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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
20:30
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward - The Freedomain Radio Review
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio and this is a quick, brief review of Zeitgeist.
Moving forward, the video that was recently released on the internet, the diagnosis versus the cure.
I'm the host of Free Domain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web, which you can find at freedomainradio.com.
So, some stuff that I liked about Zeitgeist.
I thought it was really, really good in some ways.
I really liked the critical and principled approach to the existing system.
A lot of the criticisms I massively share, which doesn't mean they're right, it just means that I happen to share them.
The criticism of the banksters and the fiat currency system, the Federal Reserve, the slow enslavement of the tax cattle into endless debt and obligation is wonderfully explicated and beautifully done.
I have no issues with that as I didn't in the previous side guest films either.
I liked the idealization and passion.
You know, you often get criticized for being utopian if you propose improvements in the generalized socioeconomic human condition.
They're not afraid to put their shiny forehead idealism front and center and for that I think they should be very much applauded.
That's not an easy thing to do.
I liked the beginning of the film where they talked about the effects of child abuse on what is commonly called human nature to help people to understand that humans adapt to their environment whether that environment is being plundered through banking and fiat currency or being bought and indoctrinated in government schools or being bullied and abused at school or at home.
What results is not human nature but an adaptation to a particular environment which I thought was was great and they had some of the same people that I've had on my show.
Hi Gabby!
So yeah, I thought it was really well done.
The ridiculousness of GDP, that you count in GDP things like the military industrial complex and health care and so on, was very well explained.
I thought that was great.
This is of course a government measure and government controlled, so again to me it's just another example of how statism is ridiculous and immoral.
Evils of child abuse and its effects on the brain, fantastic, couldn't get behind it more.
The analysis of statist fiat currency predations, you know, good, good, good.
The parasitism of the financial sector in its current incarnation where it's shoveling money around and stealing homes from the poor is beautiful and so I really wanted to start off with the stuff that I thought was really well done and well reasoned and well argued.
Yeah, well, some stuff I thought could have been a tad improved.
Look, this is something that's so common and has been detonated rationally and empirically so many times that it is a little bit wearying to see again and again and again, which is that somehow the voluntarism of the free market, of people trading Goods that they have built or own voluntarily, without coercion, without fiat currency, without national debts, just trading either in kind or through the medium of money.
This is a voluntary system.
That is a voluntary system.
The state control of counterfeiting currency is not voluntary.
You try and set up a competing currency, they will throw your ass in jail.
And so, this conflation of violence with voluntarism, when they say money is debt, this is not accurate.
This is not accurate.
A gold-based currency that's privately run is not debt.
It's just a medium of exchange.
Government fiat currency, government violent monopoly over currency, is debt, but not money.
Not money.
Money has both private and public manifestations.
The private manifestation of currency is not debt.
Government money is debt.
This is a big problem.
It's like saying rape is sex and therefore we should get rid of sex.
Saying money is debt therefore we should get rid of money is to conflate the violent monopoly of money enjoyed by the state with the voluntary money systems that can be adopted or discarded at will without violence.
So that's a problem.
Some economic problems that, I mean, you know, you know these guys haven't read their opposition, and I always feel skeptical about people who make these kinds of claims.
So when they say, well, there's one point in the film where they say, well, if you were going to build a table, you would build it out of the best conceivable materials to last it the longest amount of time.
But it's clearly not true.
I mean, it's not even close to true.
What if you're building a table for a tree house that you know your kids are going to get bored of in two months?
Make sure it's not dangerous and that's about it.
The best possible materials, would you fly to get some mahogany from, I don't know, wherever mahogany comes from, so that you could build a perfect table?
No.
You build it with the best materials that you can afford, with the time and resources that you have available, but there are always compromises.
Nothing is built perfectly because nobody lives forever.
So the idea that goods are built in order to be destroyed, that there's some sort of conspiracy that they're gonna build you stuff that's gonna break one day after the warranty, economically speaking that's not true.
Consumers decide how long they want things to last.
So, some consumers want a cheap watch because they don't have a lot of money and they just need to tell the time.
Some people want very expensive watches because, I don't know, they're status-driven ass clowns who need to know what time it is on Mars.
I don't know.
But it's consumers.
If consumers want to pay more for things that last longer, which is generally what happens when you want things to last longer, they're more expensive, consumers will drive that.
Anyway, we'll get to that next part later.
So yeah, that's driven by the consumer.
The idea that capitalism or the free market, voluntary trade, resists competition or the development of new products, I mean, you know, I always find it, I don't know, it's really startling to me when people who ...embarked upon criticizing an existing economic infrastructure or methodology, don't look at what they're actually doing.
The first thing, if you want to figure out economics, look at what you're doing, first and foremost, and then you can sort of go into the theory after that, but start with the empiricism of you, baby, you.
So...
Innovation is resisted and you can't develop new things because the existing power structure doesn't want you to.
Well, these guys are releasing their movie online.
How do movie theaters feel about that?
Well, they're bypassing all of that.
Look at, do you think bookstores are really happy that the Kindle is out and that other forms of e-books are out?
Of course not.
So, the idea that innovation is sort of resisted, well, sure it is.
I mean, nobody likes innovation to come along and take away.
Their economic advantage, but it happens all the time.
The only place it doesn't happen is where you have the government grunting a public or private monopoly through unions, through patents, through other forms of regulations, by raising the barrier to entry through taxes and tariffs and trade restrictions of every kind.
But that's not the free market, right?
That's the state.
They have this bit in there where they They bring up Mises as if Mises would somehow be in support of the existing system of fiat currency.
Mises was a virulent, magnificent moral hero when it came to opposing fiat currency and state control.
From the 1920s when he wrote his books against socialism, the man was a titan.
He was a hero for this kind of stuff.
So to bring him into a film As if he's tacitly supporting the existing system of government fiat currency.
I mean, irresponsibility isn't even the word for it.
It simply means that they've not read anything that he's written and this kind of mischaracterization of easily available viewpoints.
You know, spend ten minutes on the phone with an Austrian economist.
It's a 1-900 number, that's the worst phone sex you'll ever have, but you will learn something about von Mises' theories.
Ah, the experts, the experts, the experts.
Okay, so this is a... I mean, the child abuse stuff was different, but as far as the economics go, I mean, it's just a dull parade of bookish academics spouting Marxist cliché after Marxist cliché.
I mean I spent 15 years as an entrepreneur in the cutting edge of the free market as a software entrepreneur and so I actually have created jobs.
I've actually been out there working in the free market and so when people who have never had a real job, academics with tenure and they can't get fired, competition is incredibly limited through government dictates, When people who have never worked a day in their life as professionals in the free market, who've never created jobs, get on the screen and drone on and on to me about how the free market works, it's just kind of silly.
They've got an entire film about wealth creation and the free market.
And they don't have anybody who's ever created wealth in the free market on it.
I mean, this to me is like having a show that's all about the black experience narrated entirely by white guys.
It's like, you know, dude, if you're going to do a film about the black experience, invite a few brothers on the panel.
That's all I'm saying.
If you're going to do a film about what it's like to be gay, maybe have one or two gay people talking about the actual experience of what it's like rather than people who've just read about it.
I'm just saying.
Get an entrepreneur or two.
Because what entrepreneurs will tell you is that the government inhibits growth regulations and controls and all of that.
So barriers to creating jobs is regulations and taxation, barriers to expansion and so on.
They'll all tell you that.
At least almost all of them will.
So, I just see another academic lining books and all that kind of stuff, and also plant obsolescence.
It's a funny thing they talk about.
Consumer goods are designed to fall apart.
It's like, can you turn around?
There's a whole bookshelf behind you of books that will last probably a hundred years or more.
Anyway, this is... I get tired of the theoreticians.
I'd really just rather talk to people who've actually been in the free market and learn through experience and reality rather than books and theories written by other people, you know, like Marx and Engels.
Two rich young white kids who never worked a day in their life talking all about the experiences of the working class.
I mean, it's just silly.
Anyway, so we'll talk about that.
Resource-based economy, of course, I mean it is Marxism with robots.
It's Marxism with robots.
Central planning will never ever work.
Central planning will never ever ever ever work.
And I will take an argument from a central planner if that central planner or those who advocate for it have effectively dealt with a number of very powerful criticisms of central planning.
If they ignore them, then I just assume they're full of crap.
Basis of economics.
Resources are finite, but desires are infinite.
So how are you going to allocate resources in order to get the greatest efficiency, if that's what people want to do?
Well, without prices, you can't allocate resources efficiently.
I mean, you can say, well, a thousand widgets are better than five hundred widgets, but you don't know if a thousand widgets are better than a thousand pieces of paper or a printer or a toupee or a children's toy or anything like that.
You simply can't compare.
Different investments in capital, different forms of labor, different allocations of capital.
You can't do it without prices because prices signal the true empirical acted upon demand of the consumer.
Central planning can't push that stuff out.
It is a pull economy.
That's how you know what is worthwhile, what is valuable, what is the best use of resources to satisfy human needs.
So without prices you can't do it.
You can't do it.
Money, like if you have, I don't know, $10,000 in the bank, every dollar you spend on something is a dollar you don't spend on everything else.
So the fact that resources are scarce must be mirrored by money because money is scarce for people and that mirrors it.
So then you have to make rational decisions So knowing that everything you buy is everything else you're not going to buy, that's how we know what people actually want.
That's how we know resources are their most efficiently allocated.
Yeah, there are problems with things like scarcity, of course, right?
I mean, there are problems like peak oil.
There are problems like environmentally friendly disposal mechanisms.
I mean, peak oil is all run by the government.
The waste disposal is all run by the government.
You know, these things are all run by the government.
So saying that this is a problem inherent in the free market, when the government has taken over all of these things... I mean, imagine a world where the price of oil wasn't set by OPEC, or by wars in the Middle East, or by other forms of bribery and threats from the government, or a series of governments.
Imagine if it was open to the free market.
It would be a whole different kind of world.
Imagine a world where roads have been built by the free market rather than by the government.
It would be a whole different world.
Anyway, you understand, right?
So the calculation problem, if you think about your day, and again, when it comes to big abstracts like economics and world resources, start thinking about your day.
Don't go read books and think you've learned anything.
Every day you make decisions, hundreds of decisions about resource allocation and what you're going to do with your time, what you're going to do with your money and whether you're going to invest or whether you're going to save or whether you're going to spend or whether you're going to defer purchases or whether you're going to wait until things get cheaper or whatever, right?
You make literally hundreds of decisions every day and each one of your decisions affects hundreds of other decisions of the person next to you.
And this multiplication over 6 billion or 7 billion or 8 billion or 10 billion people or however much we're going to end up with is individual decisions multiplied hundreds and thousands and trillions and billions of times every single day.
And each one of those decisions has ripple effects on everybody, at least a large number of other people's decisions.
There's no conceivable way that a computer can simulate the unknown choice preferences of billions of individuals allocating their own scarce resources to maximize their happiness in the long run.
You can't do it.
You can't do it.
There's no conceivable way that you can do it and Because no computer can be psychic.
So, because of this, you're going to end up with someone saying, here's how the resources should be allocated.
It's going to be arbitrary, even if it's programmed into a computer, somebody's got to put the parameters in, somebody's got to put the scale of preferences in, and having people fill out forms is not the same, because if you fill out a form, you're not dealing with your own scarce resource called money.
Right?
So you fill out a form and take everything, right?
People will say, no, you have to choose some things.
But money already does that.
Money and prices, as long as they're not enforced through coercion and as long as there's competition in money and so on, fantastic.
You can't overcombat it, right?
So in these donut cities from paradise, you know, I've got a lawnmower and my neighbor has an iPad.
Well, let's just say we lean over and we say, let's trade them.
I mean, I don't want to go and send mine back to the store and then you have to go and fill out a form to get it from someone hoping that nobody else wants it before you.
We'll just trade it.
And as soon as you have that kind of trade occurring, which is inevitable because it's so efficient, Then you're going to have money developing, even if it's orange peels, even if it's bits of salt, even if it's, I don't know, the eyeballs of your worst enemy.
It's going to be something that you're going to use in trade.
And that can't be overcome.
So what are you going to do when people start doing that?
Well, these kinds of questions are never answered.
So let's keep it quick.
So there's this bit in the movie where You know, it's, it's vaguely funny, sort of creative, where people start saying, ah, this is Marxism, this is communism, this is socialism, my father died to fight this kind of stuff, and so on.
And they just make a few jokes like, oh, the narrator died and blah blah blah, and then they pretend that it doesn't exist.
Well, that's not an intellectual rebuttal to central planning, to the elimination of money, to the elimination of class, to the elimination of the stock market, of investment.
These are all Marxist ideas.
So if you're not Marxist, tell me how you're different.
Don't just say, well, I mean, it's just silly.
I don't like Marxism.
Well, that's not an answer.
That just tells me you know Marxism is unpopular.
Venus Project Criticisms.
Laborers are exploited.
Technology steals jobs.
Technology does not steal jobs.
You could get full employment in the world tomorrow just by eliminating farm machinery and have everyone go back to growing all the crops by hand.
At the turn of the century, in America, last century, 70-80% of people were involved in farming.
Now it's 2-3%.
You could get back to 70% and just get rid of all of your farm machinery.
Do we really think that that would be a step forward or would we understand that's a massive step backward?
Technology doesn't steal jobs.
Technology creates wealth.
It does shift people.
When technology replaces someone's job, that person has to go and retrain and that's a net negative for them in the short run for sure.
But if it's allowed in the free market, technology creates jobs.
We know that it does that because people invest in it and the technology which succeeds is economically more efficient than either the labor that came before it or the technology which fails.
It's inevitable.
If it succeeds, it's been more efficient some.
Religion is bad.
Money and lending and usury are bad and, you know, most fundamentally human nature is defined through economics and violence and dysfunction arises out of class conflict and as the film talks about income disparity.
You know, that's a testable hypothesis and they seem to be very keen on science, so fantastic!
If you think that it is income disparity that causes problems, then you have the significant problem of explaining why mental health problems such as depression and anxiety, eating disorders and dissociation and so on, why they're so prevalent among the rich.
If people who are wealthy are mentally healthier, then how is it that the wealthiest people in the world, i.e.
the recipients of everybody, like all the recipients of the bailout money and the people who created all of these monstrous, soul-sucking, eyeball-sucking financial instruments that pillage the general public, They were all incredibly wealthy and incredibly well-educated and complete sociopaths.
So money does not breed mental health.
And there are plenty of studies which show that as wealth increases in a country, mental problems increase.
Now they'll say it's because of a lack of equality, but even if you look at a particular class which only mingles with itself, it's mostly equal, most of them are pretty damn miserable.
So it's a bit of a problem.
And again, You know, look at the counter-evidence, present the counter-evidence, and then tell us how it's wrong, but don't just pretend it doesn't exist.
It's not very honest.
And of course the solution is the elimination of the free market, money of any kind, prices, wages, jobs, but with robots as the new proletariat.
Well, this is straight-up Marxism.
Okay, look, I mean, I've got criticisms, but so what?
Who cares, right?
Well, the only reason that it's important is, you know, they're very keen in the movie of saying, well, science is great because you've got competing hypothesis and there's no ego involvement and you keep experimenting with different things to find the best answer and so on.
Fantastic.
Look, if you want to go live in the zeitgeist floating cloud city of the gods and beg for your computerized towel for your morning bowl of porridge, fantastic.
Go for it.
I think it's a fantastic experiment.
I would love to see what happens.
I think let's have that in the world of the future.
Once we get rid of the government, once we get rid of the coercive control and profiting from fiat currency and national debts and all of these other horrible enslaving mechanisms, fantastic.
You know, if you want to tax your supercomputer for your new shoes, great.
If you want to give up money, fantastic.
You don't want a stock exchange in your city, beautiful.
No problem.
According to all the rational laws of economics, it's going to be a complete disaster.
But hey, I'm not a guy to stand between a dreamer and his dreams, or any group of dreamers and their dreams.
So hey, if you in a free society of the future, you don't want to use money, you want to subject your economic life to A personal computer or a massive supercomputer and whoever programs it.
I don't want to.
I mean, I would never do that in a million years.
I'd fight like crazy to avoid that kind of future.
But if you want to do it, fantastic.
I'm not going to use any force to stop you.
If you don't want to use money, no problem.
Go for it.
I really want to see what happens.
I really, really do.
I'd love nothing more than to be proven wrong in this area.
But I do want to use money.
I do want to trade.
I do want to barter.
And I will never use force against those who wish to abandon money.
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