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Dec. 31, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

32:53

2572 The Battle to Steal Your Money

Why is near impossible to cut government spending? Appeals to sympathy, mainstream media propaganda and death threats. Why the truth doesn't matter in today's society.

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	So, a compromise has been reached around funding government financing.
	Paul Ryan and the other so-called conservatives, the Republicans, have agreed that government spending is going to be theoretically shaved by, I think, 63 billion dollars.
	Which is literally a drop in the bucket and the government spending is still going to fundamentally continue in a massive way.
	The cuts are in no way proportional to what is necessary and so they're basically going to throw the whole mess to the courts in terms of bankruptcy and all other sorts of things.
	One of the things that is hard to understand is why the Republicans who are I think it's uncool to put it.
	If Republicans are not the party of tax cuts, then they're just an assemblage of random individuals.
	Why are the Republican lawmakers so terrified to take a stand?
	Well, I think there's some interesting answers to that.
	I don't know if these are all final answers, but I think that they're useful answers to help give perspective on the matter.
	The war against the budget, the war against overspending, the war against an unsustainable economically harikari-style financial system and government system is not that hard relative to, say, defeating the Nazis or Vietnam or even the wars in Iraq.
	I mean, that's not going to result in a million deaths.
	It's going to result in some unhappy people.
	And it's going to result, you know, if you do things, the rational things you need to do, like cut pensions and so on, and require government workers to pay some portion of their own health care costs and so on, there's going to be some genuine upset, genuine anger.
	I get it.
	I get it.
	People in the public sector, I don't know if this is why there are so many libertarians in the software world.
	But in the software world, I mean, the fact that you're an expert today might mean that you're a dinosaur tomorrow.
	When I got out of school, I got out of college in the early 90s, I mean, it was a terrible recession.
	Just brutal.
	I mean, I needed money to eat.
	I couldn't even get a job as a waiter.
	I got a job moving furniture in an office.
	I got a job taking someone's grandmother to see the town because they were too busy.
	It was crazy.
	Washing cars.
	And then, yeah, then I got a gig in the software field, started a company.
	And I was an expert in a particular form of software architecture, and then it was overtaken by larger-scale databases and HTML and what was called at the time active server pages, a kind of web technology.
	So all of the skills that I'd learned were kind of useless.
	I mean, I had to learn everything all over again.
	And now, it's functionally impossible for me to go back to work as a programmer.
	I might go back to work as a manager of programmers because I understand coding and clients.
	But to actually go back to work as a programmer would be...
	I mean, it would be tough, to say the least.
	Somebody would have to be pretty desperate.
	Even though I've learned, like, I don't know, I think I counted it up once, like...
	Over eight or ten languages and architectures in the software field.
	That stuff has changed so much.
	And I never figured it was anyone's job to keep myself relevant.
	It was anyone's job to keep my skill set valuable, to keep my human capital worthwhile.
	I just never really felt that that was my job.
	Now, in the public sector, one of the big problems is that People have literally worked in crappy environments for their whole lives, doing nothing but shuffling paper back and forth.
	They probably started, you know, oh, I need a job.
	Oh, I got a job here.
	They didn't know.
	They didn't get in.
	They stayed there for a couple of years.
	They got kind of comfortable.
	They made some friends.
	They bought a house.
	They had a car.
	And, you know, the moment you get more than ankle deep in the public sector, the quicksand of pension expectation swallows you up.
	Well, if I leave now, I'll lose this juicy pension.
	I'll lose this great healthcare.
	And you become progressively less valuable to the free market.
	I mean, there's not a lot of entrepreneurs who are going to be all hot and bothered when someone who spent 10 years shuffling paper at the DMV comes in looking for a job.
	You know they're a 9 to 4 person who's going to take every single day of their vacation and most likely every single day of their allotted sick leaves and so on, right?
	So you become less valuable to the private sector, and you get the automatic wage increases, maybe even automatic promotions if you're even remotely competent or political.
	You get your pensions, your benefits, your union, and you can't be fired, basically.
	I mean, it's very hard to fire you.
	And so they spend their lives twiddling their thumbs at the SEC during the year or two leading up to the financial crisis.
	Most of the high-level people were surfing porn eight hours a day.
	How you do that, I don't know.
	Seven hours a day.
	Yeah, eight hours a day.
	I mean, that's excessive.
	And they end up working in these crappy environments, doing nothing with their lives, waiting for their pensions and their retirements and their benefits and so on.
	And if those are touched and threatened, then their entire life decisions, or to put it more plainly, their bribed inertia, is revealed to them.
	Bad decisions, right?
	You're waiting for a big inheritance and you spend your life cruising the world as a trustafarian in your 20s.
	The big inheritance doesn't come.
	Well, now you're kind of hosed, right?
	Oops.
	So the mechanics of why this stuff doesn't change.
	I mean, there's a lot of rage in the public sector, a lot of ill health in the public sector.
	Again, I don't have the statistics.
	This is just eyeballing the protests.
	There's a lot of obesity, a lot of ill health in the public sector.
	So that's not good.
	They really are going to have to cling on to this stuff.
	Now, the reason fundamentally that it won't change is that the major battle, I believe, is with the citizenry and the media.
	The citizenry and the media.
	What do I mean by that?
	Most people have no moral compass whatsoever.
	They do not refer to any body or set of principles by which they guide their moral decisions.
	Right?
	They simply don't do that.
	Once you understand that, it's a lot easier to understand why society is the way it is and how it operates.
	Most people have no moral principles which allow them to guide their decisions.
	And there's a couple of reasons for that.
	The first is that I think those moral principles are still in development.
	I think it's a great tragedy and a condemnation of philosophers that those principles are still in development.
	I mean, there's a couple that we kind of get.
	You know, what we tell our kids, don't hit, don't steal.
	Don't push, don't be mean, don't use bad words.
	And the things that we tell our kids.
	But philosophy is not about...
	The things that we tell our kids, fundamentally, it's about making the rules for which there are no exceptions, right?
	A dog can catch a ball.
	The dog is not a physicist.
	The physicist's job is to extract the immediate into the universal, right?
	A ball falls to the earth just as we fall around the sun, just as the sun falls around the galaxy, and so on, right?
	To find the constants and the universals that allow us not just to catch a ball, but to guide a spaceship past Jupiter.
	But philosophers have been captured by the state.
	People with philosophical ability, prior to the rise of the internet, they went into academia, wherein it became impossible for them to, say, champion universal property rights and universalize the bans on theft because they were paid.
	Largely from the proceeds of state power.
	I mean, once you get people to take money from the state and to found their livelihood on the state, you don't need to tell them not to criticize the state.
	That'll just happen.
	That'll just happen.
	If you throw a bucket of rainbow paint on people, you don't need to tell them to get colorful.
	That'll just happen when it lands.
	So most people do not make any kind of decisions based on any moral standards that are universal, that are absolute.
	As a result, of course, the government can do whatever it wants because there are no principles by which people will resist the government.
	The government itself is a violation of property rights.
	It always gets its money through theft.
	If it truly reflected the will of the people, of course, if it truly reflected the will of the people, it would get its money from donations.
	But no.
	But no!
	It must forever steal and print and borrow.
	Now, because people don't make any decisions based on morality, they'll talk about it, right?
	They'll pretend.
	They'll, you know, I'm a good person.
	I'm nice, I'm kind, I'm charitable.
	All these things, but none of them.
	Ethics is that which brings you into conflict with evil.
	Ethics is that which brings you into conflict with evil.
	And all the ethics that don't bring you into conflict with evil Are not universalized principles.
	So people get to pat themselves on the back and call themselves good people because they buy food for the food bank.
	Or they bring soup to their sick neighbor.
	And these things are fine things.
	Nothing wrong with them at all.
	Nothing wrong with them at all.
	That's called being nice.
	That's not called being virtuous.
	Being virtuous is extending the principles at the expense of evil.
	And evil will have something to say about that.
	Evil will fight back.
	Nobody's going to condemn you for bringing soup to your neighbor or picking your child up when your child is upset.
	Nice things to do.
	Very nice things to do.
	But that's not where virtue really is.
	Where virtue is is extending the principles of goodness at the expense of evil.
	Someone who brings you a card when you are sick is not a doctor.
	It's nice, not going to make you better.
	Someone who finds a cure against all odds In great opposition, the guy who figured out how to bring the recovery rate for childhood leukemia up to 90% was brought up on ethics charges, was attacked, was condemned, was criticized, was threatened because he kept hitting kids with chemo even when those kids appeared perfectly healthy.
	And he combined drugs which had not been tried before and now kids live rather than die.
	So he fought the hard battle at the expense of leukemia.
	And now people are better.
	First guy through the wall always gets bloody.
	So why would people want to do that?
	Goodness is that which brings you into conflict with evil.
	If you are a cancer researcher, You are only a good cancer researcher if you kill cancer cells or prevent their growth.
	That's all it comes down to.
	Your success as a cancer researcher is directly measurable by how much the cancer shakes when you come in the room, by how much the cancer doesn't like you, when it runs screaming, when it fights back.
	Your success as a cancer researcher is directly measured by the death or prevention of cancer.
	At the expense of cancer.
	Cancer researchers win at the expense of cancer.
	And virtuous people win at the expense of evil people.
	Now, I'm not going to define the evil thing here right now because...
	We all understand, I think anybody with any reasonable intelligence understands that there are good people and there are evil people.
	And no matter how you define evil people, good people must reduce the power and prevalence of evil people.
	But that's kind of a fighty thing to do.
	And evil fights back, of course, right?
	And evil is manipulative, and evil is deceptive, and evil is vicious.
	And so why, you know, why do I say we have a battle between the people and the media for the freedom of the world?
	Well, because nobody has any moral standards.
	And therefore, Their moral perspectives, for why it's not really a moral perspective, but their moral prejudices must be formed by the emotional manipulations of the media.
	That's almost all that people have to go on.
	Is something good or is something bad?
	Well, nobody knows.
	But the media will tell them.
	And then they will believe that.
	And since most people make their decisions in life based upon what is comfortable rather than what is good, the media makes it more comfortable to side with evil than to side with virtue.
	Everybody kind of understands.
	Deep down, that it's wrong to run a massive deficit.
	It's stealing from the unborn.
	Of course that's wrong.
	I mean, that's not...
	I mean, we don't permit that in the private sector.
	I cannot run up massive debts and then have my daughter go into a virtual debtor's prison to pay them off.
	And we all know that's wrong.
	But you see, if you try to pass a balanced budget amendment that says no longer can we do any deficit spending, Then the media will immediately jump into the fray, and the media will portray the hungry, hollow-eyed children of people who are struggling to find their way in life,
	and the single moms who are heroic and raising kids after being abandoned by their husbands or boyfriends, who they have no responsibility for choosing to have children with, of course.
	And then they will...
	Show all the rich people who have invested in government bonds or say, well, we're paying off these people and we're not giving money to these people.
	See, but it doesn't matter if that's actually happening.
	I mean, one of the most chilling things that you need to get about society is that truth doesn't matter.
	The truth of the situation doesn't matter at all.
	People will simply believe what the most powerful sophists, what the greatest emotional manipulators will tell them.
	And truth doesn't matter.
	Nelson Mandela founded and was the head of an organization that blew up children.
	But he's a great man.
	The truth doesn't matter.
	So if you try to pass a balanced budget amendment, then The poor and the helpless and the sick and the needy and the this and that.
	And the human casualties of rational spending, moral spending, will be paraded in front of you.
	And then you have to look at them in the eye and say, I'm sorry, you're not getting what you want.
	And people say, well, people will die as a result of this.
	Could that be?
	I don't know.
	I think that's a pretty hard case to make.
	That is a very hard case to make that reduced government spending is directly causal in people's deaths.
	They have no alternatives.
	If I'm a bitter, lonely guy who's never done a damn thing for anyone else, I'm mean to my neighbors and I'm on welfare and my welfare gets cut, And that I'm such a mean and bitter old guy, I starve to death rather than go to ask for health or I kill myself.
	Is it the drop in government spending that has caused my death?
	I would say not.
	I would say that it is the choices that I've made in my life to be a mean, bitter, nasty old guy who...
	Doesn't ever help anyone out.
	Doesn't provide anything positive to the community or the world.
	Because, you know, if you're the friendly, gracious person who helps everyone out and so on, then if you fall in hard times, people will help you back.
	I know that.
	I rely on donations myself.
	If you help people, people will help you back.
	And I now have absolute security for the rest of my life.
	I mean, even if donations dried up tomorrow, lots of people know that I'm a smart, hardworking guy and they'll give me a job.
	Or I can go to investors and say, well, I did this, this, and this.
	Here's my resume.
	I've done lots of shows on entrepreneurship and they'll give me money to get involved in Bitcoin or something like that.
	And so the media will show you all the victims and say that it's directly causal and do you want these people to die?
	And the rational response, I think, is to say, well, you could...
	You could show a motorcyclist who was in a club who doubled the speed limit, who resulted in a crash so bad that his eye got gouged out, or both eyes, let's say, both eyes got gouged out, and then you could sit him in front of me.
	He's still alive.
	You could sit in front of me and say, you need to give up one of your eyes so this guy can at least half see.
	Do you want him to be blind for the rest of his life?
	This guy who smoked, He's dying of lung cancer.
	You need to give him your lung.
	Otherwise, you will be responsible for his death.
	I don't think so, really.
	I don't think that's really how it works.
	I don't think that other people's decisions are my responsibility to alleviate.
	Otherwise, I am morally responsible for the results of their decisions.
	And you could say, well, we're not talking about eyeballs and lungs.
	We're only talking about money.
	And it's like, well, no, the media is the one who brings up that the lack of money causes death.
	So we are talking about life and death.
	Well, you can afford the money.
	Well, I have two eyes.
	If I give up one, I can still kind of see.
	What about the infertile couples and the couples who have eight children?
	I mean, eight is not enough.
	It's too much.
	Give them two.
	Come on.
	Spread the wealth.
	What about those kids who do really well in school and get high marks?
	What about those other kids who don't?
	Let's take some of the high marks.
	From the smart kids and give it to the kids who aren't doing so well.
	Come on.
	Spread the marks.
	We can call it Marxism, let's say.
	So the media will parade the victims in front of society and society will buckle.
	Society will buckle.
	And we'll say, okay, give them money.
	Okay, give them money.
	Because they have no principles.
	I say, ah, well, what principles require human suffering?
	Well, I'll give you one.
	Detox.
	How about that?
	Mmm, lots of human suffering and detox.
	How about when you take a drug addict and throw him in jail, which most of society agrees with and approves of?
	Lots of suffering there, right?
	How about people who steal cars?
	Or how about people who sell themselves as prostitutes?
	Or how about people who deal drugs?
	We throw them in jail, which is massive suffering, often quite rapey suffering.
	How about physical rehab?
	Very, very painful for some people to regain control of their limbs.
	Very painful.
	Oh, how about...
	Analysis.
	Some people are forced into anger management programs that make them feel like crap because they realize they've been an abusive jerk for their life.
	Well, there's some suffering.
	Oh, how about kids who fail the grade and get left back?
	That's quite a lot of suffering right there.
	Right there.
	How about the fact that we don't have a speed limit called 20 kilometers an hour, which would almost eliminate the tens of thousands of people who die on the road?
	So you put in legislation saying we can reduce the speed limit to 20 kilometers an hour, 20 miles an hour on the highways.
	People say, well, I don't want to do that.
	That's crazy.
	You show them pictures of twisted wreckage and say, so you want these people to die?
	Right?
	Well...
	So the media runs the emotional responses to whatever is being talked about.
	That's sort of the first line of defense, which people have, right?
	And the media does that because it sells, right?
	Because people buy that stuff.
	And how do you get people to stop buying that stuff?
	Well, you have to confront them on it.
	And you have to confront them on it.
	You're not watching that trash, are you?
	You're not watching that garbage, are you?
	Why don't people read pornography?
	I guess, do you read pornography anymore?
	I guess not.
	Why don't people consume pornography on the subway?
	I don't believe it's illegal.
	I mean, why not?
	Because it's frowned upon, to say the least, right?
	Or the kind of people who don't frown on it you probably don't want hanging around you in the subway, right?
	Now, of course, if you...
	I mean, the media is already dying.
	Thank God.
	Mainstream media is already dying.
	But, you know, let us not hasten to accelerate its demise.
	Let us not hesitate.
	Sorry, let us not hesitate to hasten its demise.
	That sentence actually makes sense.
	Let's go with that second one.
	So, the media will tell people what to think and what to feel.
	That's sort of the first line of defense.
	And so, if you're a Republican and you propose spending cuts, Then the media has already got you because they'll portray you as a heartless bastard and they'll dig into your past and they'll try and find anything they can about you because they're in the service of the people who prey upon the body politic, right?
	The evil or amoral parasites on the productive.
	That's who, right?
	Because those people have concentrated interests, right?
	It's all economics, right?
	So, to stop that process, we need to cut off the media and propose the alternate media.
	The alternate media, the internet media, this is, as I've used the analogy before, but this is a very powerful step forward in human progress.
	It's immensely powerful.
	It is like giving people their own version of the Bible, their own copy of the Bible.
	Before a priest held the Bible, it was written only in Latin or ancient Greek or whatever.
	But then people managed to get a hold of their own after one Martin Luther.
	In the 16th century, translated it into the vernacular, into people's local speech.
	They got copies of it.
	They learned how to read.
	And it fragmented the monopoly of Catholicism, which up until then was just called Christendom.
	Now, that did produce a couple of centuries of religious warfare.
	I don't think that would be the case here.
	Because that was all fragmenting into religion.
	This is now fragmenting into reason versus anti-reason, into virtue versus moral indifference, moral turpitude, or outright moral evil.
	So that's sort of the first line of defense.
	You're going to confront people about, you know, think for yourself.
	If they spout off some crap written by the media, they say, well, what do you think?
	And what are your principles?
	They challenge people.
	We'll just parrot what the media says.
	I mean, how silly is that?
	Well, think for yourself.
	You know, we've got nice precedents for this, right?
	If everybody was jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it too?
	Blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
	Now, the second line of defense for people dependent on the state is murder.
	is assault, stabbings, and so on, right?
	So, when Governor Scott of Wisconsin was talking about limiting some of the more egregious aspects of collective bargaining on the part of public sector unions, when he talked about them contributing just a smidgen more to their healthcare costs, what resulted was...
	Well, death threats against him, against his wife, against his children.
	Somebody said that his wife, he knew where he lived and he was going to gut his wife like a deer.
	You know those Democrat legislators who fled to, I think it was Illinois they went to, so that they wouldn't have to vote on this?
	They weren't fleeing a legislative battle.
	They didn't want to have to vote on this Because their choices were to vote against Governor Walker and then probably lose their office, their livelihood, or to vote with Governor Walker and receive death threats, which are, you know, unsettling.
	So that's sort of the second line of defense.
	And people say, well, why is it hard to legalize drugs?
	It's kind of hard to legalize drugs in the States because the drug war, drug dealing and so on, organized crime is embedded in it very heavily.
	Why are they not legalizing drugs in Mexico despite the obvious disasters that the drug war?
	Because anybody who's about to legalize drugs is going to get a bullet to the head because organized crime protects its profits and it protects its profits through violence.
	And they're a lot better at doing violence than legislators are at combating violence.
	So the first is this sort of sociopathic emotional manipulation.
	These appeals to sympathy.
	You know, and the appeals to sympathy are always so one-sided.
	And it's always the seen versus the unseen.
	This is why I was talking about economic thinking in the Peter Schiff show yesterday.
	It's always the seen versus the unseen.
	They'll show you the children...
	Or the people who need their sort of healthcare right now or whatever.
	They'll show you all that stuff.
	But what they won't do is they won't show you all the kids who are born in debt, who won't get any economic opportunities, who will never have any kind of satisfying life, who will become criminals because of...
	The breakdown of the family and the economy and so on.
	I mean, they won't show you any of that because that's the unseen, right?
	You have to see that with your mind's eye.
	In other words, you have to have non-sensual empathy, right?
	Empathy for the abstractions rather than for people right in front of you.
	But the murder-based society that we're in is very important.
	I mean, if you talk about any significant cuts to the public sector or to pensions or to any of that sort of stuff, If it's something that you're perceived as willing, you will receive death threats and you may well be murdered.
	I mean, that's the whole point of a death threat, right?
	It's to make you afraid that you might be murdered.
	And that's challenging.
	And so that's why, you know, they say, well, I have power, I have money, I have fame.
	You know what they say, politics is showbiz for ugly people.
	And why would I want to take on this battle?
	Why would I want to expose my family, my children to death threats?
	And why would I want all of this?
	There's no...
	Like, without real moral standards...
	There's no way that you could possibly ever justify taking that course of action on pragmatic grounds.
	The odds of it working are very tiny.
	And it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
	The media is going to be against you.
	The benefits are going to accrue probably in 10 to 15 years.
	It's going to trigger a recession.
	You know, you pay off a bunch of debt and you're going to get a huge recession.
	That's kind of what happens when you pay off debt.
	You have less money to spend.
	That's sort of the point, right?
	So, yeah.
	On what pragmatic calculus could you possibly make that decision and have it make any kind of sense?
	Well, the answer, of course, is none.
	There's no way that you could make that decision make any kind of sense.
	So, I hope that helps.
	I guess I'm here.
	Do my Peter Schiff show.
	And have yourselves a wonderful week, everyone.

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