The Truth About Debt! Listener Questions

Stefan Molyneux

Philosopher Stefan Molyneux lays out the truth about debt as intergenerational enslavement through government borrowing, inflation, and taxes that trap kids before they’re born. He contrasts it with a Bitcoin economy that forces real accountability and free-market responsibility instead of endless coercion dressed up as virtue.    GET FREEDOMAIN MERCH! https://shop.freedomain.com/  SUBSCRIBE TO ME ON X! https://x.com/StefanMolyneux  Follow me on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@freedomain1  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

00:00Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.

00:04Couple more questions, sorry I didn't get to them before. Steph, I checked your AI and did

00:08find reference to your thoughts on government debt, but not in relation to the below.

00:12Forgive me if you find this rambling. I'm genuinely curious what you would have to say

00:16about these ideas and perhaps not equipped to inquire properly. I see debt as an enabler for

00:22many of the points you touch on, for example, allowing governments to become substitute fathers

00:26and thus dismissing the roles of men in families. Further, there have been talk recently about the

00:31feminization of the West, and I wonder if debt may be playing a significant role in enabling

00:37caustic feminism, DEI, pandering to special interest groups and ideas that seem distant from reality.

00:42What do you think? Could all this happen without debt as a contributor? Can debt make a civilization

00:48dumb? Yeah, it's not debt in particular, although, of course, that is the word that is used and I use

00:55it as well. That's the nomenclature that's typical. We say government debt. And saying government debt

01:02is like saying human ownership. It's slavery is really the word for both. Government debt

01:11takes the concept of debt and applies it to the government as if it is the government that has the

01:18debt. And government debt, national debt, and so on, all take the concept of debt and tie it to something

01:27external to people, when, of course, it's not. It is a form of enslavement. So, for instance, there were

01:36people who would come over to America and to pay for their passage to America, they were pretty much

01:44enslaved for a period of years. And if that slavery, if they were born into that slavery, we would say

01:52that they

01:52were born into slavery. If they were never released from that debt, sometimes it took them years to work off

01:58the

01:59debt, and then they were free. And if they were born into that debt, or were never free of that

02:05debt, we would

02:06simply call them slaves. We would simply call them slaves. It is a form of enslavement, and a very

02:13pernicious form of enslavement, to have children born into a million dollars worth of debt, because a

02:19million dollars is kind of what people earn on average, give or take, of course, over the course of their

02:24lifetimes. Now, to call it what it is, which is an odd form of enslavement, because normally when you

02:35enslave someone, you just order them around and tell them what to do. But what's happened now, of course,

02:40is that governments control money, governments print and create money, but the free market, or its

02:49vestitial remnants, and choice as a whole is allowed to continue. So, in other words, you are in perpetual

02:58debt, you are born into debt, and you live in perpetual debt, but you are allowed to choose

03:07the manner in which you try to pay off, but will fail to pay off that debt. That's a very

03:14different

03:14matter, and it's really only possible with fairly advanced technology, and computers, and deduction at

03:21source, and so on. Computers and accountants have allowed the tax code to get this complicated.

03:32If you've ever run a business, you just know that you can't do your taxes. You can't do your own

03:38taxes. It's impossible. A flat tax you could do, you know, just take your gross, take 15% of it,

03:44send it off. But taxes have become insanely complicated. So, it's really just another form

03:53of enslavement. And the difference is, of course, that when you are enslaved, like you just owned,

04:02you know, as most people were throughout history, just kind of owned and controlled slaves or serfs

04:06or whatever. When you're owned, in general, your children aren't more owned. Your children are

04:14more slaves. In fact, you know, you can work or hope to buy your way to freedom. You could work

04:21to hope to

04:23escape, such as through the Underground Railway to Canada for the antebellum slaves. You could hope

04:32to become less enslaved. But of course, that's not the way that it works with government debt,

04:41with fiat, enslavement. It's that in traditional sort of Southern slavery, if you, I don't know,

04:50you work, you scraped, you saved, you had benefits or generosity or something like that, you could find

04:56some way to get out of being enslaved. I mean, for some, for a few, there was some possibility,

05:02some hope. There's no hope for that. I mean, because the harder you work in old-style slavery,

05:13the higher your chances get. And again, I'm not saying they were super high. But the more you

05:19worked in the past, the greater was your chance of you or your kids getting out of slavery. And there

05:28were places to escape to where you weren't enslaved. That is not the case with modern government

05:35debt. The harder you work, the more you and your children are enslaved. For the simple reason that

05:45the harder you work, the harder you work, the more taxes you pay, the more the government has

05:55assets which can be used as collateral for more borrowing and money printing and so on.

06:02So it would be like if you had 10 years or 7 years to pay off your debt for, say,

06:09coming to America

06:10back in the day. But the harder you worked, the more years you would have to be enslaved.

06:19Well, that would be an insane system, right? That would be a deranged system. So the better the

06:28economy gets, the more innovations there are, the more advances there are in technology and other

06:34forms of efficiency and transportation and so on. The more of that that occurs, the more

06:40people are enslaved. So the harder you work, the more money you make, the more your children end up

06:48in debt. So if we took away, let's say you could snap your fingers and the government had to operate

06:55on Bitcoin, then it would not be able to print money. It would not be able to use Bitcoin as

07:03a

07:04collateral. Well, no, actually, sorry, technically, it could use Bitcoin as a collateral. But let's say

07:09that the entire economy worked on Bitcoin, then you can't really use Bitcoin as collateral

07:18to borrow Bitcoin unless you have a clear return on investment. So yeah, if you were a business and you

07:25needed some Bitcoin to start your business, then people might lend you Bitcoin if you signed contracts

07:31and would return collateral. But the government doesn't return collateral. The government is

07:37about consumption. It's not about really investment. And of course, you can say, well, the government

07:43built a lot of roads and that has facilitated things for sure. For sure. But the government

07:47doesn't really have an ROI. You can't pay people back. So in a Bitcoin world, things, of course,

07:54things need to get done. And people who were investors would have the choice to invest in

08:00something to do with the government, or they would have the choice to invest in something to do with

08:04the free market. Let's say that there was still a government. Would people invest in the government

08:12or would people invest in the free market? I mean, people would invest in the free market because in

08:17the free market, individuals are responsible. In the government, nobody is responsible.

08:20In the free market, there's no overhead of the use of force. In government, there's the overhead of

08:26the use of force. And you can sign contracts with individuals in the free market. I mean,

08:34individuals embedded in a corporation, but even the idea that corporations would exist in the free

08:39market is highly debatable. At least corporations wouldn't exist as a way to shield people from

08:44legal liability. So corporations exist so the government can sell legal immunities to rich

08:50people in return for rich people in return for rich people supporting the government. It's a very

08:53clever scheme. So I doubt anybody would really invest in the government if the government was in

09:02competition with the free market. So in a Bitcoin universe, government activity would very quickly

09:10shift to the free market, to individual responsibility and accountability and liability. Because if people

09:16aren't responsible for failure, there's no point to investing in their success. So governments could

09:23not pretend to add value, governments could not create intergenerational debt, governments could not

09:30borrow on a blockchain currency, on a Bitcoin currency, because all the Bitcoin that would be available for

09:36investment would go to free market entities, not to the government. You can't beat City Hall, so to speak,

09:42right? So if you look at debt as a drug, and if you look at someone who gets addicted to,

09:53I don't know,

09:55what's the word, crack, cocaine, or I don't know, heroin, or something like that. But let's look at

09:59somebody who becomes a crack addict, and they continually escalate their use of crack. And when we look at the

10:11failure of failure of their lives, because they end up, you know, homeless, no teeth, they end up

10:19dying in some horrible way, their health is completely ruined, they lost all their money, they lost their

10:25family, their job, their friends, they became a thief. And it was a wretched descent into a truly scurvy death.

10:38We would say, what happened? Say, oh, God, I heard that guy died. He was 94 pounds? What happened?

10:46Oh, he became a crack addict. Say, well, it's got to be more complicated than that. I mean, I heard

10:54he

10:54got divorced. Yes, his wife divorced him because he was a crack addict. Oh, I heard he had a lot

11:02of

11:02health problems. Yes, he had health problems because he was a crack addict. Oh, I heard he lost his house.

11:06Yes, he lost his house because he was a crack addict. Oh, I heard he spent time in jail. Yes,

11:10he spent time in jail because he stole to support his crack habit. And pretty much everything in his

11:15life would resolve around his crack addiction. And if you're saying, well, I mean, it can't be the

11:23whole reason as to why his life fell apart, and he ended up 94 pounds and dead. So yeah, that

11:30pretty

11:31much was it. And he said, oh, come on, it can't just be one explanation. It can't just be one

11:37explanation. If people understood that government, quote, transfers, again, to use a neutral term,

11:43if people understood the government transfers of wealth were a negative sum game, that I think it's

11:5070 plus percent of the money that is allocated to the welfare state ends up in the hands of the

11:55bureaucrats and 20-30% of it ends up in the hands of the poor. So that's very inefficient, right?

12:02I mean,

12:03would you give money to a charity where they hoovered up 70 plus percent of your donation without giving

12:09it to the people in need? Probably not. I think charities are supposed to operate 10 to 15 percent

12:14overhead, not 70 plus percent. But if governments can create money, which is the ultimate theft through

12:22inflation, if governments can create money, then they can just hand out all of this newly minted

12:27money to their friends who get it at full value, and everybody else, particularly those on fixed incomes,

12:32ends up being robbed blind. So debt, by which I include inflation. Now, I know that that's a little

12:43of a round peg in a square hole, but debt is a form of theft, right? So if I sign

12:51a note that says you

12:54owe $10,000, then I've stole $10,000 from you. I've stolen $10,000 from you. If I forge a

13:01signature

13:02and whatever it is, go off to some foreign country, and you end up having to pay that debt, I've

13:06stolen

13:06$10,000 from you, because I take the money, and you have to pay the expense. And inflation is the

13:16same

13:16kind of thing. A counterfeiter is stealing from people who have the existing currency, right? In the

13:25same way that the people who shaved off the edges of coins were stealing from those who had those coins,

13:32and the Roman emperors who kept putting more and more garbage metal into their coins, were stealing

13:38from those who already had the good coins, and so on. Because it creates a debt. It just adds a

13:44little

13:44bit of that debt to everyone else, and every other price. So it's fine to look at a single cause.

13:54It's

13:54sort of back to the guy who was the crack addict. It's fine to look at single causes for overall

14:00disasters, and government control of money, and the ability of governments to go into debt,

14:05in other words, to create unfunded liabilities on the part of others, is foundational.

14:12All right. Part two. You speak significantly of virtue, which I have taken deeply to heart,

14:17and working to learn more. Thank you. I wonder if you could also speak to virtue in government and

14:21among the elites who now run much of our world. If our leaders claim to be virtuous, which I'm sure

14:25they would, if asked, but don't bring up on their own terms, how can they justify the debts that

14:30have been accumulated, mass immigration, and so on? If elites claim to be virtuous, again,

14:34they don't bring it up, how do they justify rust belts, offshoring of work, and well-being of

14:38regular people? It seems like virtue is under attack, or is being placed to the side. What

14:42is going on? Or was it just never really a significant thing? So the best way to control

14:48people is to pretend you're not threatening them, but you are inflicting virtue upon them. So the most

15:01dangerous and excessive threats in this universe exist in the concept of eternal hell, that if you

15:11don't obey the priest, that you will burn in torment for eternity. I mean, we think of medieval tortures

15:19as brutal and inhumane, as they were, of course, if you've ever been to sort of medieval, like

15:25recreations of medieval torture chambers, and you see just the horrors that were inflicted upon people.

15:31Physically, I mean, you'd look at that and say that's monstrous, but those people would die in

15:36relatively short order, and certainly they would die virtually instantaneously relative to eternity,

15:40where even worse tortures awaited them. And so, a priest will tell you that you will be tortured

15:49and mutilated and punished for eternity if you don't do what he says. And part of what he says is,

15:57you have to transfer resources to me. If I said to someone, nah, let's not make it me, if, let's

16:03say,

16:03hey, Bob, if Bob says to someone, you have to give me money, or I will torture you, that would

16:10be

16:11a threat, and that Bob would go to jail. But if you are religious, a religious leader, and you say,

16:18you have to give me resources, or you will be tortured, say, hey, man, it's not me, it's God who's

16:24doing it, so it's not that bad. But if Bob says, oh, it's Doug who will torture you, then both

16:31Bob and

16:31Doug would be arrested. This is sort of basic.

16:33Basic morality, right? If you threaten torture from someone else, then both you, as the person

16:40who threatens, and the other guy, as the person who will torture, would both be arrested.

16:46That would be kind of like a shakedown, right? That would be like the mafia saying,

16:49if you don't pay me protection money, then we'll burn down your store.

16:53So, there's a horrible threat there, but it is under the exhortation of virtue. I tell you of these

17:02things, well, obviously, they're, I don't know if they're perceived to be true, it's hard to know

17:07what people actually believe. We only know what they say. But these things are talked about,

17:14but they're talked about under the guise of virtue. So, you're not punished because you don't give me

17:22money. You're punished because you're bad, right? So, it's less honest than the mafia, right? At

17:29least with the mafia, they say, well, yeah, basically, we're going to burn down your store

17:34if you don't give us money. But they don't say, and because you're morally corrupt and evil

17:39to the store owners, right? They say, look, we don't like to work for our money. We're good with

17:43violence. So, do that. Give us the money or we'll burn down your store. But there's no moral

17:48element involved. It's just an appeal to pragmatism. And, of course, the mafia will also

17:53say, oh, yeah, by the way, we own and run the police department and we have lots of people

17:58in there, so there's no point going to the police. There's no moral element involved, which

18:02is why it tends to diminish over time. But if you say to someone, I'm threatening you or

18:08enacting violence against you because you're immoral, that my aggression against you, my threats

18:17against you are there for purposes of morality, and if, of course, people believe that, then

18:26you have a very efficient control mechanism on your hands. So, politicians take resources

18:35from you under the guise of exhortations to virtue. Don't you want to take care of the

18:41poor? Don't you want to take care of the sick? Don't you want to take care of the elderly?

18:45Don't you want to help these poor refugees? And so, under exhortations of virtue, well,

18:52they get a hold of your resources, to put it as nicely as possible. And if you don't want

19:01to transfer those resources, then the threats are activated. So, in church, you have to give

19:10the tithe, right? Not all churches, a lot of churches. But you have to give resources.

19:15And if you don't give resources, or if the church doesn't get enough resources, then it punishes

19:20people with chastisement, ostracism. And again, you give the tithe in part to avoid going to

19:27hell and so on, right? Which is give me money or be tortured. Say, hey, it's not me. It's just

19:32God, whatever, right? But since there isn't a God, it's basically give me resources. Or my invisible

19:40friend will torture you for eternity after you die. Or, you know, I mean, I know if they say it's

19:46not God who's doing the torturing, but the torture is part of the religion. Oh, no, no. It's the devil

19:53who is going to torture you. It's like, yeah, but God is the one who sends you to hell. Because

20:00God can do

20:01anything, therefore God can choose not to send you to hell. Say, ah, yes, it's not you. It's God.

20:08Sorry, it's not God who sends you to hell. It's you who sends yourself to hell. Well, but that's like

20:13saying if the mafia, the guy doesn't pay the protection money, and the mafia burns his store

20:18down and says, well, it wasn't the mafia who really did it. It was the guy who did it because

20:22he chose not

20:22to pay the protection money. That's blaming the victim, right? So sociopaths in general are experts

20:30at threatening you under the guise of mimicking virtue. So sociopaths or control freaks or whatever

20:44you want to call them, they want to control you using aggression or coercion. But they know that

20:53if it's open, naked aggression and coercion, that you will resist. They also know that you don't want

20:59to resist because resisting is dangerous. And thereby, or therefore, they give you the fig leaf

21:05or the cover of, I'm not submitting to aggression or coercion, I'm submitting to virtue. And that way,

21:14to resist or rebel is to resist or rebel against virtue itself, which people don't want to do.

21:21So, all right, any future plans or ideas to write a children's book? I think a children's book would be

21:26fun to write a children's book on ethics, UPB. But I need to become better at AI. Now, I've spent

21:36the

21:36last month plus working heavily with AI for imagery and video snips and so on. So I need to become

21:45better

21:46at that because I need to be able to create consistent characters throughout a book. So it certainly is

21:52a plan. And I appreciate the reminder. So yeah, thanks everyone so much. Of course,

21:59freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show. Very greatly, deeply and humbly appreciated.

22:04And I hope you have a beautiful day. And we will talk soon. Take care. Bye-bye.

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