4092 The Truth About Critical Cycles in Human History
While many discuss the repetitive cycles of human history as if they were deterministic and unchangeable, the communication power and philosophical answers available today can help us forge a new path moving forward. Stefan Molyneux breaks down some of the repetitive cycles in human history, what impacts them, the cause and effect of major political decisions and much much more!Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Sometimes wonder, this is kind of one of those 3am, wake up, maybe you can get back to sleep, maybe you can't.
You may wonder where you stand in the great cycle of civilization, in the great cycle of freedom, in the great cycle of empire, perhaps you could say.
Because there's this cycle of history idea that is put forward in Which is presented in general as if it is beyond our capacity to change.
Opposing the historical cycle is like sending your troops in with swords to beat back the rising tide because you wish to thwart the will of Poseidon or something.
And really nothing could be further from the truth.
The cycle of history is open to alteration.
It may not have been as much in the past, but certainly with the intranet and these conversations now, the cycle of history is open to To change, it is open to interruption.
But first of all, you have to understand what the general cycle of history is for at least the Western, Western civilization.
So the first question is the freedoms that we have.
In general, the separation of church and state.
In general, free speech.
In general, property rights and a limited government that is theoretically itself, of course, supposed to be bound under the rule of law.
Where did all of these come from?
Well, in general, they come from philosophy and shortages, right?
So if you look at something like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and so on, These began, in many ways, out of shortages.
And the shortages that we're talking about come from a variety of factors in the late Dark Ages and early Middle Ages, to do with the endless wars of Muslim invasions and Muslim encroachment upon Christian territories, lands,
and countries, followed by, of course, a plague that came in from the Middle East through trade ships on the With fleas on the backs of rats, the Black Death, the bubonic plague, and so on, which decimated a quarter, a third of the European population in many ways throughout the early Middle Ages.
So you end up in this situation with a giant shortage of labor.
Now, when you have a giant shortage of labor, Then the remaining workers, the workers who haven't died, are in a stronger negotiating position, right?
So the lords can't just trap and enslave everyone.
There was a serf relationship.
It was not a slave relationship in the Middle Ages.
And so they have to bargain and they have to give away certain rights or ease certain restrictions on the workers because there are so few workers and they need to bargain for them.
They need to make concessions.
I mean, it's one thing to hire an extra.
You can treat them like crap because they're just a face in the crowd.
It's another thing to hire the star of the movie because that's somebody who's more prominent, more negotiating room, and so on.
And so when you have a shortage of labor as a result of war, famine, plague, pestilence, you name it, then the remaining workers, the remaining citizens, have the capacity to negotiate for something better.
Now through that process as well, when you have a shortage of labor, You have a great incentive to invest in automation.
So one of the things that happened in the 11th, 12th, 13th centuries was great advancements in agricultural technology.
I mean, things as simple as having a harness that didn't choke the horse.
The more weight was applied, or the more weight that it had to pull, allowed it to turn the earth more significantly.
There was massive improvements in winter crops, turnips and so on, and crop rotation was reintroduced and agricultural productivity went through the roof.
This automation was stimulated by the shortage of labor that came about as a result of the Black Death and wars against the Muslims from Christendom and so on.
And in accordance with this, you end up with intellectual advancements that go sort of in step with the economic realities of more rights being spread to the poor, to the workers and so on.
And this This seeding of rights, this seeding or collapsing of restrictions on the mobility and the property rights of the workers, what it does is it creates great efficiencies.
So when your worker base collapses because of war or pestilence or something, then you end up automating as much as you can or trying to extract the maximum resource usage from each of the workers.
Which means the automation.
You can see this happening when there's an artificial shortage in labor.
You see increased automation.
So for instance, when you raise the minimum wage to like 15 bucks an hour, You create a shortage of labor because no employer wants to hire a worker whose economic value is less than what he or she is being paid.
So if you can only produce $10 worth of economic value to your employer, your employer will not hire you at $15 an hour.
So when you raise the minimum wage, you create a shortage of workers Who can produce that kind of value?
And therefore, because of the shortage of workers, you have an increase in automation.
When you have unions who create, you know, very high benefits packages and threaten lockouts, and you have governments who work sort of hand in glove with the unions to give the unions the power to shut down entire businesses, right?
Like, if you're a union, like if you're a bunch of workers in a factory, you've got 100 workers in a factory, and you're unsatisfied with your pay, your pensions, your working conditions, your healthcare, whatever, Then you can all go and decide to strike.
And that's a huge inconvenience to the owner of the factory.
And so he's going to negotiate with you to some degree.
But if your demands are ridiculous, you know, I want the letter M struck from the English language.
If your demands are, you know, $500 an hour kind of thing, then he's going to say, well, sorry, but, you know, I'm going to hire other workers and train other workers.
He takes a huge economic hit.
Going through the hiring process and training the workers.
And of course, his flow of products to his customers is interrupted, so they're going to find other supply chains.
So it's a huge disruption to the business.
But he does have the option of bringing in other workers.
So it limits the capacity of the union to make outlandish demands.
Now if, on the other hand, the union pairs up with the government and the government says you can't hire strike breakers or it's very hard to hire scabs or strike breakers and so on, then what happens is the power of the union becomes ridiculously high and it's an unbalanced negotiation.
I mean, the union holds all the cards because they can basically shut down the factory indefinitely, so the factory owner has to end up Giving whatever concessions the union basically asks for in the short run just to get his supply chain back up and running to satisfy his customers' needs.
But then you see what happens is he starts to look at, well, I guess three things.
One is just retiring and not bothering with it anymore.
Number two is to automate as much as humanly possible.
And number three, of course, is to move his factory to cheaper locations, to places with fewer restrictions, you know, Mexico or China, with fewer restrictions on how he can negotiate with his workers and so on.
And so these restrictions on the supply of labor means that you want to start automating as much as possible.
What that does is it fuels the need for research, for experimentation, and automation as much as possible.
Now, with automation, what happens is you free up people to work in other areas, right?
There's this old idea that automation destroys jobs.
It's nonsense. It's nonsense.
It's like saying that cutting your lawn with a lawnmower rather than a pair of scissors destroys the jobs of the people who could cut your lawn with scissors.
Now, automation doesn't destroy jobs.
Automation frees up people to do other jobs and adds to the wealth of society.
Like, if you wanted to end unemployment tomorrow, all you would do is you would...
Well, all automatic farm machinery is banned, and therefore everything has to be planted and harvested by hand, and you'd have full employment, but everybody would be broke and half the people would be starving because it would be such a reduction of efficiency.
So what happens is when you get a shortage of labor, you get more rights for laborers, and you get more automation.
And what that means is then you have laborers who no longer are needed on the farm, so they have to go and find something else.
So what happens is they generally will move to a city, and that creates an excess labor pool or a significant labor pool In the city along with of course an increased desire for automation, an increased value for automating certain production processes.
So then what happens is you've got a big pool of labor in the cities and a huge desire to automate and therefore you get factories.
Now you can only have the excess of labor in the city if there's an excess of productivity in the countryside because people in a city don't grow their own food.
So you need excess food, in other words you need More food than the farmers themselves are going to consume themselves.
Or the local, right?
The village and so on. The doctor doesn't usually grow his own food or the accountant or whatever.
And so you end up with food being able to be shipped into the cities.
Now, once you have cities, you have the pool of labor that you can use for factories and so on, and you begin to see a real...
Growth in wealth and you can see this throughout the 16th to 18th centuries was the agricultural revolution really took off 19th century of course the industrial revolution which laid the basis for the huge progress in many ways of the 20th century 21st century and So this is sort of the cycle of how wealth begins to be generated when you have Excess labor.
Then you have the chance, of course, you have excess food and then you have excess labor.
You have the chance for an intellectual class that is not simply composed of the clergy.
Because, of course, in the past, if you were an intellectual, you would generally move into the clergy.
You become a monk or you become a priest and so on.
And tragically, of course, for the West, Catholicism, unlike Judaism, forbids, in a sense, the most intelligent members of society from having children, which is terrible, of course, because we know that intelligence is significantly, if not largely, genetic.
And therefore, if you take the people who are able to learn multiple languages and figure out all of the complexities of Augustinian theology and so on, and then you say, well, You're not allowed to marry or have kids, then you're taking the most intelligent people out of the gene pool regularly, and the church did this in order to protect its own land holdings.
It was a terrible thing. Unlike Judaism, in Judaism the smartest guy, the rabbi, generally is considered to be the hot property, the Brad Pitt of the bearded set, and so he has lots of kids, and thus Jewish IQ cranked up about a third of a point per generation for the past seven, eight hundred years,
which is One of the reasons, one of the main reasons why you have the standard deviation, higher intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews as opposed to regular old Caucasians, bland vanilla Caucasians I might add, although occasionally with a little bit of spots.
So, what happens is when you have the growth of cities, then you have the capacity for intellectuals, for factory owners and for merchants to gather enough wealth that their children can become well-educated, but there's an option for them to be educated in something other than the clergy, other than theology.
And so, when you have the growth of cities, you also have the growth of conflict, and the conflict is generally...
It's contract based, it's property rights based, and so on.
And you don't want to settle that kind of stuff with, you know, duels and pistols at dawn and so on.
And so you have a growing demand for secular law.
And this, in the late Middle Ages, early Renaissance, provoked a great interest in In Roman law, which had survived the Dark Ages and so on, and so the great demand for Roman law.
And so you can make your money as a lawyer.
And to study law, to become a lawyer, you need to study rhetoric, you need to study sophistry, you need to study logic and argumentation and so on, which gives you a bent towards philosophy.
Because once you have, again, shortage of labor, more automation, greater rights for laborers, which means that they have an incentive to produce more, right?
Because if you're just a serf, you're bought and sold with the land, you have no particular incentive to produce well or more.
But if you are more of a free agent and you can keep the profits of your own labor in a more free market as opposed to centrally planned or communist style of productivity, Or production.
Then what happens is you have an incentive to find efficiencies to produce more because it will make you wealthier.
What then happens is when the smartest and most productive agricultural workers get the most money.
Then they can use that money to buy more land, right?
How much can you bid for an acre of land?
Well, if you can grow twice the wheat or the corn or whatever than the other guy who's bidding, then you can afford to bid more for it because you're going to gain more economic value Out of it, right?
Like if you can make 100 pounds a year from an acre, and the other guy who's bidding can only make 50 pounds a year, well, you're going to be able to bid significantly more for the land.
And so in this way, through the free market, those who are most able to maximize the productivity of the land end up with the most land.
And that causes their productivity to continue to increase.
And they then displace other people.
This is back to something I talked about a couple of months ago called the Pareto Principle, which is the basic mathematical reality that has been proven again and again in a wide variety of fields.
Basic mathematical reality that the square root of workers produce half the output, right?
So if you've got a group of nine workers, three are producing half the output, right?
So this is very, very important to understand.
If you have 10,000 workers, like I think 100 are producing half the output and so on.
And so... In a more free market, which arises out of the labor shortage, and then the capacity to keep your own profits, more and more land accumulates under the management of those who are best able to maximize the productivity of that land, which again produces all of this amazing extra food, showers down on the cities, creates more opportunities for people to move to the cities, And creates enough wealth for a leisure class to emerge or a middle class intellectual class.
Like the purely intellectual classes, the highest levels of intellect, they don't generally add a huge amount to society in my experience.
But what I would say is sort of the middle class pragmatic intellectuals, the lawyers and so on, they add a fair amount of value.
They provide the theoretical framework for the freedoms that have grown out of shortage and automation and excess.
Food production. I shouldn't say excess.
Additional or enhanced food production or something like that.
So then what happens is you have the codification of conflict through, in the case of the West, through Roman law.
Now, Roman law, of course, is about property rights and conflict resolution and contracts and so on.
And what happens then is as law becomes codified, the Objectivity of the legislature begins to displace the whim of the aristocracy, right?
I mean, aristocrats, almost by definition, have huge amounts of power and control over their land and over their serfs when that was the major method of economic organization, sort of a localized tyrannical socialism.
But when you start to get secular law coming in, and of course, sorry, in the clergy, the rules from the Pope on down, I mean, you can't really oppose them, and they're a mystery, and they speak in Latin, and the average person can't get in there and debate or negotiate with the rules that are.
So you can't negotiate with the aristocracy, you can't really negotiate with the clergy.
But when you get the growth of secular law in a city, then you start to get codified rules that are displacing the somewhat, if not largely, arbitrary wills of the aristocrats and the clergy.
And so you start to get some predictability.
You start to get some equality before the law.
And because in the past, like prior to the agricultural revolution, What happened was, how did you get the most land?
Well, you got the most land in general because you were willing to kill the most people for the king.
I mean, I know this from direct ancestry that I've studied, but how did you end up with large tracts of land?
Huge tracts of land! Well, you were a very good warrior for the king.
You would smite his enemies, you would slice up the peasants who opposed him, you'd go and put down a tax revolt, you'd go and kill some invaders, and then the The king would, in return, award you tracts of land, and did it mean that you would be a very good manager?
Really enhance the productivity of those lands because you're really good at cutting people's heads off.
Well, I don't know that, you know, psycho killer is number one on the resume for most excellent farming positions.
So when you started to get the profit motive and profit rewards started accruing to the most efficient stewards of the land, you began to see, you know, you could call them the bourgeoisie.
They were widely hated and derided in that sort of traditional class system, particularly in England.
But you started to get talented and efficient farmers taking over the lands of the aristocracy.
And again, this happened in my family within a couple of generations back.
But, you know, there are stories in the 18th and 19th centuries in particular of, you know, these upstart bourgeoisie, you know, you can see this in Downton Abbey, these upstart bourgeoisie who are elbowing us aside and taking over our lands and we can't make them pay, but they can make them pay in some mysterious, magical manner. And so when you get the growth of a more objective law, rather than the whim of the clergy and the aristocracy and the king, then things become more predictable.
And because people can keep the proceeds of their own labor, the profits, they're not serfs, they're not slaves, they're free agents in a relatively free market.
And the free market in the Middle Ages was highly restricted.
There are stories That if there was a county fair and you were out there as a farmer trying to sell your goods, that if you...
You could be prosecuted or driven out of the fair for sneezing, right?
As somebody walks past your stall, right?
Let's say you're selling yams or something, somebody walks past your stall, you sneeze, and then the person says, bless you, and then you enter into a conversation.
And so sneezing was considered unfair competition.
It was really... The medieval guilds were very, very restrictive.
Like, think of sort of the modern trades, right?
Where you have to have this ridiculously lengthy apprenticeship to figure out how to do plumbing, electrical, and so on.
Think of the modern trades on steroids, like just with crazy restrictions on massively high barriers to entry, which again are fine, I mean not good economically, the rent-seeking of the economic actors who want to erect those barriers to entry to keep their own profits high, it diminishes when there's more automation and when there's shortages of labor.
You know, if you need a couple of apprentices, if there are like 10 people trying to become your apprentice where you can impose just about every standard you want.
But if there's one apprentice and there's three guys who desperately need him, then he can negotiate for better terms.
And that's a restriction on the barrier to entry.
Less apprenticeship time.
And less being sort of kept from direct marketing to customers and having to work through and give your profits to the master who apprenticed you and so on.
I mean, it just really opens up more of the free market.
When you get more of the free market and you get the increased and objective and rational regulation of human conflicts through secular law, And you get a training of people who are good at argumentation through the legal system, then you start to get an intellectual movement that wraps around the economic inevitabilities and begin to justify it, begin to provide a moral framework for it.
And this is where you see people like Ricardo And Adam Smith and so on developing a rational framework for extending and expanding property rights and the non-initiation of force all the way up to the doorstep of the state and pushing back against the power of the state.
And the reason for that is that the state is in the way Of the entrepreneurs in a nascent growing economy, right?
So if you want to say, oh, I want to go and open up this trade or that trade and you run into a whole bunch of guilds, well, the guilds are supported by the power of the state and the guilds restrict entry and say you need a 14-year apprenticeship and you need to pay this amount of money and half your profits have to go to your master and so on.
Well, if you want to just go build houses or be a plumber or something and all of this is in your way, you have a distaste for the state.
Because the state is in the way.
Now, the older people have a love for the state because the state is keeping other people from coming in and encroaching upon their profits.
I mean, just think of... Back in the day, it's like late 19th, early 20th century in America, midwives and other practitioners would provide a lot of services that doctors did, and therefore doctors couldn't charge as much for the services they provided because other people, without the high cost of the extra training, would come in and undercut them.
And so the doctors went to the state and said, you've got to restrict Other medical practitioners or quasi-medical practitioners from providing these services.
Like after the Second World War, doctors were again unhappy with how little money they were making.
And so they went to Congress and said, well, you know, give us the legal power to write prescriptions and no one else can.
And then you have to go to the doctor to get your antibiotics.
You can't just go to the druggist or the pharmacist and get them after all this sort of stuff.
And so when you have a new emerging entrepreneurial class, what happens is they look at the state and they say, you're in the way, man.
You're like this big, giant pile of bureaucratic sludge that's in our way.
And you can see this. You know, like in America, a third of people who work need a government license, need government permission for whatever it is they want to do.
So if you want to go and start a business and you want to go be a plumber or an electrician or something, it's like...
You run into all of this sludge, which is why there are so many advances in the computer field, in the software field, in the hardware field, because you don't need a government license to be a software programmer.
You can do it in your basement from the age of, I guess, when I was like 12, when I first started really coding.
So you can just go and do it.
You can go and sell your stuff. Why are there so much variety in the App Store?
On iOS or an Android or Windows phone because you don't need a big license from the government.
You don't need to go through seven years of training to develop an app.
If you can develop an app and sell it, so much the better.
It's the same thing. With the alternative media, you don't need a license to talk your thoughts and make your arguments to the world.
So there's a lot of growth in alternative media and a lot of creativity in alternative media.
Same thing with being an artist.
You sort of get the idea where there's little to no barriers to entry.
Think, do you need a license to write a novel or a book?
No, of course not, right?
So you see a lot of creativity and A lot of advancements in those particular fields.
And movies is a little different because movies, you've got to go through all the government sludge of having to deal with government-protected unions and the government restrictions on what you can say and rating systems and so on.
And so movies have become very non-innovative and non-creative because you're just running into this bureaucratic sludge.
So when you have a rising...
I don't know exactly the right way to put it.
You know what it's sort of like? It's sort of like a crusted-over volcano.
It has been dormant for a long time, and the prior lava sort of cooled and hardened into rock, and you've got this new eruption.
It makes it sound more destructive than it is, but you get the idea.
You're shaking a carbonated...
So when you have this rising tide of entrepreneurship and you have this top-down, sludgy, bureaucratic impediment to the ever-increasing and ever-expanding ambitions of the new bourgeoisie,
of the new middle class, well, then the middle class turned to the intellectuals of the new middle class, well, then the middle class turned to the intellectuals to help develop the mental weaponry, to blast through this ceiling, to blast through this crusted-over prehistoric lava of sludgy, bureaucratic slowdowns and just allow them to continue And this is where you get the free market theoreticians who are trying to push back on the power of the state to allow the new class to emerge and to...
Achieve the full scope of its potential ambition.
And this you can see throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in particular, this pushback in a lot of countries, particularly in the Netherlands and in England, this pushback against the power of the state.
And this argument also that foreign trade should be allowed.
I remember I wrote a book called Just Poor about the 18th century, the agricultural revolution.
Everyone knows about the industrial revolution.
I'm going to write about the agricultural revolution.
And I read a book called England's Treasure by Foreign Traffic, making the case for international free trade, a debate which, of course, still goes on today.
And people think things are global now.
100, 150 years ago, there was even more international trade than there is now.
And people survived.
And so what happens is the government gets sort of pushed back.
By this growing middle class and their intellectual sidekicks or weapons or whatever it is to push back against this privilege.
And because there's a population, a bulge that is coming up of newly wealthy people, it's pushing back against some of the ancient regimes, so to speak, right?
The aristocracy and the clergy in particular.
And that's because when you have power for a long time, you get lazy.
Look at the new media versus the old media.
The old media has had power for hundreds of years.
They've got kind of lazy. They've got kind of complacent.
And so you've got this new hungry media personalities and outlets and channels coming forward who are, you know, lean and mean and ready to push forward.
And they're pushing back in a very aggressive way against some of the old media.
And the old media is kind of befuddled like the fighter past his prime with the young new lightning fist whippersnapper pummeling him through full of holes like Swiss cheese.
And the same thing was happening economically and intellectually, even prior to the Industrial Revolution.
So then what happens is the state gets smaller, free trade increases, property rights increase, and you get a huge explosion in wealth.
Now, historically, this huge explosion in wealth, and you can look...
At, you know, human productivity, GDP, world productivity from like a thousand BC to the present and it's like flatlined and then, you know, it goes up enormously, dozens of times, scores of times just over the past 150 years, 200 years or so. So you have this huge explosion in productivity.
The middle class, the entrepreneurial class, The Pareto principle profiteers who benefit society as a whole because those who can best use the resources gain access to the most resources.
There's a huge multiplier effect.
If I can produce...
Sorry, if I can produce a hundred times more than you can produce, and sometimes that's where it goes, or even further.
I mean, if you look at the difference between Brad Pitt's salary and an extra salary, I mean, it's thousands of times.
Why? Because he's thousands of times more valuable.
He's just one guy, two legs, two arms, and a giant incoming legal crater where his marriage used to be.
But he...
is thousands and thousands of times more valuable than an extra.
The extra is necessary, but interchangeable Brad Pitt not being.
So he's thousands of times more productive.
This happens in the realm of code.
This happens in the realm of food production.
This happens in the realm of marketing.
This happens, you name it. It happens in the realm of philosophy.
You know, how many people have had thoughts about the world and how it works over the course of human history?
Well, billions. How many philosophers can you name off the top of the hat?
Maybe 10, maybe 20, right?
So it is a tiny, tiny, tiny slice of humanity who provides by far the greatest advancements in the species.
Forgetting that is one of the reasons why egalitarianism is so seductive, because we forget that almost all human progress is derived from A few thousand people.
Literally, I'm not just kidding about that.
That's not hyperbole. That is an actual fact, an actual reality that the vast majority of human progress comes from.
Again, it's the Pareto principle, the square root, right?
So that's pretty, it's thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people at the most, but I think it's in the thousands of people who've done the most to benefit humanity as a whole.
And so, as the government gets smaller, the free market expands, more and more resources end up accumulating in the hands of those who can maximize them.
And they then, of course, get demonized as robber barons and so on.
But what happens is, you get an enormous amount of wealth.
In society. Now, once you get this enormous amount of wealth, you get inequality.
Again, the IQ bell curve that the very smartest people will often make the most money and the very smartest people are very rare.
Most people cluster around the middle.
And the particular productive or creative genius tends to accumulate a huge amount of money.
So with freedom comes You know, if you're in a concentration camp and you have an IQ of 150, I mean, it's probably even a worse situation for you than if you have an IQ of 80.
Everybody's alike in misery and nobody, you know, are you really going to be 10 times as productive or 100 times as productive in a concentration camp if you're just, you know, crawling along under the whips of the concentration camp guards?
Well, no. So in a situation of slavery, in a situation of oppression, It doesn't matter how smart you are.
In fact, you don't want to be smart, probably, because you can even more taste the bitterness of your lost potential.
But in a state of freedom, right, so in a state of oppression, in a state of restriction, in a state of big government and little free market, there's not that much inequality, there's not that much disparity.
But when you start to get freedom, then you start to get massive amounts of disparity in society.
Now, the reasons for that are, again, very clear.
IQ, bell curves, Pareto principle, just the general distribution of talents and abilities among the population.
I mean, think of all the people you know who hum to themselves or who sing in the shower or who sing at karaoke versus the number of people who can fill a stadium of 5,000 people or, I guess in Queen's case, 300,000 people in South America.
So, there's just this distribution.
Think of all the people you know who've...
I mean, I've written songs when I was younger.
I was in a garage band for a little bit.
And think of all the people who can write hit songs versus all the number of people who creatively hum to themselves or even jot down a few bits of melody or snatches of lyrics and so on.
It's just god-awfully rare to have the kind of talent that can accumulate you a huge amount of money.
You know, in just about every field.
You know, 95% of the money goes to like 5% of the people and everyone else, well, they're just, you know, what do they call a drummer without a girlfriend?
Homeless. Well, except for Phil Collins.
Yes, I know. We look alike.
Anyway, so you start to get this inequality.
Now this provides a great opportunity for people to crawl out of the woodwork, as the Marxists did in the 19th century, to crawl out of the woodwork and say, this inequality is unjust.
Because when everyone's poor, poverty is not particularly noticeable.
If you think of a bunch of people who are tone deaf pretending to sing along with each other, you can't pick out a bad note because they're all bad notes.
But if you get a bunch of expert singers and then one person who's tone deaf in there...
You can hear when that person chimes in, right?
And so you start to see real poverty and then you can perform this sophist trick.
And you've seen this probably in, I saw this all the time when I was younger.
You see some big giant, you know, vertical ice cube tray building in downtown Manhattan or Toronto or, you know, wherever.
You see this big giant building and then in front of it is a guy living in a cardboard box.
And so you get this giant wealth, you get this giant inequality.
Now the wealth only exists because there is inequality.
This is what people forget all the time.
The wealth only exists because there is inequality.
The reason we're so rich in a free market, or what's left of it now, the reason we're so rich in a free market, the reason there's so much money, so much wealth, so much productivity, is the free market allows those who are best able to maximize resource use to get a hold of the most resources.
If you're the best guy at replanting trees, then you're going to be able to bid the most for the land that allows you to harvest the trees.
If you are the best person at coming up with cool technology gadgets, then you're going to end up with significant control of a technology company.
It's just the way it works.
It's a sorting mechanism in the free market, and it's automatic, it's inevitable, it's driven by customer demand, market research, prior history, shareholders, investors, you name it.
It just happens.
You don't ever see ugly people in Victoria's Secret catalog's runways, right?
I've looked long and hard.
But the wealth only arises from the inequality.
And then what happens is you do the sophist trick of contrasting The great wealth with the poor.
And you can see this in 19th century wood carvings and so on.
You see, you know, the rich guy rolling past in his carriage and the little kid there with his cap starving and all that kind of stuff.
And people say, oh, that's terrible.
My feels! Let us end civilizations because I would rather feel than think.
And they say, wow, this is, this is terrible.
This is terrible. See, all we need to do, like you've got the guy, you think of all the thousands of people who work in that giant building, you know, just take a buck from each one of them.
Just take a buck. Let's say there's 2,000 people working in that building.
Take $1 from each of those people a month, give it to the poor guy.
Bob's your uncle. He's got 2,000 bucks a month.
He doesn't have to live in a cardboard box.
Everything's going to be fine. It's really, really tempting because when you see that kind of inequality, we have an instinctual urge to try and smooth it out.
Right? To take from the peaks, put it in the valleys.
Or as... Lear said in his storm scene when he was insane, by the way, but it's the most compact definition of coercive redistribution for the greater good that I've heard of.
He said that distribution should undo excess and each man have enough.
That distribution should undo excess.
Take money from the rich. Excess is too much wealth.
Use more than you need, right? As Napoleon said, no matter how wealthy you are, you can still really only eat one dinner a day.
That distribution should undo excess and each man have enough.
Now, the question is, who pushes back against that?
Well, that's an interesting question.
Because as I talked about, once you've had power and authority and liberty for a while, you get lazy.
Of course you do. Of course you do.
And so, once the middle class, the entrepreneurs, have secured, you know, wealth and so on, then they get kind of lazy and they don't defend the kind of freedoms that And also, see, once you have wealth and there's a state apparatus you can utilize to protect your wealth, you're going to get even lazier.
This is why the hostility of those whose attachment to state power is threatened, whether it's the military-industrial complex, the mainstream media, whether it is people on welfare, whether it is government unions or government workers and so on, when your attachment To the financial value, state power is threatened.
Well, you react as ferociously as somebody stealing all of your food in the beginning of a long, hard winter.
I mean, you can't conceive how you could survive without this addictive state money, and therefore people who talk about shrinking the state, people who talk about expanding the free market and promoting voluntarism in human interactions rather than this point-of-a-gun, statist, top-down, hierarchical prison camp of economic coercion.
They are viewed as a predator on your source of income, and this is why people fight so ferociously against the shrinking of the state.
So when you get freedom, you get these disparities, these inequalities, and emotionally we feel like, ah, can't we just, wouldn't it be nice if, you know, this is not fair, and we put ourselves empathetically, I mean, the whole question of empathy I'll do another time, because empathy has a lot to do with...
The development and expansion of property rights and particularly of freedom of speech.
You know, we all have in our hearts, in our minds, deep down in our lizard gut innards, we all have speech that we would love to see scrubbed from the face of the world.
Come on, you know, I know it.
And for me it's the phrase, just saying.
Controversial thing, just saying.
So we all have stuff we like scrubbed from the human marketplace of ideas.
But we say, well, I don't want...
I don't want people to have the power to limit free speech, because when that power is implemented, it may sooner or later be used against me.
I mean, even, that's the old thing, I hate what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it, and so on.
Well, we say this not out of some pathological altruism, I guess maybe sometimes that's the case, but we say it because we know that if the government gets the power to legislate speech, That even if we're on the right side of the gun at one point, it's probably likely going to spin, we're going to be at the wrong side, or our kids are going to be at the wrong side, so let's just not do it.
It's empathy for your future self and empathy for those who the gun is pointed at, right?
So this same empathy that produces these rights and these freedoms.
You know, I am going to submit myself to the courts because I don't want a society where we go back to dueling at dawn and people getting shot and bleeding out as the sun rises, right?
And so this kind of empathy that produces equality before the law, this kind of empathy that produces more universal property rights and human rights and freedom of speech and so on, freedom of conscience, right?
Because after Europe had been wracked by hundreds of years of religious warfare, people finally got the message and said, if we allow the government to have an official religion that it imposes upon other people, then every religion is going to continually be trying to grab that gun of the state, impose their religion on everyone else, and ban all of the other religions.
And so they said, okay, we have to separate church and state.
So I would love for my religion to be the dominant religion and everyone to follow it, but I'm not willing to give the government the power to impose religion because some other religion may come along and use the power of the state to impose their religion upon me.
Can you imagine that ever happening in the West?
Well, increasingly, kind of.
So, it's part of this empathy.
It's the empathy to say, in your mind and in your heart, to say, I want the government to do this.
I want the government to get rid of speech I don't like.
I want the government to get rid of religions I don't like and so on.
Well, if my worst enemy had that power and it was pointed at me, how would I feel?
And so this is what you universalize.
But that same empathy that arises out of better child raising and so on, that same empathy It's also very susceptible to this cardboard box guy living in front of the giant tower situation.
Oh, the poor people, they're poor, they're sad, let's take a little money away from here, give it to there, and so on.
But it's also, I mean, it's empathy with kind of selfishness as well, because you want the problem of poverty to go away, because it makes you feel bad.
Feels bad, man. Poverty.
Cry it. But at the same time, you don't want to get involved with the poor, because, you know...
They can be loud.
They can be smelly.
They can be crazy a lot of times, right?
And they can be manipulative, right?
Because if you want to feel sorry for the poor, that's fine.
And there are certainly poor people to be sorry for.
But I grew up in poverty, and a lot of those people were just jerks.
They were just mean. They were selfish.
They were dysfunctional. They didn't address their issues.
They had weird addictions that they didn't want to confront.
And they had the Dunning-Kruger effect of just, like, not knowing a goddamn thing in the universe, but thinking they knew everything there was to know.
And so the sort of arrogance that comes from stupidity was all over the place.
And so when you look at the cardboard box guy in front of the giant, oh, let's take the money, give it him.
But you don't want to get involved.
Because when you get involved, you realize that a lot of times the poor are poor because they're just making bad decisions.
And giving them money without asking them to make better decisions is only enabling their poverty and inflicting their bad decisions in an intergenerational cycle upon people.
They're kids, right? It's if you pay the parents for bad decisions, then the kids grow up seeing those bad decisions amplified and rewarded and therefore are more likely to go down that same slippery, slidey, chillowack hole into making those bad decisions because society has greased it with incentives, right?
Kids out of wedlock and whatever, right?
Don't work and so on.
You know, like half the Turks in Germany don't have jobs and not really interested in looking for them.
It's because of the welfare state, right?
So you end up With this giant wealth, this giant disparity, and an empathy that is kind of shallow and selfish.
I know empathetic selfishness, you understand?
I want, I'm sorry for the poor, I want the poor to go away, but I don't want to get involved.
I don't want to go over and try and help them directly because that's kind of messy and difficult and is going to challenge the sentimentality of my bottomless empathy and sympathy for the poor.
And so, because you want to help the poor, but you don't want to get involved in the poor, you're susceptible to the state coming along and saying, oh, don't worry.
Are you troubled by the poor?
I get it. We all are.
We're going to take that burden away from you.
We're going to take that burden away from you.
We're going to suppress IQ differences.
We're going to suppress a bell curve.
We're certainly going to suppress racial IQ differences as an explanation as to different outcomes among ethnicities.
We're going to take that burden away from you.
And, for instance, if you're concerned that the poor don't get a good education, don't worry.
We'll educate the poor.
Just give us money and so on.
So you understand the provoking of Sentimental sorrow over disparities in economic outcomes in particular.
Alongside with the, so provoking all of these problems.
And this is why you saw in the 19th century a lot of, this person's rich, this person's poor, something's wrong with this.
Well, this came from the state. And statist intellectuals who wanted to provoke a sense of guilt.
Guilt is very, very powerful when it comes to controlling a population, at least a Western or a white population.
And so the state will say, oh, these disparities are terrible, and just give us money, we'll take care of it.
We'll make it all better.
We've got a welfare state, we've got public education, we're all going to be better.
So the wealth creates the disparity which provokes the guilt and anxiety.
And what happens is, if you go to somebody living on $10 a day and you want to tax them at 50% or 25%, they're going to push back pretty hard because that's a significant portion of their income.
When you get a lot of wealth and you come along and you say, well, I'm going to tax the very richest at 25%.
Okay, so, you know, I don't have a million dollars.
I have $750,000, whatever it is, right?
I don't... I don't have $100,000.
I can still live on $75,000.
Still richer than the vast majority of the human population and so on.
So when you get this excess wealth, inequality, anxiety, we're going to smooth it out.
Distribution undoes excess.
Each man has enough. That's the paradise we want to live in.
And there's less pushback against increased taxation.
So the government provokes anxiety about inequality, which they continue to do these days.
And they say, if you don't give us money, clearly you hate the poor and you want them to stay poor.
I mean, you know, all of this nonsense that goes on.
And of course, if you don't give the government money, then you give to charity and the charities actually get involved with the poor families.
And they can differentiate poor by choice versus poor by bad accident.
And they will not overfund poor by choice because that's subsidizing bad decisions, but they will ameliorate and fix poor by bad luck.
Which is also the role of insurance and all that kind of stuff, which is certainly available to even the poor.
So what happens then is you begin to get a big shift.
Now, the way that you solve poverty is very simple, and we have empirical evidence of that.
After the Second World War, the number of poor people in the West were declining one percentage point a year.
So once...
You have a system called the free market where resources accumulate in the hands of those best able to multiply them.
That's how you solve poverty.
You have a free market. You let resources accumulate to those best able to multiply them.
And the resulting wealth lifts all who wish to escape poverty out of poverty.
And some people don't. Some people are masochistic.
Some people want to write the great novel and therefore are willing to sit in a Garrett Raskolnikov style and earn very little for five years or three years.
Some people want to be monks. Some people want to backpack around the world and work at car washes.
You know, they're poor, but they're poor because they're making particular choices, particular life decisions.
And I'm not going to, are they wrong?
It's their life. I'm not such a busybody that I'm going to start policing everybody else's life and tell them exactly how they have to live and what they have to do.
If you want to choose, I mean, I've done that before.
I quit a ridiculously well-paid gig.
I was offered like, I think I mentioned this on the show before, I was offered like $150,000 for three days work a week in the software field.
And I said, no, because I want to work on a novel.
And I wrote this novel called The God of Atheists, which you should check out at freedomainradio.com.
But was I poor?
Sure. Zero income for like a year and a half.
But I was not poor.
I was making a choice. So no, any charity, if I say, oh, I'm poor in charity, you could offer this crazy high-paid job and so on.
I mean, this is back when $150,000, that was real money.
But no, that was poor by choice.
That was me bleeding off my savings.
I'm poor by choice. That's what I wanted to do.
So what happens then...
Is that the government is faced with a dilemma.
Because they say, we'll take care of poverty for you, but we're going to need to raise your taxes.
And so what happens is, see, people want their anxiety to go away without paying for it right away, right?
Because then they just get another anxiety, which is, well, now I'm poorer.
So if people said, we want the government to redistribute money and end poverty, and the government said, okay, fine.
Well, there are already charities doing it right now and doing a good job with only 5% of your income, but we're going to need 15% of your income.
Right, so three times the cost of charity for the government to take it over.
So you vote for it and the guy says, I will take care of poverty, I will redistribute this amount of money, but I'm going to have to raise all of your taxes 15%.
Well, then people will say, ooh, that's a...
Well, now I have a rational cost-benefit analysis.
I can give 5% of my money to charity, and charity does a pretty good job, or I can give 15% of my money to the government and see if the government does a better job.
So the government doesn't want you to make that calculation because you'll probably drift more towards charity than towards the state.
So the government has the problem of wanting to sell you alleviation for the anxiety of inequality economically.
But they don't want to give you the bill right away.
And so very quickly after government started doing a lot of welfare in 19th century, and particularly after governments took over the educational system, you saw that governments wanted central banking.
Of course. Because central banking and debt, two things that go really much hand in hand.
Central banking basically is the government's ability to print its own money, to make up as much money as it wants.
Now, I know it's a separate corporation and so on, but you can compete with it.
So it's a fascist, quasi-governmental agency.
So I just call it the government, since the government protects it and uses it and so on.
So once the government gets central banking, then it can offer you the great magic vaporware of, we're going to eliminate poverty, we don't even need to raise your taxes.
We saw this in 2003.
Well, 2001, America went to war in Afghanistan.
2003, they went to war in Iraq.
Did anyone's taxes go up?
No. They just printed money like crazy, which had a lot to do with provoking The market crash in 2007-2008 that wiped out 40% of America's wealth.
You're going to get taxed one way or another.
It can either be upfront and obvious or it can be hidden and confusing.
But you've got to pay the god of war one way or the other.
So governments then want central banking.
Now when they get central banking, they can start printing money.
Now, the wonderful thing about printing money for governments is they get to pay bills.
They're the first ones to print it.
So when they pay their bills, they pay their bills with the money at its old value.
But what happens is as the money spreads throughout the economic system, basically the people who are close to the end of the line of receiving that money, they receive money worth far less than what the government first spent.
I mean, it's a fantastic setup for inevitable corruption and the hyper- Malignant growth of the state.
And the people who end up getting the money last generally are the poor.
And so this is why you get inflation, particularly among the poor, hits hardest those who are the most on fixed income.
So the government promises to get rid of inequality, prints money to do so, which causes inequality to widen.
Because the rich people who get the money first can spend it at full value.
By the time it trickles down to the poor, it's lost 20, 30, 40, 50% of its value or more.
As we saw the Reimard became, Zimbabwe-style, virtually worthless.
And so once the government has the power to print money, and the government then has the power associated with that to some degree to go into debt, to sell these bonds, which are basically just deferring tax to the next generation.
Well, they can promise you anything.
They can print all this money. And then, because you have central banks, you get the First World War and the Second World War and the end of the empire and all of this sort of stuff, right?
And so once you get all this central banking, then you have a huge thirst for tax revenue.
Because, sure, you can print all the money that you want, but people who are buying your bonds, people who are investing in your currency and so on, well, they can tell if you are spending way beyond your means, printing money way beyond your means.
They were wise to that. I mean, von Mises in the 20s pointed out all of this, as has been pointed out even in the 18th century.
Ricardo and so on pointed out the link between inflation of the money supply and rising prices.
So then you have this giant thirst for...
Income for tax revenue.
But you can't raise taxes. Much.
I mean, I know that there was big, you know, when taxes were first introduced in America, was it 1917?
It was a temporary measure for the war.
And it was just a couple of points on the richest people and so on.
And then by the 50s, it was very, very high and so on.
But it's still not enough. Especially in the 1960s in America, you got the warfare welfare state.
You had a horrifying, destructive, and ridiculously expensive war.
In Vietnam and other places, at the same time as you had massive wealth transfers to the poor, and particularly to the blacks.
LBJs reportedly said, you know, we're going to buy the N-words vote for the next 200 years with this program.
And so they had to print a lot of money.
Now, how do you get additional tax revenue from people?
Well, the way that you do it, you see.
It's tragic, and this is the foundation of where we are.
And I'll make this a two-parter.
I'll make this a two-parter.
And I know I'm hop-skipping and jumping a lot, but I'm trying to follow the themes rather than the sequence.
So how do you get money?
1950s, 1960s in particular.
You can't raise taxes anymore.
Tax rates at the highest, ridiculously high.
How do you get more money from the population?
Well... What you do is you do two things.
Number one is you tell women to get the hell into the workforce.
And number two, you try to convince people not to have kids.
Now, how do you do that? How do you get women into the workforce and not have kids?
I mean, women in the 1950s had it pretty sweet.
They had great neighborhoods. They had loving husbands, for the most part.
You could easily bring up a family of five or six kids on one person working.
I mean, it was a paradise in the middle class in the 1950s, which is why the 1950s are so scorned by the leftists and so on, because it's a paradise that, in many ways, people would kill to get back to.
But you have to get women into the workforce.
Now, to get women in the workforce, if you convince them to have fewer children, it's easier to get them into the workforce, number one.
And number two, if they have fewer children, then as a government, you have to provide fewer services to those children.
You don't have to have as big a set of schools.
You don't have to have as much in terms of paying for the healthcare of the kids, which the government did to some degree even back then.
Kids are very expensive for society.
It takes a long time for them to become productive taxpayers to pay off the amount that society has to invest in their kids.
Also, of course...
No, I'll do that another time.
So when you want to get women into the workforce, what do you do?
Well, you provoke anxiety in their marriage, and you say that they're oppressed, and you say that being a...
A housewife is beneath them and merely being a mother is not exploring their full potential and so on.
And then, of course, you have to ruthlessly suppress the fact that there are biological differences between the genders, particularly in terms of IQ. Men in general are sort of four points higher on average and so.
And at the higher levels of IQ, at the very top levels of IQ, I mean, there are like no women.
It's just the way things are.
But you have to say that the disparities between male and female income is the result of oppression and sexism and patriarchy and so on.
Because what happens is people do this calculation, right?
They say, okay, well, I'm being told because, you know, the feminism was funded originally to some degree by the CIA and it was a PSYOP and it was designed to get women into the workforce and to raise taxes, right?
I mean, if women are in the workforce, then They're paying taxes rather than being paid for by their husbands.
And of course it doesn't do much good.
Massive numbers of people pouring into the workforce just drives down wages.
It doesn't really do that much good.
We can see this with immigration, destroying opportunities particularly for poor youths, blacks and Hispanics in particular.
Mass immigration is driving down the wages.
This is uncontrovertible for anybody with half a brain and certainly most economists understand and accept this.
And so people do this calculation, right?
They say, well, I'm being...
Honey, the woman sits down with her husband and says, honey, I'm being told that I should go to work and you're oppressing me and I need to be independent and all this, you know, programming that a lot of people are pretty susceptible to.
And so you do a calculation, right?
And so women are pouring into the workforce who aren't doing this calculation and they're driving down wages.
So you say, okay, well, I could...
I got two kids... So if I go into the workforce, I have to find someone to take care of those two kids, wages are going down, and it's really, you know, and you run the numbers, and it doesn't really work out, right?
It doesn't really work out. And so it's not economically very valuable, and emotionally very destructive, right?
Babies in daycare for more than 20 hours a week suffer exactly the same symptoms as maternal abandonment.
You know, babies who are completely abandoned by their moms.
Yes, I've said it before.
I will say it again. It bears and needs repeating.
So you do this calculation.
You say, okay, well, the cost of childcare and commuting and extra clothes and lunches out and the additional education I'll need to compete in the workforce to get any kind of decent job completely cancels out.
The money I'm getting back, particularly after taxes, from my job, right?
So basically, I'm going to go to work, get up early, commute, do my makeup, I'm going to get up and go to work, I'm going to take all my profits, I'm going to hand them over to childcare providers.
So basically, instead of being home, spending time with my kids and enjoying being a mom, I'm out there, you know, busting my boobs, trying to get a paycheck, which I'm then handing over to childcare providers.
What's the point? And my wages will probably go down next year as more and more women pour into the workforce.
So just bringing women into the workforce is tough.
So you have to convince women that having babies is bad.
Once you convince women that having babies is bad, then it's easy to keep them in the workforce, right?
And the problem is, of course, that most women want to have babies.
And when you have babies, if you want to be a decent mom and breastfeed for the recommended 18 months or so, you're kind of useless as tits on a ball in the marketplace.
Because you're tired.
Because you're, you know, up all night.
Because you're breastfeeding.
You just... You've got mommy brain, right?
There's this foggy thing that happens with moms, which is important to remember.
So, you know, if you have the choice, if you're an employer looking to hire someone, and you have the choice between a young man and a young person, A woman, well, you're going to choose the young man, not because you're a sexist, but because you're a realist, because the young man is not going to get pregnant, he's not going to be disabled by pregnancy and childbirth, he's not going to have to breastfeed, he's not going to be able to breastfeed, and so on.
So given these basic choices, then...
You're going to choose the man. But then what happens is the government, in order to, again, lure more women into the marketplace, says, well, that's sexism.
There's a wage gap. And of course, this is still going on.
There's no wage gap. I mean, just there's no wage gap at all.
I mean, it's ridiculous, right?
I mean, women who've been in the workplace for the same amount of time as men actually earn slightly more than men if they're the same age.
So there's no wage gap.
There is a productivity gap between men and women.
And women, right? Men have two surges in income, one when they get married, another when they have kids.
They work harder, and the provider of that sort of genes kick in, and we're out there hustling and getting as much caribou on the hood of the car as we can drive back to the cave.
And so then what you have to do is you have to create this myth of the wage gap, and then what you have to do is pass legislation to artificially raise the wages of women to make it worth their while, so to speak, to go out.
And go to work. And then you have to get subsidized daycare and all of this kind of stuff.
You have to pass all these laws to artificially raise the economic value of women to make it worth them going out into the workforce.
So they have fewer kids, which again lowers your costs as a government, and they pay taxes, whereas formerly they weren't.
Plus, they have to put their kids in daycare or some other place, which gives you a whole other bunch of unionized people to vote for you, and a big power block of people who want women to go to work, and so on, right?
So the media facilitates you in all of this, and the academics facilitate you in all of this.
And... So what happens, of course, is that the costs, the social costs, in terms of increased alienation, criminality, promiscuity, drug abuse, smoking, and so on, that occurs from children as the resulting divorce, right?
In order to have women go into the workforce, you have to destabilize marriage, because a woman who's in a stable marriage with a good provider is going to be like, work?
Are you kidding me? I've got it made here.
This is the best life I could possibly have.
So you have to... Inculcate and instill in women a fear of masculinity, a fear that somehow being dependent on a man is bad.
Well, first of all, why?
The man's dependent on the woman to raise his kids properly, so everyone's dependent.
I mean, it's reality, right?
But you have to convince women that men are bad, and you have to poison women's minds against...
So being dependent on a man is bad, and that means you've got to go out and get educated and keep your work credentials up and go back to work and so on.
And this, of course, is going to create stress and destabilization in marriages, both practically and emotionally.
Two people working is a stressful marriage, just the way it is.
And in order to drive women into the workforce, you have to poison their view of men and say that men are...
Male chauvinist pigs and patriarchs and oppressors and so on, and this is inevitable and tragic.
And of course, the woman who's competing with the male executive who has a wife at home organizing his life, she can't really compete with him very well.
I mean, if you've ever been in a blissful existence with a woman who can organize your life, man, man alive, can you be productive?
People say, how are you so productive, Steph?
It's like, because I married well.
And... This poisoning of gender relations is very, very essential and very important.
And then you have to massively grow the government to hire women who are economically somewhat less productive because of Being moms and so on.
So you end up with a big giant state.
And the destabilizing marriage produces dysfunctional children down the road.
But that's after, you know, the politicians have long retired and, you know, the next generation gets to inhabit all of these issues.
Now, the last thing I wanted to mention, which with regards to immigration, is that the great danger of the free market is it reduces the need for people to have a state.
If people are raised well and taught how to think and they're rational, and this is not a high IQ thing, you can be not so smart and still very rational if you're raised well and with the right kind of examples and educated well.
And so the great problem of the free market is the free market by making people wealthier, by making it more productive to work than to be dependent on welfare and so on.
It reduces The need for the state.
It reduces the need for the state.
Like if people have really good understandings of other people's personalities, if people are very good at figuring out who's trustworthy or untrustworthy, you don't even need the court system that much because people just won't go into business with people who are untrustworthy and they'll get a good sense and a good instinct for it, which is why there's so much cloudiness about all of this.
And of course, the mystery untrustworthy person is also the The excuse that's used by single moms, you know, where's the dad?
Oh, he was just fine and perfect, and then poof, he became a monster.
You have to cloud people's judgment of character and personality, which used to be, and I think still is unconsciously, a highly attuned human trait.
We're very, very good at sussing out who's trustworthy and who's not.
But if people are raised well, and they're rational, and there's a good deal of wealth and opportunity in society...
What do you need the state for? There are very few criminals because people are raised well.
And it's so much more productive to work than it is to steal that, you know, it's like in Japan at the moment.
The police are literally inventing things for themselves to do because crime is so low.
Maybe if they took some more.
Refugees. What did they take?
40? 25 last year?
Can't remember. Anyway.
So the state always wants to create its reason for being.
It's raison d'etre, right? The state always wants to create its reason for being.
And if people are happy and productive and wealthy and generous and kind and sophisticated and negotiate well with each other, then the state feels left out.
Well, people find it harder to justify the state.
So, when people become more functional, they need the state less.
And so the importation of dysfunctional people again provokes the need for the state because those dysfunctional people are going to be conflict-ridden.
They're going to be more prone to violence.
They're going to be more prone to criminality than the general population.
Statistically, they're going to be destabilizing and so on.
And so you bring a bunch of immigrants in and this provokes a lot of conflict.
And because the state is now running towards the end of its capacity to extend and pretend, we have a big giant issue.
You know what? Let me stop here.
It's been a long chat, and I really appreciate your time in this.
Please let me know whether these...
Ambles through the back alleys of human history and causality are important.
But this is where we stand.
We stand on the precipice, being pushed forward in a sense by an inexorable glacier of historically terrible decisions to cede the power of controlling property and persons to the state, to allow for the creation of a central bank, a fiat currency, of printed will, type whatever you want into your own bank account, toilet paper, asswipe, nonsense, pretend money.
And, of course, the government has created tens and tens of trillions of dollars, just in America, it's hundreds around the West as a whole, of unfunded liabilities.
Now, what does the government do when it has made far more promises than it can possibly pay for?
What does it do? Well, historically, normally what it does is it goes to war.
It goes to war to kill off dependent sections of the population.
And also to create a mental environment where people are willing to accept sacrifices that they would not accept in peacetime.
War is the solution to debt.
War is the solution for unfunded liabilities.
War is the solution.
For promises made that cannot be kept.
But war can't happen anymore because the Western powers are nuclear armed, so you can't have war anymore.
You can have threats of war and so on, Russia and so on, but you can't have war anymore.
So what do you do? What do you do when you cannot pay your bills and you cannot go to war?
Well, I think we see this all around us at the moment.
And if you want me to go more into that, I'm happy to.
Just let me know what you think in the comments below.
And please, please, please, don't forget.
Oh, I'm begging you.
Please don't forget to go to freedomainradio.com to help out the show, to help us, to help me, in fact, bring more of these arguments and these insights to a very thirsty and hungry world for this kind of information, for these kinds of facts, for this kind of analysis. this kind of clarity freedomandradio.com slash donate.
