Greece has become the first industrialized nation to default on its IMF payments, and the first since Zimbabwe in 2001. Here is the essential information you need to know about fear currency, infinite debt, bank thefts and the dangers of a delusional population.
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| So, for about 30 years, I guess, I've been telling people about the dangers of snorting political power through the medium of finely ground-up children's futures known as fiat currency, which is currently, of course, swallowing up Greece, tomorrow Puerto Rico, the day after that the Euro, the day after that, well, pretty much the Western crap type whatever you want into your own bank account economy as a whole. | |
| Information just came out, like documents have been released that show that even if Greece meets all of its financial obligations, it's still going to be massively in debt for decades and decades and decades and decades. | |
| And so it's completely unworkable. | |
| It's completely unsustainable, as has been known. | |
| Five and a half years ago in 2010 with Max Keiser about this, and this has been seen coming by anybody with non-status cataracts in their eyeballs for as long as this fantasy has been going, which is about 2,500 years. | |
| It's not really good to put a country into a situation of unsustainable debt. | |
| For those who don't remember, the Treaty of Versailles, where the Allies put Germany under the boot of debt for what was going to be decades. | |
| This was, of course, in 1918-1919. | |
| Germany was still going to be paying off its war debt into the 1980s. | |
| Instead, they hyperinflated their currency, destroyed the middle class, created a power vacuum filled by one mustachioed Austrian And hey, look at that! | |
| You're getting paid in bullets, which is what generally happens when you strangle a population through debt. | |
| Now, of course, there's lots of people on the internet who are saying, ah, you see, those nasty bankers, those nasty bankers are enslaving the poor, innocent Greeks. | |
| And, um... | |
| I don't think anyone held a gun to their head and told them to take all this money. | |
| So Greece spent, nobody really knows, between 10 and 15 billion dollars on the 2004 Athens Olympics. | |
| And this is on a population of 10 to 11 million people. | |
| So 1300, 1400, 1500 dollars. | |
| Per person for those Olympic Games, wherein a lot of people run in circles under a hot sun and then virtually collapse from exhaustion. | |
| Not an unapt metaphor for what's going on in Greece at the moment. | |
| Of the 22 giant stadiums and structures built to house the 2004 Athens Olympics, 21 of them are currently unused. | |
| The rest of them are wonderful places for weeds to grow. | |
| This is to celebrate. | |
| It would have been way better. | |
| Spend less money on the facilities. | |
| Go back to the original Greek games, which was naked oiled guys throwing javelins in the air. | |
| Play that back in slow motion. | |
| At least you're going to get the gay demographic and, of course, the shallow woman demographic tuning in to enjoy the spectacle. | |
| But instead, they just set money on fire for the sake of two weeks or three weeks of games. | |
| And that is just wretched. | |
| Now, so for Greece, this is a view for the rest of the world, of course, so you're a heroin addict and your best friend is currently in hospital in intensive care on the critical list because he just OD'd on the same stuff that you're injecting into your veins. | |
| This is generally a wake-up call. | |
| We can use the example of Greece to wake ourselves up to the dangers of pretending that we can live forever off imaginary money or that borrowing creates debt or that money printing creates wealth. | |
| This is of course an ancient illusion that goes all the way back to Greece and of course ancient Rome and the inflation of the late empire when the value of copper, silver, and gold coins was eaten away with basically metallic currency dumping of junk into the coins to pay for warfare and welfare. | |
| Well, at least we've learned that lesson in the intervening. | |
| Two thousand years! | |
| So yeah, you're an addict, your best friend is clinging to life after just ODing, and this can of course be a wake-up call, and we can serve Greeks' idiocy and greed and self-deception by learning from that lesson. | |
| I'm not holding my breath, having done this for 30 years and only seen it accelerate. | |
| But there are some lessons to be taken from Greece. | |
| Number one, if whoever can sell you an illusion will own you, especially if it's a foundational illusion, like nationalism, pride, care for the poor by borrowing money, which is simply deferring Further poverty disasters into the future or if they can get you to believe in some supernatural sky ghost or whatever, then they own your ass. | |
| If you allow people to talk you into the impossible, the irrational, the anti-rational, the illusory, then they own you because you become addicted to those illusions. | |
| What we snort is the satanic dreams fed to us by those in power. | |
| What we become addicted to is using the government to shield us From reality. | |
| To shield us from consequences. | |
| To shield us from mathematics. | |
| And basic mathematics. | |
| We're not talking vector calculus, who always sounds like a Bond villain. | |
| Ah, vector calculus. | |
| I used to know a man named the vector calculus. | |
| But we use the government to shield us. | |
| From reality and whenever you turn away from reality, you become addicted to that which is the shield against reality and this is what is occurring. | |
| But we don't have to have it that way. | |
| Another great illusion pointed out by Greece at the moment is, hey, remember that money that you put into the bank? | |
| Yeah, well, it's not your money. | |
| See? | |
| They could just say, nope! | |
| You can't have it. | |
| Oh, maybe 60 euros just so you can go buy some cat food to chow down on. | |
| Maybe if you're a pensioner, we'll give you 120. | |
| But no, you can't have your money. | |
| And this is a great wake-up call. | |
| Of course, banks are complete nonsense in the modern age. | |
| They're designed to give you a tiny return on interest, which you need because of inflation, which you need because of the money printing, which often goes to the banks to give you the tiny pittance. | |
| Anyway, you get the cycle. | |
| But... | |
| Yeah, it's not your money. | |
| You think it's your money, but they can just shut down the banks. | |
| Banks are shut down all week in Greece, and there are strict limits on what you can get out of the ATM. There are going to be capital controls, I'm sure, placed even further on what you can take out of the banks. | |
| So it's not your money. | |
| They're not holding it for you. | |
| They've lent it out. | |
| They've poofed it up. | |
| They've spent trillions of your dollars to prop up the ruble in the past for a couple of months, as Harry Brown used to say. | |
| It's not your money. | |
| Again, it's not your money. | |
| That's the great wake-up call that should be coming out of Greece at the moment. | |
| The unemployment, of course, 60% for those under the age of 24. | |
| Just wretched. | |
| It is true, of course, that the old, those who are retired, not always the same category in Greece, where you can retire as a lifeguard in your late 40s. | |
| But it's true that the old are going to suffer when the economy begins to unravel as the result of hyper-borrowing and hyper-spending and hyper-money printing. | |
| Well, less money printing now that they're under the restriction of the euro. | |
| But that's okay. | |
| Well, sorry. | |
| But, you know, in the past, it's always been the young who have to suffer when the economy teeters on the edge of collapse because that's when wars start. | |
| And so, yeah, the old are going to have to cut back on their calories, but that's okay. | |
| Because in the past, tens of millions of the young in these kinds of situations had to, say, cut back on the rest of their whole fucking lifespan. | |
| So I think it's not too bad to ask for these kinds of sacrifices to be made by the retirees. | |
| Because, of course, the retirees were voting for all this crap before some of these young people were even born. | |
| And as I learned from the old when I was young, you don't study for the test, you get an F. Actions have consequences. | |
| Wake up, own up, accept that actions have consequences. | |
| In 2012, the number of employed people in Greece was 3.8 million. | |
| And of course, we use the word employed very loosely since a lot of them were working for the government, which is working against actual employment. | |
| But the number of officially employed people in Greece was 3.8 million people. | |
| The pensioners and the unemployed totaled 4.1 million people. | |
| 3.8 million, if you went to government school, 3.8 million less than 4.1 million. | |
| So you've got a population of 11 million, 3.8 million are working, 4.1 million are unemployed or pensioners. | |
| See, that can't be brain surgery to figure out. | |
| That is not a sustainable situation. | |
| See, if you go to the doctor with a tumor that's bigger than you are, It might not be the easiest recovery known to man. | |
| That's just something to keep in mind. | |
| You've got a wheelbarrow to take your tumor into the doctor with and it weighs more than you do. | |
| It's not going to be very easy from there. | |
| And of course this is a country with a fertility rate of 1.4 per couple, far below the 2.1 needed even to maintain the population. | |
| So the reality is, Greeks, please don't embarrass yourself. | |
| Please don't pretend to be surprised. | |
| You guys gave us democracy, logic, reason, empiricism, the basis of the scientific method, all kinds of Wonderful intellectual genius throughout the ages. | |
| Please don't pretend, as a population, to be confused by math that my six-year-old daughter can handle with ease, as she did when I went over these numbers with her. | |
| So, please don't pretend to be confused by this. | |
| You're just embarrassing yourself. | |
| Everybody else saw this coming. | |
| Everybody else with any brains screamed that this was coming. | |
| The fact that it's here now Okay, you've got to do a reset. | |
| I've put in my last video what I would do where I'm in charge with Greece. | |
| But you really, really have to stop running to all of these people who are just somehow promising to keep you away from reality. | |
| It's not going to happen. | |
| There's nobody who can promise you To reverse or repeal the laws of mathematics and physics. | |
| You know, if you've put on 20 pounds, there's no point in voting for a politician who promises to dial down gravity so you'll feel a lot lighter. | |
| I mean, that's madness. | |
| And politicians have a lot of power. | |
| They have a lot of guns. | |
| They can put a lot of people in jail. | |
| They can create a lot of money out of thin air. | |
| What they cannot do is repeal math. | |
| They cannot make two and two equal five. | |
| And if you're hoping, That you can vote for someone, like the current leftist lunatics, if you're hoping that somehow you can get someone to bring magical unicorns of gold to solve your problems, you are deranged and madness. | |
| So please, don't pretend to be surprised. | |
| Now, the last thing I wanted to mention is A guy wrote about a video I did recently where I talked about the need to confront people with these uncomfortable truths. | |
| He wrote, he said, I kind of get what you're saying, that you're essentially a coward if you don't engage in political or religious debate, but people realize that by doing so you may jeopardize your relationship with a friend, potential friend, or a family member, so it just ain't worth it. | |
| And I have to agree. | |
| Well, how's that working out for Greece? | |
| Greece avoided essential conversations about the nature of freedom, personal responsibility, property rights, integrity, money printing. | |
| I mean, everybody has known for years and years and years that Greece falsified its records, lied, cheated, defrauded the rest of Europe to get into the European Union. | |
| Did anyone have a crisis of conscience about that? | |
| Did everyone say, whoa, this is really not good. | |
| We are way out of reality here. | |
| If we're doing as a country that which would get you thrown in jail as an individual, it's kind of the definition of a country. | |
| But even in the mainstream, that was off the charts as far as using the Sopranos to wedge your way into a bigger economic pie. | |
| No crisis of conscience. | |
| People are like, this is what the government does. | |
| Well, this is what the government does, and this is what a failure to have conversations about the nature of government, the nature of intergenerational predation, the nature of debt, the nature of vote buying, the nature of rank delusionary overspending. | |
| People not having these conversations, and this is where it leads you. | |
| You can avoid reality doesn't mean reality is going to avoid you. | |
| So this idea that somehow it's easier, it's easier just not to have difficult conversations about people. | |
| Hey, old people, get your money out of my pockets before I even have pockets while I'm still in the goddamn womb. | |
| Stop sucking out my life juice through the umbilical and using it to snort ouzo on some Greek island which has very low taxes! | |
| It does not help us to avoid these conversations. | |
| It simply makes the result worse. | |
| See, there is pain to the limitations of reality. | |
| There is pain to mortality. | |
| There is pain to aging. | |
| Sometimes it shows up in the back of my neck if I sleep funny. | |
| There is pain and discomfort to the natural limitations of living in three-dimensional reality. | |
| Human desires are infinite and resources are finite, and there is discomfort about bumping up to the natural limits of Life. | |
| I used to be able to eat a candy bar a day. | |
| I haven't done that in probably 10 or 15 years. | |
| You have to adjust your behavior. | |
| Yeah, you've got to give up. | |
| Smoking is bad for you. | |
| You've got to give up over drinking. | |
| Sleeping around is probably going to give you an STD. So you bump up against the limits of reality. | |
| And yeah, we're uncomfortable with that. | |
| And there's nothing wrong with that. | |
| That's why we have technology that extends and expands what we can do in reality. | |
| Because limits are uncomfortable. | |
| We like to push beyond them. | |
| I get that. | |
| And there's nothing wrong with that in a free market that produces all kinds of wonderful goodies. | |
| But the problem is that the government is a kind of drug that allows you to shield yourself from reality without the necessity of innovation and risk and failure. | |
| And that is a huge problem. | |
| Civilization does not fall from evil. | |
| Evil merely stimulates both greed and vanity in order to have people surrender their rights. | |
| If you really care about Greece, you'll support spending $1,400 per head on games that last a couple of weeks. | |
| Where's your pride? | |
| Where's your vanity? | |
| Where's your greed? | |
| For the unearned. | |
| The hell does it matter to you? | |
| If people from Zimbabwe run faster around a track, what the hell does that have to do with you? | |
| It doesn't affect your cardiovascular health. | |
| All it does is rip your wallet out through your testicles. | |
| So, civilizations fall not from evil. | |
| But from greed. | |
| Greed for the unearned. | |
| Greed to break free from the bonds and limitations of living with mortality, of living with finite resources. | |
| It is the greed, the delusion, the megalomania that we can become as gods and step outside the bounds of that which limits us. | |
| It is the desire to, as Jesus, when he was 40 days in the desert and the devil came to him and said, you can have the whole world. | |
| And he said, No. | |
| No. | |
| Knowing where your limits are is essential to the maintenance of civilization. | |
| Because if you have a toothache, a terrible toothache, and you take morphine or some pain-killing drug, the morphine will shield you from the pain, but it will not shield you from the disease. | |
| Morphine will shield you from the pain, but it will not shield you from the disease. | |
| Now, governments can shield you from truth, but they cannot shield you from reality. | |
| You cannot consume more than you produce forever. | |
| If you take morphine for a toothache, you're shielded from the pain But the disease gets worse. | |
| If you use government to shield you from the truth, reality gets more and more brutal. |