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May 16, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:19:40

2699 Why Democracy Always Fails - Peter Schiff Radio Show May 15th, 2014

Stefan Molyneux guest hosts the Peter Schiff Radio Show and discusses why democracy is doomed to failure, a case for anarchism, the flaws of objectivism and a motivational speech for the unindoctrinated.

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	Make no friends in the pits and you take no prisoners.
	One minute you're up half a million in soybeans and the next boom.
	Your kids don't go to college and they've repossessed your fancy.
	Are you with me?
	The revolution starts now.
	Starts now.
	We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.
	Turn those machines back on!
	You are about to enter The Peter Schiff Show.
	If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to.
	This is the last stand on earth.
	The Peter Schiff Show is on.
	Call in now.
	855-4SHIFT. That's 855-472-4433.
	I don't know when they decided that they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.
	Your money.
	Your stories.
	Your freedom.
	The Peter Schiff Show.
	Good morning, my friends.
	I hope you are doing well.
	I think that it's important to grab yourself six or seven cups of coffee.
	We have, oh, so much to go through this morning.
	My name is Stefan Molyneux, and I am not Peter Schiff.
	Tragic, but true.
	He will be back from Vegas next week, and I will be hosting.
	I'm the host of Free Domain Radio, and it's a philosophy show if you want to check it out.
	But this morning, I'm going to tell you why democracy is doomed to fail.
	It's important to start with something that gets you Motivated to longingly gaze at a high balcony window or something.
	But I think it's important to understand.
	We're going to go into an election cycle soon.
	And it's important to understand what democracy is and why it's going to fail.
	I, of course, want to hear your calls for sure.
	855-472-4433.
	You just let me know what's on your mind.
	We happen to talk about it.
	But let's start a little bit with democracy.
	Now, democracy...
	Historically, and I'm talking like deep multi-thousand year history, democracy has always been considered, to use a Latin phrase, totally oogie.
	And the reason for that is that idiots outnumber smart people in general.
	And when you give everyone a vote, given that there are fewer rich people I think we all understand that.
	How do you gain traction as a politician?
	Well, what you do...
	Is you say, see those bastards over there with the monocles and the bald cats plotting the demise of Bond?
	We're going to get money from those people because it's unjust that they have it.
	It should be yours.
	The economy is seen as sort of like a zero-sum game.
	They're rich because you're poor.
	Now, that was true for a lot of human history.
	The guys who, the marauders, the Vikings who came along and took your crop had food because you didn't.
	It was a zero-sum game.
	The economy, at least the free market, doesn't work that way.
	The guy who makes a great cell phone isn't stealing a cell phone from me.
	He's actually providing me a cell phone.
	But that's what you do.
	The rich need to pay their fair share.
	And this is just bribery.
	This is just bribery.
	We all are going to give you a couple of principles that are really, really important to understand by looking at economy, at democracy, at politics, and even at your own life.
	Okay, first of all, everybody wants something for nothing.
	Okay, it's true, of course, we all know there's no such thing as a free lunch, but that mirage of something for nothing is something that constantly pulls us out into the desert of statism to die and expose our bleached bones to the caustic eyes of a skeptical historian in the future.
	When I was a kid, when you wanted to change the channel, you had to get up.
	The horror.
	The horror.
	I always used to get into fights with my brother because he would be like, you have to turn the channel slowly.
	And I was like trying to crank a spark out of something.
	I'd go around really fast.
	So you had to get up and change the channel.
	But people didn't want to do that because that involves getting up and the couch is nicer than getting up.
	Particularly, you know, commercials.
	There was no mute.
	You couldn't change channels.
	So...
	So you get up off the couch, change the channel.
	Now you don't have to do that.
	You point and click.
	A cell phone has an IR blaster in it, which is tragically underpowered for microwaving my coffee, I found.
	So people want something for nothing.
	And there's nothing wrong with that.
	It's great.
	I think that's fantastic.
	That's why we're not in the caves.
	I want something for nothing.
	It's wonderful.
	I want my food to be chilled without having to have some Disney character bring me ice from the high mountains.
	Great.
	Something for nothing.
	In a free market, wanting something for nothing is a beautiful thing.
	I want knowledge without having to drive down to the library.
	I want videos without having to drive to the video store.
	I want something, quote, for nothing.
	I want to spend less effort to get more reward.
	It's why we domesticated animals.
	It's why we built the internal combustion engine.
	It's why there are giant farm machineries that look like they should be carrying droids on Tatooine.
	It's wonderful.
	We should have that.
	Now, in the free market, our desire and our drive to get something for nothing is really the root of economic progress.
	It's why we automate.
	It's why things are more efficient.
	It's why you have a credit card rather than having to borrow from the guy next in line to you and promise to pay him back.
	So our desire to get more return for less effort in the free market drives innovation.
	Drives efficiency.
	Drives customer satisfaction.
	In the statist society, in a democracy, quite the opposite occurs when you marry.
	Oh, and what an unholy marriage it is.
	When you marry our desire to get something for nothing with bottomless political power, particularly the power to create money out of thin air, which is really not to create money at all.
	The capacity to counterfeit combined with the voter's desire to get something for nothing creates the mutant tumor-based economy that we're currently struggling to recognize and communicate as dangerous to others.
	Everybody wants something for nothing.
	And a politician can promise you something for nothing.
	They can promise you a program that you don't have to pay for because The future will pay for it.
	The rich will pay for it.
	The unborn will pay for it.
	Debt will pay for it.
	You can get something for nothing in a state of society.
	And that hooks into people's drive for that.
	And it's inescapable.
	All animals want to expend less effort to gain more resources.
	It's a driving factor in biological evolution.
	It's a driving factor in human progress.
	And It is a Darwinian set of bony finger knuckles around the throat of the economy when you have a government at the center of society.
	It hooks into people's desire for something for nothing.
	And instead of harnessing that for economic productivity, for growth, for efficiency, for entertainment, which would occur in a voluntary society, instead We get the slow strangulation of economic opportunity through the constant redirection and theft and debt of resources to bribe people with the illusion that they're getting something for nothing.
	Ooh, do you want to satisfy your bloodlust and go get Saddam Hussein?
	Great!
	We can do that, and the only thing that'll happen is in six or seven years you won't have a house anymore, which we will then blame everyone else for, except you.
	Losing your house, for most people, is the price of the bloodlust, right?
	Because America goes to war, doesn't raise taxes.
	How do they pay for it?
	Fiat currency.
	When you want something for nothing, and the state is providing for it, you will pay more than you ever dreamed of.
	We're going to be right back with the second principle of the failures of democracy right after the break.
	This is Stefan Molyneux for The Peter Schiff Show.
	If you're gonna be dumb, boy, you got to be tough.
	If we changed up places, you roll like a dime.
	Yeah, you hurt.
	Yeah, you hurt.
	Yeah, you know it ain't right.
	But I ain't going, I ain't going to front you this time.
	If knowledge is power, then the Peter Schiff Show is a uranium enriched 10,000 megawatt nuclear then the Peter Schiff Show is a uranium enriched 10,000 megawatt Stay plugged in.
	Stay brilliant.
	This is the Peter Schiff Show.
	Good morning, everybody.
	I hope you're doing well.
	Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio sitting in for Peter Schiff.
	And we are talking about challenges in democracy.
	Or, I guess the technical phrase would be, our current seppuky spasm called demokracide, wherein we eat the future to bribe the greedy in the present.
	Through debt, through counterfeiting, through taxing the successful.
	So the first principle we talked about is everybody wants something for nothing.
	All life forms evolve, adapt, are driven by the goal of expending fewer resources to gain more resources, expending less energy to gain more stuff.
	You like a remote control, you don't want to get off the couch.
	So that's the first principle.
	And in the free market, it's great when you have voters and a government that controls the economy, it's terrible.
	So first principle.
	Second principle, everyone wants to escape the consequences of bad decisions.
	Everyone wants to escape the consequences of bad decisions.
	That's natural.
	I mean, years ago, I guess in my teens, I spent a couple of years working as a teacher's aide in a daycare, and we had like 30 kids in the room, ages 5 to 10.
	It was great, wild fun, and I spent summers there full-time.
	I mean, I really loved kids, so it was a really great job.
	But the one thing you can't help but notice is anytime there's a crash and a problem and something falls over or something breaks, when you look over, you see this ringed phalanx of fingers pointing all at each other saying, he made me do it.
	She did it.
	It wasn't my fault.
	She started it.
	He started it.
	That's natural.
	That's, you know, mistakes are made.
	You make mistakes and you want to avoid the consequences of those mistakes.
	And that's natural.
	And again, in a free market, sometimes you will and sometimes you won't.
	If you're a lifelong smoker and you get lung cancer, you want someone, a young, healthy person on a motorcycle to cream themselves through an ice cream truck so that you can get some fresh, pulpy, spongy, healthy young lungs.
	But you don't have the right to go out with a rusty spoon and get them yourself.
	So we all want to avoid the consequences of bad decisions.
	Women who have unprotected sex with the wrong guy, well, they want to avoid the negative consequences of those bad decisions.
	And what they used to do in the past was they'd give the kids up for adoption before the welfare state, right, before the great society.
	They would give those kids up for adoption, and those kids would do pretty well.
	They would do actually as well as kids who were born biologically to the parents.
	Now, women want to avoid the consequences of those bad decisions, as do men.
	And so there's a welfare state, and the welfare state is basically the single mother state.
	Most of the growth of the welfare state is the growth of single parenthood, single motherhood.
	So they want to avoid the consequences of those bad decisions.
	And so they want to turn children who are a massive economic loss A joy and a delight, but a massive economic loss.
	They want to turn the loss of children into the profit of children.
	And they do that through the state.
	They do that through voting, through portraying themselves as heroic self-sacrificers, when all they did was have sex with a guy that was unprotected.
	Not exactly heroism.
	Irresponsibility.
	And so everybody wants to avoid the consequences of bad decisions.
	If you didn't take out health insurance because you're young and healthy and you get struck with some god-awful disease, then you want it to be like you took out health insurance.
	Oops!
	Kind of made a big mistake there.
	I'm young.
	I got cancer.
	I don't have health insurance.
	That's bad.
	I get it.
	So then you're going to lobby politicians to say, well, you can't deny people for pre-existing conditions, which is really the whole point of insurance.
	You can't buy fire insurance when your house is currently on fire.
	Otherwise, there would be no such thing as fire insurance.
	And the idea that you can only apply for health care insurance after you're ill is completely mental.
	It's a complete...
	But of course, people who don't choose to buy health insurance who then get sick, of course they won't.
	Other people to pay for that bad decision.
	Or something which turned out to be a bad decision.
	You roll the dice, right?
	And we've kind of lost the constitutionality which we used to have as a species.
	And particularly in the sort of Western European culture, we used to be more comfortable with allowing people to serve as a warning to others.
	There's a great demotivational poster of a tanker going down, a supertanker going down.
	And underneath it says, it could be that the sole purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others, right?
	So if someone who's 25 doesn't have health insurance and gets sick and then has a very difficult life because of that and ends up being years and years in debt, then that story goes around and people look at that person and say, well, I guess I'd better get some health insurance because I look at that disaster.
	A woman who gets pregnant with an irresponsible guy's kid, he runs off.
	Well then, in a non-state society, she goes and lives with her parents and she has a very difficult life and she has trouble acquiring skills and no sane or quality man is going to want to have anything to do with her because she's got some other idiot's kid floating around and he might as well go with someone who doesn't have that massive Overhead from a biological and resource and monetary standpoint.
	And so people look at that and say, oh yeah, you remember Sally?
	Yeah.
	She had sex with the quarterback who then ran off to Chile to go pick grapes.
	And then she ended up moving back into my parents' basement.
	She never got anywhere.
	She never did anything with her life and she's unhappy and all that.
	Maybe birth control or abstinence is a fine idea.
	But we've kind of got out of the habit of allowing people to fail to the point where they serve as warnings to others.
	And I understand that.
	The people who fail have a huge and desperate desire to get resources no matter what.
	This is particularly true when people have kids.
	I can go hungry.
	My daughter cannot go hungry.
	I can choose to live in some crappy place, but my daughter shouldn't have that choice imposed on her.
	So particularly when, you know, face it, it's mostly single moms, when women have kids, if they don't have money and the kid is sick, they just need resources.
	If they don't have money and the kid is hungry, they just need resources, and they really don't care how they get them.
	So they'll organize, they'll apply on the natural male tendency to rush to the aid of women.
	And they'll vote.
	They want to escape the consequences of bad decisions.
	And so now we don't have as many warning signs on the road.
	Slippery road ahead, ice storm, dragons, chasms, volcanoes, geysers of fire and acid.
	Don't drive this way!
	We don't have those as much anymore.
	And so people who avoid the consequences of bad decisions are fertile ground for growing new bad decisions.
	There are high school girls in America who make pacts with each other to get pregnant, go on welfare, and all raise their children in some slovenly coven of irresponsibility.
	This was kind of unheard of in the past, when if you got a girl pregnant, you kind of married her, right?
	And if you didn't, then she would go away.
	Nobody would ever talk about it.
	The baby would be given up for adoption and have a much better life thereby.
	But now women hang on to their kids largely because they're a profit center rather than a loss center.
	And as a result, because enough people are making bad decisions, they represent a significant voting bloc, a significant cultural bloc, and they are warping the entire culture.
	And now if you blame anybody for making bad decisions, you are intolerant, you're a prude, you're a Victorian, you're an uptight man.
	And so the ethics of society, which used to be how these things were enforced, The disapproval of society, the ostracism of society, how these rules used to be enforced have all gone the way of the dodo, and thus we have ever an increasing state.
	We're going to talk about the last principle on the foundation of the death of democracy right after the break.
	It's Devan Molyneux for Peter Schiff.
	We'll be back in a sec.
	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.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Stefan Molyneux sitting in for Peter Schiff.
	I'm the host of Free Domain Radio, the largest philosophy show in the world.
	Check it out if you like.
	We're talking about democracide, the rampant failures of mob rule, mass vote, self-interested, drive the Thelma and Louise car straight off the cliff in a ball of fiery fiat death principles.
	First was everyone wants something for nothing, which is great in the free market, terrible in a state society where people get to vote other people's money away.
	Everybody wants to escape the consequences of bad decisions.
	Didn't buy health insurance and got sick?
	Well, go to the politician and tell them that it's discriminatory if you can't buy health insurance if you're already sick.
	I can't wait to have in my will that after I'm dead, I really want life insurance.
	That's going to be great.
	I would imagine that the first premium will be a lot higher than what they'll pay out because, you know, insurance companies need to eat too.
	But here's the most important one that's the most subtle.
	When I was growing up, I used to live in Don Mills in Toronto when I was growing up.
	And it was a broke neighborhood.
	You know, single mom farms and all that kind of stuff.
	But there were those of us who really wanted to get out.
	I was like a ferret in an overturned aquarium.
	Scrabble, scrabble, scrabble!
	I gotta get out!
	I gotta get out!
	I can't live like this!
	And so I did.
	I got out.
	And a friend of mine had two sisters.
	Now, one of those sisters was like seriously hardworking.
	You know, she was on the volleyball team.
	She had a job.
	She was conscientious.
	She did her homework.
	She was a really good girl.
	And her sister was not that way inclined.
	You know, she would stay out all night.
	She would party.
	She was one of the 30% of Americans who can proudly say that in the past year they've not read a single book.
	And, you know, she was into makeup and shallow stuff and flirting and all that kind of stuff.
	She milked her memories, I guess you could say.
	And this really didn't seem to change.
	Now, years later, I... For reasons, it doesn't really matter.
	I ran into them again.
	And this girl had gotten her accounting degree, the good girl, and she was still taking courses and she was hardworking.
	And, you know, she got up early.
	She went on business trips.
	She did all the stuff that is tough.
	And she faced her fears, which everybody does usually when you go into business from a low rent.
	Neighborhood, you get a bit of frauditis, which is like, well, these people all know that I come from a terrible welfare-based single mom household, right?
	These rich people are going to know.
	You get over that, right?
	So she faced all those fears.
	She worked hard.
	She did a good job.
	And as a result, her income was like going north.
	Seriously north.
	Like she was close to six figures in her mid...
	I think she was 26 or 27 when I saw her again.
	Now, her sister had continued the party girl lifestyle and had dabbled in...
	Various mind-altering substances, not just television.
	And stuff that if you say achoo over it, you've just lost a lot of money.
	And she had continued all of this.
	Party girl lifestyle.
	She hadn't added one dime to her human capital.
	She hadn't learned any skills.
	She was just basically milking her looks and being taken out by guys.
	And, you know, sooner or later, I'm sure, would end up pregnant.
	And The really important thing to understand is that the good girl, who was making a lot of money, had worked really hard and done what I would consider responsible, maybe even virtuous and good stuff with her life, good things with her life.
	Whereas the party girl had had a lot of fun.
	And let's not kid ourselves.
	That stuff is fun.
	You know, studying for an accountancy degree versus going to a rave.
	If you've only got one day to live, you ain't cracking the book on double-entry bookkeeping, right?
	You're going to go to the rave.
	Like the guys who went backpacking through the world for two years.
	While I was learning how to start a business, right?
	Working my 70 hours a week and so on, I'd get emails from those guys.
	Here's a picture of me studying a ruin, looking thoughtful.
	And here's the hot Australian girl I'm traveling with.
	And I was like, ooh, it burns.
	It burns!
	I have to go back and see if my code will compile for the 1200th time that day.
	So they had a lot of fun.
	The people who traveled, the people who partied, they had a great amount of fun.
	And you know what the terrible thing is in democracy, the terrible thing is in our modern system?
	You can tax money, but you can't tax fun.
	This is a very profound thing to understand.
	The sister who worked hard made $100,000 a year.
	That can be taxed, right?
	The fruits of her hard work and conscientiousness, that can be taxed.
	All the fun her sister had That can't be taxed.
	You can't swap that out.
	Irresponsibility leaves nothing but fun memories.
	Responsibility leaves income that can be redistributed.
	You can't redistribute fun.
	You can redistribute money.
	This is a very fundamental thing to understand about democracy.
	Because when the fun sister gets into her late 20s or early 30s or whatever, when her looks begin to go and men begin to look for younger women, is this the inevitable hitting the wall thing that happens to women, particularly women who've lived the hard party life and not gone to a whole bunch of yoga and aerobics and so on, you know, they hit the wall.
	They age, their eggs begin to revolt and die within their bodies, and all the shallow party guys, the players, the alphas, they all start looking for fresh meat for the younger model, the newer model.
	Well, she's going to have a pretty terrible life then.
	She's not developed emotional skills.
	She's not developed intellectual skills.
	She's not developed literary skills.
	She's not developed economically valuable or marketable skills of any kind.
	So what's she going to want?
	Subsidies, baby!
	Give me some rent control!
	Pay for me to go to school!
	I want stuff!
	All I had was fun!
	Now I just want stuff!
	You know, don't make me work for stuff.
	That's what squares do.
	That's what my sister did, that little bookworm, the librarian.
	No fun square Victorian prude.
	I had fun!
	And it's like, yeah, you had fun.
	And now you pay for it.
	Your sister didn't have fun, unless she loves accounting, in which case, I don't know what her definition of fun is.
	Your sister didn't have fun, so now she gets the money.
	You had fun, so you don't get the money.
	But in a democracy, you can vote to take away the products of virtue.
	But you can never vote to take away the products of vice, of laziness, of indolence.
	And don't get me wrong, I have nothing.
	If the party girl wants to go and have fun, more power to her.
	Go have fun.
	As the ancient Greeks used to say, take what you want, then pay for it.
	And we've got all the take what you want, and in democracy, nobody wants to pay for it, and when politicians can create money and borrow and pass laws that few people can figure out the cause of, you never really have to pay for it, because you can get the politicians to pay for it instead.
	You can't ever redistribute fun, indolence, If you want to watch reality television rather than study for your accountancy degree, if you want to eat Doritos rather than go to the gym, if you want to have unprotected sex rather than triple-bagging Mr.
	Magic Johnson, then you take what you want and you pay for it.
	It's the same thing with health.
	Between 70 and 90% of health problems are lifestyle-related, which is a nice way of saying you did it to yourself.
	Now, if you choose to go to the gym and eat well, you are much more likely to be healthy, which means you can still work hard, which means you can be taxed.
	The people who eat Doritos And chocolate, and sit on the couch, picking belly lint out of their belly buttons, and watching reality television, those people are much more likely to get sick.
	And when they get sick, they run to the politicians and say, Go get me that guy's stuff!
	I'm sick!
	It's genetic!
	No.
	The fact that your butt had Velcro and the couch had the other half of the Velcro is not genetics.
	That's a choice.
	But they can run to the politicians and say, Go get me money!
	I'm sick!
	And they can go and take all the money from the people who ate well and went to the gym.
	But the people who ate well and went to the gym, and trust me, I work out three times a week.
	It's not really a lot of fun.
	It's just not.
	I've been doing it since I was 16.
	It's just not a huge amount of fun.
	If you eat well and you go to the gym, then all of the excess value that you can have can be taxed.
	If you're lazy and get fat and get sick, you can go and get the government to take away the money from the healthy people.
	But the healthy people can't say to the politician, listen, you get me all the fun and you get me all the taste of Doritos and chocolate that I denied myself for those years.
	I will exchange $50,000 to pay for that guy's health care as long as you can go and get me all the fun he had watching reality TV and eating potato chips with nine pounds a dip every day.
	But you can only get And tax and redistribute the fruits of virtue.
	You cannot tax and redirect the fruits of vice, of laziness.
	That imbalance is one of the major causes of the slow democracy of our society.
	I worked very hard in my twenties and my thirties I went to school.
	I denied myself income.
	I read countless books.
	Struggled my way through the socialist hellscape known as Canadian academia.
	Started a business.
	Worked 70, 80 hours a week.
	Overcome all of the insecurities I had about coming from a poor place and selling to multimillionaires.
	Worked really hard at all that stuff.
	So now I can have the living crap taxed out of me and that money can be redistributed to people who had a lot more fun in their 20s and 30s than I did.
	I can't get their fun.
	Their fun is locked in their guilt-ridden memories.
	I can't get their fun.
	Can't go to the politician and say, okay, yeah, tax me, but tax his fun and give that to me.
	And this is why the successful will always suffer and the indolent will always thrive until democracy eats itself.
	Looking forward to your calls right after the break.
	855-472-4433.
	This is Stefan Molyneux for The Peter Schiff Show.
	We'll be back in a moment.
	We'll be back in a moment.
	We'll be back in a moment.
	We'll be back in a moment.
	You've heard of Karl Marx, right?
	Well, now...
	Meet his worst nightmare.
	This is The Peter Schiff Show.
	Well, good morning, everybody.
	I hope you're doing well.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio, sitting in for Peter Schiff.
	So, I've made, I think, a fairly good case against democracy, people...
	Want something for nothing, they want to avoid the consequences of bad decisions, and you can tax the fruits of hard work, but you cannot tax the fruits of vice and laziness, which are fun.
	So the question is, okay, well, so, as Churchill said, democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others that throughout history have been tried.
	Not a bad Churchill, I'm still working on it.
	But, um...
	What then, right?
	Let's say I've made a case, put a few dents in democracy.
	Now, people say, well, America's not a democracy.
	In fact, the Founding Fathers specifically warned against democracy and directed a paper tiger called the Constitution to keep democracy at bay.
	Well, as the ancient Greek phrase says, he no worky.
	It didn't work.
	It didn't work.
	George Washington...
	Rebels against a 3% tax on whiskey.
	Sorry, against 3% tax on tea.
	And then rides down with a couple of thousand armed guys to impose a 25% taxi on whiskey in Pennsylvania.
	Thus, highly increasing the possibility that you have to be sober and live in Pennsylvania.
	I mean, that's pretty much a war crime, wouldn't you say?
	I don't know.
	Nothing against Pennsylvania.
	I just like the joke.
	How long did it take for the US government to break out of the bounds of the Constitution?
	Not long.
	It happened almost right after.
	No more than 80 years.
	Certainly the Constitution got shredded in the Civil War, right?
	Habeas corpus got suspended, conscription, debt, fiat currency, all the usual statist nightmares.
	And I don't think it's a coincidence that the government that was designed to be the very smallest in human history, the American constitutionally limited Republican government, has now become the very largest government the world has ever seen.
	Governments are sort of like helium balloons, right?
	The more you push them down and think you can restrain them, the further up they pop.
	Because the smaller the government is, the freer the market is, the freer the market is, the more wealth it produces, the more wealth it produces, the more the government can use that as tax-based collateral for borrowing and the inevitable nightmare growth of the state.
	The first country really to implement free trade policies in the 18th century was England, which then became an empire.
	America had fairly good free trade in the 19th century and then became an empire.
	Small governments lead to big governments.
	Freedom is food for the tyranny of the state.
	Food for the cancer of the state.
	So what are we supposed to do?
	If you accept this diagnosis, and look, I understand it's a big diagnosis to swallow.
	Think about it, mull it over.
	I've got lots of free books on my website if you want to help things out.
	With your thinking.
	FreeDomainRadio.com forward slash free.
	PDFs, audio books, HTML. Print, if you're old school, baby.
	But let's say I've made a couple of dents, both in your conception of the value of democracy and republicanism.
	Then what, oh what, Steph, are you suggesting?
	Don't just dare down, man.
	Don't be a Miley Cyrus video.
	Be a builder.
	Be a Lego movie.
	Be a master builder.
	Everything is awesome!
	Right, so what am I suggesting?
	Well, interestingly enough, not that I'm suggesting this, and I'll give you my final answer for what it's worth in the next segment, but let's talk about monarchy, shall we?
	Ah, yes.
	Let's talk about monarchy.
	Monarchy has been shown to be more stable than democracy.
	Why?
	Because monarchy is hereditary.
	So your average monarch gets up, looks in his gilt-plated mirror and says, Ah, a king, am I? Yes, well, wonderful.
	And I have a son, and that son shall one day himself be king and wear the heavy crown of power.
	So what should I do with my kingdom?
	Should I run it into unfathomable levels of infinite debt?
	Why no, because I wish to grant my kingdom to my son.
	And if I destroy the economy of my kingdom and eat twelve serfs every breakfast, my son shall inherit only a dusty piece of nothingness ripe for invasion from others.
	So I shall not debase the currency, because I will be granting the currency to my son.
	I shall not oppress the serfs to the point where they die and leave the country, because my son will be inheriting the kingdom.
	What?
	So I suppose I'd better restrain my unholy lusts for ever-expanding power.
	I should not bribe the citizenry overly much.
	I should not start horrible destructive wars.
	Because I wish to hand this treasure of the kingdom to my lovely son over there pooping himself in the corner.
	And so the desire to retain the value of the kingdom because it is a gift you will give to your children is one of the reasons why monarchy is more sustainable than democracy.
	If you own the car, you take care of it.
	If you rent the car, you don't.
	There's not one sane human being alive who's ever returned a rental car with an oil change paid for, because you're just renting it.
	Whatever you rent, you consume without thought of reproduction, and whatever you own, you take care of.
	Now, a monarchy owns...
	The country and wishes to retain its value.
	People who cycle in and out in a democracide situation, they're just in there pillaging for whatever they can, right?
	It's like Indiana Jones grabbing gold from the Incan tomb as the stalagmites rain down above and the door is closing and he's not even sure he should grab his hat.
	He's just stuffing his pockets and running.
	And that's what happens in a democracy, which is why the predation on the public purse in a democracy is orders of magnitude higher than the predation on the public purse In a monarchy.
	Now, don't get me wrong.
	I am not advocating monarchy.
	What I will advocate, I will talk about after the break.
	And I do want to get your calls on this, 855-472-4433.
	What I advocate, I'll make the case for after the break.
	But what I am pointing out is that democracy is incredibly dangerous to the planet's resources, which includes the capital resources and economic resources known as human beings.
	They use us up.
	They burn us.
	They are like angry, spiteful children hurling toy soldiers into a fire and our futures into a chasm.
	We will be right back after the break, and I will give you at least my solution to this mess.
	You make no friends in the pits and you take no prisoners.
	One minute you're up half a million in soybeans and the next boom.
	Your kids don't go to college and they've repossessed your bentley.
	Are you with me?
	The revolution starts now.
	We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.
	Turn those machines back on!
	You are about to enter The Peter Schiff Show.
	If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to.
	This is the last stand on earth.
	The Peter Schiff Show is on.
	Call in now.
	855-4SHIFT. That's 855-472-4433.
	I don't know when they decided that they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.
	Your money.
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	The Peter Schiff Show.
	Good morning, everybody!
	I hope you're doing just beautifully.
	I hope that your latte has the right amount of little heartfelt foam on top of it, and your muffin tastes like the sweat of the gods themselves.
	I'm sitting in for Peter Schiff.
	I'm the host of Free Domain Radio, a philosophy show.
	You can check it out on the web if you like.
	And we are talking this morning about the best society.
	I was sort of making a case against democracy.
	In that people want something for nothing, they want to escape the consequences of their actions, and you can tax hard-working people their money, but you cannot tax lazy people their fun.
	Creates a massive imbalance.
	Talked about monarchy.
	That monarchies are actually more stable than democracies because kings want to hand the kingdom in decent repair to their sons or their daughters.
	So what should we do?
	What should we do?
	We know the current system isn't working.
	We also know the current system is not working anywhere in the world.
	There's no exception.
	I gave a speech to 40,000 people in Amsterdam recently and pointed out that their unfunded liabilities represent 522% of their GDP. That's kind of a challenge.
	I'm no mathematician, but that seems like a lot more than 100.
	So what should we do?
	Well, there's two ways you can make decisions in life fundamentally.
	You can make decisions according to principles, or you can make decisions according to consequences.
	You're married.
	You're attracted to someone else.
	Well, you can either say, I'm not going to do it because I made a vow.
	I'm not going to have an affair.
	I'm not going to pursue this person because I made a vow to be true, to be faithful.
	And I'm going to honor that vow.
	That's making a decision on principle.
	You can decide not to pursue the affair because you're afraid of getting caught.
	Right?
	But that's making a decision based on consequences.
	You can decide not to steal because you don't want to be a thief.
	It's bad for your conscience.
	It's bad for your self-respect.
	And it creates a world of opposing principles, wherein you will violate the property rights of others, but you don't want anyone to steal from you.
	It creates an opposite divide between you and everyone else you're stealing from, which alienates you from connection to your fellow human being.
	Or you can say, jail is scary and I'm way too pretty for jail.
	And then you won't steal because you're afraid of the consequences.
	We make decisions on principles or we make decisions on consequences.
	One of the challenges of making decisions on consequences is it implies that we know the future, which we don't.
	Let's take the case of slavery.
	Slavery was an infinite human institution.
	Basically, when human beings first existed, they said, hey, food, then slavery.
	All right, food, sex, then slavery.
	Maybe while eating cheesecake off the navel of a sex slave.
	But slavery is, that's just the way things were.
	Until a couple hundred years ago, when the Western Europeans in general led a charge around the world for a variety of reasons, both moral and practical, but fundamentally moral, to end slavery.
	And they bribed and they bullied and they waged war and they ranced anti-slave Royal Navy ships around the world and they ended slavery.
	Now, who could have guessed the consequences of ending slavery?
	Well, no one.
	No one could have guessed those consequences.
	Slaves used to do the farm work around the world.
	When slavery was ended, giant robot machines did the work, run by the crushed spines of prehistoric trees, which is gas and oil, right?
	Nobody could have guessed that.
	Nobody said, well, we've got to end slavery because there'll be these giant robot machines that run off prehistoric tree juice that will do the work of 1,000 slaves and cast 1% of their upkeep.
	I mean, nobody could have predicted that.
	So they made the decision to end slavery based on principle, that it is immoral and inhumane and evil for human beings to own other human beings.
	They are not livestock.
	They are human beings.
	We cannot functionally treat animals as people and people as animals because there is a difference of cognitive ability, to say the least, and moral responsibility.
	So what do we do with our society?
	All societies organized around states, all societies organized around a centralized coercion of oligarchical power fail.
	That is the universal constant.
	All government currencies fail, and all government societies fail, implode, go bankrupt, wage war, are taken over.
	This constant hamster wheel of history is, as the old Monty Python joke used to go, up and down like the Assyrian Empire.
	And no slave-based societies achieved an industrial revolution.
	Why was there no industrial revolution in the ancient world?
	They knew about the steam engine.
	Because they had slaves!
	And people who've bought slaves don't invest in labor-saving devices because it reduces the value of their slaves.
	Slave-based societies never prosper.
	State-based societies always collapse.
	We've gotten rid of slavery.
	Can we look at the moral question of the validity of statism?
	Nobody can figure out what society will look like in the absence of a state, in the absence of centralized coercion.
	And understand, I'm making a very tentative case, and I'm absolutely sure that Peter will disagree with me.
	I'm just making a very tentative case here.
	Opening up a possibility in your mind.
	Well, all societies have governments.
	Well, yeah, all societies had slaves.
	These things can change, and we don't know what the result will be, and we can't make the decision based upon the result.
	We make the decision based on the principle.
	There are two foundations to a good moral system.
	All moral systems encompass them.
	The non-initiation of force and a respect for property rights.
	They're kind of two sides of the same thing if we view our body as property.
	The non-initiation of force.
	Do not initiate force and respect property rights.
	If we accept those as morally binding principles, what does the state survive on?
	What does the state live on?
	What is the state?
	The state has the right to initiate violence and violate property rights.
	The state can pass laws that initiate violence.
	The state relies upon taxation.
	Taxation is the initiation of property rights.
	People within the government are legally entitled to do that which is illegal for everyone else.
	I cannot start my own tax system.
	I cannot set up my own tariff system.
	I cannot counterfeit money.
	The government does all of these things, morally, legitimately, legally.
	Everything the government does is legal.
	If a private citizen does it, it is illegal.
	That is a contradictory moral system.
	It's exactly the same as human beings can own other human beings.
	But property can't own property.
	It's a contradiction in the moral system.
	That which is illogical fails.
	If your physics system is illogical, it will fail.
	If your engineering system is illogical, or your mathematics system is illogical, it will fail.
	When you have a state, you have the maintenance of principle that the state itself is a violation of.
	That which is illogical fails.
	State of societies fail because there's no moral justification for the initiation of force.
	If one can do it, all can do it.
	If it's not allowed, it is not allowed.
	I don't have a physics theory which says these three guys can fly.
	That's a contradiction.
	Something to think about.
	We will be right back after the break, taking your calls.
	855-472-4433.
	Stefan Molyneux for Peter Schiff.
	We'll be back in a sec.
	We'll be back in a sec.
	We'll be back in a sec.
	Twice the education of a Harvard MBA. For one 168,000th the cost.
	Good morning, everybody.
	It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio, sitting in for Peter Schiff.
	Oh, yes, babies.
	It's all callers all the time until the end of the hour.
	James from New Jersey, thank you.
	Thank you for your patience.
	I appreciate that.
	What's on your mind, brother?
	Okay, so I was wondering if...
	An individual, or whatever, is opposed to the welfare state, shouldn't, in a way, shouldn't they still seek the benefits of the welfare state if they qualify?
	Because by standing on their moral high ground, they're kind of, in a way, supporting the welfare state because they're making it more sustainable by not seeking the benefits.
	Yeah, look, I mean, I'm not saying you are in this category, but the you take government benefits, therefore you can't criticize the government is what idiots say when they can't think.
	You drive on government roads, therefore you must approve taxation.
	You take government health benefits, therefore you cannot oppose government health.
	I mean, this is just nonsense.
	It's just, it's idiots.
	No, I'm not saying that.
	No, no, but that's kind of what you're saying.
	It's sort of like saying to Jews, like Jews in concentration camps, well, you ate German food, you ate Nazi food, and therefore you can't criticize Nazism or concentration camps, right?
	I'm saying to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent 10 years in gulags in Siberia, well, you can't criticize the Russian government because they fed you.
	It's like, yeah, but I was trapped there.
	They're never saying that.
	I'm almost, but I'm saying it even going further and as like an offensive measure against the welfare state to collapse it quicker in a sense.
	Look, if you pay your taxes, the taxes are used as collateral to borrow even more money.
	The more you pay taxes, the faster the system will collapse.
	The point is that there are a whole bunch of people pointing guns at everyone to use this currency, to obey laws, to hand over their money.
	It's highway robbery.
	It's the initiation of force.
	It's deeply immoral.
	What people do when guns are pointed to their head, I don't really care about.
	I care that guns are pointed to their heads.
	I don't care what people do after that.
	You know, if someone steals my bicycle, I may go and get it back.
	I may not.
	But the whole problem is someone stole my bicycle.
	Focusing on what the person does in response to that theft is missing the whole point that there's a gun in the room.
	What people do to try and survive in a government society where they're force indoctrinated for 15,000 hours in government schools, where their money is eaten and stolen away through inflation, where they're conscripted and thrown into jail for having the wrong bits of vegetation in their pocket.
	What people do to survive the random media strikes of state power?
	I don't care.
	I care that there's a necromancer on top of Mount Doom calling down state power on everyone's head.
	Let's focus on the necromancer and not the people dodging the fireballs.
	So no, if you've got a problem with the welfare state, speak out, speak loud, speak strong.
	I don't care if you take welfare benefits at all.
	Alright, Jess from British Columbia, you have a question about our smoky Russian vixen goddess Ayn Rand that we talked about yesterday.
	Go ahead.
	Yeah, hi Stefan.
	Hi.
	I'm really excited about what you were saying yesterday about growing up in socialist Canada and the university system.
	I went into Ayn Rand.
	It was a great show.
	I listened at a different time zone, so I might be off topic.
	I'm not sure what you've been talking about today, but I wanted to ask about yesterday.
	You mentioned that you'd spent 20 years thinking about her, and it wasn't until after that time where you were able to recognize some of the flaws in objectivism.
	I think I've read her for five years, and I listened to the Peacoff stuff and listened to your own book, Brooke, I can't seem to think of anything that's wrong with her philosophy, and I wanted to know what it was that you thought was faulted.
	Well, I mean, there are some tangential issues like her equivalence of homosexuality with degeneracy and some of her less-than-empathetic comments about Palestinians, but I have no...
	I mean, with the metaphysics, I can't find any objection, and that's because she founded her metaphysics on Aristotle's Metaphysics, study of reality, nature of reality, which I also can't find objections to.
	Epistemology, or how we acquire knowledge, the validity of the senses, the universality of reason, and so on.
	And she titled The Three Books of Atlas Shrugged after Aristotle's Three Laws of Logic, so she explicitly acknowledged her debt to Aristotle as the only philosopher she'd learned from.
	When it comes to ethics, I am down with the non-initiation of force, which was the central canon of her philosophy.
	When it comes to politics, she stumbles.
	And, you know, I hate to say it because she was a stone genius, but we all stumble, because the non-initiation of force eliminates taxation.
	It eliminates the capacity for the state to morally exist.
	And she was a statist.
	She was a minarchist.
	So the question is, how is the government funded in an objectivist society?
	If the government is funded through taxation, then the non-initiation of force is violated because the government has the right to initiate force So the moral principle is broken.
	If the government is not funded by taxation, then it must allow competition.
	It forcefully denies competition in the realm of police services in the realm of dispute resolution or court services or jails or whatever.
	If it specifically disallows competition, then it is initiating force against people who themselves are not initiating force.
	So, and I also think that her justification for the non-aggression principle was an appeal to self-interest.
	You know, that which is good for man's life is the moral.
	But the problem is there's not one thing called mankind.
	There's not one thing called man.
	You know, human beings are composed of predator and prey and parasite.
	It's a whole ecosystem.
	You know, what's good for the lion is bad for the gazelle.
	What's bad for the gazelle is good for the lion.
	Politics is really great for sociopaths.
	It's really great for people who want something for nothing.
	It's really great for people who are better with languages and better with words and better with sophistry than they are with virtue ethics and productivity.
	So the idea that there's some standard that is good for man as a whole, and that's how we should judge morality, I think is not valid.
	I mean, look how much money the Clintons are making.
	Barack Obama's income went to like $13 million last year.
	He wouldn't be getting that in a free society.
	So, when it comes to ethics, I agree with the principles, I don't agree with the justification, and I worked further to come up with another one called universally preferable behavior, which again, you can get on my website at freedomainradio.com, and I don't agree that you can have a state and respect the non-initiation of force and respect property rights.
	Does that make any sense?
	It does.
	I was trying to pipe in there with the point that I often hear the ARI say about Well, it certainly presupposes the existence of a country.
	And the existence of country, what is a country?
	A country is a geographical area where a small minority of people have the right to initiate force in that geographical area called the state.
	So to say, well, we need national defense is to presuppose a nation state, which is a violation of property rights and the non-initiation of force, the non-aggression principle.
	Yeah.
	Now, defense is an important consideration, right?
	And of course, like all important considerations, people want to wave the magic wand called the state and say, look, it's solved!
	We've got a government!
	But it's not solved.
	It certainly wasn't solved for the 3,000 people on 9-11 who fell to their deaths in burning towers.
	Because of the results of aggressive U.S. foreign policy and the creation and arming of al-Qaeda to fight the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
	So I would argue that national defense is a huge and important issue and therefore we need the free market.
	There's this weird thing we say the more important it is, the more we need the state.
	It's like, no, no, no.
	I mean, if the state can't handle the efficient delivery of mail, let's not give them nuclear weapons and say that that's somehow going to magically defend us.
	So, no, you cannot have an agency that defends your property, which has the right to violate your property rights at will.
	Right.
	That's like hiring a bodyguard that you pay to beat you up randomly.
	He's not really guarding your body.
	Right.
	And you cannot protect yourself.
	You cannot protect your family.
	You cannot protect your property by appointing a minority of people, all the legal, military and political power in the known universe.
	and then say, well, I'm sure they're going to do a good job with that because power never corrupts.
	Power always corrupts.
	And words cannot stop bombs.
	They cannot restrain police.
	They cannot restrain the military.
	They cannot restrain the sociopathic power lusts of politicians.
	We will be right back after the break.
	We've got Danny from Miami.
	We're looking forward to chatting with Tim Stefan Molyneux for Peter Schiff.
	back in a moment we now return to the Peter Schiff show Call in now.
	855-4SHIFT. That's 855-472-4433.
	The Peter Schiff Show.
	All right, ladies and gentlemen, we are back.
	We're talking about the Wild West massive kaleidoscopic frag fest of listener questions and comments.
	Danny from Miami, what's on your mind?
	Hey Stefan, I just wanted to give out a quick comment real quick that I just started donating to your podcast and you know what actually influenced me to donate it is actually I saw a homeless guy and I gave him $5 and I was like, wait a second, these $5 could actually go to Stefan Mollen and he actually provided me some type of benefit because I'm watching your videos all the time.
	So just to let you know, I started donating to your podcast but the actual thing that I actually wanted to talk about was The financial collapse that's pending upon us, I guess.
	And when I talk to it to people, like my friends and family, they look at me like if I'm some type of crazed person that is completely paranoid of everything.
	Right.
	Right.
	Yeah, look, I mean, people don't want to know.
	They don't want to know.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I thought you dropped for a sec, but go ahead.
	No, no, no.
	Yeah, and for some reason, like, I don't know what it is.
	People are more entrenched, especially here in Miami since the Heat just won the Eastern Conference something.
	I go on Instagram and all you see is Heat logos and I'm like, you people don't even know what's going on.
	You're watching these games and you're cheering these people on when you don't know that there's a $17 trillion debt over our heads.
	Look, Danny, it's very true that the very eggs in the 16-year-old girl's wombs have been sold off to foreign banksters, but the really important thing is that the ball landed on the right piece of grass.
	That's what people really want to focus on.
	Kim Kardashian had a butt-widening shoot in Thailand.
	Let's check out that butt cleavage.
	But sure, look, it's a lot easier to focus on that stuff than to look at the incoming tsunami of economic dislocation that people can't really do anything about.
	I mean, you could make the case that it's rational ignorance.
	Why not look at a sports game?
	Because I can't do much about that.
	And also, how do you get along with people?
	Well, for the most part, when people are deluded, you get along with them by swallowing the same Kool-Aid.
	Look, we're all happy in this Ganean compound, right?
	And so to oppose people's delusions is often to create conflict, which is uncomfortable for people, right?
	We're kind of raised soft these days, right?
	I was talking about that at the beginning of the show.
	We're kind of raised soft.
	We don't have the kind of fight within us that we're used to as a culture.
	I mean, we're kind of weakened by status and by welfare state, by debt, by the military-industrial complex providing a lot of easy money to blood-soaked sociopathic ledger books.
	So we're kind of soft these days.
	And the idea that we can really disagree with people and can be helpful to them and we'll stick with that...
	It's kind of foreign to us at the moment, so people really don't want to hear.
	And it's the kind of thing like if you don't look at it, then you could pretend it's not there.
	Of course, that makes it worse.
	Of course, that's going to make the resulting shock even worse.
	But our goal, of course, I think, at least mine, whisper into people's ear that it's not freedom that's failed, it's force.
	It's not the market that's failed, it's the government.
	It's not truth that has failed, it's lies.
	It's not reason, it's fantasy that has failed.
	And that way, when the crunch comes, people might recoil back to the right place, rather than going further down the road to fascism, which so often happens during times of economic dislocation.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah.
	Now, the thing that bothers me is that there's so much information out there.
	We have the internet, for Christ's sake.
	There's so much information out there for you to go and grasp at your fingertips, and you're not taking advantage of it.
	It's just like, oh my god, I talk to people about Bitcoin, and they look at me like I'm a zombie or something, and I'm like, In my head, I think possibly a Bitcoin economy could be something that could actually keep our economy afloat.
	It's actually something that could, I believe, in my opinion, could sustain, could be a brand new built economy.
	Well, Bitcoin has a potential to end war, because you cannot fight modern wars, total wars, democracy wars.
	You can't fight them without debasing the currency, and you cannot debase Bitcoin.
	If governments switched to Bitcoins, there'd be no war, there'd be no debt, there'd be no Poor destroying welfare state, the military industrial complex would collapse, which is why.
	But of course, no government wants to say, we hate Bitcoin, we're going to ban Bitcoin, because they're basically revealing the weaknesses of their own currency.
	And so there is a challenge that way.
	But no, I'm with you on the Bitcoin, I think, has great potential for changing society in a very fundamental way.
	All right, so thanks for your comments.
	I really, really appreciate that.
	Danny?
	Sorry.
	Oh, the other guy dropped.
	Okay, did you have any other questions or comments about this?
	No, you know, thank you.
	And I'm going to keep donating to your podcast, man.
	You've been such an influence to me.
	I actually just downloaded Atlas Shrug, rather than we speak right now.
	Oh, fantastic.
	Yeah, I appreciate that.
	For those who don't know, I don't do ads on my show.
	I don't have sponsors, and I don't do ads on the YouTube channel and all that.
	I just take donations.
	That makes sure that I remain in the business of delivering philosophy to listeners, not listeners to advertisers, which is my particular model, and it sort of works for me.
	The other models work fine as well.
	Sorry, you were going to say?
	No, yeah, because, I mean...
	The thing is that, you know, like I said, I gave a homeless guy $5 and I just couldn't believe it.
	I started thinking in my head, why am I giving him $5?
	He's not going to provide me anything of value when I could just give it to you and you've given me this library of, you know, information that is insane.
	Yes, look, I mean, yeah, with the homeless guy, I mean, my particular policy is take him for some food.
	Don't just give him the money.
	That's sort of my particular preference.
	But anyway, so we've got to move on.
	David from Kansas City, you also wish to rail against people's ignorance, which I'm sure I can get behind you on.
	What's on your mind?
	Yeah, good morning, Steph.
	Yeah, I know you've been on Joe Rogan's podcast, I think.
	Is that true?
	Twice, yeah.
	Yeah, I haven't seen any of your exchanges with him, but I did watch Peter's exchange with Joe Rogan, two hours long, and it seemed to be like he was almost winning him over in some, you know, and Rogan expressed this kind of position that he was open-minded and thought that a lot of the ideas and positions that Peter was talking about were commiserable with his own,
	that he shared a lot of the same, you know, attitudes toward the government and And then yesterday I listened to a lengthy podcast between him and this guy named Cenk Uygur.
	I don't know if you know who he is.
	Yeah, the young Turk guy, right?
	The young Turk guy, right.
	Peter was on his show, and this guy actually just cut him off.
	They're pretty hardcore socialists, right?
	I mean, they're pretty hardcore liberals.
	Right, right.
	That's exactly right.
	That's the perspective that I got from him.
	But I'm listening to this kind of back-flapping exchange between...
	Rogan and Uyghur, and they're so nice.
	Rogan is as much a socialist, but he doesn't think he is.
	And I think the problem is that we have so many people here that understand that there should be a skepticism of the government.
	One thing that they agreed on, that we should take money out of politics, which is one of the most tired, lame, You know, positions that you could pay because money obviously is not the only currency.
	If you take money out of politics, well, what is the currency of politics?
	Well, one of them would be popularity or, you know, if a movie star decided to run for office against some guy who chose to, you know, start a company or acquire academic credentials, Nobody knows who he is.
	He starts out, the only way he can compete with someone who has that kind of name recognition is to raise money and advertise and run against him.
	Well, look, if people want to take money out of politics, then just privatize the Federal Reserve.
	I mean, that's pretty easy.
	Remove from government the power to create money at will based upon the future labor and collateral of citizens, and money's going to be right out of politics.
	Because then you're going to have vaguely honest politics, which is to say, no politics, right?
	If I say, listen, man, you vote for me, and I'm going to give you $1,000.
	You know, in whatever form it's going to be, right?
	What did Barack Obama say?
	We're going to cut $4,000 or $5,000 from your health care bill?
	What a load of nonsense.
	Keep your doctor.
	It's going to be revenue neutral.
	We're going to have to raise taxes for it.
	No lies, right?
	But you can make those lies because they can print money.
	So if I say, listen, vote for me, and I will pay you $1,000 worth of benefits, All I'm going to have to do is raise your taxes $1,500 to give you $1,000 worth of benefits.
	Well, no one's going to vote for me because they're going to say, well, wait a minute.
	You raise my taxes $1,500.
	You're only going to give me $1,000 worth of benefits.
	It's like, but that's the reality of democracy.
	That you give your money to the government.
	They're inefficient.
	They have a lot of overhead.
	So they're going to have to charge you more in taxes than they're going to give you in benefits.
	Now, they can pretend to charge other people and so on, but let's say they just tax the rich and can't print money and can't borrow money.
	Let's say they tax the rich.
	Well, the rich tend to be the employers.
	So if the rich have to pay a whole bunch of money, then they're going to have to cut your salary.
	It's still going to happen, or at least not give you as much of an increase, right?
	Or fire you, right?
	If the minimum wage becomes 20 bucks, then like nine people in America are going to be employed, mostly enforcing the minimum wage.
	So, To get money out of politics means to remove from the government the power to create currency at will, and the power to force you to pay their bills in that currency.
	But everyone talks about, well, let's not have campaign contributions.
	But all government's doing are wrestling over the fire hose of magic money called the Federal Reserve, called central banking.
	Take that out of the equation, you're going to get more honest politics while people get an accurate cost-benefit of their political decisions.
	Does that make sense?
	Yes, it's all undeniably true.
	Can you condense that and put it on a bumper sticker?
	I don't do condensation.
	I have a dehumidifier in my brain.
	I don't do condensation.
	Let's see, that's part of the problem.
	If you tell people that, it's a little bit like feeding a leaf of arugula to your dog.
	He's going to look at you like, what the hell are you trying to do to me?
	There's no understanding.
	I'd like to know more about your hobbies, in fact.
	Let's just change the entire flow of the conversation about your hobbies and pet foliage, because that sounds like something we really should be chatting about.
	Well, your listeners will drop off.
	You'll hear thumps on the floor from the boredom.
	This is probably my premier hobby.
	Do you have any other comments?
	I'm happy to hear.
	We've got a little bit of time before the next commercial break if you had another comment or question.
	Well, I mean, just, you know, the Federalist, I mean, one of the things that came up on the Rogan podcast was the topic of the Federal Reserve.
	And Unger said he had several economic, you know, geniuses on his podcast, and no one understood what the Federal Reserve was.
	And no one, he said he could give them six questions, and by the six questions, they would be hemming and hawing and not be.
	And I'm thinking, well, that's because you hung up on Peter Schiff.
	You know, you don't want to hear it.
	The answers.
	That is the premier problem that we have.
	Once you understand the degree to which government controls money, you lose the illusion that you can blame the free market.
	All disasters of power must be blamed on freedom.
	And to truly understand the source of government power, which is control of currency...
	It means that you can't have a scapegoat for disasters of government power.
	You actually have to reflect the errors back on their source.
	That's really different than cognitive dissonance from people.
	No scapegoat means an accurate understanding of the problem, which means the loss of their audience and advertisers who pay for delusions.
	This is Stefan Molyneux for Peter Schiff.
	We've got another segment, people!
	Come right back after the break.
	We'll talk some more.
	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.
	Oh my lordy above!
	It's the last segment.
	Thank you so much for listening in.
	I've been doing this for four days.
	Thanks a lot to Peter for...
	Giving me the reins of his show.
	Hopefully it's not returning a smoking dodo wreckage of incomprehensibility.
	Thank you so much, everyone, for calling in.
	And I want to leave you with a few words of encouragement.
	You know, those of us who are out there in the world.
	Letting slip the dogs of truth on an unwilling and well-armored population.
	We do have a tough time of it, right?
	We can get weary, we can get discouraged when repeatedly running into the glacier wall of people's ignorance, irrational skepticism, blindness to facts, reason and reality.
	It can feel a little bit like an exercise in exquisite soul masochism.
	To continue to leap into the razor blade swimming pool of other people's irrational indifference to oncoming disaster.
	The purpose of ignorance is to make intelligence feel impotent.
	You cannot reason a man out of a belief he was not reasoned into, and reasoning with the irrational is like giving pills to the dead.
	Conserve your strength.
	Do not waste your energy and your virtue on fools who will never listen.
	Conserve your strength, and as any good surgeon in the moral battlefield of humanity knows, triage is essential to healing.
	You must assess quickly Whether somebody is open to reason or whether they are hell-bent on exhausting your moral fiber and rending you impotent and incapacitated in the most essential fight of mankind, which is for the freedom of the future.
	We all know that we are heading off a cliff as a society, as a culture, really as a species.
	State power, debt, The mad, predatory, self-eating self-interest of the lazy and the greedy and the entitled and the evil are eating us from tail to crown.
	And it is up to you what you're going to do about it.
	The future of humanity is written in the effective heroism of our times.
	Be an effective hero.
	You know, so many people, it's like a conveyor belt of chocolates going off a cliff.
	So many people are going to vanish into history leaving no mark.
	Don't be one of those people.
	Don't be one of the people who are the anonymous cogs in the increasingly heated and blood-hungry machine that is eating the species.
	Be someone who fights against it.
	Be a flare over the midnight forest of encroaching power.
	Humanity navigates not by the dark, but by the stars.
	If there were no stars in the night sky and no compasses and no sextants, you would drift in little circles just out of sight of land.
	Most of the sky is dark at night, but there are a few stars that are the only source of guidance for humanity.
	Do not be the empty, vacuum sucked depths between the light.
	Be a star.
	Be someone who burns so bright that people are drawn to you for light and warmth and guidance.
	Aim for the kind of life where the trajectory of your existence has you land not in the anonymous sand-pebble graves of history, but in a tomb wherein there may be a firework celebration every year and people will come to look at your encased and rotten bones for inspiration, because that is how brightly you burned and how greatly and deeply you served the cause of truth and virtue.
	We will all be dead soon enough.
	Spend your life in the service of virtue.
	Recognize that the future climbs over the inconsequential of the present.
	Every road, every step to the top of the mountain requires that you step on grains of sand and on pebbles.
	And if all you do is look at the grains of sand and the pebbles, You will forget the mountaintop and you will wander in tiny circles, which is the goal of those who will not profit from the extension of virtue.
	The extension of virtue in the past harmed kings, it harmed the owners of slaves, it harmed the owners of serfs.
	The extension of virtue harms the interests of the immoral.
	And yet they do not want to oppose the spread of virtue so openly.
	Because when mankind discovers something is evil, it rejects it.
	It is the evil that masks itself as the good that invades the marrow of mankind and rots us from within.
	They don't want to oppose you openly.
	They want to sneer at you, call you names, ignore you, undermine you, slander you, hack at your reputation.
	To hell with that and to hell with them.
	The advancement of virtue harms the interests of the evil.
	So be it.
	They made their choices.
	Good people can make their choices too and work to extend evil, not despite, but because of its harm to evil people.
	We spread virtue to harm evil people, to save the future, to save the unborn from the effects of evil people.
	And it can be a little wearisome.
	And when it gets wearisome, it's because you're looking at the pebbles and not the mountaintop.
	Have the courage to be called a fool.
	Have the courage to be called ridiculous, paranoid, a conspiracy theorist.
	Have the courage to be right before your time.
	And that way, when the time catches up with you and your rightness is revealed, your credibility will be bottomless.
	A sky-shooting geyser of truth That people won't only be able to navigate by, they will be unable to avoid.
	Have the courage to be right far ahead of the inconsequential.
	That is how humanity climbs the stairs.
	That is how the bloody inching up the rock face of ethical expansion occurs for the species.
	Be foolish.
	Be ridiculous.
	Be incomprehensible.
	Because the only people that we really have to be right for are the wiser people of the future.
	Those are the people who are our true companions and they will respect us for being right when all who pretended to think thought we were wrong.
	This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Aid Radio.
	Have yourselves a wonderful week.
	I will see you when I see you.
	Take care.

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