July 24, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
12:45
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| Hello, hello my friends. | |
| How are you doing? It's Estevan Molyneux, of course. | |
| Time for your daily argument. | |
| And here we're going to pose the foundational but enormously essential question. | |
| What if you're just a useful tool of state power? | |
| What if the contents of your mind have been cast into you like evil demon seeds ready to flower into worship of ever-expanding state power? | |
| What if you are a giant lever? | |
| by which freedoms are dislodged and sent down into the canyons of history. | |
| What if you are merely lubrication for the greased wheels of the rolling stock of state power? | |
| It's an important question and I spent many years there myself so I mean I'm there with you in the trenches my friends but here's a couple of questions to ask yourself because remember the government spend an enormous amount of time putting various thoughts and ideas into your mind you spent 12 years probably in government schools maybe more in government sanctioned daycares or direct government daycares and those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of instruction they weren't accidental right you know funnily enough if you grew up in Soviet Russia you tended to be fairly pro-communist at least to begin with so maybe the ideas that are planted in your head are investments for the payback of worshipping state power or in other words feeling anxiety About freedom, | |
| because when somebody proposes freedom, when somebody proposes economic freedom, i.e. | |
| you get to keep your money and not hand it all over to the government in the form of taxes, when people talk about less regulation, ending the welfare state, and so on, what do you feel when most people feel anxiety? | |
| They feel stressed, they feel worried, they feel concerned. | |
| Why is that? Freedom is a good thing, right? | |
| Why would we feel anxiety and fear regarding basic freedoms? | |
| Well, because that's how we're programmed. | |
| So, we think we have the fantasy that a problem is solved by turning it over to the state, and we have a paranoid fantasy that increased freedom will cause those problems to get worse. | |
| Well, this is not accidental, right? | |
| I'm not saying there's some Big plan, you know, like the lions who hunt the zebra who end up circling it and then pouncing on it, or the hyenas or whoever, the jackals who are chasing, they don't have a big plan. | |
| They don't have a whiteboard. They just have an instinct for bringing down their prey. | |
| And this is the case with the state and propaganda. | |
| It's not just the government. It's academia, which is dependent on state power. | |
| It's the media industry, which is dependent on state power, licenses and government protected unions and so on. | |
| It is all, you know, one big mishmash designed to turn you into a kind of human crop, wherein you believe that the water in the air is state power, and you believe that a freezing storm is freedom. | |
| And this is where your emotions are triggered. | |
| So you could be, you could be, Just a useful tool for state power and those around you. | |
| They are robots sown by evil farmers to consistently and mindlessly chant, more state, more state, more state, because of course that's what the state, hey, I'll deliver you more state if you just ask for it out of the goodness of your heart. | |
| So here's just two quick examples. | |
| There are many, many more, but it's a litmus test. | |
| Are you a useful tool to state power? | |
| So first let's look at environmentalism. | |
| Now environmentalism of course has, as reasonable people do, concern for the continuity of natural resources. | |
| We don't want to waste natural resources. | |
| Now there are more extreme environmentalists who want to remove the general protections of civilization from humanity and have us live basically like apes in the jungle but let's just talk more reasonable kind of environmentalism that we want to use nature to pursue human comfort and human the achievement of human potential but we don't want to strip like strip mine nature to the point where it can sustain so the question is here well how do we do that so the first thing that I would say is we want to make the consumption of natural resources as efficient as humanly possible the less we waste the less we use by definition so to move Resource consumption activities from the government to the private sector is to move them from wasteful and inefficient to as efficient as possible over time. | |
| So if you look at, say, Rockefeller in the 19th century, how did he end up so dominant in the oil business? | |
| Well, because he found ways to turn the waste products of oil production into useful products for the market. | |
| And, by the way, he saved the whales. | |
| Because Americans used to light their homes, as did other people, with whale oil. | |
| It came from whale, of course, came from whales. | |
| And when he produced kerosene, which was cheaper, people stopped hunting whales, probably to extinction. | |
| So, of course, you don't hear about that. | |
| So, If you are an environmentalist, you want, you know, like that old myth about the indigenous population, the natives in America, they used every part of the buffalo. | |
| It's not true at all, but you want to be as efficient as humanly possible. | |
| That means moving resource consumption activities from the government, which is wasteful and inefficient, into the private sector, which is efficient. | |
| And the more time goes by, the more efficient it will become, because whoever can Either reduce the number of resources necessary to produce a product or find useful and economically valuable uses for the byproducts of his widget production is going to end up better off in the long run like somebody who buys land rips up all the trees sells them all never replants is not getting much economic value out of the land and therefore can't bid that much to gain control of it but somebody who replaces the trees somebody who plants the trees and lets them grow again he gets a sustainable renewable resource and therefore can bid the most for the land so If you are a genuine environmentalist, | |
| of course, well, moving people from the third world to the first world is enormously destructive for the environment, and therefore environmentalists should have something to say about that. | |
| But even more importantly, environmentalists should be for privatizing everything they can get their hands on, because it reduces inefficiency. | |
| Environmentalists should be, if they're rational, if they really care about nature, rather than being useful tools for the expansion of state power. | |
| Environmentalists should go crazy about national debts. | |
| They should hate and loathe and massively oppose spending deficit financing. | |
| They should massively oppose things like selling government bonds and so on. | |
| Because government bonds are just a guarantee of future tax increases. | |
| The government doesn't produce anything, just consumes things. | |
| And therefore, if the government is going to pay you three cents on the dollar, you know, year over year and pay you off in five years, well, you're just guaranteeing yourself a future tax increase by having the government pretend to pay you more than what it takes. | |
| And the reason why, if you look at sort of the $20 trillion plus that America has in national debt, well, that's $20 trillion of resource consumption. | |
| You spend the money, you're consuming resources somewhere, somewhere. | |
| That's $20 trillion of resource consumption that has happened already that is based on debt. | |
| You know, think of all of the things that you can put on your credit card. | |
| You can go out and buy, you know, half of an electronics store if you want. | |
| Oh, how lovely. And what's happening is you're consuming resources in the here and now that otherwise you would have to consume later, if at all. | |
| So environmentalists should be massively against the government running things, so inefficient waste resources, and they should be massively against National debts and national deficits and unfunded liabilities and all that kind of stuff so this is just very tip of the iceberg stuff but if they were genuine environmentalists who cared about the sustainability of nature they would be pro-free market and anti-government debt and deficits but have you ever ever seen a significant environmentalist group that rails against the national debt that rails against deficits and demands the privatization of roads imagine if roads were privatized you know one of the reasons America has this giant Oil burning car culture is because in the 1950s under Eisenhower the federal government built all of these interstate highways all of these roads that let everyone move out move far away and of course people try to escape terrible government schools in inner cities by moving out to the suburbs which again expands oh just think of the 2008 housing crisis 10% of America's housing stock was empty nobody was living there Can you imagine how much environmental destruction occurred or how much environmental consumption occurred in order to produce that 10% of the housing stock which lay empty? | |
| Because the government forced banks to take loans from people who weren't qualified for those loans for political correctness and quotas and all that kind of stuff. | |
| So just imagine! If you were an environmentalist, what you would do rationally? | |
| Pro-free market, anti-public ownership, anti-inefficiency. | |
| You'd be anti-migration from the third world. | |
| You would be anti-government debts, anti-government deficits. | |
| And how many environmentalist groups are like that? | |
| You know the old saying, environmentalists are like watermelons. | |
| Red, communist on the inside and green on the outside. | |
| Just useful. Tools for state power. | |
| Number two, which we can do more briefly, I suppose, is let's say that you're a feminist or somebody who thinks that there's male oppression and patriarchy and privilege and all that. | |
| Well, what happens? | |
| Well, one of two things happen. | |
| Either you talk women, and it's almost always white women, out of having babies. | |
| Well, if you talk women out of having babies, then you end up with a population decline which cannot sustain social programs that women often vote for. | |
| You're not helping the women, right? | |
| Don't have any babies because men are pigs, men are patriarchs. | |
| Then there's no tax base to support your old age pensions and your old age healthcare and so it's all nonsense, right? | |
| Or what happens is oh and sorry but then but then let me just sort of back up for a sec because then what happens is if you talk white women in general out of having babies then the government uses the population decline as an excuse to bring people in from the third world who are going to vote for a bigger government of course right i mean so you are a useful tool for state power now if on the other hand women still go ahead and have babies with men but you keep whispering in their ear iago style that men are pigs metapatriarchs men are horrible rape culture blah blah Then you're going to undermine the continuity of the relationships. | |
| You know, men and women, we're designed to work together. | |
| We're designed to fit together both physically, psychologically, biologically and all that. | |
| I mean, we're a team that raises babies and nature would not design us to be in opposition to each other. | |
| It would make no sense, right? But what happens is you end up with divorces or single mothers and so on. | |
| And by the way, when was the last time you saw an environmentalist rail against divorce? | |
| Say to married couples you have to stay together because when you divorce you end up usually with two cars and two houses and and lots of driving back and forth and two sets of toys and it's hugely environmentally destructive for there to be divorce so let's get back to couples staying together and so on well of course divorce is very good for the state divorce is fantastic for the state because If it's a single mom she's going to often end up dependent on government programs and therefore is going to vote for bigger government and lawyers who love the state and are often loved in return although not in ways fit for family consumption but lawyers of course love divorce I mean they get very rich out of it and so on and of course by moving resources from a shared environment where the man often restrains spending to women who generally spend more you end up with this quote stimulation of the economy and again excessive consumption of resources so If you look at things like environmentalism and feminism, | |
| and we can go through a lot of the other isms, are they in alignment rationally with their stated objectives or are those who fall for these scams as they currently stand? | |
| Don't get me wrong. Equal rights for women, sure. | |
| Protect the environment, sure. | |
| But you want to do it rationally. | |
| But instead what people do is they swallow the bait of thinking they're doing good, but they actually get the hook. | |
| Of advocating for expansions of state power. | |
| And that, of course, is the entire purpose. | |
| Or, to be more accurate, most people who pursue these false ideologies, they end up eating the tasty bait of virtue signaling and moral self-congratulation. | |
| It's their children who get the bitter hook. | |
| Stefan Molyneux, Freedom Aid Radio. |
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