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Sept. 22, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:46
"Talk the Walk" Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Interviewed on Television by Harminder Singh
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Time Text
It's time to talk the walk.
I'm your host, Harminder Singh.
The anti-government protests have certainly generated a lot of interest around the world.
Not only are mainstream journalists flocking to Hong Kong to report on what's happening here, but so are prominent podcasters and YouTubers.
And it just so happens I have one with me in studio this week.
Host of Free Domain...
Just Free Domain. Just Free Domain.
I'm moving into the 21st century Just Free Domain.
Stefan Molyneux, thank you for coming on the show.
Great pleasure. You know, I found it very curious.
You're not the only prominent, I mean, you have a million subscribers on YouTube, almost a million subscribers.
You also have millions of downloads on your podcast.
And then, you're not the only one.
There's been other prominent podcasters and YouTubers here, and mainstream media.
Why are you here? Why Hong Kong?
Why is this What was an anti-extradition bill protest, now morphed into an anti-government protest.
Why are you here? What's the interesting story behind it for you?
Well, Hong Kong is currently in possession of the greatest story on the planet.
David versus Goliath, individualism versus collectivism, Free markets versus whatever we want to call where the Chinese government is at the moment, some element of collectivist totalitarianism.
It's an incredibly powerful story because this is the greatest bastion of economic freedom, I think, that has ever existed in the world.
And it is facing, of course, to the north, this absolute Leviathan that is threatening to swallow it up based upon decisions made by people long dead.
It is an astounding story.
And if you were to create this in some novel, your editor would say, oh, come on, this can't possibly be happening.
This is not the way the world works.
This is the way the world is working at the moment.
And so many belief systems and wealth versus poverty, redistribution versus property rights, so many stories are kind of facing off in Hong Kong and China that, to me, I just wish I could have got here sooner.
Well, there's a song going, so I don't think you've missed anything.
But you're based in Canada.
When you look at it from a...
There's a lot of people that's, I'm based, and then based in Canada.
I'm based, and I'm also in Canada, but go ahead.
You look at it through a lens of Western history, Western philosophy, things like that.
When you do look at it through that lens, what do you see?
So, in the reading that I've been doing, there is, of course, a recognition of the value of the economic freedoms that make up Hong Kong, but, to me, there's this kind of oddly troubling undercurrent to a lot of the protests that I really want to explore, so we're going to go and talk to some of the protesters and talk to the organizers and so on, because there is this great thirst for full democracy, for proportional representation, to not, as is the case for Hong Kong, merely be in the possession of the ability to vote in the opposition party, but actually to have more of a say in the government.
Now, I understand that, and I sympathize with that, and I can really grok where people are coming from, but the problem is when you get full democracy, you're heading down the path of the West, because in the West, when the franchise was extended and expanded to everyone...
What do you get? You get the welfare state, you get mass migration, you get open borders, you get massive debts, you get political correctness, you get all of this crazy stuff that comes along with democracy.
So there's this focus in Hong Kong to say, well, you know, obviously we're nervous about China, which I think any sane person would understand, but there's also this yearning for This untrammeled democracy, which since the days of Plato has been something that most philosophers and political thinkers have had a pretty uneasy relationship with because, you know, the poor outnumber the rich.
So what do you get in democracy? Well, the poor vote to take away the property of the rich and everyone ends up broke.
That's an aspect that nobody thinks about, because right now, one of the five demands that the protesters have is genuine universal suffrage, which really means we want to be able to elect our own legislature, our own chief executive, because half of the legislature goes to special interests, and the chief executive is handpicked by 1,200 people in an election committee.
Could it be that when you don't have it, you don't know what it looks like, so I want it?
Well, it is a horrible thing that's been happening in the West.
Because, I mean, we're old enough.
I'm older than you. But we're old enough to remember the end of history in the 90s.
Remember that the Soviet Union had fallen and China was reforming itself.
India was moving more towards democracy, as you know.
And there was this, oh, we're done.
You know, liberal democracy is the way to go.
And everything seemed to be going hunky-dory.
It was considered to be the end of history.
And it was very, very short-lived, of course.
And it's a great tragedy because if we had...
Fundamentally, more freedoms in the West, or at least if we were moving in that direction rather than, as it seems, away from that direction.
We would have a whole series of productive breadcrumbs to be able to drop in front of the more totalitarian societies in the world and say, hey man, you want to come?
Be like us. We've got these wonderful societies.
We're debt-free. We have sustainable economic systems.
We have growth of freedoms and we take care of people.
But we don't have that.
We used to have that more, and now we don't.
Now we have political correctness.
We have the stifling of free speech.
We have massive debt. I mean, you know, the United States has $180 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
So the problem is that we have these totalitarian systems in the world, and they're looking and picking and choosing, right, and saying, well, where do we want to go?
What do we have to offer a country like China to say in the West?
Oh, you should be like us. I think that they look at the West and they say, well, we may not be sure exactly where we want to go, but we Sure as heck don't want to go that direction.
Now, Hong Kong, to me, offers something quite different.
And this is why I'm here as well, is I'm kind of sick of the West.
I'm not a big fan of totalitarianism, but Hong Kong is something really fascinating.
And what fascinates you about it?
Low taxes, no tariffs, free ports, no welfare state, people take care of each other.
I know there are problems.
Of course, right? I mean, we talked about some of these before the taping, which is, you know, there's crazy high property evaluations and high rents and so on.
But here is...
Something which is...
It's funny, because when I say frozen in time, that sounds like a bad thing.
You know, like you're looking at the little insects that the treacle goes over to get stuck in amber, stuck like that, or the glacial air that's trapped in the bubbles of a glacier from 200 million years ago or something.
But it's kind of trapped in time insofar as you can see the effects of 19th century economic freedoms combined with 21st century technology.
And that is, to me, completely staggering.
And seeing...
Of course there are economic problems and challenges as there always are going to be.
But seeing how a society can function When people get easy and cheap access to healthcare with no deductibles, when garbage collection is privatized, as I said before, when there's no welfare state, when people can take care of each other, when there's virtually an untrammeled capacity to gather the world's geniuses on one small set of islands and let them be as productive as humanly possible, which appears to be that there's no limit to that.
So that to me is very powerful and it's a wild kind of experiment.
Because it's the same people as China.
Genetically, they're identical. So to me, it's like North versus South Korea.
It's like East versus West Berlin or East versus West Germany.
You have a little bubble here where the free market is operating at the greatest level that the world has ever seen, and then you can compare that to China as a whole.
And the difference has to be the environment.
It can't be the genetics. And seeing the incredible difference now is less than the difference it was, of course, during the Cultural Revolution, during the collectivization of the farms that occurred under Mao, the mass slaughterhouse that occurred under that ideology and that system.
It is an incredible experiment to see the effect that ideology and different systems of belief can have on a genetically identical population.
Now you have to realize what you're saying is quite controversial because, the reason I say that is because people here think the West is the ideal model because If you read the Constitution of the United States, in its purest form, it actually is an extremely well-thought-out, beautiful document.
Unfortunately, it has been trampled over many times, and it continues to be because they're chipping away at all the freedoms and then somehow using...
Different excuses to say, well, they didn't mean that, or they didn't mean this at that time.
Oh, it's a living document. No, it's in its purest form.
You have all of this going on.
At the same time, people here, people in mainland China, people in India, people in quote-unquote third world countries, not Hong Kong, but other third world countries, say, If I have a chance, I'm going to the West.
And they still are. Canada is a top destination.
United States is a top destination.
United Kingdom is, of course, all the English-speaking Western world countries are the top destination.
Exceptions are Singapore.
That's another top destination these days.
So where's the disconnect? I'm really confused because people are saying, and my family was one of them before the 97 handover, you know, just in case, they all look to the West, and they continue to look in the West, but you're saying otherwise.
No, no, no. Gosh. So here's an analogy, and I think this will work even though it's television.
So here's the analogy, right? So think of a guy who's strapped into a cannon in a circus, right?
You know, they shoot them up, right?
And now, you know, they shoot them up, and then they go land in some net somewhere.
So the West has this propulsion from the Renaissance, from the Enlightenment, from individualism, from the free market, from the dedication to small governments and human liberties, particularly freedom of speech, of course, which I know is an issue here to some degree.
Although, of course, it's an issue in most of the Western countries except for the United States, which has specifically rejected the concept of hate speech all the way to the Supreme Court.
So the West has this incredible trajectory that comes out of prior freedoms.
And it's sort of like looking at that trajectory and saying, that guy can fly!
I want to be like that guy!
And it's like, no he can't, because there's a gravity that's going to pull that guy down.
Now there's a net in the circus, there's not a net in the West, right?
So the economic system in the West...
Absolutely, completely and totally unsustainable.
The amount of debt and unfunded liabilities is unbelievably catastrophic.
Freedoms that exist on paper often don't exist in reality, right?
I mean, I wanted to go give speeches in Canada, and I functionally can't.
I mean, I have the right of free speech.
I'm not saying anything that is illegal or would be considered against Canadian law, but I don't actually have any practical capacity to give those speeches because...
You know, people phone in bomb threats and there's, you know, violent threats and so on and there's actual inactions of violence.
Similar things happened when I went to go and give a speech in Australia and then I ended up being unable to give a speech in New Zealand.
New Zealand, I was actually quite excited too because another free market destination where in the 80s they deregulated and privatized a lot of stuff.
So you look at the West on paper and you look at the trajectory of the histories that the West inherited and you say, wow, that's great, man.
I really, really want me some of that.
But in terms of sustainability, and you don't want to look at where people are.
You want to look at where they're going. And there's an old saying about wealth.
A guy who was fantastically wealthy, I can't remember who it was, but a guy who was fantastically wealthy ends up bankrupt.
And his friend said to him, but you have so much money.
How could you possibly go bankrupt?
How did you go bankrupt? And he said, very slowly...
And then very fast. And that is the problem with the freedoms in the West, that we've got a momentum of prior freedoms and liberties that we used to indebt our children.
We used to pay off and buy votes.
And unfortunately, looking at the trajectory of the West rather than the direction of the West, I think, is a bit of an illusion.
All right. We'll pick up this conversation right after the break.
Stay with us. Welcome back to Talk the Walk with my guest, podcaster and YouTuber, Stefan Molyneux.
And this is actually our backup studio, so you're the first guest here.
I'm really honored that you're here.
Now, I want to continue along these lines of thoughts about what the West is.
And you're painting sort of a bleak picture about the trajectory of the West.
At the moment, it's all rainbows and peaches and sunshine, right?
You go to Canada. Wide open spaces, clean air, rule of law, things like that.
It's all there. But at the same time, people don't look at the massive welfare state that's layered on top of all of this.
There's free health care.
And I'm going to put this in quotes because it's paid for by taxation.
A lot of people just don't figure that out.
And the same thing is trying to be brought into the United States.
You have a lot of prominent Democrats as well.
that want to bring Canadian-style healthcare, British-style healthcare to the United States.
We don't have it here. We have a two-tier healthcare system.
Some people say it works, some people say it doesn't.
What would you like to see, since you are Canadian, I mean, if you were the Prime Minister of Canada, you were actually a dictator.
Let's say you were a dictator.
You had no parliament.
Full on Pinochet. What changes would you make arbitrarily for what you feel is the betterment of Canadians?
Well, I was raised a Christian, and there are two things that I got from my upbringing that way.
Number one, I mean, there's lots that I got, but the two that I really focus on in sort of my public career as a philosopher, number one, do not bear false witness.
I've always got to tell the truth.
And number two, thou shalt not steal.
The welfare state is foundationally built upon the threat of violence, right?
You pay your money to the government, and if you don't, Pay what you owe.
They will throw you in jail.
And if you resist, they will take out weapons.
And you know how this all sort of plays out.
Now, private charity, to me, is one of the most wonderful things in the world.
I mean, I don't charge for anything that I do online.
I don't take ads. It's donations.
It's all voluntary. So, to me, private charity is a wonderful thing.
And I think I'm here as sort of a living example of how beneficial it can be for the world.
Coerced charity is not charity.
I mean, this is a foundational aspect of moral philosophy that an action that is compelled...
It has no moral content. I mean, if you force someone to do something, you're the one who is morally culpable, not them for what you force them to do.
So the welfare state is a violation of property rights.
It's a violation of the non-aggression principle, which is you can't initiate violence and be a moral person.
You can use it in self-defense, that's perfectly valid, but you can't initiate force.
So for me, given that it's immoral and given that the welfare state is unproductive, enormously unproductive in terms of society, it's just vote-buying.
It's just become vote-buying and I would get rid of the welfare state.
And that would do a lot to strengthen the family.
It would do a lot to curb drug abuse.
It would do a lot to curb promiscuity and kids born out of wedlock, which is a massive problem throughout the West and also particularly in America in particular communities.
So for me, it's the same thing when it comes to healthcare.
Healthcare needs to be voluntary.
It needs to be something where you pay for it, or it's donated, or somebody donates on your behalf.
Because it's not a productive situation in the long run.
The healthcare, you say it's paid for by taxes, but if you look at debt, so I'm from Ontario, which we talked about.
You, of course, live there as well.
We think of California as a fiscal basket case.
Ontario has five times the per capita debt.
Of California. And to me, setting up a system where people are making health decisions based upon the idea of this universal accessible healthcare which can't possibly be sustained, what happens when the money runs out?
It's always the big question when it comes to a society that we have.
What happens when the money runs out?
You have people making terrible decisions because they believe a welfare state and old age pensions are going to be there.
Maybe they don't take quite as good care of their health because they've got free healthcare and so on.
But it can't possibly be sustained, and you're setting people up for a terrible fall.
I would remove compulsion from these areas of public policy, and I would let the free market, voluntary charity, and virtue reign, where right now all we have is compulsion and debt.
See, the reason I bring up this type of question is because these protests that have been happening in Hong Kong, they're saying it's about the entry-extradition bill, and then it morphed into a larger movement.
About core values and things like that.
But one of the issues has been our extremely high property prices.
Social mobility is a lot less than it used to be in the boom times of the 70s, 80s, and even 90s.
There are kids who have university degrees that go nowhere.
I said some a couple of shows ago, in my field, a new kid who has a degree from journalism school, paid tens of thousands of dollars to go through school, they get their first job.
It barely pays $2,000 to $2,500 Canadian.
So it's $12,000 to $14,000 Hong Kong.
That's your rent right there, right? Exactly.
You can't even rent anything with that.
If you want a room, it's half your income right there, and then you're supposed to do the rest.
This anger has built up because we have an extreme free market.
So, let me finish my thought.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The anger is built up because of the extreme free market that has been allowed to run roughshod in Hong Kong.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I will let the economists and philosophers debate that.
My question is, does there need to be a cap on capitalism?
And what do you do with the 1.3 million Hong Kongers that are below the poverty line?
Okay, so I don't know much about the real estate situation other than it's crazy expensive, right?
That's all you need to know. No, no, that's important, right?
So I don't know. Obviously, it's islands.
There's rooms to expand. There's room to move.
I don't know if there are restrictions on zoning or how you can build or what you can build.
I know that they're pouring silt into the harbor to make more land, which I can understand.
I will jump into that a bit.
There is a lot of land up in the new territories.
It is not touched by the government, mostly because it is owned by powerful rural bodies that basically have held the government quote-unquote hostage because if they take away their land with imminent domain laws, we actually have them on the books, for housing purposes.
It's an emergency. We need to use it for housing purposes.
They are part of the 1,200 voters that are in the election committee.
So it's a political problem. It is a political problem.
So you can't blame capitalism for a political problem.
But do you know who brought it in? The British.
They brought in this policy.
The British government. Yes. Okay, so we're talking about a lot of government policies, so let's not give the free market the wrap for government policies.
Okay. I will say this about Hong Kong.
As an island of incredible economic liberty, not as much as I'd like to see, but more than you see in just about every place in the world.
It's number one on the Freedom Index, as you know, for economic freedom.
So this is like a boat in the ocean, and people are climbing on it, right?
Of course, now, if you've got a boat in the ocean and everything else is going down, that boat is going to get swamped.
So you said there are 300,000...
Canadians? Here, the largest diaspora of Canadians outside of Canada?
Hi! Other than the United States.
So why are there so many Canadians here?
Because of the economic freedom and opportunity.
So one of the reasons why the real estate prices are so high in Hong Kong is that it's so free.
It would be great if other locales could become more free so that people would have more choice.
They wouldn't all need to come. A couple of other lifeboats, right?
Then people could sort of mix it up a little and spread it out a little.
So Hong Kong can look and say, well, we have very high property prices in part for government problems for expansion, but also in part because it's free here and it's the most free and it's not very free other places in the world.
So what we could do is we could work to encourage the other places to become more free so that people have more choice, don't all have to swarm to Hong Kong Or you can say, well, let's reduce our freedoms here in Hong Kong.
And it's like, that to me is not winning in the world.
We want to spread freedom, not diminish our own freedoms because other places are less free.
That's like making yourself sick because other people have a cold.
Well, some people then look at Singapore and say, that's the model.
Eighty percent of housing is public.
And it doesn't turn into a ghetto.
Everybody is, it's just very clean.
It's, it... It works.
People aren't going into the streets.
It's very stable. Now, a lot of people are saying there's a reason for that stability because of certain liberal laws that are there.
But they're saying, let's use that model.
They're saying housing is a right.
Is it? Housing is a right.
That's what some people say. Housing, health care...
No, no, no. Listen. You cannot have, as a human right, the requirement for other people to produce goods and services for you, because that makes them your slave.
It's like, if I have a right to your suit, and it's a very nice-looking suit.
Let me just add that. I think it looks better on you than on me.
But if I have a right to your suit, then you have to go earn that suit or make that suit, and then I get all of that labor, all of that...
Productivity that you had to pour into getting that suit, it now becomes mine.
A human right is a right to freedom from aggression.
It's a right to freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly.
The right to not be aggressed against or coerced against, that is human right.
That is human freedom. The right to the products of other people's labor is just a form of democratic enslavement and it is unjust and it is unworthy of a civilized society.
To have that, you have the right to own other people's labor is not a moral situation at all.
All right, I just got a couple of minutes here, and I wish we had more, but I want to jump into this.
Canada's elections are coming up.
Yes, I hear there is one. There is one on October 21st, and it's down to basically a two-horse race, really, between Justin Trudeau's Liberals and Andrew Scheer's Conservatives.
There is also the Green Party, there is also the NDP, there's also the New People's Party, but for some reason that's shunned.
Wait, you mean the CPP? Yes.
Canada People's Party. It's Canada's People's Party, thank you.
Yes, it's Maxime Bernier. Yes, Maxime Bernier.
And what do you see coming out of this election?
Will there be change or is it going to be more of the same?
It doesn't matter who is voted in.
How much time do we have again? About two minutes.
Okay, two minutes. All right. Two minutes all of Canada.
Okay. So the liberals are terrible, wretched beyond words.
You know, they've bought out the media, they're threatening free speech, and they're not responding to the major concern that Canadians have, which is mass immigration.
Canada, as you probably know, has just about the highest per capita immigration rates in the Western world, four times that of France, which has its own problems with immigrations and ghettos.
And Canadians, this is the number one concern.
Maxime Bernier of the People's Party of Canada is the only candidate who is specifically addressing the number one concern.
Whatever your perspectives are on Canadian immigration, it's the number one concern for Canadian voters.
Polls have affirmed this.
You know, the media won't address it because they're in the pocket of the liberals.
The liberals won't address it because they rely on votes from the immigrants.
The conservatives won't address it.
Oh, we're afraid of being called racist and whatever.
You can have rational discussions about immigration without everybody throwing the R-bomb.
But it always jumps into that.
Yeah, of course, because, well, that's a whole other topic.
I think that the Conservatives have a good chance, and the only reason why I am a little bit more towards the Conservatives than the Liberals is the Conservatives traditionally have a fairly good record of protecting free speech, and the Liberals don't.
Now, as a guy who says, let's just say the occasional controversial thing on the internet, free speech is of significant interest to me, I don't know in this round if immigration is really going to get dealt with, but I think we can at least work to preserve free speech so that conversation remains possible in the future.
Occasionally controversial. I like that.
Not on this show, but, you know, occasionally.
Thank you, Mr. Molyneux. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it right there.
Thank you for joining me this week on Talk the Walk.
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