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July 20, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:25
Zeitgeist Addendum: The Review
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. This is the Free Domain Radio review of the movie Zeitgeist Addendum.
I did see the first Zeitgeist and I always enjoy their discussion of the state monopoly monetary phenomenon that money equals debt and the horrible predations that come out of the Federal Reserve systems.
I think they do an excellent job with that.
I'm not a truther around 9-11, and I don't particularly care about the mythology of religion because it's all a fairy tale.
So let's have a look at a movie that I was rooting for and then felt kicked in the nads during the second half, and we'll see if my reaction makes any sense or not.
The first half is around the monetary system and the economic hitman.
Again, it's a great book if you get a chance, Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
It's very interesting and worth reading or listening to.
And it's good.
I've got nothing to say about the first half, but, oh, dear Lord, then it goes into a kind of Hippie-dippie-bong-laced kind of stroll through all of the conceivable errors you could make in economics.
It explodes into a near supernova of irrational fail towards the end, and let's look at the second half, since the first half is good.
So, the basic thesis.
Let's run through a little bit of what Addendum is talking about.
Institutions and organizations are interested in preserving their money and power.
Well, who's going to disagree with that?
Profit-based institutions, you see, like receiving profits.
That's good. The desire for money equals profit.
And that is where you begin to get really messed up.
If you hold that thesis, then you indicate the limitations of the economic system.
Knowledge. People who make products prefer no competition, which is not at all true.
People lie to sell you things, which of course is true, but it's not the whole truth of competent salesmanship.
And I have been a salesman for many years in the software industry at a pretty high level and have sold to 50 probably of the Fortune 500 companies.
Lying really doesn't get you very far for very long.
So that's not true, right?
Money and trust. They say, oh, it's hard in a monetary system that's profit-based to trust people.
If I say to the customer in my lamp store that the lamps next door are actually better than I got a business, so you lie to people.
It's hard to be ethical in a monetary system.
They said, if they say industry cares for people, that is not true.
They cannot afford to be ethical.
Again, this puts this old Marxist idea forward, or socialist idea, that profits comes at the expense of people, which is of course not at all true, and I'll go into why in this presentation.
The system is not designed to serve the needs of the people.
Otherwise, there would be...
No outsourcing. This is just retarded.
I don't know how to put it nicer. It's like they never ever talked to a competent economist before making this film.
And the problem with this kind of stuff, for me, is that...
I don't know much detail about the history of Christian mythology, but when they do start making egregious and ridiculous errors, the makers of this movie, when they do start making these egregious errors about areas that I do have some expertise in, it throws the whole rest of it into question, of course, and that's a problem.
So the basic equation is that capitalism equals socialism equals fascism equals communism, that mercantilism or the union of corporations with the coercive power of the state is identical to me trading a pen for a pig with you.
So they kind of blend all this stuff together.
And what they do is they sort of blend capitalism and fascism together, right?
So fascism is nominal private control of industry, but state management of industry through profits regulation and the protection of monopolies.
Capitalism, of course, ideally is a voluntary free market, a voluntarist sort of a situation, but they kind of conflate the two together.
They say all of these different isms, what they have in common is monetaryism.
I probably could throw jism in there too.
A competition-based economy leads to, oh, what are the charges against money and competition?
Corruption, a wealth gap, class warfare, limited technology, exploitation, and a covert form of government dictatorship by the rich elite.
So, let's just say they have some criticisms, to say the least.
And they say, well, you know, companies that pollute, it's obvious that the corruption, but of course the government is by far the biggest polluters on the planet.
Even if you discount war, just the amount of garbage and trash and poison that they spew out is staggering.
So you can talk about private industry, of course, and it's worth talking about, but if you're really concerned about pollution, the first institution you should want to get rid of is the government.
And then they say, ah, but on a more subtle level, when Walmart comes into a community and destroys the mom-and-pop outfits, that's another kind of pollution.
They force them to close.
They use all of this language that is just ridiculous, frankly.
I mean, if you're going to conflate violence and voluntarism and not even notice it, then you're saying that Rape equals lovemaking, and therefore sex is bad.
I mean, it's just ridiculous to say, and indicates kind of pandering to a particular group, which maybe we'll get to or not.
So what else they talk about?
Well, politicians cannot solve problems.
Only technicians can.
Well, I certainly agree that politicians cannot solve problems, but I think that technicians can.
And technicians can, but there's lots of other groups who can solve problems.
Technology alone has improved our lives.
Nothing, they say, produced in a profit-based society is even remotely sustainable or efficient.
Well... Again, that just shows a blinding lack of regard to the basic facts of history that when you had a non-monetary, non-profit-based society such as the Dark Ages or the Early Middle Ages, really up until the Quattrocento, you really did not have a lot of technological innovation, right? I mean, it didn't really work out.
Very well. It was when profits were introduced through the enclosure movement in the 17th and 18th centuries, which produced the agricultural revolution, which produced the excess crops which allowed for people to be sustained in the cities.
It was the growth of private property rights and the spread of those that produced the incentives for industrialization, which improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
So When they say that it's not even remotely sustainable or efficient, you know, they just overstate the case to the point where they just look like idiots, frankly.
Abundance, they say, is also bad for profits, and this is an old chestnut of the left, which is that, you know, if you find a bunch of diamonds, you'll just throw them out, because if you sell the diamonds, then you will get less profit for diamond, and that's bad, and you'll hold it back, and so on. And that's not...
It's not true. Not true in the free market.
It's true in other situations, which they don't differentiate.
Because of this, it's impossible to live without war and poverty or any kind of ethical behavior.
We're evil, the sky is falling, Satan rules our loins, and apparently we go down on the Venus Project for the rest of our lives and everything is wonderful.
They quickly delve into social engineering, which is if you eradicate the conditions that produce corruption, you change the behavior.
There's no such thing as human nature.
There's only behavior which is determined by environment.
In the New Society, there'll be no laws or prisons or even any occupations.
They'll be no longer relevant.
We only need money to obtain resources because of real or artificial, quote, scarcity.
We don't pay for air or tap water.
That's certainly not true.
Of course we pay for tap water.
Of course we just pay through taxes, right?
It's just basic facts which are just kind of missing.
Ah, in the future there'll be no need for jobs, and, you know, given the trippy, dreamy music and the creepy, blonde, Aryan, black-and-white guy, I can see that this movie may well be appreciated by those who are under the influence, let's say, and so the idea that...
I can just sit here and bong and I don't have to get a job.
I can see that being appealing to a particular segment of society.
So they say, well, we've got a resource-based economy.
If we switch to a resource-based economy, we alternate energy sources to your thermal wind.
Solar and so on.
We can change our transportation.
And they go completely hysterical in terms of this slanderous stuff towards voluntary interactions.
Ah, the moment you punch that time clock, you walk into a dictatorship!
Well, you might want to read the Gulag Apicalago before you start comparing a Starbucks punch clock to a fascistic or communistic dictatorship.
Again, it's embarrassing because it just gets so hysterical and insane towards the end.
And the shame of it is that it makes the first stuff, which I think is good, look retarded to people who are skeptical, right?
So what's wrong with all this?
Well... Let's talk about profit.
And profit is something that's misunderstood.
The first thing that you need to differentiate is that you could say that profit is the return on investment that you get for a particular resource expenditure allocation.
So if I go out and buy a gun, which costs me 50 bucks, and I go and hold a guy up for 100 bucks, ooh, I've made a profit of $50.
But that's not really what the word profit means.
And so it's really important, if you want to be credible in the realm of economics and society, that you differentiate between profits that are generated through violence, like mugging or taxes or war spoils or government contracts, Profits that are accrued through violence versus like mugging or taxes or war spoils or government contracts, Profits that are accrued through violence If you don't know that difference, if you can't understand or explicate that difference, then you don't have a freaking clue what you're talking about when it comes to the economy.
You're like a doctor who doesn't know the difference between cancer and healthy cells.
It's ridiculous to speak about it.
Profits from selling arms, right?
So the government taxes us, gives the money to McDonnell Douglas and other corporations who then create arms, which the government then sells to other governments who pay for it through the violence taxation extracted from their own population.
But this is just a mafia thing, right?
I mean, this is just criminal.
Whereas a compact selling you notebooks, really not the same thing.
And it's embarrassing to see some intelligent people talk about this as if it's the same.
You've got to differentiate institutionalized theft versus service to the consumer.
And it comes down to the $5 trillion question.
It's the game show of reality called, ha, gun or no gun?
So let's look into this.
So this is what people don't understand.
There's a little schmancy graphics for you.
So... In a society, we have voluntary stuff.
We have stuff that we do voluntarily.
If you go for a job, you don't take a gun in and hold the guy hostage until he gives you the job.
You don't kidnap his children.
If you go on a date, you don't cudgel the girl and take her home.
It's all voluntary stuff that you interact with.
When you want a coffee, you don't steal it, you buy it or whatever.
So we have all these voluntary things in society.
Now, there is, in any society, a small subset of violence, right?
Of people who are parasitical, who are violent, who are criminals.
I think it's actually smaller than this in a really free society, but I wanted you to be able to read the font.
Oh, and remember that off to that way, I think it is, to the left, there's a link for a high-def version of this.
So we've got voluntary and we've got violence.
And then there's a whole bunch of people who say, we need a government because of this violence, and we're going to use the government to make this violent aspect of society smaller.
So they create a state.
Now, of course, the state always comes with society, but that's the general justification that's used.
And so the state is supposed to jump up and down on this violent thing and make it go away, and the trade-off is that we get less violence.
But that's not... What happens?
Of course, the state is an agency of violence.
The reason it's slightly overlapped with voluntary is there's this illusion called democracy, at least in modern times.
So what happens is those who like to profit from using violence basically get off the streets and get into Congress.
So the violent people all move to the state because the state has overwhelming violence and the state has the legal right to initiate the use of force.
So what happens is those people Join the government, and the government, because of its monopoly on violence and its overwhelming capacity to control and rule through violence, it grows.
And of course, as an inevitable result and simultaneous with this growth, the voluntary aspect of society diminishes.
And so basically, the gun eclipses the handshake.
The visible fist smashes aside the invisible hand.
And that is, of course, where we are at the moment, right?
And if you don't know the difference between red and blue, if you don't know the difference between violence and voluntarism, then you need to stop talking about society.
Because if you don't get this, then you just don't have a clue.
So again, if you don't know the difference between gun or no gun, If you think that punching into a Starbucks job that you got voluntarily that services voluntary consumers, if you don't get that that's voluntary and you equate it to Abu Ghraib, Then you don't get something very fundamental about life.
Now, I understand that Starbucks probably lobbies the government, and so there's edges, of course.
Absolutely. I mean, this is a voluntary show.
I think the TCPIP protocol was developed by government labs at some point, and the Internet was originally funded by the Department of Defense.
You can put a little shit in your sandwich, but there's still a big difference between that and a completely shit sandwich.
So I just wanted to point this out to understand this difference.
So, competition. Let's understand competition.
So they say, well, people selling products don't want competition.
It's not true at all.
I mean, it's not true in biology.
It's not true in economics.
People absolutely want competition.
Most people. I mean, of course, when you're in direct competition, you don't like the other guy.
But everybody wants competition in their general field as a whole.
So if you look something like FedEx and UPS, yeah, they compete with each other, but they're both advertising.
They're both consistently reminding people that there's an option to the postal service, that you can get stuff delivered by a private organization.
So they actually benefit from having each other in the industry.
It raises the awareness of the market and the opportunities as a whole.
CD or DVD or the new Blu-ray players.
If you're the only guy making CDs and nobody's competing with you, nobody's going to buy a CD player.
It's not going to be a standard.
You need people to pile in on the standards to raise awareness and general market acceptance of what it is that you're doing.
Now, a truly free market never historically, never has, never will sustains a monopoly.
And I've got a whole video on this.
Just look for Steph Bot Monopoly to see this.
There's tons of articles out.
This just doesn't happen. It's not up to a company whether there's competition.
It's up to the consumers.
If consumers only wanted FedEx, there would be no UPS. The fact that consumers want both is why both exist.
And consumers generally like having choice within a market.
And there are always contrarians.
At the moment someone becomes dominant, they like apples even more, right?
So if consumers want options, options will be provided.
So this whole thing about, you know, Walmart coming into a community and crushing the mom-and-pop stores and destroying them, no, this is nonsense.
This is complete and utter nonsense.
It displays a woeful ignorance of even the basic principles of economics.
It's not Walmart who puts the mom and pop stores out of business.
It is the consumers who make that choice.
If the consumers don't like Walmart and prefer shopping at the mom and pop stores, then those consumers We'll do that.
Walmart will go out of business.
The mom and pop stores will flourish.
It's not Walmart who makes this happen.
It is the consumers, the consumer choice of where they want to shop that makes this happen.
So, ascribing what the consumers desire to the corporations themselves, again, fundamentally fudges, misunderstands, misaligns, conflates these two opposites, right?
Walmart doesn't do anything other than offer its services.
People choose to go to Walmart or they choose not to go to Walmart.
Now, again, you could say, well, but Walmart lobbies and they've got these sweatshops and so on and blah, blah, blah.
Sure, I mean, I understand all of that.
I really do. But fundamentally, it comes down to the choices of the consumers.
Walmart's coming in. The mom and pop stores have local relationships.
They have a loyal client base.
They probably have paid off their stores if they've been around for a long time.
So, It's not up to Walmart whether the mom-and-pop stores go out of business.
It's up to the consumers. Ah, automation.
Oh, man. I mean, this stuff was dealt with in the wealth of nations with the example of the pins.
Ah, the system is not designed to serve the needs of the people.
Otherwise, there would be no outsourcing.
Well, again, this is just retarded, frankly.
And these guys are smart enough to know better.
And... A free market economist who can explain all of this stuff in ten minutes is a phone call away and not making that phone call is corrupt to the highest degree in putting out this kind of nonsense.
Of course, there is outsourcing because that's what consumers want.
If consumers wanted to pay more for domestic jobs, those domestic jobs would be provided.
If you wanted to pay another $400 for your notebook with a Made in America sign, that's what you would do, and no jobs would be outsourced.
Companies don't want to outsource.
Nobody wants to fly over to India and set up a software shop or a helpline.
You go over, you get deli belly, and you throw up for three days.
Nobody wants to go through that risk of uprooting.
Nobody wants to lay people off.
Nobody wants to fire people.
All that they're doing is reflecting the requirements or the requests or the demands or the preferences of the consumers.
It is the consumers who choose outsourcing because they choose cheaper electronic materials.
It's the consumers who choose outsourcing.
The companies. If nobody wanted outsourcing and some company started outsourcing, that company would go out of business.
So again, the system is designed to serve the needs of the people because the people choose cheaper electronics or cheaper help desk or whatever, and that means outsourcing.
But it's a choice, voluntary choice of the consumer, not some will-fascistic imposition from corporations.
And I mean, I've run a company.
I know what I'm talking about.
You can't impose your will on the consumer, right?
If you call up some consumer and say, I'm doubling the price of you.
I'm cutting down my supply.
I'm going to double the price.
And they'll just tell you to get lost.
That's voluntarism, right? So again, I sort of mentioned that.
Automation simply produces more goods per resource.
And that's how you grow wealth, right?
To say that automation is bad and therefore we need more machines to produce everything is just kind of ridiculous, right?
So automation simply means I invest a thousand dollars in a computer that returns me five thousand dollars worth of extra goods a year.
I mean, that's how wealth grows.
That is how wealth is created.
If the price of houses Suddenly went to zero.
Houses popped up like mushrooms out of the earth.
Yes, the entire building industry would be screwed.
And real estate agents would have to get real jobs.
But all the money we would have formerly spent on houses were used to buy other things.
There's a mass increase in the amount of wealth in society.
Ah, scarcity. The artificial scarcity.
Scarcity does not increase profit.
Scarcity does not increase profit.
Scarcity increases competition.
So if I've got a whole bunch of milk and people want 1,000 gallons of milk a minute and I decide, oh, I'm going to produce 500, well, people will just buy from somewhere else.
It increases competition, assuming constant demand, right?
Now, scarcity can also reduce demand, and permanently, right?
So if somebody wants to order 1,000 gallons of milk a day from me, and I say, I'm only going to give you 500, he'll basically say, well, screw you, bud.
I'm going to go to some other guy who's going to give me 1,000.
He's never coming back, right?
So scarcity does not increase profit.
It's incredibly risky and self-destructive to withhold products from the market.
Now, gun or no gun.
Scarcity plus a gun equals increased profit, right?
So if people want a thousand gallons of milk a day and I can force them to buy for me, I can crank up the price.
But the problem there is the gun, not money, not voluntarism, not a free market, not any of that stuff.
The problem is the force that is used to keep competition at bay.
I mean, if you don't get that, then you're saying theft is exactly the same as trade.
Violence is exactly the same as voluntarism.
And that's just intellectually corrupt and dishonest because nobody's that stupid.
The problem, fundamentally, is not monetarism, it's not fascism, it's not communism, it's not socialism, it's not...
The dictatorship of the punch clock.
It's not machines. It's none of the...
The problem is violence.
It's really that simple.
The problem is not...
We'll get to that.
We'll get to that in a second.
So then they get to alternative energy.
Okay, so, dudes, like, instead of telling us about, you know, all these documentaries with the creepy music and the monochromatic fascists and the pretty graphics, why don't you just go and create and get this geothermal and sell it to everyone?
You'll be able to outbid all of the people who are currently producing energy.
You'll be able to... It'll be sustainable.
You won't have any problems with the EPA. You will be able to outcompete.
Why are you making documentaries?
It's like those guys who call you up and say, ooh, I've got a hot stock tip for you.
It's like, why are you telling me? Why aren't you buying it yourself?
It's only a hot stock tip if I believe you and buy it, right?
Well, what prevents them?
Does the free market prevent them from providing cheap and renewable and pollution-free energy?
Of course not. Consumers would love that.
It would be cheaper.
There would be fewer costs for disposal.
I mean, if you send me something which says, hey, you know, I can reduce your energy bill by 50% and, by the way, you'll get the field goods of no pollution and the cheap, virtually no disposal costs of no pollution – I'd be like, dude, you had me at 50%.
Oh, frantic consumers would love it.
Would other corporations stop them doing it?
Of course not. Esso has no army, has no guns.
Standard Oil has no bombers, no planes, no jails, right?
It's not other corporations.
The violence of the state would stop them, right?
The corporations would get state injunctions.
See Daddy Day Care for a great example of this as a movie.
But the corporations would get injunctions.
They wouldn't be able to pass EPA hearings.
They wouldn't be able to fill out all the permits.
Stuff would be denied. And if they went ahead and built anyway and produced anyway and tried to sell...
Anyway, they would get cease and desist.
If they resist those, guys show up with guns, they take them to jail where they get raped.
It's the violence of the state that prevents the exploration and dissemination of alternate energy sources.
Again, the problem is not money.
The problem is violence.
The problem is gun versus no gun.
Ah, no money.
The dream of a barter society is literally as old as mankind.
And it's totally possible.
In a stateless, free society, use money, don't use money.
If you want to barter your toes for a sow's head, go for it, right?
But if some people prefer money in a free society, are you going to use violence to prevent them?
Well, that's the initiation of the use of force, since the choice to use money, if it's made in a free market environment, without a government monopoly, perfectly valid, right?
Will you use violence to stop them?
Of course not, right? So again, the problem is gun or no gun.
And as Mises wrote as long ago as the 1920s, von Mises, efficient allocation of resources is impossible without price.
That's why centrally planned socialist economies never work.
Never work. Because there's no price which indicates aggregate demand, so you can't ever efficiently allocate resources.
Now, they brought up in the film, I thought it was kind of funny, they brought up in the film, they said...
Well, what would be your motive in a monetary-less society?
What would be your motive? And I thought, okay, well, great.
So what's the motive for producing all these machines and maintaining them and oiling them and inventing them and testing them and so on?
What's your motive? And they went, oh, but the motive is for you to get out of bed and stuff like this.
But that doesn't answer the question.
If all these magical machines and geothermal energy are supposed to produce all this wonderful stuff...
Why would people strain to the utmost to produce these machines in the absence of profit?
The fundamental problem of motivation.
That's, again, why everything that came out of the Soviet Union was made entirely of crap and fail, right?
Because there's no incentive, right?
So it's all well and good to say, oh, other people will do it.
It's like, but that's why I say to these guys, why don't you stop making documentaries and stop producing all of these fantastic machines you say will change the world?
Well, because they can't, because the government will stop them.
But then the problem is government, not money.
And how will those people who know what to produce in the absence of price, how will they know what people prefer?
All human desires are infinite.
All resources are finite.
That's the foundation of economics.
So where do you apply your finite resources to solve which desires?
The only way you can tell is through price and the mechanism of money and trade.
So, to sum up, I mean, it's the baby in the bathwater situation.
Yes, of course, state monopolies and the corporations that use the state to enforce their wills, they're evil, because they're sustained by the initiation of force, and taxation, and tariffs, and union dues, and subsidies, pharma subsidies, other kinds of subsidies.
Yeah, we've got the police, the military courts, prisons, the money supply, banking, welfare, healthcare, the list goes on and on.
These... Government sanctioned, government enforced, government protected monopolies, that's all evil because it's the initiation of the use of force.
But just because the government runs money does not mean that money is innately evil.
Right? Saying we need to get rid of money in a voluntary society is like saying Russians can't grow bread because farming used to be a Soviet monopoly.
Well, just because the government does it now doesn't mean that it's innately evil.
The point is to have a free society, which means people can use money or not use money as they see fit, but they don't have access.
To the state where they can offload all the costs of enforcement under the taxpayers, right?
So, and again, have a listen to or a read of my free book Practical Anarchy at www.freedomainradio.com forward slash free for more on this.
Thank you so much for watching.
I really do appreciate it.
And I am, you know, for what it's worth, I'm grateful for what the Zeitgeist guys are doing in terms of getting interesting questions out there.
I think their answers are completely retarded, but the questions are good, right?
And so I guess good for them for starting up the questions.
Have a tootle by freedomainradio.com.
Pick up your free books and free podcasts.
If you can donate, I would really appreciate it.
And thank you so much for watching as always.
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