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| The average person does not want war. | |
| But now, today, as we stare down the double-barreled sadism, dopamine rush, train tracks that may lead to a potential international war emanating out of Syria, the question becomes very important, very essential. | |
| Why is there war? | |
| Why is there war? War is a state action. | |
| It requires a centralized coercive agency in society called the state that is nominally sold to the people as a necessary agent for self-defense. | |
| You need states to have borders, to have protections, to protect your persons and your And then, of course, what governments do is they start violating your property by taking taxes from you at gunpoint. | |
| So the idea that you need governments to protect your property when the first thing the governments do with the ostensible goal of protecting your property is to violate your property rights, well, let's just say that presents something of a logical challenge to all clear thinking. | |
| Governments in particular that not just fail to defend borders, but pay people to come across borders, pay people to stay in the country, and pay people through your tax money or the debt inherited by your children, they are violating All the fundamental reasons why governments exist. | |
| They are no longer there to protect your property, but to buy votes with your property, which means to corrupt the entire political, legal, and intellectual systems of your country in their mad thirst for power and control. | |
| So that is sort of foundational. | |
| When it comes to coercion, when it comes to violence, all human beings have a desire for the unearned. | |
| That is natural. And in a free market, that's entirely productive, because it means then, if you don't feel like walking across town to have a conversation, you're going to invent or buy a phone. | |
| And so the fact that we are, quote, lazy means that we become highly ingenious in bypassing our laziness to the... | |
| Productive use and growing prosperity of the entire world. | |
| If you don't feel like cutting down all your own crops at some point, you're going to invent a combine harvester that's going to do the job for you, and this is great. | |
| Our desire for the unearned is the foundation of wealth. | |
| We wish to automate, we wish to be quote lazy, and that is wonderful. | |
| In the free market, it's wonderful. | |
| In the state, using the apparatus of the state, it is an entirely different matter, and quite the opposite of the thirst for the unearned in the free market. | |
| The thirst for the unearned in the state is highly corrupting. | |
| And it's funny because we have these sayings. | |
| Power tends to corrupt. | |
| Absolute power corrupts absolutely. | |
| We have these sayings. | |
| We know that power corrupts, yet still we wish to hand over more and more power to the state. | |
| Why? Because we have a desire for the unearned. | |
| And the state is in the business of giving things to people that they did not earn. | |
| The state is in the business of giving to people that which they did not earn. | |
| And so, if you wish to have money to wallpaper over the bad decisions you've made in your life, maybe you had children out of wedlock, maybe you failed to educate yourself, maybe you're lazy, then you can run to the government and the government will give you the money of people who made better decisions. | |
| People who make good decisions get taxed. | |
| People who make bad decisions get subsidized, and then we wonder why we end up with more and more people making bad decisions in society. | |
| Whatever you tax, you diminish. | |
| Whatever you subsidize, you increase. | |
| This also occurs at the political level. | |
| At the political level, If you are in the, if you have the power to provide goods to people, if you have the power to, like say you're a billionaire, you can invest in people, let's say that you're physically beautiful and people want to date you, you have the power to bestow or not bestow particular gifts on people, then they will want you. | |
| They will want something from you, and then you will be surrounded by, I don't know, it seems like kind of a nightmare to me, but people's clamoring, needy selves, like you got a bunch of baby birds squawking for you to regurgitate the worm of status, money, and privilege to them. | |
| And being in the position to bestow favors upon people is something that in a free market you would have to earn. | |
| And yet in the state, you don't. | |
| Because in the state you have the power to sign contracts to transfer billions of dollars, you have the power to sell one of the few goods That politicians have left to sell, which is citizenship or a position in a country. | |
| What do they have to sell now these days? | |
| They have to sell access to the treasury, to the taxpayer-funded largesse of the domestic population. | |
| And so this kiss the ring stuff that occurs in politics is terrible because you basically have to lie and be a sophist and in general manipulate people in order to get to the pinnacles of political power or even the middling levels if you're a mayor and so on. | |
| And then you get a lot of attention, you get a lot of people who want things from you and you get a lot of people who are willing to flatter you and portray you in a positive light and praise you and so on so that you'll give them that which you did not earn, right? | |
| You're giving away other people's Money. | |
| And which you did not earn, but which is rather taken from by gunpoint. | |
| So, this thirst for the unearned, free market good, politics terrible. | |
| Now, when it comes to war, we can look at it the same way. | |
| The use of violence is very dangerous in a free society. | |
| If you wish to have something that you did not earn, well, you can ask for it or you can take it by force. | |
| Now, if you ask for it, of course, people can say no. | |
| Think of the panhandlers and so on or the beggars on the street. | |
| People can walk by and say no. | |
| So you're not going to accumulate a huge amount that way. | |
| But If you wish to take it by force, then you have to rob people. | |
| You have to mug people. You have to break into their houses. | |
| You have to break into their cars. | |
| You have to risk things. | |
| You risk a number of things, of course. | |
| You risk injury. | |
| You risk capture. You risk dog bites. | |
| You risk somebody with a gun shooting you in self-defense. | |
| And so in a free society where you're allowed to own guns and where the legal system We're to defend your right of self-defense, as recently did not happen with the elderly man who killed an intruder into his home in England, who then was arrested for murder. | |
| Terrible stuff. But in a free society, the robber risks his life every time he steals. | |
| He tries to mug someone in an alley. | |
| That person shoots him and then is not prosecuted because it's self-defense. | |
| So if you wish to use violence in a free society, the risks and the costs accumulate to you. | |
| So that is going to eliminate it, but it's going to diminish it. | |
| The rational allocation of resources, or rather allowing freedom to allocate costs to the actors who are performing particular actions, is the only way to diminish human corruption. | |
| Freedom diminishes violence, diminishes human corruption. | |
| The more voluntary our relationships, the more morally elevated they will tend to be over time. | |
| So, if you want to use violence in a free society, The risks accumulate to you, but in a statist society, in a society with a huge government at the center that controls trillions and trillions of dollars, the use of coercion, the use of violence, well, not only do the costs not accrue to you, but the benefits do accrue to you. | |
| And that would be Something you would never design in your worst nightmares, but it is a system that has come to be as a result of a lack of philosophical rigor, as a result of the indifference and beaten downedness of the population, and of course as the result of massive amounts of propaganda to sustain a system that is not just irrational, but anti-rational. | |
| I mean, if you pass a law that said to a crime gang, That if you commit a murder against your enemies, your enemies will go to jail and we will pay you a million dollars for committing that murder. | |
| Would you expect organized crime murders to go up or down? | |
| Go to Crime Gang A and say, oh, you hate Crime Gang B. Well, if you kill one, a Crime Gang Gang B will put someone from Crime Gang B into jail and... | |
| We will pay you a million dollars. | |
| Of course you would see a massive increase in the amount of criminality because now the costs of violence accrue to your enemies and the benefits of violence accrue to you. | |
| And that's fundamentally war in a nutshell. | |
| It's fundamentally war in a nutshell. | |
| When people declare war, they're generally considered to be heroes. | |
| They get positive write-ups, both contemporaneously and in the annals of history. | |
| And they get great compliance from the population. | |
| You know, war is like a heavy, thick, viscous stream of blood that is lazily flowing down a particular posture, and the fish all swim in line with that, and you get everyone in line. | |
| People will make sacrifices. | |
| People don't question you. | |
| People don't oppose you. And of course, anyone who does, you call them anti-patriotic and somebody who's giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and quite possibly you will Sanction them or jail them in some manner, and even if the government doesn't act against those individuals, as has repeatedly happened throughout human history, their neighbors will consider them traitors and will ostracize them in that manner. | |
| So a government which declares war can print money, can raise taxes, can ration things in the population, can demand sacrifices, gets very little opposition, and gets to use It's power against its enemies. | |
| This is the whole point of the war on terror, which is to give the government power to use against its enemies. | |
| So, when a government goes to war, the leaders do not expose themselves to any particular personal risk. | |
| You know their children. | |
| Aren't going to go to war, right? | |
| This is the whole point of this back in Vietnam when they had the exemption for going to college. | |
| Well, smarter people go to college, richer people go to college, and so the children of the elites could generally avoid a service through a variety of mechanisms, one of which, of course, was the college exemption. | |
| Which meant that the poor kids went to go and fight communism, while the rich kids got to go to university to be INDOCTRINATED into communism. | |
| Well, basically communism wins either way. | |
| So the government by declaring war, the politicians by declaring war, get obedience, get to spend more money, get to raise taxes, get to hand out big giant military industrial complex contracts to their friends and buddies and all the bootlickers of power that currently profit off the disassembly of human beings. | |
| So the costs of war accrue to their enemies and the profits of war accrue to politicians and their friends. | |
| So it's not particularly hard to figure out why war keeps occurring. | |
| Essentially, there's a tax on peace and there's a subsidy for war. | |
| You are paying people in compliance, in additional power, in money raising, in money spending. | |
| You are paying people to declare war, and you are punishing people for not declaring war. | |
| Because when they don't declare war, they cannot ask for sacrifices. | |
| They have less money to hand out to their cronies. | |
| They don't get positive glowing write-ups. | |
| In newspapers and blogs and in the history books for being a noble hero, leader of men and women in war. | |
| The average person cannot oppose the war. | |
| See, if war was in a free society, if there was going to be a war in a free society, the agency that ran the defense system or defense systems would have to come to you and make the case. | |
| As a panhandler would come to you and make the case. | |
| Or as a doctor might come to you and say, you need to spend money on this particular medicine and here's why. | |
| The case would have to be made to the people to participate in the war. | |
| And I just ask you this. | |
| I ask you this. Human to human. | |
| Out of basic compassion for what is going on in the Middle East, where war seems inevitable at this point. | |
| We are merely documenting the decline. | |
| I'm not sure we can do much to reverse it. | |
| But there's always next time, next time and next round if there is one. | |
| I ask you this. | |
| If someone came to you and said, I need from you $25,000 to wage a war. | |
| To bomb targets in Syria. | |
| And you would then say, wow, Syria, that seems pretty far away. | |
| What's happening? Well, there's this leader out there and he's used chemical weapons on his own people. | |
| And it's like, oh, like... | |
| Oh, so the problem is his own people. | |
| Because America used chemical weapons in Iraq, killed people. | |
| So, is it that it's his own people rather than... | |
| It's not the deaths, it's the own people? | |
| So they bypassed that, of course. | |
| They say, no, no, no. You see, he's doing terrible things in the Middle East, so we need to bomb Syria so that Assad doesn't continue to do these terrible things. | |
| It's like, okay, so you're concerned about Syrians dying, and so you want to bomb Syria. | |
| Ah, yes, but you see, we'll only be bombing military targets. | |
| Say, well, okay. Maybe. | |
| Maybe that will work. Maybe that won't. | |
| Maybe they'll be accurate. And maybe they won't be. | |
| But the population, traumatized by, what, seven or eight years of civil war at the moment, is probably going to try and flee anyway. | |
| And massive amounts of government resources are going to be diverted from any kind of peacetime, humanitarian, infrastructure-building, population-feeding activities to be swarmed in terms of defense. | |
| So I don't really see how that's going to benefit the Syrian people. | |
| And if your concern is for the Syrian people, then I don't see how bombing them will occur. | |
| Also, is the principle, anytime bad things happen in the world, we get to bomb people? | |
| Is that the principle that my friendly local defense agency is working on? | |
| That anytime there are reports, nobody was there, I mean, this has not been independently investigated or verified, and I mean, even if... | |
| It's hard to solve a murder sometimes in your own country. | |
| You know, the vast majority of murders in places like Detroit and Chicago go completely... | |
| Unsolved. They are unsolved. | |
| So solving a murder in your own country with witnesses, with no language barriers is not wartime, mostly. | |
| Very hard. Solving a crime on the other side of the world when you have no direct access, where things can be faked, where the motivations are murky, where the language is different and the culture is different, the religion is different in many cases. | |
| How are you going to solve a crime on the far side of the world beyond a reasonable doubt to the point where you're going to impose a punishment not against the criminals but against the country as a whole or against the government as a whole? | |
| Come on. We understand the weaponization of the dumb brute mechanics, the sky-raining idiocy of American missiles. | |
| If you want to take out an enemy, then align yourself with the United States and accuse your enemy of committing some sort of crime, using some sort of weapons of mass destruction, and it's like calling in a free airstrike. | |
| So, is the principle that anytime anything bad happens anywhere in the world, America gets to bomb a country? | |
| That's not defense, you understand? | |
| Calling the Department of Defense the Department of Defense is like calling the Department of Education the Department of Education. | |
| It was actually originally called the Department of Public Education until people figured out what the acronym actually spelled out. | |
| But they'd say, no, no, no, we need $25,000. | |
| Oh, and also we're going to put you in a draft lottery. | |
| Because you're a young man, I'm going to put you in a draft lottery, so we need $25,000 from you, and we're also going to put you in a draft lottery. | |
| And you say, well, but it's Syria. | |
| I'm sorry that people died over in Syria, but people die all around the world all the time. | |
| It's not my fault. It's not my responsibility. | |
| You say, yes, but don't you care about the children? | |
| I care about my own children which is why I don't want to leave them fatherless. | |
| I care about my own children's future which is why I don't want to get dragged into some horrible war. | |
| I care about the children who are going to get blown up from the backlash of angry people leaving the Middle East to come to the West. | |
| Tell me I don't care about the children. | |
| Oh, and if you care about the children so much, Mr. | |
| Government, why are you selling them off to foreign banksters for the sake of buying votes in the here and now? | |
| If you care about children, shouldn't you stop the flow of illegal drugs coming in from the border? | |
| If you care about the children, shouldn't you stop the illegal immigration that kills so many people in the West? | |
| If you care about the children, why are you burying them in debt? | |
| You don't care about the children. If you care about the children, why don't you privatize the school so children can get a halfway decent education? | |
| They don't care about the children. They know that you care about the children, and it's tough to answer that question. | |
| So, $25,000, you go into a draft lottery, would you do it? | |
| You say, well, what threat does Syria pose to me here in America? | |
| It's existential. | |
| Existential, you understand, is just French for bullshit. | |
| Would you cough up the $25,000? | |
| Would you go into debt? Would you sell a kidney? | |
| Would you sell your car in order to fund this war? | |
| Would you sign up for a draft in order to go and fight in this war, potentially? | |
| That's how a free society would operate. | |
| Now, if there is some imminent threat, that's a different matter. | |
| They can make a good case in some ways for an imminent threat. | |
| And that question is not asked. | |
| The people are not asked whether they want to go for war. | |
| Like in Hungary, they just had an election where an anti-immigration, anti-migrant political leader was vaulted into a huge majority position because he actually asked the people, do you want your population to be replaced by people from the third world? | |
| And they Not surprisingly said, no, no, not really so much, thank you very much, but no. | |
| Now, of course, that's why they don't ask the question, are they asking the American population whether the American population wants to go to war? | |
| And asking people in the abstract doesn't matter if they have no skin on the line. | |
| It doesn't matter. Do you approve of Ward? | |
| If you've got nothing on the table, I don't care what your opinion is. | |
| If you've got no skin in the game, I don't care what your opinion is. | |
| So the reason... Why we have war is because the government can print money. | |
| The reason why we have war is the government profits from war. | |
| It gets to punish its enemies and reward its friends, which is the basis of politics in general. | |
| Why do we have war? Because of the system we have inherited. | |
| Is that the system we always have to have? | |
| Of course not. Human beings had slavery for a hundred thousand years, and then they didn't. | |
| There are options. There are choices. | |
| We need to start making them. |