Stefan Molyneux discusses anarcho-capitalism as it relates to today’s political quagmire, the historical context of libertarianism, and the impossibility of bringing change to the two-party system and the connection between central banking and endless war.
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All right, let's talk with Stephan Molyneux.
Am I saying it right?
Yes, you are.
Can you hear me?
I can.
Welcome to the show.
Well, thank you so much.
It's very great to be here.
Another LouRockwell.com writer and a fellow anarcho-capitalist and radio host as well.
Isn't that right?
That is correct, although it would be more accurate to say that I do a philosophical podcast.
It was called Free Domain Radio, and it was the top ten finalist in the 2007 podcast award.
And it is really centered around philosophy, but of course, any rational philosophy, I believe or would argue, ends up in the anarcho-capitalist sphere.
And of course, I'm virulently anti-war.
I've been published on antiwar.com, of course, so I thought it might be worth a chance.
Yeah.
Well, that sounds great.
And the website then is freedomdomainradio.com, right?
It's freedomdomainradio.com.
Oh, freedomdomain.
Is that right?
Did I get it?
Yeah, freedomdomainradio.com.
Okay, see, I'm sorry.
I'm not as prepared as I should be for this one.
No problem.
And help me with your last name one time?
Sure.
It's Stephan Molyneux, silent ex at the end, French legacy back to the Asian court, invasions and the battle of Hastings and so on.
Yeah, it's a French name, although I was born in Ireland and grew up in England.
Oh, okay.
Well, yeah, Molyneux, that's not that hard.
I figured it could possibly be much more difficult than that, but nah, that turned out okay.
So, listen.
Hey, let's talk about mercantilism.
I got this theory that the problem here, more than anything, is the combination between state power and the vested private interests, the people primarily who are already successful, who've already made it in life, they've all figured out that the best thing to do is to invest in congressmen, and that way have the police power of the state ready to protect them at all costs.
And I want to kind of beat on this drum as much as I can because I know that the liberal left in America, who are my allies when it comes to opposing American empire, they believe that the imperial system, which dominates in America and therefore the world, is free market capitalism, and that's what's wrong with it.
I would like to prove that there's no one more opposed to the American empire than devotees of free market capitalism.
Help me out.
Well, I think that's entirely right, and one of the things that people don't understand about the state, you know, there's this old quote that says that the government is a fantasy by which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else.
The government, as a massive and coercive agency of the forced redistribution of wealth, basically acts as a huge enabler for this kind of pillaging of the general population.
So what happens is the corporations who don't wish to compete, or who are facing other corporations in other markets who are subsidized by their government, end up investing not so much in capital improvements and labor relations and so on, but they end up investing in the legislative process.
So, I mean, if I had some, I don't know, sweater manufacturer in Nantucket, and I was concerned about goods coming in from China, I would have sort of two choices under the current system.
I could either try and innovate and find better ways of serving my customers, or I could take all of my profits and instead of reinvesting them in my business, I could invest in government legislation.
And what that does is it pushes the cost of enforcement away from me and onto the general taxpayers, who then pay higher for their goods and also pay through increased taxes.
And so without the government, it's impossible for me as just some sweater manufacturing guy to prevent the kind of inflow of competitive goods.
I can't block all the ports.
I can't accept my own customs.
People would just bypass me.
They'd look at me as some crazy lunatic.
So once you have the state with its universal power of compulsion, what happens is you can offload the cost of this kind of corruption onto your very customers, which would be impossible in a free market.
And this, of course, works all the way up to war.
One example that is not war-based, which we all sort of understand, is a prescription drug program for seniors, which was effectively written by the pharmaceutical lobby.
And the pharmaceutical lobby invested about $10 million in lobbying efforts and have reached reward in the tens of billions of dollars.
And of course, given the system, any CEO who didn't pursue that path would be kicked out pretty quickly.
But it's not the fault of the free market.
It's the fault of this overlap between corporate power, which buys off the political power, which inflicts these terrible and violent rules on the citizens.
And you know, it's interesting in history how Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, while it had its problems, the labor theory of value and other flaws, basically his invisible hand free market theory was being argued against, not socialism, but against mercantilism, against the belief that you have to have the government of whatever country you're based out of controlling the land where you're getting your resources from or else you can't get them.
That was the point that he was refuting back then, in 1776.
That's right.
And it's an eternal curse that goes on not only between nations, but within nations.
So you have a localized form of mercantilism in the form of certain types of unions.
And I don't mean unions that sort of get together and want to improve a lot of workers based on voluntary association.
I mean those kinds of unions that turn to government for the enforcement of things like licensing and closed shops and the right to beat up the sort of people who want to break the strike and so on.
So you have a kind of internal mercantilism, which goes all the way from the licensing of doctors through the AMA, who sort of have a tranquil hold on the production of doctors, so to speak, which drives the price up and then makes everybody yell for government intervention.
So you have internally, you can look at something like the public school system, which is a very mercantilist kind of agency.
Any economic group that uses the government to artificially distort the free market process by restricting supply, by increasing demand, by keeping out competition, is essentially a mercantilist institution.
And they are myriad.
Just look at the farmers' lobby.
They are myriad throughout society.
Well, I'm reminded of Harry Brown's old phrase that it's really not the abuse of power that's in question.
It's the power to abuse, and that frankly, if you take the average amoral or even immoral businessman and you lay out for him a list of options, one of which is invest in congressmen who pay back extraordinary profits, that's an option they're going to take.
As long as it's available to them, they will invest in congressmen, right?
Senators, two bits, and house members a dime a dozen.
Well, people mistake the free market for the profit motive, and the two are not the same.
I mean, in the Soviet empire, you had a profit motive to join the Politburo, which was wealth, fame, and a nice dachau on the black seat.
So human beings will always seek to maximize their gains, right?
Will always seek the profit motive.
But it has a huge amount to do with the structure that people are operating in, the legal and political structures that people are operating in, which determines how that profit motive is deployed.
So in a situation where, as you say, you can go and buy a congressman and get a 10,000% return on investment, then people will seek that out because they have the profit motive.
That's what you want to do when you're in business, and if you can maximize your ROI, you're going to try and do that.
And so people then blame the profit motive which they associate with capitalism, even though this current system has companies like Halliburton profiting enormously over the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, and people somehow think that has something to do with capitalism, and really that's just profit optimization and a corrupt framework.
Well, what about people who argue that we have this giant national government, we're not going to be able to get rid of it anytime soon, and that what we need is more democracy?
In Republican years, it's just impossible to overlook the fact that these criminal corporations are just emptying the US Treasury at rates unheard of, this corporatism and corruption.
Don't we need a good, strong injection of democracy so that the people through their representatives can limit the power of these criminals?
Well, when I see the question of democracy in action, I always turn to the operation of the free market.
The ultimate democracy, of course, is the free market.
So if you look at what's available in your grocery store, then what's available is what people actually want.
They vote with their dollars, and that determines what the management of the grocery store is going to put on the shelf.
It doesn't mean you're always going to get your way, but that's the ultimate in majority rule.
You pay with your dollars and you get a, quote, democratic return.
There's simply no way to substitute a violent, coercive political system.
There's no way that you can ever get that to recreate or to sort of reenact the subtle gradations that are involved in the economic choices of millions or hundreds of millions of people.
So I agree that we need more, quote, democratic choice, but there's simply no way to get that with a coercive political system.
Because the moment you set it up, and you know this from American history, a little over 250 years ago, they set up this minimalist government as we overlook things like slavery and the rights of women and children and so on.
But for the average white guy, it was an incredibly free system.
No passports, no income tax, no federal tax, and the government was like 2% the size that it is now.
And within a generation, you've got, well, actually, very shortly after, you've got the whiskey rebellion, which is put down by force.
Within a generation to a generation and a half, you have a civil war, which cost the lives of 600,000 people.
Then you have public schooling, then you have, you know, the Fed was created, and then you have World War I.
You have the expansion of the monetary powers of the government, you've got the Depression, you've got World War II.
I mean, you sort of could go on and on, but it never takes any time whatsoever for the government, whatever government it is, to break these sort of quote bounds of whatever restrictions are put on it, because they're just pieces of paper.
Whereas the profit motive combined with the universal power to use violence will always break any mere paper restrictions, so I just don't think it's ever been proven possible.
And you couldn't get a better laboratory than the American Revolution.
I mean, you've never had a smaller government in history, and it took no time at all to sort of overleap its original restrictions and begin turning into another Roman Empire.
If you take a step backwards, you know, a couple of hundred years isn't very long to get from the Articles of Confederation to the biggest government ever anywhere.
Yeah, for sure, and this has been repeated over and over again, right?
This is why I get into the most vociferous and exciting argument with people with regards to looking for a political solution.
That even if you look at the history of libertarianism and if you include classical liberalism, it's been about 150 years that people have been trying to find a political way to restrain the power of the state.
And all that's happened is the state has grown asymptotically over that time period, and I'm not going to assume that I'm a smarter guy than Von Mises or a better writer than Rand or a more astute politician than Ron Paul.
But the reality is that looking for a political solution has not worked despite enormous and incredible intellectual efforts, personal talents, charisma, and so on.
It just doesn't work, and I think that we need to find another approach to reigning this particular in the BSNN rather than trying to, you know, it's sort of like an atheist can't go into the Vatican trying to become pope and then disband organized religion.
It's just never going to work, and I don't think in any way a person who's particularly interested in personal liberties can attempt to infiltrate the government and undo it from within.
It's just that the whole profit motive belies that possibility.
And, you know, philosophically speaking, I guess you have 20% who really consider themselves on the left and probably 20% on the right, and then most other people or somewhere in between consider themselves some kind of moderate or another centrist or independent of one stripe or another.
But pretty much everybody believes in our society.
Everybody believes in force, believes in government, and you can have right-wingers who hate the IRS and yet promote unlimited war.
You can have left-wingers who, you know, oppose at every turn police murdering people in their neighborhoods and yet support sending IRS guys with guns to go and steal money from the rich people.
Everybody believes in liberty for issue one, two, and three, but they believe in force for issue four, five, and six.
Yeah, I mean, that's what's so frustrating about people on the left, right, because people on the left totally get how aggressive and destructive foreign policy is, right?
I mean, we'll just talk about America, though it's not particularly true of America more so than any other country.
But people on the left have excellent, excellent analysis of the corruptions of corporate power and the problems of foreign policy.
The people on the left, they really hate guns being pointed at foreigners, but they really love guns being pointed at domestic citizens.
Whereas people on the right, they really love guns being pointed at foreigners, and they really hate guns being pointed at domestic citizens.
And then you have libertarians and anarchists who say, we shouldn't point guns at anyone, and people are like, oh no, that's a radical solution, you know.
The real battle in ideas, unfortunately, still remains, where should we point the gun that's in the room called government?
The debate has still to get to the place where people say, maybe we should put down the gun called government.
Now, when you recounted the massive and incredible growth of the American government over a very quick 200-year time span there, you mentioned they created the Fed and then World War I, and you seem to imply there was some sort of connection there.
Well, sure, yeah.
I mean, I think that's fairly indisputable that you simply can't have a war, especially a war that goes on as long as World War I did and killed so many tens of millions of people.
You simply can't have that without the ability to have a monopoly over the printing of money, until there's a supply of international credit that is available to fund these wars.
One of the reasons that America went into the war is it looked like the Allies were going to lose, which meant that all the war loans that the Americans had put out to the British and the French were going to be threatened.
So they come storming in, which then creates such an imbalance of power that you get the Treaty of Versailles, which is a fairly direct lead-in to World War II.
But yeah, you simply cannot have wars without fiat money.
This, of course, was proven very well through Lincoln, who financed civil war by printing these greenbacks, which escalated into the monetary equivalent of toilet paper relatively quickly.
You simply cannot have international lengthy wars without the ability to print money and corrupt the currency.
And isn't that what's happening right now?
I mean, Bush has even tax cuts this whole time.
It's funny in a sort of horrible way.
I mean, when you sort of climb to the top of your wise mountain and survey human history, and you see the patterns that just recur over and over and over again, you can absolutely see that the state control of the financial system, of course, is a central tenet of communism.
It's the funniest thing in the world when you think that the Second World War and the First World War were supposed to be fought against collectivism, and resulted in vast expansions in state power, particularly nominal.
Like leaving control of the economy, and nominally in private hands, but gaining control of regulation and taxation.
It's just horrendous.
I mean, once you choose government, you choose oppression.
There's no way that you can decouple the two, and there's this massive fantasy that everyone has that we can have a good government.
You know, but it's like saying we can have a good rapist.
You know, we can have a good mugger.
There's simply no possibility that you can create a monopoly of people with the power to use force at will and create a utopia.
The idea that we can be bullied, cajoled, threatened, and jailed into being virtuous is a completely mad fantasy, and it's very hard to understand exactly where it comes from and why it's so prevalent.
But once you give particularly the monopoly of the money supply over to the government, things go mad.
Like, in the 19th century, over a 100-year period, the currency increased in value, right?
There was a deflation.
And then if you look at the 20th century, after the government gained control of the currency, you have like a more than 95% drop in the value of the dollar because they just start printing like crazy.
And of course, this created the bubble of 29.
This created the crash of 29 through the Depression, which really lasted through the end of the Second World War, which was pretty instrumental in getting Hitler into power.
So this kind of control and coercion over the money supply the government had is one of the worst things.
If I could do one thing, it would be getting kids out of government schools, but if I could do two things, it would be to privatize the currency.
Yeah, and it really seems to me that the inflationary money is...
Well, there's a myth, I think, that inflationary money really benefits the middle class because they get to borrow in dollars and pay back in dimes.
But it seems to me that really it's the working people and the middle class who suffer the most from inflation because the workers, as prices rise, the guys who work for their weekly paycheck, hourly paychecks, their wages are the last ones to catch up with the rising price inflation.
And their retired moms who have their savings account, they're watching the value of the dollars in their savings account fly out the window while there's artificially low rates, so they're not really collecting any interest on their savings.
Well, at the same time, the very rich, they benefit from creating the money out of nothing.
The banks have as much power to counterfeit as the Fed, well, granted by the Fed, I guess.
And, of course, they also benefit when they have the eventual war against inflation and they have the artificially high interest rates in order to check the inflation they cause.
Then all the people who are already rich just sit back and make a killing off the interest.
And it's the working people who are screwed coming and going.
Yeah, for sure, for sure.
In general, in the economy, particularly in an unlimited democracy like we operate, I'm not saying Canada, but it's the same deal as in the U.S. by and large, the bulk of the transfers are from the very rich.
I mean, in terms of services that are provided, the poor get to the short end of the stick.
The poor get pillaged, particularly in terms of paying for higher education for the middle classes.
And the rich pay a disproportionate share of their taxation in terms of, you know, they comprise 2% of the population and pay like 20% of the taxes and so on.
And this is, of course, exactly as you would expect, that when you look at the bell curve of people in the economic scale in society, that a majority rule government is going to steal from the extremes and give to the middle because it's going to bribe as many people as possible to vote for it.
So there certainly is, I think, a small elite of economic people who have the real inside scoop.
Like you and I don't know when the Fed is going to change what rate.
But there's a group of people who do know.
And, of course, it's illegal outside the government to engage in speculation.
But, of course, when you work in the Fed, you and your friends know exactly what's coming down the pipe as far as economic decisions go.
And those people simply clean up, right?
But in terms of what happens to the money after it gets out into the system, the majority of it gets plowed back into buying the vote to the middle class.
And the very rich, who are a sort of statistical minority and the very poor, get a disproportionate pillaging relative to what they pay.
And now, you mentioned utopia there.
Are you sure, Stephen, that the statists, the moderates, the Democrats, the little d, Democrat-believing people out there, that they're the utopians and that it's not you when you advocate for a society without a state?
Well, I think so.
And over the last – I guess you're born in the 70s, right?
Arr, a young man.
But over the last 20 or 25 years that I've been debating this kind of stuff, I've sort of refined my approach to debating with statists into a very, very short exchange.
And it really comes down to the gun in the room.
I sort of got on a article on Lew Rockwell called The Gun in the Room.
And the idea basically is you simply say to people, like I was debating with a woman the other day, she said, well, we should stay in Iraq because otherwise it would destabilize the country and this and that and the other.
And I said, you can't argue that because that's Nostradamus and the crystal ball.
So who knows what's going to happen, right, other than it's going to be the opposite of what people in power tell you.
But you don't know where and exactly how.
And it really came down to I respect your opinion that you want the people, the troops to stay in Iraq insofar as I don't agree with you, but I would not shoot you for saying so.
I would not shoot you for saying that the troops should stay in Iraq.
Would you shoot me for saying that the troops should leave Iraq?
And she said, well, no, of course I wouldn't shoot you.
I said, OK, well, then we're in agreement because if I say that the troops should be out of Iraq, then clearly I should not be forced to pay for them staying in Iraq.
So you can't say that I have the right to disagree that the troops should be in Iraq, but then shoot me if I don't pay to support them because then my opinion clearly means nothing.
And that gets the point across very quickly that if I'm allowed to disagree with state policy, then surely I should be allowed to do that in some economic sense and not be forced to pay for things that I disagree with.
Once you get down to that, you know, will you shoot people for doing X?
You know, like you get into a debate on the war on drugs.
I used to have all these statistics and this and that that I bore people to tears with.
And now it's just like, well, will you shoot a guy who's smoking a joint?
I wouldn't.
I don't think it's that great to smoke a joint, but I'm certainly not going to go shoot a guy.
And if they say, no, I wouldn't shoot a guy for smoking a joint, then it's like, well, then we're on the same page as far as.
And once you get it down to where are you going to point the gun?
You find out that people really don't like the idea of pointing guns.
And then they get much closer to the concept of a stateless society.
Then I have all these questions, how would it work and this and that.
But at least they understand the foundational moral argument, which is that violence is wrong.
But wouldn't the average person say, yeah, but what are you going to do?
You know, this is earth and, you know, some gang of thugs with guns is going to run around being the enforcement around here.
At least we get to vote for the local sheriff.
Right.
Well, yeah, absolutely.
And if people are that cynical, then, of course, you can't you know, you can't do much to sort of leap into the promised land if they don't want to get off the couch.
Right.
But basically what they're saying then is that violence is inevitable.
And what we should do is give a monopoly of violence to the biggest gang.
Right.
And of course, that that kind of logic, it doesn't doesn't make any sense.
Right.
I mean, because if violence is wrong, then violence is wrong.
And if violence is right, then we should all go out and be violent.
And when people start to come up with pragmatic or practical answers that says, well, you know, if we don't have a government, then it'll be a war of all against all and this and that and the other.
Well, that's just not the case.
Right.
I mean, you can certainly look and look at the 20th century after the Second World War and say, well, why is it that after 2000 years of fighting, the European powers decided to stop going to war against each other?
Well, it's because they all got the atomic bomb and suddenly the leaders were now liable personally for destruction if they started a war.
And magically, they all found ways of avoiding war once they and their friends could get killed.
And so we know that there are situations in which you don't end up with war and it has to do with the balance of power.
The problem with the government is the government, by creating a vast monopoly of military power, completely undoes the balance of power within society.
And that's why you get such terrible predations.
You get the U.S., which has far more people in jail per capita than China does.
And it's like a massive percentage of the population ends up in jail because there's this massive imbalance between the people in the government and the people not in the government.
They can just ride roughshod over whoever they want.
But when you have a system where you have decentralized power structures, then there's a balance of power that is achieved that results in peace.
I want to know how you think a society without a state would work.
I'm sure the first objection is that if you get rid of the state monopoly, a new one will replace it sooner or later.
The free market demands diversity in bananas and computers, but the free market demands a monopoly in security forces to avoid a permanent state of, as you said, the Hobbesian war of all against all and so forth.
How do you get rid of the state and keep us out of it?
For me, that's a similar argument to the question, how do you get rid of slavery and keep it gotten rid of?
Although we have certain forms of economic system in the form of taxation and so on, there is no reasonable human being anywhere in the world, or at least let's just say anywhere in the West, who says that we should have a return to slavery.
So the key issue for me is that I really strongly believe that human beings are run by moral arguments.
There's nobody who can ever say, this is evil and I support it.
So it all has to do with gaining control of the moral narrative within society, or at least exposing the false moral narrative within society.
So the way that the abolitionists got rid of slavery was they didn't say, well, slavery is economically inefficient because it doesn't optimize investments in human capital, which of course I spent years trying to argue with anarchism and libertarianism and put everyone to sleep.
What abolitionists did, for decade after decade after decade, was simply thunder out over and over again that slavery is a moral abomination.
And then when that really began to take root in people's minds, then slavery was kind of done, right?
And in the same way, feminists for many, many decades have thundered that women are equal to men.
I'm not talking about the more radical ones, but the ones who are more anti-human equality.
And now there's very few people, particularly in the West, who would ever say that we need to get them barefoot and back in the kitchen again.
So really it's just about thundering over and over again about the moral evil of the initiation of the use of force.
And once you get that, then the whole justification for a government falls apart.
And then people say, well, how would society work exactly without a government?
But that's like opposing the end of slavery because you're not sure how every slave will get a job after slavery is ended.
I mean, that doesn't matter.
What does matter is that slavery and the coercive power of government are moral abominations.
And once people get that, then it's just a matter of time.
But we want to get that message out there before the economic collapse, which seems not too, too far off comes about because we don't want to pull a sort of Weimar Republic, have an economic collapse, and then have people turn to fascism as the solution.
Speaking of moral abominations, I'm sure you've seen the reports, and I don't know exactly how correct these numbers are, but there have been reports that over a million Iraqis have died violently since the invasion of 2003.
And that's crime and sectarian violence and, of course, bombing and raids and killings and battles and fighting by American soldiers on the ground as well.
You know, I was listening to an interview that Charles Goyette did, the guy that wrote How Bush Became the New Saddam for Maclean's last week.
Did you see that?
Yes.
Canadian paper there.
And Charles is interviewing the author of this, and the author is explaining how, well, America is now going with the Baathist strategy, which is dominate the Kurds, and they'll do that with the help of the Turks, which is limit the influence of Iran by fighting them violently if necessary, and being more or less a friendly allied state with the Saudis and the Egyptians and the Americans.
And Charles Goyette from Antiwar Radio, he just kind of got off into this emotional thing about, now wait a minute now, you're telling me that the strategy now is the exact same strategy that Saddam Hussein had?
That these last years and years of killing in order to prop up the Shiite government allied with Iran is now over, and now we're just going back, that all of these people have died for exactly nothing at all?
How's that for a moral abomination, no matter what color the uniform is, how snazzy it might look in the TV commercials?
Well, it's worse than for nothing.
The problem is, it's worse than for nothing.
I mean, dying for nothing is one thing, and that's, I mean, of course, a terrible tragedy, but dying to create massive resentment around the world for America?
I mean, there's one thing to just throw your life away and have it wasted, and that's sort of one thing, but it's quite another thing to kill and be killed in a situation that endangers the very people that you have sworn to protect as a soldier, right?
That creates additional resentment and festers the desire for vengeance inside of the Muslim community, which is not known for its rationality and stability, so it's worse than nothing.
Nothing would be bad enough, but this is worse than nothing.
This is dying to create additional problems and resentments, and I sort of, it's hard for Americans to understand because it seems so foreign and it seems so far away, but I sort of say to Americans, I say, remember how you fell on 9-11 when 3,000 of your countrymen were murdered in cold blood?
3,000 out of a population of a couple of hundred million, right?
Iraq has a population of about 27, 28 million, and we have reports, which are fairly credible, of a million deaths, right?
So this, for America, would be about 10 to 12 million Americans killed.
So remember how angry you felt and what desire for vengeance and what desire for punishment you felt on 9-11.
Well, imagine if it were thousands of times worse, how you would feel.
Very few people knew anybody directly who died on 9-11 who didn't live in New York or whatever, but they say one in five Iraqis has had a family member be killed as a result of this invasion, this genocide.
One in five Iraqis has had a family member killed, and of course, this is particularly true among the young who have been not just killed but also imprisoned and tortured, released perhaps or not.
And 9-11, while an international crime of the highest order, did not involve long detainment and torture and occupation and grinding, invasion and staying there for years and years.
You know, Al Qaeda didn't come and build a mammoth facility to stay on and on.
It's important to just understand that we're all the same deep down, and the vengeance that we feel when we get attacked is dwarfed by an attack that is worse in terms of thousands that America has done to Iraq, so they've died to create, to sow the seeds for future destruction.
Well, I remember the rage I felt after September 11, and I hate to admit this, but it's true.
My first concern was what an excuse this would serve for the Republicans to do what they wanted to do, and then I thought about the poor people on the airplanes and in the towers and all the death and carnage.
The first thing I did was think how terrible the response was going to be, the blank check that was going to be written, but two days later, I think, the Ben Sargent cartoon and the Austin American statesman had Uncle Sam with a dead woman in his arms and a look on his face like, oh man, am I going to cut somebody's throat.
I remember thinking just how strongly I identified with Uncle Sam in that cartoon, and it didn't work on me because my attitude was inoculated.
I wasn't going to follow the conclusion and help sign that blank check, but I did feel that rage, and I can put myself in those people's shoes.
People imagine that, Iraqis, human beings, and I can imagine the kind of blowback.
Again, Charles Goyette interviewed Chalmers Johnson yesterday, and that was the subject at the end of their talk.
What kind of blowback are we going to suffer from this?
I mean, this is going to go on without end now.
Well, and of course, people wonder why the US has not been attacked since, and of course, the US has been attacked since just over in Iraq.
I mean, what people don't understand about this whole 9-11 bin Laden thing is that, of course, as you know, bin Laden was trained by the CIA to break the back of the Russian economy by engaging them in a highly one-sided battle of attrition in Afghanistan.
Up until relatively recently, it cost about the same to attack or defend in terms of economics, but what's changed is that now you can bring down a $20 million plane with a $15,000 stinger missile.
So to attack has become much more expensive than to defend or to harass, and of course, this is what we have understood in Iraq as well, that the US is spending far more money than the insurgents are.
So what happened was the CIA trained bin Laden to go with the Mujahideen into Afghanistan to harass the Russians while they were there in the 80s to the point where this was one of the key factors, not Reagan thundering around the world, but one of the key factors that brought down and crippled the Russian economy.
And bin Laden has applied exactly the same methodology to the United States.
His stated aim and intention is to say, look, we cannot beat the United States militarily, but we want them out of the Holy Land.
We can't beat them economically, but what we can do is provoke them into fighting on our terms, on our soil, in our backyard, and what we can do is create such an uneven war of economic attrition that will break the back of the US economic system, which will then cause them to have to withdraw their troops.
The reason that no one has attacked American home soil again is that there's no need to, because the American government is doing exactly what these Al Qaeda terrorists want.
Well, I hope everybody was paying close attention and listening to that because, of course, the facts bear that out.
I have actually right here in front of me the looming tower by Lawrence Wright, which is the road to 9-11, and it talks about in here, he talks about Osama bin Laden's time in Sudan after the holy jihad in Afghanistan and how he was going horseback riding, he was driving tractors in the fields, and he was telling people that he wanted to be a father.
There was a jihad going on against the black animists and Christians in the south of Sudan, and he refused to take part in it and said that he was going to be a farmer from now on.
But the one burning issue that kept coming up was that the American troops did not leave Saudi Arabia as promised after the Gulf War, and that something had to be done.
And here, as Lawrence Wright says, that Al Qaeda's duty was to awaken the Islamic nation to the threat posed by the secular modernizing west occupying west.
In order to do that, bin Laden told his men Al Qaeda would drag the United States into a war with Islam, quote, a large-scale front which it cannot control.
So there you go, the action is in the reaction, the knocking down of those towers was the slap in the face to trick us into chasing them into their neighborhood.
And it cost Al Qaeda about $150,000 to pull off that attack, and it cost the U.S., what, $400-500 billion to respond to it?
It doesn't take a mathematical genius to know where that ends, right?
Yeah, absolutely, and I have to say, though, if I was a Lockheed executive, again, not a capitalist, but a mercantilist who makes his money from the U.S. treasury, I would think, great, you know what, having enemy states is fun and is good money.
But having a stateless enemy with a boogeyman in a cave in the Hindu Kush that we can't reach, who might at least live another five or ten years if they're lucky, this is the greatest enemy a mercantilist could ever hope for.
It's the war without end, which is the holy grail for the military industrial complex, is the war without end, with a tangible enemy that you can conquer, with a fear in the heart of the domestic population in a way that World War I and World War II never affected the Americans in the way that 9-11 did.
The other thing I think it's important to remember as well is that it's not just for purely religious reasons that these jihadists want the U.S. out of Saudi Arabia because they view the House of Saud as illegitimate, right, because it's funded by oil sales for the Western powers and they're pretty decadent.
It's a pretty decadent group of people who run Saudi Arabia, and the fact that America is giving such enormous military aid is considered by many of the more purist or fundamentalist Islamic people as keeping a corrupt and sort of rotting and Western decadent style dictatorship over the Saudi people.
And it's not because they want to replace it with any kind of free society, but this is what happens when you go in and start tossing billions of dollars around in a highly volatile region.
It just gets worse and worse.
At some point you're going to have to withdraw in, quote, disgrace, and things are going to return back the way they should be, right, which is people managing their own affairs in their own countries, and America, which has this unbelievable luxury of overwhelming military superiority, peaceful neighbors to the North and South, two oceans on either side, should be the one country in history that should never need to pursue military action overseas, and it's had 50 or more wars over the past 120 years.
This is just another example.
It doesn't matter how peaceful or what system you set up, the government will always grow into this cancer that just keeps attacking.
Would you get a load of this guy?
It's like the Canadian me, only he actually speaks English.
It's like you with subsidized healthcare.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, now back to the abstract a little bit here, and obviously it all ties in.
You may be familiar with the book Tragedy and Hope by Carol Quigley.
No, I don't think I am.
Tell me a little better.
Well, he was Bill Clinton's foreign policy studies professor at Georgetown University, and the book is, in a way, it's kind of the holy grail of the conspiracy theorists because it's written by a Georgetown University professor, and it really has a lot of the secret history of the Anglo-American establishment from the turn of the century through the 1960s and the World Wars and so forth.
But that's not the point that I brought it up for.
In the beginning of the book, Stefan, Carol Quigley writes, he has this whole section that's an analysis of all the different civilizations in the history of the world and their rise and fall.
He says it's all about weapons.
He says it doesn't matter what your podcast says or how convincing it is when you advocate secession and repeal and eventual free market anarcho-capitalism, and it doesn't matter how good your argument is.
Everything comes down to weapons, Carol Quigley says.
He says in the era in Europe when the average guy had a sword, there was relative freedom and liberty.
Call it the Dark Ages or whatever if you want.
There was a lot of relative freedom in Europe at the time.
Then some jerk invented the saddle, and once he invented the saddle, that was this new advanced weaponry that only the specialized trained warriors could use, and it could kick your ass up on horseback and you were on foot, and it wasn't a generation or two before the people who were specialized in horseback warfare were the lords and the kings and the knights and the tyrants and enslaved everyone around them.
Then some genius invented the musket, and the power balanced back out again.
It was around this time that the American Revolution happened.
The American Bill of Rights was written and so forth.
What Carol Quigley is, I'm sorry for going on and on, but I say all that to say this.
His point was that we now obviously live in an era of specialized weapons.
Again, we have hydrogen bombs and Apache helicopters and Stinger missiles and all this specialized weaponry that only government has access to.
Probably most people are glad that only the government has access to them.
What Carol Quigley says is the only thing protecting our liberty now is the law as it was written by James Madison and the boys back in the day.
The tradition that we have, the letter of the law, it says here that you have to bring the accused before a judge or what have you, because if it really came down to it, the American people, the Canadian people, everyone in North America tries to rise up against this tyranny, they will shut us down.
They outgun us by so much that they can't really be faced.
I guess I just wonder, what's your impression of all that line of reason there?
Well, I think it's right, though with all due respect to obviously a very brilliant fellow, I would say that there's some incompleteness to it.
I think that if you look at something like the printing press, I would view that as a kind of weapon, because it was the printing press and the publication in the 16th century of the Bible for the first time in the vernacular, so you didn't have to know Latin, you didn't have to be educated to read it, by Luther that began to break the monopoly of the Catholic Church.
I would say information is the most significant weapon, because as I said earlier, people are run by moral arguments.
Nobody feels the need to justify in some manner the way in which they live and the morals that they bring to bear on their life.
And I would say that information is a very, very powerful weapon, and I think that's where it almost took, I would say it may have even been a prerequisite, because the new printing press, the new Gutenberg Bible is the internet, right, where you can get information that does not have to run through the channels of power, and of course that means that there's a whole bunch of nonsense out there, but there's some great stuff out there as well.
So the discussion that you and I are having with regards to bin Laden, you never see that on CNN, right, so in the past, everything that came to the people in terms of information had to be processed or validated by people in power or those who were dependent on them, right, so you can't really criticize the government at any fundamental moral level as a news agency, because then you won't get your news from the government, they'll just stop inviting you places, right, and your career is toast, and so people don't do it, and the same thing is true with a lot of professors.
So I would say that definitely weapons have an effect, but I think that the most fundamental effect is the information flow, and where people can get access to the facts that can breed new conclusions, and more conclusions that have greater wisdom and understanding to them, and particularly in terms of ethical arguments, and if you look at what happened in Christendom after the invention of the printing press and the Gutenberg Bible, Christendom dissolved into these warring sects, right, the Anabaptists, the Mongolians, the Calvinists, and so on, the Lutherans of course, and then what happened was people got so sick of religious warfare that they had a separation of church and state, so here you have, without a particular weapon, information being put into the hands of the population who then break into these sects, and they all try and gain control of the gun of the government to oppose all the other sects, after about 100, 150 years of religious warfare, there is a separation of church and state.
Now I don't think we'll have to go through all that warfare a bit, but I think there's an example of something that changed, which was more to do with information and knowledge than it was to do with specific weaponry, and the result was a vastly increased freedom.
Lewrockwell.com is the center of the anarcho-capitalist intellectual world.
Stefan Molyneux is one of the greats there.
I urge everyone to check it out.
You can just type in L-E-W for Lew in Google and it'll come right up.
Lewrockwell.com.
Not everyone who writes there is an anarchist, but pretty much anti-war, anti-state, pro-market says it all, and you're a great representative of the site, and I urge everyone to please check out Stefan Molyneux's site.
You say it because I forgot it exactly.
I should have written it down.
Sure, no problem.
I have two books.
One is out called On Truth's Tyranny of Illusion, which is how to apply philosophical principles to your personal life so we don't go nuts running around after the state and try to bring it down, but can achieve freedom in our personal lives.
I have a book coming out in a week or two called University Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, and I have about 800 podcasts on various topics, all the way from psychology to aesthetics to philosophy to history, which are all available for the massive cost of free domain radio.com.
All right, and we'll have all the links up, of course, when this interview is posted at antiwarradio.com.
Hey, thanks so much for your time today, Stefan.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much for having me on.
It was a great chat.
