Sex, Playas and Single Moms - Freedomain Radio Sunday Show, 21 October 2012

Introduction - Review of Libertopia and the Liberty Cruise: 0:00
How to Tell If Someone Is Manipulating You: 3:25
The Emotional Difference between Abuse and Accidents: 25:50
What To Do If You See a Child Being Abused: 50:00
Why Playing It Cool with Women Is a Bad Idea 57:25
Why 'Rights' Are the Secular Equivalent of 'Faith' 1:35:10
The Morality of Economic Boycotting: 1:46:00
Masculinity, Fatherlessness and Russian Rape (a dream) 1:54:00
Outro; Thanks and a Documentary Update: 2:21:17

Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

Why Obama's Healthcare Mandate Will Fail

ACA: An Impossible Mandate
By John C. Goodman

Read with the kind permission of the Independent Institute - independent.org.

Most Americans will be required to have health insurance beginning on January 1, 2014. The type of insurance you have, where you will get it, and what you will pay will be determined not by you and your employer or by free choice in the marketplace, but by government. Here are the biggest problems the mandate will create. (For more details, please consult the book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis.)

Crowding Out Other Consumption

Health costs per capita have been rising at twice the rate of per capita income for the past forty years. President Obama did not create the underlying problem. Nor is this a uniquely American problem. The result: healthcare spending will consume more and more of our income with each passing year.

To make matters worse, the normal consumer reactions to rising premiums are going to be disallowed. For example, most people would react to unaffordable premiums by choosing a more limited package of benefits, or opting for catastrophic coverage only or relying more on Health Savings Accounts. But these and other responses are limited or barred altogether under the new law.

The provisions governing preventive care illustrate the problem. Everyone will have to have a plan that covers preventive care (mammograms, Pap smears, colonoscopies, etc.) with no deductibles or co-payments. Since there will be no out-of-pocket payment, no one will have any incentive to comparison shop and try to minimize the cost of these services. Could some preventive care be provided by a nurse at a walk-in clinic more cheaply than at a doctor’s office? Undoubtedly. But the new law will prevent you from being in a health plan that gives you economic incentives to economize and reduce those costs.

Crowding Out Wage Increases

Most people will continue to obtain health insurance through an employer. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the average annual cost of a minimum benefit package at $4,500 to $5,000 for individuals and $12,000 to $12,500 for families in 2016. Thus, the minimum cost of labor will be a $7.25 cash minimum wage and a $5.89 health minimum wage (family), for a total of $13.14 an hour or about $27,331 a year.

Imagine you are an employer. You certainly aren’t going to pay an employee more than his value to the organization, and competition from other employers will tend to prevent you from paying less. If the government forces you to spend more on health insurance, you will spend less in wages in order to pay for the mandated benefits.

For above-average-wage employees, this is all straightforward. Expect wage stagnation over the foreseeable future, as employers use potential wage increases to pay for expanded (and mandated) health benefits instead. At the low end of the wage scale, however, the effects of this new law are going to be devastating.

Crowding Out Jobs

Ten-dollar-an-hour workers and their employers cannot afford $6-an-hour health insurance. If they bought it, only $4 would be left for cash wages and that would violate the (cash) minimum wage law. This is not a small problem. One-third of uninsured workers earn less than $3 above the minimum wage.

Further, although health economists have known for decades that these are the workers that most need help in obtaining insurance, there are no new subsidies to help employees at Walmart or McDonald’s or Denny’s or any other restaurant chain buy health insurance. These workers and many others are at risk of losing their jobs.

Do We Really Need a Mandate?

The idea of a health insurance mandate has seemed reasonable to many people on the right as well as the left because of the free-rider problem: those who remain willingly uninsured will have extra money to spend, and if they become sick and need care they cannot pay for, they will look to everyone else to provide that care for free. Are we not rewarding them for being irresponsible and allowing them to be free-riders on the rest of society?

That argument seems persuasive until we ask this question: if we require everyone to have health insurance, what is the appropriate punishment for someone who doesn’t? The only practical way to enforce a mandate is with a fine. And if that is all we have in mind by way of enforcement, we do not need a mandate. All we need is a system that fines people who don’t purchase insurance.

In fact, the income tax already provides this “fine.” Middle-income families who have employer-provided health insurance (as opposed to higher wages) receive a generous tax subsidy. The flip side of that subsidy is a penalty: People who don’t have employer-provided insurance pay higher taxes as a result of that fact.

Why is it good not to have a mandate? Because once the government tells us what insurance we must have, every special interest imaginable will lobby Congress to become part of the mandated benefit package. This has already happened at the state level, where insurance plans in various states are required to cover providers ranging from acupuncturists to naturopaths and services ranging from in vitro fertilization to marriage counseling. All told, there are 2,156 mandates at the state level. They increase the price of insurance and have priced as many as one-in-four uninsured people out of the market.

Prax Appeal! Prax Girl Talks Praxeology on Freedomain Radio

Introduction: 0:00
What Is Praxeology? 3:35
Empiricism and Philosophy: 7:50
What Is Good? 18:20
Why Did Economics Shift from Praxeology to Empiricism? 28:30
Empiricism As A New Religion: 38:40
Choice in the Face of Coercion: 42:40

PraxGirl and Robert Taylor discuss Austrian Economics, elusive ethics and Ludwig von Mises on Freedomain Radio. For more PraxGirl: http://www.youtube.com/praxgirl and http://www.praxeology.tv

Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

Remember When You Were Three?

Okay, well Stefan it's been lovely here with you today - if you've got any grand philosophy from the mind of the Molyneux, please share it with the listeners.

Well, I was reading this article the other day, it was called "8 Questions Philosophy Will Never Answer" - I'll leave your listeners with this - and people can of course go to freedomainradio.com; podcasts are all free, no ads, free books, the forum is free, and people can - you know, 10,000 people chatting about philosophy, I hope people will check it out.

But one of the things, one of the standards that philosophy was never supposed to penetrate was: "There's no such thing as a better morality, there's no such thing as the right morality." You know this is cultural relativism, you know, "Everyone has their own way of doing things, and your way is not necessarily the 'right' way, and you have to be tolerant of other people's different opinions," and so on.

And - it really provokes my inner child - because this is what we say to adults when adults want to stand up for something that is right and true and good, like: "Hey, let's stop pointing guns at each other as a species to get shit done! Let's just try that! Let's just - I mean - let's try it as a thought experiment! What if we didn't have a violent control over the instantaneous creation of generation-enslaving debt ass-wipe paper money? What if we didn't have a violent monopoly on that? What if we didn't have a violent monopoly on the endless indoctrination of children by the powers that be, on how necessary the powers that be are and how you can never ever grow up from being a child? You can never save for your own retirement, you can never decide for yourself who you're gonna help or what kind of charities are appropriate for you. You can't even decide whether people should go mow down innocent civilians in foreign countries in your name! Unthinkable, that you should ever have a conscience to follow your conscience in those areas. You're never allowed to grow up."

But this is what we say to people who are adults - we say: "Eh, morality is kind of relative, you know it's - you can't be imposing your moral systems on other people..." And this is how we get dissolved in the spineless needy dependent entitled jellyfish screeching for the state to throw us a few more crumbs from the masters table, rioting in the streets if our goodies are even remotely cut off, if there's one less piece of bread and one fewer Christian-eating lion circus to entertain us with.

But - but - and this is the big but - and people who remember their childhoods will know what I'm talking about here - that is not how morality was inflicted or imposed upon us when we were children.

I distinctly remember, if I had the urge to push another child and take his toy at the age of 3 or 4, the other child who got upset and went to the teacher was not told, "Well, you can't impose your system of property on him! Nothing really is good or bad, it's - you know, it's cultural, it's different. You know, you have to not impose your 'wanting to play with that toy' on him."

No! I was told: "Give the toy back. Don't take. Don't push. Don't take his lunch money. Don't take his lunch. Don't splash him! Don't throw sand in his face! Don't use violence, don't use bad words, don't call names!"

That's what I was taught as a child - and there was none of this cultural bullshit rings of Saturn fog around the essence of morality!

I was taught two basic things: Don't take other people's stuff, don't use force, don't lie, don't call names - and I think that's actually pretty true! I think that if we just went back to the good old 'stuff that's on the wall of the kindergarten,' and sort of said, "Well, maybe that stuff is actually pretty good! Maybe a respect for property rights, maybe a denial of slander, maybe honesty, maybe a rejection of the initiation of force - maybe these are things that aren't just good for 3-year-olds - which we tell them with complete and perfect absolutes, as perfect absolutes of: this is right, and it is wrong to go take another kid's toy and it is wrong to push him in the dirt, and it is wrong to kick him down. It's wrong to take his coat! Don't mess up his artwork, and don't pee in his boots!

Whatever it is that's going on, we say this to children with all the moral righteousness and absolutism of dear Yahweh himself handing down the 10 Commandments to Moses!

We are certain of it, we know it - and then, when those children grow up and they say, "Hey adults – remember all that shit you told me when I was a kid about not using force and not lying and not hurting others and not stealing from other people? What the hell is it with this goddamned currency? Are you kidding me? Why the hell are all these wars going on? Why the hell were my parents forced at gunpoint to pay for a school where I was instructed never to use force to get what you want? Are you kidding me? Is this some sort of weird Satreian existentialist wet fart of a bad joke? Are you kidding me? It's mad!"

So - what if we just take those moral inscriptions in the kindergarten - which I think are right and true and good (I've got a free book on ethics called "Universally Peferable Behavior: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics" - takes y'all through the deep steps of proving that kindergarten stuff) - what if we just said, "Hey, you know that shit that was absolute when we're 3, maybe it can be absolute when we're 30 or 35 or 55 for 95 - or, if we truly get the free society we want, 335, because that's how long we'll be living without all the bad shit is going on -maybe that stuff is true, and if it is true, what does society look like if nobody gets to use force legitimately? Nobody gets to initiate force legitimately? If nobody gets to taken anybody else's shit at gunpoint, and nobody gets to push you down in the mud or piss in your boots or steal your artwork? What if you are truly free - just as you were told to be free and let other people be free in kindergarten - what with the world look like?

My god, it would be paradise on earth - and we can achieve it.

We just need to stay true to what we were told when we were three.

End the Fed!

My daughter falls down and gets owies. She doesn’t like them, and I explain to her that that’s sort of the point. She gets that now, she’s three. She says: “We like owies because they mean no more owies. Our bodies hurt us as a deterrent to doing dumb and self-destructive things. Like everyone under the age of 21 with a skateboard seems to have forgotten what wheels are kind of for, so they try to ride down railings and up stairs on skateboards. According to the YouTube videos I’ve watched, their bodies are repeatedly telling them to stop. There are probably some of you right here, now, in this very crowd – please listen – or don’t, perhaps I’m just too old…

Owies are very, very important. Outside of anaesthetics, anything that deadens pain is extremely dangerous. You don’t feel a burst appendix, you die. You don’t feel a toothache, you swallow poison and die.

Pain is our way of changing course, of saving ourselves from self-destruction. Getting rid of pain can seem like a good idea, but it’s really, really not.

The Federal Reserve – the Ponzi-scheme counterfeiting of money to enrich the politically connected at the expense of the poor, the weak, the old, and the sick – the Federal Reserve is a civilization-threatening drug.

Evil is costly – the initiation of force is expensive and risky. Violence makes enemies, starts turf wars, sickens the soul, kills love, ends lives…

What stops the growth of evil? The same thing that stops the growth of any sickness – pain, treatment and cure.

Evil is very, very expensive. War – the greatest evil – is staggeringly expensive. The Pentagon loses literally billions of dollars under its couches every single year. It uses a million bullets in to put just one bullet into another human being. War shreds economies, minds, hearts, relationships, health, wealth, freedom – war destroys civilizations.

What stops war? The same thing that stops any gambling addict – running out of money.

War is stopped only by poverty. When you cannot pay the soldiers, well - blessed become the peacemakers.

War is limited by economics, by costs, by the hard wall of hard currency.

Unless – unless war is - not free, but profitable…

This is where the Federal Reserve comes in.

Who pays for war? A defensive war, unprovoked and unavoidable, sure, we would all chip in for that. But a lying swaggering endless missile-hurling overseas mass murder?

To cover current government spending, taxes would have to be raised almost 60%.

We have wars and bailouts and untold bribery and tax cuts – paid for by what?

Who lends to a country hell bent on Empire? No one, because war and empire drain the treasury - look at England after the 2^nd world war – ran out of money, and closed down the Empire.

Lend to warmongers, what will they pay you back with? Broken pottery? Bloodstained bodies? Bones? Dust? Lamentations?

War is not profitable, it is not a growth industry. It grows like a tumor grows, at the expense of life.

How, then, is it fed?

It is fed, by the Fed.

China has lend the US a little over a trillion dollars. The Federal Reserve has lend and created almost 7 trillion dollars.

7 trillion dollars – that’s 8 times the spending on the Iraq war – 12 times the spending in Afghanistan.

Over the last 6 years, there have been very few new taxes – even though total fiscal spending has risen nearly $1 trillion per year.

For the Federal Reserve creates the free money that makes evil profitable.

7 trillion dollars covers the bills for a lot of evil.

If there was truth in advertising, the Federal Reserve would have this slogan:

Free Evil!

Or

The Federal Reserve: Turning Evil into Profits since 1913!

And is not just the overseas wars…

How long would the trillion dollar war on drugs last if everyone got a bill for enforcing it?

How long would 700+ military bases last if everyone got a bill for them? [finger snap]

So – what is the Fed relying on? How can letting the ultra-powerful type whatever they want into their own bank accounts possibly last?

The short answer is, it can’t. History is littered with the dry bones of hundreds of paper currencies – not backed by gold, or commodities, or anything more real than the vampiric promises of politicians.

But – how is it lasting?

It lasts because we do not love our children enough.

To avoid change, to avoid conflict, to avoid the peaceful revolution of real money, we are sacrificing our children. The children in pigtails, the children in the crib, the children in the womb – even the children who are as yet just a gleam in their daddy’s eyes.

We are Aztecs.

Our children’s futures are being sold on the auction block, to the highest bidder, to avoid conflict and virtue in the here and now.

Their futures have become “futures.”

They will be taxed at 60, 70, 80 percent or more to pay for this grand canyon of debt – and it will not be enough, it will never be enough, for the Lords of the New Serfs are insatiable my friends. Zombies get their fill and wander off. There is no logical end to the escalation of human greed save gulags, leg irons and mushroom clouds.

If a corporation were diluting baby food to the point where babies were starving to death, would we not act? If there was poison in the water that wrecked their livers and brains, would we not act?

Their futures are being eviscerated, but we do not act.

Paper money dilutes our responses, dulls our outrage, stokes our resentment against those who cry out for action, for exposure, for truth! “Gold bugs,” we call them. “Conspiracy theorists.” “Paultards.”

You can always tell the pioneers, not by the tans on their faces, but by the arrows in their backs.

Half the world is producing, and half the world is stealing. They steal through inflation, through debt, through public sector pensions and “free” health care and military industrial contracts and government bonds.

But they are not stealing the most from us – that is the greatest horror. They slither like ghosts into the crib and chain up the children, stamp and own them, sell their futures, their lives, all the productive joys of their future selves. A 30 year bond is a 30 year chain.

And yet we doze on, and do not act, because the pain of this horror is kept from us. We are drugged by easy money and soft living, by State power that only seems benevolent because the bill is still in the mail, by propaganda and distractions and the easy self-deceptions of the guilty.

I do not call for a revolution, since that relies on new values. I ask only for integrity, consistency with the lessons of our youth. Do not force others to suffer for your mistakes. Do not spend what you do not have. Don’t take other people’s lunch money. Do not sell people.

Let’s get back to the days before money grew on trees, or magically sprouted from keyboards, but had to be earned.

Money must be limited, for unlimited money is unlimited evil.

Let the price of injustice accrue to those committing it.

End war. End serfdom. End child slavery.

End the Fed.

Ron Paul, RNC Corruption And the True Political Education

Ron Paul's campaign has always promised an education, and by God I think we got one.

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses the recent betrayal of Ron Paul at the RNC in Tampa, Florida, with Bretigne Shaffer, author and daughter of Butler Shaffer.

Original Article: http://lewrockwell.com/shaffer-br/shaffer-br13.1.html

For more, please see http://www.bretigne.com/

Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

We Cannot Build Freedom on the Fascism of Childhood!

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, is interviewed on Decline to State about a variety of topics, including:
- How video games support the state
- How a free society resists a new government
- Why democratic elections are such a sham
- How government schools train us for passive totalitarian obedience

Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

Check out more  Declined to State podcasts here: http://www.declinefm.com

Satan Rules This World!

Satan caller starts at 1:32:37
Freedomain Radio Sunday Philosophy Call in Show, 8 July 2012. Why government funding is so bad for intellectual freedom and political equality. Are states the greatest aggressors in the world? Which group should be the first recipients of legal and political equality? Why are some people more rational than others? Also, a conversation with a fundamentalist Christian about the satanic influence over the modern world. Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

The Ethics of Atheism - A Conversation with Dr Peter Boghossian

Podcast: http://www.fdrurl.com/FDR2168

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses faith, reason, philosophy and religion with Dr Peter Boghossian (apologies for the odd video color)

Dr. Peter Boghossian's main focus is bringing the tools of professional philosophers to people in a wide variety of contexts. Peter has a teaching pedigree spanning more than 20 years and 30 thousand students--in prisons, hospitals, public and private schools, seminaries, colleges and universities, Fortune 100 companies and small businesses. His fundamental objective is to teach people how to think through what often seem to be intractable problems.

Peter's primary research areas are critical thinking and moral reasoning.  His doctoral research studies, funded by the State of Oregon and supported by the Oregon Department of Corrections, consisted of using the Socratic method to help prison inmates to increase their critical thinking and moral reasoning abilities and to increase their desistance to criminal behavior.

Peter's publications can be found in Diálogos, Education Policy Analysis Archives, The Clearing House: Educational Research Controversy and Practices, The Radical Academy; Offender Programs Report, Teaching Philosophy, Corrections Today, Informal Logic, The Skeptic, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Inside Higher Ed, Essays in Philosophy, Federal Probation Journal, and the Journal of Correctional Education. If you'd like to learn more about his scholarship, his podcast interview with Philosophy News http://www.philosophynews.com/post/2011/12/05/Interview-with-Peter-Boghossian.aspx is a great place to start.

His work has been noted on The Huffington Post, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason, and other media outlets; he was an invited guest on the Lars Larson Show, interviewed for the cover story of the Mercury, and advocated via social media by the Executive Director of the Skeptic Society, Michael Shermer, and bestselling author and head of Project Reason, Sam Harris.

Peter was a Councilman for the State of Oregon (LSTA), an advisor to Sockeye Magazine and The Weekly Alibi, wrote national philosophy curricula for the University of Phoenix and was a research fellow for the National Center for Teaching and Learning. Currently, he is the Chairman of the Prison Advisory Committee for Columbia River Correctional Institution, teaches Critical Thinking, Science and Pseudoscience, the Philosophy of Education, and Atheism at Portland State University, is an Affiliate Research Assistant Professor Oregon Health Science University, is Co-Director and Co-Founder (with Dr. Randy Blazak) of PSU's Center for Correction's Research, and a speaker for the Center for Inquiry http://www.centerforinquiry.net/speakers/boghossian_peter.

When he's not working, Peter spends time with his family, practices jiu jutsu, watches science fiction movies and television (Stargate Universe, Battlestar Galactica, Misfits, Fringe), and plays computer games (Star Craft 2, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Diablo III).

You can follow Peter on Twitter @peterboghossian. If you want to join Peter's mailing list and learn about his upcoming public lectures and debates, from your mobile phone text "DELUSION" + your email address to 22333, or enter your email address on the bottom right of this page: http://philosophynews.com/peterboghossian

Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

Liberty vs The Zombie Mob!

This has been a tough spring for Libertarian politicos. Ron Paul’s campaign has collapsed, and Rand Paul – after reportedly telling his father only 30 minutes beforehand, has endorsed the power-hungry neocon poster boy, Mitt Romney.

Romney’s politics reach a level of banal corruption only possible in the “small government big market” Republican party. After appeasing his home-state voters with Obamacare Massachusetts’s style, he then campaigns against the real thing, claiming that his only moral beef with fascist medicine is geography. “State’s rights” is a yawn-inducing moral horror, the brain-twisting claim that it is perfectly moral for governments to drive you out of your State if you hate their laws, but to drive you out of the country is just plain wrong.

Bashing the Fed – Government or Reserve – is a time-honored tradition among conservative politicians – it’s typically political and tragically believable among libertarians. Everyone who wants to be the boss claims to hate the boss; governors do their nasty business in their own states, and then defend their actions with the ridiculous appeal to “State’s rights.” States are not people, they don’t have rights; the immorality of violence is not zip code specific – the objections are all too obvious to bother pointing out. Also, States both need and drive the power of the Federal government – State A bribes its population with some goodie, thus making it less attractive to businesses, and so bribes business to set up shop with tax holidays and regulatory exemptions – and if these don’t work, it pushes the Federal government to mirror its own corruption across the country, so it does not lose out to other states.

Theories flourish as to why Rand Paul endorsed Romney. Some say he was threatened, which is perfectly believable (remember Ross Perot dropping out of the presidential race in 1992 after threats against his family?) some say he is angling for a VP spot. Some say he is laying the groundwork for a 2016 presidential bid (which really means that some people still can’t give up their fantasy of a political solution).

A VP spot would be the perfect banishment to obscurity. VPs rarely become presidents, and are perfect whipping boys for any fact or truth, as Dan Quayle found when he dared to mention the social problems caused by single motherhood. Those in the crosshairs are made VPs, in the age old commandment to keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

Threats are the very essence of politics – and with a vicious and hysterical media always ready to stroke and provoke the Christ-taunting mob, nothing factual need get in the way of the modern print lynching. Libertarians know this most of all – the moment that Ron Paul started to really gain in the polls, and the media was chided by Jon Stewart for ignoring him, they just started calling him a racist, and were done with him. All Ron Paul’s education and eloquence and obvious passion for libertarian solutions meant nothing. Floating reason and evidence in mainstream society is like trying to teach Latin to a sugar-crashing toddler. All you do is insult teaching.

Read any mainstream article on Ayn Rand – do you see any actual criticisms of her arguments? Hell no, you just read a steady pee-stream of bitter invective and cowardly insults. She’s had tens of millions of readers, sixty years of accumulating evidence – governments grow, the West collapses, Europe goes first – and you still cannot read two sensible words written about her. Look at your own life. When you make sensible arguments against the State, do you get any kind of semi-intelligent rebuttal? Of course not. You’re just a hater, man, you hate the poor and the sick, yer unpatriotic – and prolly a racist too!

Politicians in the past used schools to breed fools, knaves and scoundrels, to easier rule and bribe them. We are all left with the legacy of these hollow-headed indoctrinations. People who cannot think join mobs, in the fantasy that an aggregate of vacuity can produce gravity. They surge back and forth across the cultural wasteland like the zombies they are, sniffing for and feeding on any stray brains that cross their path. The broken attack the whole for exposing their brokenness; the rational strive to reason with the mob, the bored Borg, the haters who fear the only knowledge that really counts: self knowledge.

The goal of political action has been to try to appeal to self-interest of the mob. But the mob has no self-interest, for its members have no self – if they did, they would have fled the zombie army when it came to eat them. Libertarians say: “Freedom brings benefits to the collective” – as if there is any such thing as a collective. The moment a libertarian says that we should judge an idea by its value to individuals, he only feeds the State, since the State provides so many heady benefits to those seeking power. What kind of power would Obama have in a free, rational – but I repeat myself – society? None, because his empty rhetoric would be about as appealing as a gas station serving sugar water. His slogans would be laughed at – “the audacity of hope” makes about as much sense as mechanically repeating “the ricochet of profits” during a business meeting, or “the mobility of empiricism” at a physics conference. Zen headlines without reason and evidence would be such an obvious con that people like Obama would end up slithering through the underworld of petty confidence schemes, i.e. the Constitution.

So Obama loves the State. George Bush, Romney, Stalin, Pol Pot – they all love politics and power, because it gives their empty words violent form; from syllables to subjugation in the tick of a ballot box, how heady and addictive! Humanity has long been fascinated by magic spells, by the manipulation of physical reality through language alone – usually to ill effect – this is just an unconscious metaphor for political rhetoric, which starts fires and mobs and wars by stoking the emptiness it both breeds and feeds on.

So when Libertarians say: “we will all be better off when we are free” – this is a case that can only be made to each individual, and particular individuals – political individuals – are far better off with state power. Corrupt and lazy businessmen; charismatic and useless sophists; torpid and offensive artists; priests – the ultimate magicians in many ways – and those teachers whose heavy self-hatred gives them nimble fingers to disassemble the minds of the young – all worship the State. All benefit from the State, and all will oppose political solutions.

The Fall of Rome and Modern Parallels

http://www.fee.org

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, reads two articles by the great thinker Lawrence Reed. Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

Arachno-Capitalism On Ice! Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio interview...

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, is interviewed on Alaskan Radio about liberty, voting, financial regulation, philosophy, integrity, virtue, peace, South Park, and the hope for true human freedom in the future. Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

http://patriotslament.blogspot.com

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/radiofreefairbanks

Genes, Nature, Nurture and The Freedom of Self-Knowledge (HD)

twins studies: excludes abuse, self-reporting, pre-selected families

where a large %- anywhere from 20-70% of identical twins- do NOT share such alarming similarities

- the temperature surrounding turtle and crocodile eggs determined their gender

- young, yellow-skinned grasshoppers became permanently black skinned for camouflage if exposed to a blackened (burnt) environment at a certain age

- locusts living in a crowded environment developed vastly more musculature (suitable for migration) than locusts living in less crowded conditions

Eleanor Maguire discovered in 1999 when she and her colleagues conducted MRI scans on London cabbies and compared them with the brain scans of others.

In contrast with non-cabbies, experienced taxi drivers had a greatly enlarged posterior hippocampus—that part of the brain that specializes in recalling spatial representations.

On its own, that finding proved nothing; theoretically, people born with larger posterior hippocampi could have innately better spatial skills and therefore be more likely to become cabbies.

What made Maguire’s study so striking is that she then correlated the size of the posterior hippocampi directly with each driver’s experience: the longer the driving career, the larger the posterior hippocampus.

In 1932, psychologists Mandel Sherman and Cora B. Key discovered that IQ scores correlated inversely with a community’s degree of isolation: the higher the cultural isolation, the lower the scores. In the remote hollow of Colvin, Virginia, for example, where most adults were illiterate and access to newspapers, radio, and schools was severely limited, six-year-olds scored close to the national average in IQ. But as the Colvin kids got older, their IQ scores drifted lower and lower—falling further and further behind the national average due to inadequate schooling and acculturation. (The very same phenomenon was discovered among the so-called canal boat children in Britain and in other isolated cultural pockets). Their unavoidable conclusion was that “children develop only as the environment demands development.”

Using a late-twentieth-century average score of 100, the comparative score for the year 1900 was calculated to be about 60—leading to the truly absurd conclusion, acknowledged Flynn,

“that a majority of our ancestors were mentally retarded.”

Children in professionals’ homes were exposed to an average of more than fifteen hundred more spoken words per hour than children in welfare homes.

Over one year that amounted to a difference of nearly 8 million words which by age four, amounted to a total gap of 32 million words. They also found a substantial gap in tone and in the complexity of words being used.

In identical-twin comparisons, shared biology always grabs all the attention. Inevitably overlooked is the vast number of shared cultural traits: same age, same sex, same ethnicity, and, in most cases, a raft of other shared (or very similar) social ,economic, and cultural experiences.

in the first four years after birth, the average child from a professional family receives 560,000 more instances of encouraging feedback than discouraging feedback;

A working-class child receives merely 100,000 more encouragements than discouragements;

A welfare child receives 125,000 more discouragements than encouragements

in her 1981 book Identical Twins Reared Apart, Susan Farber reviewed 121 cases of twins described by researchers as “separated at birth” or “reared apart.” Only three of those pairs had actually been separated shortly after birth.

At the University of Minnesota, the average age of separated twins studied turned out to be forty, while their average years spent apart was thirty—leaving an average of ten years of contact prior to research interviews.

adhd studies, excludes abuse, self reporting

"know thyself"

parents have no effect on kids? arguing that is like determinism

even if true, kids have even less responsibility

myth of the soul - unharmed pure spirit

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http://www.schiffradio.com

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