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Oct. 2, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:49
The Truth About Empire - and Western Colonialism!
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Hi everybody, this is Defan Molyneu from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Here to dispel a few of the misconceptions to do with European colonialism.
Why is this important?
Well, of course, European colonialism has been cited by about 12 billion people on the internet and in the media as the cause of most of the world's ills and the reason why Europe must spend the rest of its existence groveling, apologizing, beating itself with politically corrupt social justice warrior whips, and apologizing for all of the railways it built.
Anyway, let's and and of course it's why the refugees from the Middle East are supposed to have to get in, because it's blowback, you see, because Europe raped the world for hundreds of years, and now it's blowback.
So let's go to some of the facts.
There are two sources or two reasons why you have lies about uh colonialism.
The first, of course, is that the local rulers really didn't like the fact that the European rulers took over.
Uh so of course, right?
The local power structures, local principal uh principalities, uh, the local um mandarins, the local people in charge really didn't like that the Europeans came along, and so they fomented a lot of um negative views, of course, of um uh colonialism uh on the world.
After the end of colonialism, uh things generally went for the worse for these countries.
I mean, uh, Uganda saw the rise of Idi Amin, who's killed between a hundred and five hundred thousand people.
There was the partition uh between Pakistan and India after the end of British rule in the late 1940s, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed.
Um when um the uh the Boers took over and instituted apartheid in South Africa, got the truth about South Africa if you want to check it out.
The average life expectancy of the blacks in South Africa was about 36 years old.
Uh when they left, it was in the mid-60s after uh sorry, when apartheid ended, they were it was in the mid-60s, and then it dropped by nine years under ANC rule.
So there's a lot of people like the rulers who were displaced by the Europeans, didn't like it, and fomented a lot of negative views of this European colonialism, number one.
Number two, um, the um the rulers who took over after the Europeans left, um generally screwed things up quite a bit and therefore wanted to blame everything on the legacy of colonialism, you know, like uh you you see dysfunction within the black community in Africa in America, still blamed upon the legacy of slavery uh more than 150 years ago.
So when there's a mess, people like to, a lot of people like to blame others, and that's part of it.
The third part, I guess there are three.
The third part, of course, is that uh the the leftists and the communists in general uh hate anything to do with free trade, and as I'm gonna make the case, colonialist colonialism had a lot to do with free trade and was very successful uh and raised the standards of living in many of the countries.
And uh the communists hated this, and um generally, of course, uh the leftists who rule academia uh and to some degree the media uh have uh huge incentives to point out all of the negatives of colonialism.
So it's sort of a weird thing.
Um this may upset you, but I I think it's a basic fact.
Um your ancestors may have been conquered, right?
They may have been conquered.
It's not always the case, but generally it's the case that your ancestors got conquered because they sucked.
Because they were terrible at what they did.
Uh there were, of course, more advanced civilizations that have marched across the world from place to place and from time to time.
Those more advanced civilizations generally have better weaponry, better organization, better armies, more goods, more services, more gold, more resources, and they generally beat the local population, because the local population generally sucks.
And I'll get to my ancestors where this happened as well, but I just really want you to understand this, because this is something that has really been lost.
It doesn't mean that everyone who conquers everyone is great, and everyone who gets conquered is bad.
You know, there was Rome and Carthage.
Uh, but um there is a general pattern that the more industrialized, the more free, the more advanced civilizations come across the native civilizations in various places, and they generally maybe try to integrate them, try to work with them, but in general they end up uh winning.
And um the better team in sports is often the one that wins.
And uh that is something that is is important to remember.
So just to give me example or give you an example.
So uh I have uh Irish and German and British roots.
And let's just talk about England, right?
So England uh was populated to some degree by the Celts and other people and so on.
We'll just talk about the Celts for the moment.
Now the Celts uh sucked.
They were terrible.
Yeah, they had some ironworks and they made nice pottery and some jewelry and you know, Stonehenge and all that sort of stuff.
But in general, they sucked.
They were they sucked at math, they sucked at writing, they didn't even have a written language, to my knowledge, so they had no or they had only an oral history, which is basically just endless propaganda, but enough about public school.
Uh they sucked.
They they were terrible.
They would they had no uh concept of um uh building big buildings, right?
It's like the blacks in Africa, uh Sub-Saharan Africa in particular, right?
When the Europeans got there, they hadn't invented the wheel, they had no written language, and they'd never built a two-story building.
They sucked.
Your ancestors sucked, my ancestors sucked in general.
And I'm, for one, enormously thrilled and happy that the Romans uh came and built some roads and built some nice houses and brought peace, order, and law and better administration.
Uh my ancestors was so retarded that they thought they could take on the incredibly tight-knit phalanxes of the well-trained Roman army by painting themselves blue.
By painting themselves blue.
It's so mad.
It's like my ancestors, if they'd known about nuclear war, they would have imagined that the only people to survive a nuclear holocaust would be, or the only things to survive a nuclear holocaust would be A, cockroaches and B, the blue man group.
This is how insane.
Ah, I'm blue, look, I'm invulnerable because blue is like armor.
They were retarded.
And they got taken over by a more advanced civilization, to some degree, like it or not, that's how civilization spreads.
Generally, I don't think that if Cicero had come and performed his magical oratory in front of the scratching their ass, Queen Bodicia worshipping wheelchariot Mad Max swords on the wheels riding picts.
I don't think if he'd come and given them all of their wonderful oratory, they would have said, oh, I think that's lovely.
Perhaps it would be excellent if we developed a written language and some rule of law, uh, and uh they sucked.
They they they sucked, and so they were conquered, right?
A lot of times advanced civilizations run into other advanced civilizations, they kind of trade and so on.
But when your civilization sucks, in other words, when it really doesn't have any civilization to it, it's gonna get taken over.
And it happened to my ancestors, maybe it happened to your ancestors, and um if your ancestors sucked, they probably lost.
And some good things happened out of that.
Now, of course, we all sympathize with the underdog ever since the our selected leftists began taking over the genuine general media, but um, you know, I'm not I'm not averse to cheering for the winning team.
You know, I mean, my background, as I said, uh is um uh Irish, German and uh uh and British.
And when the Germans were, sorry, when the Romans were doing their good thing, when they had vigor and confidence in their civilization, and they weren't completely corrupted by uh the welfare state and the military industrial complex and uh sorry, wait, America.
No, we were talking about Rome.
That's a topic for another time, perhaps.
When the Romans didn't suck, then they went around conquering people and they bought roads and plumbing and sanitation and better health care and uh the rule of law and less corruption and free trade and free travel, and they got rid of the local uh parasitical warlords and um the thuggies in India, which was just the highway bandits who would just stab people for uh copper coins, uh, they were gotten rid of by the British.
And the local customs that were brutal and horrible were often gotten rid of, right?
So there was a custom in India before the British came along called Suti, which is where if you died, uh you would get burned, and then your wife, uh like your body would be burned in a funeral pyre, and your wife was supposed to throw herself on that and burn to death with you.
Just lovely stuff.
Not really a Hallmark card for that.
Now that you're burnt, perhaps you'd like to not read this.
And so uh, I don't know, maybe they got two for one um offers for uh funeral urns for ashes, I don't know.
But uh it was pretty brutal, pretty horrible, and it was done away with, as were a lot of brutal practices done away with uh by the uh Romans or by the British, by a lot of other people.
Cannibalism, somewhat opposed by the European empires and so on.
So generally your ancestors uh sucked, and when they stopped sucking, they generally went and conquered other people, right?
So the uh Romans uh didn't suck for a while, the Italians didn't suck for a while, a couple hundred years, and then um for a variety of reasons, they turned to the welfare warfare state, uh just like another empire we can talk about.
And then their population got lazy and entitled and resentful, and um they had to raise taxes uh to pay for all the welfare state, which in Rome and the Roman uh in Italy drove people out of the cities because you can't really collect taxes from the countryside, at least back in the day.
Knock, knock, knock, who's there?
Somebody with a sword who doesn't want to pay his taxes.
Oh, look, the pigs have a brain to eat.
And so when the Romans uh had to raise taxes, drove people out of the cities, which meant they couldn't conscript their uh si young men as soldiers, and so they had to pay a bunch of uh barbarians to be their military, to had to buy a bunch of mercenaries, blackwater.
And then what happened was um they continued to have to raise more taxes, which drove more young people out of the cities, which meant they had to pay more money to their barbarians, and then they eventually ran out of money to pay their soldiers with.
And then the soldiers came to take the money, sacked Rome, and dropped its population from a couple of mil down to 17,000 in a couple of years, and that was it for the Roman Empire.
And so Rome didn't suck for a while and uh imposed a fair amount of peace and order and trade on the world, and then it began to death increaseth in the suckiness, and then the uh the uh the uh barbarians who sucked less uh came and conquered Rome, and uh then you got the Dark Ages,
and then the Europeans began to suck a little bit less, and uh the Europeans then kind of hit a pinnacle after the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution of not suckingness, and went and imposed that not suckingness on the world as a whole, and then the Europeans sucked so badly they got involved in two world wars,
uh, the uh international order collapsed, uh, the uh former colonies were set free, where they began to ally themselves with Moscow and communism and destroy themselves almost to a T, with the exception of a few countries like India that managed to pull themselves out of that quagmire by abandoning the socialist policies of Nehru in the 1990s and began to recover and blah de blah blah.
So uh let's go into some of the uh details.
But just remember, yeah, your ancestors lost because they sucked.
My ancestors lost because they sucked.
So let's try not to suck.
That's really the whole point of this uh channel is uh use reason and evidence to not suck, and then you won't uh get conquered.
So let's uh go into um to India.
So India, of course, was ruled for about 200 years by uh the British.
And again, all European colonialism was not the same.
There's lots of studies that show that uh the British common law system was much more beneficial to the colonial recipients than the French uh system uh and uh German systems and so on.
So you can't just say European colonialism like that that uh uh talks about everything, but just particularly in this case talk about India and uh England.
Yeah, okay, there was corruption, there was some greed, there were some cruel reprisals against opponents, but um an Indian scholar named Dr. Lalfiani says, quote, it is important to note that there is a substantial list on the credit side of that.
He says uh the the credit side of British imperialism includes railways, roads, canals, mines, sewers, plantations, and the establishment of English law and language.
Of course, English uh language allows uh you to do business uh around the world and partake of the great uh British-speaking libertarian and uh literary traditions.
In fact, there's a lower caste group in India that's actually put up a shrine to the goddess they call English.
So great cities, including Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras were built, and some of the finest universities and museums in India were founded.
The first definitive atlas of India was drawn, and there were great social reforms, such as the eradication of thugi, violent highway robbers, the banning of the custom of Sutti, as it mentioned the burning of widows on the husband's funeral pyre, and female infanticide, strongly discouraged by the British.
Perhaps the most innovative of all was the bringing together of several different states into one unified India.
And that's important too.
Of course, India was just a bunch of warring principalities before the British came and uh united it.
And um there was uh the Indian army was formed, its top officers were trained in new military academies, modeled on Sandrist.
And of course, at the heart of India's development in the 19th and early 20th century was the expansion of the rail network.
It was originally built to secure the colonial hold, but it still prospers.
So within 25 years, 10,000 miles of track were laid joining distant parts of the nation.
By independence, 136,000 bridges had been constructed.
And um that's important.
I mean, imagine what it's like building railways in India.
Oh, if you've ever been bad in a past life, you get resurrected to build railways in India because it's savagely hot.
There's bugs as big as biplanes.
Oh, and by the way, the entire Pacific Ocean seems to dump itself regularly on the continent through the Monsign season.
So not quite as comfortable as building Thomas the Tank engine railways in Sheffield.
Today, the Indian Railways is the world's largest employer with 1.6 million workers on the payroll.
By the mid-19th century, as a result of British rule, India had a postal system.
The spread of the English language, of course, allows communication from between people from different backgrounds and the arts were thriving.
This is not exactly Shaltenitz and Gulagarpicalago.
Wildlife in ancient buildings such as the Taj Mahal were protected under British rule.
They also set up the first parks to protect uh rhinoceroses and tigers.
By 1914, the Indian mining industry, which was built from nothing by the British, was producing nearly 16 million tons of coal a year.
Health and life expectancy both improved dramatically, particularly because malaria was tackled and vaccination against smallpox was introduced.
Dr. Lavani adds, quote, the 200-year window of British governance was perhaps the only period in a thousand years of Indian history to date when the minorities and people of different religions felt more secure and less discriminated again with it against with a notable absence of killings, conflicts, and persecutions.
Now, after the independence, the first British Prime Minister, uh Prime Minister Nehru, ran the country along socialist lines.
Hey, central planning, let's align ourselves with the Soviet Union.
And India thus missed out on the post-war economic boom.
It took decades for the nation to reverse that trend.
Millions of people doomed to live in poverty as the result of uh the socialist policies of that.
And uh boy, you know, taxes.
We can only dream of taxes under British rule in India.
The Lenin tax burden fell from about 10% of net output in the 1850s to 5% by 1930.
5% taxation.
I pay more than that to buy a goddamn candy bar in Canada.
Uh, people complained that of course there were famines in India, but they were primarily environmental in origin.
And after 1900, the problem was alleviated by integrating the Indian market into the world market for food.
And there was a terrible famine in Bengal in 1943, but that was generally because the improvements introduced under British rule uh collapsed because of the strain imposed by the empire during World War II.
So, what else did British rule do?
Well, it increased the importance of trade from about one or two percent of national income in the mid-19th century to about 20% by 1913.
So international trade opened up considerably.
If you compare that with um other major, another major Asian empire, which is China, that remained under Asian political control, India fared very well under British rule.
Uh the Chinese economy during the time of British rule and the particularly later part uh shrank.
Of course, there was some informal European imperialism and so on, but um, you're gonna be ruled by someone.
You know, it's not like uh it was glorious freedom and anarchy without the British.
Uh, you probably would have in India ended up being ruled by the Mughals, turned Muslim with all of the joys uh that entails.
So you're gonna be ruled by someone, and uh, if you're gonna be ruled by someone, it's uh good to be ruled by the British.
The British oversaw the spread of good government, uh, they have called Western education, modern medicine, and the rule of law.
And uh they did a lot of charity, famine relief, massively massive immigration projects, most notably in the Punjab.
Uh, this was uh at the time when the British put the irrigation in, uh, that was the largest irrigation project in the world.
And uh again, perhaps uh the most priceless asset of all was English itself, uniting India and allowing it to do business around the world.
And that is uh quite uh quite fantastic.
Now, of course, the communists went in and started stirring up the natives.
You know, one of the things that's quite true is that until, and this is not my theory, this is the open purpose of communism was to rile up uh those under Western rule, uh, rile up minorities in America, rile up minorities uh wherever they could find them and turn them against the free market uh system.
Uh and uh you know, they did a very a very good job because uh Victorians done lost their vigor uh when 10 million got killed in World War One.
So let's look at some of the numbers.
So this is 1891 to 1938.
A percentage increase in selected Indian economic indicators.
So real value of exports in this time period, a little over 40 years went up 26%.
Real national income per capita went up 29%.
Real value of imports went up 32%.
The population increased 36%.
You know what population didn't increase was Jews under the Nazis.
And that's sort of important.
The population increased 36%.
Real national income went up 80% in the last 40 odd years of British rule.
The area of cultivated land increased 84%.
The railway mileage per capita increased 116 miles.
Acreage irrigated went up 137%.
Sorry, railway mileage per capita went up 116%.
Factory employment went up 448%.
Real value of bank deposits increased 531%, and coal production went up 1,318%.
Now this was fairly common in British rule around the world.
The British felt they called it at the time the white man's burden, later to be reversed and turned into a pretty bad Harry Balfonte movie.
But the British endeavored to introduce the institutions and the ways of thinking that they regarded as essential to becoming wealthy.
So free trade, free migration and infrastructure improvements and investments, of course, balanced budgets, gold currency, the gold gold-backed currency, the rule of law, and an administration that could not be bought.
And it is even admitted within India, the degree to which British rulers or the British administrators, there are only about a thousand to run the entire continent.
They were pretty incorruptible.
And that's quite remarkable.
So let's just compare.
I mean, I'm going to make the case at the end that the real imperialism has been what is euphemistically called foreign aid, which is basically taking money from the poor people of rich countries, giving it to the rich people in poor countries so that they could buy weapons to further oppress their citizens, right?
And so the real imperialism has been the leftist focus on foreign aid rather than foreign trade.
But let's look at some of the comparisons.
In 1997, only about 5% of the world's stock of capital was invested in countries with per capita incomes of 20% or less of the US.
Right?
This is important, right?
Countries around the world who have a fifth or less of US per capita GDP, they only get 5% of the world's capital investment, which is kind of what you need to raise worker productivity, which is the essence and basis of economic improvements.
So less than 5% of the world's capitalists invested in poor countries in 1913.
That figure was 25%.
Five times more money was being invested in poor countries in 1913 than more recently in the 90s.
And that's partly because, of course, the rule of law has uh fallen apart.
The share of developing countries in total international liabilities or debt, which is good, right?
That's the good kind of debt.
It was 11% in 1995 compared with 47% in 1938.
So before the second world war, there was much more investment uh in uh in the third world.
Even in 1900, as opposed to 11% now is 33%.
And uh that's um really good.
The existence of a formal empire uh really helped encourage investors to put their money in less developed economies.
I mean, you don't want to put your money in an economy with some local warlord who's just gonna, you know, uh shoot your people and uh sell your gold and use it to buy weapons with which to shoot more people.
Between 1884 and 1914, the returns on a sample of imperial investments, oh, doesn't that sound like it should come with that bum bum bum bum bum bum bum?
The Death Star Destroyer of Imperial Instance.
Um, the returns are were somewhat lower than returns on roughly comparable domestic investments.
So that's a technical way of basically, you know, I used to be an entrepreneur in the software field and ran a green company uh or helped co-run a green company a green company, and uh we got a lot of investment from people who were willing to accept a lower return on their investment because they wanted to help the environment.
And uh this happens uh quite a bit.
Green investments sometimes pay less, but you get that feel-good feeling of helping out the environment.
Uh, unless, of course, it's uh got anything to do with President Obama and his focus on investment.
But that's a topic for another time.
Um the the British wanted to invest in the developing world because the white man's burden was considered to be to bring civilization to the world as a whole.
And so they did invest, even though they got a lower return because it was considered to be a good and virtuous thing to do.
Again, not exactly the Nazis and the Jews.
Now, around 1846, studies show that Britain could have actually withdrawn from the empire with almost no blowback and reaped what was called a decolonization dividend of a 25% tax cut.
A 25% tax cut.
But they stayed.
And that's because they felt it was the mission, you know, again, you can argue that, but the motives were in many ways quite positive.
And it cost England and the British taxpayers quite a bit.
But you know, it's the old thing.
Maybe you can afford a gas burning car, maybe you feel that a Prius is better for the environment, so you'll bet pay more for a Prius because virtue.
And this is important.
So influential paper that got published in 95.
Well, this is something really, really fundamental to understand.
One of the principal reasons for the widening, widening international inequality, particularly the 70s and the 80s, was protectionism in less developed economies.
Yes, I'm talking to you, Donald Trump.
Protectionism, of course, is raising tariffs against goods coming into the country in order to basically get votes from domestic workers and donations from domestic corporations, right?
So you've got some sweater manufacturer that can't compete with someone overseas.
It's easier to bribe a politician to raise a tariff wall against foreign sweaters than it is to upgrade and improve your efficiency.
So protectionism after the fall of the British Empire, and we'll get to the degree of protection, protectionism in the British Empire, which was virtually zero.
Well, when the uh formerly colonial countries achieved independence, they jacked up their trade barriers.
And this, of course, was similar to the jacking up of trade barriers that occurred in the 1930s among the US and the European powers, um, which uh which was an attempt to deal with the central banking created and fiat currency created great depression.
Uh they they jacked up their um protections barriers against each other, and as Bastiat noted um hundreds of years ago, when trade stops flowing across borders, soldiers will start flowing across borders.
So the best way to avoid war with another country is to embed your economy into theirs through free and open trade.
So in the 1970s and 1980s, the gap between third and first world incomes began to widen, largely because of protectionism in the socialist-run newly liberated economies.
In the words of the researchers, quote, open economies tend to converge on the developed economies, but closed economies do not.
You understand that?
So think of this uh as um you know, a bunch of columns that are separated, right?
A bunch of columns that are separated.
You can pour different amounts of water.
One can be low and high and medium, but as long as they're separated, they can remain unequal, right?
But if you put holes in the bottom, they will tend to even out.
And the holes are free trade, and that's what's important.
So the open economies, which were definitely part of the British Empire, and to some degree part of the other empires as well, French and Dutch, and to a small degree Germany.
Germany, of course, never had any empires or any colonial um presence in the Middle East.
So why they have to take migrants now as a result of European imperialism is only because apparently all white people are the same.
So the open economies, those who had free trade in the 19th and early parts of the 20th century, grew at 4.49% per year.
That's huge.
That is a huge amount of growth.
We can only dream of such growth these days.
So the open free trade colonial-run economies grew at 4.49% per year.
That means that you double your income in 15 years.
15 years is all it takes to double your income when you got a growth of 4.49% per year.
The closed countries, the closed economies grew at 0.69% per year.
So the open economies, those with uh colonial enforced free trade, grew much faster.
And those with closed uh economies and high tariffs grew much more slowly.
So the open economies grew doubled their income every 15 years.
The closed economies doubled their income every hundred years, assuming that there's no political interruptions or chaos or civil wars or decapitations or coups or God knows what, which never seems to happen for a hundred years straight in any non-free society.
So would you rather live under British rule and have your income double every 15 years, or would you rather be free and live under a poverty-grinding economy with local rulers where if you're as lucky as could never happen, your income might double every hundred years?
You might want to eat your veggies and do some exercising, because it's gonna take a while.
Now, in the previous era of globalization, and this is generally seen like the mid-19th century until the first world war, economic openness, all the stuff that leads to real growth, was imposed by colonial powers, principally, of course, Britain.
And they didn't impose it just on Asian and African colonies, but also on South America, and even using some pretty aggressive gunboat diplomacy, Japan.
Oh here's another thing that's important about European imperialism.
Do you think that the end of slavery was a good thing?
Thank you, white Western European imperialists and colonists, right?
Because the fact that England in particular had this amazing naval power and had a very strong moral commitment to ending slavery, which began in the 18th century, well, began in the early part of the 19th century, reached its fruition in the first third of the 19th century.
The fact that they were willing to use their blood and treasure to oppose slavery, to board slave ships, to arrest slave owners, to free the slaves, and to buy off this moral crusade.
You know, do you like the fact that there's no slavery in the world today, which is an institution that existed in all places under all races and cultures, everywhere across the world, from the beginning of time until you know that that first Bonobo thought maybe he could use Iraq as a tool until uh the 1830s uh throughout the empire.
Uh if you like the end of slavery, then you've got to love British colonialism.
I mean, you just have to.
I mean, that's you mean you you cannot if you want, but then you're just an idiot.
Uh sorry.
You don't care, you don't get the end of slavery without British colonialism.
So if you think slavery is bad, thank yourself some stuck up white guy who can't dance.
So they imposed this uh all over the world, and uh as a result, economies grew much better.
Now, another general principle of economics is the more free the movement there is of labor, the more international income levels will tend to converge.
So we talked about those columns earlier with the water, different levels of water in it.
And at the bottom is capital, right?
Free trade and so on, goods, capital and services, and people, right?
So if people can flow back and forth, international income levels will tend to converge and all rise together.
And uh that's very important as well.
The more free movement there is of labor, the more income levels will tend to converge.
Again, assuming free market, modern Europe is not part of that at all, for reasons we've talked about in uh the death of the Euro presentation on this channel.
So, one of the reasons why modern globalization, there was actually more globalization in the early part of the 20th century than there is in the early part of the 21st century.
One of the reasons that modern globalization is so associated with high levels of inequality is that there's unbelievable levels of restrictions on the free movement of labor from the less developed to the developed societies.
This, of course, is a great tragedy.
Uh, as I've argued in what pisses me off about the migrant crisis, if you don't have a welfare state, you don't have a coercive redistributionist state, then you can, of course, welcome people to come to your land and everyone's happy.
The moment you get a welfare state, uh, you have a problem in that you don't know who's coming to work and who's coming to leech off the taxpayer.
And uh, so this is a huge problem.
Now, the history of the British Empire, um, well, the British act actively promoted emigration to at least some of its colonies, and it did almost nothing to heed the movements of British people wherever they wanted to go.
And uh, that's really, really important.
So there was a cross-country study of post-second world war economic growth, and the researcher uh said that there were six significant variables most likely to influence a country's economic performance.
And by the way, some of these are my words, some of these are researchers' words, the links will all be below.
So, what do you need for economic growth?
Boom, bingo, bango, bongo.
Number one, the provision of secondary and higher education.
Um, I'm just telling you the facts.
Don't get mad at it.
Don't shoot the messenger.
This actually only only holds true for men.
The research does not support the hypothesis that female education is good for economic growth.
Maybe it indirectly reduces fertility and so on.
Educate the men and you will do well.
Educate the women as far as economic growth goes, and you're kind of wasting your money.
So the second thing you need is a provision of some kind of rational system, an effective system of health care.
This does not mean socialized medicine, it doesn't mean a one-payer system, it just means that the healthcare has to work.
There is a correlation between economic growth and life expectancy, which, you know, kind of what you'd expect.
More life expectancy is fewer children, fewer mouths to feed, and more accumulation of knowledge and wisdom from the old.
So good health care.
And again, the British bought education, the British bought healthcare vaccinations and uh against malaria.
The third was uh allowing for birth control, also very good for economic growth.
It's really tough to grow an economy when all of your capital is growing into feeding the squawking beaks of the young, and so uh limiting uh the population growth is very important for um being able to save the capital to invest the capital to improve the economy.
Uh the fourth thing to grow your economy, avoid non-productive government expenditures, since big government is bad for growth.
You know, all those bridges to nowhere and all of this crap that the government does is really bad.
The fifth way to grow is the enforcement of the rule of law.
Uh economies tend to grow when um capital can be invested and a reasonable return into capital can be anticipated because contracts are enforced, there's a rule of law, all that kind of good stuff.
So you've got to enforce the rule of law.
I mean, who's going to sign a 99-year contract if you don't even think the law will be enforced?
And who's going to sign a contract with anyone if the judges can just be bought out by the person with the most money?
Once you get corruption, you get economic decay and degradation.
But enough about South Africa.
The sixth was the avoidance of inflation above 10% per year.
And whether that's cause or effect, whether that's just a signal of the government inflating the money supply in order to buy votes, who knows, right?
Another researcher came up with another list.
Just wanted to point out the similarities, and it's important to remember the relationship between British colonialism in particular and these lists.
Number one, secure rights of private property.
That encourages saving and investment.
You have to accumulate capital to grow your economy.
So you've got to secure the rights of personal liberty against both the abuses of tyranny and crime and corruption.
You have to enforce rights of contract.
You have to provide a stable government, governed by publicly known rules.
You have to provide a responsive government.
One of the problems with foreign aid is the governments then are more responsive to Western politicians and douchebag rock stars in sunglasses than they are to their own local people, right?
Because their money comes from foreign aid rather than the taxes of their people.
So you have to have a government that's responsive to the people.
And positions, right?
So you don't just buy your position and use it to shake people down.
You have to provide moderate, efficient, ungready government.
You have to hold taxes down, and you have to reduce the government's claim on the social surplus.
Whenever there's an excess, you don't just grab it.
Now, the other thing too is that throughout the British Empire, to a large degree, there was a gold standard.
And a gold standard for those who don't know is that you can't just make up money out of thin air, right?
Like the quasi-private, mostly fascistic Federal Reserve in the United States can just create money by typing it into its own bank account.
Hey, it's a good way to destabilize the country and uh the economy, and in particular, hit people the hardest who are the poorest and on fixed income by devaluing their currency.
A gold standard means you can't create money out of thin air because each money can be each dollar can be traded in for a certain amount of gold.
And so why were British investors willing to risk a huge amount of their money by savings by buying assets and securities way overseas?
I mean, doing business overseas is very complex and very difficult.
Well, reasonable answer is that the adoption of the gold standard by developing economies gave kind of like a better business bureau or a good housekeeping keeping seal of approval.
And uh they've shown that when governments went on to a gold standard, uh, they um they had to provide less interest because you've got an asset, it's not just a piece of paper, Zimbabwe wallpaper, right?
So when a governments went on the gold standard, you can always take your government bonds and trade them in for gold.
And um, when you went onto the gold standard, it reduced your uh bond price by about 40 basis points.
That's quite a bit, and that means that the government has to pay less uh in terms of um uh interest, so less money is flowing out, and uh also it means that the government is restraining itself from printing money and destroying the economy.
Before 1914, membership of the gold standard was a great way of getting cheap loans as a member of the British Empire.
And that's very important as well.
Now, the British colonial administrators, at least some of these requirements for economic growth were among its defining characteristics.
Now, British colonial rule was not democratic outside the Dominions like Australia, New Zealand and the American betrayal bastards and Canada and so on.
It was not democratic outside of the Dominions.
But so what?
When it comes to economic growth, democracy does not very much correlate with economic performance.
In fact, democracy, particularly when it breaks the bonds of any kind of rule of law or bill of rights or constitution, it just becomes a massive mob rule.
I mean, the late Roman Empire was very democratic and basically committed a slow seppuku lace democracide by buying votes for degrading the population, both genetically and morally.
So the rule of law, of course, key prerequisite for sustainable growth.
And not just any law, not just any law.
Recent survey of 49 countries concluded that common law countries have the strongest economic growth.
French civil law countries, the weakest.
Legal protections of investors.
And so shareholders and creditors were protected under British law, less so under the smoky bacon-flavored cheese-eating surrender monkeys known as the French.
And uh so again, you wanted to be rule.
But again, not all colonialism is the same.
From the 1840s until the 1930s, the British political elite and electorate remained wedded to the principle of laissez-faire.
Laissez faire, laisse-nous faire, leave us be, famous cry of a French merchant when the French king kept saying, Well, what can we do to help you?
It's just leave us alone, stop helping us.
And um, so uh, you know, if uh Pavarotti is singing and I'm on backup, I think he's gonna turn around and say, please stop helping, please stop helping me.
Oh, please stop helping me sing.
And so they basically just said, let us alone.
And the British, you know, fought like crazy about this.
Uh and uh they passed, they got rid of their protectionism around the corn laws and so on.
They really fought hard for La Say Faire.
I read, gosh, many years ago, I wrote a novel called Just Poor.
I did the research, and there was a book written.
I mean, it's kind of tough to parse because it's semi-Shakespean language called England's Treasure by Foreign Traffic.
Boy, it wasn't so much keeping up with the Kardashians as it was raising the entire planet from slavery and servitude.
So the British were really into Laissez-Faire.
And certainly from the 1870s onwards, British tariffs were way lower than those of the Europeans.
Uh tariffs in the British Empire as a whole were kept low.
Now you could argue, well, the Dominions had higher tariffs, but in the late 19th century, the Dominions won the right to set their own protective tariffs, uh, leading to a long-established particularly American tradition of um uh of protectionism.
So if um if the British had abandoned control over the colonies, higher tariffs would have been jacked up right away, because we saw that happen right after the British left.
Other forms of trade discrimination uh and so on.
It's not hypothetical, right?
Because the highly protectionist policies were adopted by the United States and India after they got their independence.
And um there were tariff regimes that were adopted by the imperial rivals of Britain, France, Germany, and India after the late 1870s.
And these trade wars just went up, right?
And so what happens is, of course, you know, you you you're blocking up these holes at the bottom of the columns, and the water stops uh evening out.
So if you just look at duties, uh taxes, uh duties on uh primary products or on manufacturers, right?
Raw materials or manufactured materials, Britain was by far the least protectionist of the imperial powers.
In 1913, yes, you have to stop right before the war, average tariff rates on imported manufacturers were 13% in Germany, over 20% in France, 44% of the United States, 84% in Russia.
So just go over that.
It's this tariffs on imported manufactured goods.
13% in Germany, over 20% in France, 44% in the United States, 84% in Russia.
Boy, it's too bad they couldn't have taxed those Bolsheviks and prevented them coming in.
In Britain, the tariffs were zero.
It matters what you believe.
This is why I keep promoting free trade, because I care about people keeping breath in their bodies.
From the mid-19th until the mid-20th century, Britain acted as the world's banker.
It channelled in massive amounts of British and other European savings overseas.
By 1914, total British assets overseas amounted to somewhere between 3.1 and 4.5 billion pounds.
Okay, that's just the price of a Kardashian wedding now, but back in the day, the British gross domestic product in 1914 was 2.5 billion.
Their overseas assets were between 3.1 and 4.5 billion dollars.
That is a lot.
And those resources, they weren't foreign aid, they were going out there actually working to help improve these countries.
Between 1865 and 1914, as much investment went to Africa, Asia, and Latin America from England, 29.6%, as stayed in the UK, about 31.8%.
So as much money was flowing overseas because of free trade, because of no protectionism, because of the free movement of labor, because of the rule of law, because of greater education in these countries, there was a huge amount of capital going overseas, as much as almost as much as what stayed in the in the UK.
Now, money invested in a de jure British colony, right?
One was directly ruled like India, or a de facto colony like Egypt was more secure than money invested in an independent, albeit informally colonized country like Argentina.
Right?
So if you went to invest in a British colony, whether it was directly or indirectly ruled, directly India, indirectly Egypt, that money was more secure than someplace like Argentina.
More than three-quarters of all foreign capital invested in sub-Saharan Africa was invested in British colonies.
And Britain didn't rule three-quarters of sub-Saharan Africa.
So that is really, really important.
That the British rule in particular brought investment, brought new jobs, brought economic improvements, and so on.
And this doesn't even count the amount of money that the government spent building sanitation and infrastructure and roads and so on.
You can watch Monty Python's great scene from The Life of Brian.
What are the Romans ever done for us?
Brought peace, aqueduct, wine, voting.
I don't know.
It's pretty funny.
You should uh you should check it out.
So British investment versus foreign aid.
Uh investment raises the standard of living of everyone, extends their lifespan and so on, and allows the population to grow in a more controlled manner.
But foreign aid is just handing money over to dictators hoping that governments are going to be wise with their money, which endless amounts of economic research shows is the worst thing.
The bad in terms of Western intervention was not colonialism, uh, it is the modern practice of foreign aid, not to mention arms sales.
So the results of Anglo-globalization and globalization were truly astounding.
So they combined free trade, uh, open migration, uh, unprecedented overseas investments, and uh this propelled huge parts of the British Empire to the forefront of world economic development.
In terms of the production of manufactured goods per head of population, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand ranked higher than Germany in 1913.
Australia, Australia, the land of criminals, and sunburns.
And big knives, if I remember rightly.
I don't know, again, all my information of Australia from Crocodile Dundee movies.
But anyway.
So manufactured goods per head of the household was higher in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand than even Germany in 1913.
Between 1820 and 1950, the Dominion economies were the fastest growing in the world.
Per capita GDP grew more rapidly in Canada than the United States between 1820 and 1913, and that was when the population was pitted in a horrible war against laser-wielding beavers.
So they had a huge amount to overcome.
And so, good job, eh.
And this is uh just absolutely important, just in in um uh in bringing about the free movement of capital and bringing technology and so on.
Uh, You know, in India as well.
The British created an integrated Indian free market, they unified weight measures and they unified the currency, they abolished transit duties and introduced a legal framework which promoted private property rights and contract law more explicitly.
And they were relatively uncorruptible.
Now, of course, later on in the empire, there was a lot of insurgents, and that's because they were being armed and fed and led and had their resentment stoked by the communists and so on.
So, yes, later on there was problems.
But this is sort of earlier on.
And uh in India again, between 1891 and 1938, the acreage under irrigation more than doubled.
And um these kinds of things are absolutely essential.
You know, kind of once you have them, you don't really notice them, but before you have them, it's really significant.
Um they deployed steamships on internal waterways, and they built more than 40,000 miles of railway track, which was five times the amount of railways constructed in China in the same period.
And if I remember rightly, Chinese, not the worst engineers in the world, Google.
And um that is um really, really uh important to uh understand.
We've got railways, ports, major irrigation systems, the telegraph, sanitation, medical care, universities, postal system, courts of law, these are all assets that would almost certainly have never developed independent of uh British rule and have had a lasting impact uh on that.
So this idea that the Europe of the British in particular just went in and pillaged all these countries, is like, well, the countries were pretty desperately broke to begin with.
Uh and uh British uh, you know, of course they took some stuff out, but they created a lot more than they took out.
And of course, you know, India had had several thousand years of Indian regime control, and um what happened?
The number of Indians in education increased sevenfold between 1881 and 1941.
And then, of course, the nationalists who came to power in 1947, uh, when the Raj came to an end, they just went to this what one Neil Ferguson has called a sub-Soviet state-led autarchy, whose achievement was to widen further the gap between Indian and British incomes, which reached its widest historic extent in 1973.
A simple calculation of the ratio of British per capita GDP to that of 41 former colonies is instructive.
Between 1960 and 1990, the gap between the British and their former subjects narrowed in just 14 out of 41 cases.
So I don't know, people in Zimbabwe and South Africa and all, oh, it's a legacy of British rule.
The reality is that British rule was unbalanced, conducive to economic growth.
And tragically, most of the post-independence rulers have failed to improve upon it.
So sorry this was such a quick sprint and erase through these facts, but I think it's just important to get some of the facts out to remind you that foreign aid is the real imperialism and needs to be uh ended.
And um uh looking back upon this legacy of uh British rule uh in particular and saying that it was all about imperialism and death and predation and so on.
Look, there are tons of examples in history where there's massive amounts of uh uh theft and predation and destruction.
Uh, you can just look throughout history of the empire.
The thing, I mean, just Genghis Khan, you know, apparently he you know, hold up a hedgehog to rape if you can't find a woman.
I mean, he just you know responsible for uh uh pretty much uh all Japanese pop groups these days, genetically.
And um, if you ignore all of that, uh then what happens is, and look, this is really one of the challenges uh in in history as a whole.
Um, and I just want to close on this minor rant, which I take personally because I'm trying to do my own good in the world and receiving, let's just say, some flack for it, but it's okay, they only shoot you when you're over the target.
But um why is it that so little good gets done in the world?
Why is it so hard to progress?
Because it's the hammer that it's the nail that sticks up, gets hammered down, right?
It's the tall poppy that gets cut down.
It is the group that focuses most, or the individuals who focus most on creating the most good who generally get most crapped upon by everyone else.
Because those of us who advance human society make everyone else feel bad and expose the predations and corruptions and evils of those who came before us.
And so um who gets blamed for slavery now?
Europeans.
It's insane.
Europeans, first of all, I mean, particularly in the West, they only took 6% of the slave trade.
Secondly, they only bought slaves from Africans who had um uh who had uh caught those slaves.
The blacks caught the slaves, took them to the coast and sold them to the uh West.
And uh, of course, Westerners couldn't go into Africa to catch slaves because the average Westerner lasted less than a year in Africa because of bioincompatibility with the intense horde of god-awful stuff that tends to grow uh in in the African ecosystem that enjoys taking down human beings with great pleasure.
You know, think of uh you know things like AIDS, think of things like um Ebola and and all this kind of stuff.
So, you know, British uh had very little to do with the slave trade, uh, you know, treated their slaves a lot better, the slaves that went into the Muslim lands, the male slaves were generally castrated, which is why there's not a big black population in Islam.
So, you know, the British uh fought against it and the Western Europeans ended it, um, the white Western Christian Europeans ended it.
And now who gets blamed for slavery?
Who is uh constantly having slavery thrown in the face?
Well, it's see, the moment you try and do something better, you are showing that you are sensitive to the suffering of others.
And then people go, the the rest of the world goes, oh, you're sensitive to the suffering of people of others.
Great, you've got empathy.
So I'm now gonna push and hit and hammer that giant empathy button to get resources out of you.
Uh so being good in the world generally gets you a big giant laser target on your forehead.
Uh, and uh this is one of the reasons why it's so hard to be good in the world.
And um there was colonialism all throughout history, and most of it, if not all of it, was far more brutal than in particular British colonialism.
And now who are the only people who are screamed at as colonial evil imperial powers?
Well, the British and the Europeans.
The Europeans may have deserved it a little bit more.
The British certainly deserve it much less than is imputed.
Uh but that is why it takes so long for humanity to improve, because the people who go ahead, they don't get trophies uh on their graves.
All they get is arrows in their back.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Main Radio.
Thank you so much for watching and listening.
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