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Sept. 7, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:59
4188 Brazil Presidential Election Chaos: Candidate Jair Bolsonaro Stabbed!
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A philosopher has to wear many hats, to put it mildly.
Some of you may be outraged at what it is that I'm going to say in this story of Brazil, which is in fact the story of all of us, but I'm going to tell you straight up front in the potential hopes of at least slowing down the torch-bearing ogres of your moral indignation that I will be conducting a moral analysis of the situation later in this talk,
but first I'm going to be performing, executing really, An amoral, post-Nietzschean will-to-power, real politic analysis of the political maneuvers that are occurring.
So, hold your outrage, the ethics are coming, but I have to start with an analysis.
So, the moment that has crystallized what is going on in this...
Southern American and Central American swing between rampant, predatory, self-consuming democracy and steel-jawed, Pinochet-hatted military dictatorships.
What is happening at the moment is a leading Brazilian presidential candidate has been close to mortally wounded while at a rally being carried around on people's shoulders.
His son said, I think he was stabbed in the liver, that he lost almost all his blood and was about to die.
But he apparently has survived.
He's going to be on a week or two of bed rest in the hopes of recovering.
So I am, of course, talking about Jair Bolsonaro.
By the way, I have more followers on YouTube than this guy.
I'm just not bragging, just sort of pointing it out.
So, he was just attacked.
Bolsonaro was the frontrunner in the election and had been so for quite some months.
Why? Because the leftist Workers' Party candidate, Luis Incio Lula da Silva, well, was disqualified from running because a court sentenced him to 12 years in prison for...
Corruption. Now, by the way, I just wanted to point out to my friends who I've actually met in Brazil, in Sao Paulo, the libertarians in Brazil are doing a magnificent job of marshalling social media in order to root out and expose the corruption that is occurring in Brazilian politics.
Salud, my friends. Great, great job.
Turn the light on and see where the mold is growing.
So, a recent poll found that Bolsonaro...
The guy who was stabbed was leading all the candidates.
He had a 22% support.
And then further back, Marina Silva, leftist environmentalist, blah, blah, blah, she was only at 12%.
But what's amazing, and I'm going to spend some time talking about this.
So the guy who was thrown in prison for 12 years for corruption, recent polls said that should he magically walk through the prison walls, Inception style and a rise on the ballots, he would actually be leading at 39%, which means that the Brazilian population want to vote for this guy even though he's been thoroughly convicted of corruption and is in jail or facing jail for 12 years.
Why? Well, because women.
We'll get back to this later.
Why would they overlook corruption in order to get free stuff from the government?
Well, because in Brazil that seems to be called marriage.
Well, no marriage to the state.
So, of course, Bolsonaro, the guy who was stabbed, is consistently called far-right, extreme-right, because, you know, they've got to say that everyone who's a nationalist, everyone who likes Christians, everyone who has some pro-family values, anyone who's an anti-leftist, anyone who has even a tint identity, Of pro-free market ideology or belief systems.
Well, they are just equivalent to Nazis.
Do you remember how friendly the Nazis were to the free market?
Just go read the Nazi platform.
They're basically Democrats.
So yeah, Bolsonaro, court of the Christian vote.
He has pro-family values. He's anti-leftist, which is becoming particularly dangerous.
And... The guy in prison for 10 years for accepting a million-dollar property as a bribe, and then he was given an even bigger sentence because of the corruption during his first term as president.
So, Bolsonaro says, look, my...
Political record is clean.
I have good ideas to improve the Brazilian economy.
And by the way, I will do something to combat these increasingly violent leftists.
Hey, remember I said it was a story of all of us?
It is a story of all of us because so many people throughout the world, and in the West in particular, are facing this increased violence of leftism, which I will talk about down the road, both in terms of real politics and in terms of ethics.
So, naturally, because Bolsonaro is pro-Christian, relatively pro-free market, and because he is anti-communist, anti-violent leftism, the international far-left, also known as the mainstream media, well, they've criticized him heavily, right? You know, the woman is called, you know, she's a moderate, she's an environmentalist, she's just sweet and cuddly and all kinds of hallmark cards, whereas this guy is a far-right nationalist, right?
I mean, they just have to, right?
And naturally, of course, well, Bolsonaro has accused social media sites like Facebook of tamping down, of limiting his reach to the Brazilian people, I guess.
Not just to Brazilians, but conservatives as a whole.
Well, you've got to see Paul Johnson.
Joseph Watson's latest video on this is well worth looking at after his 12-hour timeout for naughty behavior, i.e.
reason and evidence, on Twitter.
So, who is this guy?
Well, he's a congressman, Jair Bolsonaro, former army captain, and crime, of course, a huge problem in Brazil.
Funny how this works.
See, what happens is, after a military dictatorship in Central and Southern American countries.
After military dictatorship, you get this resurgence of democracy.
And then what happens is, women get the vote, you get massive expansion in social programs, free money for women, and then you get the breakup of the family, boys being raised without fathers, then you get massive amounts of crime!
Ha! If only we could figure out this pattern!
It's like cracking the Rosetta Stone without the Rosetta Stone.
So, yeah, he's saying, look, Brazil is in chaos, as it kind of is.
I mean, you've got corruption at the highest levels, you have A rampant vote buying, otherwise known as democracy, you have huge increases in crime and you have widening income inequality, right?
Because that's what democracy does.
Democracy enriches the 1% and the bottom 40%, right?
bottom 40% or bottom 25% or so, depending on how you measure it.
So the middle class get hollowed out.
You end up with this donut economy, right, where the very rich who have control over the reins of power, they pillage the public treasury and get all sorts of preferential laws and benefits and taxes and tariffs against competitors for themselves, and the poor get massive handouts.
The middle class get pillaged, and, well, so it all ends up in chaos.
And he's saying, you need a strong hand to steady this.
So what happened was, there was a campaign event.
This guy stabbed the candidate in the abdomen.
And, well, some of them are saying, well, this is going to propel him.
Into the very top tier of politics.
Other people say, well, you see, his rhetoric, he kind of brought it on himself.
Because this is what leftists do, right?
If they disagree with you, then they consistently demonize you.
They paint you as the most evil human being possible in the hopes, basically, that somebody is going to...
Attack you is going to physically attack you, physically assault you, and take you out, right?
It's a call to murder, basically.
That's a lot of what the left does.
You know, there used to be this cliché, and probably it was kind of true, you know, schizophrenics hearing voices in their heads telling them to attack people, to kill people, to injure people.
Well, these days, that's just tuning into the mainstream media, the enemy of communism.
The enemies of communism must be attacked, but...
The pencil-necked guys behind the camera don't want to do it themselves, so they put out the bat signal to unstable people to attack their enemies.
So, according to the agents on the scene, the attacker said he was on a mission from a guard and...
Of course, he's not particularly mentally stable.
That doesn't explain anything, you understand, right?
It explains nothing. Saying that somebody is mentally unstable, therefore they stab a presidential candidate, is not a cause-and-effect situation.
Crazy people, trust me, I've been around a few in my life, particularly when I was younger.
Crazy people come up with lots of, I'm Napoleon, I'm Jesus, I'm...
There's your meme. They come up with lots of crazy things.
Whoever controls magnesium controls Pluto.
I mean, why on earth would, let's say somebody's mentally ill, somebody's crazy, whatever, why would they end up wanting to stab some guy?
Well, because the media is continually telling them that he's a Nazi, that he's going to cause the poor to starve and the sick to die of lack of healthcare and all this kind of stuff.
So... Saying that somebody's crazy and that explains why they stab a political candidate explains nothing other than what kind of propaganda did this crazy person receive so that their craziness manifested itself in this kind of attack upon this kind of person.
And again, the people who are making these clarion calls for violence, the mainstream media and so on, they know exactly what they're doing.
It's an old tried and true technique.
You demonize people, you dehumanize them to the point where...
Even vaguely unstable people can consider them fair game.
You know, it's the old, if you could go back in time and kill Hitler and that kind of stuff, right?
So, you know, and they call people far right when they call people Nazis.
I mean, they are trying to call down an airstrike.
Of unstable people to attack.
And it is an incitement to violence, without a doubt.
But of course, my free speech.
So, people are angry in Brazil.
I mean, again, largely as the result, or significantly as a result, of the Brazilian libertarians.
You've had four straight years of the massive amounts of corruption within Brazil's political classes.
And so people are getting pretty angry.
And... This is one of the reasons why they're willing to come up or risk someone who's relatively...
See, it's not that new, right?
I mean, so with the Trump, someone came in from outside, but no one has particularly come in from outside in Brazil because Bolsonaro has been a congressman since 19...
91, but he has managed to gather the frustration and the anger of people in Brazil to say, look, I'm gonna clean it up.
I'm gonna particularly confront a surge in crime.
One of the things he says That he wants to give police a free hand to shoot and kill criminals while on duty, or I should say shoot and kill suspects because the criminality has not been proven in a court of law.
And people who are desperate to have the grip of criminal gangs Taken off their neck.
They are looking for the strongman, right?
The proverbial strongman, the Pinochet.
This is the way that it happens when you get this democracy, this mass chaos of vote buying and debt and corruption and the disintegration of the family and so on.
People panic and then they flock to a strongman and then you get that phase and then the economy recovers.
Certainly that has been the case in Chile and it has been the case in other places.
The economy recovers And then they say, wow, the economy's better.
Let's have democracy again. Well, we'll get to this cycle in a second.
So... So yeah, leading rival was taken out by corruption charges and now he's been taken out by, Bolsonaro has been taken out by a stabbing.
And this is not new, right?
I mean, Da Silva in March was on a campaign tour in southern Brazil before he was imprisoned and gunshots hit the buses that were in his caravan.
Nobody was actually hurt. Marielle Franco, she's a black councilwoman in Rio de Janeiro, was shot to death.
This again, just in March.
She was an attending event.
She was shot to death along with her driver.
Now, the guy who was stabbed, to be fair, he has spoken with mild nostalgia about Brazil's 1964 to 1985 life.
Military strongman. Dictatorship?
I mean, it's not nearly as strong as some of the other dictatorships that have occurred in the region.
But, yeah, let's say military dictatorship, because that's generally how it's referred to, and you can look it up yourself.
All the sources to what I'm talking about will be below.
1964 to 1985, so just over.
21 years, just over 20 years, and he said, you know, it was not the worst thing in the world to have that, because, you know, crime was down, the economy was doing better, and again, there's not an ethical analysis.
That's going to come, my friends.
I'm just talking about the practicalities.
And he's also said that he's going to fill his government with military leaders, both current and former.
His vice presidential running mate is a retired general, so...
This pendulum, I'm telling you, it's swinging back and forth.
There's a way to get out of it, which is going to shock and appall and excite you, as I so often do, which we'll get to in a second.
So Marina Silver, remember the centrist, she's called a centrist and an environmentalist because that sounds all kinds of cuddly.
And she came out against it, of course.
Dilma Rousseff, Lula's successor, said that, well, Bolsonaro, his extreme views, maybe he provoked this attack.
The quote is, when you plant hate, you harvest thunderstorms.
And this was with an interview with a newspaper.
So, yeah, apparently, you see, he talked about his values and therefore he got stabbed.
And he's responsible to some degree, you know, like how...
Actually, I can't even say that now to take that out of context.
You know how some people say, well, if a woman dresses provocatively, dot, dot, dot, right?
Now, let's do a little bit of a history, because...
Describing current events is interesting, the analysis of current events is interesting, but where the philosophy comes in is how the hell Brazil got here.
Democracy, a fairly recent achievement in the history of Brazil.
So there was an imperial era that ended in the late 19th century.
Just in the 20th century alone, there were two long periods of this military junta, this kind of military dictatorship.
There was 1930 to 1945, and then, as I mentioned before, 1964 to 1985.
And so, Brazil, Latin American republics and so on, late 20th century, you get this period of military rule, followed by a return to democracy, followed by the chaos of democracy, then causing the pendulum to swing back to a thirst for order, you know, the old Mussolini thing, after the chaos of the post-Second World War period in Italy, the statement about Mussolini.
Well, at least he made the trains run on time.
And if you look at the mad chaos that occurred in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and early 1930s in Germany, where you had hyperinflation, the destruction of the middle class, endless war reparations.
Communists gained massively in the German Reichstag in the Weimar Republic.
Like in a four-year period, they doubled to over 100 seats in the Reichstag.
And so there was a great fear....of the Communists taking over, and then therefore, of course, the Germans kind of freaked out, panicked, sold off all of their freedoms to the National Socialists in hopes of protecting themselves against Communism, and, well, did not end up being protected at all.
So there is this swing that goes back and forth, and it is pretty horrible.
Now, in terms of nationalization, this is...
So the Great Depression in the 1930s was a worldwide phenomenon, and in Brazil, the government...
They nationalized a whole bunch of...
They took over ownership of the country's largest companies.
And they partnered...
Like, it was kind of a combo.
They partnered with local... And or foreign corporations, and then they sold stock to private investors, but they kept significant amounts of stock by the government.
The government kept a majority interest in a lot of these companies, which means that you nationalize it, you take a huge bunch of stock for yourself, you sell some stock to private investors, which drives up the value of the stock that the government holds, and makes a whole bunch of people rich in a highly, highly corrupt manner.
And in the period in between the military dictatorships, you had this democracy And the democracy, because basically democracy is just vote bribing, you end up with massive inflation.
And that was pretty horrible.
High rates of inflation were crushing to just about every aspect of Brazil's, not just economic life, but life as a whole.
And why did you have inflation?
Well, you had inflation. Inflation means inflation in the money supply.
The price increase is the effect of that, but it's just printing way more money, throwing more money at the economy than the economy can handle, you understand.
Like if you have... If you have two oranges and two dollars, each orange is going to cost a dollar.
If you have two oranges and four dollars, well, each orange is going to cost two dollars because you haven't magically increased the number of oranges by increasing the amount of money.
All you've done is drive up the price of oranges.
In the late 20th century, governments, you know, deficit spending, they would pour lots of money into industrial expansion, they subsidized business loans, you know, all the garbage that Obama was doing with all of this green energy tits-up nonsense that occurred where people just got rich and then declared bankruptcy to escape any kind of blowback.
So, In the military regime, I mean, to get really specific, April 1st, 1964.
It's just an odd date for a military regime to take control.
April 1st, 1964 to March 15th, 1985.
Yeah, the military regime really helped the economy.
And this is the pattern.
You get some kind of, I mean, I hate to say patriarchy because there's very few men in control of the government.
It's not like all men get a say in the government.
But you get this kind of military-style dictatorship, and that is a masculine situation.
And as men who are harsh, who are tough, who are military men often, they're tough on crime, and they're strong on family values.
They become like the parent.
The over-authoritarian bullying parent who, you know, like the late Dr.
Phil episode when the parents have lost control of their teenager and they need to send their teenager off to some ranch where they play with horses and have rules.
Well, you got the stern dad coming in saying, well, we got to stop all of this crazy stuff.
Too much debt, too much vote buying, too much corruption.
Just clean house! And then after a while, you clean house.
And you can see this happening in Chile now.
Chile narrowly averted socialist or communist takeover.
And then Pinochet took over, ruled for a while, and then it was begged to rule by the parliament, by the politicians.
We're begging Pinochet to take over to save them from socialism slash communism.
Pinochet ruled for a while, a long while, and now women are back in charge in Chile, and women are voting, and women are politicians, and so what do you get?
Women get to vote, and women want free stuff.
You understand? Women want free stuff.
And this may sound like I'm down on women.
It's just biological. It's just biology.
You know how men want to have sex with young, fertile women?
Well, women want free stuff.
It's what they respond to.
Because we didn't have this big, giant government throughout our evolution, and the way that women got, quote, free stuff was being a wife, was being a mother, was being a good companion, was raising children well, was running a household or a cave hold or whatever you want to call it.
Women can no more say no to free stuff from attractive politicians than men can say no to free sex from young, attractive women.
It just is the way we're wired.
It's one of the reasons why governments simply can't work and why democracy can't last.
And women... Of course, I'm responsible primarily for the feeding and care of children.
And men can say, well, I'm going to live low, close to the bone.
I'm going to just rent a little place and not eat that much and really, you know, save, save, save.
So poverty strikes a single man differently.
But if a woman has children, well, she's got to feed them.
She has to. I mean, she has to give them food.
And if she can't get it from the man, she's going to have to get it from...
Anywhere and traditionally women would turn to prostitution to get resources for their children if they didn't have a man or they'd have to give up their children.
Now women just prostitute their vote to politicians to get free stuff.
Women can't say no to free stuff and as a whole tons of exceptions but women can't say no to free stuff and so when women get the vote you can see this direct line women get the vote and government spending goes through the roof and it is Spending on social programs, it's spending on healthcare, it's spending on education, and of course, women end up being hired a lot by the government as well.
For various reasons I've gone into before.
So, yeah. Democracy, women get the vote, women want free stuff, and there's not enough money to give them free stuff.
So what does the government do? Well, the government starts printing money.
The government starts borrowing money.
And the government starts selling debt instruments, like bonds.
Like you buy a bond at the government, all you're doing is guaranteeing yourself future tax increases because, hey, guess what?
The government doesn't have any money and the government doesn't make any money.
The government only takes, borrows and prints money.
In other words, it only steals it in three different ways.
And so what happens?
Well, when the women get free stuff, they don't need to mend as much.
So there's a lot of destruction of the family.
Boys are raised without fathers.
You get violence. There's exploitation of particularly the working classes, the middle classes.
When the government prints a lot of money, you get hyperinflation, massive amounts of corruption, and then the hidden violence of democracy becomes real violence in the streets, and then people call for a dictatorship.
Oh, and also because the media is so infested with leftists throughout the West and throughout a wide variety of countries, because the media is so infested with leftists, Then what happens is the military dictatorship often puts in restrictions on free speech and that is considered to be horrendous.
Again, I'm simply talking about the real politics, not the ideal morals of the situation.
So, there was some nationalization in the 30s and then in the 90s there was some semi-privatization, right?
And This is the general pattern, that when there's an economic crisis, People want security over freedom, which is why governments have no particular opposition to economic crises, because it allows them to say, well, we'll take care of you, and it's too scary to be free, so we will take care of you.
And so what happens is the government takes over these large companies, and then there's a huge amount of corruption, and the economy begins to die because there's just no leanness.
There's no efficiency. There's no focus on retaining the best talent and firing the bottom 10%, which you regularly need to do.
All of that kind of stuff doesn't happen.
Anymore. And then the economy begins to die.
So then they say, oh, well, we'll privatize or semi-privatize this stuff.
And it's, I mean, it's crazy.
It's just crazy.
Federal prosecutors in Brazil revealed, this is back in 2014, a two...
I'm sorry, I shouldn't.
A $2 billion corruption scandal.
This was collusion among infrastructure companies, bribes to high-level executives in Petrobras, the oil and gas company, and payouts to politicians, including those who were actually in the governing party at the time.
And, I mean, it's just crazy.
And this is what happens. You get massive amounts of money sloshing around at the top levels of politics, and nobody can resist.
Nobody can resist.
Well, almost nobody.
Can resist. And so, as of quite recently, the government has grown like some cocaine-fed tumor.
So in Brazil, total government expenditures, this is public sector wages, transfer payments, and so on, more than 40% of gross domestic product.
And the tax burden is much heavier in Brazil than in places like Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and so on.
Corruption is a huge problem.
Private property rights are very shaky, and the, air quotes, judicial system remains...
That's a nice way to put it. Remains somewhat susceptible to political influence.
And yeah.
So just some notes on the economic history before we get to why this guy was stabbed.
Well, this is all kind of why he was stabbed.
So when the government runs the economy, countless booms and busts.
This is the 19th and 20th century in Brazil.
And in the 80s and 90s, Hyperinflation took hold of the hot mines and balls of the economy in Brazil.
In 1990, the inflation peaked at nearly 3,000%.
Now, granted, that's not Venezuela, that's not Zimbabwe, but it's not good.
Now, there was...
I mean, partly as a result of Milton Friedman and the Chicago...
Boys and the free market economists that went down to some of Latin America, there was a bit of a neoliberal wave throughout the 80s and the 90s, but it didn't take quite as well in Brazil.
And there was a regional debt crisis that was brought on by massive government borrowing sprees in the 70s, and then, of course, the inevitable increase in interest rates in the 1980s caused all of these problems.
As far as economic freedom goes, a couple of years old, this is as of 2012, the free countries as a whole, I think New Zealand's still at the top, free countries as a whole score 84.7 on the index of economic freedom.
Brazil clocks in at 57.9, and that's not good.
The size and spread and bribeocracy of government in Brazil is massive.
It's private sector and public sector pensions are, in Brazil, among the most lavish in the world.
So the pensions replace about 75% of pre-retirement income, which is huge.
And some of these pensions are paid to the poor to help reduce the numbers of poverty and so on.
But, yeah, if you live in the country and you're aged over 60, if you're poor and you're over 65, you can get a pretty generous pension, equal to at least the minimum wage, even if you've never paid into the system at all.
So no income guaranteed pension going out, and that is a big problem.
Now, it's not a huge amount of GDP, just a couple of percentage points, but...
This is the bankrupt welfare states and you could look at Greece in Europe as a similar sort of situation but If you allow for these generous pensions, and there are rules that allow people who are paying into the pensions to retire earlier, with even larger pensions than almost anywhere else in the world, then what happens is you're paying people to not pay into the system, and you're paying people to take out of the system, and that's not going to work.
And as a result, Brazilians, you know, there's a reason they have time for a flash in their boobs at Mardi Gras, because most Brazilians retire early.
Pretty early. So even in the private sector, the average male retires at the age of 54.
The average woman retires at the age of 52.
I've got to imagine it's even worse in the public sector.
So that's pretty young.
That's pretty young. Survivor's benefits, there's no age limits, right?
So if you're the wife of a guy who worked for the government and he dies three years after retirement, you just keep getting his benefits forever and ever and ever.
And also...
Families can inherit 100%, the complete and total pension of somebody who died.
So if you have, if you're a young widow, no kids, you never need to work.
You inherit that and it goes, you know, you have, let's say you have, you're 25 and you married a guy who's 50, he retires, he dies, you get his pension 100% for the rest of your life.
It's just astounding.
So, if you look in Brazil, take the slice of 45-year-olds in Brazil, 10% of them are already receiving pensions at the age of 45.
And they will be receiving those pensions pretty much forever.
And, I mean, it's so ridiculously unsustainable.
It's ridiculous. But that's what happens in democracy.
Democracy is the most potent and virulent manifestation of the problem of the commons.
The problem with the commons is if you have a whole bunch of sheepherders who are ringing around, like think of a donut, right?
They're all around, and the hollow of the donut, the middle of the donut, is a piece of common land.
Then every sheepherder, every shepherd, I guess, has the incentive to let his sheep graze on the common land, because he doesn't pay for it, and it's free.
And so the common land gets completely stripped and becomes useless.
Well, that's the government, you understand?
That's the treasury, that's government tax money.
Everybody has the incentive to take as much as humanly possible, And who has the incentive to try and stand in front of that stampede?
Very, very few people.
Now, entrepreneurship, of course, is the way to fight economic decline.
And entrepreneurship in Brazil, well, it's not the friendliest environment.
So in Brazil, if you want to start a business, it takes 13, count them 13, bureaucratic procedures.
It takes 119 days and about 5.4% of your per capita income just to start the business.
13 procedures, 119 days, and about 5.4% of your income per capita.
In New Zealand, it's one procedure and one day to start a company.
So basically, Brazil is even worse than China.
So, in China, it's 14 procedures but only 38 days and costs only 3.5% of your income.
Now, of course, existing businesses like having these barriers to entry.
Once you get existing businesses that, it's called capitalism or crony capitalism, when existing businesses team up with the state, they love raising barriers to entry.
They don't want it to be easy to come in and compete with them.
See, this is a general cycle.
Poor people become wealthy.
Wealthy people Have higher burn rates per month than poor people.
Like some people I knew in business, they'd get a raise, they'd immediately start spending more.
They'd lease a nicer car, they'd move to a bigger house.
And it's like, dude, don't do that.
But poor people become rich.
And rich people spend a lot more money to maintain their lifestyle.
Which means that poor people can outcompete rich people, right?
Because you can charge...
Less. When I was a software executive and a company I co-founded, we went up against some of the biggest businesses in the world.
We went up against IBM, we went up against other businesses, and we could underbid them because we were smaller, we were leaner, and new companies don't have a big retirement contingent to pay and so on, and there's less bureaucracy and more nimble.
In order to maintain wealth, you have to, in a crony capitalist system, to maintain your wealth, you have to restrict.
You have to restrict the capacity for poor people to compete with you because you can't compete with smart, poor people if you're rich.
So you use the government to raise barriers to entry and then bribe them, bribe the poor with government spending into not competing with you.
And there's a Sao Paulo correspondent, Paola Prada.
She said that... Brazil's restrictive business environment and really, really tight and rigid labor code, like French style, they date back to the 1940s.
They were originally modeled on the fascistic policies of Benito Mussolini.
So, the long hand of fascism reaches forward into the current situation of...
Brazil! And it's nuts.
So if you're just looking at one particular measure of government spending as a percentage of GDP, it has gone up quite high.
And it's almost twice as high as similar spending in Mexico.
So if you just look at social programs, infrastructure, public pension obligations, and so on, It's pretty nuts.
It's gone from 18.6% of GDP in 2000 to 20.2% by 2014.
In Mexico, it's only 12.2% as of 2014.
So it is pretty rough.
And there's a lot of heavy tariffs.
Brazil doesn't do much international trade compared to other countries because, of course, when you have big capitalist interests in the country, they don't want foreign competition and so on.
So, how did they get out of the dictatorship, the military dictatorship, into this predatory, exploitive democracy?
So, in 1985, there was a new constitution in Brazil.
And national economic development, which means bribe-ocracy and corruption at the highest levels.
And, well, it's the child's wish list of rights.
So, what you have...
Human beings don't have rights.
They don't exist. They're just imaginary labels, right?
Right. But human beings have properties, but we don't have rights attached to us.
I mean, like a liver or spleen or hair or something like that.
But the wish list of rights is very common these days, and it was included in the Brazilian Constitution in the mid-80s.
So citizens have a right to education, a right to health care, a right to work, a right to a retirement pension, and free assistance for children six and under.
And this was just one of the many, like, wouldn't it be nice, wouldn't it be good to have all these rights?
I mean, this is what just created...
Wouldn't it be great if everyone had free health care?
Yeah, it wouldn't be great if we could...
Suck unicorn jugulars to cure cancer.
Yeah, but ain't no unicorns.
And of course, if everyone has a right to healthcare, then you have just institutionalized slavery.
If everyone has a right to work, you've just institutionalized slavery.
And by the way, did you know that 10 times more blacks were taken to Brazil as slaves than were ever taken to America?
Just a little by-the-by that's interesting.
Because if you have a right to healthcare...
Then other people must be forced to provide your healthcare, which turns doctors into slaves.
If you have the right to somebody else's work at the point of a gun, well, that's slavery, right?
So all of these rights...
And if the government...
If people didn't give you this pension, if they didn't give you this healthcare, if they didn't give you this education, you could petition the government.
And so this is one reason why the private sector pensions Are so extravagant because you have a right to this wild pension and if you don't get it they can go to the government and the government will force you to give it.
Now when you give these kinds of massive generous benefits within a country you have to then restrict trade outside the country because other countries that don't have these requirements for all this free stuff being paid for by everyone they can out-compete you, right?
And so you have to restrict your trade which further restricts your economic growth and then you end up dependent as so many countries do on one particular Natural resource.
For Venezuela, it was oil, and for Mexico, it's welfare benefits sent across the border in the form of, well, just money being sent over, right?
I mean, so yeah, in America, Mexicans get welfare benefits.
Some of them work, but they get welfare benefits a lot, and then they send those benefits back over to Mexico, and it's become, I think it's bigger now than their oil business, getting this money from the American taxpayer by force.
So, nobody sits there and says, well, if I have a right to healthcare, doesn't that make doctors slaves?
That's wrong. That's immoral.
We should not use force to provide things as delicate as healthcare and education.
People said, woohoo, free stuff.
And of course, when you have free stuff, you don't need to think about the free market.
You don't need to think about...
You know, the old story, I think it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who said, I would give my kingdom for a one-armed economist.
And people said, why? He said, so I can finally have an economist who doesn't come up to me and say, on the other hand, right?
Because if you give all of these free goodies to everyone, well, they'll vote for it, and then they don't have to think about things anymore.
And it just hollows out the entire freedoms.
And of course, what it means then...
Is when you start giving people free stuff, they become corrupted.
And then they become angry at anyone who brings reality to them, right?
Because you understand, I mean, the most potent drug in the world, the most potent drug in the world is debt.
The most potent drug in the world is money printing, is counterfeiting, is government currency.
Government currency is the most potent drug in the world.
And when people get addicted to government currency, as is the case, like half of British people are dependent on the state.
It's about the same thing for America.
The drip, drip, drip of survival mechanism known as imaginary made-up monopoly money, you get addicted to it.
And then if anybody stands between you and your supply, well, if you've ever tried to talk someone out of taking a drug or a drink that they shouldn't, what do you get?
You get manipulation, you get cajoling, you get charm, and then if you persist, you get rage.
And then if you persist very often, you will get attack.
And you understand that the conservatives, the free market people, the libertarians, the voluntarists, the anarcho-capitalists, we're all standing.
Between the drug of free money and the addicts to that drug.
And of course you get manipulation, you get verbal abuse, and if you continue to stand between the addict and his or her supply, you get violence.
You understand? You get rage.
You get people addicted to this stuff, this fiat currency, and they will attack anybody who stands between them and the drug that they genuinely believe that they need to survive.
And this is particularly true when the drug flows down and brings the poor to the middle class.
So just in the past decade, 40 million people have joined the ranks of Brazil's middle class from poverty.
And since 2015, there have been more than a million job losses.
So there has been this money that just created and printed and borrowed and taxed, of course, flows down to the poor and lifts them up into the middle class, but it's completely unsustainable.
It's like, I could be happy by doing therapy and self-work and being a good person and cleaning up my relationships and committing myself to virtue, or I could just take cocaine.
Of course, when the cocaine wears off, you're worse than you were before.
So that's bad, right?
Same thing with fiat currency. You can get a facade of alleviating poverty by printing money and pumping it into the economy.
But it's completely unsustainable.
And then people begin to panic because they have gotten wealth without the skill set that should rationally acquire it, like the hard work, the discipline, the increasing of your human capital, the reading of books, the learning of whatever skills you need.
They just got free money from the government, which brings them up to a situation of relative wealth.
And then what happens?
Well, it's not real. And that which is not real, that which is mathematically impossible to continue, will not continue.
So, yeah, they've had like about a century of this kind of hothouse or greenhouse crony capitalist development where these fragile plants of pseudo-economic growth, they're only surviving because they're protected from the worldwide economy and they're protected from free market forces.
Are they going to open up Brazil to the global economy?
No. What do the Brazilian businesses want?
They want cheap credit from the government.
They want protection from foreign competitors.
They want all of this stuff, right?
So what are they going to do?
Are they going to let competition go into the Brazilian economy and clean house so that they can actually compete, particularly in manufacturing?
Well, no. No.
They want free money from the government, low interest rates.
They want to stifle competition, both internally in the forms of big barriers to entry for starting businesses.
See, also, when you get money from the government, politically connected people get the money, and the poor people are not politically connected.
It's the rich people who are politically connected.
So it's why you get this widening income gap between the rich and the poor in a crony capitalist economy, which is kind of an insult to the word capitalism.
So I was talking about the poverty programs that raise the poor to the middle class but cannot be sustained.
And one of them that is kind of key for this, and it will tie into the women that I've been talking about.
So there is a government program called Bolsa Familia.
And it is given fairly universal credit for helping millions of Brazilians get out of poverty.
It's a little more than 10 years old, and it's just straight-up cash transfer program.
So it gives money to families.
They have to send their kids to school.
They've got to take them to regular health checkups.
Although, given that it's Brazil, given that it's bureaucracy, how well those standards are enforced is just about anyone's guess.
But this... Programs, terms, they're pretty radical.
And huge numbers of people.
So 50 million poor parents get this handout.
And it's about $35 to $70, which, you know, goes a long way in, say, rural Brazil.
And they get even more for each additional child.
So 50 million poor parents are getting this money.
That's a quarter of the country's entire handout.
Population. And it is a straight-up handout.
They don't have to pay the money back.
It never runs out.
They don't have to prove that they're looking for work.
Anything like that. One economist has said, it's like Sweden, with sunshine.
Well, not for long.
And the unusual nature of this is fairly common throughout the West, or throughout welfare states as a whole.
The translation to Bolsa Familia is family grant, but it's primarily given to the woman of the house.
The woman of the house.
So there's this prejudice in Brazil, this anti-male prejudice.
When you get a welfare state, you don't need men anymore, you understand?
So when you have a welfare state, men are forced We're good to go.
Then you don't need to be nice to men anymore.
And of course, once you get the welfare state, which is dependent upon male taxpayers to a large degree, women take out generally far more than they contribute in taxes they take out from social programs, from government spending as a whole.
So not only do you not need men anymore, but you actually have an emotional motivation to become scornful towards men.
Because if you want to exploit people, you first have to dehumanize them.
Because if they're just like you, you know that old thing when you were a kid and you'd take some other kid's candy and they'd say, well, how would you like it if he took your candy?
Trying to equate, grow empathy and create normal and just and sane human relations.
But when you are using the state to exploit and violently strip wealth from men and give it to you, You have to dehumanize men.
How would you like it if men used the power of the government to strip your sexual market value from you?
How would you like it if the government took money from you, or took your children from you, or took whatever it was from you?
How would you like it if the government forced you to marry men?
You'd be like, oh, that's appalling! But a woman's sexual market value is primarily her sexuality.
A man's sexual market value...
It's primarily his resources.
I mean, we're just, again, talking amoral Darwinian evolution time.
And so for the government to strip resources from men and give it to women is roughly analogous to women being forced to have sex with men.
I mean, just in terms of evolutionary standards and so on.
So if you want to exploit people, if you want to use the power of the state to strip resources from them and give those resources to you, you have to dehumanize them.
So you don't just become indifferent to men, you become hostile towards men.
There's a reason why the Society for Cutting Up Men and radical male-hating feminism came after the welfare state.
It couldn't really come before the welfare state because it's really, really tough to dehumanize and hate someone Who you depend on to pay your bills.
You have to first have a welfare state and then you can unleash female hatred towards men because men can't ostracize women anymore.
They're forced to pay. So the state as a whole in Brazil kind of believes that women are more reliable than men.
Because, you know, the story is that men just go ahead and get drunk and get into fights, whereas women are caring and responsible and like to help the children and community and charity and all this kind of stuff.
And basically what it means for the state, for the leftist state, why does the leftist state like women?
Because women like the leftist state as a whole.
So when they say, well, women are more reliable with money than men, what they mean is women are more reliable voters for leftist programs.
And, yeah, one mother in Rio de Janeiro said, Had recently left who she described as an abusive partner.
She told The Guardian, and I quote, I substituted my husband for Bolsa Familia, right?
Trade in my husband, and I get married to the state.
Now, once you're married to the state, you become, well...
The single mother state, the welfare state is the single mother state, as I said many, many times.
When you become married to the state, when the state provides you your resources, you don't need to stay attractive to men.
You don't need to find value in men.
You don't need to like men anymore.
There's a reason why you get the welfare state, you get radical feminism, and then you get obesity and blue hair and making yourself physically unattractive.
You don't need to be attractive because you're getting your money from the state rather than The man.
And this is one of the fundamental problems.
Gender relations, like race relations, are government programs being hugely distorted by the evils of fiat currency.
So, I have to put the note in because it's important.
Why is there this highly predatory democracy and then these military dictatorships?
Because when the IQ of a country goes below about 90, according to studies, You can't sustain any kind of republic.
You can't sustain any kind of civilized social system.
And the average IQ in Brazil is 87.
And this goes all the way from high-end ethnic groups to low-end ethnic groups.
And so this is going to be a problem.
So why did a guy get stabbed?
Why did a guy get stabbed?
Because politics is violence.
Because politics as a whole, the state as a whole, is violence.
The state is taxation.
Taxation is the forcible removal of property against people's will.
The government is debt.
In other words, the government enslaves people, usually the young, usually even the unborn, by enrolling them in debt schemes to bribe the current population.
So if you can force the unborn to eventually pay for the Bribes that you're using to buy votes in a political system, then you get all the money, you get all the power, you get all the votes, and you hand off the debt to the kids, and by the time the debt sinkhole opens up beneath your economy, you're either dead or you're retired or you have enough money to be able to weather it out or move elsewhere.
So, yeah, there's taxes, which is coercion, debt, which is rampant exploitation and enslavement.
Money printing. Now, money printing, when you create money out of thin air, when you have a central bank, when you have the equivalent of Federal Reserve...
What you're doing is you're stealing in particular from the poor because you're diluting the value of their money by introducing more money than the economy requires or demands or can sustain or manifest.
So taxes is theft.
Debt is theft and exploitation and enslavement.
Money printing is theft in particular from the poor and it's all used to buy votes.
So why did the guy get stabbed?
Because for decades now The electorate has become addicted to free stuff, and that is on the poor and as well as the rich, right?
The rich through the military-industrial complex, through favoritism from the government, through being invited to the kind of meetings that you or I will never attend.
They get all this preferential benefits.
So the lie in Brazil, as in the rest of the world, is to say, well, there's corruption in the government.
No, there's not corruption in the government.
Government is corruption. Government is exploitation.
Government is force. Government is lies.
Government is propaganda. Government is the selling of the unborn into almost perpetual enslavement to foreign banksters.
More than 40% of the GDP is consumed and spent by the government, which means at least 40% of the money in Brazil is stolen and redistributed for political power.
This is countless billions of dollars.
The realignment of this money, the creation of the theft and the printing and the borrowing of this money creates economically dependent classes of people over time who make significant life decisions on the continued flow of free stuff.
On the continued flow of free stuff.
And if that flow is interrupted, if that flow is threatened, Why I said it's the most powerful drug is that the cocaine user, he kind of knows that cocaine isn't good for him.
He'll go through a phase of, you know, party on, dude, coolness, like it's just, you know, it's what you need to do to survive on the street, Wall Street or whatever, right?
He'll go through a kind of phase, but it pretty much quickly becomes something that he knows is bad for him, that he knows he shouldn't do.
So there is the rage of having the supply interrupted if somebody doesn't It gets between him and his drug of choice, but deep down he knows it's bad for him and he knows he should quit.
So there is some sort of end to that rage.
There's some sort of tempering of that rage because he knows the drug is wrong and it's bad for him and he needs to quit anyway, right?
But fiat currency is not like that.
People mistake it for the real economy.
People mistake it for charity.
They mistake it for niceness.
They mistake it for helping people out of poverty when it's not doing that.
It's getting them addicted to a substance that can't possibly continue.
Fiat currency. Government debt.
And then they make fundamental life decisions.
Like they leave their husband.
Or they leave their wife.
Or they buy something they can't afford.
Or they say, well, if I'm getting all this free money...
Why would I want to increase my human capital?
Why would I want to learn new skills while I'm getting the money anyway?
You know, you do sit-ups and you diet if you want abs, like if you want male abs or female abs, I guess, for that matter.
But if you just woke up tomorrow morning with abs in perpetuity, would you do a thousand sit-ups a day?
Kind of not. So it gives people a delusion.
And it also has them addicted not just to fiat currency.
They're addicted to violence.
Because it is violence.
It is monopoly. It is compulsion.
It is force. You try and create a competitive currency to the government and try and using it to pay your taxes and try to use, they will throw you in jail.
It is illegal. You try doing what the government does and counterfeiting and borrowing on other people's lives and you will go to jail for fraud.
They're not addicted fundamentally to To fiat currency, they're addicted to the coercive power of the state.
They're addicted to violence, the violence which produces the wealth they believe they need to live.
So, the idea that somebody Who may even potentially interfere with that free flow of money.
The fact that that person gets stabbed is entirely in line with the fact that people dependent on the state, both rich and poor, are addicted to violence.
They're addicted to the fruits of violence.
They live on the fruits of violence.
So the idea that they would use violence is not that surprising.
It's more manifest because when you have the overwhelming power of the state, then people just comply.
And with that brute compliance, it kind of looks like there's no violence, right?
But if you don't pay the government the money that they want from you, you go to jail.
And in jail, you can get raped, you can get stabbed, you can get murdered, you can get infected with an illness, you can get substandard health care, you can die from all of that, right?
So, these two poles that these Latin American countries and the West as a whole are swinging between.
There's only one way to solve it.
The moral part comes in.
I guess it's been here for a while now.
So, Government is force.
Taxation is theft.
Money printing is counterfeiting and theft.
Now, in a democracy, this is generalized, but it's fundamentally true.
You kind of need to etch this into your brain.
So in a democracy...
You go to jail if you don't pay the women off.
Because the women are all the free stuff, social programs, healthcare and childcare and government education, which is just another form of indoctrinating childcare.
So in a democracy, you're going to go to jail if you don't pay the women off.
In a military dictatorship, you go to jail if you don't pay the men off.
Because, you know, military men and so on.
And... The chaos of single mother households, the chaos of the violence that begins to erupt as a result of a society where significant portions of the population are addicted to the fruits of violence, of course it's going to manifest into outright violence.
I mean, in the same way that if you borrow money from a loan shark, if you keep paying him off the minimum, he won't attack you.
When you stop paying him, he will attack you, right?
So in a civilization, quote civilization, if you keep paying off people They won't riot.
But when you stop paying them off, they will riot.
But you understand, you were only paying them off because you knew that they would riot.
You're only paying off the loan shark because you know it's going to break your knees if you don't.
The violence is all there.
The violence is always there.
My purpose as a public intellectual for more than a decade has been to point out the gun in the room, that there is a gun pointed at people.
And so the fact that society has become increasingly addicted to violence and the fruits of violence and the fact that some guy gets stabbed, it's like, well, of course he is.
Of course he is. And do we want this?
Rampant vote-buying, bribing, gynocracy, democracy.
Do you want to have a situation where in a democracy you go to jail if you don't pay the women off?
Or you can swing to a military dictatorship where you go to jail if you don't pay the military men off?
Do you want either? I don't!
What do I want? What do you want?
Freedom! I want freedom!
Just freedom! And as long as we have governments, we will have this cycle forever.
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