By Vin Armani
In this video, Vin Armani discusses the ideological foundation in the battle for freedom, collectivism versus individualism, with the incredible historian and philosopher G. Edward Griffin. GRIFFIN is a writer, documentary film producer, and Founder of Freedom Force International. He is best known as the author of The Creature From Jekyll Island.
Watch the full broadcast here
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Vin Armani is the host of The Vin Armani Show on Activist Post, TV Star of Gigolos on Showtime, Agorist entrepreneur and co-founder of Counter Markets. Follow Vin on Twitter and subscribe on YouTube. Get the weekly podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Vin is available for interviews at email Vin (at) VinArmani.com.
First, as something of a fellow historian, I think that he does not really know how civilizations and societies even began. When man went beyond the basic family, he saw that he and his family would be far more secure from prediters if they joined with another family so that people could take turns at watch and this would make them safer from the preditors all of the time, and by joining this basic tribe they had to give up some of their individual freedoms for the good of all. Those on watch could not exercise their individual freedom to take a nap when they wanted to, but had to stay awake and on guard so that others would be do the same thing, and keep him safe when he was his turn to sleep. They also found that hunting as a group was both safer for the individuals and more efficient than if they had done it as individuals. Have you ever seen representations of a single hunter taking on a wolly mamoth – if you were in a party that brought home a big animal for food it would have been far better for your family and other families than if you had just been able to bring back a rabbit or two. As these family groups joined together to form tribes and later societies we found specailzation, where one person had more and better skills at making clothing, their skills were put to use to make clothing for a number greater than their family of even tribe, so in order to keep the person who made the clothing safer, others had to continue being guards – all for and in the best interests of the larger group which, then developed its own version of the language, and with societies becoming larger and larger there were more necessary restrictions on individual rights, and more people who needed the services of the specialists, so there became governments and laws to enforce the restrictions on individual freedoms. For example sometime in the early history of athens, the area was occupied by family groups (in English, Fraternities) with each of the 7 or so competing for land and the other requirements of the fraternaty with other fraturnities, and in this process the inevitible happend – people from one tribe would kill or injure people from the other fraternaties and this would then lead to the blood fueds (the Hatfields and McCoys), and the kidnappings and all else that goes with tribal warfare. The wise old leaders of these tribes did get together from time to time to try to make peace and look at other things that might be better for all of the tribes if only they could stop the blood fueds. They found another, outside, and impartial wise old man, Drako, who was probably actually a captured slave from a group far away and the leaders of the tribes appointed him as their overall leader when it came to finding a solution to the constant inter-tribal warfare, so what Draco did was to go to the root of the problem and inpose a real restriction on individual rights – a law which made the killing of any member of any tribe to be a violation which called for the immediate execution of the murderer, so solve the problem of execution other slaves were charged with the duty of throwing the murderer off off the accropolis onto a bed of sharpended stakes which were actually charged with the death of the Athenian citizen, and they were tried and found guilty of this murder, and when they were made of wood, removed by burning. This, at the expense of individual freedoms solved the problem of the constant wars, and so the tribes could join together and do things that were profitable to all, which resulted in Athens be comming one of the great sea trading centers of the world at that time, and they also discovered the best was to keep all of their citizens the happiest – they put the tax burden onto the traders and the people on the traders boats pay a tribute (tax) so that they might be safe, so the citizens were not directly taxed.
The same taxation scheme was used by England when we were a colony, they passed the stamp act which put the tax burdens of the actual residents of England onto the colonists, and we did essentialy the same after independence, by imposing import duties on goods brought into this country which would compete with our efforts to become self sufficent as a nation, and protective tarriffs on the goods that they would bring to sell to us, and that worked until we had the chaos of the civil war, which, for the south with our larger naval foces allowed us to keep trade from either reaching or leaving the revoling souther states, who wanted their freedom and independence to keep slaves while those in the north though that this practice was against God;s law. This caused the North to impose its frist income taxes, but these only applied to those who were wealthy by current standards and actually had money where the rural parts of the north continued to rely on trade and barter, and it is really difficult to tax a busheel of turnips. In the name of keeping the united states together, one of the first things that it taxed that was a product of the US was alcohol, so when the farmers who grew the grains from which the alcohol was made, we had them doing the Whiskey revolt, because if was better for all if wihiskey was make pure and taxesd than it was to have been made with contaminations which might kill the consumers. One of the reasons why prohibition ended was that it represented the first time that an individual right had been taken from all of the people and so there was no federal revenue from the alcohol tax, so we had to extend the income taxes which had been needed during WWI when taxes from duties and terrifs did no cover our expenses. Then, after WWII, the income taxes remained so that we could pay down the debt that we had incurred in winning of WWII, because we were the only intact nation surviving so there was little to no international trade.
Then when trade resumed the fight between the free traders, and those who wanted to maintain the duties and terrifs system of collecting federal revenue to disperse to the states – read the Constitution and the prohibition on the states imposing any forms of taxation on goods coming to or going to any other state. Reaganomics was a great win for the free traders, so without this income we have had to maintain our taxes directly on the people. You can either have cheap goods or good paying jobs, but not both at the same time.
While Trump talks all about jobs and uses them as an excuse for all of his nutty acts that offenf people from other countries, he apparently has not gotten the word that due to free trade, we cannot even be a real industrial nation any longer – we have sent our steel industry to where the labor is chepest by removing the protective tarrifs, so all of the steal needed for the great wall, if they will sell it to us, witll come from overseas. If we were to try to restart the steel industry, we would have to import want we needed from abroad – only if they would issue an export licence for it. By getting us in debt and doing away with our industrial capacity we have just made ourselves as irrelevant as possible.