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May 14, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:19:41
2697 Defending Ayn Rand - Peter Schiff Radio Show May 14th, 2014
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I don't know when they decided that they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.
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The Peter Schiff Show.
Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
We are sitting in for Peter Schiff.
Today, tragically, as I mentioned yesterday, Peter was auditioning for Chippendales in his Austrian economist Lederhosen outfit.
He did actually get the gig.
You know, good for his, obviously, supple hips and professional moneymaker.
Tragically, though, he's not able to come back.
He was hoping to come back today, but they offered to pay him in bitcoins, and...
Peter don't shake his money maker for no stinking bitcoins.
So he's still on the look for a second gig.
So I'll sit in for today.
Tomorrow, we'll see where he's at, and we will continue.
So this morning, ladies and gentlemen, I am going to introduce you to my fetish.
For the premium members watching on the webcam, now may be the time to avert your eyes.
Or put on the beluga white body male filter, which will simply have me revealed as a pair of Cheshire cat eyes and a few tufts of hair.
So last night I was watching a show called The Good One, which is a fun show.
And, you know, legal wheelings and dealings, and Christine Baranski and those actors I think are just fantastic.
And Tom Skerritt, who played the helicopter hairdo military guy in Top Gun, was on the show, and he was playing one of the 1%, one of the rich guys.
He was a CEO, a self-made man, lost his company, rebuilt it, lost his company, rebuilt it again.
And he was working, his company was working on a gene that extends human life, quite important.
And he was being dragged into a lawsuit where he said, somebody said he fired a guy because he was gay.
And then he goes on TV and he says, and this comes out of one of Rand's articles probably called Big Business, America's Persecuted Minority, where she points out that different laws apply to the rich than to everyone else.
Small companies can merge, big companies have antitrust legislation, the graduated income tax hits rich people harder as a proportion of their income and of course in real dollars than the poor and so on.
And so he made some obviously insensitive remarks comparing big business to persecuted minorities in Nazi Germany to Jews.
And then he says to this woman whose name is Alicia, He says, if you want to understand me, basically read Ayn Rand.
And she says, oh dear God, have you read her books?
They're awful.
And he says, well they weren't meant to be Moby Dick, they were meant to make you think.
And she says, it's a 12-year-old's view of the world.
It's like basing your philosophy on the books of John Grisham.
Now I'll tell you this, I would not be sitting in this chair if it weren't for that smoky-voiced Russian goddess of reason and evidence known as Ayn Rand.
She is a stone genius.
Whether you like her or not, agree with her or not, she's a stone genius.
She has written the second most influential book in America after the Bible.
After the Bible.
You know, that's an okay number two.
You know, that's an okay number two.
Bible had a bit of a head start and also contains within it the power to send you to heaven and hell.
So stakes are a little bit higher.
That's according to a New York Times book survey.
Second most influential book after the Bible.
We're number two, and that's basically number one.
She did this, wrote the second most influential novel in the American canon.
She did this without growing up learning English, knowing English, right?
She spoke Russian.
She grew up in Russia, and she witnessed the 1917 revolution.
Her father was a Bourgeoisie.
And everything was stolen, everything was taken in the general predation of the Russian Revolution.
And, of course, she was Jewish in the later persecution of the Jews under Stalin.
It was a pretty rough time, to say the least.
Now, we wouldn't mind a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany writing books, exoriating, lashing, laying into Nazism.
We kind of understand that, right?
We'd be okay with that.
Yeah, I get it.
Well, can we really blame the daughter of a bourgeoisie Jew for In Russia, who had his life's work stolen from him, and whose nightmarish totalitarian regime she had to flee, can we perhaps find it in our tiny, over-tanned, raisin-like hearts to forgive a woman for having a real fundamental lizard-brain hate-on for totalitarianism?
National Socialism fascism shows up In race, usually, particularly in Nazi Germany.
But communism shows up in class, right?
So for Ayn Rand, her father was to the communist revolution as a Jew was to the Nazis.
And this lack of sympathy and empathy for a brilliant girl who grew up watching her father be persecuted for his success Wanting to do something to redress that imbalance in society?
And we all know it.
I mean, most people have a love-hate relationship with successful people.
We love to go and see celebrities who entertain us, and we love it when their lives turn to hell in a handbasket, when they get divorced, when they get drug problems.
We have a love-hate relationship with the stars of the human constellations.
Now, in this television series...
And I think Ben Shapiro has a pretty funny series of stories.
He's a writer in America as well, worth reading.
He talks about submitting a script to the good wife because they really liked his writing.
And they're like, yeah, let's go ahead.
And then they actually looked him up and found out he was a conservative and says, I'm like, we can't work with you.
You're not a socialist.
Now, Alicia Florek, the woman who deigns to criticize Ayn Rand, An absolute stone literary and philosophical genius.
Listen, getting people to read 1100 pages of philosophy is not the easiest task in the world.
And yes, she learned her English from watching movies, so her characters sound like 40s movies characters and 30s movies characters, and she got her start writing movie scripts.
But getting people to wade through 1,100 pages of small print philosophical discussions, not the easiest thing.
Hey, think it's easy?
Give it a shot.
Just go give it a shot.
She spent 13 years writing Atlas Shrugged.
And she could tell you, as she did in a wide variety of interviews, why every single word, every single comma is there, what it's for, how it fits into the theme as a whole.
It is one of the greatest symphonies of language That a human being has ever produced.
And stimulating, and inspiring, and thought-provoking.
Alicia Florek, who deigns to criticize Ayn Rand in this show, is married to an Illinois politician.
Or as my daughter calls it in Monopoly, ill and annoyed.
She's married to a complete sociopath.
I mean, her husband, to get their children into a private school, threatens in his capacity as governor to put the head of the private school in jail.
In jail.
Listening to this character give her opinions on Ayn Rand is like listening to a gangster's mall give her opinions on virtue.
Carla Homolka, what are your thoughts on Aristotle's eudomania or the pursuit of excellence in ethics?
Monstrous.
I will defend this smoky-voiced Russian vixen until the end of my days.
But I will do so with your help.
Give me a call, 855-472-4433.
This is Stefan Molyneux for The Peter Schiff Show.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
We're sorry.
Peter Schiff is back on the air.
Good morning, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux sitting in for Peter Schiff.
I am from the Philosophy Show, Free Domain Radio.
You can check it out if you like.
We're talking about Ayn Rand, and she was incredibly influential.
To me, really was the foundation of the metaphysics that I accept, objective reality, the epistemology, the study of knowledge or how we acquire facts, which is reason and empirical evidence, the validation of the senses.
She just did magnificent work in this area.
And she's constantly maligned, and I don't mind that she's maligned.
Look, I mean, if you're not being maligned and you're a philosopher, You're not doing your job.
Your job as a philosopher is to aid good and harm evil.
Your job as a doctor is to aid health and harm disease.
And if someone's cancer isn't bothered by your treatment at all, you ain't a good cancer specialist.
You ain't a good oncologist.
So the fact that Evil people, immoral people, morally decayed human beings attack Ayn Rand?
Doesn't bother me at all.
In fact, I consider that the stars that should guide us towards the best people in the world is you look for the calumny of evil people, and that is sure as sunrise, sure as the morning star, sure as Venus, the way you navigate to a better world.
Hey, who do evil people hate?
I'll go to that person, right?
I don't think we ever say, was he Churchill?
Oh man, that Churchill guy?
I can't really accept that he has any value because, you know, Hitler really didn't like him.
So the fact that Ayn Rand is maligned, to me, is proof of her efficacy.
And a lot of it is, of course, professional jealousy.
She wrote an incredibly influential book.
She started a movement.
She's influenced the Tea Party.
She's influenced Republican politics.
And she was a strong atheist.
In other words, not an agnostic, i.e., I can't tell, but there is no God.
Not a weak atheist, which is, I'll wait to see if there's proof, but I don't believe now.
Strong atheist, which bothers a lot of people as well.
So it doesn't bother me.
That Ayn Rand is attacked.
What bothers me is that her attackers are so retarded.
That's what bothers me so much.
That basically she painted this extraordinary canvas of drama, of characters, of powerful moral situations, of integrity, with fantastic speeches on such a wide variety of topics.
You know, from ethics to economics to integrity to love.
I mean, she, like Bertrand Russell spoke about everything, and Ayn Rand spoke about everything, and that's really the job of the philosophers, speak about everything.
There's nothing that reason and evidence doesn't touch, except the things it can't touch, which it will, defines out of existence.
She created such a tapestry, such a glorious tapestry, such a motivating tapestry, Of human thought, human action, human potential.
That I don't mind if people stand back from the canvas and say, this is wrong, this is wrong, I disagree with this, she made a logical error here, she contradicted herself here, or this information that she has has been superseded by greater knowledge, right?
I mean, her arguments on homosexuality were a product of the early to mid-20th century thought, and she certainly wasn't the only person saying that homosexuality was problematic, but it, you know, We know better now, and she based an argument on information she could not possibly possess, that nobody possessed, about the genetic role played in biology to homosexuality.
Yes, and she had unkind things to say about the Palestinians.
Well, I guess as a Jew, that would be unprecedented.
But that's, I mean...
People who say, well, oh, she took Social Security later on in life.
And she took government medical assistance when she got lung cancer after 40 years of smoking like a chimney.
So what?
First of all, that was in accordance with her philosophy in that she says, well, the money was taken from me by force, so I'm going to get some of it back.
Ooh, that kid stole back a bicycle that was stolen from him.
He doesn't believe in property rights.
Yes, he does.
You just don't believe in thinking.
And of course, even if she was personally hypocritical, Marx, who railed against the sexual exploitation of workers, did not pay and had sex with and kicked out when she produced a child of his, his maid.
Yet nobody says communism is false because Marx was a perverse sexual hypocrite who, as his mother said, I wish that little Carl was more interested in making capital than writing about it.
Marx, through Engels, preyed upon the profits of the working class victims, as he would define them, of Engels' factory system, never worked really a day in his life, and survived off handouts from a capitalist who had to pay lower wages to his workers in order to pay Marx to write about how bad it was to exploit the workers.
Ah, you could go on and on with leftists.
They're so ridiculously hypocritical.
I could do a whole show on that, but who cares, right?
It's understood.
So she's got this glorious tapestry, this beautiful tapestry, heart-wrenchingly, amazingly wonderful.
I mean, even if you disagree with a lot of her arguments, which is your prerogative if you can find flaw in the thinking.
I mean, to challenge Ayn Rand is, I'm not the dumbest hammer in the bag, and it took me about 20 years of hard thought to find some flaws in Ayn Rand.
But people criticizing the beautiful tapestry and canvas of Ayn Rand's works are basically like monkeys throwing their own poo at something that frightens them and calling it thought.
It's like a 12-year-old's vision of the world.
No, that is a 12-year-old's argument against a philosopher.
She's like John Grisham.
Her books are awful.
Oh, man.
Grody!
Grody to the max!
Like, Ayn Rand, like, totally bums me out.
I mean, I don't even know if she's pro-mall.
I don't know if she's, like, pro-ocean.
I mean, she likes super tankers that go around getting oiled to places.
It's really gross.
I mean, ew.
Plus, like, she smoked.
Yuck.
And, like, that hairdo?
I mean, seriously.
I mean, come on.
Throw a little streak in that, lady.
I mean, you're getting photographed from time to time.
I mean, this literally is the level of criticisms that you hear.
Nobody reads her books.
Nobody quotes her, except out of context.
Nobody actually says, here's her argument.
Here's where it is false.
And then people have the nerve to write that something is a 12-year-old's view of the world.
If you are...
Accepting of Ayn Rand's arguments, that's an insult to 12-year-old people to say that they couldn't muster up a better argument against Ayn Rand.
So it's almost inevitable that people who are dumb but cunning We'll put this emotionally manipulative stuff in where a pretty person basically says, Ayn Rand, like, super gross.
My God.
Work a little harder.
That man broke, sorry, that woman broke titanic tsunamis of mental sweat to bring some glorious language to the world.
Work a little harder to repudiate her.
And I'm still waiting for the feminist to accept the glory of what she produced.
We will be right back after the break where we talk about the Fed.
This is Ben Molyneux from Peter Schiff.
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.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
How are you?
This is fine AM. This is the man Molyneux sitting in for Peter Schiff.
We are talking about Ayn Rand and what you think of her.
Do you like her?
Do you not like her?
I certainly have worn my heart on my sleeve.
That I would have French-kissed that ashtray of a mouth.
In terms of reason.
But James, on the line, you have some thoughts about her.
What's on your mind?
Hello?
Yeah, go ahead.
Hi, Sylvain.
How's it going today?
Good.
How are you doing?
So I get really frustrated when people, you know, especially like libertarians, they say, oh, you have the mentality of a 12-year-old child or a child in general.
And it's like, well, you know...
The adults and the state are the ones that kept telling us, you know, don't lie, don't steal, don't cheat, don't initiate force as children.
And now they want to turn around and say, oh, well, that was all, you know, that was crap.
You can't actually do that if, you know, you wear special costumes and the majority or minority approve of it.
And so, well, then tell us that when we're kids and then deal with the questions that we're going to ask in response to those because of how illogical that is.
Yeah, I mean, Ayn Rand receives such a level of insult.
I mean, she was compared to Nazis.
She was saying that poor people should go to the gas chamber.
And it's so hysterical.
And it's so the opposite of what she was arguing for.
Basically, she was arguing for property rights and the non-aggression principles.
That you should not initiate force against others and you should respect other people's property.
Well, if that's a big problem, then we've really got a whole bunch of kindergarten teachers to talk to and correct and say, yeah, kids should be able to steal each other's toys and hit each other.
But all we ever hear when we're kids is, use your words, not your fists, and don't steal other people's property.
And if this is a big issue, man, school's got to be really revamped.
We've got to allow a total sociopath-ruled Lord of the Flies pyramid from hell because kids should be able to hit whoever they want and steal whatever they want.
So, but basically the arguments come down to, Ayn Rand, I'm going to try and coat her with the cooties of my calumny.
I am going to just try and sneeze a whole bunch of my venom on her and hope that you think she's poison.
When did you first read her?
Probably like 18, 19 years old, I started to get into her.
I mean, she's not my favorite philosopher, but, you know, she's up there and, you know, likes her ideas, and I'm more of a Hayek guy, but, I mean, he's kind of in line as well, so.
Right.
I mean, I just, I mean, it's not even just in that response, but, you know, you always get that as a libertarian, or, you know, you just have a childish view of the world, and it's like, no, my principles should have been compromised by, you know, Some outside, you know, special interest that I, or even an inside special interest that I, you know, that I may have by using the state.
You know, it's like, don't tell me that I'm a 12-year-old because I, you know, I haven't said all, you know, it's wrong to feel except in this situation that it might benefit me in a sense.
It's just very insulting because, you know, a 12-year-old, basically you think a 12-year-old is principled and you're not.
I think when you make that argument.
Well, and it is a 12-year-old argument to say that someone is wrong because they're acting like a 12-year-old.
Right?
That's literally like me saying, your argument is incorrect because you're too short.
Your argument is incorrect because you have a pimple.
Your argument is incorrect because you're black.
I mean, nobody would accept that at all.
You know, Ayn Rand is a monstrous figure in human thought.
Now, she's not a monstrous figure in academic thought, because academic thought is kind of an oxymoron.
Academics are state-sucking toadies, really, really get up every morning in the world and say, how can I further corrupt the youth in the service of the masters who rule us all?
That's their whole reason for getting out of bed.
How can I bewitch, bother, and bewilder the potential rationality of young minds to further mush them into the bloody Play-Doh carved channels of the service to state power?
Oh, but in return, I only have to work about three hours a week.
I can offload my work onto TAs.
And look, every couple of years I get a sabbatical.
Ooh, a conference in Belize.
I'm in!
Who do I have to mind-screw in order to get all of these benefits?
And so, of course, academics...
I don't like Ayn Rand.
You know, for the same reason that counterfeit, counterfeiters don't like counterfeit detection machines.
For the same reason bank robbers don't like video cameras.
It exposes them.
And in terms of professional jealousy, you can be an academic and you can write a paper that's read by a dozen people or you can teach maybe a hundred or two hundred or five hundred people and maybe a couple of thousand if you're teaching philosophy 101.
You can get that level of impact if you want.
By joining into the state-sucking toady morass of government-protected academia, which is another government worker, the most dangerous kind of government worker.
Or you can bring philosophy to the masses.
And you can talk to people about reason and truth and virtue and evidence and you can give them some actionable stuff about how to change their lives for the better and how to bring virtue to life in their own world, in their own life, in their own world, how to make their world a better place through philosophy.
All academic philosophers are doing is handing incomprehensible Sanskrit recipes to each other under the table.
Well, three security guards hold down the taxpayer and they rifle through their pockets.
Nobody's publishing a diet book for the masses which causes people to actually change what they put in their mouth or in their minds or in their hearts or what they bring out of their souls.
My show's had over 65 million downloads over the last couple of years.
Peter's show reaches millions and millions of people.
Oh, but I could be an academic and get published in some obscure paper about what is the ontological difference between an arm and the opposite of an arm.
Ooh, thank you for contributing to the moral muscle of mankind.
The state regularly lays these breadcrumbs of dollars to the foggy cliff edge of inconsequentiality, and people are like, ooh, kibble, ah!
Off I go!
I just wish they were a Thelma and Louise and ended up in a fireball sometimes, but they're not.
They just come back.
Can you tell I spent a lot of time in higher education?
In socialist Canada?
As a libertarian?
As an objectivist?
As a capitalist?
Yeah.
I got some thoughts.
I got some feelings about all that time.
I had a Marxist professor.
Looked like a complete caricature of a Marxist.
Like they always look like Ewoks who've had too much chip dip.
You know, like that vague facial fur and, you know, the proletariat clothes and all of that and the barrel-shaped body.
It's like, hey man, just because Marx didn't do any sit-ups doesn't mean that you can't break a sweat once in a while, comrade.
And the course was called The Rise of Capitalism and the Socialist Response.
And I fought him tooth and nail.
I fought him tooth and nail.
Because, you know, I felt that it was important to get other perspectives to the class.
And at the end of it, end of the class, final day, I gave a big speech.
And he said, well, you know, I can't argue any of those points.
I guess it just depends which side of the fence you come down on.
And I was young and naive enough to still be shocked by that, to still be like, what?!
What do you mean, which side of the fence you come down on?
Is this eeny, meeny, miny, moe?
Is this I like purple mauve and not dinosaur butt for my wall color?
What do you mean it's a choice?
You're marking us!
You're giving us a pass or a fail, and now you're saying it's a subjective choice?
You can't do that.
I know you're a furry-faced, Ewok, barrel-chested, Marxist nobody in academia, but don't you even notice?
That you just gave us all this information.
You marked us a pass or a fail on tests.
And now you're saying, well, I guess if you lean that way, you lean that way.
If you lean this way, you lean this way.
Oh, so it's like your taste in ice cream.
How can you fail that?
You like Rocky Road?
I like Grasshopper.
You fail!
Madness.
But this is the intellectual climate that we're living in.
People are dumb but cunning.
People are dumb but cunning.
In The Good Wife, the guy, the rich guy, the guy who'd worked incredibly hard to make his mark and who was doing incredible service to mankind through the pursuit of profit, he had to say...
In the show, he was forced to apologize under threat of lawsuits and not having a merger go through.
He was forced to say, it's nobody's fault for being poor.
It's nobody's fault for being poor.
Nobody has any responsibility in being poor.
My God, what an astounding statement.
So a monk who makes a vow of poverty to serve God at the expense of material goods, material ambitions, material possessions, Has no responsibility for his resulting poverty.
A man who decides to forego earnings in order to work for his dream, to be a writer, to be an actor, to be a philosopher, a man who foregoes economic opportunities to pursue his dream is not at all responsible for that dream and how it turns out.
When I was a kid, if I didn't study for a test, I got a big fat F. Didn't study.
Well, wait a second here.
How can adults not be responsible for being poor, but children are responsible for failing tests?
Oh!
Oh!
I forgot!
I'm sorry!
Children don't vote!
And so you don't have to pander to the vanities and insecurities of children.
Some people are poor involuntarily.
They deserve our sympathy and our charity.
Some people make really bad choices.
As the old meme says, there is a reason for everything that happens to you, but sometimes that reason is you're stupid and make bad decisions.
Sometimes.
I give people the respect of making bad decisions.
I really do.
I give myself the respect of making bad decisions, as I have and regularly will make over the course of my life.
If you're not making any more bad decisions, you're not trying anything new.
I don't make bad decisions about how to climb stairs anymore because I've done it a million times.
But are we no longer allowed to say to the poor, to any of the poor, any of the poor, you made some bad choices?
Is that completely impossible?
So the rich are not responsible for being rich and the poor are not responsible for being poor.
Then nobody's responsible for their vote.
Nobody should ever go to prison.
No one should ever fail a test.
We should all have the same income.
But then we can't, because the only way to have the same income for everyone, the redistribution of wealth, is to give a small minority of people called the state all the guns in the known universe and have them point at everyone else and make that money go back and forth.
In this big bloody tide, fleeing the guns that they're pointing at.
But if you give a small minority of people all the guns in the known universe to make everyone else equal, guess what?
They're not equal.
They have the guns and other people don't.
They have the law and other people don't.
They have the military and other people don't.
They have the power and other people don't.
Egalitarianism is only possible by giving a small monopoly of people all the power in the known universe which is not egalitarian.
We either have inequality of money or we have inequality in the realm of political power.
I will choose the former because the former is productive and the latter is destructive.
This is Stefan Molyneux for The Peter Schiff Show.
We'll be right back after the break.
break.
Thank you so much for listening.
Thank you.
Nine out of ten historians agree if If Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were alive today, both would be Schiff Radio premium members.
Somewhere up there, Thomas Jefferson is looking down with great pride.
Schiff Radio continues right now.
Good morning everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio sitting in for Peter Schiff.
We are talking about Ayn Rand and really in a larger sense we're talking about what it's like to be a thinker in a world of zombies who don't even know that they should be trying to eat brains.
And what's it like for you rolling around in this socialist relativistic hellscape of I mean, I first got into Ayn Rand through a friend of mine who was a fan of the rock band Rush.
Which, you know, if you want a squeaky-voiced hobbit singer screaming about Rivendell, is a great band.
Actually, I like the band.
I shouldn't say that.
Red Barchette is a great song.
But the drummer, Neil Peart, was into objectivism, into Ayn Rand, and wrote about that.
And he's a lyricist for the band.
And that's how I sort of ended up.
And I had a sort of vaguely...
This is amazing how propaganda is.
I had a vaguely negative impression of Ayn Rand before I read her books.
And within about two pages of The Fountainhead...
The Fountainhead and Crime and Punishment were two books that I read straight through without sleeping.
Those Russians.
And it was literally a life-changing book.
An absolutely life-changing book.
I get the hyperbole.
I get, you know, that the characters are extreme.
And Ayn Rand got that herself.
She said very explicitly, my characters are not recipes for action.
They are romantic portrayals of philosophical ideals.
These are not people.
They're not people.
She was not a naturalist.
She was a romantic in the realm of Victor Hugo and also in the realm of Shakespeare.
And she said, don't do like my characters do.
I don't.
But get the principles behind what they're doing and try and live your life that way.
Greg from Tallahassee, you have some comments or thoughts about this?
Are you on the line?
I am here, Stephan, and the comment that struck me is when you were talking about your professor, the Marxist professor, and you make the defense for what you would contend, and at the end, what he's left with in the face of your reasoning is, and I may misquote your quotation of him, but in the end, he's basically left saying, well, I guess that's just a question of which side you come down on.
And the end of that process is for him to basically admit, okay, well, it's all just a matter of your opinion, right?
So I'd like to propose that at the point you get that professor or a politician or a leftist of any stripe to admit that whatever is being debated here ultimately is just a matter of opinion, that's the point at which you've won, right?
You've won the debate at that point because, and I'm going to make a couple of contingents here that you may or may not agree with, but the way I see it, the going-in position for a libertarian is that liberty is fundamentally essential because everybody values things differently.
Human value is arbitrary, it's perfectly arbitrary, it's perfectly unique to the individual, and it's perfectly dynamic.
Always changing.
You value a Coca-Cola differently right now than you will in a day, in 24 hours or whatever, right?
You value everything.
You value hearing from me less right now than you, or you'll value it less in five minutes than perhaps you do right now.
Everything that you value changes perfectly.
That's just the way it works.
Leftist thought is predicated on the idea that there is a single reality for everybody that can be derived, that can be figured out through science.
We can figure out what is the best thing to do for healthcare and for education and for nutrition and everything else.
And our priesthood of the scientists, the academics, will tell us what is best.
And in order to achieve that which is best, therefore we have to have compulsion and loss.
Yeah, sorry, let me just follow that point up, Greg, which is somehow the idea has gotten across that libertarians have no respect for the poor or don't like the poor.
But I will contend that there is no one you treat with more contempt than the person you take away choice from.
The most disrespectful, condescending, jerky thing to do to another human being is to say to them, you are not responsible for your own life.
That is the greatest contempt that you can have for any human being.
I mean, we don't even do that to cats, for heaven's sakes.
We train them to go in the litter box.
We train dogs to go outside.
Don't poop on the rug.
Go outside.
We encourage them.
We will give choice to animals.
who lick their own genitals.
But the idea that the poor might have anything to do with their own condition is incomprehensible to us, and that somehow then the people who grant moral responsibility to the poor We're considered to be disrespectful to the poor, but the people who say, well, you're not responsible for everything, and by the way, you need blood money from governments just to survive, and you have no choice, no power, no capacity to change your station, nowhere to look forward to, nowhere to rise, nothing to achieve, nothing to gain.
It's not your fault.
Those people paralyze the poor, and the more the poor listen to them, the more poor we get, but that's what they want, because the poor are their crops.
They're farmers who grow the poor in order to wave the poor around to gain power over everyone else.
Sorry, I'm...
I'm going to interrupt my rant so you can finish up your thought.
I think your rant is correct, but what I'm talking about is approaching it not from the causative end of the discussion, but approaching it from the remedial end of the discussion in the sense that if I were having a discussion with a leftist about what to do about the poor, The leftists would say, well, we need to help them, right?
And of course he means give them money that he's taken from somebody else.
Then I would follow that up and I would say, okay, well, what is help?
And he would use a meaningless term like he would say, well, whatever's reasonable.
And I said, well, you know, what is reasonable?
Adjectives are not arguments, right?
Exactly.
I'm going to get him to admit that Okay, at the end of this, underlying it all, really is a value judgment.
Sorry, we've got a break coming up.
We've got a break coming up.
So hang on to a few if you want to come back after the break.
Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg gave $100 million to New Jersey schools to help them.
Money's all gone.
Nothing changed.
Helping people is hard.
Therefore, you should never leave it to the government.
We will be right back after the break.
break.
Thank you for listening.
Make no friends in the pits and you take no prisoners.
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I don't know when they decided that they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.
Your money.
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Your freedom.
The Peter Schiff Show.
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio, sitting in for Peter Schiff.
Hope you're having a magnificent morning.
I hope that this show is helping you get there.
We were talking this morning about Ayn Rand.
Boy, I had a whole show laid out for you, end to end, like the veritable railroads of life that she depicts in Latina Shrugged.
But I was watching A Good Wife last night where they slagged.
My favorite philosopher.
I shouldn't say favorite philosopher.
I think the best philosopher.
If not the most, one of the most important and influential thinkers of the 20th century.
In terms of popular provocation of thought, Ayn Rand is far and away the most important philosophical figure of the 20th century.
I mean, if you're, I guess...
Wearing a black beret, possibly a pretentious pirate eye patch, and smoking black cigarettes, you could be into Sartre existentialism.
But that didn't really make it to the mainstream.
Ayn Rand, throughout the shrugged, wrote what the New York Times found to be the second most influential book in America, after the Bible.
Not a bad second place.
Now, we were just chatting with a fellow named...
Greg from Tallahassee, I just wanted to, I know I interrupted you with a rant, as I am one to do, but Greg, did you want to finish up your thought?
Yeah, I think just in summary, what I would say is that the whole of leftist thought is predicated on the idea that the leftist, empowered by modern science, modern knowledge, modern studies, or whatever, knows what is best for society and therefore needs the law in order to do that.
But when you really try to get them to defend their contention that they know what is the best thing to do about inequality or about poverty or about the economy or whatever, when you really pin them down on what they believe, ultimately they must always admit That whatever they think about, let's say, the economy, right?
If you had the opportunity to pin Janet Yellen down, when she says, and she gets up there and makes these speeches and basically says nothing whatsoever, she says, well, we'll take action to be determined at the appropriate time, right?
If anybody in the press ever did their job honestly and pinned her down on that, or the engineers on poverty or inequality or whatever the presumed You know, it's really just ultimately my opinion about what is, quote, best for the economy, right?
It's not an objective.
It's not grounded in truth.
It's grounded in subjective values that I hold.
It's my opinion.
And that's exactly the point that in your illustration about your communist professor, you've got him too.
You've got him to admit, okay, well, all this ranting that I've been doing about communism, All right, it's really just my opinion, right?
Right, and this is where, I mean, this is why Yellen can't say anything that she's going to do, because there's no rule of law in the Federal Reserve.
I mean, the Federal Reserve, the economy is an inside job, right?
And the most astounding thing about this professor, which he had no capacity To understand.
This would require what psychologists call the observing ego, where you look at your own behavior and evaluate it relative to your principles.
He had zero capacity for that.
The most amazing thing about this professor is that he was paid by being part of a government monopoly called academia.
Academia is a heavily fenced off government unionized monopoly.
And It was people who didn't go to university who end up working and paying for a lot of the taxes that pay for this guy's salary.
The irony that he's railing against exploitation of workers when his salary comes from people who are working and not going to school in that particular time frame is something that would have been incomprehensible to him.
Sophists make emotionally compelling arguments.
In other words, they mine historical prior prejudice And it seems true because it mirrors the prejudices we already have.
Right?
If you and I went to a Klan rally, we would not be moved by the speech other than maybe to revulsion.
Because we don't have those historical prejudices.
I wasn't raised with any of that stuff.
But if you were raised with that stuff, it echoes in your...
Emotions in your reptile brain, right down in your gut.
It resonates.
And then, where emotions are with the argument, reason needs to be against the argument.
The slippery slope of prior prejudice is what sophists appeal to in their emotions, in their emotional manipulation.
So where you most want to believe an argument, that's where you must set the spikes of your mental resistance most strongly against it.
And there's two ways to help people in this world.
One works and one does the opposite of working.
So I was sick last year and some people emailed me and said, I'm praying for you.
Well, I guess that's okay.
I'd like something a little bit more practical, if you don't mind.
I'm praying for you means like I feel like doing something, but not really.
Because praying for God to release me from an illness is saying that God did it to me to begin with, which, you know, doesn't exactly work for me.
And the second thing is we're going to get a law passed.
Now, if you want to help the poor, there's a couple of things you can do that are really practical, really pragmatic.
Number one, work for the privatization of education.
Poor people are trapped in these government...
Underworlds of terrible schools, of terrible public services, of government housing, subsidized housing, ghettos, and they're put in these terrible schools.
And idealists aren't even allowed to go to those schools fundamentally because they can't change the curriculum.
They can't experiment, right?
That's why people in ghettos are so desperate for their kids to get into charter schools.
They're dying for it.
They'd rather win the charter school than the lottery sometimes.
You can start a business and hire people.
Oh, no, no, that's too practical.
How about starting a business and hiring people?
You know, I was so repelled, viscerally repelled by academia.
I got my master's and I headed to the business world and I didn't talk or think about intellectual ideas for about 15 years.
I was pretty repulsed by the art world and its dependence on government money, and therefore its inability to provide anything other than a mouthpiece for socialist meat puppets in the forms of plays.
I could not stand the art world.
I went to the National Theatre School for two years, and I thought, well, I can either write plays that no one will produce because they're critical of socialism, or I can go be an actor and be a charismatic meat puppet for some socialist character.
Propagandist.
Ooh, I get to be in a Bertolt Brecht play.
I feel unclean until the end of time.
Now, in the business world, at least there's some facts.
There's some reality.
There's some measurability.
There's some accountability.
And we hired poor people.
Gave them jobs.
How about that, socialists?
Go actually make some jobs.
We'll be talking more about this right after the break.
Stefan Molyneux for the Peter Schiff Show.
We'll be right back.
You ain't got no business trying to run my life, no.
Cause I'm sick and tired of you trying to tell me what's wrong and what's right, hey.
If you plan it on, stay around for a while You're gonna have to change your style You've heard of Karl Marx, right?
Well, now...
Meet his worst nightmare.
This is The Peter Schiff Show.
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio sitting in for Peter Schiff.
Oh, my internet and radio babies.
We are going to go deep, deep baby into Aristotle.
Before we take the call, I'll just give you a very, very brief aspect of Aristotle.
2,300 years ago, basically, it's been argued that nobody ever knew more than Aristotle.
He founded formal logic.
He founded zoology.
He wrote fantastic works on ethics and politics and almost every subject you could imagine.
We don't actually know what he wrote, though.
His original texts were lost.
We have notes from his students.
We have notes perhaps in his hand, but Plato's works we have.
Aristotle's are largely reconstructed.
He had some problems, not a big fan of women's rights, could be argued that he justified slavery, but at least it was only limited slavery.
Plato made everyone a slave.
So the two opposites in Western thought, and they really are fundamentally opposed, right?
So Plato said that there's this higher realm, the nuomenal realm, the realm of forms, which we float in before we're born.
We see perfect chairs and tables and people and boobs, and then we come.
Into the world, and we have a vague memory of these perfect forms, and that's how we develop concepts.
And seeing the world of perfect forms is the province of the philosophical elite, the philosopher kings who must rule over everyone else who cannot see the truth.
And the truth cannot be communicated to those who cannot see it.
So a mystical dictatorship was the ideal society of Plato's Republic.
Aristotle, on the other hand, was sane.
Maybe he just didn't smoke the extra good Jamaican stuff, but he basically said, no, no, that's all nonsense.
There's no perfect forms.
We don't float around in a perfect world before we're born.
We develop concepts from looking at stuff through the sense data, through stuff coming in through our senses.
That's where we develop concepts, and therefore empiricism trumps theory, right?
For Plato, theory trumps empiricism.
You can have a theory opposed to what you can observe, and then you must be just forced to obey it if it's moral.
For Aristotle, No, no, no, no.
He's the scientific guy.
He's a scientist.
He was the very first, really, you could argue, developer of the scientific method, which then had to be further refined by Bacon in the 16th century.
But he said, no, no, no, no, no.
We don't have these massive ideas that can contradict the senses.
All of ideas must bow to the senses.
And as a result, he was not a dictator guy.
He did not believe in dictatorship, unlike Plato.
These two poles have been going back and forth in the whole world ever since.
Nathan, you have some questions or thoughts on Aristotle.
Yeah, I do.
Thanks for that terrific introduction to Aristotle.
But I just thought I'd call in today, because you were going on about Ayn Rand, and that got me to thinking.
You know, I'm a physicist by trade, but I've been reading philosophy lately, which I guess makes me, what, a philosophist?
Yeah.
Well, you know, philosophers do have fists, so I like that one.
It makes it sound like the least macho World Wrestling Foundation guy.
I'm the philosophist!
Exactly.
Fists of reason.
Go on.
Right, right.
So, yeah, right.
So, from one skinny nerd to another.
Now, here's the thing, though.
I picked up a copy of Politics by Aristotle, and I read into the first couple chapters, and he lays out all the forms of government, and In his usual sort of matter-of-fact way, where he doesn't...
I guess back then, philosophers didn't waste a lot of energy sort of justifying their positions.
They just sort of set forth their positions.
That is a very, very diplomatic way to put it.
Yeah.
I don't waste a lot of energy justifying my positions.
You've got to love that, though, because they're sort of saying, well, this is how it is.
Let history decide which one of us is right.
But...
He sets forth the different forms of government, and sort of his position seems to be, well, you don't want the rule of the poor or an excess of democracy.
That is bad, and sort of leaves it at that.
And he sends states equally matter-of-factly, well, you certainly don't want the rule of the uber-rich.
That's an oligarchy, and that is bad.
And I'm reading this stuff and I'm scratching my head and thinking, yeah, he seems to be right.
And I can't, for the life of me, discern any way in which the political discourse or debate has advanced one iota since he wrote this stuff 2,000 years ago.
And I'm curious, since you're a philosopher yourself, I'm curious to hear your...
Oh man, you're just gearing me up for an epic grant here.
Let me just check my time.
So listen, when you compare philosophy, particularly moral philosophy and political science, when you compare philosophy to physics, to medicine, to engineering, even to geology, to biology, to most of the other reason and evidence-based disciplines of mankind, philosophy has made almost no progress.
In the 2300 years since Aristotle was writing.
Aristotle, of course, taught by Plato.
Plato taught by Socrates.
Now, Aristotle was a bit conservative for the main reason that one smoking crater was where Socrates would have been because he was forced to drink hemlock after charges were brought against him for corrupting the young and not believing in the gods of the city.
And I've got a whole series at youtube.com slash freedomainradio.
I've got a whole series on Socrates' death, which you can watch if you want.
And then Plato tried to make the world a better place, and he was almost sold into slavery.
He had to flee for his life.
And so it was very tough to be a philosopher back in the day.
I mean, now you still get calumny heaped upon you, but it's basically just typing.
It's not actual hands around your throat.
This is the progress that we've made.
But ethics has made almost no progress in the 2,300 years since Aristotle was writing.
And that's because, as the old saying goes, if they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't even care about the answers.
Aristotle asks, which is the best form of government?
Hmm, I think that's the wrong question, with all due respect to my shaggy-haired ancient friend.
That's the wrong question.
The question is, what is virtue?
Now, from the question, what is virtue, we can then, like dominoes rolling down a hill, knocking each other down, or some rock music video in a warehouse, we can, in the Rube Goldberg machine, we can derive the best organization from society.
But first we must ask, what is virtue?
Virtue, and I've made this argument, you can read this in my free book, Universally Preferable Behavior.
I don't mean to pitch, but freedomainradio.com forward slash free, you can get all the free books.
Universally Preferable Behavior is the key to ethics.
And when you really define ethics without looking to politics, you go metaphysics, reality, epistemology, knowledge, ethics, preferable behavior, to politics, social organization.
People who start with politics without going through all the first stuff are sophists.
Now, they may be sophists because they've got, I guess, daggers pointed at their heads in ancient Rome because you get killed for questioning the powers that be.
We've, I guess, made some progress in that It's now publicly known when people get killed for defying the powers that be, and that scares the tax livestock too much sometimes to make them productive.
But if you're not starting with what is reality, what is truth, what is virtuous, but you're jumping to how should we organize society according to a government, then you are a sophist.
And whether it was because of force or because of emotional hesitations, which I guess are two of the same things, or whether it was just a lack of ability, Aristotle did not start Arguing for social organization from first principles.
It was too dangerous at the time.
The question is not what kind of government should there be?
What kind of minority should we give all the weapons over which to rule us?
That is the wrong question.
What kind of slavery should we have is the wrong question.
How much force should be given to sociopaths to point at us and our unborn children through time across the world forever?
No.
Wrong question.
What is virtue?
Non-initiation of force, which results in the illegitimacy of the state.
A question that only now can begin to be asked in human history.
This is Tevan Molyneux for Peter Schiff.
Looking forward to your calls.
Calls 855-4SHIFT.
We'll be right back after the break.
We now return to the Peter Schiff Show.
Call in now.
855-4SHIFT. That's 855-472-4433.
The Peter Schiff Show.
Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio sitting in for Peter Schiff.
Ah, the myth makers are busy at work again, my friends, telling you all about the Wild West of the free market known as the Great Depression.
When business trampled without any government restraint, without any dependence on fiat currency manufactured by the Federal Reserve, when it was just a wild west of pure free market capitalism, and look what happened!
25% unemployment, the destruction of the world economy, the collapse of trade resulting in, it is easily arguable, the Second World War itself and 40 million crosses where living souls should be stalking the earth.
Gentlemen, if we can go to cut three, let's chat about Elizabeth Warren, shall we?
So what's the simple answer, then, to critics like Elizabeth Warren, the senator, from Massachusetts, to say you focus too much on big financial institutions, not enough on families?
By the way, I have a lot of respect for her.
I think she's a very talented person.
And just this general view that what it takes to put out a financial crisis, and it's a mistaken view, is to, you know, you should let the fire burn.
You should worry about putting people in jail.
And although that's a very understandable position, if you do that, like we saw in the Great Depression, you cause amazing damage to the innocent victims of a crisis.
So first obligation, land that plane safely.
And then you can figure out how to reform the system to make a crisis likely in the future.
So your doctor says you're at risk for lung cancer, you should double your smoking.
You would probably have some skepticism about that.
So you can read Lawrence Reed's great PDF, Great Myths of the Great Depression.
It's on my channel as well.
So for more detail about that.
But just off the top of my head, let's see whether the Great Depression from 29 to, you could really argue, the outbreak of World War to 13 years, in America at least, was this a free market?
Hmm, let's see.
Well, of course, you had the creation of central banking in the First World War and in 1913 in America, which took a lot of countries off the gold standard.
You had the explicit abandonment of the gold standard in the First World War and the turning over of currency to the manic printing presses of statist sociopaths in order to fund the butcher's bill of the First World War, which killed 10 million people and destroyed almost all the wealth that had been generated throughout the Industrial Revolution.
Then you have the monstrous Treaty of Versailles, which put debts on Germany that would have been paid off in the 1980s had they stuck to their payments.
You had the shipping of Lenin by Germany through Finland into Russia to start a Russian Revolution, which was the direct result of America joining the Western Front in the First World War.
This is all of the unexpected consequences.
Hey, let's go help the Allies in the First World War.
Ooh, look, we just started a Cold War 40 years down the road.
In order to pay off the war debts, this is all government.
This is not the free market.
In order to pay off the war debts, Germany prints money like crazy, resulting in the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic, where you had to run from your employer to the bank, to the grocery store with wheelbarrows full of money that was disintegrating financially as you trundle along the soon-to-be goose-stepped cobblestones of Berlin, where people found that the best use of money was burning it for heating fuel.
This destroyed the middle class, destroyed business, paved the road to Hitler.
Have we seen any free market yet?
Hmm.
No, quite the opposite.
What about in America?
Well, of course, the government massively expands the money supply through the Federal Reserve, massively expands the money supply.
Throughout the 1920s, then cuts the money supply by about a third.
Ooh, I wonder if that's going to have any effect on stocks.
Stocks were valued 17 times earnings.
It wasn't massive in 1929.
There was a crash.
There was a correction.
There had actually been a worse correction in 1920 to 21, which lasted about 18 months, because they did nothing.
Governments interfered and intervened like crazy in the markets.
Oh, let's not also forget that the death count for the Spanish flu after the First World War was 20 million, which was twice the actual deaths of the First World War and which was a direct result of all the troops getting home and bringing their illnesses to a malnourished population.
Does that have some effect on the markets when you wipe out 30 million people as a result of a horrendous war?
I think it does.
Carpet bombing the huddled masses of humanity with state power and mustard gas.
Yes, kind of has an effect.
What about all the kids who had to grow up without fathers?
We know what that does to kids, particularly sons, in terms of their economic potential and possibilities.
Massive trade barriers erected around the world as a result of the Great Depression.
Massive trade barriers, 40%, 50%, 60%.
A collapse of international trade and all of the efficiencies of the division of labor that occurs as a result of that.
And as Bastia pointed out, where goods stop crossing borders, soldiers will cross borders.
Where you are not united by trade, you will be divided by war, propaganda, and death, and murder.
Massive armaments programs going on in Germany.
Massive rearmaments programming, programs occurring throughout the West.
Building of the Maginot Line in France, which turned out to be completely useless.
Hey, Panzers can go through Belgium.
How did that work out for you?
Well, it was a good make-work project.
Massive protections of government unions, massive creations of make-work programs, massive amounts of debt going on throughout America, throughout the American governments, all throughout the Great Depression.
I read this book of disasters when I was a kid.
It was all about historical disasters, but this one I read with great care and attention because it was a premonition, and it was about the Great Depression.
And I remember, even as a kid, I looked at this book and it said, you know, 25% of people were out of work.
And I thought, how is that possible?
Is there nothing that needs to be done in America?
Anything?
Screen doors need to be replaced, houses need to be painted, dogs need to be taken for a walk, children need to be minded, lawns need to be mowed.
Was there nothing?
That needed to be done, that people couldn't take any salary for.
We'll work for food.
25% unemployed.
I couldn't figure it out.
Why don't they just charge less money?
Get work.
Because less money is better than no money.
I couldn't understand it because I didn't understand what government intervention meant at the time.
I was like eight.
But I couldn't understand it.
I got my first job when I was nine and a half.
It was in a factory.
No, I was painting plaques at home.
I got my first real job when I was 11 in a bookstore, and I've been working sort of ever since.
So I kind of got it, you know?
I mean, if candy is cheaper, I'll buy more of it.
I mean, as a kid, you go to the store, you say, oh, something's on sale.
We should buy it.
Price is lower, demand increases.
You kind of get that when you're a sugar-based junkie life form like I was in England in the 70s.
So I thought, how could people possibly be unemployed?
Just lower the price of labor.
Stuff always needs to be done.
But then I understood, well, the government banned this occupation, raised the prices of that, set the standards of salaries in various places, and slaughtered the economy with hyper-regulation.
And the economic recovery after the Second World War was largely due to free markets.
People say, ah, you see, it was the Marshall Plan that helped Germany.
That's not true at all.
There was one guy who helped Germany.
He was the Minister of Finance who deregulated the entire economy.
Well, most of it.
The German economy was already well underway to recovery by the time any of the Marshall Plan money showed up.
You don't need external money bombs to grow your economy.
Is that what happened in England in the 18th and 19th century?
Or in the 17th century when the agricultural revolution, which always precedes the industrial revolution, do you have to have an agricultural revolution in order to have the excess labor that can go into cities that can start an industry, work in factories?
You know, I mean, they didn't even have a harness that didn't choke the horse or the oxen.
They had a harness that went around the neck, and therefore the more you put on it, it chokes the beats of burden, which is also known as modern economic policy.
But you choked the beats of burden.
They had a shoulder harness.
Finally, they could put some real weight.
They figured they had to plant winter crops.
They put turnips in.
Agricultural productivity in the later Middle Ages rose like 10 to 20 times.
10 to 20 times.
I mean, from the fall of the Roman Empire until the sort of 14th, 15th centuries, it was just constant starvation.
And there was such a lack of mobility for your goods, your food.
One village could be starving to death, and in another village they might have so much food it's rotting in the fields, like 15 miles away.
But they didn't get a 10 to 20 time crop increase Because some foreign aid government from outer space dumped massive amounts of gold on the farmers.
It's freedom.
That brings this stuff in.
It was agriculture reform.
It was the liberation of serfs and the capacity for them to keep their profits that gave the impetus to the agricultural revolution, which grew the excess crops and diminished the need for labor to produce food, and therefore you create the capacity for industrialization in the cities, the capacity for cities themselves.
When agriculture dies, cities follow very quickly.
When agriculture grows, cities grow.
But it wasn't some external money bomb, some government program, some stimulus that grew the Western economy from its 50,000 or 100,000 year history of bare subsistence, dying at 15, teeth rotting in your head, starving to death, locking up the seed crop so the children don't get at it for the last two months of winter.
It was a diminishment of coercion that causes the flourishing of the human condition.
It is the restraint of the guns.
It is the putting the safety on, on the powers that be, that liberates human potential and human efficiency and human growth and human ambition and human achievement.
It is the diminishment of power that grows life.
Life flourishes in the absence of force.
But all we can think of these days Is how can we use more force and more power to grow the economy?
They can get you to ask the wrong questions.
They don't care about the answers.
But here, we ask the right questions.
Feel free to call in 855-4SHIFT. We've got one more round of chatting before the end of the show.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Peter Schiff.
That was God telling me Everything's gonna be all right So long, good friends When will we meet again?
I said so long, good friends You're now enrolling in the Peter Schiff School of Advanced
Economics.
Twice the education of a Harvard MBA. For one one hundred sixty-eight thousandth the cost.
Good morning everybody, Stefan Molyneux.
Heartbreaking though it is, this is our last segment.
I hope you're going to have a wonderful, wonderful day.
Thank you, as always, so much for listening.
I really, really, really appreciate it.
So, we're just going to finish up with this...
Massive propagandistic lie that is always told by statists and socialists and others that it was the Wild West nature of the free market during the Great Depression that resulted in all this instability, and the government really didn't do much, and that's why the Great Depression went on so long, that's resulting in World War II, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
Well, this is all nonsense.
So just real brief, real brief.
So, there was something called the Civilian Conservation Corps, created in 1933.
A massive work relief program provided jobs for Americans.
It built parks and trails.
Because, you know, that's what people really need when the economy is collapsing, is a nice view of some loons.
Or, I guess, just a pipeline to Congress, which is sort of the same thing.
The Civilian Works Administration created in 1933.
Massive jobs, building structures that nobody needed.
It was abandoned in 1934 because it was so expensive.
A government program only lasting a year because it was so expensive.
Those were the days, my friends.
Federal Housing Administration, government agency created to combat the housing crisis.
Ooh!
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.
Does this seem familiar?
To you at all, history is the same show over and over again with different costumes.
In this case, more felt hats.
Federal security agency established in the late 30s responsibility to administer Social Security federal education funding.
It was abolished in 1953.
Homeowners loan corporation to assist in the refinancing of homes.
That's just happened, of course, under Obama and with the usual Nonsense.
The National Recovery Act designed to bring the interests of working-class Americans and business together.
Blah-de-blah-de-blah.
It was declared unconstitutional.
Back in the days when things could be declared unconstitutional.
Unconstitutional now is just a for-sale sign for lefties.
Ooh!
We can get it cheaper.
The Public Works Administration provided economic stimulus and jobs during the Great Depression.
It ended in 1941.
And of course the Social Security Act.
Why were the old so poor?
Well, because the old put their money in gold!
There's a reason why it makes for a great rap lyric.
And FDR went off the gold standard, nationalized gold ownership and forbade private gold ownership.
Ooh, I wonder if that's going to have any effect on your life savings.
Just mad.
He hobbled the banking system, destroyed the gold standard, And then he turned to agriculture, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933.
1933, kind of a pivot.
See, the economy was recovering, as it tends to do after a crash.
But in 1933, Agricultural Adjustment Act, acreage and production controls, restrictive marketing agreements, and the regulatory licensing of processors and dealers, because nothing says free market like government permissions for free trade.
Ooh!
That's just almost more liberty than you can stand.
New lending taxed processes of industrial commodities and rewarded farmers who cut back production.
Wow, that's like me being paid for not speaking.
I still wouldn't be quiet.
I'd just make less money.
So the whole point was to raise farm commodity prices until they reached this mythical parity level.
People who couldn't afford food may be forgiven for questioning the wisdom of a government program that paid farmers to not produce food and also jacked up the price of agricultural productivity and produce.
Industry virtually nationalized under the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933.
It's the usual horror show of special interests and predatory sophistry.
Business people wanted higher prices and barriers to competition.
Everybody likes the free market in the abstract and in every field but their own.
Nobody wants the free market in their own field.
Labor unions wanted government protection.
Social workers wanted to control working conditions and so on, right?
And of course, whenever the government says we're going to spend a bunch of money, everyone lines up with hat in hand to take the blood-soaked coins coming off the printing press.
Licensed businesses controlling imports.
You had to have a code of fair competition in almost every industry, setting minimum wages, maximum hours, and what are called decent working conditions.
The whole idea, we'll cartelize the business, we'll get higher prices, less work, and really jack up the price of labor, and boy, won't that help the economy.
Well, it's the exact opposite of what is needed to help the economy.
It's just Capitalism 101, right?
National Recovery Administration General Hugh Johnson, a crony of the Baruch's and former draft administrator, was the head of it.
He forced businesses to display it and to display the emblem of the NRA. I guess the bad NRA. And you had to abide by these codes.
Just massive amounts of regulations.
You know, there's a statistic that says if regulation in America, business regulation in America, had remained at post-Second World War levels, the national, gross national product would not be 15 trillion, but 52 trillion, more than three times as high.
If wages were three to four times as high, in real terms, would we have a better society?
Would we have a society which could take care of the poor and the old and the sick?
Would we have enough money to pay our bills?
Of course we would.
Of course we would.
The government enslaves you and then says, well, without us, nobody would file through your chains.
It's like, well, maybe if you worked on my chains rather than my legs, I'd be a little happier.
The NRA approved 557 and 189 supplementary codes, covering about 95% of all industrial employees.
Big Mises supervised the writing of these documents in the phenomenon known as regulatory capture.
I could go on and on.
You can go to Mises.org and look up Great Depression, government programs.
The idea that the government did nothing during the Great Depression is just another lie.
It's the stories of the Jews if the Nazis had won the war.
It is just a lie.
Governments create chaos.
Governments destroy wealth.
Governments destroy freedom.
And then, after that stuff is all destroyed, they tell you, well, we didn't do anything and look what happened, so we need to do more.
Really, people, we've got to stop believing the lies.
If a man has a podium in front of him and a seal behind him, everything that comes out of his mouth is a soul and life-destroying lie.
The best way to escape the government is to stop paying attention to it.
We're free from tyranny when we yawn at it.
When we know exactly what people are going to say and exactly what they're going to lie.
When you stop being in an abusive relationship and you recognize it's never going to get better, the lies are going to continue and life is going to get worse.
Move out!
Move on!
Stop believing the lies!
We will be back tomorrow morning, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you so much for your time and attention.
I hope you found it worthwhile.
Stefan Molyneux heading out for The Peter Schiff Show.
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