples of patent-free societies, and innovation and economic growth was far greater.
So for me, what you should do if you're an inventor, first of all, you're going to get the capital to invest in the business.
Everybody has 10 great ideas a day.
The only difference between people who make it and people who don't is just putting it into practice.
So there is a certain amount of effort that it takes to get funding for your business.
I did co-found a business in the 90s.
We raised $80K to start it, and then we ended up growing it to a multimillion-dollar business.
So, if you have a great idea, it's the execution.
You've got to actually implement it in some way.
You've got to get the investors.
You've got to get the employees.
You've got to get the office space, your marketing.
You know, there's lots of things that you need to do to actually make the product get out there.
And that gives you a significant advantage over everyone else.
First out of the gate, you establish the marketplace, particularly if you're sort of following Say's law that supply creates its own demand.
We didn't know how much we wanted iPads until there were iPads, right?
So you're going to have a certain advantage just being first out of the gate for sure.
My suggestion is if you're an inventor and you want to keep making money, keep inventing.
You know, if you write a great song and you want to keep making money from writing songs, keep writing songs.
Everybody will know it's your song.
Let other people cover it.
You know, if you let other people cover your song, then they'll get to hear your song, and then they may come and see you live, or they may see your webcast, or whatever it's going to be.
I mean, so a lot of bands now just release their music over the internet, and you say, pay what you want, and they're making a huge amount of money.
The moment you start getting patents, the moment you start getting copyrights, what do you get?
You get George Michael not recording for 20 years, you get Prince Getting the word slave tattooed on his forehead because he's so sick of the record companies and how much they control things.
The moment you start involving third parties, you start to get rent-seeking, monopoly-seeking, you get stifling of innovation, you get the pestilent growth of the legal profession, which is fine in a free society but not so great in a stater society.
In a stater society, the old joke holds true.
What do you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
It's a damn fine start.
It's fine to look at the rent-seeking.
You'll get more money having that monopoly and so on, but all of the costs tend to accumulate and tend to overwhelm the economic advantages of that.
I think the best way to stay ahead of the market is keep innovating, keep coming up with new stuff.
Does that help at all?
It does.
Let me phrase it a different way.
Let's say I want to do something I want to invent.
I don't know.
I want to innovate something about cars.
Even if I'm not 100% inventing something new, it would still require me a lot of money to do that.
And if I think that there's someone who, once I release it on the market, there's some company who will do the exact same thing on the same day because they have the technology, they know how it works.
I will have to invest all the money.
But they don't have your genius.
Coming up with a great product is fine, but you have to keep coming up with great products.
So let's say you write a great song, somebody covers that song, they still can't make the new song.
You can't buy genius.
You can't buy passion.
So either you'll get a great job offer from the other company, or they won't be able to keep up with your innovation.
I mean, nobody wants the iPhone 1 anymore, right?
So it's not quite as simple as, well, some other company's going to copy it, and therefore, I'll never be able to make any money.
Because you're the guy who came up with it, and you'll come up with other new cool stuff as well, and they simply won't be able to replicate that.
So we'll be right back after the break, and we'll continue talking with listeners if you want to call in.
We now return to the Peter Schiff Show.
Call in now.
855-4-SHIFT. That's 855-472-4433.
Rebel Radio.
The Peter Schiff Show.
Hi everybody.
Stefan Molyneux sitting in for Peter Schiff who I believe is attempting to break his way into a Spice Girls reunion as we speak.
Hope you're doing very well.
We are happy to chat with listeners through the duration of the show or I can return to my nonsensical ramblings.
I would suggest...
Calling in.
That's the way to go.
855-472-4433.
Miles, are you on the line?
Or are you miming?
Are you on?
Yeah, can you hear me?
Yeah, yeah.
Go ahead, man.
What's up?
How are you doing, man?
Yeah, I just have a couple quick questions.
First is, are you going to be on the Joe Rogan Experience again?
And...
If you are, will you be talking about Bitcoin?
Well, first of all, you don't go on the Joe Rogan experience.
You submit to the Joe Rogan experience.
For those who don't know, Joe Rogan has the biggest podcast in the world.
He was the host of Fear Factor.
He's an announcer for Mixed martial arts fights, and he is an incredibly funny comedian.
I was on a show recently, which was basically sitting in his hotel room for three hours chatting about whatever came into our minds, which was really enjoyable.
To number one on iTunes.
Can I tell you, as a software entrepreneur, if you'd ever told me I was going to number one on podcasts on iTunes, I just never would have believed you.
But that's only because I'd listen to myself do karaoke.
Couldn't imagine anywhere I'd be anywhere near number one on iTunes.
But yeah, he's a fantastic guy.
I really, really enjoyed the conversation.
I think that people found it valuable on many levels.
And it's his show.
I'm happy to chat about whatever he comes up with, and we'll talk back and forth.
And so, yeah, the short answer is I actually will be submitting myself to the Joe Rogan experience.
I'm going to fly out to Los Angeles to do his stuff in studio, which I think will be a lot better.
So we have the audio and video set up.
And we're going to do that on the afternoon of January the 6th.
And I just want to tell you.
I just want to tell you, Miles, these are the kinds of bullets I take for the cause, leaving the frozen icy fist tundra of Canada to go to the sunny climate of Southern California.
I am willing to take these bullets for the cause, and I don't expect a lot of praise for that, because I just know how heroic and noble that really is.
You had more questions?
Yeah, I do.
Just as a follow-up question, I've been seeing, like, on the internet a lot lately, just some crazy stuff with technology and technological progression and stuff.
And I've been listening to your show, I've been listening to you for a long time, and you seem to be, like, really into philosophy and principles and stuff like that, but you don't seem to be too much of a nerd, so to speak, as far as, like...
Video games and like really into the technology and stuff like that, except for your fascination with Bitcoin.
So it seems like you really understand the future as far as economics and freedom and stuff like that.
I'm wondering if you have any thoughts or any just observations or interests in Just other accelerating technologies like the future of video games and stuff like that.
There's this new thing called the Oculus Rift which is basically like pretty much it's going to turn into this entire virtual reality thing.
It's this thing that sits on your head.
It's a video game that puts you in an entire virtual world.
Wow.
No, I mean, I gotta tell you, I'm a big fan of video games.
I used to play them quite a bit, a little bit less after I got married, and enormously less now.
I barely play at all, except for, you know, tablet games that my daughter likes since I sort of became a full-time stay-at-home dad, so...
I think it's fantastic.
I mean, the amount of imagination and creativity, it is an art form that is truly astounding and vivid and powerful.
I mean, if you look at some of the worlds that they're able to create, even in things like Skyrim and so on, I mean, it's vivid and beautiful.
World that is being created.
Great novelists try to create worlds.
People who write music try to create worlds or soundscapes.
And video games are amazing, amazing pieces of art.
So I think from that standpoint, I find them absolutely fascinating.
I think it can be a bit dangerous, I think.
And I don't mean the violence.
No study that I know of has ever found any significant correlation between violence in video games and violence in the real world.
You know, I used to play Pac-Man.
That doesn't mean that I'll eat M&Ms that people leave lying in a hallway.
But I do think that there is a challenge with video games, particularly when you're young.
So, like, I grew up kind of poor, and when you grow up kind of poor, maybe when you grow up rich too, I don't know, The early part of your life, you know, a lot of it is pretty sucky, right?
I mean, you have to take crappy jobs.
I was a waiter.
I cleaned offices.
You know, a lot of really boring, stupid stuff that you kind of need to do just to get into the middle class, right?
What do you need to do to get into the middle class?
Well, you need to not have a kid without getting married.
You need to finish high school, and you need to get and keep a job for a year.
And you're almost guaranteed to get into the middle class if you do those.
Three things, but a lot of the jobs that you get when you're young, they're kind of dumb, they're kind of dull.
And so my concern is that facing these amazing virtual worlds that you can crawl into and lose yourself in, you know, where there's one more kibble, one more little reward bit around the corner, and the people who make these video games make them so that the kibbles are spaced apart, that are hunter-gatherer nature, just wants to keep going.
And these vivid worlds, these virtual worlds, they're so exciting, they're so cool, they're so powerful, they're so immersive, I kind of wonder sometimes how the necessary drudgery of minimum wage jobs can kind of compete with that.
So I do have a little bit of a concern.
Society needs to become more interesting.
People need to become more interesting to compete with video games.
So from that standpoint, I think that there's a kind of cool bar that's being raised in society.
But I certainly have heard a lot from people who kind of get lost in them.
Has that ever happened to you?
Were you sort of like, where did my weekend go and why is there a pee on my computer seat?
Well, actually, I mean, I actually kind of do it intentionally.
There's times in my life when, you know, things aren't going too well, and technology at this point in time can really provide kind of like an escape, like you just mentioned.
And so, yes, I definitely have experienced that.
Yeah, and certainly for people who aren't great at chatting with other people, like a lot of the things that you want to get done in your life that have real import or growth potential have to do with negotiating with other people, dealing with challenges in relationships, finding win-win negotiations when it just seems like it's inevitable that it's going to be win-lose, being creative in your problem solving with people, brainstorming.
And all of those things are kind of skills.
That need to be developed.
And, you know, my concern is since it does tend to be a somewhat solitary activity.
Now, I know there's tons of online games and there's sort of multiplayer online games that can kind of go from here to eternity.
But that's all very structured.
That's all.
Here's what we're going to do.
You're not trying to create something out of nothing.
So I think that blank page, you know, we have to write a story or a poem from a blank page doesn't really happen in video games.
You're kind of going through a scripted environment.
Negotiations that are really open-ended don't tend to happen in video games, even if you're sort of chatting with other players, like, let's go over here, let's take this bunker, look out, there's a helicopter, ah, rocket launcher, whatever, right?
They tend to be very structured within the game.
So I think a lot of the skills that people need to develop to really reach their full potential from an economic or just plain old human standpoint might be bypassed with, you know, again, we were talking earlier about the hidden costs of things.
The visible benefits in video games are obvious, right?
You get a very immersive experience.
You're very absorbed.
You're not thinking about your problems.
I mean, you can have a toe cramp.
You probably wouldn't even notice it.
But the problem is all the things that you're not learning when you're doing that.
And I do have some sort of mild concern about that kind of stuff.
Like they say that kids are losing fine motor skills because they're doing so much touching of tablets these days, right, little kids.
So I got one with a pen just so my daughter can get sort of more used to that.
I mean, do you find that it can sort of add to your social isolation video games?
Yeah, definitely can.
Definitely.
Right.
Well, can I tell you how glad I am that you're speaking to the whole world through this radio show then?
I assume you're not currently playing a game as we speak, so I appreciate you taking the time for that.
Did you have any other questions?
You had a couple of questions.
I don't know if we have another caller, but you said you had a couple of questions.
Did you have one more?
Well, just maybe we can talk a little bit more about just transhumanism in general, not just video games, but like What are your thoughts on, like, have you heard of Google Glass?
Yeah.
So this is basically the idea that our carbon-based physical flesh is going to merge with technology to some degree.
And so that is, I think that is certainly possible.
I think it's great.
They are actually talking about, I think there's a male, it's not exactly transhumanism, a male contraception pill that's going to go in under the skin and so on.
I think that stuff is fantastic.
Obviously, I'd like it to be scar-free and reversible if possible.
But hey, I mean, if I can do the Cartesian brain experiment of transferring my consciousness to a robot, which can then dominate the world, I would be hugely excited about that.
So I think that stuff is all great, as long as it's voluntary.
I think that's going to be just wonderful stuff to get a hold of.
It's a fantastic and exciting time to be around at the moment.
The possibilities of what it is to be a human being are just...
Astounding.
So, this is Stefan Molyneux from the desk of the Peter Schiff show.
We are going to take a short break in a minute or two, and then we're going to come back.
We've got a caller from Wisconsin we're going to chat with, and we'll be back in a sec.
Thank you so much for listening.
Hey there, brother, watch your little lady.
She's sneaking around every time you blink.
To President Obama, Madam Pelosi, and all of the socialist econ Madam Pelosi, and all of the socialist econ professors across America, we're sorry.
We're sorry.
Peter Schiff is back on the air.
Hello, everybody.
It's Ben Molyneux sitting in for Peter Schiff.
My goodness, it is the last segment.
Oh, I'm going to cry.
It just flies so much.
Thanks to all the callers for calling in.
Just wanted to mention, I will be back tomorrow and Thursday.
Tomorrow.
Very excited to bring you Dr.
Peter Boghossian, who is a professor of philosophy, and we're going to be talking about some very cool analytical tricks.
That you can use to win, friends, influence people, and I think bed women.
That's what he was promising.
We will call him out on that tomorrow.
On Thursday, I have Max Gausen and Gerald Salente, two fantastic economic thinkers.
It's going to be optimism versus pessimism, the cage match.
We're going to see who comes out alive.
One of them is wildly pessimistic, and the other one...
His name is Mark.
So, we have one more caller for the show today.
Thank you for your patience for waiting to chat.
And we got Jonathan, are you on the line?
Yes, sir.
How you doing?
I'm doing all right.
How are you doing?
I'm well.
What's on your mind, brother?
All right.
Well, I'm going to run down the situation real quick.
I moved away from my family three years ago down to Georgia.
And I've been doing my own thing down there.
But my mom got cervical cancer.
Last month and ended up passing away last month also.
And she owned a group home that she ran out of her house.
And I've been kind of putting the steps in order to take that over and operate that.
But I've been dealing with the moral questions of, the obvious questions of receiving taxpayer money for that.
So I'm kind of wondering what your thoughts are on that.
Yeah, first of all, I mean, I'm incredibly sorry to hear about your mom.
I mean, that's sudden even for cancer, so I'm very sorry about that.
Thank you.
Now, the ethics of taking government money...
Well, first of all, the government has no money, as you know, right?
So you can't take something from someone if they don't actually already own it.
The government is almost always in moral possession of stolen goods.
So I think that's sort of the first consideration.
The anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard had a fairly good argument, I think, which is to say that you can be paid by the government if the service that you're providing would also be provided in the free market.
And there's no doubt, in my mind, that a group home would be necessary in a free society, in a free market.
So from that standpoint, I think it's fine.
You know, I always am sort of concerned...
When I hear people worrying about the morality of receiving government money, and I'm not talking about people who could work and end up on welfare.
I mean, I think there's just an aesthetics of life situation, like just don't do that because it's just going to make you unhappy in the long run.
But, you know, the government...
Steals money, the government starts wars, the government enslaves an underclass in bad schools, a welfare state, public housing, bad government roads, bad government services, you name it, they are a sticky trap, a Venus flytrap for the most vulnerable in society because they keep them and they farm them, right?
I mean, poverty programs, poor people are their crops and farmers don't destroy or reduce their crops.
They tend to try and have more of them and so that's the way, sadly, that it works based on economic incentives and The immorality, if not the outright immorality of what we understand of government power.
So given all of the immense evils that the government is doing, concern about clawing back some of your money seems kind of morally very sensitive.
And I appreciate that moral sensitivity.
I mean, it's a good question to ask.
But if someone steals something from you and you're morally agonized about stealing something back, I think that we need to look at first the morality of the initial theft, right?
You did not design this system.
You did not create the system.
You're trying to survive within it.
You, as a morally sensitive individual, is exactly the kind of person I would want running a group home.
And if you take government money to do that, the ethics are not on you.
The ethics are on the people who defend and justify and enforce the system, not on the people who are struggling to survive within it.
I think you can do an enormous amount of good as a morally sensitive person to the vulnerable people in your group home, so I would take it.
I mean, there is just a logical system.
Also, if you don't take it, If you don't take it, then you'll, of course, have to raise your prices, which is going to mean that fewer vulnerable people can take advantage of your services and so on.
So I think that, you know, we fight the good fight.
We speak truth to power.
We speak reason to all who will listen, and then we go about our lives.
But I wouldn't worry about it overmuch.
You know, they take your money.
Don't let them take too much of your mind space.
Does that help at all?
Yes, it does.
Thank you.
Yeah, I guess that before my thinking kind of was...
Well, if everybody in Congress and everybody receiving government money would finally take a stand, then we could do something.
But, I mean, the chances of that happening soon and everybody in unison would be pretty minimal right now.
Well, yeah, absolutely.
That's not going to happen at all.
I think we all understand that.
But I do think...
People who say, well, you know, if you pay your taxes, that's bad.
Well, no.
I mean, they throw you in jail if you don't pay your taxes, so pay your taxes.
And the reality is, of course, not everyone's going to stop paying their taxes.
Of course, right?
It's an impossible scenario.
Sorry, but the reality is that if you don't pay your taxes...
It's not like the government reduces it.
Let's say you owe $10,000 in taxes and you don't pay it.
The government doesn't say, oh, well, we have $10,000 less, so I guess we need to cut $10,000 worth of spending.
That's not what they do.
All you're doing is shifting the burden to someone else.
They'll raise taxes somewhere else.
They'll print money.
They'll borrow money.
They're not going to reduce their spending by whatever you don't pay in taxes.
All you're doing is shifting that burden to someone else.
And again, that's not on you.
But don't imagine you're fighting power.
All you're doing is you're making them print $10,000 more, which adds to inflation.
You're making them borrow $10,000 more, which adds an untold amount to future debt and probably hyper-printing of money and all that kind of stuff.
So if you don't pay your taxes, and people say, well, you support the wars by paying your taxes.
Well, first of all, being forced to do something is not a moral standard, right?
I mean, it's not charity if some guy sticks a knife in my ribs and says, give me your wallet.
There's no moral.
You just try and survive or you don't.
But this idea that you can fight things by not paying your taxes, I consider to be false.
Sorry, you were going to say?
You'll be supporting the prison industrial complex if you don't pay them.
Yeah, I mean, what you want to do, I think the way that we fight the system is we just really passionately advocate for voluntary, free, and peaceful solutions to complex social problems.
And this is, I mean, I think we're coming along with this as a society.
I mean, American public school education is completely wretched.
Completely wretched.
I mean, they're built by the same people who build prisons.
They have metal detectors, endless bullying, drugs, violence.
I mean, it's just a wretched environment.
One of the things that's a complete miracle for anyone around me who's been around the block a few times is that nobody is saying...
What we need is more money.
Nobody is credibly, because the U.S. is spending like $10,000, $15,000 per student per year, of which I think about $8 gets into the classroom, right?
And at least people are no longer saying more money will solve the problem.
That's a miracle, because more money solving the problem has been the mantra for like the past 60, 70 years.
And the fact that people aren't saying that is fantastic.
Now, we've just got a minute or two left.
I want to make sure if you had another question.
Otherwise, I'll do my rousing exit speech.
Anything?
Well, essentially on the Peter Schiff show, what do you think is going to happen with gold in the future for an investment?
I think that gold is going to remain shiny.
I think it's going to remain pretty heavy.
I think it's going to come in pretty shapes that you will get of them all.
Other than that, I really can't say because gold, of course, is to some degree controlled by governments and it's really hard to predict what governments are going to do.
I do think some governments are going to liquidate gold holdings when they start running out of debt.
It's not running out of money to pay their debt, so I don't know.
I mean, I don't believe anybody can really predict these things.
There are some general principles, which I think we can certainly live by, and gold does seem to be a good hedge against inflation, but I would hesitate to give anyone any thoughts or any certainties on that, but I don't think it's a bad thing to have some.
That's really all I can say.
I think it's a fine thing.
I think it's going to hold value relative, in fact, increase value.
Relative to the toilet paper currently masquerading as currency being put out by the Fed.
So I think it's a worthwhile thing to have in your portfolio.
It wouldn't be the only thing I'd have in my portfolio, but I think it certainly has.
Some value.
So we're out of time.
I can't believe it.
It's shocking.
It's appalling.
It's horrifying.
I think I'll just keep talking to myself for the rest of the day and call it a show.
Thanks, obviously, for Peter for having me on.
I will be back in the mothership, the control room, the Peter Schiff vault, tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.
Eastern Standard Time.
We're going to have a conversation with Peter Boghossian about the Socratic method or...
How to think.
Thanks to everyone for calling in.
I will talk to you tomorrow.
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