July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:09:02
Moral Hysteria and Environmental Genocide (Speech at the University of Toronto, Liberty Now 2012)
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It's a real, real pleasure.
Thank you everybody so much for coming out.
And, Reverend, thank you so much for putting this together.
I've run a conference or two in my life.
Can we just get a little hand? All right, so I have a new theory.
And I wanted to run it by you, and you can tell me what you think.
Now, you know, we all had our carbs this afternoon.
I know we're all propped up a little bit with coffee, but I'm going to try and keep it lively.
So if you have questions or comments as I go through, I throw myself off all the time, so don't worry about disrupting the train of thought.
So let's try and keep it as a dialogue.
But I'll tell you the theory.
Quite an interesting one. And I'm going to do with reference to three things.
Sorry, I tried to get as much CanCon as I could, but this is due with reference to DDT, FDA, and the Cuyahoga River.
We're going to tie it all together in one lumpy bundle.
So my theory is something like this.
In the Middle Ages, you didn't get a lot of complaints about child labor.
Like, if you read, I did this whole course on medieval literature because I have no sense of economic value.
And in it, we read a whole bunch of stuff about the Middle Ages, as you would expect.
And I don't remember one theologian or political scientist or writer ever talking about how terrible it was that the five-year-old children had to labor in the fields.
Does anyone have a guess as to why it was not?
Again, now, of course, remember how the government saved us all from having child labor.
Because there was no government in the Middle Ages, interestingly enough.
Why do you think they've never talked about child labor?
Yes, sir? Because if you want to provide, you need it every hand.
Yes, that's valid. And sorry, just because I don't know your names, I'm going to refer to you as celebrities.
So I think Robertson-Davies is actually correct in the back there.
It's because there was absolutely no alternative, right?
Everybody had to work. I mean, in the European population of the Middle Ages, Like, 10% of the population in any given year would die of starvation.
You could have, like, plenty here, and literally 10 miles away, people could be starving to death.
No trade. Medieval guilds controlled everything, and it was a terrible system of the serfs of war and salt of the land.
Terrible system overall. So they didn't talk about child labor because it wasn't an issue.
Right? So if somebody now lives to be 100, we say, what a great, great old life he had.
You know, that's good. Now, imagine there's some pill that we can take that makes us live to 300.
Some guy dies at 100, but like, oh man, that guy died, yeah.
Right? When you change the scope, something that was not a problem before, now becomes a problem.
And to make the case, this is a foundational problem of statism, that is exacerbated by statism.
So, child labor, of course, only became an issue in the sort of mid to late 19th century, right?
Dickens and, you know, there was this general sentimentality around not stuffing your six-year-olds up chimneys and so on for reasonable reasons.
But it only became an issue because it was possible for children to not work because of the accumulated wealth that was gathered in Europe in the 19th century.
Ended the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the start of World War I. In 1914, with the exception of some Prussian nonsense, there was no war in Western Europe, which had never occurred before.
And then, brainiacs as they were, they took the entire accumulated wealth of the Industrial Revolution and blew it up in France in the First World War.
Do you know, almost to a dollar, all the wealth that was created in the 19th century was destroyed in the First World War.
It was the most fundamental catastrophe because it laid the stage for everything that came after it.
So when enough wealth had been gathered that it was no longer necessary for children to work, and of course parents generally are quite favorably disposed towards their children and like them not being in chimneys, breathing black smoke.
So when it was possible to take kids out of the factories and out of the chimneys, then suddenly it became an issue because it was possible.
And this, I think, is a very interesting phenomenon.
When you look at poverty, right, after the Second World War, um, no.
Okay, my first tangent, first special tangent.
Do you know, there's this myth, right?
We can all recite this in our sleep, right?
What caused the crash in 1929?
March 2,000. The free market exuberance, right, and irrational greed and all that, you know, caused the crash in 1929, and then the free market was unable to solve.
It somehow was able to solve the crash of 1920, which was actually even worse, but it was not able to solve it, and then the government came in and then tried to rescue everything.
And finally, what ended the Great Depression for the free market and made everything okay again?
The war! The war!
Because we all know that blowing stuff up makes you so rich.
I used to have this fantasy.
I'm not recommending you do it.
I had an economics professor who was talking a lot about, you know, the broken window fallacy.
We all know it. He's like, you know, war is good for the economy.
You've got to rebuild stuff. I just wanted to go.
I didn't, but I wanted to go out and pop him up the key, find his car, and give him a raise like this.
Squee! And he'd come out and say, what are you doing?
I'm donating to your wealth.
Actually, I mean, because in the post-war period, a lot of the fascistic and socialistic and Marxist controls that were put in in the 1930s were done.
They were gone. And, you know, there's this Marshall Plan that's credited with rescuing, because every government program takes success for volunteerism, right?
But they were credited with rescuing Europe at the end of the Second World War.
It's nonsense. The economic recovery was already way underway before any of that money was spent, right?
I thought it was a day late and a dollar short with every government program known to man.
And Germany, of course, had the good luck to have an incredibly free market finance minister who was dedicated to Hayekian and just liberalized everything.
This is why Germany is now paying off Greece, because freedom makes you change when there's a state around, right?
And so, after the Second World War, when all of these status controls were taken away, poverty was, I mean, the ancient dream of mankind.
You look at the Bible, they're like, oh, the poor will always be with us, always underfoot, always hanging on to your leg, begging for money.
At the end of the Second World War, you could see it declining.
And these are even by government statistics.
One percentage point every single year, poverty was being eliminated.
It was incredible. And so suddenly, poverty became a huge problem that needed to be solved by the state, right?
Because the free market was solved.
We were within probably about 20 years of having no involuntary poverty.
You could be a monk or a student or a podcaster, but you were That's in order of descending work.
But we were within, like, 20 years of actually not having poverty for the first time covered in human history.
Statistically, it was going to be done.
And so suddenly, everybody thinks that poverty needs to be eliminated.
And this is where we get the big social programs that come in in the 1960s, right?
LBJ's Great Society, massive income redistribution, socialized medicine in Canada.
You know what bugs me most about the social life medicine thing?
It's that the first generation of social life medicine got such an incredible deal.
They didn't have to pay any taxes because they were all funded through debt and all that.
And they inherited a free market system paid for by the government.
That's the best. Because it takes about a generation for things to get crappy.
Because, you know, you've got a bunch of doctors they're used to caring for their patients and stuff, right?
House calls and all that kind of stuff.
And they said, oh, the government's taken over, how good it does not do it anymore, right?
Remember NASA, they sent a man to the moon?
What did it take them, eight years to do that?
I think from when Kennedy first talked about it in the early 60s to 69.
It's just an incredible technological feat.
Why? Because these guys were all pillaged from the free market, the engineers, right?
And what happened since then?
You know, there's a meme that's floating around the internet, right, which is like, technology in 1980, and they had a cell phone the size of, like, an ottoman, that you actually had to stand outside and point at the satellite and fall in a club you talked.
And they had, like, a computer that went from one of these, you know, monster brick things to something you can sew into your eyeball or something like that.
And then they had a picture of the space shuttle, and then they had a picture of the space shuttle.
Nothing can change, right?
Because once, like, for the first generation, this is why statism is so addictive, because that first generation, their taxes don't go up, because they're all funded through debt, and deficits, and printing money, and so on.
And they inherit all of the expertise and the resource allocation precision of the free market, where prices and ambition and entrepreneurship drove everything.
And it's like watching a movie, and it slowly goes out of focus.
You know, the first half of the movie is great, and it's like, whoa.
And then at the end, you can't see a thing.
Well, that's what happens with this socialized stuff.
This is why it works so well for the first generation, and then later on, it's like, what kind of dunghill was this?
Why did anyone vote this? Well, because for them, I mean, it was super cool.
It was fantastic. Free market, no money.
Woo! But see, in America, too, and I don't know what the name of it is here, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, what is the...
You should know this. Yeah, okay, so they're really interested in industrial accidents because they really want to protect their citizens.
This came in in the 1960s, early 1970s, when they were still drafting people.
Really worried about industrial accidents, we're sending you to Vietnam.
Only in a state of society could that make any sense at all.
We don't want you crushed by machinery, we'd rather have you blown up by landlines.
But of course, industrial accidents were going down hugely.
Before this stuff came in.
And it only became a problem because it was being solved.
Does this make any sense at all?
Good. Okay, three nods.
I'll take this. Yes, sir. I'm sorry, substantiation?
No, I work on the internet.
If you try to substantiate the internet, you go back to the Pony Express.
That's what we have to do next. Sorry, go ahead.
So my point was just like, a lot of these things I've heard, but I can't cite a conference that I've mentioned.
And I often find people just don't think they're like...
Oh, that accidents were declining?
I mean... Or like that traveling...
I'll tell you what, I will create a...
I've got this slide, so I'll create a slideshow, I'll send it to everyone through Redmond after the show.
So I recently had a debate with this guy, Sam Seder.
He's a nice guy in some ways.
An unfortunate voice. He sounds a little bit like the Swedish chef.
Anyway, a nice guy, but he's such a statist, he doesn't even know that there's such a thing as the word statist.
And he brought up this Cuyahoga River.
Did you guys know this story?
The river was on fire, there were songs about it, and then they had to have the EPA because...
So there are three things that you know when you hear about a huge failure like this.
The river was on fire.
Okay, so here's the audience participation.
What's the first thing you know when somebody brings up that example?
I actually brought it up in the debate. When there's collective pollution, let's say, what's the first thing you know?
Government owns the river.
Government owns the river, which means nobody owns the river.
Right? Now, let's say that's one, and what's the second one?
Sorry? I think that's another way of saying what he said.
The free market polluted it.
The free market polluted it?
That's your second guess?
Yeah. Okay. I wouldn't necessarily guess that.
Certainly, if the government owns it, right, then they would, you know, probably would be easier to pollute it.
The second thing that you know is that legal remedies were not committed to operating.
Right? Is that clear? I'll give you some examples.
I do have a fact. I brought it up.
Oh, no, that's my name.
Fact-free from here on in!
Yay! Here's my tearaway pants.
Come on, man. Sorry.
Sorry to Mentally scrub, right?
So, the second thing you know is that the legal remedies are being blocked by the state.
Because, you know, if somebody puts oil on your beach, you sue them for property damage, right?
That's common law as old as ancient Rome.
So you know that the common law is not being allowed to operate.
And I would argue the third thing you know is that the problem is much less bad than it used to be.
Because it's now a problem.
I read this article the other day where they said cancer rates have tripled since 1900, which is great news.
It is. Because cancer only usually hits you when you're old.
Which means that they're saying when you had a lifespan of, what, 45 in 1900, you didn't get cancer as much as a population because you didn't live long enough to get it.
Cancer is a sign of health.
It's weird. Statistically, it's true, right?
I mean, most cancers, if you die at 40, you don't get cancer, you die at 80, you might, right?
So cancer is a problem because we're doing well.
Right? So I did some research to test this theory, right?
I thought, why not try it the first time?
And so I did some research in the Cuyahoga River.
So, it's in Cleveland. Anyone ever been to Cleveland?
No. What?
Why? Baseball?
Okay, so that's your little status patriotism shot at the side.
You're a guilty pleasure. Okay, got it.
Anyone else? Why? I was born in Cincinnati.
Well, okay, so. From Cleveland, I can understand.
I mean, you don't know where you are when the storm drops.
It's just what happens, right? Rock Hall of Fame?
Yeah, alright. I've never been there, so naturally I consider it completely unimportant.
Sorry? I should go, it's very nice.
I should go, it's very nice. Really?
Lots of places to go in the world.
Are you really saying I should put Cleveland right on there?
Amosuvius, Asian, Rome, Tahiti, Bali.
Cleveland? Really? That's where I'm going.
Okay, so just give me their names and I'll go.
Alright. Because if it's a recommendation, I don't want to pay for a hotel.
That's all I'm saying. So in Cleveland, believe it or not, pretty much the river was always on fire.
No, seriously. Since the mid-19th century, fires were constant on the Cuyahoga River.
And, like, bad fires.
So then in 1969, there was a fire, and it got national.
Everybody just went insane.
The rivers are burning. Sorry?
They're walking out. No, no, that's another's latest lie.
And we'll get to that another time. And it was a pretty bad fire, right?
So this debris caught fire under a bridge and apparently flames shot five stories into the air.
Which gave me an idea for the opening of my presentation that Redmond's all like, fire codes, man.
Fascist. Come on, you don't need to write brass for three rows.
Anyway, so we went with confetti cannons.
I'll come later. But, so, there was this constant fire on the Cuyahoga River.
There was one in 1952 that cost like a million and a half dollars worth of property damage and all that, like, that went insane.
Like, we've got to clean this river up. It's crazy.
Now, when Time ran the story in 1969 about the fire on the Cuyahoga River, I know this is going to take a moment to reorient yourself.
They completely misrepresented it.
The fire was out so quickly, it was out within half an hour, so there were no photographs there.
Nobody got there in time, because it was pretty minor.
I mean, it flared up, and they put it out, and all was fine, right?
So they ended up printing a picture of the 1952 fire, which was huge and terrifying, and saying, fire on the Cayahuga, just last week.
Of course, you know, it was the wrong picture and all that kind of stuff.
But everybody kind of went insane, and it's like there's a huge problem to be solved.
And so there you get the EPA. This is credited with, this is what my debate partner in this conversation was talking about, that this was responsible for the EPA. And the Clean Water Act of 1972 and so on.
The Cuyahoga River was much cleaner than it used to be.
The fires were diminishing considerably.
In fact, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, don't you love that name?
I love that name in the newspaper.
That I would give Cleveland credit for because that is a very great name.
So the Cleveland Plain Dealer had a whole article rejoicing the return of fish to the river in like 1960 or something like that, like almost 10 years before this fire.
So it was really, really being cleaned up.
But why was it taking so long?
Why was it so slow? Oh yes, what's the fourth thing you know when there's an environmental catastrophe?
The government is most likely the biggest polluter.
So who runs sewage in Cleveland?
Government, right?
Goes straight in. So the government is the biggest polluter.
The Army Corps of Engineers also would just, I don't know, just open up gangrenous bags of filth over the river on a regular basis and all that.
And so the government was the biggest polluter.
They interfered with the operation of common law in a very easy way.
And so if you were a polluter in Cleveland in the 1960s, you would apply to the state for a permit.
Because for every law, you have to create an exception.
If you can't create an exception, what's the point of passing a law?
You can't sell the law to people, you can sell exemptions to people.
Remember Obamacare went in?
What's the first thing the Democratic Party started doing?
Handing out exemptions and waivers and you don't have to comply.
Thousands of them all strangely clustered around Democratic...
It's a weird coincidence of that.
And so what happened is the state would grant permits to people to pollute.
And the permits were like crazy, like basically if there was one cup watering your oil, you were fine.
And the permits had a little waiver.
The waiver was, if you comply with this permit, you cannot be sued for any public nuisance.
Immunity from law through government waiver.
But it's a free market problem, you see.
So the government grants people the right to pollute, and it grants you immunity from any common law remedy for polluting this river.
And so the idea that the Cuyahoga River was some sort of a justification for an expansion of state power is ridiculous.
The government owned it. The government controlled it.
There was, in fact, a law that went in that said it was illegal to discharge oil into the Cuyahoga River, which, of course, they've also classified as an industrial waste pond rather than a public waterway so that it could escape the feds.
Anyone guess what the fine was for dumping oil into the Cuyahoga River?
Ten bucks? You are a genius.
It is, in fact, $10.
And this is back when $10 meant...
Logical. It was $10.
Now, in the 60s, of course, $10 was like $4,000.
But not a lot for an industrial concern.
So this is an important thing.
I know I'm sort of chasing the horse a little bit here, but I wanted to sort of point out that...
The pollution was getting much, much better.
As Redman mentioned, right, I mean, we start worrying about pollution when we're not worrying about cholera.
You know, when we're not worrying about infant mortality, we start worrying about pollution.
And also we start worrying about pollution when we live long enough for the effects of pollution to make a difference, right?
I mean, if everyone dies at 30 from a toothache, who cares about black lung that kills you when you're 50?
Right? You want to get your teeth fixed or something like that.
So you have to live long enough for the accumulated toxins to be important to you.
So you have to extend longevity before pollution It becomes something you're really that concerned about.
Again, we all want clean air, clean water, but we also want stuff.
So the two can sometimes be a little bit in opposition.
So I think the illustration of the Cuyahoga River is an illustration of how when things get better, suddenly there's considered to be a huge problem.
And I'll give you...
Do you have any questions about that so far?
Can you think of any other examples of where things are getting much better and suddenly they become...
A big problem that justifies state permission.
Anybody, anybody.
All together now.
Okay, sorry, you were saying?
What about bullying?
We don't have the children.
We don't have the answer now.
Yes, we care so much about the children.
We will sell them off to the Chinese for the sake of getting a cup of wine to bribe voters that are here and now, but we're really concerned about the children's well-being.
We'll sell them off with national debts and so on, and we'll put them in these terrible public schools where the 50% dropout rate, even in Canada, And when they learn nothing but propaganda, they get no economic value whatsoever.
We keep them locked in there so they don't compete with older people for jobs that could be done by younger people.
But we're really concerned about bullying.
Well, of course, my first suggestion would be stop forcing them to go into schools, stop making their parents pay for those schools at gunpoint.
And stop having crap teachers.
You know, teachers almost universally, I think with the exception of the guy's wife that we talked about earlier.
They come from like the bottom 20% of all students.
It's like, oh, are you a teacher?
We just carve that bottom 10%.
Ooh, they're going to become teachers, right?
Which is the exact opposite. You want the best people teaching, not the worst.
So, yeah, I mean, if we were really concerned about bullying, then we'd look at all this kind of stuff.
And, of course, you know, as I mentioned before, 80 to 90% of parents hitting their children.
Maybe we could focus on that rather than, I got a bad text message or something.
But, yeah, there is this hysteria, and it's used to, you know, scare the parents and control the...
Internet and all that kind of stuff.
And I would say that the treatment of children, of course, has gotten measurably better in many measures over time.
So, of course, this now is a big problem because things are generally getting better.
Oh, I almost ran out of air. Next, we have some other one.
I think Canada. That may be a bit broader.
Canada is a problem, but it's almost solved.
Terrorism. Terrorism, right.
Terrorism, of course, is...
I don't know.
Let's see. Can I give it...
Well, I mean, you know, the statistics are pretty clear that between 20 and 30 million people across the EU world have died as a result of U.S. imperialism since the end of the Second World War.
That's a lot. That's almost the whole World War II right there.
You know, that's six to eight times the Holocaust.
And yet, you know, it's this crazy stuff that people fly on planes and all that.
There's law enforcement guidelines in the U.S. now that include a terrorist watch list of military debtors and people who support the Constitution.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I don't get that at all.
In fact, yeah, I think that if you find somebody who quotes the Constitution when you pull them over, you take the safety off.
That's what they're approaching. You may know his rights.
Watch out for him. Sorry, car safety?
Car safety. Oh, I love that one.
Seatbelt laws. One of the most dangerous things ever put in place.
Anybody know the story? It's not a tangent.
It's not a tangent. It's an audience question.
Seatbelt laws. Do you know there's an economist who argues that the best way to have traffic safety is to build cars with a giant spike coming right out of the steering wheel?
The argument for that is that you put seatbelts into cars, and what do people do?
Drive faster. Drive faster.
Woohoo! I'm invulnerable!
I'm in a tank! So what they do is they drive faster, and it hasn't reduced mortality among motorists, but who pays the price of people driving faster?
Pedestrians, cyclists, ace-quirrel, who knows?
So, yeah, I mean, it's very bad for all this kind of stuff.
And, of course, what's happened is, because the government has mandated all these mileage things, too, cars have basically become eggshells, right?
So there's a lot more danger of being in a car now.
I mean, I remember driving in cars with kids.
I mean, it really felt like you could take Normandy with these things, you know?
You slam the door and...
They were cool.
But now, you're basically riding around in a soap bubble on wheels that can go 400 miles an hour.
I mean, it's crazy. So yeah, I mean, and of course car safety was getting much better as a result of consumer demand.
And so then it became a big problem that had to be solved by the government.
And then, of course, what happens is when the government steps in to solve a problem that's almost solved as it makes it intractable.
Right? I mean, with poverty, right?
Post-war period up until the 1960s, 10-15% reduction In the real poverty rate, not like relative, like it didn't go down a 10 to 20 percent.
It went down a percentage point in absolute terms.
And then socialized nonsense comes in.
And, you know, everybody, I can't believe people think it's cool.
Or modern, or hip to be left.
You know, they always get this, it's this city TV thing, does anyone, you know, they all get little horn-rimmed glasses, you know, the funky weird shoes, and the flappy shirts, and like, I'm on the left, man, I'm hip.
It's like, dude, do you know in King Lear there's a line that says, ah, the best society, or something like that, that distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough.
You know, that you just go, oh, we've got a bunch of people at a table, and these people have too much food, these people have too little food, one scoop here, and oh, everybody's got enough.
If Shakespeare was writing about it in the 16th century, it's not hip anymore.
That's old school. So, I'd like to, any questions or comments or examples?
Workplace safety. Hey, they deserve that porn too.
It's tough out there in the sticks.
I mean, at least for the sake of the cows.
Let's have to download...
Anybody here from the country?
I'm sorry. That's actually...
Well, okay. Sorry.
Chris Christopherson, I apologize.
No, yeah. So it's almost being solved, right?
Although Canada has got...
I think they were chastised recently the Canadian government for providing third world levels of access.
I mean, it's ridiculously slow. Mike was saying how fast was your internet?
Oh, God. It's like...
5 up and 30 down.
5 megs a second up and 25 megs a second.
30. 30 megs a second download?
Yeah. I mean, you basically have to stand in front of the computer with a catcher's mitt.
It's so fast. And here, I mean, you're struggling to get a third of that.
It's crazy. Okay, so any other questions or comments about another example?
Housing. Yeah, affordable housing.
Affordable housing. Yeah, and it's weird, you know, because the government says that it wants affordable housing.
Do you know that the square footage property tax on an apartment is higher than a house?
Development charges of up to $50,000 because of...
Development charges?
And what does that mean? They charge the developer.
But is it like permits and taxes?
No, this is on top of all the permits.
Oh, on top of all the permits? Yes.
Development charges for $5,000 for a...
A retirement home with just one room, up to $50,000 for a single family member in the region.
And what's it called?
It's called a development charge.
A development charge. You do developing, we'll do the charging.
That sounds about equal.
That sounds about right. They wanted to think it's coming out of the developer's profits, but it's a past few costs.
Oh, yeah, right. Because the developer's just sitting on a map of money.
Absolutely. But also the congregation.
Right, yeah, because people don't know so much about that, right?
I mean, the government has a huge investment or interest in raising the price of housing because that ups the property taxes, right?
And do you know, also, I mentioned this the last Mises event, I mean, I think it's interesting, you know, a lot of issues around U.S. housing, do you know a lot of people, they weren't just stupid and couldn't read, okay, they'd gone to government schools, but they weren't just stupid and couldn't read, like, the fine print, but they actually were getting into very expensive houses not out of greed, But because that's where the good schools were, Right?
So people think you get sort of free public schools, but you have to buy your way, you have to bribe your way into getting to those decent public schools to your kids by buying houses way outside your hospital.
Yes, sir.
I think the funniest thing is when people on the left actually recognize that, we don't see that as a problem.
It's a problem that, you know, the best example would be Elizabeth Warren.
Who actually has to...
Oh, oh.
I know.
She actually said there's a problem with education in the U.S. because people have to buy the long-spersed house, because you know what's in the neighborhood.
You have to think, like, who's subsidizing your mortgage?
And whose role are you in the school?
And, like, you're telling me there's a problem of pre-market causing inequality in the boy.
Yeah, at a pretty personal level, she really gives me the creeps.
She seems like somebody who's, like, super nice up front and then goes home with six forks in her can at night.
It's way too pleasant a demeanor up front for that to be any core-to-core thing.
It's really creepy. Alright, so sorry.
Useful so far? Okay, so here's another example of...
Okay.
What percentage... Let's take a bit of a turn.
What percentage of human diseases are caused by mosquitoes and other airborne mosquitoes?
In a state of nature, like prior to DDT, it was 80%.
80% of illnesses came from this guy.
No, 80% of illnesses came to our patients.
Anyway. Say that again?
80%. Actually, let me read you the direct quote.
It's got a word here I'm not too familiar with.
80% of all infectious diseases affecting humans are carried by insects or other small arthropods.
What the hell is an arthropod?
I could have just said insects, right?
It's the internet. Dumb it down on me.
It said, these scorches, which have killed billions of people, include bubonic plague, yellow fever, typhus, dengue fever, chagas disease, anyone?
Does that make you paint in a very abstract way?
I don't know. No, sorry, let's check out.
African sleeping sickness, elephantiasis, I assume that's...
Elephantitis? Elephantitis.
Try panosomiasis. I don't know what that is, but I feel dirty.
Viral encephalitis.
That's not good, right? Leishmaniasis.
Phalariasis, and most deadly of all, malaria.
Insects also cause or contribute to mass starvation by eating approximately, in an untreated agricultural environment, approximately 40% of your crops are going to be eaten or destroyed by insects.
Right? So, magical stuff, DDT, first synthesized by a grad student in the 19th century, finally made available through the development of its commercial potential in the 1930s.
I mean, I don't think anyone here is old enough to know or recognize what it was like beforehand.
But, I mean, malaria is just an ungodly affliction of mankind.
I mean, in the South of the U.S., at 10% per year, people would be afflicted by malaria.
It's devastating to the economy.
That's why they're just slaves.
Too tired. Go do it.
And with the introduction of DDT, right, you know, you spray just a little bit and six months your house is free of insects.
Two cases per year would show up after they did this.
Of course, in Europe got rid of it and in Africa and in Asia and so on.
It was an unbelievable change that occurred with DDT. I mean, there's nothing that compares to it in terms of its ability to just keep So who was the sworn enemy of DDT? Joni Mitchell.
Sorry? Rachel Carson.
Rachel Carson, right, the silent spring lady.
I won't sing it, but you know that song from, is it Big Yellow Taxi?
Yeah. How does it go?
Yeah, that bit that she's...
Hey, farmer, farmer, put away your DDT now.
Leave me the spots. Oh, give me the spots on the apples, but leave me the birds of the beets.
Because you really want to go for your environmental information to somebody who smokes.
But so, because the myth is out there that says, oh, well, you see, without DDT, there's just a few little spots on your apple, but all the birds will die.
All the birds. Right, so Rachel Carson put forward this book.
She tried to sell it to a magazine and they wouldn't, and so unfortunately she had to go through no fact-checking, because magazines have a legal response to the fact-check, so she got the book published full of wildly inaccurate information, misinformation.
I mean, I haven't read it because I try not to put my face into evil too much.
It leaves, like, wells and blotches and stuff.
But the book is unholy.
I mean, the lies. It talks about, you know, it's a subtle carcinogen that worms its way into your body and causes subtle destruction.
I think she was actually referring to her prose.
But she also said that it thinned out the egg's Of birds and that she had this whole fictional fairy tale of a town with no spring because the birds couldn't sing and all this sort of stuff.
I mean, it was all nonsense.
There's no carcinogenic aspects that have ever been proven.
What they do is they load the dice, right?
I mean, if you feed rats enough of anything, they'll get sick, right?
And so what they did was they, you know, pumped DDT up the asses of rats until the rats exploded and they said, oh my god, it's bad for you.
Which is like saying, I dropped a brick on your mouse And your mouse died, so your house is out to kill you.
Makes no sense at all.
And they also said that if you put DDT in water, it'll destroy the capacity of life to regenerate itself.
It's a cataclysmic world.
It kills photosynthesis.
The algae will die with the algae, the fish, the sharks, us, everything.
The moon explodes and we all learn.
You may remember this from the global warming predictions.
And so they put all of this stuff out there, and of course it was all nonsense.
The guy who actually did...
Actually, let me give you the facts here, because the guy who did the experiment on DDT... So, yeah, he said, the maximum solubility of DDT in seawater is only 1.2 parts per billion.
And he says, but at 500 parts per billion, bad things can happen.
I mean, it's 400 times what could possibly be dissolved.
So in order to get this, he had to not use seawater, but saltwater and alcohol, because you could dissolve more into alcohol, including your liver, if Rebecca gets its way later.
But, um, so, uh, so Carson claimed that DDT was doing all of this stuff, but it's not, none of it was true.
So, um, the government's, uh, banned DDT, right?
Because, you know, whenever there's a moral hysteria, you always know that something good is about to get crushed.
You know, that's, that's always, you know, in the stories, they're always chasing an ogre.
They're not. They're chasing some beautiful dancer, you know, who's helping humanity with fairy dust, and they're just going to put a big giant stegosaurus foot in her head.
Yeah. Yeah, so in Ceylon, DDT had cut malaria cases from millions per year in the 1940s down to 17 cases.
I mean, and malaria is seriously bad stuff.
I mean, obviously it kills, it debilitates, it stays with it around.
In a little, okay, this, I mean, these figures blow my mind, mostly because we don't know the site.
So, in two decades, right, from the sort of 1940s to the 1960s, Guess how many deaths the BBC is estimating by independent studies to prevent?
Tens of millions.
It's like in the hundreds of millions.
500 million.
500 million deaths.
Twelve World War II's.
Right? Eighty-nine holocausts.
I mean, it's half a billion people.
I mean, that's as many people as died by governments in the 20th century.
So there's twice as many now.
And so there was a whole court case about this, and it's Judge Sweeney.
He wrote, he said, the uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife.
DDT is not carcinogenic hazard to man.
DDT is...
Not a mutagenic or tetragenic as a command.
I think that means they don't change into robots.
I'm not a scientist. And around the course...
So they banned it in America.
And why did they ban it in America?
Because malaria is not a problem.
See? As soon as you've solved the problem, there's moral hysteria.
Moral hysteria means they're about to crush something wonderful and the problem has almost been solved.
Moral hysteria about poverty means that we're about to eradicate poverty.
Moral hysteria about child labor means we're about to eradicate child labor.
Moral hysteria about workplace injuries means that workplace injuries are seriously declining and about to be eliminated.
It's like there are so many people who feed off screwing up the human condition that if you take away screw-ups of the human condition, they're out of the market.
Is that guy back?
The filmmaker?
No, no.
Because he handed the bishop on a sidewalk or something like that.
Well, you know, it's pretty stressful.
You know, that cold eye of the media comes on you.
It's not always the most pleasant thing in the world.
But, yeah, so whenever a problem...
And this is really important, right?
Because if we understand that moral hysteria means a problem is about to be solved, that's an indicator.
Because right now, we...
Not we, but most people think that when there's moral hysteria, it's because there's a big problem that really needs our attention.
What it means is that somebody's income is about to go out.
Right? And we'll, any questions about this?
I just want to finish, yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, the interesting thing is they replace DED with much more plastic chemicals that actually, like, up blocks a bird at a time.
That is the first time nothing's ever happened with a government problem.
They make it out of that, so a government program comes up.
For how U.S. wind farms wipe out 400,000 birds a year.
Right. Yeah, a lot of lefties don't mind UDT when they've got lice in their bed, right?
Yeah, the stuff that's resistant to pesticides, right?
Yeah. The birds aren't boaters.
Right, birds aren't boaters. And interestingly enough, when they did a study, right, so the whole decade, from the 40s to the 60s, the bird population in the U.S. increased at the time of Rachel...
See, this is how weird it is.
This is how we live in language, not in reality.
Rachel Carson could write this compelling, you know, obviously a very good, evil writer, wrote this whole book about how bird populations are going to get decimated.
Nobody notices that it's like Alfred Hitchcock movie out there, right?
I mean, it's like birds flying all over the place.
LAUGHTER They must be faking it with mirrors.
It's not going to last.
But it did impact all the same trend for first.
I understand the point.
It's worth it to use DT.
It saves half a billion lives, but it did result in a decline of the penguins also.
Well, and that's the big goal.
So what about the trade-off?
Yeah, okay. So here it says eggshell thinning.
Is that what you mean? Yes. So eggshell thinning is a potential problem.
This is, you know, from a couple of different articles.
If you find different stuff, let me know.
I'll put it out there. But it should not be overstated.
The levels of DDT required for malaria control are much less than those required for crop dusting as practiced in the 1950s.
Furthermore, the problem does not affect every bird species.
Indeed, for some species, there is reason to believe that DDT has an overall beneficial effect by protecting them from the insect-borne diseases that are the primary cause of bird mortality.
In fact, dogs doused with DDT were healthier because the parasites were removed from their innards, and so on.
I would not ban any worse stuff, but it's not...
We're not familiar with arguments.
We don't acknowledge reality.
You know what I mean? No, I agree.
That's what I'm saying. The thinning of the eggshells is not inconsequential.
But if it's just used for, not crop dusting, but just for the malaria control, it's going to have no effect on growth.
That's what the science says.
Because the American...
Let's just see here. I've got a pretty good quote here.
I know. Some of them.
Oh yes, so in 1970, the National Academy of Sciences in the US issued a report, because they were trying to not have it banned, right?
Because they're like, oh my god, this is going to be catastrophic, right?
And this is what they said. I'll just read a short paragraph.
It's really important. To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as the DDT. It has contributed to the great increase in agricultural productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably perhaps the stroke, typhus, and malaria.
Indeed, it is estimated that in more than two decades, the DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable.
Abandonment of this valuable insecticide should be undertaken only at such time and in such places as it is evident that the prospective gain to humanity exceeds the...
Component, the consummate losses.
As of this writing, all available substitutes for DDT are both more expensive for crop year and decidedly, as your point goes, more hazardous.
So there is no magic solution.
There are trade-offs, right? So the question is that how did the U.S. and other countries, which you could ban DDT in the U.S. because malaria was done, right?
So it's like, hey, we're done with it.
You know, like how we get all mad at India and China for having smokestacks.
Did you see the 19th station?
So how did they get everyone else to stop using it?
I mean, so you're in Ceylon, and you're saving a million lives a year with DDT. What do you care for America Banting?
They bribe the governments.
You've got it! What do they have?
Forced and stolen money.
I'm noble. Yes?
They bribe the governments? Is it an international or another product of sexual porn that they have two sides of their life as a U.S. organization?
Is it U.S. policy, U.S. policy, is it enforced around the world?
I'm no international legal expert, but...
I mean, Portugal legalized drugs, the U.S. can't do so much about it.
It's not through that. It is through the foreign aid program.
That's the reason they did not legalize it, they decriminalize it.
Decriminalize it, yeah. No, they basically here to say that it's legal because they don't care about it.
But at least according to this, you could only get the foreign aid if you weren't going to use DDT. Now, of course, any reasonable leader would say, screw the foreign aid, my people's lives are more important.
But since those remain largely fictional, they took the money and people started dying again.
Estimated that since the DDT ban, 100 million more people have died in Africa than otherwise.
A hundred million more people have died that otherwise would have lived.
We don't hear about that.
Yeah, the opportunity costs of all of those people, and I mean, this is one of the reasons Africa remained by, because it's not just, I mean, it's not just, it's all of the pathogens that get carried by these insects and arthropods.
They are all incredibly dangerous, and...
It's just something you don't hear about.
I don't know if it's because they're from a country or a different color or something like that, but it's just, this is invisible.
I guess nobody could fight Joni Mitchell.
She's a superhero. So I guess what you're saying is the Nazis weren't subtle enough and couldn't write blitzy little books.
Yeah. Yeah, no, if you really want to do comic humanity, be a good artist with a lack of knowledge and a weirdly driven emotional pathologies.
I mean, who writes the history of the 19th century industrialism?
It's Charles Dickens, right? I mean, that's what people go to for facts.
I mean, people were in factories, the children were in factories, not in the ground.
But all what people think is this weird thing.
What's my time? Do you notice this weird thing?
When you're reading stories to your daughter, everything is backwards.
Nature is fluffy.
You know, nature is cuddly.
Nature is, you know, like, around the apple, cheating on the bunnies, having to play with the...
Tigers and stuff like that, right?
Sorry? The three little pigs and all this, and you know, the bears are all cute and cuddly and, you know, put out oatmeal because that's what bears eat.
And so, I really think that, you know, when you look at the rationality of environmentalism, which, you know, is different from wanting nice and clean stuff, I think it has a lot to do with just the way kids...
I think if you don't outgrow that kind of stuff...
Like, so my daughter... We're starting to go out into nature rather than just read about it in books and explain things about it.
It's like, Daddy, why do the frogs jump away when we come close?
It's because they're afraid we're going to peck them and eat their eyes out and swallow them whole.
I don't quite put it that way.
But we have this other book where this bear, he wants to hug trees.
That's his thing. He wants to hug trees and then a man comes along and a man wants to cut the tree and kill the tree.
And so the bear goes up and gives a hug to the man.
I'm afraid to turn the next page.
It's like a pop-up with the head flying.
And then he brings his entire scalp off.
And you know the irony, when you get any kind of breaks in your head, you can't, you know, it's like, it's printed on paper!
You have to cut down the paper to...
It's not an e-book.
Anyway, so we get this weird distorted cue, right?
So the people are always not so good, but nature is so kind and gentle and fluffy and so on, and there's this weird thing, and it's all...
I'm trying to get my daughter more realistic, you know, I'm saying this is a fun story, but we believe each other.
I mean, nature's a bitch, and nature's horrible.
You know, nature, talk about pollution.
In the middle ages of pollution, you know?
You didn't have enough to eat you.
I mean, it's horrible, right?
That's pollution. You know, what we got now?
I'll take it. But we have these weird distorted ideas of nature and our relationship to it.
And I think a lot of it just really comes from just people being read all this cute cuddly nonsense when they're kids and somehow growing up with this idea that You know, animals cooperate and they like to play together and, you know, they all go over for tea and, you know, it's just like, no, they're all just hunting and killing.
They're just monsters. They're little sociopaths.
I mean, nature is just one long serial killer documentary.
Alright, so let's just end up with this last example of how when things are getting better, there's moral hysteria and then...
The solutions are blocked, are stopped, and the problems usually become centralized and worse, right?
So poverty is declining, great society programs come in, poverty stabilizes, but in fact it's getting worse.
Because you've got a permanent underclass now, poverty used to be more like this now, right?
And also if you include the national debt, the floor is really badly off, because they're in an unstable situation, right?
When the bottom falls out, they can't pay the bills, got a whole bunch of people unprepared for change who were going to have to adapt pretty quickly.
So, FDA. Sorry, this is the big, you know, non-Canadian example, but we have mosquitoes.
I know that. I worked up north. All right.
According to, this is a lady who's been on my show, Dr.
Mary Ruart, who makes my name look easy, I think.
Okay, so as many as one out of three people who've died from disease in the last 40 years has died unnecessarily, according to her research, because of a law passed by Congress in 1962.
So, does anybody remember the big health scary panicky thing in the early 1960s?
I forget the name of the drug, but it caused the...
The pregnant, right? You guys know about thalidomide, right?
Okay, so, what's the story?
What's the story of thalidomide?
It was a third morning thing.
So, yeah, because we've got morning sickness, so then you would take this drug and unfortunately, of course, some small percentage of babies there would be born with deformed lips and so on.
The number was, I think, about 12,000 babies born in Europe, where this drug was, and I mean, in America and in Canada, it was only, like, you know, the doctor will give you a few samples, they only had samples, so it really wasn't, a couple hundred, I think it was, in the U.S., and probably a much smaller number here in Canada.
A baby to a woman with this.
And of course it's tragic and it's horrible and so on.
The science of how medicines affected a growing fetus was, dare I say, in its infancy back then.
And so it really wasn't done.
It wasn't like this was, you know, they didn't change or cheat, you know, like they do with psychotropic drugs now, right?
You know this thing where the FDA says, you can run as many tests as you want, just submit the two best ones to us.
By that rule, I'm a gambler that never loses.
Because I go gamble a hundred times, twice I win.
I'm infallible, right?
According to the bell curve, you're eventually going to come up with something that says something that's not true.
Also, what they put all these rules in place to vet and triple vet and quadruple vet all of these drugs.
And, you know, the whole challenge of economic thinking is the hidden costs, right?
It's what goes on behind the curtain that's important, right?
So you all know this thing where the government has created a thousand jobs, right?
Everyone's like, ooh, a thousand more jobs.
We're plus a thousand, right? And all those people who get those jobs are really happy.
I have a job. Government did me good, right?
But what's missing? The 10,000 jobs that otherwise would have been created.
And the people who didn't get a job, they can't say, those who passed in government, you stole my job.
Because they don't know. You can't trace that back, right?
And it's the same thing. So people say, well, you see, we're really banning our drugs thoroughly now.
Because, you know, since then there have been no recalls.
But the opportunity costs are captured on.
Right? So, she's done some research, some pretty serious.
You can google her and you can talk to her.
She's very, very happy to talk about this kind of stuff.
So, these amendments to the drug approval process to go from lab to market went from four and a half years to fourteen and a half years.
Why is that so significant?
I mean, other than the extra cost of development.
The people you want to save.
The people you want to save, there's something else too.
There's no such thing as startups anymore.
Yeah, of course, there's no such thing.
There's 100 million dollars to develop the growth.
What else? What are the other costs?
You deter R&D? You deter R&D, yeah.
So for smaller populations of sick people, you know, for cancer, sure, right?
But for people who've got some obscure liver ailment, there's no possible way to class justify it.
It cuts into your patent.
Huge, huge problem.
If it takes you 15 years, on average it could be longer.
You don't know ahead of time. That's the problem.
That could be 20. You've got a 25-year drug patent that's going to take you 20 years after you've patented to get it to market.
That's going to affect your spreadsheet quite a bit, right?
Which is why you get boner pills.
No, seriously, I mean, you know, so parenting is a big issue.
And so you get boner pills, but you don't get stuff which deals more obscure liver ailments.
In fact, this woman, she was working on cures for liver ailments, affected 100,000 people every year.
The guy at the FDA would say, God, give me this stuff.
We've got nothing to offer these people.
But then she went and tried calculating the numbers with the business people, but there's no way that they could make it work.
Sorry, you were saying? The drugs will often be more expensive to recoup the cost.
Yeah, they'll have to be more expensive to recoup the cost.
And also, you would then have to have a big legal department to prosecute the knockoffs and so on and so forth.
So, the amendments, they've tried to calculate how many drugs were prevented from going into market that later proved dangerous in other areas, and they've saved 7,000 lives since 1962.
Now, to those 7,000 people, that's not so insignificant, right?
Now, what about the numbers?
So 7,000 guys, 7,000 up.
What kind of polls are we looking at, do you think, of people who were denied drugs that are legal and safe to use in other countries, but were denied in North America?
4.7 million.
Now, I would argue that for a government program, that's not bad.
No, no, no. There's something on the plus side.
It's 4.7 million minus 7,000.
Usually you don't get the minus 7,000, so this is hugely successful as far as government programs go.
But that's not all of it.
There have also been estimates based upon the amount of R&D that was occurring before this, and the amount of R&D that's not occurring after this, and the amount of R&D that resulted in life-stated medications being available, This is just the calculations of known drugs that were denied to people through the government action.
Anyone want to guess about the R&D loss and its effect upon mortality?
15 million people.
One, five.
One, five. 15 million people.
Again, we're talking about half of World War II.
The problem is, of course, the people, they don't notice, right?
I mean, if you take a drug and your arm falls off, you're like, shit.
I'm glad I have to be done. But if you don't get a medicine because of some legislation that was passed 20 years ago, you don't know that.
There's no alternate universe that you can compare to.
This is why this state is so dangerous.
One of the many reasons why it's so dangerous.
Now, of course, drug safety was vastly improving.
This is how you know. When the moral hysteria hits, it's because the problem is almost solved.
And people are going to step into blanket block whatever solution is coming in because they're dependent upon it.
So when drug safety was improving, the FDA is running out of things that didn't.
So how do you make drugs more dangerous?
Well, you raise the regulatory requirements.
This provokes regulatory capture.
You all know this phrase, right?
So when you start making things more difficult for pharmaceutical companies, pharmaceutical companies will start to run your organization and have it bend to their will.
And then they use it, right?
There's no bigger fan of statism than a large corporation, right?
So they use this then to block other entrants in the market, create a monopoly, and become the revolving door between the regulators and the Companies, right?
So like in the whole financial mess, right?
I mean, the SEC. Did you ever watch Wall Street, you know, that old movie from the 90s?
Was it 80s or 90s? 80s, right?
I also remember there was this one scene where there was this guy from the SEC who was walking up, he was like 350 pounds, he was walking up with some spreadsheet waving around, right?
The really smart guys in the financial industry don't go into the SEC, right?
I mean, it's the bottom 10% again, right?
They're either going to be teachers or regulators.
You know? And can they outsmart the super ingenious math computer brain heads who are out there?
Of course not, right? I mean, and also they have no incentive to, right?
The Bernie Madoff scandal was, what, ten years ahead of time?
They were saying, this is impossible, he can't possibly do this, it's a Ponzi scheme.
it's like, oh, we'll get to that.
But right now, you know, I've got to try and get some more conflict of interest to pay raises.
So, sorry, sorry.
So, yeah, what they've done with the true public SEC, they've now restricted their access to porn.
They've restricted See, I'd like to give free porn to all government regulators.
I'll make it.
It's a geeky subset.
No, I would, because that would give them something to do other than regulating.
I mean, that would be great. You know, just keep your hands busy.
Don't die. Don't interfere with us.
You know, I'll give you a pulp-horn biosphere, if you mean.
Just stay out of my face. I mean, in the U.S., it is here too, right?
I mean, it's really chilling, right?
So the cancer patients, you know, obviously facing the Grim Reaper coming down the escalator, they wanted the right to purchase a drug.
A drug that had great promise was in development, right?
I mean, you know, there's this high lunatic, there are lots of comedians who talk about, you know, they're giving a guy the death penalty injection.
They've given an alcohol swab.
Only in the government. It's a regulation.
No one gets an infection. That's a closed practice.
That's good. But so, like, because the government is saying, well, the drug might be dangerous.
It's like, the cancer is more dangerous for me.
Anyway, so they tried.
They tried to go to the government and say, look, it's a free market exchange.
We want to buy this drug. We'll sign every way that you want.
I'm going to be dead in six months, according to my doctorate.
This thing is going to give me a 30% chance of survival.
It showed reasonable signs of either slowing the progression of their illness or putting their cancer into remission altogether.
Court ruled that these individuals had no constitutional right to purchase a drug on the free market that could possibly save them.
The Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
I mean, statism kills.
I mean, I've given you some numbers, I hope that are pretty horrifying, because we all know the numbers of the wars, right?
There's a guy in Hawaii, a professor in Hawaii who runs a website tracking deaths by statism called democide, usually democracy, right?
And he calculates the...
Famines, the concentration camps, the force marches.
He doesn't even include wars, and it's 260 million over the 20th century, throwing wars, even half billion.
Another half billion for the EDT. I mean, soon we're starting to talk about some serious illness.
Right? So, I think it's really important to understand that the numbers that we're talking about are, they stagger the imagination.
What is it? Stalin, I think, said.
It's always good to put Stalin as a libertarian.
He said that, you know, a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, right?
But we're talking about hundreds of millions of lives.
I mean, all people, all like you and I, all facing the same fear of death, the same desire, thirst for life.
And this is all winged out.
And what's so frustrating, to me at least, is when you look at the numbers.
This stuff is being solved by freedom, mutualism, trade, entrepreneurship, our delight in human engineering and win-win negotiations.
And whenever we're about to solve a goddamn problem, people step in and screw up the solution.
It's so, it's like the method systems, you know, okay, we wrote about this old thing, guys trying to roll the rock out the hill, and every time he gets to the top, it comes back down again.
It's like we keep trying to solve these foundational problems within human society.
Poverty, disease, opportunity, education.
You know what the literacy rate was in America, in Massachusetts, before government schools?
90%. Yeah, 96-97%.
Because there were still some people running braves, they didn't know how to write, but everyone else, right?
And if you look at the books of the 19th century in America, try to make your way through Moby Dick without a shot of caffeine to the eyeball, that stuff.
It's a big book. It's a tough book.
Thomas Paine's books were incredible.
I mean, that stuff is complicated in the sense.
We don't ask you how to beat this stuff up.
I mean, people sort of fade out on their hunch of comics these days.
Seriously. The American literacy rate has plummeted.
I mean, even if you count government literacy standards, you can look at the internet to see what kind of tests they're giving people in grade 6.
A hundred years ago.
I mean, it's crazy how much they do.
And this is when they've been learning Latin and Klingon and Elvish.
It was the internet. I'm not sure how good the sources are, but it seems incredible to me.
And so it's like every time, oh look, we've solved the problem of literacy.
Let's get government schools in.
Oh, we're just about to solve the problem of poverty.
Let's get a poverty program in.
Oh, we've solved the problem of peace.
We've had a hundred years of peace in Western Europe for the first time in human history.
Largest continental area without war ever in human history.
Government solved that, right?
World War I. Yes? So, everyone, go ahead and get some something.
Here's a fun question, and I thought I had an example in some of the latest Let's Regulate the Internet Out of Distance efforts.
But are there really good examples of problems we've almost solved?
That the government didn't interfere, but then did get some that we can point to, to the Council that sort of shows it.
And I thought we had it. We had largely voluntary regulation by means of, hey, here's a good protocol.
If you want to use it, you can too.
Everybody gets it. It's exactly like that.
There was no government Whatever.
In terms of enforcing that standard.
And then now you start to have laws in place to make sure there are holes in it, to make sure encryption is not sufficiently in place.
So I thought we had an example and maybe we didn't.
But if it's important for us to know about, the government will screw it up.
If you look at the rating system on eBay, people say, how could you have a society without a government?
It's like eBay has 350,000 people making their job.
It's basically the biggest single employer in the free market in the world.
And there's no document.
There's no court system.
Nobody's going to adjudicate over 50 bucks for the government court.
Or Visa is an incredible dispute resolution organization.
I was talking to a guy who was speaking in Vegas.
Because, you know, it's a tough job.
I was speaking in Vegas, and a lawyer was talking about how he went to South America, and he, you know, they said, oh, it's, you know, half price, and then they said, oh, it was two minutes past five, and they tried the full price for some big meal he went to.
And so, what's he going to do?
Get back to the States and call the Bolivian cops and say, listen, you know, I went to a restaurant, and nothing's going to happen, right?
But anyway, he took on visas. Visa dealt with the restaurant and ended up refunding him his money.
Done. One phone call.
You ever try to get justice from the government with one phone call?
LAUGHTER Years and years and years, right?
So there's tons of examples of how these things are resolved without coercion, without compulsion.
I mean, they really go on and on forever.
But yeah, something like the development of the internet is something that there's no email standard.
Or how about cell phone providers carrying each other's data?
The government doesn't order them how to do that or whether to do that.
They do that because it's profitable. So there's lots of examples of this kind of spontaneous guilt.
I was talking to someone just before we came in about how, you know, people say anarchy, it means no rules.
And that's true, except for one letter.
It just means no rulers. It's one R. Take that out.
You get rules. It doesn't mean no rules.
It means no rulers. Because when you have rulers, you have no rules.
You have no rules. You have no rules.
There are no rules in a state of society.
There's books out there that say, basically, you commit three felonies a day, whether you know it or not.
There are no rules. They can get you for anything they want at any time.
It's chaos, right? Hayen Brand said this, too, right?
The dictatorship is not with brutal rules.
It's with no rules. That's the problem.
You don't know what the system is.
So, a common law, of course, another example of spontaneously developed legal systems and so on.
There's lots of examples of that, but if it's important and it's about to solve a significant human problem, The government will step in by folic acid.
Who here has been pregnant?
Pregnant, of course.
But, you know, it was illegal to advertise that folic acid was good for fetuses.
Because a violent manufacturer is not going to pay $100 billion.
They sell some vitamins, which the moment they do, since they have a patent of the falling acid, everyone else can do it, too.
So, when vitamin companies try to save pregnant women, this will reduce, what is it, spina bifida?
Spina bifida. Yeah, spina bifida, I think.
This will reduce, like, all in the names, right?
Tens of thousands of children are born with this terrible disease because the government would not let vitamin manufacturers tell pregnant women about something so easy, so cheap, and so essential to the health of their child.
So, you get problems that are about to be solved.
There's a moral hysteria that comes up.
And I don't know, it's hard to track where it comes from, right?
But there's this moral hysteria that comes up.
Oh my god, the Cayuga River's on fire!
It's like, but yes, but less than it used to be.
Look at the red spots here!
Because occasionally we can see the shore.
Um... But as soon as the problem...
So, I just really want to point out that as soon as you see moral hysteria in society, I can almost guarantee you, please email, post at freedomairadio.com.
I use counter examples, whatever, we'll try and just need a shoe on them in the theory or change the theory.
But when you see moral hysteria, look for a problem that's about to be solved.
And look for who's bringing the hysteria up.
Because, remember...
When problems are solved, government logically should diminish.
So how interested is in government solving problems?
Is your local security force, alarm force, whatever, are they hugely dedicated to eliminating crime?
Of course not. You don't see a lot of ads for books on TV. Because nobody can read them anymore.
40% of college grads will never read another book in their life.
It's true. That's true.
It's a standard. And of course, you know, it's an emerald, right?
It's amazing. Sorry, somebody had a question?
Oh, I was going to say, I think we solved the acid rain, the result document was absolutely true.
Yeah, and there was some things in the stage where we...
Yeah, man!
Sorry, cheesy joke.
It's better with that rain go away group.
Nice gas rain.
Yeah. But yeah, you'll see, so, I mean, the constant keeping us in a state of anxiety and fear is why you can't actually solve these problems, right?
If we run out of more people, huge sections of the government have to close in.
Forming war. Well, but that's what the poverty programs do, right?
They are, in fact, poverty programs.
Yes. Right.
Right.
Right.
Right. Right. Yeah, yeah.
I remember there was a brief moment of respite between the end of the Cold War and the war on terrorism.
Remember that? Three weeks or so, I was like, I like to slam it.
So I was chatting with a woman once on a plane, and I think she was like 16 or whatever.
We were talking about, you know, when I was growing up or whatever, because, you know, it's good to be that age.
And I was thinking that we were really scared of going to be a war or whatever, and she was like, yeah, you know.