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March 27, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:29
2649 Bitcoin, Internet Freedom and Liberation - Stefan Molyneux Interviewed by We Are Change
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I'm here with Stefan Molyneux, a great philosopher, a great thinker.
You also have a really good YouTube channel.
You're also on Free Domain Radio.
You do a lot of good stuff.
And we're here at this Bitcoin conference here in Austin, Texas.
And in light of all the bad news, because you see it in the mainstream media, they just hound you with how Bitcoin's dead, how someone committed suicide, how this exchange is gone.
With all this bad news, how do you feel about Bitcoin?
Well, I feel that it's a measure of its success, and I think that's great.
Look, the mainstream media, anybody who believes the mainstream media after the debacle of the call to war in Iraq and all of the lies that were promulgated about that, I mean, it's just a compulsive addict to verbal abuse.
That's the only people who still believe the mainstream media.
I think it's wonderful that it's in the news.
There was a quote that was mentioned yesterday, which is, I don't care what you write about me, just make sure you spell my name right.
You know, now millions and millions of people are being exposed to Bitcoin, and the imminent demise of Bitcoin is being predicted.
And it's going to be around next week, next year, five years from now, and therefore people are going to know that the media was wrong, they're going to be informed about it, and they're going to get to learn about it.
And what does it matter if companies go bankrupt?
Have we become such a fragile culture that, oh no, a company went bankrupt.
That's the end of the world.
Companies go bankrupt all the time.
You know, lots of people you date, you never get married to.
The relationships break up.
Is that the rule now?
The first person you date, you have to stay with until the end of your life?
No.
Stuff doesn't work out all the time.
Friendships end.
People move.
People quit jobs.
There's a turmoil in the marketplace, which is called freedom.
And...
Companies fail, that's a mark of Bitcoin's success because, boy, what you don't want in the financial industry is bailouts.
But we've become so coddled and protected by the government, the FDIC and the government's protection of the financial industry that now if anything close to a financial services company closes doors, You know, it's just like, ah, end of the world because we've been shielded from it.
But that's what we need to get back in the financial system is the capacity to fail.
See, this is what intrigued me about Bitcoin is the bankers, the media, the government, they all are really against Bitcoin.
And I was like, if the guys I don't like don't like Bitcoin...
I'm going to like Bitcoin because it's very interesting.
But one criticism I get of Bitcoin is people who watch our channel and people who are in the general movement, they say that it's a cashless, trackable, one-world government currency.
That's what I've been hearing.
What answer would you have to that?
Because, you know, there's Visa, there's MasterCard, already all of our money is digital anyway now.
But what do you say to that argument that this is the New World's Order plan for a one-world government currency that's trackable, that all these elites wanted throughout the years?
Well, I mean, I think the people who criticize it for being a New World Order tool are missing the bigger picture, which is that it's actually run by Lizardman.
I'm not really supposed to talk about this in public.
In fact, I'm going to...
No, I mean, it's silly.
I mean, digital is good.
Digital is environmentally friendly.
You know, one of the things that...
What is an advantage is the reduction of labor in the production of goods is basically the definition of a rising standard of living.
You know, we could have full employment tomorrow if we eliminated all farm machinery and all the crops had to be planted and picked by hand.
You know, we would have one tenth the population because we produce almost no food, but nobody would be out of a job.
The elimination of labor, however difficult it is for the individual laborers, is the very definition of economic progress.
The elimination of overhead.
Anytime human hands touch anything, the price of it goes up enormously.
And so the idea that you can have the transfer of value...
Bitcoin is...
To call it a coin or a currency is...
Understandable, but kind of unfortunate.
I mean, it's an ecosystem of information transfer, and that's what it is.
And that's as limitless as the Internet.
Saying that the Internet is about text is missing the big picture of what the Internet can do.
And so I think that people are kind of missing that the elimination of labor and the transfer of barter value is such an enormous and unfathomable step forward.
I mean, The elimination of bankers, the elimination of stockbrokers, the elimination of accountants in this kind of area, the elimination of all the lawyers needed to do an IPO and all of that kind of stuff.
We can release these people to more productive employment like asking us if we want fries with our Happy Meal, washing our cars, massaging our feet, cleaning our shoes, you know, any number of things these people can do instead of making massive amounts of money controlling other people's money.
I also find it really interesting how it totally eliminates the need for central banking.
And it totally gets rid of all the transaction fees and all the big money players and the big banksters aren't really in charge of it.
So it's kind of a very interesting dynamic to see it develop, to see it grow.
It's still in its baby stages, but it's very exciting.
I mean, you've been into Bitcoin for how long and how has it helped you?
I think it's wonderful because...
What it's showing is that when something is privatized, because the most important thing to me about Bitcoin is not the open source or anything like that, not the peer-to-peer, not even the anonymity.
It's that it is privatized.
In other words, it is, and that doesn't mean for profit, that just means outside of coercive regulation and control and the violence of central planning.
So what we're seeing is an incredible eruption of creativity.
And I talked to most of the vendors yesterday.
I used to be a software entrepreneur, so part of me is like, oh, I wish I was still doing that.
But, you know, the guys are coming up with open source ATMs that you can buy for $1,000, that you can run off a tablet.
I mean, it's mind-blowing.
People are coming up with...
Basically, it's a stock exchange on a USB stick, which can be run, you know, you can even run it off a cell phone.
So you can sell, for instance, you say, I want to write a book, I need six months, and you can create and sell shares to people to...
Share in the profit of what you write and you can do that very easily and the contracts are embedded.
Dispute resolution, third party verification, just incredible stuff that's going on.
What an amazing amount of entrepreneurial energy is being dedicated to one of the most important things of the world, which is money.
And when the government has monopoly on money, it shields it from innovation by entrepreneurs and allows sociopaths to prey on the unborn by printing money.
So I love the fact that one of the most essential aspects of human life is finally being opened up to entrepreneurial energies.
And I think the internet is a huge part of that.
I mean, we're living in really exciting times where, I mean, guys like me and you wouldn't have a voice if it really wasn't for the internet, if it wasn't for the community out there.
I mean, how long have you been doing this and what effect have you seen with social media and kind of where do you Well, I guess I started writing my first articles in 2005, and I started reading them.
And then I ended up podcasting from my car, because I had a long commute.
So I just recorded myself in my car, talking about the philosophy that I read about and studied.
I have a master's degree in history, focusing on the history of philosophy, for 20, 20 years, 25 years at the time.
And so, yeah, it's been six or seven years since I went full-time doing this.
I mean, the show is great.
We're doing...
Three or four million downloads a month.
I'm down here.
I did Alex Jones.
We're going to do Joe Rogan later in the month.
It's a great venue to be able to get philosophy out to the masses because most people don't really have any exposure to philosophy, and yet it is such an essential part of how to be a decent person.
Social media is fantastic.
As you say, I would have no voice.
I would still be a software guy, still be building companies, still be running things, which was fun and a great thing to do.
But I felt the world needed a little bit more philosophy and a little bit less software.
And I felt that was a good trade-off for me and hopefully for the world as well.
But it's essential that the absence of gatekeepers is the most astounding revolution.
And it's never occurred before.
We've got the Gutenberg Press where people were able to print books and, you know, Luther translated the Bible into the vernacular and people could read the Bible for the first time in over a thousand years.
So all of that kind of stuff is great, but they all required gatekeepers.
You still had the monarchs often licensing the presses.
You still had extreme censorship.
And the printing press itself was expensive and technical and messy and the average person didn't have access to it.
Now, like, for the price of a cup of coffee a day, you get access to all the world's intelligence to which you can contribute.
With no gatekeepers.
I mean, it's truly unprecedented.
And I think people will look back in the future and say, damn it, I wish I was alive back in that day.
What an incredible ride that will never come again.
It's fascinating.
To me, just like right now, we're living in a day and age where one voice, one person, one human soul could just light a match that could just...
Turn everything upside down.
And it's slowly and surely happening.
Talking about social media, I asked social media what questions they wanted to ask you.
I mean, this is just on Instagram here.
We got like 34 comments, huge debates.
They weren't that mean to you.
They're mean to everyone on social media.
Some people love you, some people hate you, but just like everybody, everyone has an opinion online.
This was, I guess, one of the first questions that came in from Patel2110.
Yeah, 2111 doesn't like me.
Yeah, 2110, he's a good guy.
They weren't too brutal on you.
They're brutal on me.
They call me Putin's son.
It's insane.
Putin's son.
Oh, because of the...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm Polish, I don't like that guy at all, but for some reason you...
They just said they didn't like your philosophy or something.
So you got off easy.
But one of the questions that I thought was interesting is, does libertarianism really make sense in a modern world where we are so technologically advanced that we could actually have enough resources to food, house, and clothe every man, woman, and child on Earth?
And that's Apatel 2110.
He keeps going on.
What you get with capitalism is an incentive to keep goods at a certain demand in order to keep making a profit.
As an exemplified by the diamond and oil industry, which we know for a fact, are lying about exactly how big oil and diamond deposits are in order to keep prices up.
So I guess he's asking, does it make sense to be a libertarian with capitalism and all that?
What's your take on that?
Well, you can't talk about the oil industry and the diamond industry as if they're part of the free market.
These are government-sanctioned cartels.
I mean, one clue about the oil industry is it's run by the Saudi government, not really part of the free market.
They're an autocratic dictatorship that is brutal on women and children in particular.
And so generally, any time a monarch is involved...
It's really nothing to do with the free market.
The diamond deposits are regulated and licensed by the state.
And look, philosophy teaches you to value people over things.
and if you want to drive down the prices of diamonds, stop being so ridiculously vain about pretty stuff on your finger.
You know, like, stop measuring yourself by the work of crap produced by the earth accidentally millions of years ago.
I mean, that's, look how much I'm worth, you know, flash me, they say, and all that, you know.
How about, you know, the diamond glow of your virtuous heart being your measure of value?
So one of them can be taken care of by philosophy.
The second one, if you want to drive down the price of oil, the first thing the government should stop doing is subsidizing roads.
You know, we have an oil-based culture because after the Second World War, in America in particular, the government built all of these roads out of fear of a nuclear strike and needing to move troops from place to place.
Now, of course, once you build all these, quote, free roads, which everyone is still paying for, once you build all these free roads, guess what?
You know, you dig a big channel out of a river, you get another river.
And so they built all these free roads, and now we have this car-based culture.
So stop subsidizing roads.
And another thing, if you want to deal with this kind of stuff, too, stop having ridiculously high prices for taxi plates.
You know, one of the reasons everyone needs a car in a city is because...
I was driving some friends around the conference because to get from the airport to here, which is about 30 minutes, was over $60.
So just these kinds of things.
Stop having the government intervene in everything and drive up the prices.
You always have to bid down in the free market.
That's what drives prices down.
If you look at computers and software, computer hardware in particular, That's where the free market is operating the most fluidly and the most fluently at the moment, and that's where the prices of things are going down continuously.
If you want to get computers into the hands of the poor, the important thing is to let people compete as much as humanly possible to drive the price down.
That's how you get computers and cell phones, and that's why almost all poor people now have color televisions and air conditioning and dishwashers and computers and Internet access.
I mean, because that's where the free market has taken them.
Wherever you see the prices staying high or going high, just look for the heavy hand of the state.
Get rid of that, and it'll bring it down.
Very well said.
Personally, I don't know what the answer is, but I know what the problem is, and it's government.
So, I thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
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