Aug. 25, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:22
3390 American University of Afghanistan Terrorist Attack | True News
There are reports of a "complex" terrorist attack on the campus of American University in the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul. In other news, there has been a United States taxpayer funded American University in Afghanistan since 2006. Stefan Molyneux explains the details of the terrorist attack and explores why a western style liberal arts university even exists within a third-world country which is fiercely opposed to western values. Background Information: http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/08/24/report-kabuls-american-university-siege/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 Freedomain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
Hey!
I bet you didn't know there was such a thing as the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul.
But if you did know that there was such a thing, how safe do you think it would be?
Well, answers were provided today and as we speak, because the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul is reportedly under attack, according to a variety of journalists, Afghan officials, and the students currently hiding in closets at the school.
According to a quote, he also went on to say, Now, at least one student has been killed and estimates range from 14 to 16 others who were injured.
Some of them were injured because they were in the second floor and they tried to get away from the gunmen by jumping out and broke their legs and all kinds of stuff that's generally not in too many student handbook invitations to come and study at a glorious university.
The Afghan Ministry of the Interior has said that the two gunmen are still believed to be inside The university compound, I assume, walking around in the electricity is off pitch blackness, trying to find people breathing and rectify that situation.
There's reports that there have been no hostages because it's not Iran.
So this is a completely crazy situation.
And it's not without precedent.
So two professors at this university, one American and one Australian, We're recently abducted at gunpoint outside the campus.
And let's just say it's a somewhat deteriorating security condition, not only in the capital, but across all of Afghanistan.
And two people employed by the university were actually killed in 2014 because a suicide bomber set off an explosion in a restaurant in Afghanistan.
Kabul that was popular with expats.
The two professors who were kidnapped, their whereabouts remain unknown, and hopefully it will not be in the plural for each one of them.
So, I guess like you, I was a little surprised to find that there was such a university in Kabul.
Looked into a little bit of its history.
It opened in 2006.
It has about 1,700 students, though I guess that will be changed as of today.
And March 2005.
The first lady at the time of the United States and former teacher Laura Bush visited the site and announced a substantial grant from the United States Agency for International Development just to help the university get off the ground.
In other words, she went out and said, Hey, I'm going to do really wonderful things with other people's money.
I'm a teacher, but you couldn't pay me enough to stick around.
And then she went back to, I guess, being behind the continued guard of the Secret Service as the wife of an ex-president.
Hey, it's just great when you can do your virtual signaling at other people's expense and be flown back and forth all you like.
So USAID continues to be...
The main financial backer of the university as the university, I guess, flails around attempting to find sources of private funding in a country where the World Bank, usually fairly reliable on these issues, just says that the average annual income per capita is Very low.
There have been estimates that it's a couple of hundred dollars, but it's pretty hard to convert goats to gold, so that's a little bit of a challenge.
Now, the university in Kabul held its first commencement ceremony on May 26, 2011, because it awarded undergraduate degrees to 32 students.
Graduates.
And that is, I don't know, off the top of my head, a cost of approximately $10z per graduate.
And in spring 2015, just a little under 36% of the students are women, and more than 85% of the students get financial assistance.
So it's good to know that student loans and student grants aren't just a problem in America.
It's a problem in America that, like so many problems in America, can be easily exported through bad foreign policy decisions to other countries.
As well.
And the former president of the American University of Afghanistan stated that for 2013 school year, over 50% of the entering students were women.
Now, when you have a war-shattered country known as the Graveyard of Empires, where people are relatively illiterate and The average income is a couple of hundred bucks per year.
What do you need?
Well, you need a very complex legal department at your university.
In fall 2008, Stanford Law School's Afghanistan Legal Education Project was launched at the university.
It provides introductory legal training, and it is the first new text in decades dedicated to the legal system in Afghanistan.
Just in case you're wondering whether there was much free market demand for this, I can put that question to rest by pointing out that the American University in Afghanistan and Stanford University received a $7.2 million grant.
For this program from the US State Department.
So if you're wondering why you A don't have a job or B if you do have a job, it's very insecure and the taxes are very high.
That's because it's really, really important to have complex legal systems and theories taught in Afghanistan.
So why?
It's a fundamental question.
Why?
Oh, why is there an American university in Kabul?
I really couldn't answer other than people think that you just set up first world institutions in third world countries and pretty much you get first world countries.
I don't really think that's how it works.
Social progress tends to be a little bit more complex than all of that.
And there is a big question in the West.
How can we help third world countries?
Well, the two answers that have generally come to the forefront is number one, foreign aid, taking the We're good to go.
Which makes the government in third world countries so valuable that there's continual civil wars, overthrows, coup d'etats and other forms of non-peaceful transitions of power that everyone's trying to grab the golden goose of the foreign aid stuffed with gold government in the third world.
So foreign aid has proven to be a complete disaster.
The second answer to how do we help third world countries is military intervention.
See, what you do is you print a lot of money, you pay a lot of people, and you go and kill a lot of other people in third world countries.
And if you put all of that magic sauce into the blender, what comes out is not a destroyed country and ISIS. What comes out apparently is a glorious first world Republican style Jeffersonian democracy, except exactly the opposite seems to happen over and over again.
Another way in which the West seems to want to help third world countries is to pay for farmers to produce a lot of stuff, then scoop it up and keep it from first world markets, thus driving up the price that farmers are allowed to charge, dumping all of this produce in third world countries, which I guess allows the dictators to feed their troops, but unfortunately destroys the agricultural market in third world.
These third world countries, so there's another example wherein the government waving guns in everyone's face and forcibly moving resources from A to B, A to Z, and all over the place results in general disaster, except for all of the people who like to preen around with their virtue signaling and claim that they're doing a wonderful thing because violence and the coercion and counterfeiting of state power always produces such wonderful things, at least if you listen to the people who like to pretend that they do.
But I have another suggestion.
Let me sort of run past the planet and you can let me know what you think in the comments below.
So I was sitting here before doing this show, brainstorming, okay, what are some pretty cool, pretty good, pretty productive stuff that the West has developed?
A couple of things, political things.
You know, there's other things like philosophy, the Socratic method, logic, reason, evidence, science, medicine.
But, you know, those are largely effects of either intellectual movements or effects of the free market.
So I would say a relative free market, the more the merrier, but, you know, what we have in the West is a relative free market.
So free markets...
Pretty good thing to develop.
Now, this one is a toughie for a lot of people, even in the first world, but certainly in the third world.
I know you've got some, let's say, religious beliefs that you really, really want to impose on everyone else.
And the best way to do that, of course, as Christians in the West thought for many centuries before this finally occurred, you really, really want to Use the power of the state to impose your religious views on other people.
Well, the West went through this for hundreds and hundreds of years and eventually recognized that the only way to stop bloody religious conflicts from continually consuming and destroying your society is to separate church and state, to move religion from state policy to the free market of free speech and have people try to convince each other of the benefits of their religious beliefs rather than use the power of the state to enforce religious ideology on other people.
So these two, you know, kind of go a little bit hand in hand.
Separation of church and state and freedom of speech, pretty important.
If you have good ideas and you're good at debating, you want freedom of speech.
I love freedom of speech.
I kiss the Roman togas of the goddess of freedom of speech.
If you generally don't have good ideas and have, I don't know, We're good to go.
To be exposed to people so that they can be ridiculed and proven wrong and driven from public discourse like the squelching, soul-sucking demons of tyranny they generally are.
So, separation of church and state, some free markets, freedom of speech, equality before the law is really, really important.
And, well, that's a...
It's a little shaky these days in the West, but it is something that we should aim at, that even the king, even the president, even the prime minister must be subject to the law, because otherwise those who wish to be the most lawless are the ones most desperate to claim and maintain political power, to remove themselves from the constraints of law.
So yeah, free market, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, equality before the law, Great things.
Private ownership of things rather than public ownership of things is fantastic.
Now these ideas, and there's more, but you know, there's a couple of the basics.
These ideas were developed over thousands of years and cost millions and millions of lives to achieve.
And they're not just theoretical.
They were, of course, theoretical for a time.
And then they were implemented in the 19th century, 18th century, and have a little bit decayed or perhaps a lot decayed over the 20th century.
But they still remain...
As values that the West claims to like.
And in general, if you appeal to the separation of church and state, you're going to do okay in a Western debate.
Free speech, free markets is a little bit more dicey, but these are ideals somewhat respected in the West.
Not only has the West developed these ideas, but the West has actually implemented these ideas and the effects are empirically have been unrolling throughout world history for the world to see for the past 150 years, 200 years, depending on which aspect of these sort of four pillars we're looking at.
A couple of hundred years they have been implemented in the West and there has been some absolutely great and wonderful stuff coming out of it, particularly out of the free market.
Now, You may have heard the saying, I guess it's more of an aphorism about making pills, right?
That the first pill costs you $10 billion to make, and after that, they cost like a buck to make.
And everyone says, well, it only costs a buck to make this pill.
Well, you know, all the trials and testing and regulatory hoops you had to go through at the beginning was where the real cost was.
Again, thousands of years and tens if not hundreds of millions of lives were spent in the West to implement these ideas of freedom and property rights.
And limited government and separation of church and state, all that kind of good stuff.
And, you know, what the West never did was copyright them.
You see, so you out there in the world as a whole, you're watching this, and you're thinking, gosh, you know those Western countries, they've got some good stuff going on.
Well, what's amazing is the West spent $10 billion, so to speak, to develop the first pill.
Never patented or copyrighted it.
And so if you out there in the world wish to do things like establish free market, separate church and state, have equality before the law, have all these other wonderful things, freedom of speech, you can do it and no one's going to really get mad at you.
Well, okay, maybe the people who have bad ideas and the people who are currently profiting from state power, they might get a little testy with you.
But nobody in the West is going to take you to court because it was never copyrighted.
It was never patented.
So the West has built the pill and has gone through massive amounts of sacrifices showing the world how to achieve a just and fair, reasonable, prosperous, and peaceful society.
And so now what can happen is the world can say, okay, we can do that.
The second pill is so much cheaper to make, we can go and copy the principles that the West has developed over thousands of years and millions and millions of lives, and we can make a free society for ourselves.
Isn't that wonderful?
Because the one thing that's true, and this American university in Afghanistan is the primary example of that, I don't really know that in a largely cashless and illiterate society, there is a giant burning, vacuum-packed market demand for advanced MBA programs.
So why is this stuff in Afghanistan?
Well, because the government...
It takes money from taxpayers and ships it over to Afghanistan to do its virtue signaling and, I don't know, makes some money by selling some contracts to people and pretending that Afghanistan is something different than it currently is.
There's no market demand for it, which is why the government has to force people to pay for it and force people to maintain it.
And this is why when you put a university up, In a third world country, well, unless the culture has changed to the point where people respect freedom of speech, separation of church and state, market forces, free markets, and so on, well, you're going to get this kind of stuff.
You can't bribe, bully, steal, and pay your way into prosperity and civilization.
So I invite the world.
Look at what we in the West sometimes are dangerously close to forgetting.
Look at all these wonderful things that the West developed at great cost to itself, which is now available to you for free, for free.
Free market, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, equality before the law, the subjugation of the hierarchy of power to the universality of ethics.
It could be yours for the taking.
Take the ideas, implement them yourselves.
And then, if you want to enjoy freedom, you've already got it at home.
