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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:22
The True Costs of War: Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio speaks at the University of Toronto
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Thank you.
It's really hard to recognize Brad Pitt with his hat on.
It's really kind of cool.
Thank you, everybody, so much.
Just out of curiosity, how many people, like, have no idea who I am?
Has anybody listened to the show before or knows the show?
A couple of people?
Okay, good, good.
So here's hoping the live experience doesn't suck too much.
I normally will do some jokes, you know, a little soft shoe number, but of course the topic is the true costs of war, so it is going to be a bit of a serious topic, but sometimes I can be a little bit more entertaining, but I won't strain that, given the seriousness of the topic.
My family history is intensely bound up in war, in European wars.
Half of my family comes from Germany, and the other half comes from England and Ireland.
And not the part of Ireland that set out the Second World War, but the part that got intensely involved.
And my mother was born in Berlin in 1937 to a pretty Jewish clan.
And this was, of course, pretty much the worst time you could pick to be born and the culture you could choose to be born in.
She went through the war, of course, as a young girl.
Entire society blew up and disintegrated all the way around her.
She lived in Dresden.
A lot of the civilians in Germany went to Dresden because Dresden was entirely civilian and had all the art treasures of the Weimar Republic.
And so the Allies had not bombed it because, as we all know, bombing civilians is a war crime.
And they changed their minds in 1944 and they sent one of the first thousand plane raids to Dresden and created a death toll that was greater than that of Nagasaki that night.
My mother and some relatives of hers fled the city.
When they heard the planes approaching but my grandmother had to stay.
She had to go to work the next day and of course nobody was really anticipating this is one of the first firestorms that occurred in the Second World War.
A firestorm is when the fire because they use incendiaries to start the the fires in the city, and the fires get so intense it sucks all of the air in from all the way around the city, which further fuels the fire.
And then when my mother and her relatives went back to try and find her mother, they could only find the clasp from her purse.
There was nothing else that they could find.
Interestingly enough, tragically enough really, that was on my mother's side.
On my father's side, one of my uncles was a pilot.
on that thousand plane raid that killed my grandmother.
So the subject of war, and going further back, I mean, my great grandfather's generation, because we were aristocracy back then, We had to go to war.
You know, you get to flog peasants.
I'm sure that was fun for the people at the time, but you also have to go to war, which is part of the deal with the aristocracy.
And four of the men in their prime died in the First World War, my great-grandfather's generation.
So there are tragically, at least in my family portrait, a lot of missing people because of war.
And of course, as we all know, the 20th century was the most gruesome century in the history of warfare.
Democide, which is the murder of citizens by their own government.
Does anyone know what the rough tally?
They can't even get it down to within 10 million.
Does anyone know what the rough tally was for the 20th century governments murdering their own citizens?
This doesn't include war.
About a quarter of a billion.
Yeah, 250 million people or so.
Probably another 100, 150 million in war.
So it is the most ghastly thing that can occur in a society.
So we're going to do a little bit of numbers just so we can get a sense of the scope of it, and then I'm going to do a little back and forth if that's alright.
I know you've got a lot of speakers today, so I know if I keep talking I'm going to, you know, see a lot of that.
So we're going to try and do a bit of back and forth because I'd like to Identify what I believe is the cause of war.
If we can get to the root cause of war, really there's no greater benefit than any set of intelligent people can provide to the world than identifying the true cause of war and then maybe we can explore some solutions.
Sounds like a tidy 45 minutes, right?
Okay.
So let's start.
We'll start with the most recent wars, at least in America.
Anybody know about the rough calculation of the total cost of Iraq and Afghanistan?
No, no, sorry, dollars.
More than $5,000.
Sorry?
Five?
I hear one trillion, one trillion going in the back there.
Do we have anyone else?
1.5?
No, higher.
Six trillion.
Six trillion dollars.
Six trillion dollars?
That is astonishing.
Anybody remember what the initial cost estimate, I mean this is outlandish even by government standards.
What was the original cost estimate of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? - 700 billion, I think.
- Less than a billion. - Zero.
Because George Bush proclaimed to the world that the entire operation was going to be funded by oil revenues.
Zero impact, like Obamacare, zero impact on the budgetary process.
So from zero to six trillion was the gap in estimates.
The price of one day of war in Iraq, anybody want to take a guess?
guess.
This is just fixed price, not trauma, not PTSD, not drunkenness, not drug abuse. Fixed price.
Anybody?
500 million?
That's pretty close.
720 million.
One day of war in Afghanistan is 300 million.
What has happened to the American government and its powers since 9-11?
Because war, as we know, is the health of the state.
What are some of the fancy, shiny new features of the upgraded NSA State 2.0 that has happened in America since 9-11?
Sorry?
Patriot Act.
Anything else?
Warrantless wiretapping.
Right.
What else?
Right.
The security theater at the TSA.
The war on terror.
The extraordinary rendition to avoid torture laws.
The open assassination of Americans authorized by the executive at any time, at any place.
Drone strikes.
Absolutely.
This has been a bonanza for the state as war always is.
As war always is.
Anybody know the calculations of the excess deaths in Iraq since the invasion of 03?
That's close.
It's a million plus.
Plus.
Plus, they don't even know.
Nobody can guess.
And it's not just been deaths.
There are several geneticists who visited Fallujah after the white phosphorus and depleted uranium attacks of 2006 and found that between a quarter and a third of the children were born with birth defects.
The half-life of the uranium that's used in these shells is longer than the life of the planet.
They say that they have never found or seen a population that is as genetically compromised as the population of Fallujah.
Not even close.
No, the number of birth defects that came out of Chernobyl were tiny compared to what's going on in Iraq.
6,500 American soldiers dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.
16,500 total U.S.
military deaths, 2001 to 2010.
Almost 50,000 wounded.
300,000 veterans have PTSD.
And the estimate is that even if we accept the government's definition of who is a terrorist, you know, they can't ever decide who is a terrorist because they can't ever define terrorism in such a way that it does not include the foreign policy of Western nations, of all nations, really.
Well, because they say, well, terrorism is the use of violence to achieve political ends.
We call it voting.
So even if we accept the definition that they were actually identified as terrorists, were correctly identified as terrorists, Thank you.
Can anyone guess the ratio of admitted and known civilian deaths for each terrorist who's killed?
How many civilians get killed to kill one supposed terrorist?
29, 33, how many else we got?
Sorry?
50.
Five, now it's 50.
50 civilians killed to kill one terrorist.
What's that a great way to do?
Make more terrorists, it's a factory.
I mean the environmental damage I mean I won't even discuss but just to mention one thing that the amount of oil used in Iraq and Afghanistan per day is the equivalent of the amount of oil used by the entire billion person strong economy of India.
Which is one of the reasons why gas prices have gone through the roof.
And the cost of war is never really that much in the present.
This is what it's hard to understand.
I keep doing these guessing games, but it is important.
So the First World War, of course, they had veterans benefits, healthcare benefits, and so on, right?
Because you have to bribe people to go risk life and limb.
Does anyone know when the height of veteran spending on World War I soldiers was?
What was the year that was the height of spending on World War I soldiers?
It's 1969.
The peak of spending tends to occur about four decades after the war.
Because old, sick, ill, all the health care benefits, all the veterans benefits that continue tend to accrue later.
The second world war spending on veterans peaked in the 1980s.
Anyone remember how long the Gulf War was?
Six weeks, right?
Do you know how much it costs the U.S.
at the moment for veterans' benefits for the Gulf War?
Four billion dollars a year for a six-week war.
And it's still going to peak in the future.
So the costs of the soldiers now, which are staggering enough, are going to peak in 30 to 40 years.
Well, assuming there's any kind of U.S.
economy in 30 to 40 years, which seems somewhat unlikely, at least in its current form.
Military spending in the US, 19% of federal spending, and 44% of tax revenues.
Because they can't cut.
They've cut to the bone.
I mean, they're down to only 750 military bases overseas.
Because 749 would be catastrophic.
It's a little fact about when the government says they have no money to cut.
It's a bit of a side note, but I found it was too interesting to pass up.
The bailouts of the U.S.
banks, you know those capitalist bastards.
The bailouts for the U.S.
banks cost more than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the moonshot, the savings and loan bailout of the 1980s.
For you students here, ask your parents.
The Korean War, the New Deal, the Iraq War, the Vietnam War and NASA's lifetime budget.
Just to bail out the banks.
See, but they have no money.
I mean, of course, 40% of the current deficit is directly attributable in the U.S.
If the current debt and deficit is attributable to the war in Iraq, because George Bush, for the first time ever in American history, what did he do in the middle of a war?
Cut taxes.
Never, ever happened before.
Cut taxes twice, in 01 and 03.
And we'll get to why wars happen in just a sec, because that's an important part of that equation.
One third of returning veterans are being diagnosed with mental health issues.
Being a soldier now is incredibly different from being a soldier in the Second World War.
Does anyone know?
Again, I hate to do this guessing game stuff, but it's important to understand this.
The number of days of combat the average World War II veteran would see in a year.
Ten.
Ten days of combat per year.
Between 60 and 70% of soldiers in the Second World War never fired their weapon.
Why?
Because we don't like killing people.
We, as a species, don't like it.
And of course, this is well understood by the military.
This is one of the reasons they got rid of the draft, was because getting an average person to go out and shoot people they don't know is very hard.
I don't know if you ever heard this story, but in the First World War, it almost disintegrated within a few months.
They didn't want to fight each other anymore because it was supposed to be this glorious, you know, you ride up the hill with the sword and, you know, all the paintings, right?
And the sword and a white horse.
You're shot, you know, like an extra in the background of a John Wayne movie.
You just fall off your horse and lie there.
And I think it was Siegfried Sassoon, a World War I poet, who said, war, we all thought, was riding up a hill to fight a bad guy and so on.
It's not what it is.
War is some asshole 20 miles away pushing a button and you get blown up.
And in World War I, they played soccer.
Christmas 1914, just a few months after the war had started.
They were out there playing soccer and they didn't want to fight anymore because it was just too ghastly, too horrible.
The trench warfare was too brutal for everyone.
And they had to start shooting people to get them to start fighting each other again.
It's hard to get people to kill each other.
One of the reasons the Vietnam War ended was because the military was completely disintegrating.
They were fragging their own officers, strung out on drugs, because unlike the World War II vets, who saw 10 days of combat a year, Vietnam vets, over 200.
That takes a different kind of person, that produces a different kind of person.
And that's one of the reasons why in wars after Korea, they had to really focus on breaking down the personality.
This is when basic training became that godforsaken scream fest that you see in movies.
What is that, one full metal jacket?
They got the whole... I won't even repeat it here because it's horrifying.
The language and the brutality that goes into producing people who are willing to kill each other.
Because they had a different kind of war.
They had total war.
Total war, of course, is only possible in a democracy, and one of the ugly things that capitalism does is it produces all of these wonderful things, which then gets turned over to the devil's incarnate in charge of the state to dismantle human beings by the tens of millions.
The cost of deploying one American soldier for one year is about a million dollars.
I believe it's two million bullets they need to shoot to get one into an enemy practice and all of that sort of stuff.
The Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement signed by the U.S.
President and America's puppet in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, U.S.
military operations are scheduled to continue in Afghanistan for at least another decade after the formal withdrawal deadline at the end of 2014.
Does anyone know why Barack Obama pulled the troops out of Iraq?
I'm sorry?
No.
I believe it was a, we're going to no longer continue agreeing to stop prosecutions for crimes, war crimes in the area.
Not war crimes, any crimes.
I mean, war crimes, you know?
War is a crime.
So what they did was the government said, we are no longer going to indemnify US soldiers from criminal prosecution.
They're like, shit.
OK, we're done.
I mean, if we're actually going to be held liable to the law in the country we wanted to bring democracy to, we're out of here, man.
That's not playing fair.
Madness.
U.S.
borrowed at least $2 trillion to finance these two wars, the bulk of it from foreign lenders.
So, enough for the fun part of the presentation.
Let's talk about where it actually comes from.
Where does war come from?
I don't have the, obviously, ultimate answer.
I mean, I'd be walking on a moat if I did.
But does anyone have any thoughts or ideas as to the genesis of war?
I was talking to this lady here who said it's part of the human condition, like gravity or hair loss.
Well, not everyone.
But does anyone have any thoughts?
Power?
Okay.
People want to get resources, right?
Property?
Fanaticism.
Sorry?
Glory.
Yeah, yeah, glory and honor.
Sure.
Statues.
Want to be on stamps, right?
Capturing tax bases.
Hey, don't give away the ending.
Patrick?
People aren't free to disagree.
Greed?
Well, yeah, I'm reading a book by a very Good scholars.
It's called The Origins of War and Child Abuse.
It's on my website as an audiobook.
It's available for free.
And the argument is that when you improve parenting, as a result, you end up with more peaceful people, fewer sociopaths.
Early child abuse is responsible for a lot of sociopathy.
So, for instance, in the Scandinavian countries, which banned, for the most part, spanking in the 1970s, not one of them have gone to war since.
I mean, they're not paradises, they're still socialist hells, but they're not, you know, currently dismantling the genetic composition of foreign tribes.
Inheritance disputes, I'm intrigued.
Oh, you mean like between the royalties?
Right, yeah, like World War I was just a family infighting, right?
I'm sorry?
Competition?
To testify to the idea that death is not the greatest evil for human beings?
Historical grievances?
Historical grievances, yeah.
Fear?
Fear?
You mean fear of attack?
I think fear is often used to sell.
What does it say?
We don't want the smoking gum to come in the form of a mushroom clad.
See, the one reason, you know nuclear powers never declare war on each other, right?
Because then the leaders can get blown up.
Suddenly they all blessed are the peacemakers because they all have nukes.
I mean, they said that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction.
The fact that they were willing to invade it means you knew for sure that he didn't.
Because otherwise they'd be in danger.
They don't want to do that, right?
They don't want to push things around like that Pink Floyd song, right?
Lines on the map move from side to side, these guys just monopoly pieces.
Yes, sir?
At home, you mean, or overseas?
Need to maintain political authority?
I think that's something to do with it for sure.
Yes, sir?
Nationalism.
But I think you can have nationalism without war, although certainly all wars do involve nationalism.
There's a great line, it's attributed to Herman Goering, I don't know if it's actually been tracked down or not, where he says, well of course the average person, what on earth would they want to have to do with war?
I mean the best they could conceivably hope for is to be shipped overseas, not see their children, be traumatized and hope, the best they can hope for is to come back with their bodies intact.
For what?
Nothing better than what they left.
But it's easy to do.
All you do is you inflame nationalism and patriotism.
You provoke foreign enemies and then you say that anyone who disagrees is a traitor.
It works the same in a democracy, in a dictatorship.
It's the same deal either way.
Let me make a case.
Cronyism.
Tell me more.
Well, perhaps if businesses go to basically Rebo, for example, a lot of those businesses will be interventional.
They're not really doing anything useful in their game.
Oh, so the argument that...
I can't remember who said it.
Maybe Larry, you remember.
Who was it who said, when goods cease to cross borders, soldiers will follow, right?
So I'm going to make a little case.
Boy, I haven't used a chalkboard in a while.
I'm so used to like digital movie things, right?
Okay, so I'm going to argue that there's three kinds of people who are involved in war.
Two willingly and one not.
So the first is those who decide.
Those who decide whether to go on war.
We know who they are, right?
Politicians.
With their cheering squad, Blood Soak, Pom Pom, Queens, the media, right?
I mean, it's shameful.
I mean, it's shameful if you just look at what the American media was doing, and all media is doing, in the lead-up to America's wars.
I mean, they really are completely reptilian in this mindless rah-rah.
But of course, we're all trained with sports and all that crap.
So, the deciders.
That sounds familiar.
I am the decider.
All right.
So, there are those who decide.
Then, there are those.
And I hate to use this word, I really do.
I wish there was another word.
We've got to brainstorm at the end of this to come up with another word for profits that don't come from the free market.
Economists call it rent-seeking.
It just sounds like you're looking for a flop house.
I don't know what... Spoils.
Spoils, that's great.
Spoils, alright.
I'll give you the mic, you keep going from here, that's great.
Alright, spoils, that's nice.
Because it sure does spoil the world.
All right, so spoils.
So the deciders, those who get the spoils, and the payers.
This all costs money, right?
Can't have a war without money.
So there are those who decide, there are those who get the spoils of the profits, and those who pay.
So these are the politicians, the military-industrial complex, and the taxpayers.
And the taxpayers, of course, are mostly floating in an embryonic sack in their mother's belly waiting to be born so they can be presented with a bill for $12 billion, right?
Anyone know what the average per person expenses of the American war so far from 01?
From '01?
$75,000 per person.
That's why you need the media.
That's why you need debt.
You know, the fascinating thing, by the by, of watching the Obamacare rollout, is this is government without anesthetic.
This is government without debt.
This is government without the bullshit of printing money.
This is government without the anesthetic.
This is government where you get the bill for the stuff you want now, rather than later, because they're out of it.
They can't add to the debt.
They can't raise taxes that much.
So it's interesting to see how horrified and shocked people are when the bill for government crap actually comes due at the same time the government crap comes due.
So the payers.
Who would like to give me a little brainstorming scenario here?
Who's feeling energetic?
Who's had coffee?
Come on, let me smell your breath.
Can you come down?
We don't have a second, Mike, and I don't have to repeat everything you say.
Okay, so I'm going to do a scenario called Evil Capitalist.
You may remember this from all of your graduate school seminars, and the media, and movies, and your friends, and your families, and everyone else you're ever going to meet outside of this room.
Okay.
All right.
What's your name?
Misha.
Misha.
Pleased to meet you.
Okay.
We're both bald.
That has no relevance, I just wanted to point it out.
For those on the audio-only version of the show.
One by choice, one.
Yeah, that's fine, fair enough.
Fair enough.
Wait, let me see, let me see.
You know, I'm looking at this, it's a low tide up there for follicles.
Okay.
Preemptive.
Preemptive, that's right, that's right.
He's doing liposuction rather than dieting.
Okay.
Let's say I am, I wish I had a monocle, I am like evil capitalist waxy mustache.
Wait, sorry, I know there's a guy here with a waxy mustache that I was talking about earlier.
Yeah, yeah, cover him, he's there.
So I am like the Daddy Warbucks evil capitalist guy, right?
Mr. Burns.
I'm sorry?
Mr. Burns.
And a few more liver spots, anyone got some?
Anyway.
And you are, so I am, let's say, what am I making?
What am I, like, evil capitalist guy?
Tires?
Tires!
Okay, great.
Okay, so I'm making tires.
I certainly am, thank you very much.
Alright, so I'm making tires, and this is my competitor, the other tire guy.
OTG.
Alright.
Now, let's say I don't want to compete with this guy.
I want to burn his factory down.
Because the wax in my mustache has made me evil.
So, now, who else wants to be an evil guy?
Really evil.
Or a woman.
We can be gender neutral.
Okay, yeah.
You've got a suit on.
You'll do.
Alex P. Keaton.
Come on down.
Alright.
Ask your parents.
All right, what's your name?
Liam.
Liam, pleased to meet you.
Liam is our arsonist.
Because I, as an evil capitalist guy, I don't want to go and set fire to this guy's factory because I don't like the smelling of gasoline, I might light an eyebrow on fire, whatever.
So I go to Liam, Craigslist, the Darknet, or something like that, or it looks like a few people in the back would know someone like this.
So I go to you and I say, what am I going to say to him?
I say, look, go burn this guy's, this is without the state.
I don't get to go to the state.
I don't get to go to politicians.
I don't get to lobby anyone.
Go burn this guy's factory down.
Now, what are my risks of going to Liam and saying, go burn my factory down?
Why doesn't this generally happen in the free market?
And we just take, assume that people are just amoral, maximum output rent-seeking scumbags.
You know, pure reptiles with opposable thumbs.
What are my risks here?
Yes, sir?
You look like a man of experience in this matter.
Let me tell you, when I tried this... Oh yeah, good, good, you'd be good at evil.
Are you going to get involved in politics at some point?
One day.
And that day will be a dark day for humanity.
Okay.
So, he goes, I say, I'm going to give you $25,000.
Just go burn this... $50?
No, wait.
No, you're not... Okay, go.
Now, so I say, go burn this guy factor down.
Now, what are you going to do if you want to maximize your money?
This guy.
Think of him.
Think of him on your shoulder with a little pitchfork and a tail.
Well, my boy, I have a little proposition for you.
You know, this other bald bastard, he was going to pay me $25,000 to burn your factory down.
So go over and down.
You can do, you know, Shylock if you want.
Well, my boy, I have a little proposition for you.
Let's say a little accident happens to his factory.
For good measure, his cottage.
$50,000 for you.
And then what are you going to do?
Go back.
Sounds like a plan.
Did he make you an offer you can't refuse?
All right, so you're going to come back to me and you're going to bounce this back and forth, right?
Now let's say that, you know, we just say, I don't want to play anymore, right?
What's the other risk that I've taken?
Yeah, he could be a cop.
He could be, uh... He could have recorded everything.
He could blackmail me.
I mean, really, really bad stuff could happen if I try to... Like, anyone here sell and buy stuff from eBay?
Right, okay, so you know that, you know, if you've got to shop on eBay, you can just somehow, the guy's outselling you, you can go get a hundred friends and go and downvote him and whatever, right?
But people don't do that, because there's retaliation and troll wars and all that kind of stuff.
What else bad stuff could happen?
Let's say I succeed.
He's not a smart thief, pretty, but not a smart thief.
And he says $25,000, that's great, that's going to keep me in product for a week and a half.
I say this out of pure envy.
So he's going to go burn this guy's factory down.
Are there any negative repercussions to me if I even get what I want with my $25,000?
I could get caught.
Yeah, absolutely.
What else?
He could get caught and then what do they do?
Well, they say you're going to get 20 years, but we'll give you five if you turn into the guy and, right, so bad for me, right?
What else?
He could still blackmail me, even if he burns this idiot's factory down, right?
Actually, I'm the idiot in this one.
So he could blackmail me.
What else?
There's another kind of subtle one that's interesting.
Well, only if I'm caught, right?
Only if people can figure it out.
Now, clearly, I would have an incentive, right?
And I may even need to burn more than just burning one guy's factory down.
He could do lots of it.
But the other thing too is that, you know, if you've ever run a business, you need what?
You need fire insurance.
Now, if I pay for a bunch of factories to get burned down, what's going to happen to my fire insurance?
It's going to go up, right?
So it's going to raise my cost.
Plus, you know, with all these smoking factories around, there's a huge incentive for people to come into the marketplace and compete with me.
And they might be a lot better than this guy.
I'm sure he's great.
But, you know, go burn down some factory that's producing software.
I don't know, factory cubicles or whatever, right?
And then Microsoft's like, ooh, you know, I'm going to go in there.
Thanks, guys.
I appreciate that.
That was great.
Thank you.
So this is the price of evil without the state.
You take on a lot of personal risks and problems and it's stressful.
Right?
I mean, how many people have really done evil here?
They always sit in the back.
That's why I was saying earlier, because they don't want people to come up behind them.
But no, I mean, how many, okay, let's not say evil.
How many have done stuff that they're afraid of getting caught about?
Okay, it can be, oh my gosh.
I'm not even going to ask what it is, but I'm going to picture it.
That's more fun for me.
So, it's stressful, right?
When I was a kid, I always had something I could be gotten for.
I'd lost a flashlight, or I didn't know where my braces were.
There was something.
And you're in this uneasy North Korean environment, just hoping nothing's going to get you for something.
So there's stress.
It's anxiety-provoking.
It makes you uneasy.
And the possibilities of blowback are huge.
I mean, if you don't know how to deal with evil people, then you're going to go in blind.
You don't know what you're doing.
You don't know who's reliable.
You don't know who's good, who's bad, who's going to turn on you, whatever, right?
So, this is why evil sans state, not too efficient.
Now, I'm happy to hear if you've got a big evil scheme, right?
We'll start rubbing our hands together, get the wax on.
If you've got an evil scheme, give me one and we'll see if it works without the state.
Cuban cigars in the U.S.?
Well, they're only not there in the U.S.
because of the state, right?
So I'm talking about, like, in the free market.
Let's say no state.
In the free market, what's an evil scheme with no possibility of blowback that's going to be productive?
Fraud.
Can you give me an example?
I don't know.
Selling cheap costume jewelry and saying it once belongs to the Zardina of Russia?
I don't know, but let me give you something really specific.
I have a friend who has erectile dysfunction, a doctor.
I wonder if you could help me with that.
That would be great.
Is this a salute or is this-- What do you have?
So Microsoft stole the Windows XP from digital.
And under threat of lawsuit, they made an agreement and later on backed off.
Well, OK, but this again, we're talking about sort of state interference with monopolies and lawsuits and intellectual property and so on.
But go back to your figurine.
You say this was owned by the Tsarina of Russia.
She was really into plastic.
And trust me, you know, Well, I mean, but people can buy the story if they don't want to validate it.
I don't know that that's, I mean, you may or may not know.
They can verify it or not, right?
But I don't think that tends to last too long.
I mean, that usually gets found out pretty quickly.
Anyone else?
Like an evil, nefarious scheme?
If we're talking about a role of Salt State, I can go wrong a bank or anything, and if I have a better private defense contract with a bank, then I can get away with it.
All right, come on up.
No, I'm kidding.
No, no, don't.
It's too tough for me.
No, we'll get to the defense, because I want to talk about... How are we doing for time?
You guys all right?
Okay, so we'll talk about the private defense-y things in a sec, but it's tough to come up with, like, evil without the state in a business context, because you don't have these guys, fundamentally, right?
Sorry, corporate espionage?
And there certainly, I'm sure, would be some of that in a free society for sure, but that again can be traced.
It's really tough to do without any kind of tracing and of course the possibility for retaliation is really high.
Like a lot of people don't want to start that ball rolling and certainly if you try, I mean I've presented to boards and I've been a senior executive, you try going to the board and say well we could invest in R&D but there's a guy named Uncle Spanky Fingers who's really great at getting corporate secrets and can go in as a mole and you know they're like you know what I think we'll just do the R&D thing because I don't know what the hell freaky show you're watching but that's not what we want to do as a business, right?
Because if you ever get caught In a free society, reputation is huge, right?
I mean, what was it, Chick-fil-A?
In the States, they did something, they offended the gay rights groups, and next thing you know, they're bending over, right?
I mean, it's just wretched, right?
So, sorry to... I went to theater school, I can make these jokes.
Anyway.
So, it's hard to come up with, like, good evil in a free society, but boy, once you've got the state, what are you gonna do?
Lobby.
Do you know American corporations spend more on lobbying than they do on R&D?
Average return on investment for lobbying is between 150 and 200 times.
That is irresistible and if you are not lobbying in a state of society, you are a terrible businessman.
It's true.
I mean, I hate to say it, it's true.
Because your responsibility, your legal fiduciary responsibility, is to provide the maximum returns you can to your shareholders, to your investors, to your employees.
And if you are not pursuing the most lucrative thing you can do, which is to lobby, you are really bad at business.
Right?
So, the deciders and the spoils and the payers change fundamentally the equation.
Because once the state takes over the enforcement, all personal risks to you Vanish.
Right?
As I said before, and I'll probably say again, government is a game called free evil to anybody who wants it.
And of course, anything that's heavily subsidized tends to increase.
When you subsidize the use of violence and you remove the risk from the individual actors of violence, well, I mean, of course it's going to escalate until general social collapse.
Let's get back to your question, because you've been reading ahead.
All right.
So, let's say there's no state.
That was easy.
Now, of course you all know, what does anarchy mean?
It means throwing shit through Starbucks windows.
What else does it mean?
Anarchy, the technical definition.
No rulers.
What do people always think it means?
No rules!
There's a little R there, people, that's really important.
It doesn't mean no rules, it means no rulers.
My argument is, if you have rulers, you actually have no rules.
I mean, if we're playing chess and there's some guy who sits next to us who decides arbitrarily whether our pieces can move that way or not, do we have any rules?
No.
When you have a central group in society that can decide at will, at whim, what the rules are going to be, then you are in a situation which people always project into anarchy.
Ten minutes?
Okay.
I just finished.
That was really fast.
You can play it back later, slower, in the recording.
So, let's say we are a country, ish.
Anarchy, no countries, blah, blah.
Some geographical region.
We want protection.
We don't want the risk of war, which always accrues to the state.
So we have, I would assume, we know we live in a state of society.
What is the problem if you're a government invading a non-government society?
One of the problems.
No one surrendered to you?
Yeah, everyone who you don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, the nipples could be explosive.
I don't know what the hell people are doing, right?
Those who laugh have those.
Yes, sir.
Sorry?
Your army might desert you?
Yeah, sir.
There's no what structures?
Yeah, so let's look at Germany.
May of 1940.
They go and invade France.
Why?
Because they're French.
And what are they trying to get control of?
The tax structure in France.
If there's no tax structure, let's say you're standing right here, and to your right is a really profitable farm that's beautifully run, and to your left, like Amazon rainforest desert full of bugs and crap, right?
Who do you want to invade?
You want to invade the place that's got the organizational structure where the livestock is already domesticated and the profits are already in place.
You go take over the farm, cashola, right?
You've got this spigot of money and oil coming up, right?
Go over into the jungle, it's like, ah!
It's horrible.
You're just not having any fun and you can't conquer anything because there's no structure in place.
So you can't take over a stateless society.
Why do you take it over?
There's nothing, right?
So...
You don't have to worry too much, but let's say you do, right?
So let's say I come forward and I say, I am Steph, the great player of risk, and I will defend you people forever.
So what questions would you ask me if I offered to defend you for a particular sum of money?
What's my hourly rate?
Trust me, it breaks down very easily and simply at an individual level.
It'll cost you almost nothing.
You'll find the pennies under the count.
No, sorry.
I think I'm back in the software world.
Yes, sir?
No, because you won't want to leave.
It's going to be so beautiful.
What, you want a fireplace where there's taxation again?
I don't think so.
What's your experience?
What's my experience?
In war?
Okay, that's a great question to ask.
How would you guarantee that you're not going to become an expat?
Right.
Because you're going to say, here, guy, there's a bunch of money to go buy a bunch of weapons.
What's the most scary thing that could happen?
I'm going to be the new government.
You know, and all this, right?
So how will I give you good assurance that I'm not going to do that?
What would you want from me?
You what?
My firstborn child?
Oh yeah, you spend an afternoon with her and then you come back to me.
Sorry.
Yeah, everyone's going to come make their pitch to the people and you can choose more than one or whatever, right?
But what would you want from me?
To make sure that I wasn't going to turn around and do this whiplash statism thing with, thanks for all the money, here's my robot army.
Independent order?
Yeah.
So, you know, I say, okay, well, I have $10 million.
I'm going to put it in a big pile here.
Anyone ever finds that I bought one more bullet or one more shell or one more robot attack spider from Mars or something, and whoever gets the $10 million.
So I put some money in escrow to guarantee blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
What else?
You can also imagine that you're making the pitch, right?
And if you're talking about people about this, put them in the position of making the pitch.
It really helps them think more fluidly in this stuff.
A reputation, for sure.
I mean, I probably, if I'd already took over nine countries before, trust me, I'm over that.
It was a phase.
I feel I got it all out of my system, man.
Come on, give me some money.
Give me some money, right?
A lack of facial tics, excuse me.
A lack of fondling of intense weaponry during the presentation is probably, I don't know what this is.
A baby who's, I don't know, a bomb?
I don't know, anyway.
But you would want somebody who's going to submit to outside audits, and of course, what is gonna happen if I, wah-ha, right?
I can secretly start to build up an army.
You had another, right, before I went to the next thing, okay.
You have an agreement?
Speak up.
Maybe we can have an agreement so I would have authority over you.
Yeah, okay, so you could have authority.
So I would surrender my whatever.
Firstborn, was it?
Savage over here was talking about, right?
Just because they got the suit.
Actually, it's a nice suit.
What can I say?
Okay, so yeah, you could have some agreement.
Like I give up my house, I surrender to jail or whatever if I do any of this stuff.
Okay, but what's the market signal that I am accumulating a secret army of zombies or academics.
I'm sorry, I repeat myself.
What is the market signal going to be?
Costs, right.
I mean, I've got to pay for this secret army.
So what am I going to do?
I'm either going to have to borrow, which is going to be noticeable, or I'm going to borrow and then I'm going to have to pay interest, which means I have to raise the rates, or I'm going to charge the customers directly.
So, you know, the moment you get a doubling of your bill, you know, again, Obamacare excluded, from the defense agency, you know that they're up to no good and this is your market signal.
Will you be able to compete if you are building a secret robot army with all the other people who aren't?
Well, of course not.
They're more expensive, right?
So there's tons of market mechanisms that are going to be very clear.
Plus, you know, if there are like three guys or three groups who are handing out agency defenses in a geographical area, you know they're going to be watching each other like hawks, right?
It's the moment they see somebody doing something nefarious and they take out banner ads, skywriting, you know, put it on the web.
Did you know that we found evidence of the warehouse of You know, secret scorpion, kaleidoscopic robot, laser, whatever, I don't know.
I'm not a defense expert.
Sorry, you probably could figure that out.
But so there's lots of ways in which you can get a great deal of security about whether you're going to have these guys turn on you, right?
And I think that that's actually pretty efficient.
You know, what's the one thing also that governments tend not to do in war?
You know, they tend not to assassinate each other.
Ah, you know, I have some sympathy to this viewpoint.
But of course, they don't want to do that because they don't want to open that, you know, that's the arsonist example.
They don't want to open that kettle of fish to everyone, right?
But it certainly would be fairly easy.
Five?
Five minutes?
Fairly easy today.
So listen, I, uh, questions?
Sorry, I literally could do like five hours on this.
Be thankful I'm the last speaker.
Otherwise, they'd have to take me down with security.
Again.
No, do you have any, so we went through, I think that there's some arguments to be made that without the state, it's really tough to have a war, right?
Imagine, right?
They say, we want to go invade Iraq.
Can you give us $75,000, everyone in America?
What do you think they'd say?
You know, I like the flag and all that, but you know, I got my eye on a new Lexus.
Yes, sir?
So basically, I think we've actually kind of touched on fourth generation warfare.
Sure.
You can't win those.
I mean, you all know, sorry to interrupt, but to those who don't know, right?
This is what the Al-Qaeda was taught by America in fighting the Soviets, right?
You've got a $20 million plane and you've got a $20,000 Stinger missile.
It's economic destruction to attack a non-state entity.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, so in terms of that, just, could you comment on the economic barriers that come with that?
So, I mean, for an example, so if you're, if two governments were going at war, obviously there's organization, and there's more structure, and there's ways to dismantle that.
But through fourth generation warfare, the guerrilla groups, that totally changes things.
Because as you've seen, right, with Al-Qaeda, we've killed them, but we haven't killed Okay.
So with that, what are the economic implications that come with that?
Yeah, I mean, the economic implications is that to attack a non-state entity is empire suicide.
I mean, because you simply cannot sustain the cost of attacking non-state entities who are getting their weaponry through the black market.
I mean, there's an old Bill Cosby... And Americans, of all people, should understand that.
That's why they have a country to begin with, right?
There's this old Bill Cosby routine.
You know, he used to flip for the beginning of a football game, and they had a flip between the British and the Americans in the Revolutionary War.
Oh, the Americans win!
Okay, you guys, you get to dress like trees, you get to move through the undergrowth, you know, all this kind of stuff, and all the British guys got a big X on them, red, got to go in a straight line, you know, and got to go, oh, oh, oh, make sure everyone knows where you are, and so, I mean, this is exactly what happened with America, that they had a non-state entity fighting a state entity, which was the British Army, and they kicked their asses, which is what always happens, it's currently, and this was the express plan.
of Al-Qaeda.
Osama Bin Laden, I think in 06, said, you know, it's easy.
They're so ridiculously easy to provoke.
You just stick a flag the furthest point away from Washington, D.C., you put Al-Qaeda on it, and they'll come storming over and burn up all their money.
And this is exactly, how are they going to close these 750 bases?
Bankrupt the empire.
I mean, that's what happened to the British Empire.
It's what happened to the Roman Empire.
You can say it over and go, I want to hear more about that.
But how you bankrupt an empire is you draw them into non-state combat.
Sir?
Yeah, I was watching one of your videos and you spoke about how during your childhood war was like a very cultural thing that you played, you said you just played with soldiers or anything.
Do you want to expand on that?
I was just reading, I was going to do a whole bit on Winston Churchill, but I didn't.
Winston Churchill would play with toy soldiers obsessively as a kid.
He would play with his brother Jack, except all of Jack's soldiers had to be colored and were never allowed to have artillery.
So we would play marbles and he'd roll the marbles and Walk over all the guys and so on.
Yeah, it was very much part of my upbringing.
I went to boarding school when I was six.
Go separate the ruling class from their mothers so they have no empathy for the victims of their imperialism and all that.
But I think there is a lot of that that happens, particularly to men, to prepare them for this obviously suicidal nonsense, right?
In the First World War in America, 200,000 people in the draft just vanished.
200,000 guys were like, are you kidding me?
Because they were not used to that kind of indoctrination.
Yeah, it's a big problem.
I was just going to say, what do you think of the idea, in terms of a stable society with private defense firms, is that they're most likely going to reduce aggression because a successful private defense firm is kind of like a successful insurance company.
So taking as much as possible and not pay out as much as possible.
Sure, yeah.
So it's not going to insure aggressive clients, or it's not going to take on, even if it's a contract, if you aggress upon another, we're not going to cover you because that's going to increase overhead and drive down our profits.
Well, no, it's not going to drive down your profits if that's not what the customer wants.
If they want you to cover someone who aggresses against them, then you'll have to provide that service.
What I mean is they're not going to cover someone who's going to aggress against someone else and expect you to defend them once they come running back to you.
So, for example, if you rob a bank...
Yes.
And you come running back to your defense firm.
Oh no, yeah, if you rob a bank, you're off, yeah, absolutely.
If you smoke and you said you didn't, then you're off the health care thing, right?
So yes, they will absolutely have to drop you from that.
But Redmond Weissenberger, who runs Mises Canada, was clearing out his house the other day and came across newspapers from like the 1940s where the insurance companies were all desperately trying to figure out how to cure polio.
Because polio was staggeringly expensive.
And of course, I don't think it was them, but they definitely dedicate a lot of money to that.
And in the same way, violence is incredibly expensive to a stateless society.
It's incredibly profitable to the evil goblins who are in the military-industrial complex and the politicians and the media.
It's incredibly expensive, and I think that it would be the greatest human endeavor possible to try and figure out the root causes of human violence and to find ways to prevent it.
Human violence, I don't believe, ever should come as a surprise to a society.
There are so many keys.
I've got videos called How to Make a Monster.
on YouTube going into this.
I've got a whole series of interviews and research called The Bomb in the Brain you can find on YouTube.
Human violence is very easy to prevent.
It's easy to prevent than just about anything else.
It's all about early childhood contact and love and security and so on.
So I think that that society, it's hard to, like, we look at the current society and we say, oh, but we'd have all these problems.
How would a free society handle it?
But that's like saying from the 1930s, well, you know, we've got smallpox and polio.
How would they be handled in a free society?
Well, now we don't really have to worry about those.
I think the same thing will be true of human violence, but right now, the state and its associated entities profits from the destruction of childhood in so many ways, whereas a free society would be the opposite.
Yes, sir?
Just looking at the present, though, like, I think you have a lot of valid criticisms of both conventional war and people who are more current these days, non-conventional war.
You're still worried about the fact that Al-Qaeda does exist.
But Al-Qaeda exists because of these three bubbles.
What did Bin Laden say?
All you have to do is listen to the enemies.
They said, well we don't hate you for your freedom.
If we did, why are we not invading Sweden?
Because Sweden doesn't have 750 military bases killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims over the course of the 20th and 21st century, right?
So because of the military-industrial complex, you have all of this stuff.
Al-Qaeda only exists as blowback to U.S.
foreign policy.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I mean, Islam is a crazy religion that needs to be fought intellectually because it's, you know, hugely problematic.
But the attacks are not because of religious differences.
The attacks are because the U.S.
is, I mean, they fund the Saudi Arabian government, which is, and they funded and gave weapons to Saddam Hussein, who was secular, right?
And so they had a problem with that, that he wasn't establishing caliphate or some sort of religious theocracy.
So I would argue that al Qaeda is a product of statism, not So, I just wanted to point out, in your previous diagram, you have a 4, you have a 3, you have a state... I erased it, because otherwise people can refer to it, and then I might be mistaken.
The diagram is kind of important in the conversation, in the context, is that you have the state, you have the people who have the spoils, and then you have the payers.
I could only wish that diagram was actually true.
And the reason I say that is because the spoils in the government are in the present, and the payers in the future.
It's like if the cost of war accrued to those who propose it, and away from those who oppose it, in the present, and that's an experiment we're not allowed to conduct.
Well, that's with the arson thought experiment, the cost of violence and the risk of violence accrues to the individual.
Oh, absolutely.
There may be a desire for more, but if people have to actually pay for it in the present, you're setting a bill for the Iraq war, you're setting a bill for everything.
In advance.
Including all the PTSD, including all the horrible therapies that these people have to go through.
therapies are horrible, but actually, we put them in a state of needing therapy and then the medical care, and all of that accrues to the people who want the war, including the politicians and all that stuff.
In that diagram, then it would be like-- - Oh yeah, it's like the war on drugs.
I mean, you send a bill to the people, say, oh, you for the war on drugs?
You half of the people?
Great, here's your bill.
Suddenly they go, oh, wait a minute, I think I found me some tolerance, right?
And then half of them drop out and the other half get the rest of the bill and the one guy is left with a $20 billion bill.
He's like, okay, I think I'm okay with some brownies, right?
Sorry, I think we're done.
You'll stick with us for dinner?
Yeah, yeah, I'm hungry.
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