Dec. 15, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
20:03
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Your Honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, court of world public opinion and in the visible sight, hearts and minds of all thinking people in the world, the question before the court of public opinion today is what is the question before the court of public opinion today is what is the validity of the handover of Hong Kong to China happen. | |
| This is a complex and deep issue. | |
| And I'm going to focus on the first contract, which was, in effect, from the end of the 19th century to 1997. | |
| If that contract is not valid, questions of the validity of the later contract become irrelevant. | |
| If the foundations cannot stand, the top floor comes down of its own accord. | |
| So the question is, is the first contract valid, wherein Hong Kong was transferred from the British to China from the late 19th century, occurring in 1997. | |
| To answer that question, we must first ask ourselves, what is the nature of a valid contract? | |
| Now, a social contract, a government contract, a state contract lies in a different moral sphere to some degree than a personal contract, but some of the same principles still apply. | |
| And I will elucidate those here and eviscerate the case for Hong Kong returning to China. | |
| The communists who took over China in the late 1940s had a particular relationship to contract law. | |
| And that relationship to contract law is that it could be shredded upon the will and whim of those in power. | |
| Under the Communists, starting in the late 1940s, within a relatively short period of time, 40% Of the land in China had changed hands through violence, through the tearing up of existing contracts, some of which had lasted for hundreds of years. | |
| If some entity wishes to say that contracts between governments and contracts between citizens are valid, which is the basis of the case as to why Hong Kong should be handed over to China, Then that entity must themselves have respected contracts. | |
| Did the communist government respect contracts for land, for private property, for corporations between employer and employee? | |
| Absolutely not. | |
| In fact, the entire purpose of the revolution was to tear up existing contracts, usually through force. | |
| So I must say, when it comes to world-class hypocrisy for the Chinese Communist Party to suddenly say, ah, but you see, we must respect contracts, when the entire foundation of their power was on the tearing up of contracts and the murdering of millions of people, | |
| Well, let's just say it's a rather staggering feat of hypocrisy that if it had physical manifestation would cause the earth to buckle and physics to reverse itself. | |
| Has the Chinese Communist Party ever said, "Well, the way in which we gained power and the way in which we transferred and tore up property and contracts, that was unjust and we owe reparations." | |
| No. They have resolutely stood by the tearing up of contracts, By what moral right can they claim that they should now enjoy the benefits of contracts? | |
| There is a term in the law called interstate. | |
| Interstate is a situation of property that occurs when a person dies with no will. | |
| The property in general reverts to the state. | |
| the state looks for any next of kin. | |
| That is what happens when a person dies. | |
| Yes. | |
| All existing contracts are invalidated. | |
| They don't have to pay their debts. | |
| They don't have to fulfill their contracts. | |
| The cars they leased must be returned. | |
| The cell phones they borrowed must be returned. | |
| All the contracts, when an individual dies, are voided. | |
| The British did not make a contract with geography. | |
| The British did not dig up a pile of dirt and negotiate with that. | |
| The British made a contract with a dynasty, the Qing dynasty. | |
| When an individual dies, his contracts are voided. | |
| What happens when a government itself dies? | |
| What happens when a government itself dies? | |
| Well, the Communists have already answered that question for us. | |
| In fact, when they murder a government, they void and destroy all of its contracts, as we see with land reform, which was wholesale slaughter and theft. | |
| So, the Communists have already told us what happens when a government dies. | |
| So, how is it possible that the Communists can now claim a contract that was signed by the Qing Dynasty, which then transformed into a republic, which then transformed or was Murdered by the communists and transformed into a communist dictatorship, a socialist dictatorship, and now is in its fourth iteration since the signing of that contract. | |
| Said fourth iteration is the mostly fascistic system that characterizes the existing method of government in China. | |
| Originally, the government owned all the means of production property, were socialized, profits were largely forbidden. | |
| This changed. Over the last few decades, to the point where now private enterprise is encouraged in many areas, profits are allowed, corporations are permitted, which means you have a significant degree of public ownership with private incentives for profit. | |
| Public ownership, no profit, socialism, communism. | |
| Public ownership, private profit is fascism. | |
| So we have gone from a dynasty, to a republic, to communism, to fascism, and yet like a immortal vampire, like a superhero, immune to the bullets of time, morality, reason and evidence, the contract has maintained itself. | |
| It lives. | |
| It continues. It cannot be killed. | |
| Why? Well, because the communists will rip up contracts when it profits them, and the communists will maintain contracts when it profits them. | |
| The profit, not in a free market sense, but in a totalitarian sense, is the one constant. | |
| Let us look. At a dynasty. | |
| Because the British signed a contract with a dynasty. | |
| Now, putting aside free market considerations of contracts, let us ask this question. | |
| Can a man who signs a century-long, a virtually century-long contract, can he then bequeath that contract to his son? | |
| Well, of course. I have a daughter. | |
| If I go and rent a piece of property for 99 years, I can choose in my will to bequeath that contract to my daughter. | |
| She can choose to fulfill it or abrogate it as she sees fit. | |
| The British made a contract with the dynasty wherein a continuation of the line was expected, and therefore the contract could be transferred down through the generations in at least a conceptually just manner according to the law of the time. | |
| But the dynasty has no power and has not had power for a long, long time. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Here is another consideration. | |
| When you sign a contract, there is an expectation of a continuance of the conditions under which you sign that contract. | |
| If you sign a contract to lease a car for $500 a month, The car company cannot say, oh no, we're changing that to $2,000 a month. | |
| There is a reasonable expectation of the continuance of the services for which you contract. | |
| If those services change, the contract is null and void. | |
| Imagine this. Imagine that you sign up for a charity that opposes abortion. | |
| You send them $50 a month and you sign this in perpetuity. | |
| Now, let us say that that charity is taken over by a pro-abortion group and now wishes to use your money not to oppose abortion but to subsidize and promote abortion. | |
| Would you be justified in canceling your contract if there had been a complete reversal of the terms of that contract? | |
| Well, of course you would be. Of course you would be justified in terminating that contract. | |
| If we don't have that right as individuals, then contracts can be unilaterally rewritten to be anything, to be the opposite of what you initially signed up for. | |
| And therefore, there would be no such thing as contract. | |
| Would you sign a contract to enter into a 25-year mortgage where the bank could choose at any time To change the terms of payment, to transfer the deed, to jack up the price with no prior warning and no prior contractual limitation? | |
| Of course not. There is no contract if contracts can be unilaterally rewritten. | |
| There is no contract if there is no continuity of services. | |
| So then we must ask ourselves, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in the court of public opinion, when the British signed the contract, What was their expectation? | |
| That the freedoms would continue. | |
| That the freedoms would continue. | |
| They had every reason to believe that the dynastic rule in China, which had lasted for thousands of years, would continue. | |
| As the old joke goes, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, and I think it was reasonable to say at the end of the 19th century that nobody expected the Communist Revolution. | |
| You will also note that it is somehow considered unjust that the British took over Hong Kong. | |
| Why? Why is that unjust? | |
| Why is the right of conquest accorded to every single race, color, and creed except the whites? | |
| Hong Kong was not initially part of China. | |
| Hong Kong was taken over A few centuries B.C. by China. | |
| Ah, you see, but that made it part of China. | |
| Why? Because the land touches? | |
| That's crazy. That's like saying you own your neighbor's property because you have a fence bordering it. | |
| There was no rioting when the British took over Hong Kong. | |
| There was no sabotage, there was no terrorism, there were no bombings. | |
| There was, I dare say, a fairly deep inhalation and exhalation of an enormous sigh of relief as Hong Kong was transferred from a mercantilist, state-controlled, semi-fascistic, tax-gouging monstrosity of pretend trade to an actual free port with virtually no taxation. | |
| Freedom. The mind and the body and the soul yearn for freedom. | |
| We grow towards it like a plant towards the air. | |
| Freedom is a consummation devoutly to be wished. | |
| That transfer from China to the British Empire made people in Hong Kong far more free. | |
| It was to the benefit of Hong Kongers. | |
| Which is why there were no riots. | |
| Why the appalling scenes that we saw last night, tear gas, paramilitary maneuvers in the streets, cannons of blue liquid designed to mark people for later arrest and detention, | |
| hundreds of thousands of people marching in a desperate bid to push back The Iron Curtain of totalitarianism that is slowly surrounding and choking off their civilization. | |
| None of that occurred. When a corporation signs a contract, if that corporation goes defunct, the contract is also null and void. | |
| And what is human progress, my friends? | |
| What is human progress other than the tearing up? | |
| Of old contracts, if they are replaced by more just and fair ones. | |
| The institution of slavery is as old as humanity itself. | |
| In every country save America, slavery was ended with the stroke of a pen. | |
| Only America had a civil war, well, arguably related to slavery. | |
| All other countries ended slavery Simply by disallowing the government to continue the enforcement of slave contracts. | |
| You see, those contracts were torn up. | |
| Those contracts were destroyed and humanity, significant portions, swaths of humanity breathed free air for the first time in their existence. | |
| The tearing up of contracts in the pursuit of liberty Is God's grace or reason's gift to the world? | |
| The communists accept this, though they use it for evil. | |
| In the Middle Ages, the relationship between the aristocrats and the serfs was explicitly or implicitly contractual. | |
| The progress of the agricultural revolution, of the enclosure movement, was the tearing up of existing contracts in the pursuit of private property Free markets and profits. | |
| Those contracts were torn up and we became free as a result, or freer. | |
| There is a contract that stipulates one country, two systems, and the complete handover of Hong Kong and its related territories to China in 2047. | |
| One aspect of that contract has already been torn up. | |
| The British were supposed to hold Hong Kong Island in perpetuity. | |
| Already been torn up. | |
| Already the terms of the conditions have changed. | |
| So, there is nothing that mere rhetoric can do to change the brutal realities of real politic. | |
| China is extraordinarily well armed. | |
| Hong Kong is not. Hong Kong It's immersed in freedom and surrounded by water. | |
| It has no nuclear weapons. | |
| It has no armies to speak of. | |
| And it already has a garrison of Chinese troops embedded in its heart. | |
| The words that I speak to you today can do nothing to alter the brutal realities of political power. | |
| But that political power relies upon a certain moral justification. | |
| Ah, we must fulfill the contract! | |
| Say the Communists. This contract that has stretched for so long must be honored, must be fulfilled. | |
| Nobody can take the claims of a Communist to respect long-term contracts seriously when they only gain power by slaughtering not just the contracts, but significant portions of the population who held them. | |
| So my words can do nothing. | |
| To stop one bullet, move one troop. | |
| But... The inverted pyramid of power rests upon moral justifications. | |
| This is why totalitarian powers, those who would hold unjust authority over free human souls, this is why they continually justify what they do with appeals to moral standards. | |
| Those moral standards, in this case, hold no water whatsoever The progress of humanity rests upon the tearing up of unjust contracts and the maintenance and continuity of just contracts from your cell phone, | |
| to your car, to your apartment, to your house, to the social contract with virtue that is supposed to guarantee our human rights and freedoms. | |
| Morally speaking, the contract to hand back Hong Kong to the totalitarians is not only invalid, it is unjust, immoral, and evil. | |
| Let it be torn up. | |
| For the progress not just of Hong Kong, but of justice, freedom, humanity itself. | |
| Free Hong Kong. We take a step forward. | |
| All of us. Through example. |
Export Selection