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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:49
The government is not just inefficient...
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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph! My God!
Spring has sprung up here in Canada.
Oh, look. Oh, listen. This we Canadians call the sound of outdoors.
Ooh, ooh, just listen. It's going to make me weep with the joy of not being inside forever and ever and ever.
So I hope you're doing well.
I'm completely thrilled.
Yesterday was like 5 degrees.
Actually, the day before. Now, it's almost 20 degrees.
It's almost 20 degrees.
This country is... Mad.
But this madness we can take.
This is the upside of the annual manic depression that is the Canadian climate.
So, joy abounds, badminton rackets are popped, and people can disencase themselves from the snowsuits and hunched shoulders of winter.
So, we're going to have a little bit of ambient background noise, car horns, screams, and so on.
Now, I... I broke out of the tight curriculum we have going here, the deeply plotted cavalcade of knowledge sequence that is free domain radio.
This morning I let loose something which was not supposed to be until later, but what the hell, let's assume that there was a good reason for that somewhere in the universe, and we shall continue with it.
This morning I said that a government will intervene in an improving situation and make it worse.
A government will intervene in an improving situation and make it worse.
Because government is evil?
Well, sure, government is evil by nature.
Because the people in government are evil by nature?
No. Just because these are the circumstances.
Nobody wants to run themselves out of business.
Nobody wants to develop a specialty, a career, a training, this, that, the other, and then end up throwing themselves out of a job and having to retrain.
That's a huge financial hit, as we've talked about many moons ago, retraining yourself to some other different kind of job.
If suddenly nobody ever became sick anymore, all the doctors would have to retrain themselves to something else, which would be a huge loss of the investment that they had in their doctoring skills and a huge loss in terms of the money they'd have to outlay for the new skills and so on.
So nobody really, really, really wants to do that at all.
And so this is the sort of fundamental nature of government.
The inertia of people like unions and governments, and when I say unions, I mean those united with the government.
Freedom of association is fine, but forced association is a violation of freedom of association, which is the case with forced unions.
But unions and governments and other...
People don't want to give up their investments, the investments that they have, right?
The horse and buggy manufacturers didn't want to give up all of their investments in horses and buggies when the car came along, naturally.
That's inevitable.
And the only thing which opposes that, really, is competition and freedom of association, right?
So if people prefer cars to horses and buggies, then naturally, They will stop buying horses and buggies and those resources that were formerly being consumed by the production of horses and buggies will be released and some portion of those will go towards cars and the added efficiency will release other resources to other uses and so on.
There's a huge inertia in people.
People don't want to work themselves out of a job.
We're getting a little windy now.
I think we shall close the windows.
But the principle is still there.
People don't want to work themselves out of a job.
And the other thing which we'll get to probably, I think, early next week is that everybody is a genius.
Everybody is a genius.
I think that the huge and fundamental problem, if I could sort of, one of the top five problems that I would erase in human life, Would be that people don't think that everyone else is a genius.
And they don't think that themselves, that they are geniuses.
But I do believe that everyone is brilliant.
I really do. And the amount of processing that occurs in a nanosecond within our minds, as we talked about this morning, With regards to if you don't believe that everybody knows the state is violence, no problemo, just do the fine and dandy thing of telling them that the government is violence and see what their reaction is, right? In that Malcolm Gladwell blink moment, bang!
They get it instantaneously and they reject it and feel threatened by it and feel that it is a negative thing immediately, like right away, boom, got it.
So that amount of processing, that bandwidth, which is available to every human being, I don't care how smart you are, I don't care how dumb you are, Or how smart or how dumb you think you are.
Everybody has this unbelievable super cray times a billion processor sitting between their ears, but we just tend not to use it for a variety of reasons we'll talk about next week.
But if we assume that everybody is a genius, Then we can understand how it is that governments move to intervene in improving social situations in order to make them worse again.
Because government is designed to solve...
The cover story for government is that there are problems which cannot be solved through voluntarism.
That's the cover story for government.
You can call them public goods or whatever, but there are problems which cannot be solved except through a monopoly of force.
And that the alternative to that monopoly of force, which creates obedience due to overwhelming force, and that creates obedience.
And obedience is stable.
Obedience is not random.
And the alternative to the obedience of the general population that is inflicted through a monopoly of overwhelming force on the part of the government.
I mean, nobody seriously thinks of shooting back at cops unless they want to get killed, right?
I mean, or fighting back in terms of U.S. foreign policy in any sort of direct way.
You just get, you know, you get the shit bombed out of you from the B-52s slightly sub-orbit.
So... Nobody really thinks of challenging the overwhelming force of the government, unless they're feeling particularly suicidal.
They tend to work in oblique ways, like, say, starting 9-11 and then watching the U.S. Treasury drain itself in the endless war on terror that results.
So this is the cover story, that the monopoly of overwhelming force contains, controls, and organizes and regiments, obedience, and the alternative to that is random and perpetual and unpredictable violence.
So predictable, stable, controlled violence which hides itself through breeding conformity.
The government violence is hidden because it is so overwhelming.
The violence is hidden.
If I beat the living shit out of my wife for five years every day, I never have to hit her again.
Assuming I have some, I don't know, my kid.
Let's say I beat the living tar out of my kid every day for 10 years.
I don't have to do anything to him anymore.
I could probably only do it for 10 days, and it would be fine.
All I'd have to do is lift my finger to scratch my head, and if that was the signal for obedience, my kid would obey.
And there would be no need for violence, but it's only because I've used and already have inflicted and am imposing the threat of overwhelming force on my kid that the obedience occurs.
You know, it's just like they've taken a goddamn plow to these public roads and they've just plowed the hell of them up.
They're like bumpy and serrated and it's actually quite a nice buzz on my crotch.
Alright. Don't have any smokes.
To continue. So, all the stuff that will be edited out in the future versions of these podcasts when I'm dead and gone.
Bye-bye text and poor and low and ribald jokes.
So, we...
We're all sort of geniuses.
Government will continually move to intervene in social problems because the government's claim to fame and claim to the legitimacy of its power is to say that overwhelming force breeds predictable conformity.
And in the absence of overwhelming force you get unpredictable violence.
And that really is taken from the view that spare the rod, spoil the child, right?
That you must beat the hell out of your child, because if you don't, your child will grow up stubborn and willful and violent and dangerous and will be a burden on society.
So you must break the will of the child, as we talked about in the humiliation podcast.
And through that process, then the child will become a productive and positive citizen.
But you must drive out the devil in order to save the soul of the child.
And this really is a justification for government.
So, government is fundamentally threatened by only one thing, other than sort of financial self-destruction.
I mean on a sort of moral, a sort of practical sense.
The morality is easy, but in a practical sense, governments are really only threatened by one thing, and that is the success of voluntarism, of freedom, of pacifism, of Simultaneous and, I'm trying to think of the right word here, spontaneous order.
That's what I'm looking for. Government fundamentally is only threatened by the principles of spontaneous order.
In other words, everybody has this feeling that if I don't beat my cows, my cows will take over my house.
They will kill me or gore me or whatever.
I must keep beating my cows or terrible things will occur.
And then if the knowledge sort of comes, it's like, you know, if you don't beat your cows, they're actually very peaceful.
And they're going to live longer, they're healthier, their milk tastes better, blah, blah, blah.
Then that sort of threatens my desire to beat my cows, if it's just a cover story, right?
So, with government, the great danger is the spontaneous order that arises in the free market, the spontaneous order that arises through voluntarism and through pacifism.
That people can solve their own problems without having an infinity of state guns pointed at their necks.
is fundamentally the greatest threat to the state.
The greater that society succeeds in the realm of spontaneous order, which of course is the only realm that society can ever succeed in.
You can't succeed in a realm that is awash with blood and violence and humiliation and degradation and thievery and bullying and jails.
I mean all the apparatus of state control.
There's no success whatsoever in that arena.
But State control is enormously and fundamentally threatened by spontaneous order, by the success that spontaneous order represents.
Because if we look at the natural progress of human society, we can see that there should be less and less and less and less and less and less requirement for a state.
Less and less and less requirement for a state.
I'll just throw out a couple of examples you could think of about a bazillion of them.
Well, with nuclear weapons, the invasion of a country becomes nearly unthinkable.
It practically has become unthinkable.
So, surely, with about 20 nuclear weapons, we should have no requirement for a military.
I mean, other than those 20.
So, the need for massive standing armies and massive state apparatus to defend themselves against foreign invaders or whatever, this should, right?
So, the progressive technology renders the need for a military pretty much non-existent.
Has said military become non-existent?
No. Wherever there's a great disparity of power, that doesn't occur.
The military keeps growing.
As the wealth of society grows, then as charity grows, which it always does, when taxes decline, charity increases, and as people's disposable wealth increases, their charitable impulses also increase, then the need for poverty programs, for state aid to the poor, should diminish proportionally.
As people get smarter and as educational opportunities and educational technology increases, then the state should need less and therefore as the price of education goes down, distance learning and internet learning and so on, as the price of education goes down, Then, surely, the government should not need to be as involved in education, right?
So if education costs $20,000 per student, then you could say, just on a purely practical economic level, well, there's an argument to be made for the state.
It's so expensive, blah, blah, blah.
But as the price of education and the availability of education goes down considerably, If you've got the noise-canceling headphones, you can listen to lectures while working on the line in a factory.
The need for education should decline, but of course it doesn't.
As people have the capacity to gather more and more wealth to themselves over the course of their life, then the government should not need to be involved in old-age pensions as much anymore.
All of these sorts of things, right?
As spontaneous order and the wealth and benevolence and productivity that grows out of freedom and volunteerism, the free market and so on, as that grows, then government should need to be less and less involved in these sorts of things.
However, you find, of course, that the exact opposite is true.
You find that the exact opposite is true.
When education was relatively expensive in the 19th century, relative to people's income and the number of children that they had, there was no state aid.
State education didn't start until the mid to late 19th century in most of the Western world.
At a time when people had far more children and their income was far lower, and there was no distance learning or iPod learning or anything, the government was not at all involved in education.
And now that people have far more money, far fewer children, and education is far cheaper relative to those factors and just independently relative to the technology that's available, government is everywhere in education.
Government spends trillions of dollars on education and controls every aspect of the curriculum.
It's the exact opposite of the argument that would make sense, again, not from a moral standpoint, just from a, well, it's expensive, so the government should help.
The less it costs and the easier it is to attain, the more the government controls it and the more the government spends on it.
Because if the real price of an education these days were left to the free market, it would be very evident, very quickly, that you do not need a Department of Public Education.
I'm going to use the original acronym because it makes the most sense.
You wouldn't. You wouldn't.
Any more than you need a department of potato chips to subsidize potato chips for individuals who want them.
It's just so cheap that you wouldn't need to.
So, this is what governments do.
They don't help in the way that they describe their own help.
We'll just take this at face value.
I know we want to help because it's so expensive.
They don't help when it is expensive.
They raise the price when it gets cheaper.
And prevent the price from ever lowering again.
And so what people do is they say, well, you know, education, my God, education takes like a decade and a half just to get through high school almost.
And governments are spending like $10,000 or $12,000 per student per year.
So if you have three kids, that's almost $40,000 per year of after-tax income that you would have to spend over the course of a decade and a half.
Well, that's, you know, $600,000.
There's no conceivable way that a family could afford to send their children to school.
We must have a government, right?
And this is what people say.
And of course, it's all the purest form of nonsense.
It's all the purest and most corrupt form of nonsense.
People were sending their children, 90% of children, 95% of children went to school prior to government getting involved.
When income was far lower, children were far more numerous and education was relatively expensive to all those factors.
So there was no, I mean, even when things were far worse, far more children were getting far better educated and they didn't sit there in high school picking their noses and going mad from boredom for 14 straight goddamn years.
What a complete torture that was.
Let's look at our good friends the blacks.
There were no social programs to help the blacks out of slavery.
That all was a private charity, right?
All the teachers from New England flooded down to teach them.
People set up businesses to hire the blacks.
That was all charity, right?
So let's say that you believe this and will take it at face value.
Well, the time that government programs would have been the most necessary would have been right after the slaves.
We're released. But of course, slavery itself was a government program, right?
Just as war is a government program.
And slavery was a government program insofar as slavery is completely economically inefficient unless you can Apply the costs or shift the costs of capturing and returning and punishing the slaves who flee onto the taxpayers.
If you've got to pay for it yourself, it's no good, right?
They'll just wander off.
How are you going to find them and how are you going to get them to come back and how are you going to harass them and how are you going to stop them from crossing borders?
Well, you can't. You don't know which way they're going.
It's ridiculously expensive. It never would work.
Slavery is the ultimate government program, just as war is the ultimate government program would never be economically viable in a free market situation.
So, when the blacks were released from slavery, well, of course, their mortality actually increased.
And, of course, their stability...
But the stability of their lives had changed quite a bit, but the families all stayed together, they began doing the long battle for more of an economic equality and so on.
So, when the government could actually have had a legitimate reason for aiding the blacks In certain forms of argument, when it was most necessary, there was nothing.
There was nothing. Now, let's fast forward, I don't know, 80 or 90 years, through all the Jim Crow stuff and so on, let's get to the 1960s.
Well, what was happening?
Black families were mostly intact, right?
It was not substantially different from white families in that way.
And of course, family staying intact is pretty key to economic success.
Black income had been rising considerably over the past 30 or 40 years and was heading within a couple of decades to be on par with white income.
The blacks who were sort of native to the north were not particularly discriminated against and there wasn't the kind of, oh my god, blacks have moved into the neighborhood, let's all move out.
That didn't really happen until what Thomas Sowell calls the cracker culture-derived blacks moved out from the south.
You can listen to white rednecks Sorry, Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
It's actually a very interesting book that Thomas Sowell has written about the history of the blacks in the United States.
He has some very good arguments about why slavery was maintained for so long.
Not moral, but practical from a government standpoint.
But blacks were doing great.
They were doing great.
And that became a problem.
That became a problem.
When you see that government programs are not helping people, even the few that were around for the blacks, and they're doing great, then what happens?
As more volunteerism and more wealth and more of the spontaneous order of the free market and voluntary associations begin to spread its benevolence and positivity throughout the land, The people in government begin to feel just a little uneasy, just a little creepy.
Because if this continues, what do we need them for?
What do we need them for?
And this is not true to people in government.
It's not fundamental. It's not anything to do with civil servants.
It's just natural.
It's just natural.
For instance, if you run a crime-fighting organization, some crime-fighting organization, and you know that if you protect, I don't know, an island, you protect an island from criminals, and you've got a monopoly, let's say whatever, but let's say it's free market on everything else, but you've got a monopoly on this.
Well, There's a certain amount of crime that the people will accept and still consider you to be a relatively good crime fighter.
Like if I get a call, I don't fire my doctor, so to speak.
There's a certain amount of illness that I'm going to handle and not call my doctor a bad doctor.
Do I want to switch the lane?
I don't know.
Forget it. Ah, the lanes always.
The free market also takes, you know, if the lane is open, everybody moves into it, then this lane opens up.
You can spend your whole life switching lanes, right?
So, let me just reboot again.
I lose, you know, I'm on this net and I drop a thread and it's like, damn it, it's down here somewhere.
Oh yeah, so you're on this island, and there's a certain amount of crime that people will accept.
And let's say that that rate of crime is, you know, 10 murders and rapes a year.
Let me just make something up, right?
Now, of course, you could spend 50 times the amount and reduce that to five rapes and murders a year, but that would not be something that people would be willing to pay for, right?
Just the same way that if the speed limit everywhere was 10 kilometers an hour and nobody made a car that went faster than 10 kilometers an hour, then nobody would die in a car accident, right?
Body shops would largely go out of business.
So, we accept a certain amount of deaths on the roads in order to have the convenience of going at decent speed.
But, in the same way, we will accept a certain amount of crime because at some point we just spend more time and resources fighting crime, even though we could bring it down a little bit.
It becomes sort of asymptotic, like you pile on more and more efforts, like approaching the speed of light.
You put more and more energy into propulsion and it just gets converted into matter, right?
You swell. So, If you're the company, then you are going to want to not spend too much money to reduce crime below the level that people find it acceptable.
Now, let's say that you have found some magical method of eliminating crime completely.
What is your motive and incentive, given that you have a monopoly, what is your motive and incentive for getting rid of that?
Well, there really isn't any.
And yes, you're going to have some sort of ethical hum-and-a-hum-and-a where you're going to say, well, you know, it'd be nicer if, but you wouldn't really, A, you wouldn't develop it, and if it came your way, you'd be very skeptical and wouldn't investigate it.
And this really is, you know, government's, in a nutshell, They don't want to develop and establish solutions that put them out of business.
Let's say that you're a company that makes antidepressants, and some philosopher in your organization comes up with a podcast, say, that eliminates depression far more effectively than antidepressants.
And the podcast can't be sold because it's on the net.
He's been whatever. It's a virus.
It's replicating. It's growing or whatever.
Let's take a truly theoretical situation.
Are you going to want to develop that?
Are you going to want to get that out there?
Well, no. All that's going to do is destroy the investment that you've put into developing your medication.
You're going to be skeptical about it.
You're going to say, well, it has its place and blah, blah, blah, but you're not going to run clinical trials and prove the philosophy's efficacy in reducing depression.
Why would you spending money to cost you business?
I mean, nobody does that, right?
The only... The way that that happens is in a state of competition where somebody else who doesn't have your investment costs and your fixed capital costs can undersell you.
Only in an insurance situation, with the DROs where there's competition, will somebody sell the magical formula that eliminates rape and murder.
The security company won't do it.
Won't do it. Because it would put themselves out of business.
But Somebody else, without all the startup and capital costs, will both develop it because they can then undercut.
So the guy charges $500 a year for protection on this island, which is 10 rapes and 10 murders a year.
And then you come along and you say, you know what?
For $2,000, you'll get no rapes and no murders.
Ever. That's the deal.
That's what they'll come up with.
Or something like that. But there's no way, or at least it's highly unlikely, that the company will come up with something which destroys its own investment in its own...
I think we can get a little bit of air, can we?
Actually, you know what, I'm going to go from the top, and that way...
I get...
Ah, there we go.
It's important to get the beams from the mothership.
And of course this is what governments do.
Imagine if you were a teacher in the public school system and you did sort of private tests which showed that you could educate to a grade 12 level in three years.
In three years. What is it?
There's an old Dilbert that says, you know, I found some way of copying all this media free and instantaneously and easily.
I wonder what the telecommunications companies would give me for this.
And Dogbert says, you know, probably a horse's head in your bed.
Because what would happen? You've got all these unions, right?
And the unions make money based on the number of teachers who are employed who are forced to give them pay.
They're forced to pay the unions.
If you say, well, look, I've just shrunk the requirements by 75% for the number of teachers that you have, what's the union going to do?
Well, they're going to do everything they can to harass and intimidate you into going away.
Right? Because if the union gets behind this plan to reduce the number of workers, the number of teachers by 75%, What's going to happen to the union?
The union is going to shrink by 75% or more.
Other than me, who wants to take their income down by 75% or more?
That's my particular kick.
Going Free Domain Radio full-time.
They just don't want to do it.
Why would they? It would make no sense economically.
The only way that this happens is that the parents, and this is all part of the spontaneous organization of the free market, parents would say, really?
I can get the same education for a quarter the price?
Well, it's like the same car for a quarter the price.
Well, guess what happens to the expensive car?
Bye-bye. This kind of optimization only occurs with competition.
Spontaneous order and continuous efficiency only occurs in a free market.
The government doesn't do that. But more fundamentally, people say that the government is inefficient.
The government is not inefficient.
The government is anti-efficiency.
The government is anti-efficiency.
Because efficiency erodes the requirements for governments.
If I came up with a plan, and if it was a free market in education, I promise you I could, To provide education in a quarter, the same quality of education in a quarter of the time that it takes right now?
I would appeal to parents, right?
I would go and appeal to parents and say, same education, one quarter of the time.
So not only are you paying 25% of the cost that you're paying right now, but think of all of the, if I could get you out into the marketplace by the age of 12, or at least your education would be finished and you could do whatever you wanted, By the age of 12, instead of the age of 18, or by the age of 10,
instead of the age of 18, or maybe I could give you a graduate study, or take you all the way to the age of 22 in terms of your undergrad degree, what's currently an undergrad degree, and get you there by the age of 14, 10 years before you might otherwise do it, if we throw a master's in.
I could do it, no question.
There's people who've done it in the past as certainly as possible.
Well, not only have I saved you an enormous amount of time and money, but now you have 10 years where you can work instead of paying for school and not working, or at least only working part-time.
It's worth millions over the course of your life if you invest some of the money that you make through earning.
It's worth millions.
So how much could I charge for it?
Well, a hell of a lot. More than just the reduction in the price, because I've also opened up 10 years of earnings for you, which is, you know, at least three, four, five hundred thousand dollars.
And invest it over the course of your life?
It's millions. It allows you to retire 20 years earlier.
20 years earlier.
What's that worth to you? Retiring at 45?
Not bad. See, I managed to pull it off so far at 40, but we'll see.
It's up to you with the donations, my friends.
Keep me alive! Keep me in vittles!
But governments absolutely, completely and totally don't want that.
If governments reduce the price of something, Then the need for government diminishes.
The government has to portray voluntarism as chaos and brutality.
When, of course, that's pure projection.
Government is chaos and brutality.
Just look at the government schools. Look at the depression.
Look at the violence. Look at the suicidality.
Look at the bullying. Oh, we say bullying in schools is so bad.
Oh, my God, we've got to not bully in schools.
Right. Right.
Because the real problem in schools is that there are bullies, not that the schools are founded on violence and people are just acting out all of the unconscious bases of the institution.
We've got some speed, which means we've got some wind, which means we've got some closing.
So governments are anti-efficiency.
Governments sniff volunteerism that is working and throw a program in to kill it.
Throw a program in To kill it.
The problem in the 1860s and 1870s and 1880s with education is that it was becoming really cheap and really effective and too many people were getting educated and that's why public school came in.
And of course it was because there were lots of immigrants and people wanted to impose Catholic or Protestant Christian culture on everyone who came in and blah blah blah blah.
But fundamentally it was because the price of the commodity was going down so low that it began to threaten the very foundation of the need for a state.
So the state moves in to block progress, to destroy and undercut voluntarism, to destroy and undercut the perceived value of voluntarism, the real value and the perceived value of voluntarism.
And that's why somebody posted on the board today and they said, oh, I was arguing with this woman.
She says, well, you know, women only earn 71 cents on the dollar for everything that men earn, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, that's pure nonsense.
It's pure nonsense. That's like saying, you know, well, 20-year-olds only earn half of what 50-year-olds do.
What a jib! It's like, well, the difference is experience, right?
Accumulated intellectual and knowledge capital.
Women prefer working part-time.
They take time off to have children.
And women are more along the center of the bell curve, and the men who are, like, the women are less widely distributed along the bell curve as men do, as men are, which means the men who are on the lower end of the bell curve aren't in the job market, usually in prison or whatever, right?
So, I mean, that's all.
College-educated women who've been in the workforce for the same amount of time as college-educated men earn, like, within 2% or 3% of what men earn.
But this is, of course, what governments want you to think, that That freedom results in tyranny.
But tyranny results in freedom.
This is the war is peace, freedom is slavery nonsense that George Orwell got so beautifully.
So when the environment was getting better, when the environment was getting cleaned up, when nuclear power had been developed and when cleaner burning cars were being developed, when the environment was being cleaned up, what happened?
Government stepped in. When blacks were doing great, what happened?
Ooh, Civil Rights Act! When everything becomes affordable, the government steps in, takes it away, and makes it expensive again, so the government can continue to justify its existence.
And this is a continual battle. It's continual, continual, continual.
And I just think that's an important thing to understand.
It's not going to be an easy thing to communicate to someone, and I hope I haven't done too bad a job of it here, but it is a very important thing to understand that the government is the enemy of progress.
The government kills any form of progress and then reverses it to justify its own, right?
Because it's violence versus freedom.
It's tyranny versus voluntarism.
And any time voluntarism begins to get the upper hand, BAM! Government comes down and gets rid of it completely.
Or gets rid of it as totally.
And then discredits it until the end of time.
So I hope this has been helpful for you.
Thank you so, so much for listening.
I will talk to you this weekend on the Sunday Call-In Show.
And have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful evening.
I will talk to you soon. All the best!
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