All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:10
Bribing the Present, Billing the Future: The Reality of Democracy
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux for Freedomain Radio.
Let's talk a little bit about democracy and the vote that is coming up.
I did a series on democracy recently, got lots of questions and comments on it.
Thank you so much.
Let me give you the straight goods.
A lot of people feel that defensive voting is the way to go.
So if you want to find some way to end the drug war, then you try to legalize pot and have governments control and regulate and tax it and therefore you will end up in a better position.
This I do not believe to be the case.
The one way to make sure that drugs and alcohol and so on are minimized in terms of their penetration into society is to cut the profit margins of these companies as much as possible.
When you have a huge amount of excess profits, Which you get with a government monopoly, which you get with government regulation and control.
Just look at the drug companies.
Pharmaceutical companies have huge profits relative to other businesses.
All governments control and create monopolies.
Those monopolies get excess profits, which in turn go back into the government coffers in terms of taxes and create huge amounts of allegiances to the government and create a rich source for campaign donations in the future.
The government always wants to build a fence around major industries so that those industries are dependent upon the government, will give money to politicians, and what happens as a result is the profits of those industries are extraordinarily high.
When the profits of industries are extraordinarily high, what they can do is they can advertise lifestyle So, the British government has been controlling alcohol for many years, so has the Canadian government.
In England, alcoholism, particularly among the young, is rampant.
In the US, alcohol abuse is rampant.
Why?
Because there's so much money in alcohol because of government-controlled regulation, protection, and taxation.
There's so much money to be made by private corporate interests that they can make it cool, they can make it part of a lifestyle.
Why on earth would every single adult gathering require Alcohol.
It's just a given.
Well, because it's become a lifestyle.
The way it becomes a lifestyle is it's continually advertised and propagandized, the cost of which is paid for out of the excess profits generated by state-granted monopolies.
It's the same thing with marijuana.
If marijuana is legalized or decriminalized or whatever, then the supply of it is going to remain illegal, which is a completely bizarre mutation, or the source of marijuana is going to become legalized, in which case you're going to get marijuana corporations.
Those marijuana corporations, because of their close and cozy relationship ...with the government are going to have huge profits and are going to be able to advertise marijuana as a lifestyle choice, thus exacerbating its use.
In England in the 1950s, before heroin...
became illegal.
You could buy five or six hits for under a pound in a British drugstore and there were almost no addicts.
Ten or fifteen years later, after it had become illegal, it cost ten pounds for one hit and there were tens of thousands of addicts just in London alone.
Why is that?
Well, because when the profit of a particular drug goes up, Then you have an incentive to give out free samples, to get people hooked, to get it in as a lifestyle drug.
Because once you get people hooked, the profits are so high.
So it's very, very important to understand.
The only way that the drug war is going to end is through compassion for those being victimized in the drug war.
It's not going to end through government regulation.
It's not going to end through government control.
Any more than problems with alcoholism ended when the government took control.
of alcohol.
Doesn't happen.
What we have to understand is that drug use, primarily, is a form of self-medication, just as alcoholism, just as cigarette smoking, just as promiscuity, just as a lot of other dysfunctional behaviors.
That substance abuse is a form of self-medication designed to manage the symptoms of child abuse.
And you can look at my Bomb in the Brain series for the scientific evidence behind all of this.
Obesity, alcoholism, drug addiction, promiscuity, all other forms of dysfunction are the result of what are called adverse childhood experiences.
Assault, rape, beatings, being ignored, being underfed, unloved.
These create a class of people dependent upon external Sources of brain-balancing drugs, like nicotine, like alcohol, like marijuana, like cocaine, like heroin, like the drug the endorphins release through romantic or sexual affairs, short particularly affairs, and child abuse is so detrimental to one's health that it takes an average of 20 years off the lifespan of people who've experienced it.
So that is the understanding that is going to end the drug war.
Not saying, well, you know, we need to tax it because we're low on money.
All that will do is create a marijuana lobby that will make sure that it has a monopoly that will be able to afford in lifestyle advertising, marketing, and it will create more problems with drugs.
The root cause of drug addiction is not the illegality.
The root cause of drug addiction is child abuse by caregivers.
That is the root cause of substance abuse.
It is the root cause of crime.
And if you want to get rid of the state, then you need to first of all diminish the number of criminals, and by that I mean private criminals and public criminals.
You need to decrease the number of people who are going to prey upon others, and you need to decrease the number of people who are so messed up emotionally and intellectually that they have a hunger for power over their fellow human beings.
That is the only way to end the state.
The only way to end the state is to cut off the source of criminality in the public and the private sphere.
Once criminality goes down, the state has less reason for being.
Once fewer and fewer people are interested in having political, violent, coercive power, over their fellow citizens, then those who want to be in the state will diminish and the state will just begin to crumble away.
This is the only way that we can get rid of the state, is to recognize that the source of criminality, both public and private, the source of addictions for which the state is deemed to be some sort of control mechanism, which of course it isn't, is child abuse in particular, in general, in society, in perpetuity, until we recognize this basic fact.
Another thing that's important to understand about voting is that voting is always enslaving your children.
Voting is always selling off the future of your children.
There's no other way that a democracy can work.
The sort of quote prosperity that occurred in the post-war period in the West was largely, though not exclusively, was largely the result of a very simple equation.
So the government began to provide charity, which meant people had to give less money to charity.
Now, the government also began to provide health care for people.
Medicare, Medicaid.
The government, before the war, began to provide old age security.
What meant was that freed up capital, it freed up people's money in the moment to spend on consumer items.
Houses, cars, TVs, radios, whatever.
And it's a really, really important thing to understand that The explosion of, quote, wealth in the post-war period in the West was due to the fact that the government began to provide immense and enormous services, including the federal highway system.
The only way that it was able to do that in a democratic society, the only way that you're able to provide benefits to pay off to bribe taxpayers in the here and now, is by pushing the costs off into the future.
By pushing the costs off into the future.
There's no other way.
Can you imagine if people said, hey, we want the Great Society.
We want LBJ's Great Society.
And LBJ said, great, fantastic, no problem.
All I need to do is double your taxes for a few years so that we can then have this Great Society and your taxes are going to remain doubled in perpetuity.
And we need to start before we actually implement the program, because we need to do all the hiring, and the planning, and get the buildings, and get the infrastructure, and get all of the bureaucracy set up, and all the paperwork, and the reporting structures, and the org charts, and the management training, right?
So we need to double your taxes for, you know, say three to four years, and then we will start implementing this program, and your taxes will remain doubled, and your taxes will double every decade after that.
If that were the truth that were spoken about government programs, if that were the actual facts presented, which are the economic facts presented to the electorate, how many people would say yes?
Well, a politician and his dog maybe, but nobody else, because everybody else would say, well, there's not much point doubling my taxes in order to help people because I'm already paying for charity.
I already have my churches involved in charity.
I have private, as they had in the 19th century, private insurance and friendly societies that kept costs low for workers and the poor and provided support that over 90% of people who were below the poverty line were enrolled in these kinds of private market safety nets.
They're called friendly societies.
You can google them if you want.
That was a great presentation recently that I saw at Libertopia on this topic.
Over 90% of the poor were enrolled in these societies that paid for unemployment, that paid for catastrophic medical care, that paid for all of these things.
So people would say, well, if you're just going to double my taxes, then I'd rather just pay for a private institution as 9 out of 10 people who were poor were doing so in the past.
I'll just pay for that.
But that's not, of course, what governments can do.
In order to buy off the electorate, it has to push the costs down the road.
So it has to implement the programs based upon deficit financing.
It has to debt the programs.
Because otherwise, the scam would be up.
You have to give the people the illusion that they're getting something for nothing.
So if people were gung-ho on blowing up innocent Muslims after 9-11, would they have remained as gung-ho If those in favor of the war had been sent the bill for its anticipated real cost, not the bullshit that they were talking about at the time.
The real cost based on historical estimates of trillions of dollars.
You have a referendum, you put your name down.
If you put your name down and you're for the war, if you're for the invasion of Iraq or for the invasion of Afghanistan, great!
You get the bill.
And we're going to triple your taxes for a couple of years, we're going to get in there, we're going to continue to double your taxes after that.
Very few people say anything but the drug war.
Drug war costs, what, $100 billion a year?
Have a referendum, say people in favor of the drug war, you get the bill.
Well, of course, nobody would end up being for the drug war within about 20 minutes.
So the only way that the government can operate in a democracy is by bribing this generation with the enslavement of the next generation.
That's the sleazy secret of democracy, that You have to give people the perception or the illusion that they're getting something for free.
Because otherwise, the scam is up.
It doesn't work.
If you charge people for what the government is doing, they quickly realize that it's far less efficient than the free market solutions that they have, in terms of charity and health care provision, old age pensions and so on.
You never raise this fundamental law of politics.
You never raise taxes to pay for your programs.
You just raise them later in other areas, down the road, and continue to accumulate the national debt.
That is the reality of democracy.
So if you vote, if you vote, then you are voting for enslaving your children.
I'm not going to participate in that kind of system.
I'm just not going to.
I'm also not going to beg for my freedom from people.
Please, please, please give me the right to smoke a joint.
I beg you.
No.
This is what they want.
This is what they want.
And there's no possibility that California is going to get this anyway, because the federal government is going to come down and smash any initiative.
Governments can't get out of the drug control business.
Because, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars are invested in this.
Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of jobs and their dependents.
At the time of the unemployment rate is almost 10%.
Is the government really going to lay off hundreds of thousands of workers and make those numbers even worse?
Those workers who've been corrupted and brutalized through the Drug Enforcement Agency's policies and practices of kidnapping and incarcerating people, particularly minorities, for having a few bits of vegetation in their pocket, those people can't function in the free market anymore.
They've been too brutalized by what it is that they're doing.
It's like taking a prison guard and putting him in as a kindergarten teacher.
Just know that they're locked in.
It's not going to change.
The other reason that democracy is not going to work in voting, is not going to work to control the size of the government, is that just so many damn people working for the government as it stands, that those people would have to vote to take away their own economic self-interest in the continuance of the state.
This, my friends, is not going to happen.
You have between a third and a half of people in certain sectors working for the government.
How many other people are dependent upon the government for their income?
Public school teachers, you have police, you have the Drug Enforcement Agency, you have prison guards, you have people on welfare, you have people on old age pensions, you have people on Medicare and Medicaid, you have doctors, you have lots of... So many people in the public and the quasi-public sector are dependent upon the state for the majority of their income.
I bet you if you added all these up together and I'm just tossing up a few, there are many more.
There would be... It would be way over 50%.
They're bought and paid for, people.
They're bought and paid for.
They're not going to vote to limit the size and power of the government any more than you would vote for a 40% pay cut.
Would you do that?
I don't think so.
Crazy idiots like me will take a 75% pay cut to talk about freedom on the internet.
But not many people have that kind of dedication, and there's nothing wrong with that.
It's just a reality, in fact, of the world.
So you have to get a majority in order to get something changed in a democracy, but the majority of people are either directly or indirectly dependent upon the government.
You're going to talk to some Boeing employee or somebody from Halliburton, to say you should vote for an end to imperialism, but they're entirely profiting from imperialism.
They're just not going to do it.
There are way too many parasites and way too few hosts for the system to be changed through democracy.
Now, I believe that people get involved in democratic change simply because they feel despair, they feel anxiety, they feel frustration, they feel rank terror at the way that the world is going, and they feel they need to do something.
Well, you can do something!
You can do something.
I know it's counterintuitive, I know it's a tough pill to swallow, but I go where the facts are, and the facts are very clear.
The lust for power comes from childhood abuse.
Look at the childhoods of American presidents.
All brutalized, all abusive.
The lust for power comes from child abuse, from having yourself smashed down so bad that you spend the rest of your life trying to claw up to the top of the human pyramid because you've been so obese as a child.
Criminality comes from child abuse.
Everybody in the US prisons who's ever been interviewed, to my knowledge, has reported child abuse.
Now, it doesn't mean everybody who was abused as a child ends up in prisons, but everybody who's in prison was abused as a child.
Gotta lower criminality, gotta lower the lust and drive for power over other human beings.
And don't talk to me about human nature.
Oh my God, so many people sending me emails.
It's human nature to be aggressive, to be violent.
It's human nature to want to control.
No, it's not.
It's not.
It's human nature to adapt to one's environment.
That's human nature.
I mean, if you were some space alien and I showed you a video of a Brinks truck that had Blown up in a poor neighborhood raining hundred dollar bills and you saw everybody scrambling and kicking and biting and so on to get to those hundred dollar bills, you'd say, well, it's human nature to be greedy and avaricious and violent and grasping and blah blah blah.
It's like, no, it's human nature during a time of great scarcity when there's random abundance to grab and claw for it in a sort of feeding frenzy.
Sure, but when that's not there, that's not what people do.
You understand, the government is like an exploded brink strike.
Where there's a fire and there's burning bills floating all over the place and it's... Grab what you can when you can while you can.
Because it's almost all gone, right?
The future is almost sold off to the last atom.
So the government is just like a...
Explosion of $100 bills in a poor neighborhood?
Of course everybody's going to have this scrambling blood feud, fest, violence, corruption, abuse, politics.
Politics is such a dirty word.
I can't believe that's how we run our society.
Somebody says about somebody in the office, he's totally political.
What he means is that he's a slimy, conniving scumbag of manipulative verbal abuse.
That's how we choose to run our most essential institutions is through the dirty word of Politics?
So human nature adapts to its environment if there is free evil.
The government slogan is free evil because you get to steal and rob and torture and rape and invade and murder and everybody else has to pay for it.
You get to bribe people in the present with the earnings of the unborn.
It's free evil.
Right?
Just like it's free money when an armored truck explodes scattering hundred-dollar bills all over a poor neighborhood.
Free money.
And in that environment, yeah, people go hog-wild, they go nutty, they go crazy.
Of course.
That's not human nature.
It's not human nature at all.
Human nature to a death.
Before the end of slavery, people would have said, well, you can't get rid of slavery because it's human nature to enslave.
Yeah, and okay, so there's now second-tier slavery in the form of the government, but it's not direct.
Brutal, whipping slavery and human ownership in the direct sense.
We're sort of free-range livestock at the moment.
So it's not human nature.
But up until the 18th century, you couldn't find a non-abusive parent.
You couldn't.
Lloyd DeMast from Psychohistory.com has had a $10,000 reward out for years for anyone who can find, before the 17th century, a parent who would not be thrown in jail under current child protection laws.
No one has ever been able to find it.
So you would say, well, it's just human nature to abuse children, to control, to rape, to manipulate, to beat, to farm them off, to be wet nursed by strangers outside of the town.
It's human nature.
But it's not.
That's what human nature is in the absence of progress.
Human nature.
Is it human nature to become Muslim?
Is it human nature to become Christian or Zoroastrian?
No.
Is it human nature for the child of an atheist to grow up most likely as an atheist?
Is it human nature for the child of a Sikh to grow up most likely as a Sikh?
It's human nature to adapt to the environment.
And the state is a great soul-sucking, blood-tentacle, raping the minds and spines of free human beings.
And of course human beings are going to adapt to that.
If you get rid of that, if you get rid of that free evil, blood-soaked pile of fiat currency, well, then it will be human nature to be free without the temptation of free evil, of subsidized brutality.
Then we will have a chance for freedom.
But to get involved in this system, any more than you absolutely have to, to voluntarily go and beg and plead for freedom from sociopaths who love the sweat of your yearning to see just one glimpse of blue sky beyond the cage.
Fuck them!
▲
Export Selection