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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:39
UFOs, Global Warming, Taxation and Facebook!
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You're listening to Republic Broadcasting Network, because you can handle the truth.
Hello, hello.
I've got to get me one of those cool radio echo machines, machines, machines, machines, so that I can sound slightly less, a little bit more godlike and slightly less other side of the pond, vaguely gay.
So, hi, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio, standing in for our good friend Corbett from the Corbett Report.
And welcome.
We are going to have some interesting conversations tonight, and I would like to chat with you.
Call in, if you'd like, at 1-800-313-9443.
And if you have questions or comments or issues, I generally do philosophy.
I branch out a little bit into economics and some other things as I amateur thrash my way through these various topics, but I would like to hear from you.
So, I'm going to tell you what I'd like to talk about tonight, and I'm willing to take your lead.
If there's other things that you want to chat about.
But I've been thinking all weekend about UFOs.
And it's not kooky.
I'm telling you, it's really, really a useful thing.
And the question which we're going to ponder tonight, the question we're going to roll around like tobacco in the cheek of an 80-year-old man in Arkansas is, what happened?
What happened to the UFO movement?
In this examination, we can very quickly and I think powerfully find out what happens to a wide variety of movements.
Saving the poor, saving the sick, saving finance, stabilizing the economy.
All of these things, and global warming, we'll touch on that as well.
All of these things are tied into why the UFO movement has collapsed.
It's gone.
It's vanished.
Welcome to my show!
I was born in 1966.
And when I was a kid in the 70s is when I sort of really started to notice something beyond my own diapers.
The UFO movement was pretty big.
I mean, it was a pretty hippy-dippy time.
There were the after effects of the radical mysticism of the 60s still rolling around.
The empty noise chamber called Culture and we had mood rings and tarot card readings and there was a lot of freaky guys with long beards at my mom's dinner table.
And one of the things that was really going down was UFOs with a little light touch of the Loch Ness Monster from time to time but frankly UFOs was a big deal.
And abductions and Klaatu calling occupants of interplanetary craft, it really was quite big in the culture.
And it still was going on in the 80s, but it really, really began to vanish.
And, you know, it just suddenly struck me this weekend that it was gone.
And I haven't thought about UFOs in years and years, but it just suddenly struck me that it was gone.
Now, why has the UFO movement vanished?
Well, if you've got aliens in gigantic, well-lit spaceships...
That often look quite a bit like store-bought frisbees at a medium distance.
If you've got those guys floating around the universe, zipping down to Earth, bungeeing in, yo-yoing in to scare Arkansas farmers from time to time, how would you best set up a system to catch them?
Well, what you do, of course, is you would give almost every known human being in the planet A camera and a video recorder that they would have on them at almost all times.
We call these cell phones.
And you could say portable cameras, but just about everyone has a cell phone and just about every cell phone has video and at least photo recording capacity.
And billions of people around the world have cell phones.
And with the advent of the cell phone has come the end of UFOology.
Why?
Because you now have people all over the world who are capable of recording and figuring out whether these things are actually here or not.
If UFOs could be captured fairly regularly, bone grainy footage by people who accidentally happen to have 8mm cameras running at the night sky for whatever reason, then surely we should be seeing them all over the place if people have these cell phones and can take high definition video at a moment's notice.
This kind of stuff is verification.
And as soon as verification begins to hit a mystical discipline, that mystical discipline tends to evaporate.
And we're going to talk about a wide variety of mystical disciplines tonight.
And I would like to get your feedback at 1-800-313-9443.
And we'll talk about how verification blows the ghost of mysticism out through the walls of reason.
Talking to you late at night on the Corbett Report.
We will be back very shortly.
Hello, hello, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux for the Corbet Report, which you can find at Corbet2TsReport.com.
So, we're talking about how verification blows away mysticism.
Now, one of the greatest mystical elements in human society are the statements of governments.
The statements of governments are always akin to UFOs exist, are circling us, and have a rabid intergalactic interest in the innards of our bowels, for whatever reason.
And a couple of them have been floating around that have had some significant impact on my thinking.
I'll share them with you.
I don't think I'm alone in this.
And one of the ones that is beginning to crumble under the weight of evidence is global warming.
Now, I have a hate on for global warming that probably exceeds my capacity to rationally wrangle.
So please be aware that confirmation bias is always something I have to fight with global warming.
And I actually wasn't that much of a foe of it originally.
I thought it was very interesting and like all people, I'd like to live in a world currently not on fire or encased in four tons of ice per square inch.
So I was kind of interested in global warming.
I'm actually going to be having an expert on doing the Peter Schiff show tomorrow at 10 o'clock Eastern.
He's going to come on around 10.30, a fellow from Australia who's very interesting thoughts about this.
I'm going to read a little bit from his article.
But then I remember, and you probably remember this as well, that this sort of famous hockey stick graph that first sold global warming turned out to be erroneous.
The algorithms in the computer code were wrong.
And no matter, even if you fed random data in, whatever data you fed in, you got a hockey stick graph.
I remember being floored by that because so much talk had gone about global warming.
This was post-Kyoto.
This was the Rio Earth Summit.
I mean, it was just, you know, kiss the planet, make it better had been going on for year after year after year.
And hundreds of millions of dollars at this point had been spent on global warming research and all of this sort of stuff.
And then to find out that the hockey stick graph which had sold it originally was completely false and In any rational universe, in other words, in a non-statist universe, this would have taken everything to a grinding, screeching, sparky stop.
And everyone would have said, whoa, what have we done?
What have we done? What a catastrophe, what a mess, what a disaster.
Why didn't anyone check this stuff to begin with?
But this stuff goes into the memory hole.
And that's a big problem.
It goes right into the memory hole.
And everything just vanishes and goes away all the time in these kinds of things.
It's really a big, big problem.
So we're just talking about global warming and how this hockey stick graph turned out to be completely false and nothing came to a screeching halt.
It just was swept under the carpet.
It went into the memory hole and everything vanished and everything just kept marching on the way it had always been.
And that, I remember, chilled me.
This is over a decade ago now.
That chilled me to the bone.
And that's when I really, really began to think, my goodness, what is going on here?
Now, there were a number of things that seemed to make global warming make sense at the time.
So originally, carbon dioxide, yes, it's a greenhouse gas.
It traps heat and all that.
That's been proved in the laboratory over a century ago.
I'm down with that. I'm A-OK with that science.
Number two, this is sort of in the 80s.
Global warming had been occurring for a century and concentrations of atmospheric carbon had also been rising for a century.
And of course, this is particularly in the post-war period, heavy industrialization.
Now, of course, as we all know, correlation is not causation, but it kind of looks like it fit.
And then people drilled down deep into the bowels of the glaciers and pulled out lots of ice core data.
And they could measure temperature and atmospheric carbon going back hundreds of thousands of years through periods of global warming and global cooling and so on.
And to the data points that could then be delineated in this ice cores, it kind of looked like atmospheric carbon and temperature moved together.
So when you got more carbon in the atmosphere, the temperature rose.
And then when you lessened, so on.
Ah, smoking gun, that's it.
And nobody else could explain why global warming might be occurring.
So all of this stuff, it seemed to kind of make sense.
Ah, this is the period of the UFO theory.
But what happened, of course, is that the data got better and the data got to accumulate and, most importantly, the models put forward by the climate scientists began to be measured against the actual data.
Because remember, all of this climate stuff No, really black, kind of black, black, black, black, the opposite of white.
It's all the same thing.
And what happened was that from 1940 to 1975, the Earth cooled while the atmospheric carbon increased.
Oops! That is not, of course, the way that it is supposed to go.
And also, they got better and better at figuring out how to read the ice core data.
And by 2004, again, this is eight years ago, Scientists found out that in the past warming events, the temperature increases generally started about 800 years before the rises in atmospheric carbon.
Not so much of a smoking gun.
Or if it is a smoking gun, it is a smoking gun that has been dropped from the head of the suicided global warming theory.
And that doesn't work, right?
You have to have the carbon first and then the temperature rising.
If the carbon emissions are causing the temperature rising, then you have to have it first.
If the temperature increases generally start about 800 years before the rise in atmospheric carbon history, then what's happening is the temperature is increasing and generally the carbon is being released from the oceans into the air.
So that didn't work as well.
And now, of course, there is not a proven but a credible alternative to – an alternative suspect to global warming.
And so in October 2006, Henrik Svesmark showed experimentally that cosmic rays cause cloud formation.
Fascinating. I love the world of science.
I really do. I think it's just amazing.
So clouds, of course, have a net cooling effect.
But for the last three decades, there have been fewer clouds than normal because the Sun's magnetic field, which shields us from cosmic rays, has been stronger than usual.
So the Earth has heated up.
Now, nobody knows for sure.
It's still too early to tell, but it's a good theory.
Nobody knows for sure what fraction of global warming is being caused by cosmic rays.
So, as of now, well, I shouldn't say.
This is an article I'm sort of gleaning from February, so...
Two months ago, three months ago.
As of now, there is no observational evidence that global warming is caused by carbon emissions.
I'll repeat that.
There is now no observable evidence that global warming is caused by carbon emissions.
Twenty years of intense investigation, literally billions of dollars spent on this stuff, they would have found something.
Something! Something!
And there is a lot of evidence that goes counter to the predictions.
And one of the things that's really important to remember is that there's these multipliers.
They're called feedbacks, but there are multipliers in global warming calculations.
So about a third of the increase in temperature is considered to be global warming, but then there's supposed to be all these feedback loops, right?
So because the carbon dioxide is going into the atmosphere, there's some more heat, a little bit more heat.
And then That causes water to evaporate into the sky, which causes more heating because water is one of the greatest global warming agents.
It's a heat trapper. And so two to three times of the effect is from these multipliers and none of these multipliers have panned out at all.
And so it really is very, very dubious at the moment.
I had Bjorn Lomborg on my show, Freedom Aid Radio, a while back.
I mean, he's down with the fact that global warming is going up and the global temperatures are increasing.
He's very much for let's spend money on other things because it is very important to remember that even if Kyoto was fulfilled to the latter, and of course it's not.
Global warming is way, sorry, the carbon dioxide levels that are being released by industrialization is way higher than anyone expected because nobody really expected, at least in 1980, that India and China were going to have these massive growths in their economic activity and all this amazing, you know, horrifying coal productions and so on, coal plants and so on. I think, was it in dozens of coal plants opening every month or two in China?
I mean, it's nuts. So if Kyoto had been fulfilled to the latter, which it hasn't even come close to, it's quite the opposite, then the amount of future global warming that would have been saved would amount to about 0.07 degrees Celsius by the year 2050 and 0.15 degrees Celsius by 2100.
I mean, that's really quite astounding.
The amount of warming delayed for just a few years at such an incredibly high cost.
This is actually too small a variation for scientists to distinguish from the noise of just Variable temperatures that go on every year.
So I think that's really, really important to understand.
You hear all the time, of course, that global warming is a consensus.
That if you are skeptical of global warming or climate change, then you are a denier.
You are a medievalist.
You are a flat earther.
You believe that the moon is made of space cheese.
And this is actually not particularly true.
We live in this mob-like world of words, not actual facts or truths.
So, we'll come right back as to where the consensus breaks down right after the break.
Thank you for your patience. We will talk to you in a moment.
All right, Stefan Molyneux for the Corbett Report.
We are talking about global warming.
I'm going to wrap this up and we're going to talk to a caller in just a sec, but I really want to sort of pull together this theme we're talking about, that these wild claims are made.
UFOs that exist circling through the skies, eclipsing the sun, the moon, and the stars.
And yet, when the verification begins to set in, when everybody's got a cell phone and we should be getting thousands of pictures a day of these flying craft, We're good to go.
The great ghastly pillar of the state.
And we have a caller who wants to come in and talk about media lies, which again to me is like saying climate change or black is black.
Media lies is just a synonym, except for this media, of course.
Mike, you want to throw him on the waves?
Hello? Hello.
How are you doing, my friend? Good, Steph.
Good to talk to you. I just have a question.
I'm wondering about your thoughts on these things because as you're mentioning, you know, technology is sort of making these things like UFOs kind of go away.
But at the same time, I notice all these other things come up.
You know, there's still lots of proof proving global warming isn't as big as a threat and things like UFOs aren't as real and ghosts aren't real.
So why do people still cling to these beliefs when faced with almost overwhelming evidence that they don't exist?
You know, there's all these UFO and ghost shows on TV and they never catch anything.
With all their high-tech equipment, they never catch anything.
And people still believe that this stuff exists.
Right. Well, they catch viewers, and I think that's the high-tech equipment is the camera and the commercials and so on.
They do catch viewers, and I think you've got a fantastic question, which is why do people continue to believe lots of irrational things?
And did you want to add more?
Do you want me to take a swing at that pitch?
Yeah, there's one other thing that – I don't know if you've noticed this on Facebook, but I always see people run into these things, these urban legends that get propagated like – Recently, it was something like, people are poisoning dogs and dog parks all over the world.
And it was a complete, obviously, you know it just looks like a fake story.
And when you do a quick Google search, you find out it's a hoax.
So I'm just wondering what your thoughts on those kind of irrational things and urban legends and stuff like that.
Why do people still believe in them?
Right, right. There's a lot to talk about with that.
For once in my life, I'm trying to organize my thoughts in some kind of different fashion.
No problem. Why not take a real left turn in my minor media career and try and organize my thoughts for just a moment?
It's a great question.
We could spend the rest of the show on that, which might actually be a really good idea.
As far as global warming goes...
There is something about it that – there's something that Lloyd DeMoss talks about.
He's a psychohistorian. He talks about growth anxiety.
In other words, when society begins to do really well, there is an unconscious fear.
That the gods will punish us.
That there must be some sort of evenness in life.
And anybody, you know, pride cometh before a fall.
And anybody who is too proud is going to get crushed by the gods.
Think of the myth of Icarus flying up too close to the sun.
He wants to fly like the gods and crashes down because the heat of the sun melts the wax on his wings, his artificial wings.
The Tower of Babel, they're going to grow, build a building up to see God.
And then God gets upset and thunders it down and splits everyone into warring languages and so on.
And so we have historically this belief that if we do too well, if we get too wealthy, if we get too strong, if we get too healthy, that something bad is going to happen.
Now, there's no way to prove this, but my general suspicion is that this is a myth that is propagated by warlords and priests throughout history to keep people small.
To keep people small.
And so you have all of these myths about a man who thinks that he can – the man who thinks he can do without God, the man who's doing really well like Job.
He's wealthy. He's got lots of children.
He's got a beautiful wife.
He's healthy. He's happy.
And, of course, Satan comes along and says to God, you know, he only loves you because he's wealthy and happy.
And then God, like any jealous, crazy lover, says, okay, I'm going to smack him full of boils.
I'm going to blow up his sheep.
I'm going to make his wife fall down dead.
I'm going to kill his children. I'm going to, you know, make him his – This is the idea that if we are doing too well, we're going to get struck down.
At a very unconscious level, I think this is partly to do with what happens.
Don't we always hear that whatever is going well in society is about to kill us, right?
So we have this incredible food production that goes on, but now the food is going to kill us, people say.
We live a long time, which is why people have higher incidence of cancer.
And so now we feel that somehow everything is going to give us cancer.
And one of the things that was coming out of the post-war period was this incredible boom.
And with this incredible boom, economic boom in the post-war period in the West in particular, in the West almost exclusively, what came with it was a sudden fear of environmental retribution.
Like we're doing really well.
We're solving the problem of poverty.
We're solving the problem of miseducation or lack of education.
We solved some of the problems of racism and so on.
We were doing really well in the 60s.
You could see this statistically, poverty, the rates of poverty dropping by 1% every single year, not every decade, not every century, but every single year.
And no – I mean so there was the fear of nuclear war and then there was the fear of environmental collapse.
And we'll come back after the break and talk about it a little bit more.
But I think we're always waiting for that bent branch to whip us back in the face.
Every progress is a catastrophe.
Hello, hello, hello, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux for The Corbett Report.
My regular home is Freedomain Radio, freedomainradio.com.
You can check me out if you like.
We're chatting with Mike about why do people believe crazy things.
Well, and I'll get back to you in a sec.
Let me just sort of finish up one little thought.
It's a great, great question.
You know, we have to fit in this hierarchy.
I mean, we don't have to, but that's the way the world is.
We fit into this hierarchy where there are these rulers at the top, and sometimes they're priests, and sometimes they're kings, or some sort of horrific mixture of the both, and sometimes they're demagogues who claim to represent the will of the majority, but in fact usually represent only the special interests of moneyed power,
or other times it's just a straight-on fascistic dictatorship, so sometimes it's bullying teachers or bad parents or priests or whatever, but when we grow up and as adults, we have to fit into this It's really tragic.
It crushes and destroys an infinite amount of human potential and human genius, which I think everybody has and everybody can express if they break out of this hierarchy.
But we always have to believe that there's something bigger than we are, whether that's God or the collective or the class or the state or the nation or there's something bigger that we have to look at in awe.
And the UFOs are part of that as well.
And recently, it's been nature.
Nature is big, is going to backlash at us if we do things like are successful as a species, you know.
Nature is a total witch with a capital B. I'm all for environmentalism, but nature is itchy, nature is dirty, and nature really, really is good at killing human beings who don't have technology and who don't have medicine.
If you look at the history of the human race, It's a staggering wasteland of famine and disease, basically famine and disease, death by childbirth, premature death through every conceivable disaster that can happen.
Infant mortality is incredibly high.
Very, very few people made it to any kind of advanced years.
I think the average life expectancy in the Roman Empire was about 20 or 21 years old.
I mean it's just brutal. So I'm a big fan of the outdoors.
I love to hike. I'd love to have a nice clean planet to live on.
But there's no way that I'm letting that Mother Nature witch stand over me because she slaps a humanity silly with the diseased dead fish of bad harvests and bad germs and all that kind of stuff.
And so to the point where unpopularity has survived, like people with bad social skills have survived to reproduce because the more popular people tend to get decimated by disease all the time.
So we've got this idea that everything has to be bigger than us and that limits our human potential.
It fits us into a hierarchy.
And so I think people are always seeking to replace that.
So when the growing skepticism around religion began to really rise up in the 19th century, which came really out of the enlightenment of the 18th century – There's growing skepticism towards the inherited organized Judeo-Christian religions of the West.
When that began to diminish, what happened?
Well, you got the rise of socialism.
So you started to shift God out of squatting over humanity and you had to replace it then with the state.
And you will see that, that people who are on the Republican side, who are more religious, have the God to stand over them and so they can handle a smaller state because they have a bigger God.
On the Democrat side, where they're more skeptical and more secular, they have a smaller God and so they need a bigger state.
And so we feel that there's just something that has to be over us and that the disasters are going to occur if we get too big and successful.
And that's simply the ruling class implanting those ideas in us so we don't actually compete with them and outgrow them.
Anyway, those are my off-the-cuff thoughts.
Mike, tell me what you think.
Does it make any sense? Did I even put a syllable or two together that was useful?
Yes, it was definitely useful.
I agree with you on that.
But I see something else, which I think might be a part of this, is also that I think the ruling class needs to get everybody to believe that, be suspicious of the other slaves and essentially be scared that every one of us is evil and that we're poisoning the planet.
And by doing that, they're sort of causing this fear of the other person.
So instead of cooperating and reaching out a hand to be voluntarily involved with other people, we kind of look at each other suspiciously and almost angrily.
It's kind of pushing us right into the cage of our own enslavement.
So do you mean, tell me how that sort of fits in.
So the way that we'll sort of snarl at each other if we're not recycling properly or that kind of stuff?
Yeah, or even just the sort of making it popular to believe in global warming so you can look down at somebody who doesn't believe it or who is skeptical of it and say, well, you just want to poison all the waterways and, you know, whatever scare tactics that they want to use so they can just sort of fear, you know, get that fear to control everybody and keep everybody in line.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, no, I think that's right.
I mean, rulers are very big on collective punishments because collective punishments turn the slaves against each other, right?
So, I mean, I remember when I was a kid, I don't know if they still do this anymore, but when I was a kid, if some kid did something wrong, like something was broken in the classroom, we all had to sit there until somebody confessed.
And so we'd all turn on each other over time.
And so the collective punishments are, you know, if you can't find the slave who stole the water jug...
Then they all get beaten.
And that way, the slaves will give you the one who stole it, and they'll turn on each other.
It creates divisions. It's horrible and brutal, but that's the way it works.
It really is, to me, astonishingly horrifying how much human suffering, of course, is caused by all of this environmental controls and so on.
And the idea that we turn to the state to save us through environmental degradation is just astounding.
I mean, the state runs the military, and the military is one of the biggest polluters on the planet, even if you don't count bombs and shrapnel and bullets as pollutants, which I certainly would.
But the government is the largest polluter by far in the world.
And so running to the government for this kind of solution is like saying, well, I'm not going to call the airline to book a flight to St.
Petersburg. I'm just going to wait for my friendly UFO to come by and pick me up.
Yeah, I think there is a lot of aggression that goes horizontally in the world that turns us against each other and environmentalism is just another one of these collective punishments.
If you don't do the right thing, if you drive too much in your car or if you don't recycle properly, then the world as a whole is going to get back at us and I'm going to have to live in the filth that you generate and so on.
So it gets us to all sort of police each other.
Of course, the ruling classes, they don't have to do any of this stuff, right?
I mean, Al Gore takes a private jet everywhere.
He has a bill in the thousands of dollars per month just for his electricity.
He has homes all over the world.
This man who believes that the sea level is going to rise 9,000 feet just recently bought a house right on the seafront.
I mean, even he doesn't believe this nonsense.
And so the rules are just for us, the plebs, right?
We're the ones who have to use single-ply toilet paper.
The ruling classes, they can, all the environmental activists who are rich, well, they can squander all the resources that they want.
Sting will march through a rainforest and then come back to his nine million square foot house and jet all over the world to do his concerts.
And I have no problem with people jetting all over the world to do concerts.
I've seen Sting perform I don't know how many times, and he's fantastic.
But the idea that they're going to finger-wagon us to not waste resources...
You know, you always expect the rulers to lead by example, and they never do, which I think tells you something important about the nature of the rulers.
But does that make any sense?
Yeah, definitely. Definitely.
It's definitely meant for us, not for them.
Right. All right, so I'm going to keep going on with the debt crisis, so hang around if you like, or call back if you have more.
If anybody else wants to call in, it's 1-800-313-9443.
So just for funsies before the show, and this is a definition of funsies that really only applies to me.
Maybe to you. Let's find out.
I went back to everybody knows, right, this European debt crisis.
It's kind of hard to call it a crisis.
It's really hard to call it a crisis.
So if a guy falls out of the plane and he's plummeting for a couple of minutes, he doesn't have a splat crisis at the end.
It really is a splat inevitability at the end.
You know, those little Wile E. Coyote cartoons, the Roadrunner cartoons, you see him falling down those canyons of desertified cartoony goodness, and there's a little puff of smoke at the bottom when he hits the ground.
That's not a crisis. I mean, once you've fallen out of the plane, it's kind of an inevitability.
So I went back and I looked at one of the goals.
The European Union was like a A slow cancerous overgrowth that overtook these member countries.
I think there's 27 at the moment.
Maybe 26 in a little while if Greece hits the Star Wars eject button.
But I went back and looked at one of the big ones, Maastricht, 1993.
The Union, I read, shall set itself the following objectives.
to promote economic and social progress, which is balanced and sustainable, in particular through the creation of an area without internal frontiers, through the strengthening of economic and social cohesion, and through the establishment of economic and monetary union, ultimately including a single currency and through the establishment of economic and monetary union, ultimately including a single currency in accordance with the Sustainable economic progress.
Balanced and sustainable economic progress.
See, that's the goal. That is the UFO. And as time goes along, just like global warming, the infinite cell phone cameras of reality checking come in, and we see what the results of this has been.
Greece cheated its way in, spent itself madly while relying on the credit of more responsible and less restrictive nations, and now is facing, frankly, kind of fiscal collapse.
Greek bond interest rate is running about 1,000% recently.
I mean, it's just crazy. And they've already extracted hundreds of billions of dollars really at gunpoint with the threat of drilling a hole just in their section of the raft and taking everyone down with them.
And what this, of course, is producing is a massive amount of conflict just as the democratic late fascistic income redistribution that's going on between public and private sector workers and so on is causing a massive amount of conflict.
In America and other countries, the conflict is now between those who feel that Social Security is somehow deserved, despite the fact that there's nothing there, and the young who have no job opportunities.
You've got unemployment and youth in certain sectors running at 50%, 50% unemployment.
That is a recipe for revolution.
The unemployed youth, you can drug them for a while with incredibly subsidized and borrowed handouts, but that is a game.
That won't end well.
And Obama was recently over and he was talking about what is the magic solution?
See, you don't need to cut your spending and you don't need to default and you don't need to exit the European Union.
You just got to wave your magic statist wand and produce enough economic growth that you can grow your way out of the problem.
You can increase your tax receipts by just having more economic activity.
And this really is quite an astounding claim.
It's one of these astounding claims that you can only listen to with a straight face if you are in a truly post-Orwellian state of living in the terrifying Buddhistic post-statist now, now, now, now, now, where there is no history and no past.
No history and no past.
So Obama, who's never had a real job as far as I know, and who's certainly never created any wealth, And started and created jobs for other people, never run a company or never been an entrepreneur.
He's saying, you see, we just have to push this button called create economic growth, you see.
And this button has always been available to us.
The fact that workers' wages have stagnated and declined for over 30 years in America is just because, you see, the governments didn't push the growth button.
Push the growth button and everything will be fine.
So what he's saying is if we can just grow our way out of this crisis, that governments can create economic growth, but they've just kind of decided not to do that.
For the past 30-odd years or 40-odd years.
Why? Why wouldn't they do that?
If the governments have a big growth button that they can push, why do you have a welfare state?
Because you can just grow the economy and then nobody will be poor.
So there's this fantasy that there is not going to need to be any cut in spending and there's not going to need to be Any defaults and nothing.
So the bankers aren't going to get hurt and the citizens aren't going to get too angry.
You're just going to push this magic button.
You're going to steroid up the entrepreneurs and you're going to have them out there with their legs pumping and fist pumping and they're going to do all of this wonderful stuff and create all these jobs.
Of course, as is usually the case with a politician, he neglects to point out Exactly how this growth is supposed to occur.
I mean, is it through free trade?
No, Europe already has free trade.
That's the whole point. It's supposed to have the free movement of goods and people.
And so how are they going to do that?
Oh, I know.
I bet they're going to invest in some R&D. Because R&D is another magic word.
We're going to invest in science and research and technology.
And that's going to create economic growth.
Of course, that's all nonsense because every dollar they take is taken away from someone else either now or in the future.
And how on earth is the government going to know which businesses are going to satisfy customer demand the most?
And how is the government going to know that a whole lot better than investors who actually have their own money on the line?
It's got to take all the money from investors and from other people and then the government's going to invest it.
Because you're really going to quit smoking if some Alien's lung is going to get diseased maybe on some other planet rather than your own.
And you're really going to make really great intelligent decisions about what to invest if it's never your own money and you suffer no economic consequences from making those promises.
And when you invest money as the government, you actually get a lot of votes because you can sell those investments under the table as ways of getting votes and support.
So the idea that the government is going to push some magic R&D button, which then pushes the magic growth button, is ridiculous.
Now, America could... Loosen some of the restrictions for sure, but if you loosen some of the restrictions, then you really get a lot of negative feedback from all the people who are currently benefiting from those restrictions, all the companies that are benefiting from the restrictions that are in place, whether it's restrictions on capital or anything like that.
So that's all nonsense.
It's all ridiculous, and it's just words.
Another one. Let's look at the Great Society.
Johnson, good old LBJ, launched an unconditional war on poverty with the goal of eliminating hunger and deprivation from American life.
Eliminating hunger and deprivation from American life.
What a wonderful goal.
What an amazing UFO that we hear.
What an amazing Loch Ness monster that we hear and have grainy footages that seem to be floating in the sky or in the sea.
How much of that actually came true?
I think we can see that all around us.
Poverty is still very high in the United States.
It is increasing in many ways, in many measures, and that's if we don't count the debt.
Spent over $15 trillion trying to fight poverty in the United States.
Oh, look at that! The debt is about $15 trillion.
Has poverty gone away?
Hells no! In many ways, kids are worse off than they were before.
Rise of single-parent households and all of the intended problems that go with that in the short and long run.
Wretched. Just wretched.
So, these are all of the UFOs that are currently floating around the sky and darting away and vanishing like tadpoles before the feet of an elephant when the cell phones of empirical reality come out and start actually taking pictures.
It is just brutal.
Here's another one that is going away.
We'll talk about this just very briefly after the break as well.
Here's another one that's going away.
Remember that? Love it or leave it!
Argument that's post-Socrates and onwards.
You live in a country, you accept the laws, and if you don't like those laws, you can leave.
Well, some guy, I can't remember his name, and I'll check it on the break.
He decided to go to Singapore to avoid hundreds of millions of dollars taxes on his Facebook profits from the stock going public.
And what happened?
Well, we'll talk about that when we get back.
The lie of the social contract.
Hello, hello everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux.
Just for the last few minutes of the show, we can try to call 1-800-313-9443 if questions or comments.
So Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, thanks to the producer Mike for reminding me of the name, may not be allowed to return to the U.S. after he renounced his citizenship to save millions.
In tax. The 30-year-old who has a $3.64 billion stake in the social networking site migrated to Singapore ahead of the company's massive or I guess recent stock market flotation.
So, of course, Singapore doesn't have capital gains tax.
He's going to save estimates or hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes.
So, according to an immigration law, he could be refused reentry to the U.S. if he is judged to have relocated for the purposes of avoiding taxes.
And some politicians are talking about, well, we're just going to bill them anyway.
I mean, that's really astounding because the taxes have not actually been levied, at least at the time that these threats were being made.
So, it's like saying, well, I'm going to move to Singapore.
And I currently make $50,000 a year and pay, I don't know, $15,000 a year in taxes.
And I'm going to move to Singapore. And then some government official could then say, well, but if you'd stayed in America, you'd have paid us $15,000 in tax per year over the next 10 years.
So we're going to send you a bill for $150,000 plus interest or whatever.
Because you've moved and therefore deprived us of income.
Because it's not like he has a tax bill...
Of hundreds of millions of dollars, and he's fleeing it.
He left and renounced his citizenship before he had the tax bill.
So he's not fleeing taxes that he, quote, legally owes.
He doesn't owe them.
He leaves, renounces his citizenship.
But the government says, oh, by leaving the country and renouncing your citizenship, you're depriving us of potential income, so we're going to bill you as if that potential income was actually real.
So... However horrifying this is, and after 30 years of looking at the state, it's hard to be horrified anymore.
But what this does is it gives a great gift to libertarians or voluntarists or whoever is talking about the invalidity of the social contract.
Because people will say, well, if you don't like it, you can leave.
But the government is really saying, no, you can't.
Or we're going to hit you with a huge bill even if you leave and we're going to not allow you to come back if you go.
And so that really does turn the entire social contract into a UFO that people believe in until there's lots of people around who can verify to the opposite.
And now the people in power, the people in government are actually verifying to the opposite as well.
You say, if you don't like it, you can leave it.
No, you can't.
No, you can't. We will bill you hundreds of millions of dollars for trying to leave.
And we will not allow you to return.
And if you return and don't pay us some money, we will arrest you.
And we will throw you in jail.
And if you resist, we are going to shoot you.
That is a very powerful cage that is descending.
Because you see, you are the ruler's property.
You are the ruler's property.
If I go to a neighbor's farm and steal his cow, he is going to come and get his cow back.
And if I won't give him his cow back, he's at least going to demand all the milk.
That I'm getting from the cow.
And Singapore is the neighboring tax farm that has stolen this very fat and lucrative cash cow called a Facebook co-founder.
And they are coming to get their pound of flesh because we are tax livestock.
We are not people.
We are not free souls.
We are not the glowing gods of the universe we are designed to be.
We are profit centers for the powerful.
And as soon as we see that, We diminish in value because an evil that is identified, that is exposed, is no longer accepted, is no longer worshipped, is no longer praised, and no longer obeyed.
Thank you, everybody, and thank you to Monsieur Le Corbet, who's currently enjoying Europe for the opportunity, corbettreport.com.
I am Stéphane Molyneux from Free Domain Radio saying, good night, my fellow tax slaves.
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