July 11, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:45
3022 Who Will Pay? Austerity vs. Bailouts | Greece, Europe and The Euro!
When debt consumes a country and its financial system collapses - who will pay? Who will be held responsible for the bad decisions, the debt and the malinvestment? Throughout history, it is typically the young who are sacrificed for the sake of the older generation; young people are herded into the buzz saw of war and have their futures sold off through massive debts long before they escape the crib. As financial collapse looms above several major world economies - who will be held responsible when the bill comes due?
There's no doubt that there's a huge amount of suffering that is coming up because we are on an extend and pretend extended fiat currency coke-snorting binge of ultimate decaying addicted disaster.
And when we run out of money, as we can see happening in Greece, as people are lining up at midnight to try and get money out, scrabbling like sharecroppers in a dust bowl for a few scraps of income, there's no question that there is suffering.
Coming along.
And the suffering can be quick, or it can be slow.
You can basically either rip the band-aid off and have it go relatively quickly, or you can do the boiling frog slow exploration of all that is good, virtuous, noble, and free in civilization.
And somebody posted, just did a video about Greece and somebody posted and said, well, what about the old people who've paid into the system for so long?
First of all, there's no money.
There's no money in the system.
If there was money in the system, it would have assets and not debts.
The money that old people have given to the government or had taken from them by the government, the old people's...
Retirement savings?
All spent.
All gone.
In fact, the money, it's even worse than it's all gone.
The money that old people gave when they were younger to the government for their retirement was used as collateral to borrow.
So it's not even like there's no money.
There's negative money.
And that is a truly horrifying situation.
And the question is, well, who should pay?
Who should suffer for this situation?
If I give my money to a con man, do I then get to rob someone who didn't give their money to a con man?
I don't think that's really the case.
Like, I don't think when Bernie Madoff made off with a huge amount of money from Hollywood elites, Kevin Bacon, Steven Spielberg and others, when he made off with all that money, you can try and get your money back from Bernie, from Bernie Madoff, but you can't then get license to steal money. but you can't then get license to steal money.
Oh, you lost money with Bernie Madoff.
So here's your license to steal from everyone else.
And here's a gun to intimidate them.
That's not how the common law and justice system, how they work.
When I was a kid, if you didn't Study for an exam, by God, you got an F. You failed.
And you couldn't say, well, you know, I forgot that there was an exam.
Even though that might be true.
Like, I forgot that there was an exam, and I don't know, I went to the wrong place, and the dog ate my homework.
It was like, you didn't show up, you just got an F. You didn't get to steal other people's marks.
And apply them to your own Marx deficiency in order to put Marxism into practice.
You just weren't allowed to do that.
And the question of who should suffer, we need to look at this objectively, not with the emotions of old people generally wailing that, you know, they're poor, helpless victims and we need to give them money and it wasn't their fault.
I mean, that's natural.
When people are cornered, they generally either attack or, if their bones are brittle, tend to whine quite a lot.
But the reality is, I sort of look throughout history, this is where I go, to try and find moral...
Firmness, because pity can be very corrosive to the future because Well, it has us not hold people responsible for their actions.
Pity is an emotion generated by people who are guilty and want us to pretend that they're not responsible for their actions.
Now, I go back, so my family was heavily involved, that's a bit of a nice way of putting it, heavily involved in World War II on my mother's side in Germany, on my father's side in the British Army and Air Force in particular.
And what happened was, in general, when you were young, I'm thinking of the Battle of Britain, right?
So you're 18, 19, 20, you are drafted into the Royal Air Force.
And if you're in World War I, you are, the moment you turn 18 or 17 in some cases, if I remember rightly, you are drafted into...
The trenches.
You are drafted into facefuls of mustard gas and shells and rats eating off your toes while you sleep and all kinds of 99th layer Dante and hellscape scenarios.
And so why?
The question is why?
Why would an 18-year-old be forced to fight in a war?
I mean, certainly the 18-year-old is not responsible for that war.
I mean, the 18-year-old couldn't vote.
The 18-year-old was stuck in a government school.
The 18-year-old can in no way, shape, or form be morally called upon to fight a war that his elders have stumbled into, right?
So you could really argue that it was throughout the 1930s that the build-up To the Second World War was occurring, that the politicians let Hitler expand beyond the 150,000-odd army that Germany was allowed to have after World War I,
that it let them build up an air force, that it let them take Alsace-Lorraine, it let them take the Rhineland, it let them take Czechoslovakia and Austria, and all of these steps that led to World War II. Okay, well, an 18-year-old in 1940 was 8 years old during the time that the World War II marched to the virtual and protracted end of classical Western civilization, was 8 years old when this started.
Was 8 years old?
I mean, how is that even remotely possible?
How can that...
I mean, 7 years old when the 1929 market crash occurred.
This can't possibly...
It has to be the fault of a seven or eight-year-old who grew up with no capacity to vote.
It has to be the responsibility of the people who had a voice in public affairs, and those are the leaders, and those are the people who choose the leaders in a democracy.
In a democracy, the wonderful thing is that everybody of voting age is responsible for what has happened.
Not all equally, and of course people vote for different people and so on, but Activism is very powerful.
You set up a petition.
You want to get this person impeached.
You want to get this person sent to jail.
You can do civil disobedience.
You can do lots of things to influence what's going on.
And this is particularly true now.
What's going on in your country?
So when the old people screw up and sort of middle-aged people and older people screw up and stumble into a war...
Who pays the price?
The 18-year-old.
The 18-year-old is saying, hey, you can shave.
Here's a gun.
Now we, hey, you see, we're 50, so we can't really go and fight.
You know, maybe we can buy some war bonds and we're willing to do with a little bit less butter.
You will have to do with a lot fewer limbs and no real capacity to breathe because of poison gas.
And that's good.
And by the way, even if you survive physically, your brain will be wrecked.
From shell shock, but you have to go and fight and die because we screwed up.
And throughout history, this has been the cycle.
Middle-aged and older people completely screw things up, and it's the younger people who have to march into withering bullets and bombs and weapons of mass destruction and be vaporized and have rats eat out their intestines in the barbed wire death field known as No Man's Land.
And this is true even of women who can vote, right?
Women get the vote in the 1920s in a lot of places.
So in the 1930s, women can vote.
But they're really focusing on banning alcohol rather than, say, preventing the rise of Hitler.
And so when women screw up, the men have to go off and fight and die.
When the middle-aged and the old screw up, the young have to go off and die.
And that's the way it has generally been.
Now, in this case, we have a problem in that there's no money to pay for people's retirement.
In other words, the middle-aged and the old people have screwed up, and who has to pay the price?
The young.
Again.
Again.
And as the young grow up, they too will get middle-aged and old, and they will look back at their own history and say, doesn't really matter what we do.
Because we can always fasten our fangs on the jugulars of the young and either force them to war if it's culling time or drain them of opportunity, drain them of resources, laden them down with debt, use them as collateral to borrow more, to get a little bit more money into our own dusty pockets.
That is the cycle.
It doesn't matter if you screw up.
Because you can just take from the young.
You can sell off their future before they're even born.
You can sell off their future Before they can vote.
In order to appease the government unions that run the educational system, you can stuff them in terrible schools and not really give much of a rat's ass about what happens, whether they learn anything.
You know, one of the reasons why there's a minimum wage is because nobody wants to find out after 12 years of government education just how worthless people are in the economy.
If you have your average high school graduate come out His actual market value price will be pathetically low after 12 years of government education.
And we have to pretend that that's not the case by jacking up the minimum wage and pretending that they're worth a lot more.
And also, that way, they either get a job and say, well, I'm worth something, or they don't get a job, in which case they blame the market, the free market.
Yeah, right.
So...
For the old people, I don't really think there'll be social change until the people who make the mistakes are held accountable for their mistakes.
We all know that.
We all know that.
If kids are never marked down for failing to study, few kids will study what they don't like.
I mean, people respond to incentives, the basic reality of human life, human existence, and of economics.
We all know that if people are not held accountable for their mistakes, nothing will change.
And it is to the advantage of the middle-aged, and particularly the old people, who have spent 40 years ignoring mounting debts in their society, who have spent 40 years voting in the flashiest, pearl-toothed, smooth-skinned, nice-haircut sociopaths who are promising them something for nothing, Not noticing that the fisherman's net of infinite debt is falling upon the emerging spawn of the next generation.
That they have steadfastly avoided having conversations that might be uncomfortable.
You see, we don't want to be uncomfortable, do we?
We don't want to point out, like, hey, we're getting all this free stuff.
Right in Greece, they spent $1,300, $1,400 per person on two weeks of games, building 23 structures, 22...
Stadiums of which now remain almost completely unused.
How many people said this is a bad idea?
How many people confronted those who were opening their mouths wide like a snake with an ostrich egg to suck at the government teat and inhale the sole fluid and economic opportunities of the next generation?
How many people said, we've got to stop this?
How many people did that?
How many people protested That there's no such thing as a free lunch.
You can only sell us our own freedoms back to us at a massive discount.
You can only take $10,000 worth of economic opportunity for us in return for $1,000 of debt.
How many people protested?
Is it because they didn't know?
Of course they knew.
When I was young, I was told not to spend beyond my means.
I was told that debt is not wealth.
I was told that I had to be responsible for my actions.
I was told that if I failed, I had to suffer the consequences.
And that was the only way that I would learn.
I was told not to blame other people for my decisions.
That's what I was told.
Repeatedly, emphatically, and with highly negative consequences.
So the question is, who should pay?
Who should pay?
It cannot be the young.
It cannot be the young who pay for the disastrous decisions of their elders.
The politicians are a shadow cast by the willed self-delusion of the people.
You cannot lie.
You cannot cheat.
You cannot manipulate.
You cannot sell into slavery.
You cannot fool a fundamentally honest person.
The hook is enslavement.
The bait is free stuff.
And the fishermen...
Is drawn to where the fish congregate.
Every demonic statue casts an evil shadow.
The demonic statue is the willed self-delusion of the people, their need to avoid.
Essential conversations about virtue and truth and honor and integrity.
And how about, let's not screw the young for the sake of immediate comfort in the here and now.
How about there's an intergenerational chain of responsibility?
How about that?
How about, well, either the poor and the young, mostly synonymous these days, either the young are going to suffer enormously or we're going to have to have a tough conversation with everybody who's clamoring at the government teeth looking to get something for nothing, which they know they cannot get.
You cannot get something for nothing.
You can steal and pretend you've earned.
But all you're doing is hollowing out the motivations and social contracts of the future.
There is an intergenerational contract which must be upheld and abided by.
The intergenerational contract is we will not steal from you, the young.
The young are helpless.
The young get stuffed in schools.
The young have no voice in a democracy.
They have no vote.
As the head of the American teachers union said, I will start representing the interests of children when children start paying union dues, which they don't.
That is the intergenerational contract.
We will not prey upon you.
We will not sell you off to the highest bidder.
We will not destroy your economic future for the sake of a few shekels in the here and now and the avoidance of uncomfortable conversations with our peers.
We will not march in blind delusion into the widening shock jaws of government power and dependence.
And we will not leave you a land which used to be a forest and which is now a giant economic crater wherein nothing can be grown.
We will not slash and burn.
We will not poison the wells of the future.
We will not leave you hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for the sake of our own greed for comfort.
And trinkets.
It's the intergeneric.
We'll take care of you when you're young, you take care of us when we're old.
Well, one of the smartest men I ever knew, my college roommate, now has two PhDs, he told me many, many years ago, best strategy, well proven, treat people the best you can the first you meet them and after that you treat them as they treat you.
That is the best strategy for doing well in the world.
You treat people the best you can.
The moment that you meet them, and after that, you treat them as they treat you.
If they continue to treat you well, you continue to treat them well.
If they lie and cheat, you are no longer bound by any moral obligations towards them.
Morality is not a train track that you must follow regardless of all circumstances.
Morality is a navigational tool.
It's a GPS. It's a goodness positioning system.
I'm not going to keep going on this train track because this train track is blown up and there's people on it and there's baby carriages on it and there's cars on it and trucks on it, so I'm going to shift over.
I'm going to go somewhere else.
The only people who want you to deal with moral standards, take the high road.
The high road leads off a cliff.
You treat people the best you can the moment that you meet them and after that you treat them as they treat you.
Oh, you're lowering yourselves to their standards.
It's like, no, I'm simply recognizing that there are no standards.
If somebody steals my bike, the best way for me to get it back is to steal it back.
I'm going to do that.
They don't respect my property rights.
Why the hell should I respect their property rights?
Younger generation meet older generation.
Treat them the best you can the moment that you meet them and after that you treat them as they treat you and they have treated you As disposable financial Kleenexes used to wipe any slight excess from their noses.
They have treated you as disposable.
They have not given much of a rat's ass about your future.
They've sold you off to banksters.
They've sold you off through fiat currency.
They've sold you off through unfunded liabilities.
And they have believed, which is not credible, but they have believed politicians who have come and said, here's something for nothing.
Ignore the news lowering around the newborns.
Ignore that.
That's just crazy case-elected capitalists, right?
So somebody has to suffer as this financial magic carpet ride hits the ground.
There is a high, an illusory high that we're going to have to crash down from.
Somebody's going to have to suffer for it.
Now, should it be the young?
No.
The young have historically done their part in fights.
The young have suffered enough.
The young have suffered to the tune of millions in World War I and World War II, just to name them.
Two of the wars that resulted in 50 million deaths.
The young have really done their part throughout history.
Do not ask the young to do it again.
That is unjust.
You know, this is where ancient vampires who feed upon the living...
This is the analogy.
This is why this resonates with us.
Because we have old people who sell off the young for the sake of immediate comfort and then whine that it wasn't their fault.
They had no choice in the matter.
They're victims and so on.
You know, vampires.
You have to take responsibility for what you did and what you didn't do.
And in North America and in the European Union and all over the world, all over the world, there's nobody who doesn't know that governments are going into debt.
There's nobody who doesn't know that governments are going into debt and that debt is going to have to be paid at some point or there's going to have to be a repudiation of debt or there's going to have to be some sort of hyperinflation Which is another way of defaulting on the debt.
And again, that's just screwing the future for the sake of appeasing the past.
Somebody is going to have to suffer for these bad decisions.
Is it the politicians?
No.
Politicians are voted in by a majority.
See?
Old Greek people start worrying about their pensions, and do they say, well, we knew this day was coming.
We have to take responsibility.
It was a good ride while it lasted.
Clearly, the young people aren't responsible for the system that we voted for for 40 years, so we're going to do...
We're going to do about 1% of what we've demanded young people do when we run into trouble, which is to march off and get killed in wars.
We're going to do 1% of what we have continually demanded of the young, and we're going to take some personal sacrifices, and we're going to make do on less.
Imagine this.
In World War I, you were told by someone, well, you can go to war, or you can live on less money.
They would have chosen to live on less money rather than go to war.
What old people are being...
Offered as the just desserts of their irrational, fantastical delusions is far less than what has been inflicted on the young throughout history.
How about we give austerity medals to the old people rather than pin medals and hand out flags to the children of the dead young?
How about the young people say, for once, no.
Not our mess.
Not our fight.
I was nine years old.
I was not even born.
I was not even a twinkle in my daddy's eye.
When all of this was set in motion, you people voted for it.
You people wanted it.
You people begged for it.
You people shouted down anyone who dared to say trying to get something for nothing is putting a noose on the newborns.
Stop selling your children to bankers.
Stop believing politicians who give you their greasy smiles and kiss your newborns, suck out an eyeball, and call it a meal.
Stop believing the liars.
I know it's comfortable to believe liars.
I know it's comfortable to imagine that you live in some My Little Pony universe where you get stuff for nothing.
I get that.
It's comforting.
Yeah, I get that.
It's comforting to think I'm the best at everything.
Take a test and find out.
Let's get some reality in this here neighborhood.
So who should suffer?
Well, two groups of people should suffer.
Number one, the massive, swollen, cancerous financial class that supplies the government with the drug used to dope the people into believing you can get something for nothing.
That financial class needs to be whittled down and huge.
Those people should suffer.
Those people should see their incomes and their assets evaporate as this fiat currency house of cards come crashing to the ground.
Absolutely.
They should suffer.
Because they are the drug suppliers.
Well, they're the people who sell to the drug dealers who sell to the people.
They're like the growers of the cocaine who ship it to the drug dealers who ship it to the people.
And that analogy is vastly incomplete.
Because at least you become a drug consumer and a drug dealer to some degree by choice.
This is more like a gang that kidnaps and strips children of their kidneys to sell on the black market to people who've destroyed their own kidneys through bad living.
I was a smoker for 40 years.
I got me some lung cancer.
Go get me the healthy young lungs of an 18-year-old.
Because that's fair.
Did he smoke?
No.
I need him.
And I'm old.
Help me.
Don't you have a heart?
Oh, do you have a heart?
I'll take that too.
My ticker's getting a little ancient.
Who should suffer?
Let's have an honest conversation about that.
And I would love to hear the moral case as to why the young should suffer for the decisions of the old.
I mean, I think that would be fascinating.
I'd love to hear that case.
Why should my daughter's teeth be ripped out because someone refused to floss for 40 years?
I don't understand how that could even remotely be called moral.
Why should the kids who study have their grades stripped away and given to the kids who didn't?
Why should the eyes of the young be ripped out?
Because old people stared into the fires of dilution and rotted their eyeballs out for 40 years.
Why should the money and potential of the young be sucked out of their future and host down for delusory, predatory, middle-aged and old people who voted for the same lies year after year after year and shouted down anyone who said, this is not sustainable, this is wrong.
This is a violation of all that is good and noble and virtuous in the human condition.
Who should suffer?
Not me.
I've been squalling about this.
I've been raising my barbaric libertarian york from the top roof of the world for over thirty years.
I have acquitted myself in this fight with honour and dignity and courage.
I have no reason to suffer for having spoken the truth and taken great personal hits for thirty years.
I have acquitted myself with dignity.
I walk tall.
My conscience is not only clear, it is glowing.
It is a Batman searchlight against the low clouds of human delusion, spraying out reason, truth, evidence and virtue to everyone with a digital network who can listen and see.
My honor is clear.
My conscience is not only perfect, it glows.
And my daughter?
Should she suffer for the delusions and the cowardice of her elders?
Is that fair?
Is that what we've been reduced to as a society?
Is that what we have descended into as a society?
That, like any ancient addicts, we will now rip off a child's piggy bank to get our next fix.
Is that really what we have descended into?
A bunch of ancient cryptkeeper zombies circling the savings of my daughter, waiting until she goes out for a run, To go in with bony clawed hands and seize everything she's got.
Is that really what we have become?
Have we really descended into this kind of horrorscape, this kind of zombie movie?
And are we really going to serve up the young to these deluded masters?
