Stefan Molyneux speaks about the reality of the environment, growing up in cities and the fantasy of mother nature at the University of Toronto at the Liberty Now event.
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| Thanks, everyone, for coming out. | |
| So, my actual environmental education started after high school. | |
| I wanted to go to college, but I needed some money. | |
| My father is actually a geologist, and he put me in touch with somebody who I thought was a geologist, actually turned out to be a sadist. | |
| And what he said was, I can give you a job, because, you know, you've just graduated from a government-run high school, so you have all the skills of attorney. | |
| But I can send you up north, and you will be a gold panner and prospector. | |
| And I did that for about a year and a half, all told. | |
| And I spent the first winter in a tent. | |
| Now, who's gone the furthest north? | |
| It might be me. | |
| It might be somebody else. | |
| I went so north that, you know, the only water is your own tears and there are no trees at all. | |
| So, Nikina, does anyone... | |
| Who's gone further north? | |
| Anyone else? | |
| - Yellow and I. | |
| - Okay, anyone else? | |
| Okay, hey, what happened? - I'm about to go up to you, but... - I don't even know what that is. | |
| Where's it? - Baffin Island. | |
| Okay, okay. | |
| Alright, so I was out, like, where the highway ends, you then, you take a plane, and then when the plane can't fly anymore, you burrow through the snow like a rat. | |
| It's just, you just went on and on. | |
| And we spent the winter in a tent. | |
| And at one point, we got snowed in. | |
| And I grew up in cities my whole life, right? | |
| So I don't know much about, like, raw nature. | |
| You know, it's like, oh, it's raining, you know, and an umbrella, whatever, right? | |
| But this was like, we had no food. | |
| And I was working up there with a couple of other guys. | |
| And it's really interesting how quickly your perspective can change from like comfortable civilization to like Lord of the Flies. | |
| Like where you, you know, there was one guy who was working and he was pretty fat. | |
| Right? | |
| And what happens is when you start to think about running out of food, he doesn't look fat anymore. | |
| What he looks is nicely marbled. | |
| That's an important change in your whole mindset. | |
| Like the skinny guys, they don't look skinny anymore. | |
| They look like lacking in nutritive value to you as a hunter predator about to turn on your own kind. | |
| And it was rough. | |
| You didn't want to go to sleep. | |
| Clothes started to look like tasty wrappings, all that kind of stuff. | |
| It was quite a change. | |
| That's the first time I've ever really faced if the snow doesn't let up, we're out of food. | |
| It also made me never want to be a smoker. | |
| Because the smokers ran out of cigarettes and they were like out there in the blizzards like digging through paths where we might have walked, they might have dropped a butt. | |
| So that's a better anti-smoking ad than any other brother freeze to death than go for another five minutes without choking on a plan. | |
| Anyway, so that to me was like a really interesting, like me and nature without human comfort, human interventions, human technology. | |
| Actually, I went to grad school here, as I mentioned, and I was curious at the time, and I went out to an environmentalist meeting, and they wanted to do it outside, because they're environmentalists, right? | |
| And the clouds were foreboding, and the distant rumble, and they're all like, you know, we've got to take this inside. | |
| And I get this irrationality, epilepsy, you want to hear stuff that doesn't make any sense. | |
| Socrates had a nice quiet demon that would just whisper to him when stuff was irrational. | |
| I get like a twitch, like a full body twitch. | |
| And so they're like, well we've got to go inside because the weather might not be great for our environmentalist meeting. | |
| And I'm like, yes, you want shelter, right? | |
| Shelter! | |
| You know, human construction. | |
| All animals adjust their environment to serve their life and to protect their babies. | |
| You know, it's not like the beavers who make the dams are like, well, but the trees downstream. | |
| They might not have enough to drink, so we've got to balance this out. | |
| I mean, all animals adjust their environment, and we've adjusted this environment outside today. | |
| It's completely horrible. | |
| We have adjusted our environment, and everybody who then says, well, we've got to live in nature and with nature and so on, have you been to a dentist? | |
| Go to a dentist and they'll give you these mouthwashes and they'll clean your teeth and all that. | |
| Kills huge amounts of natural germs that otherwise they're not going to be very friendly to your longevity. | |
| And when we had less technology and we were able to less shield ourselves from nature, you know, things didn't go very well, right? | |
| Anybody know what the life expectancy was around the time of the Roman Empire? | |
| 35? | |
| We were. | |
| Average, it was in the early 20s. | |
| Now, this, of course, if you made it to your mid-20s, you were probably okay. | |
| A lot of that is infant mortality. | |
| But that counts. | |
| Babies want to live too, right? | |
| And now, I mean, an average life expectancy of 21 or 22, like if you're not a Justin Bieber fan, you might think that's like a good cutoff. | |
| But for the rest of us, you know, we kind of want to blow past that and go to our old age as much as possible. | |
| Okay, two Justin Bieber fans, I think. | |
| Other people are like, who? | |
| Was he eating one of the Trudeaus? | |
| So we want that shield against nature. | |
| There's a great old quote, which is sort of like if you're standing in the woods looking at a beautiful meadow, listening to the crickets and the birds and the butterflies are wending their way through, you're seeing a massive sociopathic portrait of all the organisms in the world trying to kill each other and get laid. | |
| And that's very true, because that's what nature is all about. | |
| That's why we're at the top of the food chain, at least for now. | |
| Because nature, if nature was like a human being, she'd get the death penalty. | |
| Because she's just, there's no trade, there's no negotiation, there's nothing like that. | |
| It's all just kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. | |
| There's no win-win negotiations in nature. | |
| Maybe there's some, I guess some, like the egrets that sit on the back of hippos and Clean off their mites or something like that. | |
| But most of it is win-lose when it comes to resources. | |
| And we've gone above that. | |
| We've gone against nature where we have a free market where we can trade and it can be win-win negotiations and all of that. | |
| And that's great, but that's only because we've kept nature very much at bay. | |
| And a lot of technology is about keeping nature at bay, right? | |
| I'm looking at the amount of hair products in the front row here. | |
| And, you know, without that, I don't know But you can have this. | |
| You can have product. | |
| And not smoke around the front row. | |
| Very, very important. | |
| So keeping nature at bay is really foundational to civilization. | |
| And I think that environmentalism is kind of like a luxury that we have when nature is at a safe distance. | |
| When we can go and visit nature and see it at its most pretty, and its most fun, and its most relaxing and all of that. | |
| But if you actually have to live there, it's really, really difficult and unpleasant. | |
| Like, if you ever had parents who come from the old country, you know, wherever the old country is, you know, as they get older, they tend to get kind of nostalgic about the old country. | |
| You know, oh, back in the old country, we did this, and back in the old country, everybody could have danced the right way, or whatever it was. | |
| And yet, you know, they left the old country, and if they ever had to go back, they'd be like, oh, no, I want to stay here where it's, you know, cool. | |
| And so, I think we get this nostalgia. | |
| For nature, because we've left it behind. | |
| We've controlled it. | |
| We've bent it to our will, so to speak. | |
| We have things that keep nature at bay. | |
| And I think that's a really, really important consideration to understand, that environmentalism is kind of a luxury. | |
| You know, like if you go to some person in India who's eking out some living on a quarter acre and he's not talking about the beauties of nature, I mean, they just look at you like you're completely insane. | |
| Because the moment that human beings get to get away from nature, They do. | |
| Right? | |
| The whole industrial revolution was, hey, we've got three pounds of excess food in the city. | |
| You know, everyone is stalling out to the city and leaves the country behind, like at the turn of the century in America. | |
| 80% of people were involved in farming. | |
| Anybody know what it is now? | |
| Yeah, three, two, depends on how you count it and so on. | |
| Without subsidies, there were like three guys producing all the food for America. | |
| But, I mean, as soon as people can get away from nature, they do. | |
| John Kenneth Galbraith, the 20th century economist, he said that, because he grew up on a farm, and he said, Nothing else is work, which is true. | |
| If you've ever really worked in nature to sustain yourself, nothing else is work after that. | |
| So there's luxury that we all have. | |
| So I think that there's a certain amount of Not exactly spoiled, but, you know, the champagne socialists, you know, I'm with the working class because they drive me around. | |
| It's the same thing, I think, with environmentalism, that there's a certain amount of privilege and prestige that you need to have. | |
| Does anybody, I tried looking this up and I couldn't find anybody, it was not an exhaustive search, anybody know any environmentalists who came from a farm? | |
| No, they're all like rich, white, or middle class, or very privileged, grew up in cities, and so on. | |
| And so their version of nature isn't like Hobbes, it's like Ansel Adams, you know? | |
| Like, it's so pretty. | |
| We want to maintain it so beautiful. | |
| Yes, because it's a picture. | |
| And you're not in there with bugs flying up your nose and malaria invading your audience, right? | |
| Because nature, frankly, is a bitch. | |
| I mean, she's homicidal. | |
| I mean, she kills human beings off like no tomorrow. | |
| Like a third of the population of Europe died just in like 20 or 30 years of the Black Death. | |
| As you pointed out, malaria is just monstrous to human beings. | |
| Nature is not a pretty mistress. | |
| I think, you know, good to serve in all of that. | |
| So I think these are really important considerations to have around the question of environmentalism. | |
| I think that another thing... | |
| Any questions so far? | |
| I don't know if you're like...emptily entertaining if you have no questions yet. | |
| Oh, you just stretch them. | |
| Okay, so... | |
| Sorry, somebody... | |
| And I think, like, another consideration as well, I think... | |
| You know the old joke about... | |
| that the environmental movement is like a watermelon. | |
| It's green on the outside. | |
| Red on the inside. | |
| They used to say this about Nazis. | |
| They called them beefsteaks because they were brown on the outside but red on the inside because they have so much in common with the Socialists and Communists. | |
| And I think that's an important consideration as well. | |
| The question of why we need a monopoly of force at the center of society becomes sort of harder and harder to answer. | |
| One of the big problems that the Western governments have had is creating fear, scare-mongering, whatever, especially since the end of the Cold War, but even since the advent of nuclear power. | |
| The advent of nuclear weapons and so on basically ended the possibility of these endless European wars that plagued the continent for thousands of years. | |
| Because when the leaders are like, oh wait, the bomb can hit me? | |
| Wherever I am, hey, blessed are the peacemakers. | |
| They change when they're not moving pawns around on a map, but when they're always exposed to their own martial dangers, they suddenly change their tune, and they are happy to negotiate. | |
| And so with the end of external enemies about to take over and so on, and with the end of grinding poverty and with the end of disease that's going to rampage you and so on, I think that there's constant need to invent reasons for government's existence. | |
| You're probably aware that after the Second World War, Poverty was declining by a full percentage point every year. | |
| Unprecedented in history, at least until China and India over the past 20 years, where hundreds of millions of people have climbed out of poverty. | |
| And to the point where even Bono is saying there's something about the free market that might be of value, not only because it made him very rich as a single songwriter, but also because, you know, he was all around, let's get governments to do all this stuff, and while everyone's running around trying to get laws passed, the free market's actually lifting people out of poverty, because there are people who talk and there are people who actually get things done, and activists usually are in the former, not the latter category. | |
| So, I think what's happened is, why do we need government? | |
| Government is a massive overhead, it's dangerous, it's problematic, it's, you know, full of nonsense and platitudes, it's manipulative, it's, you know, all that kind of stuff. | |
| So, the question, I think, that society, and often unconsciously, continually asks is, why the hell do we need this overhead? | |
| Why do we need all this stuff? | |
| And the environmental movement is fantastic for governments. | |
| And I think so, there is philosophical causes, but I think there's more philosophical purposes to the Green Movement, right? | |
| So examples as to how the Green Movement serves the state. | |
| That's the end of my talk, so you take it. | |
| No, just go ahead. | |
| Well, it serves the state because now the state can come in and be completely intrusive in your life and control it. | |
| And I would ask you a question. | |
| This is what I don't understand. | |
| In my garden, all I do is hack and splash back nature, right? | |
| Or it takes over my nose. | |
| There's this notion that the environment is so fragile. | |
| And everyone believes it, even after they haven't splashed their own backyard. | |
| There is this perception that nature is fragile, of course, but something has to be fragile for you to surrender your rights. | |
| Either peace has to be fragile or the capacity of parents to educate their young has to be fragile. | |
| That's another area where bad science is a major factor. | |
| There are lots of examples of this. | |
| Take oil spills, for example. | |
| That's a wonderful area of investigation. | |
| Oil spills at sea. | |
| Well, the example of the spill in Alaska, the Exxon Valdez. | |
| And what happened there was they said, well, you know, the shoreline will probably never recover. | |
| And they spent, you know, millions and millions of dollars trying to clean it up. | |
| Meanwhile, the part that they didn't try to clean up got cleaned up by bugs and birds and so forth. | |
| And it was, you know, within a couple of years, it was just fine. | |
| You're not doing well as a bureaucrat when you can be replaced by an insect. | |
| That's not where you want to be in the hierarchy. | |
| And when there are major oil spills at sea, they discover that various kinds of fish that just love oil, oil is edible, they fried and the fish population burgeoned underneath the oil spills. | |
| Those are the little things that we don't hear about. | |
| All we hear about is how we need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars cleaning these things up because, after all, they're evil. | |
| Do you know that the amount of crop yields in Europe as a result of increased CO2 is skyrocketing? | |
| It's fantastic for food production. | |
| Of course, you don't hear about that. | |
| I mean, this whole topic on global warming, but even We're catastrophic. | |
| Pretty significant scientific research has gone into the reality that if you wanted to solve the problem, it would cost you about $6 billion. | |
| I think $4 trillion has been spent researching it, but about $6 billion you could fix it. | |
| You get 1,900 pilotless boats out of the ocean taking seawater and spraying it into the air. | |
| This creates what's called saltwater cloud whitening. | |
| It makes the clouds more reflective. | |
| It reflects the heat back into space that comes in from the sun. | |
| It solves the whole problem. | |
| I've actually asked so many people if they've ever heard of the solution. | |
| Bjorn Lombard talks about it in a book called Cooling. | |
| And nobody's ever heard about it because the whole point is there's not supposed to be a solution other than more power for the state. | |
| Right? | |
| So, even if this were, and of course, in the free market, they would try and solve the problem. | |
| They'd identify it objectively. | |
| They'd try to solve the problem as quickly as possible for as cheaply as possible, but that's not the way the state works. | |
| Yes, sir. | |
| If we're going to play this game. | |
| No, I mean, I like that. | |
| Oh, more power for the state. | |
| I mean, it's nice when we're in this descriptive game, but maybe I think the problem is more fundamentally ideological, like the progressive imagination or the managerialist fantasy of the 20th century. | |
| The middle class would achieve its destiny through social administration and engineering of the great machine that is civilization of the apparatuses of civil society. | |
| The environmentalist movement plays to this fantasy that, well, the legitimate experts of which we can give the resources in different places in society will fulfill their roles and will all kind of race together. | |
| There's a greater human problem where we all take greater comfort, maybe, in ceding to power or giving power to the right. | |
| You know, capacities and people. | |
| You mean so there's some comfort in surrendering your rights? | |
| But is that the case? | |
| Not just that. | |
| That there are levers and that social administration is to be desired. | |
| And so kind of a bit before the, oh, let's subject our rights to the state, that there are legitimate experts in the time of the benevolent, decentralized, you know, Yeah, like they had to change it from global warming skeptic, | |
| because skeptic is good, right, to global warming denial, which puts you in the Holocaust category and all that kind of stuff. | |
| I mean, yeah, that is natural. | |
| So many years ago, I was talking with a nuclear engineer, and he said, we use almost no computers. | |
| As few computers as possible. | |
| We use physical levers, knobs, cogs, chains. | |
| Like, ridiculous, right? | |
| There's some guy pedaling in the basement or something like that. | |
| And the reason for that is computers are subject to bugs, errors, whatever, glitches, EMTs, or whatever. | |
| And so they really needed to have as much mechanical stuff, which is not going to fail in the way that computers do. | |
| And that's because, of course, the problem is so huge if there's a nuclear power problem. | |
| And so when the consequences are catastrophic, your standards for excellence, your standards for proof, your standards for reliability have to be huge. | |
| Now, the reality, of course, is that, I mean, first of all, if the Kyoto Treaty were actually implemented in the way it never was, but if it was actually implemented and everyone followed their goals, do you know how much it would delay? | |
| The increase in temperature over a century. | |
| Anyone know that lovely number? | |
| Five years. | |
| It would delay the increase in temperature projected by the IPCC, but by five years. | |
| That much? | |
| I think that's a exaggeration. | |
| The figures I've seen are, after 50 years, the degree to which the climate would have cooled as a result of the Kyoto is 0.015 degrees, which is Below the threshold of anybody, because you wouldn't be able to tell whether it had worked or not. | |
| And that's the estimated improvement you get. | |
| And the cost of this, while only several trillion dollars... | |
| Well, and that translates into millions of lives. | |
| Well, yes. | |
| All that, too, yeah. | |
| Yeah, so to me, if you're talking about something which may cost millions of lives, you have to have a high standard of proof, obviously. | |
| So I meant by saying that the environmentalist thinks that the environment is... | |
| I just think the biggest boon for government in regard to environmentalism is that if you take the phrase, if you can measure it, you can manage it. | |
| Well, you can't measure anthropogenic global warming. | |
| There's no, you know, I mean, you can't tell the weather around a couple of weeks, right? | |
| I mean, so, you know, I mean, like, they don't want to manage it. | |
| I mean, if you could measure it, that'd be bad for them because then they could say, okay, well, now we've done our job. | |
| We can measure it, and the results are not as important and dramatic as they want. | |
| So do you know what they do? | |
| They have this magic thing called the multiplier. | |
| They just say, well, there's something in the atmosphere or something, it's going to multiply the effect, which is great. | |
| Try that in business with a business plan. | |
| I'm not going to sell that many, but if I turn this dial, you can see that number goes up, so give me a half million dollars. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. | |
| What I'm saying is not necessarily the measuring, What is done or the efficacy of specific efforts rather than the actual results and what is the best outcome. | |
| So, I mean, let's say it gets colder in the future, then, you know, governments will simply say that, oh, we're not doing enough, we need to do more. | |
| Or that, you know, we need to keep doing what we're doing. | |
| But if it gets warmer, they'll just say, you know, we're not doing enough, we have to do more, right? | |
| But there's no cost-benefit in the law other than political calculations, right? | |
| So, I don't know, you remember in Al Gore's movie, he said the sea water could rise like six meters or whatever, and hopefully that would drown out his speech, but do you know that Tokyo, since the 1930s, has sunk under the sea by about five meters? | |
| They just deal with it. | |
| I mean, even if all this is true. | |
| I mean, people just... | |
| I mean, yeah. | |
| There's a hand way up in the back there. | |
| He was first. | |
| I was just going to say that other... | |
| The reason why I think environmentalism helps the government is because people who work in the government, they always like to take up the mantle of representing someone, and they always take up these abstract things like, you know, the people. | |
| And with declining voter rates now, it's harder and harder to say I'm a representative of the people. | |
| But now... | |
| I represent the planet. | |
| Yeah, who has no voice and can never say, no, I don't want you to be doing that. | |
| Well, and the problem with environmentalists, which is why whenever you drill them about their knowledge of the free market, it's woefully deficient. | |
| Because price, I mean... | |
| Bossy pants always want to find some reason to tell people what to do. | |
| There's a whole class of people who just, they wake up in the morning, it's like, who can I boss? | |
| Who can I boss? | |
| Who can I tell what to do? | |
| Come on, come on, I need a fix, man. | |
| Give me someone to boss. | |
| And they have to find someone to boss around. | |
| And the question is, well, you know, the whole point of the free market is nobody's in charge and nobody gets to boss anyone around. | |
| And you actually have to sell stuff to skeptical people. | |
| Laws are about imposing your will on resistant people, because if nobody was skeptical or resistant, it would just happen anyway, right? | |
| You don't need laws for people who don't like candy, because candy is fun and nice, right? | |
| So I think that one of the things that We're running out of resources, but the free market handles that perfectly. | |
| Everybody knows this, right? | |
| You can all probably chime it out, right? | |
| When something gets scarce, price goes up, and alternatives are sorted. | |
| You don't need a central planet to deal with shrinking resources, right? | |
| And we're never going to run out of any particular resource. | |
| It's impossible, right? | |
| There's this economist who's got this metaphor where he says, if you are in a big room and you've got all of these peanuts in shells, you will never, and you've got to eat all the peanuts, you will never, ever run out of peanuts. | |
| Why not? | |
| You'll never find the last peanut. | |
| Yeah, because you get more of these shells than you get, oh, forget it. | |
| You know, I'll just go get a baked root pie or something, so... | |
| Well, the label of this panel was the philosophical roots of environmentalism. | |
| And I was hoping something along of exploring Marx's ideas and Rousseau's idea and possibly even going back to Plato's of these two fundamentally different concepts of the environment. | |
| One is that we are the children of nature, and the other one is that we are the masters of nature. | |
| The masters of nature's idea was very much prevalent in the 19th century. | |
| This is what helped us to the industrialization. | |
| And what we see now is that more and more we see the other side gaining ground that says that we are just... | |
| Children of nature and we should take care of this thing that sustains us and lives us. | |
| And it's a cultural war. | |
| So before we talk about the politics of what is the right approach to deal with the environmentalist movement and why do they want to have the government, The real question to me is how do we deal with the cultural issue that as we are walking away from nature, as you pointed out, the moment you get into nature, there is nobody in the environmental movement who ever grew up in a farm. | |
| That's absolutely impossible. | |
| But how can we win the cultural argument, the cultural war that we're supposed to be the masters of nature, we're supposed How to manage it in a way that is probably best managed by the free market, as opposed to just dealing with the politics? | |
| I think, yeah, I mean, I'm a stay-at-home dad, and, you know, like anybody who's read stories about animals to children, I mean, it's not exactly like a National Geographic special when you talk about animals with children, right? | |
| They're all cuddly, cute bunnies with little bow ties, and, you know, nothing ever gets eaten, and they all just drink sunlight and flowers and stuff like that. | |
| But the reality is that, so to me, there's a kind of A childlike element, a lack of maturity, a lack of growing up, growing out of that phase for a lot of people who end up in that kind of situation. | |
| I mean, you think you're right, the considerations of mankind is a stain upon nature. | |
| This is an old religious idea, right? | |
| Which is that there's nature that was created by God, and we screwed it up, you know, with the apple and all of that. | |
| And we screwed it up, and now we're a stain upon nature, and this is original sin and so on. | |
| And I did a show with Redman recently where we talked about this, that if somebody can get you to feel bad for breathing, they own you. | |
| I mean, they own you, because then you've got to pay them to remove this sin, right? | |
| Whether it's a carbon tax or a donation in the confessional box, if you're just bad for breathing, then they own you. | |
| They make you feel bad just for breathing. | |
| This is a very old idea, that human nature is somehow fallen and corrupt, and nature, whether it's a deity or the natural world around, is somehow good, and we fall and we're stained. | |
| And we need to pay people out of guilt, whether it's carbon taxes or confessional money, we have to pay people to absolve ourselves from the guilt of stealing. | |
| Excuse me from whatever, nature or the poor or whatever. | |
| And the other thing I think that's important too is that when we look at how we've controlled and affected the environment, it's so obviously beneficial to everyone that it's hard to make that into a sin. | |
| And people really do make it into a sin. | |
| You have to buy them off too. | |
| But the idea is that resources are managed by a conglomeration of individual choices. | |
| And that's important. | |
| Because then the free market and prices will deal with all of that. | |
| And the last thing I'll say is that the oldest division in political science, and the oldest artificial division, which you touched on as well, is the idea that there are these bad people out there who are greedy and selfish and exploitive and so on, but then... | |
| Over here, in the government, it's all these angels who have no personal considerations and work solely for the good of everyone and so on. | |
| But it's Hobbesian argument. | |
| If people are evil, then people in the government are going to be evil. | |
| If people are greedy and grasping and selfish, then the last thing you ever want to do is give a monopoly of political power, because then it's like, free evil, pass, go, collect $200. | |
| So you can only make the government the savior of the environment if you assume it's inhabited by the opposite of everyone else. | |
| But of course, if they're good and everyone's evil and they need a democracy, what do evil people do? | |
| They're not going to vote good people to rule over them. | |
| That's silly, right? | |
| They're going to just try and gain control of this evil thing and so on. | |
| Yeah, I just wanted to follow up on this gentleman's remarks and point out that there was another dimension that you would, all along those lines, it wasn't just master of nature or child of nature, but you made this point several times about nature at bay, which is a kind of art-fuse in a way, so there's an extra dimension to this. | |
| Let me just rephrase my question. | |
| Let me make it very clear here. | |
| My feeling is that most of the people who are buying into this environmentalist mantra are not doing it for nefarious reasons. | |
| They are doing it because they need religion. | |
| They need faith. | |
| I don't agree with you about the nefarious things. | |
| Like, if I go around giving people advice on how to cure some disease, and I've not studied it, I am actually doing some harmful things. | |
| Now, I may say, well, I just, I don't know. | |
| But then if you don't know, stop giving advice. | |
| So if people say, well, here's how resources and people's lives and capital should be allocated, study some damn economics. | |
| You know, don't go out there telling people how to think. | |
| Like, Russell Brand was just up in the interview the other day. | |
| You know, it's completely mad. | |
| Like what Murray Rothbody said, you know, not everyone has to be an expert in economics, but if you're not an expert in economics, don't talk about economics. | |
| But intent is, who cares? | |
| I mean, you can't gauge that. | |
| You can gauge the effects, which is people are saying we should use force to achieve a sentence while never having studied it. | |
| But the easy way to show intent is very easy. | |
| You simply ask people whether they know about the free market. | |
| And if they say, you know, actually I don't, but tell me more, you know, then their intent is good, right? | |
| But if they then say, oh, the free market is evil and this and that and the other, so voluntary interactions between two people expecting win-win negotiation is evil, explain that to me like I'm free. | |
| And if they then resist and reject, then their intentions are not good because they're actually rejecting knowledge that is important. | |
| Any question? | |
| Can you talk a little bit about... | |
| I can't talk a little bit about anything. | |
| Okay, I'll try. | |
| Can you talk a little bit about legitimate environmental challenges like air pollution in Beijing, like Ontario pollution? | |
| Air pollution in Beijing? | |
| I mean, they're a dictatorship, so why should they... | |
| The government has all this control, so why is there a problem? | |
| The free market was actively prevented by governments from dealing with the issue of air pollution, and Murray Rothbard wrote about this, where he says, so in the 19th century when the satanic males began belching out their, you know, ugly smoke onto the farmer's orchards, the farmers were growing apples around London and all that because they wanted to give apples to the poor so the poor could be exploited. | |
| And what happened was all of the smoke came out over these orchards and, you know, screwed up all the apples. | |
| They couldn't sell them, right? | |
| So they took the Mill owners, the factory owners, to court. | |
| And they said, look, it's common law. | |
| You've damaged my property with your smoke, so I need restitution. | |
| And that would have been the move to factories or they put scrubbers or whatever they would have done to deal with that. | |
| Or they would have paid the farmers to move further away. | |
| But that was being dealt with. | |
| Unfortunately, the government courts looked at the tax base of the manufacturers versus the tax base of the farmers. | |
| They're like, hmm, I think we're getting a lot more money from you guys. | |
| So we're going to basically, they just threw out common law. | |
| And this is a continual process. | |
| I mean, if you want to talk about things like pollution, I mean, what about the pollution of, like, psychotropic drugs being thrown into kids, right? | |
| I mean, that's really pollution for kids, and yet that's entirely beneficial to the state. | |
| There's an even better example from Ontario itself. | |
| It's told by, what's my friend in Guel's name? | |
| The Department of Agricultural Economics. | |
| It's terrific. | |
| Libertarian. | |
| Anyway. | |
| He gives the example of the Sundry area, where, back in the late 19th century, a bunch of farmers sued the smelting people for, you know, in effect, despoiling their property, which they certainly were doing. | |
| And the judge said, well, sorry, it's in the national interest that we have no coffee, so screw you, in effect. | |
| It's funny how the social good always accumulates in somebody's pocketbook, in particular. | |
| Individual rights non grata. | |
| That's what we have to fight. | |
| Or the cod fishery. | |
| You know, 400 years, they were able to basically walk from their fishing boats over the cod to get back to shore. | |
| It was that plentiful. | |
| The government takes it over in the 80s, and within 10, 15 years, it's all gone. | |
| Because they set the quotas, and they wanted to set high quotas to get boats, and they then pushed aside. | |
| You know, there's this whole basket argument that you cannot fundamentally mistake government for society. | |
| Because when government takes over something, whether it's taking care of the poor, educating the young, then people make this mistake. | |
| They say, well, if the government stops doing it, It won't get done. | |
| And so, people are very good at managing resources. | |
| If they're left free to do it, and if the consequences accrue to them personally, people are excellent at managing resources. | |
| But once the government steps in, you've got political considerations, vote-buying considerations, and then... | |
| I mean, I don't know. | |
| One last time. | |
| Well, you get a lot of inflation. | |
| And if you get a lot of inflation, you're really stimulating people's desire to spend more now rather than save. | |
| Because if you save, you lose money. | |
| It's like termites are attacking your dollar bills, right? | |
| So even things like government control of currency and the incentive to print money rather than raise taxes, that produces a huge In fact, the roads are built for through deficit financing. | |
| How has that influenced our use of cars and use of oil and so on? | |
| If you look at the way that society is organized, it's so fundamentally organized along the lines and literally the highways built by the state that resource consumption in a free market environment would be very entirely taken care of by price and demand. | |
| But right now we just live in this weird situation where The demand is stimulated by hyper-carrency and debt and all of this stuff. | |
| So anyway, I think there's a lot that goes into destroying the environment that comes out of the state. | |
| I was going to point out an illustration of the recent events in Australia. | |
| Australia, the fine country where you get fined for not voting. | |
| And at the same time, you're going to have a point about environmentalists not being able to afford what they really want. | |
| So there's been some free market activity where residential solar companies in Australia are installing solar panels free. | |
| And what they cost is... | |
| The resident has to give them a portion of the energy that goes back to the grid. | |
| Right. | |
| So what they're really doing is making people energy producers. | |
| And I think if the environmentalists really want to get their message out there, Put your money where your mouth is, so to speak. | |
| That would probably be your best bet. | |
| Yeah, I mean, we don't even know whether centrally generated electricity that goes out on 12 billion light years' worth of electrical cables is even... | |
| I mean, why doesn't every house, or at least every street, have some little generator? | |
| I mean, we have no... | |
| But because governments took it over and built all this stuff, deficit finance, people are like, okay, well, I guess we'll build it. | |
| That's not quite true. | |
| There are good technical reasons for large generators. | |
| If the government hadn't reduced that, then we don't know what technological considerations might have brought it to bear. | |
| Fuel cells, for example, do come as that possibility. | |
| You have your little generator in your basement. | |
| It's perfectly quiet. | |
| Is that a question right? | |
| In the actual history of... | |
| The electrical system, they actually did do that because... | |
| You actually know the history of the electrical system? | |
| Do you say that when you sit down for a dinner party? | |
| Hey, I know. | |
| You want to sit here? | |
| Go ahead. | |
| What happened was, when Edison invented the light bulb, it was a DC-based system, so you can't transmit low voltage high current over a long distance. | |
| So they literally had to build generators on every street. | |
| His competitor actually built an AC system. | |
| He could build a single large one. | |
| It was actually a free market solution. | |
| That's interesting. | |
| Right. | |
| Because it was far more profitable for them to simply-- Compare that on the other hand with wind towers. | |
| Yeah, speaking of back of the birds, right? | |
| Welcome to the blades of death. | |
| I wanted to address the solar generation. | |
| The way that company works is they actually rent your route from you. | |
| They'll give you like $100 a month, and then they actually make all the profit off of the system. | |
| But you can do it here where you set up solar panels, sell it back to the grid. | |
| You can do that. | |
| Yeah, it's a fit program. | |
| It's a feed-in tariff, and it's set up by the government. | |
| It's a 20-year program. | |
| So they make their money back on the system, make profit for 10 years at least, and then you're left over with the system at the end and whatever rent you get for it. | |
| Yes, sir. | |
| I think some of the biggest issues are arguing with people about things that are already in place. | |
| The fact that Just about all the water in Canada is already a publicly owned resource. | |
| I live on the Holland River up north a little bit, and recently they've been putting in sewage plants down the river, just pumping sewage into the river. | |
| And reading, for new liberty, there's a whole section on alternative ways to deal with sewage and how it hasn't been done because it's just free to dump it into the rivers. | |
| Yeah, they're unowned and therefore despoiled, right? | |
| No, exactly. | |
| People talk about the problem of the commons like the government is not subject to the problem of the commons. | |
| And you have companies like Nestle who are going to Aberfoyle and paying the government, or even getting free rights to drain the water out of the aquifers. | |
| How do you get people to see that a lot of the problems that they're arguing with I think those are great questions, and I get sucked into the black hole of what would a free society deal with these? | |
| How would a free society deal with these problems? | |
| But I was trying to go back, and you've listened to my show, you've heard this analogy before, If you were in the 17th or early 18th, late 18th century, and you were arguing against slavery, you know, everybody and their dog would say, but without the slaves, we'd starve. | |
| And we'd have nothing to wear because they'd pick the food and the cotton and the, you know, so without slavery, we'd all die. | |
| And if you said, no, no, no, I know how it's going to work, man. | |
| Smoke some of this. | |
| It'll all make sense to you. | |
| Because the way it's going to work, you see, is in about 150 years, there'll be these giant robot machines with these giant wheels. | |
| And you know how they're going to be powered? | |
| With the crushed juice of 100 million-year-old trees. | |
| And they're going to go all the way through the crops. | |
| And there's not barely going to need Be anyone there, and they're going to put them in these big, giant squares, and then they're going to get shipped on these giant wheels of these flat tart. | |
| People would think that's completely insane. | |
| Of course, you can't predict what's going to happen in the absence of compulsion. | |
| You do know that compulsion is wrong, and you know that public is actually unowned and therefore despoiled, and it's a violation of property rights and of the non-aggression principle for the government to protect that which it has not homesteaded. | |
| And so you can make, I think, the moral case and the consequences be damned. | |
| We can't possibly predict what the consequences of liberty are going to be. | |
| We just know it's the right thing to do. | |
| I think the analogy there would be people who thought that slave trade was solely perpetrated by profits and profit motives and they don't recognize the legal structure of keeping the slave system intact. | |
| Yeah, you can't have a slave system unless the government's going to go cash it for you. | |
| Right? | |
| Because, I mean, they just walk off. | |
| And what are you going to do? | |
| Go hunt all your slaves and they might fall higher than, right? | |
| But if you can socialize the cost of catching the slaves and bringing them back, like, in Brazil, how did they get rid of slavery? | |
| The government just said, we aren't going to catch them anymore. | |
| Whoops! | |
| You know, immediately, hey, I'll start giving you five bucks an hour to whatever, right? |