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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:01
A Statist Intervention | True News
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Hi.
My name is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
And you've been sent this video or audio by someone who cares about you a great deal and frankly is worried.
about you because you're a statist now you may not know what that word means because you were most likely educated in a state school or college or university but a statist is someone who believes that
The government and the laws that it passes and the violence that it inflicts is the best way, and maybe you even think that it's the only way, to solve complex social problems like the education of the young and
the protection of the elderly and health care and poverty and uh... keeping drugs away from people uh... destructive drugs and so on and if you believe that the government is not only beneficial but absolutely necessary to deal with these kinds of complex challenging problems then you're a statist and really the first part
of solving a problem is first admitting that you have one, and that's why you have been sent this video, and why we are going to stage a little bit of a statist intervention for you, to free you from these kinds of destructive and really terrible thought patterns, and break you free into a happier and freer and more voluntary kind of world and way of thinking.
So there are two elements to this addictive spiral that you're in that you probably don't know.
When you're in the grip of an addiction it's really hard to get out of your own head and to see where you are and what you support objectively.
So there are two aspects to the way that you think that are significantly problematic and we'll just touch on them briefly.
We'll look at some facts and then we'll suggest ways that you can escape this terrible and destructive mental habit.
So the first is that you don't know, it's clear from the outside but it's really hard to see from the inside, you don't know that what you're advocating is So there's just no nice way to put it.
What you're advocating is violent.
It's the initiation of the use of force against usually disarmed citizens for the sake of achieving some political or social or, quote, charitable end.
And if you don't remember that any time you tell the government to do something or ask the government to do something or vote for or suggest that the government should do something, that what you're saying, really, I mean in reality, not in story time, but in reality, what you're really saying is that a small group of individuals should be given the power to use unlimited force to achieve either their own ends or the ends of the majority if you believe that democracy works, which we'll stage another intervention for another time.
But you forget, probably, that when you say, well, the government should do X or Y or Z, that you're saying that a small group of individuals called, you know, the government should have the legal and moral right to initiate violence to achieve their ends, right?
So if you think that the government should help the poor, then what you're really saying is that a small group of people should be able to use the police and the prison guards and the prisons and so on to take money through the threat or execution of force from one group of people and
distribute it as they see fit to another group of people while sadly and statistically keeping seventy percent of the charity quote charity for themselves so you probably don't get and this is really part of the addiction and this is why I'm bringing this up in the hopes that you will be able to see a little more clearly you probably don't see that the government is The legal initiation of violence.
I mean, every individual has the right to self-defense.
And we're not talking about, I don't know, taking down a mugger or dealing with somebody who's broken into your home.
Everyone has that right already.
But only a few people have the right to pass laws, initiate force against citizens in order to achieve particular goals.
I can't start a welfare state because I'm not allowed to go up and down to my neighbors, take their money at gunpoint, keep 70% of it for myself, and then hand out the remainder to whoever I see fit.
But the government does.
And that's really that rake in continuity of thinking, that complete illogic.
The complete illogic of that as an approach is probably something you're not very aware of.
That violence is not the way to solve social problems.
And if you remember that, and you think about that before you start talking about state solutions, then it will be a lot clearer, I think, for you why you've been sent this video, and how the things that you're proposing will never work.
Will never work.
They will work in the short run for a small group of individuals, like heroin or cocaine makes people happy for a short period of time, but there's an immense and enormous cost.
to be paid, which is why this addiction is so destructive.
Now, the second thing that you're probably not aware of is that when you give this small group of people the universal right to use violence to achieve their ends or the ends of the majority, that the solutions that you're hoping for, that the solutions that you're hoping for, they never happen.
They never come into being.
The poor are still in worse shape than before the great society programs of the 1960s.
A drug addiction and abuse is much worse now than it was when drugs were legal.
Between half and three quarters of all property crimes are for drugs, to pay for the drugs which are so expensive because of keeping them illegal.
The prohibition brought The Mafia into the United States and the drug war has only continued to infect society with the cancer of violence.
And of course, if you look south of the border, to just take one example, it has completely destabilized Mexican society where thousands of people are murdered every year with the goal of taking over the drug trade.
It has completely corrupted the police force in the 1970s.
Just to take one example, three quarters of a narcotic squad was indicted for taking bribes.
It has completely corrupted The police force, and it has made it very profitable to hand out free samples of expensive drugs to children and teenagers and other vulnerable groups in order to get them addicted.
And this would not be the case in a free society, and it certainly was not the case when drugs were still legal.
So, and of course the multi-hundred billion dollar cost of the drug war, that up to half of criminals in prisons are non-violent offenders who merely wanted to, I don't know, see some dancing pink unicorns or something.
It's really not the solution that you want.
And we would expect that.
Once we remember that using violence against innocent people to achieve an end is not a good thing to do.
We recognize that in the realm of rape and murder and theft and assault, but we forget about it in terms of the government.
And I'm here to remind you this is part of what this intervention is all about, to clear away some of the fog and confusion in your thinking and put you on a path of much greater clarity and happiness.
And we could go through many, many examples.
Education, three quarters of inner city public school kids are not even reading at their grade level, and the grade level is a pretty ridiculously low standard.
So the poor children are being miseducated.
They're not even being not educated, they're being miseducated.
In the 19th century, when Alex de Tocqueville was writing Democracy in America, he noted, and it has been statistically fairly well validated, that over 90% of the population was very literate, and it was the most educated society that he'd ever visited, and he'd been all over the world.
This is what he wrote about.
This was before public schools, and now that we have public schools, functional illiteracy is rampant, violence within schools is rampant, And there are almost no politicians or civic leaders who put their children into public schools, and public schools on average spend twice the amount of money per pupil than private schools do.
So we don't have a good solution, and of course because we take property taxes or other kinds of taxes from people at gunpoint and redistribute them to a monopolistic union where nobody ever gets fired, there are no standards of quality, money gets spent with no rhyme or reason, the amount of people who are actually educating the children versus administrators is tiny compared to any private school system.
There are a hundred times more ridiculously overpaid and lazy bureaucrats in the public school system than there is in any private school system.
So again, we have an example where when you use violence to achieve an end, which is the education of the poor, You simply don't achieve the end.
In fact, you achieve quite the opposite of that end.
You diminish and destroy the minds of the poor.
Similarly, and again, I won't go through every example, but I just wanted to give you some empirical facts about this situation.
At the turn of the last century, 70% of Americans were poor.
And this went down to about 13% by the 1960s, before the welfare state really got going.
And at the turn of the last century, there were about 20,000 to 25,000 voluntary welfare charitable organizations that went around and made sure that the poor were well taken care of and given the right incentives and positive encouragement to get back in the workforce or cared for if they couldn't.
From 70% down to 13%, certainly after the Second World War, before the welfare state as we know it today, the number of poor declined by about 1% a year and poverty was well on its way to being eradicated as a non-optional, sorry, as an optional state.
There was going to be no more poor.
Of course, governments don't particularly like that because if there aren't any poor then you need less government.
You certainly don't really need redistribution in that way.
Unfortunately, when the welfare state went in, the decline in poverty stopped and has remained stagnant and risen slightly ever since.
And this, of course, is exactly what you'd expect when you use violence to achieve ends that you don't achieve the end that you want.
In fact, you achieve the opposite.
And with health care, in the past, before Medicare and Medicaid, seniors paid about half what they do now for prescription drugs.
The FDA is estimated to have caused the deaths of over four million Americans by not approving drugs that are easily available in other countries while having saved maybe a couple of hundred lives, at best, by banning drugs that proved later dangerous.
The FDA came in in the wake of the thalidomide scandal in the 1960s where a few hundred children were born with birth defects, a terrible tragedy, but unfortunately the FDA suppressed and would actually take to jail and throw in jail Anybody who promoted the health benefits of folic acid, thus resulting in thousands of cases of spina bifida and other deformities.
When you use violence to achieve your goal, you really just achieve the exact opposite of what you want.
And society is both functionally, morally, and practically much, much, much worse than it was Before you started picking up the gun and waving it around, or sort of suggesting that the monopoly called the government gets to do this, it just has terrible, terrible effects.
And I think the reason that this intervention, I think, is going to be effective, or hopefully to lift the scales from your eyes, so to speak, is because it's... Well, I mean, let's be straight.
It's pretty clear now, don't you think, that it's not working.
It's pretty clear that using violence to achieve your ends, whether your ends are the financial stability that the Federal Reserve and the SEC and other regulatory agencies are supposed to enforce, which It clearly doesn't happen.
The value of the dollar has dropped by over 95% since the Fed was introduced.
And if you look at price indexes, which were relatively stable for a hundred years before the Fed was created in 1913, they have simply gone up enormously since then.
And this stability has exacerbated itself terribly.
And so it's another example where using violence, giving the government the monopoly right to print whatever money it wants, results in massive economic instability and is a direct hammer blow against the poor, like the minimum wage, perhaps the most racist statute in existence in terms of keeping people away from jobs who most desperately need them.
So, when we look at, let's just say America, you could pick just about any country, but let's just say America for the most part.
I mean, come on, it does not take an intervention video like this one for you to Look up, look around and see that it's not working.
The welfare state is not working.
The war on drugs is not working.
Social Security is not working.
They're taking 15% of your income at gunpoint and there are now over 70 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities on the part of the government.
It's clear that you're not going to get that money, that it's simply outright theft.
It's a massive Ponzi scheme which is reprehensible and wrong.
And this is what comes when you give the government the right to pillage people's money for the sake of a retirement that will never be provided.
The financial stability is ridiculous and not at all present.
The regulations, even those on the books, are not enforced.
Bribery and corruption and pillaging is the order of the day, as you would expect in the shark-fest feeding frenzy of the initiation of force and all of the ill effects of violence that we all understand in our personal lives, but we can't seem to make that same connection to the state, which is why this video has been sent to you.
There is the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, which we all understand is completely counterproductive and destructive of the wealth, lives, and blood of friends, both foreign and domestic.
And, of course, now we have many more domestic enemies than we did in the past, and America is much less safe than it was.
Your savings have been pillaged as a result of the overspending, as a result of the war.
The financial collapse has a lot to do with the invasion of Iraq and, of course, the purpose of Al-Qaeda in getting America to invade Iraq was to destroy America's financial backbone, which is exactly what Americans taught.
It's what the CIA taught.
Bin Laden and the Mujahideen to do in Afghanistan in the 1980s when fighting against Russia, which is the central reason why the Russian economy collapsed.
Exactly the same tactic is being used against America, which is to draw America into an unproductive, costly and destructive war that really can't end.
And this is all with the goal of bleeding America's coffers dry so that the 700 plus military base empire that America possesses and inflicts upon the world will collapse and the troops will be withdrawn as a result of the financial collapse that is being engineered by Al Qaeda and of course those in the government who are trying to get as much money out of the public purse before the whole system collapses.
So I think we can all appreciate and understand that statism, as a philosophy and as a method of attempting to solve social problems, is over, is done.
It's not working.
It is doing exactly the opposite of working.
We have more poor.
We have more drug abuse.
We have more war.
We have more people in prisons.
We have more illiteracy.
We have higher teenage pregnancy.
We have far higher single-parent families than we're used to.
It's gone up by a factor of between 5 and 10, depending on which culture you look at.
And we have higher education facilities at Harvard and Princeton and even all the other Ivy League schools where people come out knowing less statistically than when they went in.
It doesn't work.
And I know that you feel this deep down, because we are in the later stages of this addiction.
And it really hasn't taken very long to take the most powerful and productive economy that the world has ever seen, which is really where America was in the 1950s and 1960s, when a single income could feed, clothe, house and drive around a family of four or five or six people.
We understand that this massive destruction has really been wrought within the span of a single generation, or perhaps a generation and a half, from the 1960s to where we are now is 40-odd years.
And it really hasn't taken very long for this cancer to metastasize and to take down the body politic.
And we are really looking into the abyss of the failure of violence to achieve ends.
And this, of course, is a lesson that we tell our children.
If we have a child who's not rich or we're not rich and we go to a rich person, rich a kid's house, they don't get to steal their toys.
We say that's not right.
Even though he has two toys and you have none, you don't get to steal one of his.
We understand that when we are explaining it to our three-year-old or our four-year-old.
But we completely forget the exact same lesson when we are looking at how to solve problems within society and we feel that the government can pull out guns and steal and move money around and create this shell game.
In the past, before this massive state intervention that has occurred over the last generation or generation and a half, the incomes of the poor over a twenty year odd period rose by over a hundred percent and the incomes of the rich rose much less dramatically.
Since the seventies, the income of the poor has barely risen.
The middle class income has declined since the eighties.
And the rich have done fantastically well, because when you give a lot of power to the government, you basically hand a huge amount of power to people who are politically connected.
And that's not you, and that's not me.
That is the wealthy and the people on the inside that make all the money, right?
It was the people at the top of the Communist Party who had the Dachaus on the Black Sea, not the average proletariat worker.
There's one last thing that I wanted to mention as part of this intervention, and I'll try and keep this short, because I know that I'm speaking to a part of you that fully, fully understands all of this stuff, but knows it's not working, knows that we need an alternative, knows that the alternative cannot be.
A continuation or an exacerbation of the trends which have gone before.
You can't use more violence to solve the problems that violence has created.
That really is not a productive, logical, or sane approach to solving the problem.
The problem is the initiation of the use of force that is represented by the state.
There are many, many creative and wonderful solutions to social problems that don't involve the initiation of the use of force.
They've all been tried in history.
We are very happy having certain areas of our life not controlled or regulated by the government, like who we marry, or the kind of job we have, or the kind of education that we have.
And that is where things tend to be at their best, where voluntarism and non-violence is the solution, and really that's the solution to the problems of statism, which is really to say the problems of institutionalized violence.
You can't solve a problem caused by violence with more violence.
Instead of Sopranos, escalation will only lead us off the cliff into a very dark place where a state power grows exponentially to the point where we end up with a kind of communism or fascism with internal repression and external war as the result.
We've seen that in the twentieth century and we really don't want to go back there.
Again, I absolutely can guarantee you that.
I'm not telling you anything that you don't know.
But the solution to violence is Pacifism is non-violence, is voluntary and peaceful, and charitable solutions to social problems, not waving guns around, throwing people in jail, and calling it any kind of solution.
And the last thing that I'll mention is that whoever has sent you this video, and I really do thank you if you have sent this video around, whoever has sent this video has probably doubtless said something like, well, we should not use violence to solve the problem of education, or they may have put it in another way, which is saying we should get rid of public schools and so on.
And you probably, as an addict, have a kind of knee-jerk reaction to this statement, where if somebody says, well, we should get rid of public schools, you then say, well, How will the poor be educated?
There will be no education for the poor if we get rid of public schools.
I just sort of wanted to point out that that is a completely irrational statement, and I mean this with all kindness and respect and civility.
It's hard to see when you're in the addiction, right, how irrational that is, because it kind of makes sense in the world that you're in.
But in reality it makes no sense.
It makes no sense at all.
So, to explain what I mean, Let's say that we lived in a society where we were forced to marry each other.
Government or the church handed out, you're going to be married to this person and if you don't we're going to throw you in jail or whatever.
And if I said this was wrong and we should not force people to get married and you said, well, how will people get married?
That would not be a logical response, right?
On two levels.
One is that it's not marriage.
It's not marriage if you're forced.
It's just institutionalized rape if you're forced to get married to someone and can't leave.
So when you say, well, how will people get married if we don't force them to get married?
Well, they're not getting married when you're forcing them to do it in the same way that it's not charity.
If people are forced to give money to the government, of which a small amount dribbles down to the poor and blights their lives.
So when you say, or when in response to the statement, we should get rid of public schools, you say, well how will the poor get educated?
You're kind of assuming that any kind of education is going on at the moment.
And if it was really going on at the moment, you wouldn't fall into that crazy logical fallacy.
But it is a kind of knee-jerk response to this issue.
If I said, I'm against rape, and you said, well, how will men and women make sweet love to each other then without rape?
It's like, well, if it's rape, it ain't making love.
And of course, people will have sex without forcing them to.
So, So, I think one last example and then we'll stop.
I mean, if I'm against, I'm in the 19th century South and I'm against slavery and I say, well, we should free the slaves and you said to me, what, you're against farming?
You're against people voluntarily working on a farm?
Well, that would be a non sequitur, and we can understand that, because they're not voluntarily working on the farm, and I'm not against farming, of course.
I'm just against the violence of slavery.
So the next time that you hear someone, and you will hear this more and more, I can guarantee you because the problems are becoming so stark that it's really taking a lot of work for people to avoid realizing what an abyss we're staring into and how we need to put down the gun and start shaking hands to solve problems rather than pointing guns at people's faces.
You will hear this more and more.
Well, we should get rid of social security.
Well, who will take care of the old?
Well, the old aren't being taken care of.
It's an illusion to think that they are.
They are getting much lower returns.
Even those who are receiving social security are getting much lower returns than they would have in a free market situation.
And nobody's going to get it.
I mean, I'm not going to get it.
You're probably not getting it.
No one's going to get this money anyway.
It's just a simple shakedown with holding up the sort of old poor as hostage and then taking our money to be spent on wild government spending binges to those who are the most politically well-connected and favored.
So when people say, well, let's get rid of Let's get rid of public schools.
We're actually for education when we say that because kids are being de-educated, they're being programmed, they're being bored, they're being aggressed against, they're being confused, they're being baffled, they're being droned at, they're being bored to tears, they're being scared to death.
We are actually for education and we say let's get rid of public school the same way we would say let's get rid of forced marriage and rape so that people can have voluntary better and more positive relations.
So I hope that this helps, this intervention, this hopefully a bit of an eye-opening look at the calamity of the society that we live in and the disasters that our addiction to institutionalized violence has produced and is now exacerbating.
And I hope that it will help you to understand that one of two things is going to happen, of course.
Either we're going to realize that we need to put down our guns and start putting on our thinking caps, so to speak, and start thinking about how to solve problems, rather than Assuming that if we pass a law and threaten people with violence that we're going to somehow solve our problems.
We're going to figure that one out and we're going to start sorting our society from the ground up and really making this a better thing.
I mean, this is just the next thing, right?
I mean, we had slavery and then we got rid of slavery.
We had discrimination against women and we got rid of, to a large degree, discrimination against women and minorities and so on.
And then this is just the next thing.
Which is voluntarism within the formerly political sphere of society and allowing people to solve problems without using violence.
It's just the next step and I know it's scary.
It was scary for the people who were into slavery and the people who were into sexism and the people who were into racism and the people who were into statism.
It's scary.
I understand that and I really do sympathize with that and you should take your time to examine these ideas for sure.
But it is inevitable that we are going to solve these problems voluntarily, and we are going to stop using the violence of the state to imagine that we're solving problems, when we're in fact just making them worse.
And now that the evidence is in, and now that you've had some exposure to the reasoning, I hope that you will explore more.
You can certainly visit my website.
I have free books and podcasts at freedomainradio.com.
You're welcome to peruse and download and listen to whatever you see fit.
But it is coming.
There is going to be a commitment to voluntarism, not violence, as a way of solving problems.
And I hope that you will explore these ideas, and I hope that you will begin to see the violence that our society represents, and that it can never lead us to anywhere good.
And thank you so much for taking the time to watch, and I look forward to hearing your questions about these very, very essential issues.
Thank you so much.
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