Nov. 25, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:34
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| All right. | |
| Monetary policy. | |
| Oh, this is the meat of the matter. | |
| This is the marrow and the bone of the good stuff. | |
| So money, money, money. | |
| It's at the heart of any empire or country. | |
| So fiscal policy, political power, military power, and what's called democracy all hinge on money. | |
| And we just watch the RNC and the DNC and the DNC in particular My goodness, the Democrats are just promising people free stuff. | |
| Well, that means that they have to have the money for it. | |
| Fiscal policy, political power, military power. | |
| Can you pay for your military? | |
| Well, these all hinge on money. | |
| So all governments, all throughout the world, always inexorably seek to monopolize control over money in their territories. | |
| They want to be able to create and print and control the money because that way they get to inflate, they get to borrow, they get to do all of this crazy stuff to pretend that they have more money than they have, at least in the short run. | |
| Now, when a government gets control of a currency, it seems to benefit people in the short run. | |
| It's like, you know, cocaine. | |
| Hey, I'm happy. | |
| But that's only a side effect of the central goal of giving the illusion of gifts, right? | |
| So, if the government says, I'm going to give you $1,000 and then it has to tax you $1,500 to give you the $1,000, it's very clear that it's a bad deal. | |
| But if they say, I'm going to give you $1,000 and they tax you only $250 and they use that $250 as collateral to borrow $1,000, then you... | |
| You know, you give them $250, they give you $1,000. | |
| You're like, wow, we're wealthier, except for the debt thing. | |
| Or they can use it to dilute the currency, to print money and so on. | |
| Or in this case, to dilute the high-value content of the money, the gold and the silver. | |
| So, it's bad stuff. | |
| So there was one emperor, Septimus Severus, it does sound like something out of Battlestar Galactica, doesn't it, gave this advice to his two sons, Catacalla and Gaeta. | |
| He said, live in harmony, enrich the troops, ignore everyone else. | |
| The state is a fist. | |
| They didn't listen so well. | |
| One brother killed the other and spent so much on the military that his mother begged him to slow down. | |
| You know when your mom's saying you're spending too much and your mom's very rich? | |
| It's not a good situation. | |
| So the son raised military pay by 50% and doubled the inheritance tax, and then he made almost everyone who lived in the empire a citizen, because that way you could tax them more, right? | |
| Well, he said there was no more money to be pillaged from the population, but not to worry. | |
| Quote, for as long as we have this, he snarled, pointing his sword, we shall not run short of money. | |
| And, uh, yeah, it, uh, it devolved from a, um, a mafia with good PR to just a plain old mafia later on in the Empire. | |
| And so, this expansion of citizenship, right? | |
| What do they have left to sell when they can't bribe you with your own money, when there's so much debt and so much devaluation of the currency that the government can't bribe you with your own money? | |
| What do they have to sell? | |
| Well, they have citizenship to sell, and we can see this happening all over the West at the moment. | |
| So you used to be a citizen because you had the same values, and then citizenship just became a means of expanding the tax base. | |
| Bring people in, especially when the birth rate begins to decline. | |
| So when the birth rate begins to decline, what happens is governments say, well, we need more people. | |
| We've got old people retiring. | |
| We need money from young people to pay for the retirement of the old people. | |
| There aren't enough young people. | |
| But the problem is, it takes a long time to grow people and taxpayers, like a quarter century or more. | |
| So governments can't sit there and say, well, to deal with our fiscal crunch, to deal with not having enough money to pay off all the unmet promises and unfunded liabilities and obligations to the old people, we're just going to encourage childbirth. | |
| Because what happens is, when children get born, they're a huge Liability to society. | |
| They cost a lot of money. | |
| You've got to put them in schools. | |
| They need health care and so on. | |
| A quarter century later, maybe, or more, they'll start producing taxes, but it's much easier for people to just, hey, let's import some taxpayers. | |
| Boom! | |
| Other countries have paid for them being kids. | |
| We just get the rewards of them being taxpayers. | |
| Of course, the problem is, generally, You end up paying more in social services and welfare than you collect in taxes, but it's still more than if people were having kids. | |
| It also takes moms out of the workforce if they want to be good moms, so you can't even tax them. | |
| So it's bad all around. | |
| It's just a huge drain. | |
| And so expanding citizenship is the best way for governments who are way underfunded to get money rather than having the domestic population have kids. | |
| So that's pretty important. |
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