Why We Are Dying!

Stefan Molyneux

The lecture examines societal dynamics through property rights, scarcity, and abundance within statist systems, contrasting them with free societies. The speaker highlights the transition from hunting to agriculture, which formalizes property rights and fosters productivity and wealth. He discusses the emergence of societal stratification and its moral implications, emphasizing that unresolved wealth disparities can incite conflict. The impact of sophistry on rational thought is noted as a barrier to progress. Ultimately, the lecture advocates for a return to foundational truths about property rights to address modern inequities and promote equity.   GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK!  https://peacefulparenting.com/   Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!   Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!   You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!   See you soon!  https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2025

Transcript

00:00All right, it's time for the all-explanation of things. This is a theory I've been working on

00:06for a while that will have everything come into horrible focus and traumatic sense,

00:15so we can sort of understand where we are in history, how we got here, what's going on,

00:20and where it's heading. And thank you, of course, for the time and resources to be able to put all

00:28of this together in my mind and communicate it to the world. freedomain.com slash donate

00:34to help out the show, to help out philosophy in the world. freedomain.com slash donate. Thank you.

00:38All right, so this is all applying to a statist society. This is not something that applies to

00:47a free society, so this is not the human condition. This is not the inevitable physics of history. This

00:54is nothing like that. This is how things work in a centralized, oligarchical, coercive society,

01:03a society with data at its center. So, unfortunately, truth breeds delusion,

01:12and this is one of the central problems of philosophy, or one of the central problems

01:16of philosophy is really supposed to find a way to overcome. Truth breeds delusion.

01:24Now, truth arrives out of scarcity, and then the truth that is derived from scarcity breeds

01:33abundance. Abundance breeds delusion. Delusion breeds evil, and evil destroys abundance.

01:45So, and there's a case that's made for this in my novel The Future by Roman, the aptly named Roman.

01:54So, it's very subtle. So, you can go and check out that novel. You really should. It's a great

02:00book. freedomain.com slash books. So, scarcity breeds rationality. Scarcity breeds property

02:11rights, and like if you are a bunch of natives in North America hunting a virtual infinity

02:18of buffalo, you don't need property rights because there's no functional scarcity. There's

02:24more food than you can possibly eat. It's the same thing if you live in some tropical abundance

02:32paradise of fruit and fish and game and all that, and there's more food than you can eat.

02:36So, because of the abundance, you don't need property rights. You don't need strictness.

02:44You don't really need rationality in a way, and if you look at sort of the history of the West,

02:52particularly sort of, well, I mean, I know it's not in the West, but Siberia, which gave birth

02:57to the great East Asian race, and North, Northern Europe, Western Europe, which gave birth to

03:03Caucasians, scarcity is essential. Like scarcity is a foundational fact of life. You don't have

03:15enough food. You don't have enough game, and you have a long, long winter. That's tough,

03:26a very tough, that long winter. So, when you move to an agricultural society, which

03:32is an advantage in many ways because it takes care of the limitations of trying to find

03:41game, right? As your population increases relative to the amount of hunting that's around,

03:47people start to hunt each other as well as hunt game, because if there's a limited amount of

03:55rabbits and deer and whatever else you're hunting to eat, if there's a relative scarcity of that

04:02stuff, well, what happens? What happens is you keep running up against other people who are

04:07taking the food that you need, and so you then will hunt to eliminate other people so that they

04:15won't take all of your food, or a significant portion of your food which you need to survive,

04:20in particular, the winter. Winter is harsh, but it's also nature's natural freezer, so you can

04:26at least store your food in some way. So, agriculture transforms that so that you can

04:35grow your own food and trade, and growing your own food has three major categories. There are

04:41the crops, of course, there is the livestock, which you can eat, and then the products of the livestock,

04:47such as milk, and of course, the fertilizer that is needed to keep your crops, your soil healthy

04:54and fertile. So, when you switch from a non-property right society, which is hunting, now there

05:02are some property rights around hunting, but that tends to be later on, like you can't hunt

05:09on the Lord's land, right? That's called being a poacher and was often punishable by death,

05:12but that's sort of later on, and that's a subset of agriculture. So, or what is it Oscar Wilde said

05:20about the aristocrats hunting the fox, the unspeakable in hot pursuit of the inedible?

05:28So, you don't really need property rights, you can't really enforce property rights

05:31when it comes to hunting, so then you transition, because hunting creates constant warfare, right?

05:38If there's a lot of game, then humanity reproduces to the point where you run out of

05:43food and then you have to have war over the scarce resources. It's constantly going that way,

05:50and you don't need rights, right? The only right that you have in the state of nature

05:56is the right of violence, which is not really a right, but if you can dominate the other person

06:03to threaten, enslave or kill the other person, then that is your, quote, right. You have power

06:10and therefore you get your will in your way, but there's no such thing really as abstract rights,

06:16because it's really hard to own that which is in motion, right? So, can you really own a herd

06:21of deer that's constantly roaming around? Not really, because you don't know where the hell

06:24they are. Pretty hard to have property rights when you don't even know where the deer are, right?

06:30So, when you have farm land, well then, that's a whole different matter. With regards to farm land,

06:39you now have property rights, and in fact, there is no farming without property rights, because

06:46it takes a huge amount of labor to clear the land and to fertilize the land, to seed the land,

06:51to keep the plague species, the insects and the birds, at bay to grow the food, and then

07:00you have to have usually some right to trade, because you're focusing all your efforts on

07:05food and livestock, and therefore you're probably going to have to trade for other people, like the

07:10blacksmith needs your food and you need the blacksmith's skill and abilities, so you have to

07:16have property rights in order to have an agricultural society. And so, the property

07:23rights in general have to be universal. Now, I'm aware, of course, that there's the property rights

07:29of the aristocracy, and then there are the property rights of the serfs, and no property

07:35rights, really, for slaves at all, and that's kind of a fact that is real, but there still

07:42has to be a conception or concept of property rights. Now, when you have property rights,

07:51then you have the right to buy and sell land. You can't say, I mean, this is how you distinguish

07:55serfs from people who actually own the property, is the serfs can be bought and sold like livestock

08:00with the land, so you have to have the right to buy and sell the land in order to be considered

08:07its owner. Property rights must be the right to buy and sell, to transfer property rights.

08:12So, the transferability of property rights means that there's a universality of the concept of

08:19morality and of rights. If I can sell my 10 acres to you, then ownership is a universal,

08:26because ownership can be transferred from one person to another. All human beings have the right

08:30of property, and so that universality of morality and of rights spreads throughout

08:38society because it's just so productive. So, the scarcity of land, right, game is an

08:46unknown scarcity, I mean, for the most part, right? And again, if you're following 10,000

08:50buffalo, it's a different matter, but sort of in Siberia, in Northern Europe, in Western Europe,

08:55game is an unknown scarcity, right? I mean, if you go out hunting three days in a row and get

09:01nothing, it might just be a dry spell, or the place, the whole area might have been

09:08overhunted, and then you have to kill each other as tribes in order to reduce the number of hunters

09:15so that the game can replenish. So, the only solution to scarcity in a hunter-gatherer society

09:23is a violence. And when you move to an agricultural society, you have property

09:28rights because that's the only way that farmers can be productive, is if they know they're going

09:31to own the products of their labor. So, you have property rights, property rights become universal,

09:36and it's not a win-lose, it's not kill or be killed, it is productivity based upon property

09:43rights to mutual benefit and trade. Now then, what happens, of course, is once you have property

09:50rights, as I mentioned, you can buy and sell the land. Now, once you can buy and sell the land,

09:57then you have a meritocracy. Now, of course, you have a meritocracy in hunting and gathering,

10:04some guys better at throwing the spear or whatever, right, than the other guy. So,

10:07there's a meritocracy, but being a great hunter reduces resources, right? So, if you're a great

10:17hunter, then you are really good at killing the local animals, which means that your skill,

10:25your ability, reduces the resources available to you, because you kill too many and then you end

10:32up with not enough food, and it can take a while for the food to replenish. It's one thing if it's

10:39rabbits, they breed like, well, rabbits, but deer have a slower life cycle and other creatures that

10:45you would be eating. So, a meritocracy in hunting reduces the amount of resources available to you,

10:53and that's in stark contrast to being a really skilled farmer. Oh, whole different matter,

11:02you know, the green thumb, the people who are just magic with plants and animals,

11:05animal husbandry, they used to call it in D&D or in history, I guess, always a strange phrase to me,

11:11bestiality, but I'm sure it's valid. So, if you are a really great hunter,

11:18you destroy resources, and being a really great hunter is kind of negative, because it toasts all

11:23the animals and takes a while for them to replenish their numbers. However, if you're a really great

11:28farmer, then you can coax double the crop yields, five times the crop yields, really great farmers

11:35ten times the crop yields. So, excellence in farming massively increases the resources.

11:43And, of course, I understand, you know, our reputation, I understand soil exhaustion and so

11:48on, but a really great farmer finds ways, you got winter crops like turnips and so on, so really

11:52great farmers find ways to keep their productivity high. I mean, anybody can get a whole bunch of

11:57crops out of land if you just plant like crazy, but then that destroys the economic value of the

12:04land by stripping it of nutrients and resources and phosphates and all that kind of stuff. So,

12:08it to create a sustainable increase in crop yields and so on, and of course livestock yields,

12:17is really important. So, excellence in farming increases resources to a massive degree.

12:23Excellence in hunting temporarily increases resources in terms of what you hunt and what

12:28you kill, but then destroys those resources because you strip the land of the animals you

12:35need to hunt. There aren't enough of them to reproduce and so it feeds now famine later.

12:42So, once you get productivity in a farming or agricultural scenario, then the number of

12:53resources available in the society goes through the roof. It's incomprehensible and the sort of

13:00Malthusian idea that the human population increases exponentially, but food productivity only

13:05increases in a linear fashion, therefore starvation will always happen, has so far of course proven

13:10false. So, universality of property rights and of the transfer of ownership, respect for property

13:19rights, the enforcement of property rights in an agricultural scenario, which is really the only

13:23place where property rights can really take root, produces a, I mean obviously it's not a technical

13:31infinity, but compared to what came before, meritocracy in land ownership and farming

13:38produces what is effectively an infinity of resources. You have infinite resources compared

13:46to what came before and of course I know this is sort of based on my research for my novel Just Poor,

13:50which you should also check out, it's a great book, freedomain.com. My novel Just Poor, I was doing

13:55the research and I got this out of my medieval courses in graduate school, but crop yields,

14:02when a meritocracy was finally allowed in the production of land, which is to say that they

14:07moved from a serf to a, in a sense, capitalist system for land ownership, called the enclosure

14:12movement, up. Yields went up 5, 10, 15, sometimes even 20 fold, which is what allowed the excess,

14:20I mean it was the equivalent of AI, sort of back in the day. And like at the beginning of the 20th

14:26century, 90% of Americans were involved in farming, now it's 2 to 3%, so that is allowed for the

14:33release of the urban proletariat, which was the foundational labor pool for the industrial

14:37revolution and so on. And so the birth of the modern world came out of the excellence

14:41of meritocracy in farming. So, of course, this is an obvious economic principle I've talked about

14:48before, so I'll keep it brief, but when it comes to meritocracy in farming, the most competent

14:56farmers end up with the most land. And this is an obvious thing, right? If you are a farmer,

15:04and let's say that it's 10 pounds, just make up some numbers here, 10 pounds for,

15:10and 10 pounds for 10 acres, right? That's what, right? And if you're a bad farmer,

15:16and you can only produce 5 pounds worth of crops, or a pound worth of crops, you know,

15:22maybe pay it off in 10 years or whatever, right? Then you can't bid much for the land.

15:27But if you are a really great farmer, who can produce, let's say, 20 pounds worth of crops

15:34from those 10 acres, then you can afford to bid, of course, a lot more for that land.

15:42I mean, if you imagine two people who want to buy a camera, one of them is just going to use

15:49it to take holiday snaps that he stores under his bed, and the other one is a paparazzi or Pulitzer

15:58Prize-winning photographer who can sell photographs for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or

16:03more. Well, who's going to be able to bid more? The guy who is not able to produce any revenue,

16:09or is not going to produce any revenue with the camera, or the guy who's going to produce

16:13a million dollars a year revenue with the camera? Well, the guy who's going to produce a million

16:17dollars a year revenue with the camera, he can bid a whole lot more for that camera,

16:20because it's a capital asset that is going to profit him, rather than somebody who's going

16:27to use it as a consumer consumption item. So, in a meritocracy based upon property rights and

16:35universal morals, with regards to agriculture and land, the very best farmers end up bidding

16:44the most for the most land. And then, there's a sort of countervailing impulse, which is that

16:51the children of great singers tend to have nice voices, but they probably aren't as good

16:56as the voices of their parents, because there's a regression to the mean. The children of two smart

17:02parents are likely to be smarter than average, but not as smart as the parents. So, there's a

17:08regression to the mean. So, the regression to the mean is how the land gets redistributed, because

17:14the children of great farmers are probably not going to be quite as great as their parents.

17:18However, there's a countervailing, two countervailing impulses or realities to this.

17:22One is that the child, let's say the son of Bob the great farmer, has two advantages. One is that

17:30he already has the land, because Bob has bought it and has it. So, he has the 10 or 100 or 1000 acres.

17:34So, he's already inheriting that. That's number one. And number two, of course, Bob's son has Bob

17:41teach him how to farm. A talent is not transferable, but skills are. You can teach your

17:50kid how to read music. That doesn't mean if you're really good at writing music, that doesn't mean

17:54that your kid is going to be good at writing music. I remember talking to a guy once, I was talking

17:59about a friend of his who was the son of a famous musician who could play anything he wanted on the

18:03guitar, but just couldn't write music to save his life. So, what happens is, of course, when you

18:09move to an agricultural society, which is based upon universal ethics and property rights, you get

18:16massive increases in productivity. And the amount of food that's available to the society

18:23is virtually infinite compared to what it was before. So, that's a big plus. The minus is that

18:29you get classes. You get classes. I mean, you can't compete with genius. Maybe another genius

18:40can, but two genius farmers are not likely to bid each other for their land. The genius farmers

18:47are not going to bid each other for their land because you're bidding against somebody who can

18:50make a high offer based upon productivity. The genius farmers tend to bid against the worst

18:55farmers because they can bid a lot more for that land. And because we don't accept IQ and

19:04innate talent, we don't really accept that. And this is partly because people who are

19:11brilliant don't look fundamentally different from everyone else. And also because the

19:17conception in most religions is that there is a soul and the soul is equal to every other soul.

19:25Now, of course, human rights should be equal across people, but the fact that both Adam Lambert

19:31and I have the right to be the lead singer for Queen doesn't mean that we both have an equal

19:36opportunity or ability to be the lead singer for Queen. Not going to happen, right? Bro has a

19:43good pompadour and a great voice, although a little too fey in his stage presence. So,

19:52the emergence of a property-based meritocracy in agriculture creates classes. So, serfs are

20:02equal in general in their misery, but people who are bad farmers, and this could be

20:09for any number of reasons, right? Could be laziness. It could be that they really want

20:16to become priests and don't really care about farming. Just not exactly laziness, just

20:19inattention. It could be they just had a bad series of luck with regards to health. It could

20:26be, or it could just be lack of intelligence. Could be any number of things. It doesn't really

20:30matter. I mean, it matters at a personal level. It doesn't matter at an economic level in terms

20:34of who ends up in control of the most land. So, what happens is Bob the Great Farmer ends up with

20:42a thousand acres of land because he can outbid everyone else, and then Bob's kids have a

20:47substantial advantage. The substantial advantage being that Bob already has a thousand acres,

20:54which he's going to leave to his kids, although with sons it's going to get split up, which is

20:57why some of the sons went into the military, and some of the sons went into the clergy,

21:01so that there wasn't quite as much fight over land distribution. But Bob's sons are going to

21:07inherit the land, and Bob's sons are going to inherit what Bob teaches them about farming.

21:12And so, already having some land and also having Bob's knowledge about how to farm creates

21:19significant, and it creates a class or almost a caste system. Now, I say this merely in terms

21:27of analysis. This is not any kind of moral evaluation. I mean, the only way to break this

21:35class or caste system, other than waiting for some accidental regression to the mean doofus to go and

21:41blow all of the family fortune, which tends to happen on a pretty regular basis, I can certainly

21:45say this from my own father's side of the family tree, that I had a grandfather who was a drunk,

21:52if I understand the family lore in the right way. He was a drunk, and he sold off a lot of the

21:59family lands, I assume gambling debts, whatever, right? So, even though we'd been in that region

22:04of the land for almost a thousand years, or 900 years, didn't matter. Actually, yeah, it's funny,

22:11900 years. From 1066, when we came over with William the Conqueror, the Battle of Hastings,

22:16until 1966, when I was born. 900 years. So, there is a hardening of a caste system,

22:24and this goes against a people's, and this happens from both the significant left and

22:31the significant right. This offends people's sensibilities. Why should Bob have a thousand

22:39acres and I don't have any? I have to work Bob's lands. Why does Bob have a thousand acres? Which

22:45is, you know, why does Elon Musk have hundreds of billions of dollars, blah blah blah, right?

22:49I mean, he's not substantially taller than me. Bro is, on a regular basis, seems to be built by

22:55a fridge, built like a fridge, and we don't see his genius. We see the products of his genius,

23:01but we don't see his genius. It doesn't manifest itself. Like, with regards to singing, right,

23:06we can hear a great singer on the radio, whatever, we try and sing along, and I'm like, oh, that's

23:10why they get paid so much, right? Because they kind of know what they're doing, or they can do it.

23:15So, when you start to get universality and morality, you get abundance, and abundance

23:23fragments society into the haves and have-nots, the control over the means of production,

23:29ownership of the means of production, in this case, Bob's thousand acres, and those who don't

23:34control the means of production, which is all the people working on Bob's farm.

23:37And this offends our sensibilities for two reasons. One is that, on the left, all wealth

23:44arises from exploitation. Everyone is equal. There's no brilliance on the part of the manager.

23:49He's just a bad guy willing to exploit the workers, because everyone's equal and everyone's

23:53interchangeable like some Star Trek blob, right? That's on the left. On the right, on the religious

23:59right, it is everyone is the same because everybody has a soul, and therefore, vast differences

24:07in wealth offend the sensibilities on the left and on the right. And this also just partly arises

24:14from the inevitable solipsism or narcissism that occurs on the basic fact that we are all

24:20heroes and we are all the lead in the movie called us, in the movie called life. I am the lead

24:28in the movie called life. And of course, I aim as much as I can to have as much empathy as possible

24:34with others, and I think I do a pretty good job of it in the call-in shows in particular, trying

24:38to step into other people's shoes and so on. But we cannot experience another person's

24:46internal reality. We can't directly experience it. I think, you know, idly sort of just by the by,

24:50like from time to time, I think about how to step into somebody else's mind, like I'm talking to

24:56someone. I think about this when I'm sitting on the couch chatting away with my wife, and I think,

25:01you know, for 23 years, she sat across the couch and looked at me. I've never sat across the couch

25:06and looked at me, right? I know what I'm about to say. My wife does not, in the same way that she

25:12knows what she's about to say, but I do not. We cannot jump from one consciousness to another.

25:19And so a certain amount of solipsism, you could say narcissism, but it's not really because

25:24there's no alternative. But we are all the lead actress in a play called life. And, you know,

25:33I think, of course, occasionally about, you know, if somebody's taking a photo and I just happen to

25:38be in the background, I'm just some person in the background of their photo. They don't care about

25:45me. They don't think about me. I'm completely unimportant to them. I'm just some, you know,

25:49bald head in the back of their photo. You know, maybe if I get my philosophical credit down the

25:55road, people will be like, holy crap, he was in the back of our photo, and there'll be a

25:58little cottage industry for all of that. I don't know. I mean, I think it will happen, but who

26:01knows, right? But I'm just a background player. I'm just I'm a filler. I'm just a head in the

26:08crowd, right? So that's kind of inevitable. So if you are now a renter or an employee on the land

26:19your forefathers owned, then your fall from grace, your fall from wealth is frustrating. It's

26:29annoying. It's baffling. It's confusing. Now, and the world goes to heaven or to hell based upon how

26:35this disparity is explained, right? Based upon how. So if, let's say, Joe, right? Joe's family

26:44used to have 10 acres or 100 acres, and Bob bought them out, and Joe now works the land that his

26:51family used to own. And how this is explained is where the society goes to heaven or to hell.

26:59That's it. That's all there is. If it is explained well, you know, Bob ripped off your ancestors

27:05and stole your land. And, you know, he's got all of his cool stuff and his hot wife and his happy

27:11life because he's a thief and a sociopath and an exploiter. Well, then society goes to hell, right?

27:18And of course, Christianity tries to deal with this envy by saying, oh, it's fine. It's, you know,

27:22don't worry so much about Bob having a thousand acres. Worry about your own soul. And he was last

27:28will become first in the afterlife. And it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of

27:34a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, and poverty is the best and so on,

27:38right? So it attempts to have people focus on following particular moral rules and how well

27:45they're going to do in the afterlife, rather than the resentment and seeing people do much better

27:50than you in the world that is. Marxists, of course, don't try. They try to weaponize this disparity,

27:56right? So scarcity breeds property rights, which is to go from hunting to farming. Property rights

28:07and universal morals breeds vast disparity in wealth outcomes, and they tend to persist.

28:15I mean, if land is involved, and again, it just takes one wastrel or one fool or one

28:21person who doesn't care about farming to, even if he just wants to study Latin and

28:25follow theology. It could be any number of things. It only takes one generation to

28:30break that class system, to cycle the classes. And it happens sooner or later, but that doesn't

28:38really help Joe, who's frustrated at working the land his grandfather owned. So if it is explained

28:48that Bob lied, cheated, stole your ancestor's land, and I talk about this in my documentary

28:53on Hong Kong, Hong Kong Fight for Freedom at freedomand.com slash documentaries. It's free.

28:57You should check it out. It's really good. So if on the other hand, people say, well, Joe,

29:06so the reason why you are an employee on the land that your grandfather owned is your grandfather

29:15chose, chose voluntarily to sell his land to Bob. And, you know, you can probably look at the

29:24numbers, right? The accounts books probably still exist. And you can say, look, Bob came along and

29:31offered your grandfather, Joe, Bob came along and offered your grandfather £100 for his land.

29:38And your grandfather, Joe, was only able to eat £2 a year off of his land. He was not a very

29:46good farmer for whatever reason, doesn't really matter why. And so when Bob came along and offered

29:53your grandfather, Joe, 50 times his annual productivity to buy his land, and your grandfather,

30:01Joe said, yes, as you probably would say, yes, right? 50 times. That's a lot, right? That's a lot.

30:10So, I mean, this is why people who make $100,000 a year, or $10,000 a year, 50 times,

30:18or $500,000 a year, quite happy if they make 50 times that amount, right? It's $5 million.

30:27Now, Joe, if your grandfather had invested the money that he got, you'd be fine, right? Because

30:39your grandfather could, like, we'll just use modern numbers, your grandfather could only

30:46produce $100,000 a year worth of crops from his land, but Bob came along and offered him $5 million

30:53for his land, which is 50 times the amount, then if Bob had taken, sorry, if your grandfather,

31:00Joe, had taken that $5 million and invested it, right, even if he'd invested it at,

31:05if he'd invested it at 10%, that 5 million would have gotten 50, sorry, would have gotten $500,000

31:13a year, right? 10% of 5 million. So even if he'd invested it at 5%, he would have got $250,000 a

31:20year. And even if he had invested it at 2%, he would have got $100,000 a year. And, you know,

31:27you could buy investment stuff back in the day. Or, even if there's no particular investment

31:33vehicles, if your grandfather, Joe, had taken the $5 million and bought up a bunch of land,

31:40and then sold it to Bob, the excellent farmer at a profit, you still would have made a bunch of

31:47money. Or, even if he'd just set the money, I wasn't assuming there's not a huge amount of

31:52inflation, which there tended not to be with bimetallic currencies like silver and gold,

31:56if your grandfather, Joe, had simply left the money, or kept the money somewhere, put it in

32:01gold, stuck it in a bank, something like that, then you would have had enough money for many

32:06generations. If your grandfather, Joe, could live on $100,000 a year, and he got $5 million a year,

32:17that's 50 years worth of money, even if you just spend it all. So, if he chose to blow it

32:24on a bunch of stuff that didn't work out, he chose to invest in South Sea bubbles, or

32:29tulips in Holland, or something like that, if your grandfather sold the land and blew the money, or

32:37did not save the money, or whatever it is, right? Well, that's a shame. But that's not Bob's fault.

32:44Bob honorably paid the $5 million for your grandfather's acreage, and what your grandfather

32:51did with the money has nothing to do with Bob. What your grandfather did with the money has

32:56nothing to do with Bob, right? I mean, if you have employees and you pay them, well, you're

33:02obligated to pay them, what they do with the money, I mean, you might, you know, want to give

33:07them some good advice, but what they do with the money is not your concern. I mean, you may have,

33:13if they're getting into terrible debt, then that's probably going to be destabilizing to your

33:16business. But if you sell your house to someone, do you care, after you sell it to them, how well

33:25or how poorly they maintain your house? Well, no, because it's not your business anymore, right?

33:31If you sell a car, do you call the guy up every couple of months and say, hey, man, did you

33:36check the brake fluid? Did you change the oil? No. I mean, you sell your car,

33:43and, you know, some guy spends a couple of years driving your car into the ground.

33:48Is that your business? No, it's not your business. So, if you explain to Joe, the worker on the

33:57lands his grandfather owned, if you say to him, well, your grandfather chose to sell those lands,

34:03and your grandfather, unfortunately, did not invest or take care of the money,

34:10and now you have neither the land or the money, right? I mean, I don't sit there and say, gee,

34:16after 900 years of being aristocrats in Hoyland, why was I born into a single mother welfare state,

34:26dirtbag poverty? Well, I know the answer to that, because the money was sold,

34:32and the resources were blown. My parents, when they were still married,

34:36had a lovely house that probably is worth a fortune now, but they sold it as part of the

34:41divorce, sold it, split the money, and the money was all toasted. My family, with the exception

34:51of me, has a spending problem, in my humble opinion. I tend to hold on to money, or at least

34:56spend money on stuff that hopefully goes up in value, but my family as a whole has a spending

35:02issue. Now, so you end up with a small number of wealthy people, and it doesn't matter what you do.

35:12Like, I mean, assuming that you still have a relatively free market, property-based,

35:16property rights-based system, you can take all the land and redistribute it among everyone,

35:20and with a generation or two, it'll be back to the same configuration,

35:24because there are just some people who are ungodly talented in productivity,

35:30magic multiples, right? The Pareto principle stuff, right? So what happens is, there is the

35:38creation of a class system because of skills and excellence and property rights. The people best

35:46able to bring resources out of the means of production end up with massive amounts of wealth,

35:52and the people who formerly had land but managed it badly end up as employees.

35:57And, you know, if you're patient, which, you know, that's a long view and all of that,

36:02but if you're patient, then some massive advancement, some change in whatever is going

36:07to shake up the whole system, and whereas land used to be the great wealth, then it becomes

36:13the factory system, and then it becomes financial instruments, and like this just changes all the

36:17time, right? I mean, there's podcasting, which was not around a generation ago. So what happens then

36:25is you end up with very wealthy and very poor people, or relatively poor people, and this is

36:32true, a riding tide lifts all boats and so on, but people don't look at how wealthy their ancestors

36:37were, right? Because if you say to Joe, look, your grandfather owned land, but you have twice

36:44his income. People don't compare themselves to the past, they compare themselves to others

36:49in the present, usually because they're not taught differently. So rather than say, look,

36:58your grandfather made $100,000 a year from his acreage, but you're getting, you make $200,000

37:06a year working that same acreage, so you're better off than your grandfather, or whatever, right?

37:11Or even if you only make the same as your grandfather, you don't have the same variability

37:15that he did. In other words, your pay is guaranteed, whereas his would go up and down depending on

37:21weather and various infestations, and whether the scarecrow worked and stuff like that, right?

37:27So you end up with significant wealth disparity, and then that, because you have a whole bunch of

37:35sophists who are out there pouring their Iago-based poison into the ears of those who are

37:42not owners of the means of production, and saying, oh, he stole from you, and he's a bad guy, and he

37:47ripped you off, and you should go and reclaim your heritage. Just people who get their tickles and

37:52jollies from fomenting wars and fights and battles and all of that kind of stuff, right? There's

37:58some people, I mean, real verbal say to sophists, they get a huge kick, and probably almost a sexual

38:03pleasure from fomenting wars and fights and combat and conflict, right? And they tend to be

38:08physically weak, but rhetorically skilled people, right? Like the woman who can't beat up a guy,

38:14but she can complain to a big guy that the other guy called her a whore and grabbed her ass,

38:19and then the big guy goes and beats up, right? Just physically weak, but rhetorically strong.

38:24So what happens then? Well, then, because the sophists are whispering their poison

38:32into the resentful, those who formerly, whose ancestors owned the means of production,

38:38and now they're just workers, then a combination of guilt and sympathy and fear, right? Guilt,

38:45sympathy, and fear, there is a resource transfer from the wealthy to the poor. And I did the show

38:53on this, on Peter Schiff's show, radio show many years ago, called Spenhamland, S-P-E-E-N-H-A-M-L-A-N-D,

38:59Spenhamland, where they tried this welfare state, tried this welfare state, and hundreds of years

39:04later, it's still depressed, just as when there was a, if the flood of gold from the New World

39:12hit Spain, it caused massive inflation, it caused a 400-year recession, because all of the hyper

39:17skilled Pareto principle geniuses flee, and everyone just kind of staggers on under a load of

39:24diminished expectations. So, because the sophists and rhetoricians are fomenting rage and violence

39:33among those who are employees against those who own the means of production,

39:38there is a break in property rights. So, the only way to get abundance is through inequality.

39:45The only way to get abundance is through inequality. The only way to get wealth is

39:48through inequality. But then, and so, and the only way you get inequality in outcome is through

39:55property rights, right? As we talked about with land, right? If the wealthy guy, sorry, if the

40:01really great farmer is eyeing land, he can pay more for it, because he's so productive. So,

40:07you know, I would bid more for a microphone, if there was one microphone, and there was a bad

40:12podcaster with only a few people listening, and there's me, sort of at my height, with millions

40:18of subscribers and 10 million views and downloads a month, then I would be able to bid more for that

40:24microphone, sorry to label the point. So, property rights and universal morality breeds abundance

40:30and inequality, and the two sides of the same coin, same big beautiful new coin with ridges on

40:36it for reasons you can look into. So, property rights, universal morality, the truth, the truth.

40:44Universal property rights are true and valid. We own ourselves, we own the effects of our actions,

40:50whether it's a crime, whether it's a baby, whether it's crops, whether it's a freshly killed deer,

40:55whatever it is, right? We own ourselves, we own the effects of our actions. That's a universal

40:59moral principle, and accepting that universal moral principle breeds both wealth and inequality.

41:06Inequality breeds a fertile ground for resentment and rage and threats, and then what happens is

41:12the people who are doing really well feel bad, feel guilty, feel fear of the incipient revolution,

41:21and so they take some of their wealth and they carve it off to spend money on the poor,

41:27and they do this not usually through charity, but through the state, because the poor and the

41:36workers vastly outnumber the wealthy, the productive, and the owners of the means of production.

41:41I mean, it's one landlord per building, let's say, but there's a hundred tenants

41:45in the building. So, in a democracy, the tenants vastly outvote the landlords,

41:52and the politicians have to appease the tenants, not the landlords, which is why you get

41:58zoning, rent control, blah, blah, blah, right? So, through the power of the state, which is

42:04supposed to enforce property rights, property rights get violated through forced redistribution

42:09of income, and the morality, the universality is broken. We can, at least at some level,

42:16justify a state that protects property rights, even though the source of the revenue for the state

42:21protecting property rights is a violation of property rights, taxes, duties, and so on,

42:25but when the state is redistributing income at scale and forcefully, either directly through

42:31taxation or indirectly through counterfeiting or money printing and debt, well, then the morality

42:40is broken, the universality is broken, and the fault, for the most part, lies with the sophists.

42:49This is why Socrates identified them, in many ways, as the primary enemy.

42:53So, rather than tell the truth as to why your grandfather was a landowner and you're

42:59an employee, resentment is sown. When resentment is sown, the threat of violence increases,

43:07and people run to the government to redistribute income, which violates the property rights,

43:13for the foundation of the plenty, and there has been, of course, a massive battle. Those who do

43:19worse are called victims and exploited, and those who do better are called victimizers and exploiters,

43:26and all sorts of evils are heaped upon their troubled brows. So, the truth is that we own

43:33ourselves in the effects of our actions, universal property rights. When that truth is accepted,

43:37you get wealth and inequality, which is, of course, of course you do, of course you do. I mean,

43:43when was the last time, outside of Andy McDowell and four weddings and a funeral,

43:49when was the last time you saw a bad acting in a movie? It's very rare. I mean, seeing great

43:54acting is rare, but seeing bad acting is rare, because people are unequal in their acting

43:59talents and abilities, and therefore, most people are either not cast or are cast as minor roles

44:06or are cast as background extras or whatever, right, whereas the really good actors, especially

44:12the handsome ones, pretty ones, are front and center. Yeah, inequality. Acting talent and good looks are

44:18unevenly distributed among the population, and therefore, there's an inequality. Of course,

44:24when I was an extra in the made-for-television movie Cain and Abel, although I had a full

44:31screenshot of me in the crowd, I was not paid as much as the actors. Of course, right? It was not

44:37a shock to me. Why do I get paid more? Because they've proven their worth. Nobody pays to see me

44:43back in the day, but they pay to see the other actors. So, the degree to which a society accepts

44:49the truth of the universality of property rights, owning yourself and the effects of your actions,

44:52is the degree to which you get wealth and inequality, and then, because of sophistry

44:59coming from both the left and the right, because of sophistry, you end up in a situation where

45:05the truth is broken. The truth is broken. The truth of the universality of property rights,

45:12the morality of self-ownership, and owning the effects of your actions is broken, and then, well,

45:18we can see this in the West, right? That when wealth really began to explode in the post-second

45:24World War period, but even to some degree before that, I mean, although there was a 14-year Great

45:28Depression, but when wealth really began to explode in the post-war period, you got massive

45:34income redistribution schemes, because the sophists were telling all the people who were making more

45:40money, but not as much as the wealthiest, that the wealthiest were ripping them off and stealing

45:44from them and exploiting them and blah blah blah. And then, the West, like, why is the West in so

45:50much trouble? Because the West has denied universal morality. The left has denied the West,

45:56sorry, the West and the left, but the West has denied universal morality, as has the right,

46:01because both are in favor of horrible income redistribution schemes, such as the welfare state

46:06and, you know, subsidized housing and all kinds of stuff, right? So, the West has broken with

46:16universal morality. Thou shalt not steal property rights. The West is broken with universal morality

46:20and, as a result, the West is dying, because, of course, the welfare state, which was supposed to

46:26help the poor people in the West, now has become a magnet for migrants and immigrants to come and

46:32live off the taxpayers' time, right? I mean, in the Middle East, you make one-tenth as a wage laborer

46:38as you can make getting government income in the West, until society learns the truly moral roots

46:47of inequality. And, listen, I hate to say inequality, because a disparity or whatever it is,

46:53right? But, you know, some people open their mouths and sing like angels. Other people can

46:57take singing lessons for years and don't sound particularly good. C'est un fact. It's just a fact.

47:05Now, have singing voices been unequally distributed? Well, no. It's not like there's

47:09some central factory of vocal cords and, oh, I like this fetus, I'll give them a great singing

47:13voice. That's not how it works, right? It's just organic, it's biological, it's evolutionary,

47:17whatever it is. It's genetic, right? And, obviously, you can't have too many great singing

47:24voices, otherwise society becomes a choir which starves to death. So, talent has to be relatively

47:30small, because a talented singer might entertain the farmers in the evening, but the farmers still

47:38need to work and most people would rather be singers than farmers. And so, the number of

47:43people without good singing voices has to vastly outnumber the number of people with really great

47:46singing voices, otherwise nobody wants to work and they just want to sing. So, you have universal

47:53morality which produces disparities in outcome and those disparities in outcome, those wedges

48:01are widened and salted and poisoned by sophists into rage and that is used to break out of fear,

48:08guilt, shame, obligation, that is used to break the universality of property rights and morality.

48:15The wages of sin is death and the West is in trouble because we have sinned. We have sinned.

48:21We have broken property rights for the sake of sentimentality and fear and guilt and obligation.

48:30And what happens is, of course, what we should tell the poor is, you know, work hard, look for

48:36various opportunities and so on, right? Look for ways that you can do something new economically,

48:42look for ways that you can assert your skills. You know, poor people should be studying AI like crazy,

48:47look for ways you can study your skills and, you know, see if that gets you out of your

48:51poverty, right? Okay, that's good. I mean, I studied a lot of computer stuff and a lot of

48:56economics, a lot of history, a lot of philosophy and it ended up with, you know, I had a career in

49:00as a software entrepreneur and then as a podcaster and videographer, video vlogger or whatever, right?

49:06And public speaker and so, yeah, kind of worked out, kind of worked out but, you know,

49:10there's a lot of extra work but that's fine. I mean, the wealthy people usually work pretty hard

49:14too. So, I have no particular issues with that. It's that Britney Spears song, Work Bitch.

49:20So, yeah, just should be taught to work hard and, you know, that it's not like all the wealthy

49:27people are happy and it's not like all the poor people are unhappy and it's not like the wealthy

49:31people don't work hard and, you know, maybe the wealthy people could do a little less Instagram

49:35flaunting of their wealth. It's usually the kids, not the adults who do that. But unfortunately,

49:41we broke morality. We broke morality in the first world war. We broke morality in the second

49:48world war, particularly with the draft. Broke morality with Vietnam and America with the draft

49:54and broke morality with income redistribution schemes, which is just buying off the proletariat,

50:00so to speak, and buying votes because the poor will always outnumber the rich. So, the poor always

50:05vote to take away the property of the rich and everyone becomes poor. So, we broke morality and

50:10we refused to continue to look at shrinking the size and power of the state and now we have a

50:15giant state that can redistribute income, not just within our own borders, but in a sense across the

50:20world by having people come in who get free stuff, quote, free stuff from the government. So, the

50:25wages of sin is death. It's hard to mourn. Like, I wish people had made better decisions as a whole.

50:30I wish people had listened to moral philosophers. I wish people had listened to, you know,

50:34Ancaps and libertarians and so on, but they didn't. They didn't. And it's kind of tough to

50:41mourn the hardships being suffered by a society that has broken morality so fundamentally,

50:48to the point where, you know, it's stealing from the unborn through national debts. It's

50:53stealing from everybody through rampant inflation. It's redistributing money.

50:56Like, so we broke principle. We broke property rights. We broke universality.

51:00And when you break universality, you destroy productivity. And it's sort of like, if you are,

51:09you know, there used to be this thing where doctors would talk about how great smoking was,

51:13and all the doctors, they smoke camels, blah, blah, blah, right? And it took about 40 years

51:18to break that. And if you are somebody who's campaigning against smoking, oh,

51:25smoking is really bad. Smoking is really dangerous. And then there's a bunch of doctors

51:29who are promoting smoking. Oh, this cigarette is the best cigarette, and you'll be fine.

51:34Well, when one of those doctors gets sick from smoking, what is your response? Well,

51:39obviously, you don't want them to get sick, but that's why you told them that smoking was

51:42dangerous. But if they fought against you, and through their advocacy of smoking, you know,

51:48killed hundreds of thousands of people statistically, well, you're not happy that

51:53people are sick from smoking, but you are vindicated that people are sick from smoking.

51:58Because if you say, you know, smoking is bad for you, smoking is dangerous, smoking

52:01will kill, like, one out of two smokers, or whatever the numbers are. Well, it's not that

52:05you want people to die. You don't want people to die, which is why you're against people smoking.

52:10But if people continue to smoke, and then get sick, you are vindicated, like your life's

52:15work is vindicated. So we don't want to waste our life. We want our life's work to be vindicated.

52:23And the breaking of universal morality, the rejection of universal morality, the turning

52:29of societal sympathies into systemic immorality, well, a society that rejects truth, and reason,

52:39and evidence, and facts, well, it's like a guy driving blindfolded. I mean, he's going to crash,

52:47you don't know exactly when, or where, but he's going to. He may drive for a few minutes, okay.

52:55Now, you don't want him to crash, you say, take off your blindfold, and instead he puts on another

52:58blindfold, and you say he's going to crash. You don't want him to crash, that's why you're telling

53:01him to take off the blindfold. But when he does crash, you're vindicated, and you were right.

53:07And then hopefully his crash means that other people will not do the same thing. So that's

53:14on the grave of the West. Do not reject reality. Do not reject morality, or suffer the same fate

53:22as us. And that will be the sole lesson we have for the future. Sadly, but certainly. So I hope

53:29that helps. freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show. Love to get your feedback, and don't

53:34forget, we've got shows Wednesday night, 7 p.m. Eastern, Friday night, 7 p.m. Saturdays, 11 a.m.,

53:41and you can set yourself up for a public or private call-in show at freedomain.com slash call.

53:46Thanks so much, everyone. Talk to you soon. Lots of love. Bye-bye.

Category

Transcript

Recommended