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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:18
Statism is Dead: Part 1 | True News
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Good afternoon, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
This is True News number 11, and I hope it's not too disappointing to see my head and this presentation after those fancy graphics.
Thank you so much to the listener who provided those.
It is November the 18th, 2008, and just wanted to mention for those people who have expressed some interest in the recent UK newspaper The Guardian article on Free Domain Radio, there's more information at fdrurl.com forward slash Guardian, the article itself and some responses there's more information at fdrurl.com forward slash Guardian, the article itself and some So this is Statism is Dead.
And this is going to be a three-part series.
We're going to start with definitions and theory, as always, and then we will look at examples.
So, of course, we start with definitions.
Statism is a concentration of economic controls and planning in the hands of a highly centralized government, often extending to government control of industry.
All the more relevant after the last month or two.
This is from MiriamWebster.com So, the argument for statism, for the government, is that governments are both necessary and virtuous.
So the necessary argument, this falls into arguments from fear, frankly, and arguments from morality.
So, of course, the fear argument is, well, without the government, there would be anarchy with Somalia, people with Mohawks riding heavily armed motorcycles with machine guns, and chaos, civil war, endless bloodshed, dogs living with cats, and so on. So that's...
The first argument, which would be similar, or pretty much identical to the argument that if the government did not force you to marry someone and choose who you were going to be married to, there would just be anarchy.
And it's like, well, yeah, but that's what we want, right?
We want to have that kind of free choice.
Without the government, there would be choice.
There would be voluntarism.
But anarchy, of course, is the pejorative term that is used.
So let's look at the argument for morality, which basically runs that the good That governments do in society could never be achieved without the state.
Which, of course, fundamentally assumes two things.
One, that governments actually do good in society rather than evil.
And the second is that even if they did do this good, that it could never be achieved without the government.
And without the welfare state, the poor would starve in the streets and so on.
And we've all heard these arguments a million times if you've ever debated voluntarism.
So, let's have a look more clearly at this.
Now, we're going to start with synonyms, definitions.
And this is very important.
False ideologies always manipulate language and cannot actually survive the bald truth, dare I say, about the actual content of what is being discussed.
So, if I say, Jim, this man's heart has stopped!
I can put a synonym in, and it doesn't change the sentence.
Makes it longer, right? The chambered muscular organ in this man's chest that pumps blood received from the veins into the arteries has stopped!
The sky is light blue.
The sky is azure. The synonyms, they don't fundamentally change the meaning of the sentence, right?
So this is very important when it comes to debating statism, government, and so on.
There's an old saying, the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.
And I think that's very important.
We'll talk about that here. The government is a group of individuals within a geographical area who retain the monopolistic moral and legal right to initiate Force.
Just take a pause on that.
This is what a government actually is.
Because if you think that a government is some sort of platonic manifestation of the thrilling, idealistic words of Barack Obama, then you don't know what a government is.
A government is a group of individuals within a geographical area who retain the monopolistic moral and legal right to initiate force.
They can tax you, you can't tax each other, you sure as hell can't tax them back.
They can make marijuana illegal and throw you in a rape room for years for possessing it or selling it, but you can't do the same in reverse.
They have the right and it is the most fundamental thing about government.
It's really the only thing that differentiated government from any other social agency.
It's this right to initiate To initiate the use of force.
Everybody has the right to self-defense.
You, Barack Obama, so this is a universal right.
But governments of those people within a geographical area have the right to initiate force.
So, what we really should be talking about is not The government, but a violent monopoly.
Because if you... That is what a government is.
It's a violent monopoly.
It's a monopoly of people with the right, moral and legal, to initiate the use of force.
And overwhelming force as well.
Aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, the army, and so on.
So, in the same way I can say the sky is light blue, the sky is azure, or, you know, pick your synonym.
We can talk about a violent monopoly rather than the government.
It doesn't change the meaning.
But, of course, nobody wants to talk about it like that.
Who's a statist? For obvious reasons.
So, let's look at when we stop using the cover word government for the real thing, violent monopoly, what happens?
So, statists will say, the argument from fear is, well, without the government there would be anarchy, and say, well, we need a violent monopoly because people like to use violence to achieve their ends.
I mean, that makes no sense whatsoever.
We need a violent monopoly because people like to use violence to achieve their ends.
Well, those people who like to use violence to achieve their ends will simply become part of that violent monopoly and use the government.
Violence to achieve their ends does not solve the problem.
We need a violent monopoly to punish criminals, because without consequences, without punishment, people become more violent.
If you don't have a government to restrain criminals, criminals can act with impunity.
People like to use violence, and if they can do so with impunity, the violence will escalate.
It doesn't solve the problem.
What about those within the violent monopoly?
Who face almost no consequences for their violent actions.
What's going to happen to George Bush after initiating an illegal war causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people?
Going to get a library named after him and a tidy pension.
Speaking tours, book deals.
Same thing with Clinton.
So, not hundreds of thousands, but what went on in the Balkans.
So, again, once you say, well, we need a government to punish criminals, so we need a violent monopoly And the people in that violent monopoly have almost no consequences for their actions.
They can run up trillions of dollars in debt and are never personally liable.
They can declare war never personally liable.
They never go to jail. See, it doesn't work, right?
When you call it by its proper name, status and collapses.
We need overwhelming violence to reduce violence.
So I have a headache and the solution is decapitation.
It's really not very medically viable.
Now, as far as the argument for morality goes, what do we have?
We need to use violence to achieve virtue, right?
Because remember we said the argument for morality is the good that governments do can't be achieved any other way.
So we're assuming that they do good, right?
So if they don't do good, the argument falls apart.
So virtue can be achieved through the initiation of force.
If I go up and threaten someone, I can produce virtue.
Because the government is the threat of jail for non-payment of taxes, non-compliance of edicts.
It's a little harder to sustain, but the initiation of violence can achieve virtue than we need the government to do good.
Oh, this one, right. Well, you see, we need a government because we need to initiate violence against people to defend them against the initiation of violence.
Oh, you make my brain hurt!
We need to initiate violence against citizens to defend them against the initiation of violence.
Just fighting off an aneurysm.
How about this one? The social contract.
We need to enforce, because people say we need a government to enforce contracts and go after debtors and stuff.
We need to enforce voluntary and peaceful contracts through an involuntary and violent social contract.
Which is the supposed legitimization of the government through this involuntary, you're born into it, social contract.
You never choose it, you never sign on a dotted line, you have no choice, and the violence is initiated against you.
So again, once you call something by its proper name, government is a monopoly on the initiation of force.
People won't be voluntarily charitable, they won't help the poor, but they will vote for the violent theft and transfer of their wealth.
I mean, it's like a Kafkaesque dream sequence, these arguments, right?
People don't want to help the poor, but they will vote for people who'll put a gun to their head and force them to help the poor.
Why would you want that extra layer?
If they're going to vote for people to help the poor, they'll help the poor.
I mean, the existence of the welfare state and the delusions about how it helps the poor is certain proof of the fact that people want to help the poor, and will.
And the problem fundamentally comes down to the problem of universality.
Which is whatever judgments you apply to the people, to people as a whole, to society, to citizenry as a whole, you also apply to the government.
You're saying people are X. People like to use violence to achieve their ends.
Well, you're saying the same thing about those in the government who are composed of, strangely enough, people.
To sort of graphic this up, we have the Kumbaya Blue Man group of people holding hands, which is society as a whole.
Within society as a whole, there is a small subset...
It is perceived, and I believe it's true, there's a small subset of people who want to use violence to achieve their ends.
Because if there was no one who wanted to use violence to achieve their ends, we wouldn't need a government.
We'd live in some hippy-dippy utopia land, right?
Which... People say, well, anarchy is so idealistic, people have to be perfect.
It's not true. The imperfections of human beings is the fundamental axiom of anarchy.
Statism believes that people can use near-infinite violence and remain uncorrupted.
Anarchism recognizes that violence corrupts, power corrupts, and therefore we can't have a state.
So anyway, we go back to this small group of people who want to use violence within society.
So the argument goes then, well, we need to...
Because of this, we need to take another subset of group of people, right?
Which is the people on the left of this group.
Because there's a bunch of criminals, we need to create a bunch of people and move them over and give them a big honking luga, right?
We need to give them a big honking gun so that we can protect ourselves against the small subset of people who are criminals and want to use violence, counterfeiters, whatever, right?
But, since there are a small number of people within society who like to use violence to achieve their ends, how can we guarantee that those we shift over and put behind the gun of the state aren't the same people?
You can't. Who will watch the watchers?
It's the fundamental problem that no intellectual system, no social system, no philosophical system, except voluntarism, except anarchy, actually solves.
Which is the recognition that you can't watch the watchers.
You can't guarantee that the criminals won't be in the government.
Because you're saying a subset of people Like to use violence to achieve their ends.
You create a huge institution of violence called the state.
Where are those people going to go?
Straight there. So what happens is, well, because we have a small subset of people who do want to use violence, and we've chosen to create a fairly large subset of people with the legal right to use violence, what happens is government grows, government grows, government grows, government grows.
Because people like to use violence to achieve their ends, right?
That's why we have a government, that's why the government will always grow.
And, of course, as the government grows, so does the criminal population, because the government makes things illegal, which creates organized crime.
The government creates tariffs, which creates smugglers.
The government destroys families through the welfare state, renders children uneducated through the public school system, and so the number of criminals grows.
And so what happens is, in order to solve the minor headache of a small number of people using violence, We have created a monopoly of the use of force which creates massive increases in government power over us and massive increases in the criminal element.
This, I submit, is not exactly a solution.
Moving on. So, let's look at the three largest, I mean outside of war, the three largest U.S. status initiatives of the 20th century.
Well, the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, which enabled the income tax and the printing of fiat currency, it enabled the U.S. entry into World War I. You could not have had that without fiat currency.
You can't have a war without fiat currency.
It's true of the Civil War, First World War, Second World War, Korean War, Vietnam War, Iraq War, First and Second.
All wars require fiat currency.
Can't have it. The moment you have a Federal Reserve, the moment you have a centralized bank, the moment you have a monopoly on wealth creation through fiat currency, you have escalations in violence.
It's inevitable. Because violence costs a lot of money.
Unless you can shield that price from the voters immediately, you'll get a rebellion.
So, the U.S. entry into World War I, as I've talked about before, enabled communism, the Treaty of Versailles, World War II, and some guy was saying, well, but Germany wouldn't have sued for peace in 1917, but Germany did sue for peace in 1917, so, got to go back to the facts, right?
And of course, if you want to read this great book by Murray Rothbard on the Great Depression, the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 led directly to the hyper-escalation of the stock market in the 1920s, the subsequent crash, the extension of that into a Great Depression from 19...
1930 through 1938, 1939 may have been responsible for the voting in of Hitler and, of course, the Second World War.
So, you know, statism leads to statism.
Government controls lead to more control.
So, the Great Depression, which was the result of a statist initiative called the Central Bank, the Great Depression led to...
The New Deal. The New Deal, a chicken in every pot.
1933, we get massively increased banking controls, emergency relief programs, work relief programs, agricultural programs, industrial reform, the NRA, a federal welfare state, as well as the end of the gold standard, right?
Controls and violence lead to more controls and violence, as we had the exploding blue man group a few slides back.
There was a second wave of the New Deal, labor union support, WPA relief program, the Social Security Act programs to aid farmers, including tenant farmers and migrant workers.
The Supreme Court struck some of these down as unconstitutional, but of course they've almost all returned.
So this is a huge increase, the second huge increase in government power in U.S. history.
This is when statism was at its height, and people said, we will solve these problems using this monopoly of violence.
Round three. Again, we're excluding wars, Korea, Vietnam, the overthrow of the Iraqi government, Iranian government in the 50s.
So, great society, civil rights.
And there were two kinds of civil rights legislation in the 60s under Johnson.
The first, of course, was the dismantling of restrictive laws, the Jim Crow laws and so on, which is really actually a reduction of power.
And, of course, the second, since you can never really reduce government power, Is the banning of discriminatory activities, which many have argued have not served minority communities very well.
The war on poverty.
It was supposed to eliminate poverty, and Thomas Sowell and other economists have argued very strongly and convincingly, as has Charles Murray in Losing Ground.
That the war on poverty did more to destroy minority and poor families than any other single factor, which continues to exacerbate poverty.
The war on poverty, of course, the welfare state creates a prominent underclass of people and does not eliminate poverty.
Poverty was being reduced by the free market until welfare state went in, and then it has remained pretty much stable.
Federal aid for public education causes a collapse in learning standards, which is directly traceable to this kind of stuff.
In the 1960s, when the federal government got heavily involved in public education, educational standards almost immediately began to decline.
Couldn't fire teachers anymore.
Medicare and Medicaid, the two greatest unfunded liabilities in the current government system.
National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, which creates some questionable art, I suppose you could say.
Much more transportation, consumer, quote, protection, environmentalism, and so on.
So this was the third major round where statism, the use of this violent monopoly, was considered to be essential to solve major problems within society.
But what's being talked about now?
What is statism offering now?
See, I'm making the case that statism is dead.
It's intellectually bankrupt. And we're not getting anything new.
More socialized medicine, because of course the US is more than 50 cents on the dollar, is spent through the government on medicine.
There's hundreds of thousands of regulations run by the government for medicine, which raises the price of everything enormously.
So we have socialized medicine, but there's more socialized medicine under Obama.
Oh, more regulations.
We've got higher taxes or shifted around taxes.
We've got the usual suspects of bribes and favors to special interest groups, the banks, the unions, the teachers, right?
Why is GM being bailed out?
Because unions did a lot of work for Barack Obama, right?
Or for other politicians. So it's payback, right?
It's got nothing to do with virtue or ethics or any kind of idealism.
But there's no radical new programs being offered.
It's simply an extension of what came before, and this is when you start to really see the intellectual bankruptcy of statism, because there's nothing new that's being offered.
I mean, we're not talking about a government takeover of the software industry or anything like that, right?
That's not really happening. So what do I mean by intellectual bankruptcy?
What are the signs? Well, intellectual bankruptcy of an idea occurs when past failures are no longer analyzed Or understood, right?
So the failure of the war on drugs, the failure of the war on poverty, the failure of the war on illiteracy, the failure of foreign policy, the failure of imperialism, the failure of higher educational standards, the failure of education as a whole, right?
The failure of all of these programs is no longer analyzed or just push on, right?
Just keep moving, right? Like you hit something in the road and you hit the gas, right?
You don't look back. More of the same becomes the automatic response.
It's no longer a process.
It's no longer thought. It's no longer debatable.
If we have a problem with health care, more government control, more government spending, more government management, more violence, more regulation, more initiation of force is the automatic response.
People can't think in any other terms.
That's when it's intellectually bankrupt because it's become a knee-jerk reaction to any problem.
Dissent questions and real criticisms are almost completely absent from the debate.
Nobody talks about the violence of Social Security, of Medicare, of Medicaid, of imperialism, of the war on drugs, the war on poverty.
You simply can't get any core or fundamental criticism of what is going on.
Late communism is the same way.
Speeches become more and more abstract.
You start getting all these windbaggy phrases, you know, hope and yes we can and drill baby drill and change and, you know, building a bridge to the 21st century, whatever the hell that means.
Charisma is substituted for intellectual rigor.
But fundamentally, intellectual bankruptcy occurs when the core morality of what is occurring is no longer believable.
It's no longer believable.
And what's happening now is everyone's just trying to grab the last slices from the exploding empire.
Cake, to mention my metaphors.
They're just trying to grab whatever they can from the decaying body.
It's got nothing to do with any poor morality.
And we'll get into more of that in the next presentation.
So this idea that government equals virtue, there's simply too much counter-evidence for it, particularly in the U.S. these days.
Corruption, violence, genocide.
So... Principled opposition no longer exists in the general or mainstream debate over statism.
Core criticisms become incomprehensible.
That's when intellectual bankruptcy is really set in.
So, pointing out the violence of statism, people can't process it anymore.
There's just an elephant in the room.
They simply can't. And that's when something is intellectually dead, when it has to ignore criticism rather than respond to it.
You have to pretend to be incomprehensible as to how and why the state is composed of a monopoly of force.
That's when it becomes dead, right?
Because it now avoids criticism rather than responds to it.
Intellectual bankruptcy occurs when a manipulation of language becomes the norm, right?
When you have to talk about the government and government programs rather than the initiation of the use of force to achieve, quote, virtue within society.
So you have to avoid stuff, you have to manipulate language.
There's other things that occur as well.
There's haste, right? Well, we have to decide now.
We have to make it happen now. This, of course, occurs with all the disaster scenarios that Naomi Klein talks about in Disaster Capitalism, or the Shock Doctrine, sorry, that's the name of the book, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
Disaster is equal haste.
Anyone who brings up principled objections to the core ethics of the solution is derided.
There's ad hominem attacks, appeals to patriotism, everything to avoid the core intellectual decay at the center of this.
So there's chance, not arguments, or anything like that.
A highly volatile emotional defensiveness, so when you point out the violence of statism, people get offended, they get upset, they get tense, they get hostile, they get emotionally screwed up.
Then again, that's because there's no validity that is perceived or believed at the core of the statism.
And of course, there is an excess of psychologizing the opposition.
So if you bring up the violence, then you don't care about the poor, you're too academic, you're too naive, you're too this, you're too that.
But what about the actual argument?
Well, that generally is never addressed.
So I'm saying, statism is dead.
But that doesn't mean that we don't have to press the issue, because nothing is more dangerous, I believe, than a dying ideology.
So when Christianity was dying in the 19th century, as it was perceived at the time, it produced Marxism, right?
People go from one sinking ship to another, which takes a lot of people down with it.
When republics die, they produce imperialism, which is, of course, what is going on with the United States.
At the moment, the death of statism very often will produce socialism or fascism, because statism is not an absolutist doctrine, but it tends to spread into an absolutist doctrine when it fails.
The solution, I believe, is to attack the core illogic and to call statism by its proper name a monopoly of violence.
If we can do that, then we can really, although it's emotionally volatile, and I understand very difficult, I've been doing it for 25 years, I know that it's very hard, but it's the only solution, is to attack the core illogic and immorality of using force to achieve good in the world.
It never works, it never will work, we just have to keep pointing that out.
So, I just want to keep this short.
Next up, we're going to talk about moral examples of the bankruptcy of statism, starting with the non-prosecution of George W. Bush for murder, which would be perfectly legal and, in fact, required under U.S. law.
So, thank you so much for having a look and a listen.
I really do appreciate it.
Drop by the website to pick up all the free goodies on the planet, and I really appreciate your attention.
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