All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:09:35
Government: An Unnecessary Evil | David Seaman and Stefan Molyneux
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everyone, brand new episode of the David Simon Hour on iTunes and Stitcher.
We will be joined today by Stefan Molyneux, who is a true, I think, one of the leading voices of limited government reform and I want to say progressive thought, because I think that that word progressive shouldn't be owned by any one side, and progress is a good thing.
So we're going to speak to him, but first and foremost, I want to just remind people that this episode and the last few ones before it are 100% commercial free, 100% sponsor free, and that is due to people out there sending in small tips via Bitcoin and via PayPal.
If you're somebody who's done that over the last few episodes, Obviously, enough tips have come in that I'm convinced that this is a model that works, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart and my bank account.
It's great to be able to do this and not have to insert completely unrelated messages for websites and products that have nothing to do with the issues at hand.
Stefan, how are you today?
I'm well.
I just wanted to add to your commercial message by mentioning that I do sell magic pills that turn toilet water into drinking water.
I just wanted to mention that.
No, I'm kidding.
I don't do anything of the kind.
It's great to be here.
Thank you so much for the invitation.
Yeah, thanks for coming on.
I think that, well, I've come across your videos before, and you have such a way with words that is usually, I feel like people who are good at explaining things, unfortunately, are co-opted by organizations that really serve to distract people and deceive people.
And so you have really smart people who are going on TV and doing radio shows who are promoting what is essentially bullshit, and you're doing the opposite, and you've built up this following, you, Joe Rogan, Abby Martin, a handful of other people are really using the internet and just kind of twerking it up to the maximum and providing real content a handful of other people are really using the internet and just kind of twerking It's really cool.
I mean, I appreciate that.
That's very kind.
You know, I'm thrilled to be alive and talking in a time where we have no gatekeepers between speaker and audience.
Nobody whose gauntlet you have to run, nobody whose agenda you have to serve.
It can be a direct communication face-to-face, the sommerstat of the new philosophy, I guess you could call it, and it's an incredibly thrilling time.
The only other time, I think, when you had this kind of excitement was when the printing press was invented and people could actually get books for less than a king's ransom.
So it's a completely thrilling time to be a human communicator.
I don't think the like will come again unless we figure out some telepathic dragon speak that will allow us all to merge into a borg hive collective brain.
Yeah, and I think even if we become some kind of bored hive mind, it'd be cool to keep the trappings of individuality.
You know, I'm okay with tapping out on my screen to tweet and having that separation, rather than just having the whole world read my mind directly.
I realize that that's the next step, and that's what technology will move toward in terms of things like Google Glass.
For me, I'm okay with the foreplay.
I think it's fine where we're at right now.
I don't think we need to get more direct in terms of technology embedded in people.
I don't think we have to do that, but maybe there's an efficiency game there.
I think as long as you can unplug, the plug is fine.
But I know what you're saying.
Yeah, I like this little space and divot between my thoughts and everyone else's.
It gives me a chance to organize them before spewing them.
Yeah, your thoughts are air-gapped.
Kind of a cold wallet for your own ideas.
Speaking of which, the first topic, if I don't get into this with you right away, then I will be digitally crucified by my listeners on Twitter.
Your thoughts on Bitcoin.
I know that you're an advocate of digital currency.
And really, when you think about it, we're just talking about how it's incredible to be alive right now and be creating content.
It's incredible also.
that in the 90s and like the early, I guess, part of this century, it was really about the internet unlocking communication for everybody, to the point where you have people like Peter Diamandis giving TED Talks saying that the internet has lowered the price of communication by about a thousand fold.
And now we're seeing the beginnings of digital currency where the price of finance itself is being lowered by a similar margin.
And it's opening it up to everybody from farmers in Kenya who are, you know, cannot attract the interest of a traditional bank to multi, I'd imagine, billionaires.
I mean, literally guys like Richard Branson are interested in Bitcoin.
So what do you see happening with that in the kind of near term?
Well, I've listened to a couple of your shows, but to gauge your audience, more scholarly, more academic, or do they like a good old frothy spit bubble of passion to blow across the webcam?
I would like the bubble of passion.
You're in the safety nest right now, so that's what I want to hear.
Okay.
All right.
Well, let me tell you then.
It's a delicious piece of digital goodness, no question of that, and it's efficient and it bypasses the financial oligarchies that currently run the planet, frankly, into the ground.
It's environmentally friendly because it doesn't rely on fiat currency.
Fiat currency gets printed, you know, like a deli belly after a raucous first-time Indian meal in Mumbai.
It gets printed so much that it promotes a whole bunch of consumerism, a whole bunch of wasted economic and environmental resources.
10% of the US housing stock is currently lying empty because of the result of federal policies promoting home ownership and suppressing interest rates.
So this evil medieval thumb-jiggery of statist currency is one of the most destructive forces on the planet.
And it is what makes war possible, it is what makes the intergenerational predation known euphemistically as national debt, which frankly is Picking the pockets of fetuses before they even have pants, which is particularly egregious.
None of these evils are possible without status currency, without the government monopoly over currency.
And so what I like about Bitcoin, yeah, it's efficient, it's portable, it's transportable, it's friction-free, you can send and receive money or value for free.
It's a whole architecture which allows you to resolve disputes and publicly register contracts and things like that.
But let me tell you, what I really like about it is it's not evil.
And I know that's a strong word, and a lot of people are sort of post-evil and post-modern and so on, and I'm not a theologian or even religious.
The problem with fiat currency is the guns.
It's the violence, right?
You have to use it, particularly to pay off the theft known as taxation.
You have to use a fiat currency.
And if you try to introduce alternative currencies that are physical, backed by gold or something like that, I mean, they just throw your ass in jail.
And so I don't like the coercive monopoly over currency.
And the fact that the people in power get to type whatever they want into their own bank accounts at my five-year-old daughter's expense, it's massive theft.
Inflation, which results from overprinting, is a massive theft, particularly against the poor and those on fixed incomes.
So what I like about Bitcoin is it allows you to have transactions.
Without having to use what is literally the intergenerational and war-soaked blood money of central banking.
So I like that it opens up an avenue for human transactions that is not evil.
And I think that's a really great opportunity for the species.
Yeah, I was reading a piece by Krugman or somebody like that about why he didn't like Bitcoin.
And the argument for fiat currency that was in this article Is when you think about it, just intrinsically ridiculous.
Well, Bitcoin is not backed by a nuclear arsenal as the United States and China is.
I read that sentence to myself maybe like four or five times.
I wasn't stoned or anything.
I was just like blown away by that.
I was like, there it is in print in a single sentence is why we use the dollar and the one is because they have nuclear arsenals.
And if you reject it, they can cause any level of havoc for you up to and including destruction of your country.
And I was thinking about that.
I was like, well, that's not really a free market then, is it?
If we're forced to use something purely because the other party has weapons that are superior to yours, that's actually antithetical to the idea of free markets and people transacting amongst each other and innovation.
And when I read that sentence, that's when it clicked for me that Bitcoin is not just something that's going to make a bunch of nerds in Silicon Valley rich.
And it's not just something that's going to Lower the transaction costs for selling goods on something like eBay or Craigslist.
What it really is, is the end of that craziness.
And it is really exciting to be able to cover it.
Yeah, I mean, if there's no free market in currency, there's no free market.
I mean, there's some vestiges of it, leftovers of it, but saying that, say, for instance, America or Western Europe has a free market is like saying that guys in prison have a free market because you can trade cigarettes for a blowjob.
No, they're in prison.
And we are imprisoned in this matrix of government-controlled currency, which is not currency at all.
I mean, it's just toilet paper with old dead white guys on it.
And the idea that we can, as civilized and free human beings with the potential for that, that we can wrestle back control of what is literally the lifeblood of the species.
Currency manipulation is one of these weird subterranean things that completely alters human history.
You know, there's very credible cases made by mainstream historians That the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 was what allowed the war in Europe to go on as long as it did, right?
Ten million dead, four plus years, and completely destroyed the wealth, almost down to the dollar that was created in the 19th century through the Industrial Revolution.
All the suffering that went around to create that wealth, all destroyed.
in the first world war uh... there's a very strong arguments that uh... of course the uh... and this has been admitted by by the federal reserve chairman ben bernanke uh... x chairman recently that the uh... the the bubble of nineteen twenty nine was caused by the federal reserve massively inflating the money supply and suppressing interest rates the great depression the the fourteen-year monstrosity of socialist engineering
that was created and engineered by left-wing politicians and the federal reserve throughout the nineteen thirties which destroyed the economies of western europe and to a large degree america led directly to the second world war it's hard to imagine without the first world war and in particular without the great depression uh... hitler having any power mussolini getting into power in the twenties in
These things, if you really want to understand history, I mean, everybody wants to distract you with, like, guys in funny hats and books and so on, but what it really comes down to is who can steal the most in the most hidden ways.
And that is, there's no better thief mechanism than a centralized government-controlled currency which can be manipulated at will.
Fall of the Roman Empire, same thing.
I won't go into the boring details, but The freedom of money is fundamentally the freedom of the species, and a population can never be considered free if they do not have competition in currency to limit the inevitable predations of those who want to debase and counterfeit it.
Yeah, I think that that is 100% true, and really the innovation here that people need to focus on, it's not just The idea of Bitcoin, it's this idea of cryptocurrency, which did not exist before.
Now we can have truly scarce digital money.
So, I mean, the example that I use when people ask me about it is, if I send you a music file, I still have that file on my computer, so it's not truly scarce.
And cryptographic money solves that problem because it truly leaves my possession.
It's gone.
It's now in the new party's possession.
And I think that idea is bigger than anything we've seen since possibly, I don't know, I mean, probably to go back to probably the printing press, right?
Like what is more revolutionary than that idea?
And people ask me, well, can it be shut down by governments?
That's what happened in China.
And I'm like, sorry, no, it can't.
First of all, the more enlightened governments will see that it's a huge source of innovation.
And if the US government just kind of leaves it alone, it'll be like the nineties boom, except even bigger.
Cause every single company that's gotten used to this cartel of working with Visa and MasterCard and Amex will now have to retool everything for a digital currency economy.
And, uh, I just don't see it going away unless the internet is shut down and outlawed.
I I don't think it's possible to extract our freedom of commerce from the internet.
Well, I mean, between, depending on how you measure it, of course, David, between a half and a third of the world economy exists outside of state legal systems.
They exist in the black market and in the gray market, in the undocumented market.
And people forget that, you know, like whitey tighty guys like me who generally work in the middle class.
And before I was a podcaster, I was a software executive and entrepreneur.
You know, we generally work above the table and all that kind of good stuff, but there are massive, massive sections of the world economy that have no access to law courts, to contract disputes.
They all function fine, despite the fact that the government is pursuing them at all costs.
And so, those people are going to use this currency.
And, you know, let's say the currency only ends up being a quarter of the world's entire economic output because, you know, a good number of people find it incredibly useful to use.
I mean, encryption devices are dirt cheap.
You can get them built into cell phones and all that kind of stuff.
So staying anonymous in this stuff is fairly easy.
It's going to make inroads.
And people think, well, you know, if the government shuts it down, Boy, it's just not going to be there.
Like, have you ever heard of the drug war, for heaven's sakes?
The government can't even keep drugs out of prisons, for God's sake.
The idea that the government can, you know, they can't even keep people from stuffing cocaine up their butts and walking through and bribing prison guards.
The idea that they can stop 350 bytes floating around encrypted through the world's digital pipes is completely ridiculous.
The government is in control of nothing fundamentally, except law-abiding suckers like me.
And so they can't shut it down.
I mean, they can't possibly shut it down.
I mean, it's a whole lot harder to get drugs from Peru to New York than it is to tap two phones together and transfer a bit of encrypted information.
information and if the government uh... you know really only extends and expands the drug war uh... by uh... trying to control it and the more the government tries to control bitcoin the more it's going to extend and expand its value yet that's really a point about the government uh... being the the government's the reason why drugs cost so much money to put it simply the uh...
only way for the demand to be met is through the black market and uh...
i mean if the word for the d_e_a_ i think that there be far less drug users and things like making methamphetamine that would just become economically non-viable because nobody wants a bad And it's only the fact that there are so few producers of it that the price is allowed to go up.
You mentioned if Bitcoin becomes a quarter of the world's economy.
I want to bring up a number I put on my notepad earlier today.
Trace Mayer, who's a Bitcoin expert and one of the earliest investors in some of the Bitcoin-related companies, he said that if just 1% of rich people's offshore tax haven assets make it into Bitcoin, the price per coin could be 2.8 million U.S.
dollars.
I gotta tell you, that is the highest estimate.
Last I heard, I think Max Geiser pegged it at $700,000, but that is quite a sum of money.
Yeah, I mean, you think about it, there's so much, you were talking about gray areas, there's so much illegitimate cash that's hiding in places like the Bahamas and Bermuda and different countries in South America.
And that cash is scared.
You know, it's money goes where it's freest and where it's safest.
And if it's between some shell account in the islands or this thing called Bitcoin, where there's, you know, a global liquid market, you can buy and sell it or use it to buy products and services.
Well, old rich people, are going to tap out on the whole idea of the shady account in the Bahamas.
They want something that's global and that is a real store of value.
So I think that's actually pretty reasonable.
As crazy as it sounds to people out there today to say that one coin will be worth $2.8 million, I think that's even conservative by what it could become eventually.
Yeah, I mean, I think definitely the sky is the limit.
But there is this belief that people have that if the government bans something, then it will lower in value.
And I mean, it's just not the case at all.
Again, to look at the drug war, there are some statistics, and this is completely wonky on my part, but there's some statistics.
That before, like in the 1940s and 1950s, you could buy heroin at a drugstore in England, and it was three hits for 25 pennies.
25 pence, or I guess about 50 cents or whatever it would be in Was about $800 in today's economy or something like that.
But basically it was pennies to get yourself three hits of heroin.
Within a couple of years after the government made it illegal, it was £10, £10, 20 times the price to get one hit of heroin.
So the idea that the government bans something and therefore it becomes less valuable, It's crazy.
I mean, if government bans the selling of gasoline tomorrow, the price of gas would go up.
So the idea that you're going to ban bitcoins is going to cause their value to decline is, I mean, it just, it's one of these, like you've learned your civics lessons in grade two and you've never actually looked at any real world data, but it's just not the case at all.
I mean, After they shut down the Silk Road, the value of bitcoins went up.
It's riding out.
The Chinese government is telling banks not to use it.
It's going to ride that out and it's just going to keep on growing in value.
And maybe there'll be some other cryptocurrency that will come along that has even more features.
But of course, as I think a recent guest of yours pointed out, bitcoin is not just a pseudo currency or a cryptocurrency, it is a whole architecture.
And so if there's some new thing that comes along, they're just programming into it.
Like if WordPerfect comes up with some great feature back in the day, then Microsoft Word would simply adapt that feature because you can extend it to do pretty much whatever you want.
And so I think it is.
This one is one of the few really first out the gate wins pretty much the whole prize, in my opinion.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And actually, not many listeners know this, but my background is in personal finance and credit card marketing and stuff.
So a combination of seeing that article where the whole basis of the dollar was justified by the fact that we have nuclear weapons, between that and just understanding that credit cards have been Owned.
I mean, Bitcoin completely owns them.
It's like Bitcoin sitting at the table with the royal flush and just hasn't revealed its hand yet.
So it's kind of almost laughable to me when I see articles that Wells Fargo is looking into Bitcoin and they're trying to evaluate, should we get into it?
What are the risks?
Is it too risky for our customers to be involved with?
It's funny that you're setting yourselves up as the judges.
That'd be like Blockbuster saying, we're going to decide if Netflix is going to be allowed.
Let us convene a panel to figure that one out.
You know, Blockbuster, of course, now is out of business.
It's just this shift.
Or like the U.S.
Postal Office saying, well, I don't know about this email thing.
I think it may have some potential, but it could be kind of risky.
So I don't know.
No, I mean, look, I mean, if you've ever run any kind of business that deals with credit cards, I mean, the chargebacks and the fees are staggering.
The average retail store loses 50% of its profits to credit card fees.
The average store, let me say that again, it's so important to understand for people, they lose 50% of their profits to credit card fees.
And this isn't fraud or anything like that.
40% of a lot of the profits from credit card companies is just lost on fraud, which is functionally impossible in the Bitcoin universe.
But the amount of money just I mean I was involved I was an entrepreneur is involved in taking a company public and we paid or sorry the average company pays you know three to four million dollars to take a company public and and they lose five to ten percent of their stock just For that requirement.
You can set up a stock exchange and go public on Bitcoin for free.
I mean, get involved in Bitcoin if you care about the poor.
I mean, the people who don't have banks, the people who don't have access to the kind of infrastructure that we have here in the West, you know, give a thought to them, to the entrepreneurs in the Saharan belt and so on.
Bitcoin is going to be unbelievable for them in terms of lowering the cost of getting into a global business.
It's incredible.
Yeah, I just saw The Wolf of Wall Street yesterday and it's kind of a montage of corporate, of corruption in Wall Street and selling people who can't afford to buy it, selling people over the phone, shitty stocks, you know, papers, what is it called?
Penny stocks or pink sheet stocks.
Yeah, Jack Bonds they call them too.
Yeah, and like shit like that and stuff like what Madoff did to his investors.
Yeah.
Seems like it's a recurring theme.
And as Bitcoin starts to take off, a lot of those people are gonna be unable to continue ripping other people off because you can't give somebody-- - Oh yeah. - You can't sell somebody a shitty Bitcoin in the same way that you can sell them a shitty stock.
You can't sell somebody a fake Bitcoin.
You know instantly if you have it or not.
And that is revolutionary also. - Yeah, let's at least look into Bitcoin out of hatred.
I mean, I think hatred is a very powerful force.
You hate slavery, you hate injustice, you hate racism, then you can do a lot of good in the world.
And these demonic banksters sucking the lifeblood out of the unborn and the poor and ripping off taxpayers for trillions with a trap!
Trillions of dollars in bailout money and engineering elections.
I mean, Barack Obama is only in power because he took more money than Judas from the financial oligopolies.
So, I mean, let's at least explore Bitcoin out of hatred for these... I don't know how strong the language is that's allowed on this show, but let's explore it just out of hatred for these god-awful parasites who produce virtually nothing and continually lie to and rip off and engineer elections and steal from the unborn and screw the poor.
I'm not talking, you know, like honest stockbrokers and guys, nothing wrong with finance and all that kind of stuff, but that's such a tiny percentage of these, you know, brain-bagged blood sea cucumber parasites that live on I mean, these guys are a cancer.
They're going to take down the body politic unless we find an alternative.
So even if you just want to explore it out of hatred, I would salute that too.
Yeah, I want to mention Barack Obama's speech on NSA reform the other day.
Your brothers, your friends, they're the people who kiss your dog, they're the people who mow your lawn, they're the people who are measuring your inseam without any gloves on.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, I want to get your thoughts on what he said, but just from my perspective, what I saw was a US president endorse For the first time ever, the idea of two-hop warrantless surveillance, because he said that, you know, the three hops is going to be reduced to two hops.
So he's actually endorsing, this is insane to think about, on national TV, a U.S.
president endorsing the idea of guilt by association, which is something that is profoundly un-American in my opinion, and which brings us one step closer to something like China or North Korea, where you can be locked up just because your neighbor said something.
And that's fundamentally not a part of America, and Obama endorsed that during his speech.
Well, I mean, to be technical, it kind of has been a part of America ever since the drug war.
And it certainly has been a part of America ever since these endless wars of imperialism, right?
I mean, the socialist opposer, Eugene Debs, the socialist opposer to the First World War, under Woodrow Wilson, was put in jail and died in jail, sick as a dog, after 10 years in prison.
And of course, as you know, 95% of Americans who are charged with anything never get the benefit of a jury trial because they're just given outlandish and outrageous sentences and then end up pleading down just so they can scrape some kind of life out of the horror show 95% of Americans who are charged with anything never get the benefit of a And the way it works, of course, you just pick up some low-rent guy that you think is involved in the drug trade and you say to him, "We're going to give you 10 years unless you cough up the names of 20 people," at which point you can get three months.
So he coughs up the name of 20 people.
And then they get caught up and they get handed these... I mean, there's no proof, there's no due process, there's no rules of evidence.
They're simply bludgeoning people with life-ending sentences.
And I would argue that the entire culture of corruption in law enforcement that has come about as a result of the drug war has paved the way for the NSA.
And it's interesting that a lot of the conservatives who are pro the war on drugs are horrendously shocked at similar tactics being used for the NSA, but that's because they're more likely to get caught up in this kind of stuff.
But the idea that these people are sort of friends and family, you know, I mean, I think technically if a guy's a peeping Tom, he may be your neighbor, but he sure as hell ain't your friend.
Yeah, and it doesn't matter if he's abusing the peeping hole that he's installed in your shower, the fact that he's installed that hole, that right there is a crime.
I mean, that whole argument that it's not collection until a human looks at it is absolutely ridiculous.
Yeah, that's like saying I'm not stealing your money until I actually spend it.
Right.
It's stolen.
The stealing is in the transfer of value, not in what happens afterwards.
You know, it's still stealing if I take your money and give 10% of it to charity.
I'm still a thief.
It doesn't matter what happens after the immorality occurs.
Yeah.
Since this is already a pretty futuristic nerd out, I wanted to get your views on space mining.
I think that's another thing that is not on many people's radar, but is actually making real gains, at least in terms of ideas and people investing in it.
And I think that could take people by surprise.
One day we could wake up and an asteroid has been successfully lassoed and brought back to low Earth orbit, and there's tons of whatever we want on it, whether it's gold or plutonium or anything.
Oh, I think it's fantastic.
I mean, the amount of resources out there in the universe, I mean, relative to our paltry human needs, is practically infinite.
You know, the only challenge is going to be getting away from the idea that the government runs space.
You know, the government owns space.
The government can do stuff in space.
I mean, we'll get there if we want, but it sure as hell won't be government money that gets there.
I mean, what has government money got us out of the space program?
You know, there's some tertiary stuff that has been used but you know it's a couple of moon rocks and some footprints and a flag that doesn't budge so if we get out of the way uh you know i was saying this to my daughter the other day like i said she said oh i'd love to go into space oh i'd love to go into space too and i bet you there'd already be tickets except the government has taken over the space industry and you know as usual has run it into the ground with massive waste and and overhead
and and so on there's this great meme floating around the internet which is you know like cell phones in 1980 cell phones in 2010 you know it goes from this big giant shoe shoe box size brick uh down to this tiny little thing you can plant in your ear you know computers in 1980 computers in And to notebooks and so on.
And then it's like, spaceships in 1980 is the space shuttle, spaceships in 2010 is the space shuttle.
Nothing really changes.
So if the government gets out of the way and stops taxing us into oblivion to pay for all of these nerd pensions called NASA workers, I think we'll get there.
But most people, of course, think space, government, Mars, government.
It's like, no, I mean, that's all.
And I don't know.
I want to get too deep into the topic.
When you first socialize something, you get really cool stuff.
Like in Canada, where I live, when they first socialized healthcare, they got really cool stuff.
And when you first socialize engineering, you get all the engineers who come out of the free market, and they're hardworking, and they're conscientious, and they're driven, and they bring all of those great habits.
Like when you socialize medicine for the first time, you get all the doctors who've developed all their skills, and they're in the field because they used to be in the free market, and they do house calls, and they'll stay up all night.
But then a generation or two later, It's just turned into this bureaucratic Soviet-style slugfest.
And NASA had some cool successes at the beginning because they recruited everyone from the free market, but now you've got all these career people in the government, and they're an entirely different breed than what came before.
So people often mistake those early successes for something sustainable, but it's about, you know, success in a long-term government program is like, you know, deep spiritual happiness from a hit of cocaine, you know?
It might get you...
Yeah, there's a persistent worldview that some people have that the government, if you just empower it to do so with enough of your money and enough laws, if it just finds any problem, whether that's how do we get to the moon before the Russians or how do we eradicate poor health, you know, whatever the problem is, if we just point
the government at it, and the government takes out its Nerf gun of money and just shoots enough money at it until the problem is fixed, that eventually we'll go to the moon or we'll eradicate whatever disease it is that we're afraid of.
And although that's true, we did go to the moon, we did it at an incredible cost.
And things like the birth of the smartphone could not have been done by government mandate.
I mean, if in 1995 we could decide that, you know, Bill Clinton has to make it the nation's priority that every American has a smartphone in their hand by the year 2000, it wouldn't have happened.
So $100 billion at smartphone development, the only thing that made smartphones as good as they are today, this tiny thing that's more powerful than a A tri-quarter from Star Trek.
The only reason why is that the thousands of incremental improvements that were created by competition between the smartphone makers and the free market.
The fact that people want this stuff.
We demand it.
It's not the government throwing money at it and creating an artificial need.
There's a real need.
And the second a better phone comes along, I'm willing to spend a few hundred dollars to buy it.
And that's what's driving the innovation, not some kind of mandate from above.
Well, I agree with you with every part of your analysis, save one.
I can't imagine that Bill Clinton would be a big fan of additional recording devices of any way, in any way, shape, or form.
I think he'd like to really fly below the radar in his office, and the idea that there'd be more recording equipment probably wouldn't be high on his agenda for things that he would want.
Other than that, yeah, I completely agree with you.
And this is because people don't understand, or rather they've been misled, fundamentally, about what the government is.
And even though Barack Obama recently said this very clearly in a speech, a government is a monopoly of violence.
It is a monopoly of violence.
It is a group of individuals in a given geographical area with the legal rights and mandate to initiate force against usually disarmed citizens.
That's what a government is.
A government is an agency of coercion.
It is an agency of violence.
All the government is is a gun.
And threats and violence and prison, it always comes down to that.
You know, when people say the government order, what they're saying is more guns will solve the problem, more violence will solve the problem, more armed people pointing guns at people will solve the problem.
Because that's what it all comes down to.
You know, pay your taxes, you'll get letters and you'll get letters, you'll get court dates.
Sooner or later, some cats in blue are going to knock on your door with a big ram and drag your ass off to jail.
And people... Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, I was gonna say taxation and monopoly of force are definitely aspects of government.
You know, if you have a problem, it's the local police department coming to your apartment.
It's not some company that runs police in your area, and you can't choose from several different providers.
So what you're saying is definitely there's a validity there, but I also think that things like interstates or things like tetanus shots for every infant or things like the USDA, how would that come about without a government?
I know you could say the free market, but I don't see how, I mean, we get to the whole tragedy of the commons problem where how is an interstate going to be created by a number of individual actors unless there's a government there to pool our resources and say, you know what, we need an interstate, you know what, we need this aircraft carrier, whatever it is that we supposedly need. we need this aircraft carrier, whatever it is that we Amen.
Well, I mean, let's start with tetanus shots.
Boy, there's a sentence that will draw everyone right next to you at a dinner party.
But with tetanus shots in a free society, well, we're going to assume that tetanus shots are medically advantageous to people.
I certainly have no reason to disbelieve.
I'm a big fan of stuff that doesn't get you killed.
And so all that happens is your health care insurance provider will give you far better rates if you get a tetanus shot.
You know, it's going to be $5,000 a month or $50 a month, you know, to take two extremes.
And it's $50 a month if you get a tetanus shot.
It's $5,000 a month if you don't.
And then people will just do it that way.
Schools could, of course, require that children have tetanus shots before attending to them.
Social pressure, ostracism, oh, you can't play with so-and-so, they don't have a tetanus shot or whatever.
I mean, that stuff is pretty easy to handle as far as that goes.
There's so many options that pop up into being when you stop pointing guns at people.
And look, please understand, I'm not saying you're suggesting that we point guns at people, but when you stop with the idea that we just have a problem, let's solve it with guns, I mean, amazing creative things can come out in terms of solutions.
For things like interstate highways, well, I don't... Who's to say we need them?
Who's to say that it's the best possible solution?
FDR, who kind of got... No, it was Eisenhower, I think, who got the interstate highway plan going, and that was because they were afraid of nuclear war and they wanted to be able to move troops around in case of an invasion and so on.
And just think of how much destruction has been wrought uh... on society and on the economy because of our intense mobility you know without this intense mobility brought about by all these government roads which of course by the way they're still paying off none of the taxpayers in the nineteen fifties paid a penny for these roads it was all funded through debt and bonds and all that kind of crap
So, you know, what it's done is it's allowed people to, you know, communities have fragmented and now we have a completely car dependent culture, which has, you know, placed massive amounts of wealth into the hands of the lunatics in charge of the Middle Eastern countries.
So I'm not entirely sure you can make the case, well, we have to have this thing that the government provided.
So how would the free market provide it?
I don't know.
I have no way of knowing if interstate highways are a really good idea.
You know, maybe if we'd waited a little longer and the government hadn't paid for all the damn highways, we'd all have jetpacks or flying cars.
And I mean that in all seriousness.
I have no idea what would have happened if the government hadn't printed and stolen all the money to pay for these stupid highways, what society would look like.
I, you know, I certainly know that it wouldn't look exactly like it does now.
And I think some very cool, maybe we'd have teleporters.
By now.
Maybe 3D faxing would have been invented 40 years earlier.
I mean, maybe people would say, OK, well, you know, for business stuff, you know, with fewer highways and it's more expensive to get places, we'll do a lot more webcamming and that stuff would have come about sooner and there'd be much less waste of resources for airplanes and jet fuel and so on.
I mean, I have no way of knowing and nobody does.
But I certainly wouldn't accept the argument that, how would the free market do what the government does?
You know, from a moral standpoint, that's like saying, well, how would a guy who dates you do exactly what a rapist does?
It's like, well, the point is he wouldn't.
That's sort of the definition.
Whatever is voluntary is morally and consequentially different from whatever is coercive.
Yeah, you know you're a good thinker when in only five minutes you've managed to take my mostly positive view of the US interstate system and make me hate the fact that it's the reason why we don't have teleporters.
Well, we could.
I don't know.
I mean, they were thinking about them back then.
And if it was really tough to get from A to B, you know, it's not like people just say, oh, well, forget it.
Right?
It's really tough to get from A to B. They just find some other way to do it.
You talked about the problem of the commons.
I don't know how many economic wonky geeks you have in the audience.
Hopefully a few more after this show.
But it's a very interesting question.
Would you like to sort of mention the issue for those not familiar with it?
And we'll take a stab at it.
Sure.
So the tragedy of the commons, and I might not be explaining it as well as it deserves, is this idea of essentially public services.
Who's interested in providing that on an individual basis?
So it's like if you go to a public park and there's trash everywhere, part of the reason why is that the individual isn't motivated to keep the park clean.
And then you get this thing, the tragedy of the commons, and there's the actual phrase tragedy of the commons.
There is a scenario that involves, I think, a field.
Or a crop or something.
I forget the exact scenario, but that's the essential idea.
The example that I like to use personally is the public restroom.
You know, it's the year 2014.
Why, when you walk into a public restroom in a high-end hotel or a movie theater, is it still like you're walking into, like, the early 1700s or something?
You know, there's paper towels on the ground, everything smells bad, people just leave their waste and walk out.
It's the tragedy of the commons.
Nobody cares because nobody has ownership in it.
And maybe you can explain it a bit better.
Yeah, I think that's great.
The actual 18th century argument was, if you've got a bunch of farmers, like think of a donut, right?
So there's a bunch of farmers on the donut, and in the middle of the donut, where the hole is, there's this field that nobody owns.
And they all have a bunch of sheep, or cows, or whatever eats grass.
Cheech and Chong.
And what happens is they just all have an incentive to send their sheep or grass-eating cattle onto the commons, into the middle, and then they're all, it strips it bare and then nobody can use it at all.
So where something remains unowned, where it's held in common, everybody has an incentive to exploit it and nobody has an incentive to maintain it.
And I mean, you can see this, you know, just drive through any neighborhood, wherever there's an abandoned house or an abandoned lot, you know, what is there?
There's a bunch of trash in there.
There's, you know, boarded up windows.
There's tires in the front yard.
I mean, you know, Nazgul circling around the parapets or whatever.
And so the argument is that Where there is this issue of the commons, the market itself can't very well deal with stuff that is unowned, in other words, which is beneficial to everyone if it's regulated, but if everyone gets to exploit something that's not owned, it's pretty bad for everyone.
So another argument is, you know, we got a bunch of people who are around a lake and they all want to fish as much as possible.
Nobody really owns the lake or the fish, so everyone has an incentive to fish as much as humanly possible, which then You know, you end up with no fish, and that's sort of why we need, and therefore government, but it's sort of one of the, you know, arguments.
Does that accord with your understanding of the issue?
Yeah, it does.
Definitely.
It's the common resource problem.
And yeah, I'm just interested in your thoughts on that.
Because things like, by the way, health care, it's stuff like health care that I think a lot of smart people who normally would not be in favor Of such things, go, well, you know what?
I'm going to empower Obama to force people to buy health care because it's the only solution to this tragedy of the commons of what if somebody can't afford to pay $300 a month for insurance?
That person in America clearly doesn't deserve to die of something that's easily treatable like strep throat or, you know, to see their health be impacted over years by diabetes when all they need is an insulin shot.
So a lot of people perceive that as a tragedy of the commons problem.
How would you counter that argument?
Well, the healthcare thing is a big topic, so I'd like to start with something easier, if you don't mind.
I'm happy to chat about it, but it's a pretty big topic.
Of you figuring out everything, so we're going to try to cover everything.
Then I should just be the dictator of everyone, because otherwise I couldn't, right?
First of all, there's not really many examples of the problems of the commons that people can actually find that don't already involve a government.
Right, so for instance, there are tons of communities throughout history that have all lived around a lake and have all fished there, right?
So in Canada, on the east coast, off Newfoundland, is one of the most astounding, or tragically was, one of the most astounding seafood resources the planet has ever seen.
When Jacques Cartier, not the watch guy, but the explorer, came over about 400 years ago, he wrote in his journal, he said, you know, I feel, there's so many fish here, I feel like I could walk from the boat to the shore.
I mean, they were literally boiling all over.
There was such an immense amount of fish there.
And for about 400 years, this was maintained.
And how was it maintained?
Well, if you all live around a lake, then you all socialize together and you all kind of have to live with each other and your kids play with each other and so on.
And Everybody knows how much you're catching because, you know, everybody knows each other and nobody caught more than they should because that's kind of being a dick, right?
And when people know that you're being a dick, you tend to not be a dick anymore.
I mean, it's just one of these fundamental things about society.
You know, in eBay, if you constantly cheat your customers, then nobody buys from you because everyone can see that you're being a dick, right?
Your rating system and everyone complaining and so on, right?
And so, until the government started managing the quotas for these fish, the resource off the East Coast had been managed, even though nobody, quote, owned the fish and nobody owned the ocean and so on.
They just had, you know, don't be a dick, was like the general rule of the society.
You know, get some fish, but don't get so much fish that we're not going to have any fish next year.
And it worked.
It worked fine.
And the government came in and started handing out these quotas.
And when they started handing out these quotas, everybody stopped worrying about whether anyone else was being a dick.
And this whole methodology of social ostracism, social enforcement, social pressure, and all of that just vanished.
And it became a true feeding frenzy.
Of course, the government wanted to raise the quotas so that they get lots of votes and so on.
And within, you know, five years, there are no fish left on the East Coast.
So a system that worked that was supposedly subject to the problem of the commons stopped working when the government came in to, quote, solve the problem.
And they've never come back, to my knowledge, as yet.
I mean, one of the world's enormously, incredibly great resources that fed millions of people around the world has vanished.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that it's impossible to think of a problem of the commons that doesn't apply to government.
Government is not a person.
Government is not even a corporation.
It is a revolving door of exploitation.
So if people are concerned and say, well, something which is publicly owned tends to get exploited, well, the government is, quote, publicly owned.
Right.
I mean, you can go and print money.
You can go and start wars.
You can go and run up debt.
You can sell bonds.
You can do just about anything you want.
And you're never personally liable for any of this stuff like this bridge to nowhere off Alaska that cost God knows how many millions of dollars.
Nobody's liable for that.
I mean, in fact, politicians get voted in by promising all of these goodies to people that they don't have to pay for and nobody fundamentally has to pay for until a long ways down the road or possibly.
Or promising massive pension and health care benefits to government workers when they retire gets you a lot of votes now and the bill comes due 30 years long after you're out of power.
So the government, I would argue, is the social entity that is most subject to the problem of the commons and that everybody goes in and feeds off its power, its capacity to uneven the playing field in favor of particular people in favor, its power to print money, its power to use coercion, its power to pass laws.
Everybody goes in and uses that power for their own advantage at the expense of society as a whole.
And so I think that if people are concerned about the problem of the commons, The idea that the government, which is the entity most subject to the problem of the commons, should be used to solve it is sort of like saying, well, I'm concerned I might have a headache at some point in the future, so I think I'd better decapitate myself now.
Well, it might be a bit of an over-solution, so to speak.
Does that make any sense?
It does.
That makes a lot of sense.
And I want to play government advocate here.
and suggest that governments have been around for thousands of years, certainly not for our whole existence, but for thousands of years they've been around.
And I think the don't be a dick ethos really died with the industrial revolution.
I think that that's a pre-industrial concept where you're living in a village and you can't overhunt because if you come back with 10 dead bucks and your neighbor's starving, everybody's like, this guy's a dick.
You know, he's eating all the food.
He's controlling all the resources for his family and not for anybody else.
And that's unacceptable.
Then you have the Industrial Revolution.
It's not so much the government as it seems like all rules, everything's off the table.
It's like, well, if you can make a factory that produces more than anybody else and markets better, the world is yours.
And you see that with companies like, you know, I love Apple.
Everything I do is on an Apple, just about.
And I'm grateful to the promotion that iTunes has done for the show.
At the end of the day, it's an exploitative company that creates great stuff in California and then ships that idea to China, and it's made in factories where people are not paid, I don't feel, a fair wage.
Am I wrong in this assessment?
In other words, I guess what I'm getting at is how do we avoid that in practice?
How do we avoid people being dicks?
Yeah, yeah.
No, that's, you know, anti-dick measures.
We sound like we're now in the Duck Dynasty.
We need to implement more anti-dick measures.
But no, look, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong.
I mean, that would be presumptuous on my part.
I think that the exchange of information is key.
Now, one of the things that has really fallen off the radar in history, and an economist, Rod Long, which is one of the best names ever outside of porn, Rod Long has done some great articles on this.
It's something called friendly societies, or they were called collegiate societies, or whatever it was.
And what they were was this group of working people got together to pool their risks.
So they would all get to, like, they all need health care, right?
So they would all get together, and they would say, okay, we're going to pay a doctor to be available to all of us.
You know, like, 50 of us are gonna get together, and we're gonna pay a buck or two a month, and then a doctor is available to see us for free whenever we want.
And they still kind of exist, like the Shriners and all of that.
There's still sort of echoes of these things.
But at the turn of the last century, you could get quality health care for about two bucks a year.
Like, good quality health care for about two bucks a year, which wasn't much, you know, even with the standards of the time.
And in fact, it's the doctors who began to lobby the government saying, well, we can't live on this.
We want more money.
And so it was the doctors who actually began lobbying the government.
And the problem the government was trying to solve, according to the doctors, was that health care was too cheap.
And everybody who's on the receiving end of money always feels that they deserve more, right?
I mean, do you ever say to yourself, well, that's it.
That's all the donations I need.
I'll never need another one.
No, we always want more, because we can always hopefully do something valuable and productive with the money to further whatever cause we're embedded in.
And this issue of people getting together and trying to solve their problems, recognizing that if these workers' societies could get together, then they don't have the overhead of an insurance company.
And they don't have to pay for these insurance investigators trying to find everyone who might be defrauding.
It's all very expensive, as you know.
But if they get together in groups where they can kind of monitor each other and, you know, if some guy says, well, listen, and they did unemployment insurance, they did welfare, they did single mom benefits, they did catastrophic insurance, they did death benefits or life insurance, all of these things were done by these workers groups, recognizing that if they could work it out among themselves, they could kind of police each other in a socially, you know, ostracizing or socially better kind of way, a cheaper kind of way.
And so, you know, the medieval guilds were kind of another issue altogether, but I think in the Industrial Revolution you did see, and I'll send you some stuff if you want to include it in the podcast, and nobody should take my word for anything, but I'm a slippery son of a bitch, but I'll send you some links, and people should do a little bit of research on these friendly societies.
This is what They're also called mutual aid societies.
This is what people did to solve problems like my husband got hit by a bus.
I suddenly got struck with some weird illness.
The company that I'm working for closed its doors because people were embezzling.
Everybody recognized that these were risks that were natural to human existence.
And they got together and organized the purchasing of their own insurance and welfare and unemployment insurance and health care and all these kinds of things.
And they were very effective and very efficient.
I mean, if you got tuberculosis in the 1890s and you were part of one of these societies, which cost you very little, I mean, you could go and spend years at a resort and, you know, people would pay.
Now, if you faked it, if you pretended to, or if you were just an idiot, right?
Like, if you were just a woman who kept having kids without dads, then that would give you some negative consequences.
So, I do agree that there were problems with industrialization, and I don't want to sound like a one-note pianist, but I think a lot of those had to do with state power and corporations using state power to create unfair advantages, to tilt the playing field in their direction.
But I think that the ways in which workers self-organized to get themselves protection without surrendering their power to an external authority, and these friendly societies, these mutual aid societies, They were, first of all, kind of broken a lot up by governments because they, you know, the professionals, the lawyers, the doctors, you could even get legal aid from these societies.
They just hated the fact that they were being bid down by all these societies.
These were just little workers, you know, they were educated professionals.
What?
They went to call the congressmen and they were eventually just outlawed.
And then, of course, people began turning more and more to the state for provision of that which was much more cheaply and beneficially provided for in the past through these, I think, pretty warm and convivial, mostly social groups, but with these sort of economic collectivization of risk and reward scenarios that, I mean, they seem to work very well from what I've read.
That's really interesting.
I try not to listen to my own podcast, but I think this episode is what I'm going to have to listen to, because that's still sinking in for me.
Well, no, no.
Don't listen to it again, because I sound really plausible.
And I'd say this to your listeners, too.
I sound pretty plausible the first time around, but if you listen to what I'm saying again, the extraordinary amounts of imp… No, I'm kidding.
I appreciate it.
That's a very kind thing to say.
I hope that it's you.
And I will send you some links.
I promise I'll send you some links.
I'm not just pulling this stuff out of my armpit.
It is fairly well established, but it's just something that's vanished from our history.
Yeah.
I mean, even much more recently than the Industrial Revolution, my dad, he's retired now, but he was a doctor and his dad was a doctor.
And in my grandfather's day, according to my dad, poor people didn't have health insurance.
So the way that they were dealt with in the community is that most doctors, if you were a respected member of the community and you were a doctor who cared about your reputation, you would take on free clients one or two days a week.
So people from the church would come or people from your community organization.
Bobby's 65 years old and doesn't have health care and he's got a bad knee.
Can you check it out?
And the doctor's like, yeah, sure.
Come in on Saturday.
We'll take a look at it.
And it's just done off the books.
Today that never happens.
Good luck trying to gain the sympathy of one of the clerk ladies at the ER.
They're some of the least sympathetic people ever.
One of the first questions they ask you is, you know, do you have a credit card or an insurance card?
And it's kind of soul crushing.
Yeah, well, of course, government interventions in the healthcare industry.
I mean, it's weird, you know, it's like we live in this bizarre time of now, now, now, now.
There's never any past that has accumulated into the now.
I mean, government interference in healthcare goes back over a hundred years, probably a hundred and ten, a hundred and fifteen years.
Governments have, American governments in particular, have been trying to solve the problem of healthcare.
And so there's this weird thing where it's like there's no history to government intervention in this industry.
There's no licensures.
There's no, like, one of the first things that doctors did when they got the ear of congressmen was get lay practitioners banned, you know, midwives banned.
getting pharmacists able to diagnose and prescribe drugs, banned.
Getting a monopoly on the provision of drugs to doctors, banned.
I mean, the enforcement of these truly insane requirements to become a doctor.
I mean, yeah, we want somebody operating in your brain to be highly skilled.
How much skill does it take to say, "Pee in this cup, send it to the lab, Here's your antibiotics for your urinary tract infection.
I mean, a fucking vending machine could do that.
And yet you have to have a guy who's gone through like 50 years of school.
And this whole situation where, you know, the cost of malpractice insurance is ridiculously high because the government runs that whole side of things as well.
And this system where you've got to do your undergraduate and then you do your medical degree and then you do, you know, this crazy 36-hour shift.
I mean, you can't even be a trucker and drive for more than eight hours at a time, but doctors can make life-and-death decisions on virtually no sleep.
I mean, you couldn't design a more insane system or a system that was more designed to raise costs, like what happened in the 90s, if I remember rightly.
Was the American government passed legislation that says you can't deny people with pre-existing conditions for insurance.
And look, I get it.
I mean, I really, gosh, you know, somebody didn't buy insurance and then they get sick.
That's terrible.
I mean, that I mean, God, I feel sympathy.
I really do.
But that doesn't mean you drop an atomic bomb on the entire mathematical principle of insurance and say that you no longer Have to buy insurance until you get sick.
That's like saying, you know, my wife can buy my life insurance after I'm dead.
The whole point is you have to have the veil of doubt.
You have to have the fog of uncertainty.
You have to buy this stuff before you get sick.
Otherwise people wait till they get sick and then they buy insurance.
And then everybody wonders why the price goes up so much.
Because people are waiting till they get sick before they buy insurance because the government is allowing them to.
And also, of course, people being tied to their jobs through healthcare being provided through their employer, which also means they're not about to haggle.
I had a medical procedure done in the States.
I got a bill for $4,000, haggled it down to $390.
Do that if your insurance company is paying, and so on.
And of course, that came in out of the war, right?
In the Second World War, you weren't allowed to give raises to your employees because they didn't want any of that going on while the war effort was on.
And so companies just began paying for people's health care, and then it became a tax-free benefit, and then it gets set in stone.
Now people are stuck in jobs, and their employers are paying their health care.
Employee doesn't pay your car insurance.
I mean, so Obamacare is just the latest in an incredibly long line.
Yeah, I think everything you just said about the healthcare industry applies equally to the financial industry.
on and solve the problem forever, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, we can start to recognize the pattern at some point soon that, you know, one intervention leads to another intervention, leads to another, leads to another, until, you know, the whole thing gets swallowed up by some Soviet-style machinery.
Yeah, I think everything you just said about the healthcare industry applies equally to the financial industry.
This idea that if you're somebody who's been successful in your community and you have a few million dollars and you want to become a community banker because, you know, Sue down the street wants to open a bakery, and Chase rejected her because all they're looking at is credit score and assets on book, and they see a weak credit score because of whatever, she got a little bit behind, and they don't see enough assets on her books, she's not getting that loan, and she goes to Bank of and they don't see enough assets on her books, she's not getting that loan,
Their answer is identical because they're relying on the same data.
She is literally just a number to them.
But if you're a local banker, and you have the resources, and you know she's been living in the same community for 30 years, you know she's not going to run off with the money, you know she's not a con artist, you know she has a built-in base of customers from her last shop that closed down, and you take all these things into consideration that a banker at Chase can't do, And unfortunately, you can't be her banker because there are too many regulations.
And even if you're a multimillionaire, you can't just start your own bank.
In fact, the only companies that can offer banking services in this country are pretty much Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Chase and Citi, because they're the only ones that can afford the teams of lawyers and compliance officers to deal with all of the laws that they helped create by lobbying because they're the only ones that can afford the teams of lawyers And yet people are still getting ripped off.
You know, people are still being foreclosed on.
So where is the actual safety for the consumer?
There is none.
It's just a fucking moat to keep their castles, to keep them in business, and to prevent more competitive practices within banking and lending.
Yeah, I mean, it's a phenomenon that's also been called regulatory capture, which is, you know, we're going to regulate those pharmaceutical industries to make sure they don't put anything out that's not safe, you know.
Like SSRIs?
Like drugging children at the age of four for the made-up ailment of manic depression or bipolar?
Don't get me started on that.
Or, oh, I know, we really care about what people eat as a government, so let's make sure that we basically ban sugar with massive tariff walls, and then companies end up using fructose-glucose, which is like napalm for your innards, as far as I understand it.
Or the FDA.
Well, let's keep Americans safe.
There's Dr. Mary Ruwart, R-U-W-A-R-T.
You can look her up online.
She's been on my show a couple of times.
I've seen one of her presentations.
She's a medical researcher and a doctor.
And she's run through the whole statistics of this, that the FDA has caused Directly caused the death of over 5 million Americans over the past 30 or 40 years by keeping substances out of the hands of Americans that are perfectly legal in other countries.
You know, beta blockers and stuff which keep people alive in other countries.
And also by suppressing information about the health benefits of various things like aspirin and even Cheerios are supposed to be good with cholesterol or something, but you can't make those claims because then you run into FDA problems.
What about marijuana?
So we always, and the FDA came out of thalidomide, which was a pretty tragic situation, which was a couple of hundred birth defects.
And so to solve the problem of thalidomide, which was a couple of hundred birth defects, which was all terrible and awful, you now have a death count of five million people and counting, and this is what is called a solution in the world that we live in.
Yeah, I was just trying to shout over you.
Marijuana is the best example.
It's a Schedule 1 drug, which means it's the worst of the worst in terms of safety for your body.
And yet, nobody has ever overdosed on marijuana.
It grows freely in nearly every part of the country.
It's called weed because it grows everywhere on its own.
And meanwhile, you can walk into CVS, buy Tylenol over the counter.
And kill yourself by taking too many.
And people do that all the time.
They overdose on Tylenol and die, or they don't realize that they're taking something else that interacts, and it fucks over their liver, and then they have to go to a, what's it called every week, where they pump out your blood?
A dialysis center.
Oh, dialysis, yeah.
Yeah, you got to do that every week for the rest of your life because you took too many Tylenol, which is supposedly safe and is over the counter and freely available.
Meanwhile, marijuana, which will never do that to your liver, no matter how much of it you smoke or ingest, and which is responsible for giving people a lot of creative ideas and opening up communities in more human ways.
That is a schedule one drug that shows you that the whole thing is bullshit.
And I really remember clearly the days of the D.A.R.E. campaign in the 90s because a cop came to our school and showed us this briefcase of all these different drugs.
They were like the mock-up versions of each drug.
And I was thinking, even as a child, I was thinking, this is insane.
I didn't even know what half these drugs looked like.
Now I just had a cop give me a lecture on which one's which and which ones should I avoid.
It's almost as if he's a salesman.
It's ridiculous.
Well, of course, uh...
I mean, that's a huge topic.
I mean, the ferocity that I feel towards the war on drugs, and I say this as a non-drug user, I mean, it's nearly bottomless.
I mean, the amount it destroys communities, the amount it has destroyed the black family by cycling black men in and out of prison is just staggeringly evil.
The degree to which it's completely corrupted law enforcement to the point now where there's massive bribes and the militarization of this, the degree to which it has destroyed crops in Mexico.
You know, they keep bombing all these crops in Mexico, the degree to which it has destroyed the lives of millions and millions of millions of people in America.
I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of marijuana arrests every single year, the degree to which it terrorizes the population.
And you go find one person who's pro-drug war, you know, look through their record album collection, like one Pink Floyd album, one Sgt.
Pepper's album, and you are a hypocrite, I tell you.
I mean, if you like the products, don't hate the sauce.
And in Portugal, I mean, 10 years ago, they decriminalized all of this stuff.
And their drug addiction rate is down 50%.
That's how you solve complex social problems with compassion, with curiosity, with better and more peaceful parenting.
People who are abused as children are 49 times more likely to be drug addicts.
Drug addiction is a form of self-medication for early childhood trauma.
And so basically taking people who are self-medicating for early trauma and then throwing them in the rape rooms of modern overcrowded federal prisons is literally piling abuse upon abuse.
But to treat them as people who have been harmed, particularly when they're young, and who are managing the best they can, and I'm talking addicts, not sort of people who talk on the weekends, You know, getting them into therapy, getting them into treatment programs and so on.
That's how you humanely and positively deal with a complex social problem like drug addiction.
But, you know, chasing these people with guns and, you know, driving them out of society with the high price of drugs, helping them get addicted because it's so profitable to get someone addicted to drugs if you're a dealer.
They often give free samples just to get people hooked in.
I mean, it's so insane, and the destructive results of the war on drugs are so horrendous.
It is a true holocaust throughout the Western world, a true carnage of humanity, and it will be viewed in the future.
Like, you know how we look back at these witch hunts and we say, how could people have ever been so insane?
I don't know how we're going to look to the future, but we're going to look like a bunch of insane, violent, evil apes in the way that we try to approach these complex social problems with the massive jackhammer boot and increasing fascism of state power.
And people were like, didn't they look around?
Didn't they?
Even in the newspapers this was all being talked about and still they marched on.
But I sort of believe now that
politicians in in america i mean prohibition brought organized crime to america and the drug war and was uh... and sorry banning prostitution and and uh... gambling and so on only helped enhance it i sort of wonder you know whether the mob wouldn't just put a hit out on a guy who wanted to legalize this stuff because like all across the board because i mean it would really really cut into their profits it would be a pretty dangerous thing for a politician to do i would imagine yes we're thinking about also
We actually are coming up on the end of this one, but I want to thank you so much for what's been a really—your eyebrow's gone there.
I want to thank you so much for— Sorry, I'm watching the webcam.
Good, I won't do any funny faces.
Fascinating.
Let people know where to, if they don't already listen to you, where to go.
I'm standing right behind you in the shadows.
No, I'm in the NSA.
I'm your friend.
I'm your neighbor.
You can find what I do at freedomainradio.com and I'm youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio.
If people want to check out the iTunes, it's fdrurl.com forward slash iTunes.
We've got a bunch of speaking gigs, but you know, doing some Bitcoin stuff and all that, but people can find that at freedomainradio.com.
I wanted to thank you as well for a very, very enjoyable conversation.
I hope we can do it again.
And for my listener, no wait, listeners, sorry, two people now, where can people find your stuff?
Yeah, people can find me at davidseaman.net.
That's probably the best place.
When you go to davidseaman.net, it just redirects my YouTube channel.
And I've got a video up now with some predictions on where Bitcoin can go this year.
And, of course, some stuff on the NSA.
Those are my two passions, really, right now, are digital currency and criticizing everything the NSA does.
Because I think that it's really an existential threat to digital freedom.
We've got this amazing tool that's the Internet, which is why you and I are communicating and doing this.
And it could all be destroyed by something as stupid as a very well-funded Paul Blart mall cop agency, which is what the NSA is.
And, yeah, so those are my two passions.
Well, I appreciate that, and I'd certainly love to come back and talk more about the NSA, because I have a raging hate on for them as well, so I'm sure we could get some good outrageous spittle going.
But thanks again so much for your time.
It was a real pleasure.
You too.
Thank you.
▲
Export Selection