0:04 - Introduction to Stefan Molyneux
0:25 - The Power of Bitcoin
4:43 - Characteristics of Money
7:36 - The Flaws of Fiat Currency
10:47 - The Risk of Fractional Reserve Banking
14:56 - The Consequences of Unlimited Money
17:19 - The Cost of War
22:06 - Bitcoin as a Solution
26:47 - The Impact of Monetary Policy
28:31 - A Call to Action for Bitcoin
In this lecture, Stefan Molyneux, a prominent radio host and philosopher, presents a compelling argument on the intersection of Bitcoin and political power. Drawing from his extensive background in technology and philosophy, he engages the audience by addressing the pressing issues regarding fiat currency and its implications on governance and economic systems. With over 65 million downloads of his radio show, Free Domain Radio, he introduces a provocative analysis that situates Bitcoin as a potential counterbalance to the expansive reach of government authority.
Molligneur starts by examining the current financial landscape, illustrating the staggering unfunded liabilities of various governments, including an alarming $100 trillion in the United States alone. He asserts that these fiscal gaps are largely a consequence of government policies that allow for the unlimited printing of currency, which diminishes the power of the populace while reinforcing an oligarchic structure wherein businesses and financial interests have undue influence over political decisions. Through a blend of historical context and economic theory, he presents Aristotle's classical definition of money, emphasizing its intrinsic properties—portability, durability, divisibility, and limited supply.
Transitioning into a discussion about Bitcoin, Molligneur highlights its remarkable design as a digital currency that meets these classical criteria, notably its scarcity capped at 21 million coins. He posits that the limitations of Bitcoin can effectively curtail the political machinations that come with fiat currencies, suggesting that a move toward decentralized digital currencies could empower individuals and enhance accountability in government actions. He critiques the inflationary practices of modern states, contrasting them with historical periods where limited currency maintained price stability and fostered genuine economic growth.
Throughout the lecture, he elaborates on the historical precedents set during major conflicts, most notably World War I and the Vietnam War, where governments circumvented fiscal responsibilities through monetary expansion, leading to devastating social consequences. By comparing the cost of these wars to the limited resources of gold-based economies, Molligneur argues that fiat money enables governments to wield power beyond democratic mandate, creating a disconnect between the needs of the populace and the realities of governmental spending.
Molligneur juxtaposes this historical analysis with contemporary issues, highlighting the failures of large-scale financial institutions and their lack of accountability, as witnessed during the 2008 financial crisis. He notes that while ordinary citizens faced the fallout of reckless banking practices, those responsible largely escaped unscathed. This observation leads him to emphasize how Bitcoin's inherent structure could catalyze a shift in power dynamics, forcing governments to be more responsive to their citizens’ needs rather than the interests of wealthy donors and lobbyists.
The lecture also touches upon contentious social issues such as the war on drugs and surveillance capitalism, prompting the audience to reconsider the role of government in everyday economic decisions. By illustrating these points through relatable scenarios and rhetorical questions, Molligneur underscores the significance of a monetary system that limits the capacity for state overreach. He presents Bitcoin as not merely a financial opportunity but as a foundational shift that could redefine the socio-political fabric and restore agency to the people.
Concluding his lecture, he calls upon the audience to actively engage with Bitcoin and explore its potential to reformulate not only personal finance but also the broader societal contract between citizens and their governments. He presents a vision of a future where fiscal responsibility prevails, and the historical patterns of the past can be rewritten through the responsible adoption of technology. Highlighting Bitcoin's potential, Molligneur leaves the audience with a resonating message: a chance to reclaim power and reshape the trajectory of society through informed choices about currency and governance.
[0:00] All right, the next speaker is a radio host.
[0:04] He's got millions, I've got the exact number, but he'll repeat it for you. Millions and millions of listeners in Canada and the US. And the radio station that he's hosting is called Free Domain Radio. A warm welcome for Stefan Molyneux.
[0:25] Thank you. Thank you.
[0:27] You know, it's right, sorry.
[0:30] Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well. Thank you so much for coming out to Bitcoin versus political power. I have a technology background, which is probably why I managed to slip into the conference. I was an entrepreneur for about 15 or so years in the high-tech field, and then I got bitten by the philosophy bug. I studied philosophy at a graduate level in Canada, and I ended up running the show. We have about 65 million downloads. I've been on TV. I speak all over the world. And since about 2011, I've been really talking up Bitcoin. Now, I'm just curious, how many people have Bitcoins? I don't mean on them. I'm just curious how many people have Bitcoins. Okay, good. Good for you. How many people are interested in getting Bitcoins? Not that I have any on me to provide, but okay, good. And I'm going to make a case here. I mean, And Bitcoin is great technology, it's genius, code, this public ledger of value transfer and information, copyright, deeds, wills, almost anything you can think of can be implemented in the Bitcoin architecture. It is one of the greatest innovations, I think, in human history. It's a lot to say, but I'll hopefully make the case here.
[1:46] And one of the things it has the power to do is to limit the seemingly endless growth of political power that literally appears to be eating up the world, eating up the next generation. The unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government are estimated at over $100 trillion. That's on a GDP of $15 trillion. Can't possibly pay it. Even here in the Netherlands, unfunded liabilities, the Social Security pensions, all the stuff the government has promised to pay for but has no cash to pay for is 522% of GDP. That's not good. That's not good at all. And there's a reason why that has occurred.
[2:36] And the reason is because governments can print any money that they want. That's their business plan. I've got a bank account. I've got a keyboard. I'm going to type some numbers in. Look, I'm a business genius. That's what they're doing. And that takes away power from the people. A study just came out yesterday from Princeton and Northwestern University that proves, I think, what we all feel instinctively to be true. They did a study in America, and they said, And one of the political beliefs or preferences of the American population.
[3:17] And what has the government done? Was it this close? It was not. This, this. They couldn't, you know, it was like watching a guy tell you how big the fish was he caught in Narnia. They couldn't find a further gap. Now, business interests, financial interests, they had the ear of the government. The people did not. It's an oligopoly. It's a plutocracy. We all know this to be true. And I'm going to argue that it is fiat currency that enables that in the government, and it is Bitcoin that can stop it and stop a lot more besides.
[3:57] 2,500 years ago, Aristotle, known as a very smart cookie, defined money as having four characteristics. sticks. It had to be portable, right? You know, lead coin. Can't do that. It had to be long lasting and not fade away, not lose its value. It had to be divisible, right? You can cut it up, reassemble it. And it had to have intrinsic value. And its most important intrinsic value was that it was limited. Limited. Now, I'm sure you guys know what was the original money back in the day? Solid gold. That's right. Not just a great TV show, but a very, very fine basis for currency.
[4:43] Of course, nobody under 40 knows that reference. Okay, never mind.
[4:51] Gold has those properties. It lasts long. You can slice it up. It retains its value. You can reassemble it, and it has intrinsic value because people like it. It's shiny. It's pretty and all that. So Bitcoin, of course, lasts. It's digital. Bitcoin is divisible, right? There will be 21 million Bitcoins. They could be divided by 100 million each into these Satoshis, and I think that's about as many pennies as there are in the world economy, so we're not going to run out of money anytime soon. And it is limited.
[5:22] And I know this sounds like very abstract, maybe even annoying, intellectual economic abstractions, but the limits of money, the limiting of money is the limiting of political power. We have these governments and we believe that they're necessary, but they are considered to be great servants and terrible masters. We create them for security, We create them for defense, for dispute resolution through the court system, and then they seem to do everything else under the known universe, and they run up enormous debts, and they start wars, and they sell off the unborn to foreign banksters, and we can't control the government when we need to. We try to vote, we try to rally, we try to have activism, and we cannot control this beast of the state. Anybody know how many Occupy Wall Street protesters ended up in jail? Anyone know that number? About 2,500. 2,500.
[6:23] The bankers in the United States are estimated, if you take out some of the government spending that's tried to remediate the damage, estimated to have destroyed about 40% of America's wealth. 40% of the wealthiest country destroyed by a financial oligopoly, who were clearly breaking laws repeatedly. Does anybody know how many bankers went to jail? Yeah, big fat goose egg, a bagel, zero. Remember Mitt Romney? Corporations are people, my friends. No, People go to jail. Corporations never go to jail because they give money to the government. Barack Obama was elected because it took the most money of any political candidate ever in history from the financial sector. And in return, he extends the tarp bailout. And banks that made hundreds of millions of dollars lying to their customers, selling them financial instruments that they were actually betting against, well, they get slap on the wrist fines that basically get passed off as costs to their customers. They pay nothing.
[7:36] We cannot control this monster.
[7:44] In the 19th century, we're all so used to inflation. Here, it's crazy. Like, I came to Amsterdam, and my wife told me it was going to rain all week. Turns out it's quite sunny. I don't want to get full-on tomato head, so I went to get some sunscreen. Like, $30 is like 20 euros for a sunscreen and all that. I thought it was going to be like gold and turn me into C-3PO or something, but it's just crazy expensive. When I first came to Canada in 1977, a candy bar cost 10 cents. You know, within 10 to 12 years, it was up to a buck. Inflation is just something we're so used to. In the 19th century, when gold was the basis of currency, prices went down. Can you imagine that? Don't we all feel like our money is just kind of evaporating? You know, like it's like grapes left out for ants to eat. Like you put it under your bed and it just smolders and vanishes. It's one of the reasons why we put money in banks, why we invest in the stock market. It's just a hedge against inflation. In the 19th century, when money was limited by gold, prices went down for a hundred years in general. Everything was a computer. Everything got better and cheaper over time. We can't fathom this anymore. But that's how it used to be when money was limited. Now...
[9:04] What happened in the 19th century was rich people, not all rich people, but rich people in general want to privatize profits and socialize losses, right? Ooh, I made some good money. Yay, all mine. Fine, I'm fine. Down with property rights, good thing, right? Ooh, did I lose some money? Can we find a couple of taxpayers? Maybe they're kids. Maybe they're unborn. They're not voting yet. Let's do that. And in the 19th century, people put money into banks. Now, they're already making money just by sitting on it because prices were going down. But they put their money in banks. Now, how do banks give you interest? They don't have any money other than what they're given. They're not entrepreneurs in the way most of the audience members here are. So banks lend money out to other people. And then those people make money and pay back the bank. And then the bank gives you a couple of points on your deposits. Fine business model. No problem with it at all.
[10:06] But in the 19th century, banks had the capacity for failure, of course, right? Because sometimes you invest, you give a whole bunch of people making carriages a lot of money, and then, oh, some jerk invented the car. Damn. Buy to that money, and you lose a lot of money. And of course, banks maybe make one or two percentage points on a loan, which means for every loan that fails, between 50 and 100 have to succeed perfectly, so it's a very risky business. So banks were competing for customers, and they always wanted to be able to offer more interest. How could they do that? Well, fractional reserve banking. Boy, there's a phrase that will get people to flock to you at dinner parties.
[10:48] I know about fractional reserve banking. Would you like to sit next to me?
[10:56] So the banks wanted to offer more interest, so they had to lend out multiples. Like they got a ton of gold, they lend out five tons worth of money to people. And they hope that the law of averages is going to even it out and they're going to be okay. And a lot of times it did. And sometimes it didn't. Then people lost money. They lost money because they were greedy, because they wanted the bank to lend out more than it was holding. When the bank went bankrupt, a lot of rich people lost a lot of money. Where do they go? Oh, congressmen. They go to the state. Now, the problem is the state is a negative sum game. The state is the deal where they say, hey, I can give you five euros. And people are like, hey, I like euros. I'll take that. And they say, well, to give you the five euros, I need to tax you 10 euros first, if that's all right. And then people say, I think that deal just got away from me. I don't feel like that's going to work that well. Because you're going to give someone 100 bucks, you go tax people a dollar each, 100 people, you've got to go pick up that money and people aren't going to comply. You've got to have a court system, collection, IRS, all that. So it's a negative sum game. Some people think it's worth it. That's perhaps a conversation with other time. I'll be at the Q&A session afterwards.
[12:13] But it is a negative sum game. So if a bunch of rich people come to you and say, my bank went bust, give me some money. Well, you've got to go and raise taxes on a bunch of people. And they don't like that. See, when money is limited, when it's limited on gold, the government can't just make it up. It means if you want to transfer money, you have to go take it from someone first. And those people don't like it. And so governments are always trying to, and rich people are always trying to break out of limited money, to get out of this little cage of limited money.
[12:47] And freedom for the government is enslavement for the people. We're talking about power to the people at this conference. When the government is free, the people are enslaved. When the government is contained, then the people are free. And when the government can print all the money that it wants, and when the government can create, in Canada there's a province, It has 75-year bonds, which means, give me money now, and in 75 years, someone will pay it back. I mean, there's no conceivable way that that could be considered just or fair or democratic. These people aren't even born yet, and you're taxing them. Picking the pocket of a fetus takes some pretty nimble fingers, but they can do it with fiat currency.
[13:41] To limit money is to limit political power. So prior to the First World War, the Federal Reserve was created in America with the capacity to create money, which is, well, technically called counterfeiting, but in the annals of government, it's sound fiscal policy. And during the First World War, which everyone started late in the summer and everyone expected it to be over by Christmas. Why? Because that's all the money they had. War is ferociously expensive. And all wars prior had been relatively short, relatively contained. And one by one over the First World War, the European governments went off the gold standard because they had no gold. War and gold don't mix very well. War and limited currency don't mix very well. When you have fiat currency, you have like this infinite blender for human parts. You can just keep shoving more and more people in. If they'd had to wage the First World War on gold, it likely would have ended by Christmas 1914 and a further nine or ten million people would not have died.
[14:57] This is how serious money is. Money is life and death for millions of people.
[15:06] So, the social programs that were instituted by most European governments in the 19th century, Germany first and foremost among them, kept running through the First World War. Right? You know that, I don't know if you know this, guns or butter, do you want to have a war economy or do you want consumer goods? When you have fiat currency, you don't have to give people that choice.
[15:28] You can have your social programs, you can have a war economy, and you pay for it by printing money. Anybody? What's the effect of printing money? What does it do to prices? Who's awake? Yeah, it goes up. Yeah, they go up. Inflation, technically, according to the Austrian economists, who I'd really recommend you look into, inflation is an inflation of the money supply. The price that goes up is just an effect of the inflation. First World War, they kept the social programs going while running unsustainable wars, and they had to go off the gold standard. the First World War did not need to be fought. The economic disasters that followed, the uncoupling of money from gold, are still being felt. 1971, in America, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society social programs were underway, costing billions and billions of dollars. Fighting a war in Vietnam, which like the First World War did not need to be fought, did they go to the people and say, we need money for the war, we're going to have to shut down all this other stuff. No. They went off the gold standard, just like the European nations had done through the First World War. They go off the gold standard so they don't have to ask you to choose between food and death, between life and murder, between guns and butter.
[16:53] Taxes in America have not been raised. They're waging a war on terror. Throughout all of human history, 174,000 tons of gold has been mined and refined. 174. Just think, 174. The war on terror cost 291,000 tons of gold.
[17:19] The cost of World War II for America, which was never invaded or bombed, save Pearl Harbor, was 15 times the amount of gold that they had in Fort Knox and the Fed.
[17:39] In terms of bitcoins, the war on terror costs 500 times more bitcoins than will ever be mined, and about 1,100 times more than is currently available. How is this possible? How is it possible to wage these astoundingly destructive wars with the deaths of over a million Iraqis and the displacements of a million and a half Iraqis? And in Fallujah, the genetic damage to the population as the result of these hellacious weapons is so bad that anthropologists and geneticists estimate that the population of Fallujah has been genetically destroyed for at least a generation. How is it possible? It's possible because money is unlimited. It's possible because not more than one in a thousand or 10,000 people know that they lost their house because they cheered the war. They don't know that. They can't trace that. They're certainly not educated about that. Why would you educate people about that if you want all the evils of warmongering political power?
[18:43] So when governments can print money, they don't have to ask the people to make rational decisions or to balance things, right? The basis of economics. All human desires are infinite. All resources are finite. But with the magic of the printing press, with the magic of typing whatever you want into your own bank account, you go into this crazy psychotic world of limitless capacity for destruction and debt. So if in 2003, the American government had gone to its population and said, hey, that's a damn bad guy, right? Bad guy. I think we're all in agreement on that. Very bad guy. Would be nice if they hadn't armed him before, but bad guy. Why don't we go to war? People say, I'm not sure about that. They say, well, that'll be $75,000 per household. Please and thank you very much. How many warmongers would be left? Oh, really? $75,000? No, that's okay. Blessed are the peacemakers. Let's find another route. The tarp bailout for the banks. Hey, do you feel like bailing out Daddy Warbucks and his gold monocle? Would that be fun for you? Great. $2,200 per person. $4,400 for every working person. Want to send that money to us? Really? No, I don't think so.
[20:03] But they can just keep doing things without referring to the will of the people because they didn't invent the photocopier but they sure know how to use it the government has no money of its own.
[20:16] Bitcoin is intrinsically limited. You can't make a Bitcoin. You can mine it, and the government can't print a Bitcoin. The government, in a Bitcoin currency universe, has to actually go to the people and ask them what they want. The government will actually have to do what it claims it does, serve the people. Ask the people. not with votes votes you only ever get to vote for people who've already been bought and paid for who is up there on the podium in the presidential debates whether you go to Europe or to America or South America or China anywhere the only people who are up there are people who've got enough money to run and where are they getting the money from they're getting the money from special interests at your expense. That's not a theory. I mean, this is fairly well documented. If we have a Bitcoin universe, you don't get to print money for war.
[21:27] You don't get to print money for a prison industrial complex. You don't get to print money for a war on drugs. You have to ask the people. War on drugs in America costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year at the most conservative estimate, hundreds of billions of dollars a year. How many people, if their moral outrage against drug use, ooh, that's bad vegetation, if their moral outrage was not subsidized by money printing and they had to pay the bills themselves, how many of them would find tolerance for people who like Pink Floyd? I think they would be all right with that.
[22:06] All the people who hate drugs and love Sgt. Pepper's.
[22:15] So Bitcoin gives us an opportunity to reclaim the power of the people to say yes or no to what the government claims that it wants to do. Because there's this weird thing that happens in society. There's something that's happening that's cool, and then people say, well, the government can make it better. And they say, okay, well, the government can make it better, or let's have the government add to it. And then what happens is, boink, you get over to this place where suddenly the government has to do it. And then suddenly it's like only the government can do it. And this is how we think about currency now. It has to be government. Why? It's a complete anomaly. The last time the government had this much power over currency was in the waning days of the Roman Empire. When they inflated the currency so much that the gold coins only had 2 or 3% of gold left in at the end. And they were trying to pay all their mercenaries with this crap gold. And the mercenaries said, this stuff is crap. We're coming to Rome to get the gold. They killed the Roman economy, depopulated Rome from like a million and a half people to 17,000 people in a year or two, and that was it for civilization for quite some time. When you give governments the power to control the money supply, it grows like a tumor until it extinguishes society itself. I really urge you to consider it to be that important.
[23:36] With Bitcoin, you can't steal it. Well, if you leave your wallet on a park bench, it can be stolen. But with any rudimentary security, you can't have your Bitcoin stolen. I was just speaking at a conference in Texas. I met some vendors who are integrating something so that if anybody tries to get a Bitcoin out of your wallet, It sends you a text message to your cell phone. You enter a PIN and you approve the transfer. Solved. It can't steal the Bitcoins now. That happens anywhere and everywhere.
[24:15] There is going to be enormous amounts of resistance to the adoption of Bitcoin, but I really believe that it is about the most peaceful revolution that we can have in this world. It's been called the internet of money in that it's a protocol and you can program around it, you can build anything on top of it, which the community, thousands of developers are currently doing. But it's better than the internet. There's a non-controversial statement. It's better than the internet because the internet has not slowed the growth of governments around the world. The internet has not saved the next generation from the endless gutter hole of debt. Information empowers the people, but not with regards to political power. Political power is a monopoly of the initiation of force in a geographical area. Information don't stop bullets. But when you don't have money to fund bullets, the bullets stop.
[25:24] War, surveillance, as the lady was talking about before. Debt, the growing fascism that is occurring throughout the Western world is all predicated on money. Imagine a football game where every time you cheered, you were charged five euros. How loud is that game going to be?
[25:48] Very quiet. Imagine if our primitive reptile bloodlust brain, which we all have, nothing wrong with it, Imagine if our primitive bloodlust, us-versus-them, tribal, base-of-the-skull-meat-brain was provoked with an enemy. Those guys are bad. They're coming to get us. We don't want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud. What stops that brain from cheering war? Cost. Cost stops us. Think of the environmental predation and environmental destruction that is wrought, by the continual increase in the money supply. How much consumerism is driven by the fact that your money is burning a hole in your pocket? Literally, it's melting, it's evaporating, it's dying in your pocket. Convert it to something, convert it to something, buy something.
[26:47] How much consumer demand is stimulated by excess money being flushed into the system?
[26:57] How much wealth, genuine wealth, not bubble wealth, genuine wealth, how much genuine wealth is not being created. I'll give you one tiny example, then I think I have to end. Oh, the countdown. Normally it takes like three or four security guards to get me off, but.
[27:11] There was a study that came out recently that said if, just one tiny aspect, if American regulations and controls over the economy, interferences in the economy, had stayed at 1946 levels. It was not a Mad Max, Thunderdome, flaming-headed, bayonetting kind of wasteland in America in 1946. Civilized society. If regulations had stayed that small in America, if they just stayed that size, the GDP of America would not be $15 trillion. It would be $53 trillion. This is the opportunity cost of one tiny slice of an expansion of government power. There would be no poverty, nobody would have to worry about health care costs, charity would take care of everyone, and there would not be, as there is in America at the moment, children born into $1.4 trillion worth of debt that they never voted for, never chose, and will spend the rest of their lives groaning under the yoke of foreign banksters to pay off. This is the alternative universe that Bitcoin can generate. So I strongly urge you to start looking into Bitcoin. Start promoting it. Yes, it's great. You can make some money. You can do some cool stuff technically. But I really believe this is our best chance to save the world from a direction that it's heading, which is sadly a photocopy of the end of the Roman Empire.
[28:32] When you study history, you're basically watching the same movie over and over and over again with different costumes.
[28:39] Not a toga. It's a suit, but it's the same damn thing.
[28:43] Bitcoin, we can. Stop the tape. we can break out of the loop. We can regain power to the people. Jesus, who knew a thing or two about handling the moneylenders, Jesus said, Blessed are the peacemakers. I say, no. Build shall be the warmongers. And then we get peace. Thank you, everyone, so much.
[29:15] Thank you. Thanks.
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