Aug. 17, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:34
3382 George Soros Hack: What They Don’t Tell You!
In the latest of a series of hacks and leaks, over 2,500 documents from several George Soros organizations have been released online. Many of the documents are from the Open Society Foundations, regarding influencing international immigration policies and taking advantage of the European Migrant Crisis. Other news relates to the “unique opportunity” brought about by the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and a $650,000 payment to Black Lives Matter. Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
So we're going to talk a little bit about George Soros, the cryptkeeper-faced financier who seems to be just a little bit on the lefty side and seems to have more money than God and all of his angels put together.
He's given about $8 billion to his Open Society organizations, pretty much pro-globalist stuff, 650,000 to Black Lives Matter groups and so on.
And according to Breitbart, quote, a series of documents leaked from George Soros' Open Society Foundation have revealed a number of startling revelations about the work of the NGO, non-governmental organization, When it comes to combating what they refer to as xenophobic parties in countries around Europe, according to at least one document the Foundation has been calling for the censorship of language in the European Parliament.
They term as hateful and have been actively working with various socialist members of the European Parliament to train them on how to combat xenophobic populism, which I think means having some reservations So,
it's fairly nasty stuff, and I'm here to make a case in defense of George Soros, because I've had requests to talk about this guy forever, but it doesn't matter.
I'm going to make the case that he's merely a symptom of a self-betrayal in the West.
And what, of course, happens is people dislike the way he's funding, the way he's spending his money, and so maybe they want to restrict that, which is further incursions into property rights and voluntary associations and so on.
So I'm going to make a case.
Hopefully you can hold your nose and follow me through it, and then let me know if it makes any sense to you.
Look, human beings are innately conservative.
I don't mean like, here's a faster tablet, computer or smartwatch.
I mean, they're conservative around values, around fundamental changes in the value structures of society around them.
Because that's really, really risky stuff.
Sure, once out of every hundred times you get an American Revolution, which is a shrinking in the size and power of the state...
But a lot of other times you kind of get a French Revolution where a lot of nuns get skewed with various sharp implements and society decays into a horrifying series of bloodletting and guillotining and Lord knows they eventually beg the king to come back and save them from their own ideological addictions.
So we're kind of, you know, people resist information, they resist arguments, and, you know, for those of us out in the world making arguments, that can sometimes be frustrating.
But I fundamentally love and respect and adore that aspect of human nature.
It's fundamental...
Tree roots that reach to the center of the earth kind of immobility.
I think that's really, really important.
Society is supposed to change slowly and voluntarily and peacefully through debates, through arguments, and so on.
So I'm going to give you sort of an example.
It doesn't mean it has to be a millennia or two.
Like a hundred years ago, a little bit more than a hundred years ago.
In America, like 80-90% of the population was involved in farming in one form or another.
Now, in America, that's down to like 2%, right?
So, you know, about 80-90% drop.
And that happened over the course of 100 years and pretty quietly and relatively peacefully and, you know, productivity went up and farm machinery replaced labor and all that kind of stuff.
So there's a transition that occurs.
A hundred years, a massive switch from, you know, rural to urban, from farming to manufacturing and now welfare.
But it was a relatively gradual process and a huge change.
Let's compare that to, you know, Stalin's forced collectivized farming in the Ukraine, where they just forced everyone into these collectivized farms, which resulted in one of the worst famines in human history outside of almost the same process that happened under Chairman Mao in China.
Where tens of millions of people combined died.
I mean, the death count of this collectivized farming just in the Ukraine and just in China was not far off that of the entire Second World War in the West.
So here we have a transition from one farming style to another, very peaceful, over 100 years, voluntary.
Here we have one that caused the deaths of tens of millions of people.
If you've seen the killing fields, you've seen some of the examples under the radical communist regime in the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
They forced city dwellers onto farms with the attendant results of mass starvation and all this kind of stuff.
So there's two ways that you can try to achieve change in society.
You can engage with the people.
You can build the case.
You can learn how to speak well.
You can work on charisma, honesty, openness, humor.
And you can try to engage the people with a better or different way of doing things.
And that's what we call...
Civilization.
And this requires that you have a fairly good view of the people.
You reason with people.
You respect.
You force people.
You hold in contempt.
So, if you think that society should be doing things differently or better, You have the choice to engage with the people and make your case, which of course risks rejection and risks the fact that other people are busy and can choose to ignore you or choose to make fun of you or just choose to get on with their lives and bypass you completely.
So that's kind of a bit of a risk.
Of course, that's the approach that I'm taking, which is to have hopefully a series of good ideas, engage with the people, try to make my case and see where it goes from there.
On the other hand, if you are full of, say, bile and hatred and impatience, and if you are full of contempt for the people, then you do not engage with the people.
You engage with their government.
And that is a very, very different situation.
Engaging with the government is saying, I either can't convince the people, my ideas are terrible, Or the people are so stupid that my wonderful, great, amazing ideas won't take their natural florid root in their stony, idiotic hearts.
And so when people engage with the government to get their ideas across, to get their solutions across, rather than with the people, they are...
Expressing their contempt and hatred for the people and basically the idea that they should be viewed as livestock to be cattle prodded from here to there all over the place.
Now, let me tell you something as a public intellectual for just past my 10 year anniversary on YouTube at least and I was writing a little bit before that and speaking decades before that.
But as a public intellectual for 10 years, let me tell you something.
You know, if you're really bad in life, you're going to come back as someone who has to go through my inbox.
Because there are a lot of people in the world with bad ideas.
Fewer in this listenership than in most, I would say.
But a lot of people in the world with bad ideas.
You know, just go to a bar, go to a coffee shop, and just sit down and bring up problems.
And there's always, you know, people, oh, all you need to do is this, and all you need to do is that.
It's like, then why are you in a bar?
So lots of people with bad ideas and a very strong desire to implement those bad ideas.
Those people tend to lose in the marketplace of ideas.
Things like socialism and communism and so on and all of this New World Order stuff and globalism and wickedly dysfunctional immigration policies, they don't win in the marketplace of ideas.
So those people want to run to use the state.
Because if you use the state, you get what you want, right?
If you use the state, you get what you want.
Like if you want to kiss a woman and you...
Woo her, she might say no.
But if you just grab her and assault her with a kiss, you get your kiss.
And so people are drawn to the use of force because it is a guaranteed way for them to get what they want.
Now, People like the Open Society Globalists and so on, they have a particular vision of how the world, and in particular Europe, should run.
They don't seem to be nagging places like China or Japan for a lack of migrants, but they have a particular vision of how the world should run.
And they can choose to use the state to get their way.
And it's legal.
And it's effective, of course.
I mean, it's working out beautifully for what they want.
So is it really their fault that someone who has a very strong desire and the legal means to achieve it uses the power of the state to enact their vision?
No, it's not their fault.
And it isn't even their problem.
Fundamentally, it's our problem.
Their capacity to use force to inflict their views upon the rest of us is not their fault.
It's our fault.
And why?
Because we did it first.
So with regards to power, when you give the government the power to control trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of lives in any particular country or tens of millions of lives Well, that power exists.
That genie is out of the bottle.
The ring has been forged and is now rolling around the countryside.
And so when the government has that power to create money out of thin air and, you know, relative to George Soros' wealth, well, how did he become wealthy?
Well, I don't know all the specific details other than apparently the Bank of England was crying at some point.
But my guess is, like a lot of people in the finance area, he became wealthy because the government herds all of your money into the stock market and into financial instruments, whether you want to or not.
Because you can keep your money, in which case it erodes because the government keeps printing and creating more and more money, which lowers the value of your currency.
So basically your gold is turning to dust under your mattress, and the only way to save it is to put it into the stock market or put it into tax-protected 401k or RRSP, like retirement plans of some kind.
So people are forced into the stock market who damn well don't want to be there, which means there's a huge amount of money sloshing around back and forth in the stock market that's kind of been herded and corralled in there.
And there's lots of profit to be made when there's huge amounts of money sloshing around looking for tiny little changes in fortunes or profits or quarterly results.
And CEOs end up just focusing on real short-term stuff because investment is always – A, it's automated, and B, there's way too much of it in the stock market.
It's all put there by the government, or a lot of it is.
So yeah, there's a lot of money to be made.
And of course, governments are manipulating their currency.
And if you're one of the privileged financial elite who gets hold of the new central bank printed currency before everyone else, you can use it at its full value.
And then it gets diluted by the time it gets to everyone else.
You know, you get the popsicle, they just get the popsicle stick with a vague bit of woody flavor on it.
And so even this wealth in this financial world is generated through state power.
And then they use the power of the state to get what they want ideologically.
So people get mad at George Soros.
But why?
Because the reality is we had a goal called, I don't know, helping the poor.
And did we say, listen, I'm going to really rack my brains about the best way to help the poor.
I'm going to come up with great ideas.
Maybe I'll start businesses to raise demand for workers so that will drive up the wages of the poor and make them less poor.
No.
What happened was about 50 years ago in LBJ's Great Society programs, the War on Poverty programs, is everyone said, well, we really want to help the poor, so what we're going to do, you see, is we are going to have the government create money out of thin air, borrow money out of thin air, and then spend it on the poor, and then kick the can down the road until the Western world have unfunded liabilities in the hundreds of trillions of dollars.
That doesn't help the poor.
It's called buying votes.
But we allowed our sentimentality to be taken over by the languicides, by the verbally adept parasitical classes, and we were guilted and shamed, and the pathological altruism so common to the Western soul fell before the combine harvester of, well, Don't you want to help the poor?
And then we overlooked the fact that the way we were helping the poor was through violence, was through the coercive monopoly of fiat currency, was through the absolutely unjust and immoral use of the unborn as collateral to foreign banksters to get money to buy votes in the here and now.
We handed charity.
This is just one of many, many examples.
We handed charity over to the state.
In other words, people who wanted to, quote, help the poor, used the power of the state to achieve that end, did not help the poor, and now the poor are in a worse position than they were even in 1965, because now they're trapped in poverty.
There have been a couple of generations in the welfare state where all the human skills have been lost about how to get and keep a job.
And, by the way, the education has got worse for the poor.
And last but not least, there's a huge amount of debt which is going to have to be paid off or repudiated at some point, which is going to mean that those who've become addicted to the drip, drip, drip Chinese water torture of government cheese, well, it's going to run out and it's going to be ugly.
So when people get mad at George Soros for using the power of the state to achieve his ideological goals, how is that different from the welfare state that they support or from old age pensions that they support or from government health care that they support or you name it?
It's not that the integrity of the West is being murdered, it's that it committed suicide and people are picking up the carrion meat that's left over.
And that's really, really an important thing to understand.
We were given all these great gifts of freedom by people who'd suffered through excessive and hyper-powerful states, and then we got lazy, and we got sentimental, and we thought, oh, you know, this old thing, well, there's these giant buildings, and in front there's a man living in a cardboard box, and we just take a little bit of the money from these giant buildings and we give it to the guy living in a cardboard box, and blah, blah, blah, right?
Won't it make everyone feel better?
Ooh!
Don't you know?
That woman happened to marry a man who was a drunk.
And he sleeps around.
And he got fired from his job.
And she has three kids.
Hmm.
So let's just take a little bit of money from the more responsible and happily married people and we'll give it to the woman with three kids and then she'll be better and everything will be fine.
Sorry, you just created really perverse incentives for people to have kids out of wedlock and you end up with what we call the welfare state, which is basically the single mother state and that is what we have to live with now.
And we all have this.
We all have this.
Look, I guarantee you, if you rifle through your list of wishes in the world, There's something you want the government to do.
Maybe you want the government to control George Soros' spending.
Or maybe you want the government to ban this.
Or maybe you want the government to support this.
Or maybe you want the government to pay your grandmother's social security or old age pensions, which the government doesn't have the money to have and is just stealing from the young to do it.
There's something you want the government to do, and it's that thin edge of the wedge that these people get their little hooks into you.
Oh, don't you want the government to solve this?
Don't you want to keep the view that you have from your condo?
Well, the government should set up zoning so that nobody can build between you and the lake, and thus the future and the freedoms are sold for the sake of a good view.
Ah, what you could do, of course, is buy all the land between you and the lake, and then nobody can buy in it.
But see, that's kind of pricey.
That's kind of pricey.
If we just get the government to do it, we are set.
So, the cause is the power of the state.
Now, the effect is varied, but the problem is that the state has so much power to change and control and manage and borrow and profit and invest and tax and tariff and manipulate and regulate.
It has so much power.
That trying to control all of the effects of that power is a pointless fool's game.
And in fact, it's how we feed into more of that power.
Well, the state has so much power it's having these negative effects because people are controlling the state.
So what we need to do, see, is we need to start controlling all of the people who are trying to control the state.
Well, actually, that just gives more power to the state.
And that's really a fool's game.
So you may be tempted into saying, well, what George Soros is doing is terrible and so on and so on.
But is it any different from what other people want the state to do, maybe even what you want the state to do?
Oh, you see, we want to make sure that the poor get educated.
Really?
So how are you going to do that?
Well, you see, we're going to take money from people who've got excess money and we're going to use it to set up schoolhouses in poor neighborhoods and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
And what happens?
Well, there was a 97-98% literacy in most parts of the United States, at least in the North, in the 19th century, and now the literacy rate is far below that.
So before government schools, well, Americans could plow through a book as complex as Moby Dick, and Tom Paine's Common Sense sold 75,000 copies in a 2-plus million population.
It was a very complex political work, very highly literate, very highly educated, very highly...
We're linguistically capable.
And now, you know, people are, you know, thumb and movement mouth reading through Pokemon Go help screens and trying to decipher what these strange symbols mean.
And so what's happened is the education has gotten much worse because the government has taken it over.
As Milton Friedman said once, if the government were put in charge of the Sahara Desert, there'd be a shortage of sand in about five years.
So I understand people are frustrated at Saurus and this manipulation and the buying and selling and this and that and the other and how dare he and this and that and the other.
How dare he?
You know, let's look a little closer to home.
We are the society and the culture that has created this vast amount of government power.
Is it really something that we are going to condemn someone else for using to further their ideological aims just because those ideological aims happen to go against the grain for us?
Come on.
If you're in a sword fight and someone grabs your sword, is it really just and fair and right for you to condemn swordplay of any kind?
