Great Overview of the Situation for Your Friends and FamilyI was a guest on the Palm & Pine Podcast and did a great soup-to-nuts overview of both the scam (illegitimacy & criminality) of “government” and how the monopoly media is censoring that information from the public. I covered what money is, how the banks and “government” are stealing the value out of everyone’s purchasing power through inflation, and how you can fight back. I illustrated the transcript below with images, memes and visualizations! IntroductionHello there, and welcome to the Palm and Pine Podcast. The boys are coming to you from their hidden camp, set deep in the Florida woods on the banks of the mystic Suwannee River. So let’s take a moment and hear from the boys of old Florida.Steve BarlowAlright, folks. Welcome to the Palm and Pine Podcast. And I tell you what, we’ll roll right into this. Professor Barlow, we have got an amazing guest. We’re gonna learn so much.Let’s go ahead and get right into it.Douglas A. Barlow (Professor Barlow)I’m so excited about the guest we have today. You know, I love a man with mathematics in his name. You know? And we have none other than Etienne de la Boetie² with us today. Etienne de la Boetie². So Etienne is the chairman and founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation, ArtOfLiberty.org. Go there and check them out. And he’s spreading the word about this theft of working people in our society by government and big business and such. He’s the author of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History and The Greatest Theft in Human History.And if you go to his website, artofliberty.org, you can get both of those books, and I encourage you to do so. So I saw him on Geopolitics & Empire, and I was just so excited that I thought, let’s reach out and see if he’ll come on the podcast, and he did agree. So we’re happy to have him today. So welcome to the Palm and Pine Podcast, Etienne de la Boetie².Etienne de la Boetie²Oh, it is a pleasure to be with you and your audience. And, yeah, I’m a big fan of Geopolitics & Empire as well. And I think we’re all on the same track that, you know, we’ve got an organized crime government. And so I’m best known for the book “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History. And what I do in that book is I make the case that government has been the biggest scam in history.It’s really an illegitimate way of robbing and controlling societies. And it’s always illegitimate because you can never have a moral legitimate government. There’s no way that, you know, that you two guys can vote to take all my money because there’s two of you and one of me. I can’t be bound—nobody can be bound—by a social contract that you didn’t sign. You know, if I don’t have the right myself to tax you or to make up rules for you myself, then I can’t delegate a right that I don’t have myself to a representative or to a government to represent me doing something I don’t have the ability to do myself.And so government really has been the biggest scam in history. Now who’s behind the scam? I believe it’s the banks. And I believe that they implemented government to backstop and create a central bank of the United States that gives the money center banks the ability to create money out of thin air. And so this is called fractional reserve banking. In the basics of the theft, when you go to a bank to get a mortgage or to get a car loan or to get a consumer loan or when you’re using your credit card, they’re not loaning you depositor money.They just tickle the keyboard and they credit your account with digital dollars even though that’s inflationary and even though that steals the value out of everybody else’s money. And this is the reason that the value of the money is losing value. It costs more and more to buy everything from, you know, a home to the stock market. You name it, prices are going up. It’s not that the Dow is going up; it now takes more dollars to buy the same amount of stocks in the market as it used to.And so that’s not only just the banks, it’s also the government. When the government creates dollars, it has the exact same effect. And so quantitative easing and a lot of the shenanigans that are going on in the Treasury market and the unbelievable borrowing today—the deficit just went over $40,000,000,000,000. And so that money that the government is borrowing, now that’s going out the back door. That’s weapon systems that we don’t need to fight wars, foreign wars based on lies and manufactured intelligence and propaganda. And that money is going out the back door for, you know, a bag of bushings.You know, the Air Force secretary got called onto the carpet a while back, and I forget the name of the congressman that held up a $100 bag of bushings that they were paying $90,000 for. But whether it’s the $10,000 toilet seats or the $4,000 coffee mugs or the $400,000 helmet for the F-35, we’re getting robbed. That money is going out the back door. It’s trillions and trillions of dollars. And if you’re stealing trillions and trillions of dollars, well, you can well afford to spend a couple hundred billion a year to buy up and consolidate the media.So the media isn’t going to tell you what’s really going on. And so that is kind of the big idea in a nutshell. I think it was Doug mentioned that, you know, our latest book is called The Greatest Theft in Human History – How the Banks and “Government” Will Steal At Least $1.40 Million From The Typical American Worker… “Legally”. And what we did is we calculated: what does this cost the typical American? So the typical American salary is $60,000 a year. If you make $60,000 for 40 years, you’re gonna make about $2,400,000. And out of that $2,400,000, the government and this crooked monetary system is going to steal $1,400,000 out of that $2,400,000 at a bare minimum.Find your income level (above) to understand how much the crooked monetary system will steal out of the value of your purchasing power over a 40-year career and 20-year retirement. After you understand how much the crooked monetary system will steal from you, find your income-level on this chart to understand how much confiscatory taxes and Social Security underpayment will steal. Full expose at ArtOfLiberty.org/InflationThat’s the floor. That’s not the ceiling. It’s actually much more than that, especially if you compare the monetary system that we have right now with an honest, hard-money gold system and a gold standard, that your dollars that you earn and save, they should buy more and more and more every single year as innovations and productivity improvements reduce the cost of the necessities and the luxuries of life. So everybody should be getting dramatically richer every year.But I believe this is a kind of form of economic warfare waged against us to where they don’t want the population to have independent wealth. They don’t want the population to be able to fund newspaper ads exposing what’s going on, it’s keeping them poor and in the dark to a certain degree. Now people can be very successful in society because we’re all generating a tremendous amount of wealth with the latest AI tools, computers and everything we do. But the lion’s share, around 58%, is being stolen. And the world would look very differently if everybody had an extra $1,400,000 to spend. You know, we’d all be crazy rich.There’s more than enough wine, cheese and bread at the table. The big secret of my book is you don’t really need government. And so that’s my kind of thesis of who I am and what we’re exposing at the Art of Liberty Foundation.Steve BarlowNo. Hey, that’s great. I think one thing I wanted to kinda get a little clearer understanding of, and if you could, let’s just put this in a blue-collar perspective for everybody out there listening. Let’s talk about money, because I think most people don’t really know what money is. They’ve never studied it; they don’t know it.They just know they want it, they need some $100 bills. And we’re three generations in now after coming off the gold reserve. So we’ve got people now, grown people, that think inflation is normal.As the Organized Crime “Government” Prints More and More Money, the Value of the Money Decreases Stealing the Purchasing Power from People Who Earn and Save. They think it’s normal that they can’t get as much with that $100 bill as they could two years ago. Despite improvements in technology that should be making things cheaper—you know, Elon Musk, he claims that we’re gonna have this super abundance because as things become made more easily and cheaper, they’re gonna become cheaper.Well, don’t believe that because all I’ve seen is the opposite of that. We’ve gotten better at making things, but the things they make are junk, and they don’t last as long. You get a TV, get ready to take it to the dump in two years. You know, things don’t last as long, but shazam, they’re also getting more expensive. So what are some of the fundamentals?Just break it down for us. What are the fundamental ways they’re stealing from us? They’re printing money, they’re buying back Treasury bonds, they’re doing all these forms of quantitative easing instead of raising taxes because they can’t do that. They can’t raise money to go fund a foreign war. Would you mind just going through those briefly?What are the ways we are being stolen from, kind of in a Ponzi-like scheme?Etienne de la Boetie²So, you know, if you believe the founding of the country and the Founding Father stuff that you were taught in the mandatory government school, some of it’s true, much of it is false. But one thing everybody agreed on back then was that you didn’t want paper money. You wanted to have gold and silver. It was enumerated in the Constitution, and the world had decided upon gold and silver as really the best form of money because it couldn’t be printed on a printing press. It couldn’t be created out of thin air, you know, digitally.And so back in the early days of the country, gold and silver were the coin of the realm. And all the government did was stamp the coins. You could go, you know, if you’d struck gold in California during the Gold Rush, you would take your coins to the mint. The mint would buy the gold from you. The mint would stamp its hallmark on the coin to assure people it was the right weight and fineness.And so it was a recognizable hallmark, which did good. But the government didn’t create money. Money didn’t come from the government. It didn’t come from a central bank. Back in 1913, before the Federal Reserve Act, we’d had two other national banks of the United States, the First National Bank and the Second National Bank of the United States.Both of those were corrupt. Both of those had 20-year charters. At the end of the charter, they kicked the bank out for financial shenanigans. Andrew Jackson famously said, “Y’all are a den of vipers. I will rout you out.” There were two different assassination attempts on him. Many speculate that was from the bank for trying to get rid of this—to engage in financial shenanigans at the level that we’re talking about.And so I think the bankers after they got kicked out two times in a row, they waited around. In 1913, they passed the Federal Reserve Act. The Federal Reserve Act created the third bank of the United States: the Federal Reserve.The Federal Reserve acts as a backstop. And that backstop allows the money center banks to create money out of thin air and loan it at interest. Now, this is a kind of continuation of the theft. The original bankers were goldsmiths. Goldsmiths essentially had the only vault in town. If you lived in a thatch hut or a very simple house in, let’s say, the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, there wasn’t really a lot of good places to hide your gold.And so what people would do is they would give it to the goldsmith. The goldsmith would write a note, a banknote essentially, and he would say on deposit, you’ve got one ounce of gold. And instead of hauling your heavy gold coins around, you could have these notes in your wallet, and you could go to a merchant, and people began exchanging the notes for goods and services. And the bankers, the goldsmiths and the early bankers realized that, hey, not everybody comes around for their gold. So what we can do is we can just print up extra notes and we can spend them and nobody will know the better until people figure it out.And then there’s a run on the bank. Everybody’s seen the Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, where people have seen the run on the bank. And what happens is, if the bank’s crooked and the bank’s been writing out extra banknotes, everybody in the beginning of the line gets paid and then they run out of gold in the middle and then everybody else loses everything and the bank collapses.And so there wasn’t a lot of it, but there was enough of it for the bankers to sell the population that this system would protect it. They lobbied and bribed Congress. They installed this Bank of the United States. In the first days of the Bank of the United States, a $20 bill was a warehouse receipt for a one-ounce gold coin, a Saint-Gaudens gold coin. And so, you could go to the bank and you could take your $20 bill and put it on the teller window and the teller would give you a one-ounce gold coin.Now, in Roman times, a one-ounce gold coin would buy you a toga. It would buy you a fine pair of sandals. It would buy you a fine belt for a toga. In 1913, a one-ounce Saint-Gaudens gold coin would buy you a finely tailored tweed suit. It would buy you a fancy straw hat, and it would buy you a fine pair of shoes.Now, you took the $20 bill and the $20 gold piece, and you buried them in the ground, and you dug them up today; the $20 bill is not going to buy you anything. The gold coin—the gold—is worth 4,800, somewhere around 4,800, 4,500. I forget what the exact price of gold is right now. But you can still buy a finely tailored man’s suit, a belt, and some really, really nice shoes for $4,500. Right? And so what happened? Did the gold go up in value?Or did the dollar lose its value because the government was printing a gazillion of them? Now when the government started printing, when they got the Federal Reserve System in place, the banks started doing the exact same thing and they were gonna run out of gold again. And so they lobbied and bribed the president. Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 passes an executive order and forces the American people to turn in all of their gold. And so the gold was really the discipline of the government being able to do anything that it wanted.And so they actually, if you had a safety deposit box, when you went to the bank to get into your safety deposit box, there was a U.S. marshal there for quite some time after this law passed. And he got to look in your box to make sure that you didn’t have any gold. And so a lot of people didn’t turn in their gold, and it’s now, you know, worth a small fortune. And every once in a while, we’ll find a stash of somebody’s gold coins that they didn’t turn in in a wall of a house or something like that. And so those were the smart people. Smart people didn’t turn in their gold.Everybody that turned in their gold, they had it replaced with these rapidly depreciating fiat paper tickets. The money was worthless almost immediately. And that began this monetary experiment that we’ve been on for the past hundred and twenty years plus, which is there’s nothing backing the value of the currency. And that’s why it keeps losing value. Really, the only thing, you know, that backs it is your belief that you’re going to be able to get $100 worth of services for that dollar.Now, a lot of people, they’re turning it into gold. They’re investing in silver, gold, precious metals. They’re turning it into everything from the toilet paper they’ll need for the next two years to as much storable food as they can get because they see the handwriting on the wall. And the handwriting on the wall is that in all of human history, every single fiat paper currency—fiat means by decree, by government decree; the only thing that gives it value is government’s decree—has gone to zero. Voltaire said that all money returns to its intrinsic value of zero.And they understood that in Voltaire’s time. And so the quote-unquote Founding Fathers knew that, and they tried to put—you know, even the ones that were semi-corrupt- they tried to put in protections for themselves, probably against having paper money. But it was all discarded. And we believe this is an intergenerational organized crime system.The intergenerational organized crime system back then was controlling the information that the population received so that they didn’t understand what was going on in the ratification debates. They didn’t understand what they were signing up for with the Constitution because the Federalists were censoring Anti-Federalist mail. They were buying off the stenographers at the ratification debates so that they would only transcribe Federalist speeches and not transcribe Anti-Federalist speeches. They were collapsing newspapers at the time. This is all in—there’s a lot of people who have seen the Federalist Papers. They don’t understand there’s Anti-Federalist papers.Everyone learns about the Federalist Papers, BUT the anti-federalists were right. It did turn into tyranny, confiscatory taxation, theft through inflation, foreign wars, and an unlimited executive. But this ability for moneyed interests, for organized crime money interests, to control the information that the population receives, this is why either the schools aren’t teaching people what money is or why it’s losing value, why the media isn’t explaining to people why the money is losing value. If you turn on CNN or Fox News, you know, inflation happens because fairies come at night and sprinkle pixie dust on price tags and gas pumps. And they’re not going to tell you what’s really going on because they’re stealing trillions. But a lot of people don’t understand how much they’re getting dinged because it’s coming out of their purchasing power.It’s being done invisibly. They’re seeing that their dollars buy less and less, but they’ve never really calculated or had somebody calculate what does that cost me over 40 years? Or what does that cost me over a 40-year career and a 20-year retirement? Well, if you’re a typical American worker, it’s costing you $1,400,000 and it’s really more than that.That’s as conservative as we could get it. You know, we wanted to make that number bulletproof and we wanted, you know, to be able to go toe to toe with any economist or financial pundit, you know, whatever. But it’s actually more than that, but that’s 58% of the money that you’re going to earn over that 40 years. And then the final thing I’ll say is that number also includes them stealing the value out of your Social Security payment.And so government is lying to everybody about what the true cost of living is and what the inflation rate is. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they calculate something called the Consumer Price Index. The COLA, the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security, is based on this calculation by the Bureau of Labor Statistics called the Consumer Price Index. Because they’re lying about what the real inflation rate is, you’re not getting—and your grandmother and your parents aren’t getting—a true cost-of-living adjustment and that’s going to steal somewhere between—so that number, that $1,400,000 number, includes $16,000 of money that they’re stealing just out of your Social Security. It’s really over $70,000.If you didn’t use the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculation, but you used an all-chart—there’s other people that calculate the inflation rate, and they calculate it much higher, one of which is called the Reality Index. The Reality Index uses the exact same weights and measures that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses, but they take out some of the financial shenanigans like hedonic adjustment, substitution, and other things that the Bureau of Labor Statistics does to lie to the population about what the real inflation rate is. They say it’s $70,000. There’s other people that say it’s more, but they’re going to steal $16,000 to $70,000 out of your Social Security that they owe you.And by the way, they’re forcing you into this Ponzi scheme Social Security system, whereas if you’d been able to just invest that same amount of money in a private retirement account, you’d have somewhere around a million dollars. And you would be living off the interest in your retirement, and then that principal- that million-dollar principal- that would be—you could will that to your kids.Your kids would inherit that as an inheritance, but that’s another thing that the government has stolen from you and has replaced with this Ponzi scheme that they admit alone is not going to be able to cover its current obligations.Douglas A. Barlow (Professor Barlow)Etienne, let’s go in this direction. You know, throughout the 19th century, as I understand it, there was literally no inflation, and everybody kept all of what they earned. But also in the 19th century, I would say 98% of people worked in farms, shops, and factories. So when the 20th century came around, there was this—there might have been this parasitic class, but it was maybe 1% of the workforce.But in the 20th century, we see this expansion of this white-collar bureaucratic class. And so it’s maybe 30% of the workforce now, and we see this explosion in this parasitic class in the 20th century. Why do you think this phenomenon was so much a 20th-century thing?Etienne de la Boetie²Well, first of all, it’s even worse than you portrayed because in the 1800s, when we were on a gold standard, not only was the money not losing value, but prices were actually benignly deflationary. And this is what I mean by when I say the $1,400,000 is the floor, not the ceiling. And so back in the 1800s under a gold standard, prices were going down between 1% a year, 1.5% a year, 2% a year, somewhere around 1 to 2% a year. Everything got cheaper as innovations and productivity improvements reduced the cost of either manufacturing, you know, a pair of Levi’s jeans, because in the old days, there was one worker sewing it on a sewing machine. Now you’ve got a factory. So obviously, the cost per pair goes down.In the old days, you know, everything was on a horse-drawn truck. Now, it’s on a semi-trailer. And now the semi can pull two trailers or three trailers. And today’s engine uses 30% less diesel than a decade ago. And so these innovations and productivity improvements in the market were really taking the cost out of the necessities and luxuries of life, and people were getting wealthier and wealthier.And that’s the dynamic that we should be on today. Everybody should be getting wealthier and wealthier and wealthier. But once the government got unbridled and could grow by not tax—so, you know, under taxation, there’s kind of a ceiling where everybody’s not going to accept more and there begins revolution. So what they began doing is they began stealing through inflation. They began printing excess dollars for bailouts and stimulus.And they began funding the government through this deficit spending, through this borrowing. And that pumped up Wall Street because a lot of Wall Street are—there’s 24 primary dealers that get to market the government’s securities. And what we believe—we can’t prove it—but what we believe is that the banks that are creating the money out of thin air, they’re providing unlimited capital to asset managers like BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard and other little ones that you haven’t heard of. Everybody’s heard of BlackRock and Vanguard and State Street, and they’re buying up and they’re monopolizing companies. So they’re providing certain companies unlimited fractional-reserve-banking capital to be able to buy up and consolidate their own industries.And that these companies are operating as a cartel. And as they buy up and consolidate industry, and as there’s less and less competition, you know, as Wall Street owns more and more and more, now this parasite class—you know, and as they wage this economic warfare—now people that would never ever dream of needing a payday loan or four payments with Klarna, all of a sudden, they now need a payday loan or four payments with Klarna. And so that parasitic money-lending usurious system of credit card companies and, you know, other parasitic Wall Street asset managers that are participating in the scheme, they’ve grown exponentially at the same time that real businesses have been consolidated and monopolized.And so they don’t like to leave just one. So tricky, tricky, tricky, they’ll leave—there will be Walmart and Target. There will be Lowe’s and Home Depot. There will be FedEx and UPS. They’re not going to just leave one because that would be obvious of what’s going on. So what they tend to do is they tend to leave, you know, two or three or four.In the media, they bought up and consolidated the media on the old-media side. Okay, old media being television, newspaper, magazines, cable television networks. There are about six companies running hundreds and hundreds of subsidiaries to give everybody the illusion that there’s all these different media sources, media brands, newspapers there.But if you really dig down—and that’s one of the things that I do in my book “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History—is we’ve got media ownership charts. And you can take a look at a media ownership chart and all of a sudden you realize, hey, you know, News Corp, they just don’t own Fox News. News Corp owns 175 newspapers. News Corp owns magazine publishing. News Corp owns Sky News in the UK.They own movie production. They own movie distribution. They own television. There’s hundreds of companies under News Corp, different brands, different logos, to make sure that you don’t understand what’s going on. But that’s what we call the brute-force manufactured consensus.So on every channel, government’s legitimate. Not only is government legitimate; government’s a hero. The government’s like, if it wasn’t for, you know, Tom Cruise as Maverick or Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, CIA agent Ethan Hunt—like, if it wasn’t for the government, man, there would be nukes cooking off in every American city, like, weekly. If it wasn’t for the government, man—and the government is the hero whether that government agent is, you know, an FBI agent like Mulder and Scully or a TSA agent. There’s a movie for every—or television show for every government department from U.S. Marshals to, you know, in Wind River, the hero was like a wildlife agent. It’s crazy.It’s crazy what they’re doing. And so that system, that every single channel, makes sure that nobody knows what’s going on. Now, that’s the old-media side. On the new-media side, on the Internet side, there’s, you know, probably three, four dozen streaming platforms, search engines, you know, Reddit, Wikipedia, others, okay, that have been caught algorithmically censoring information. So shadow-banning certain authors and certain information, blacklisting, de-indexing.We’ve had some of our investigations de-indexed by Google where every other search engine pretends they can find it, but Google pretends like they can’t. And so if you don’t understand that this dynamic is going on, that they’re controlling the information that society receives so they can steal, you know, trillions of dollars, then you’re not even on the—you’re not even on the playing field. Like you’re not even in the game. It’s that—it’s that…Steve BarlowI tell you what, I think what you’re laying out here for us is we’ve all been made into slaves and we don’t even know it. Kinda like, you know, they got the water warmer for the boiling frog. We’ve all heard about that. Now we’re slaves. So let me put this to you, because I’m solutions-driven, right?I’m always fixing things. I’m a man, right? I’m always fixing things. So let me put this to you: now, we’re slaves and every slave wants to know how to escape. That’s the only thing a slave’s thinking. All he wants to know: how do I break out?Now, me personally, this is just me, I’m a fan of Bitcoin. A fan of it because it’s hard money and it’s separate. It’s not fiat, it’s separate and it can’t be controlled or at least not easily controlled. And we’re in the era of mass surveillance, KYC, like they know everything you bought. They probably know how much gold you bought and they took the gold away before; they can do it again.But what are some potential solutions that we can hang our hat on as we kinda close up today? What can we start to do? Do we put a little money in Bitcoin? Do we buy silver? Do we buy some gold?What are some of those real things you can tell our listeners: hey, this is what I’m gonna do. These are some things you can do and here are some steps we can take. Obviously, you’re doing massive great work exposing—and your creativity using AI to find these things, right, and to pull these dollar amounts out—you’re shedding a light, and light is what we need. We need a light on this problem. But what can a simple person, a slave like me, what are some steps we can take?Etienne de la Boetie²So it is a tax slavery. And you’re right, cryptocurrencies. So I actually think Bitcoin was created by the NSA, but it’s better than dollars in many, many ways. But, you know, I think Monero is as strong for many reasons as Bitcoin is. I think that a lot of the price activity in Bitcoin was because they wanna get people into Bitcoin because Bitcoin has a public ledger.And that once they’re able to tie that wallet address to your individual phone or computer, then they can use chain analysis and they can figure exactly how much money you have, exactly who you spend it with and other things. And so I think that that’s one of the reasons they did, and that’s a topic for another show. But I definitely like Bitcoin better than the rapidly depreciating fiat tickets. But I like gold and silver even better in your own—not owned in an ETF, not owned digitally—but your core wealth ought to be some gold and some silver.Silver is better for small transactions. I like old Mercury dimes. There’s a new form of flexible spendable gold called Goldbacks. If you haven’t seen a Goldback, it looks like a dollar bill, but it’s physically gold. It’s laid down at the atomic level. You can melt it down and you can get the gold out of it.But it’s also flexible and spendable. They just hit Florida. Florida passed the law that said that gold and silver are legal tender. So now here come the Goldback guys. Every state that does it—I think they’re on like seven states—they come in. And then the merchants can make a decision of, hey, do you want to—I’ll take, you know, the dollars, but I’ll also take Goldbacks.And then that’s a way of keeping your money in gold versus the dollar. You should pay in cash, especially with mom-and-pops. When you pay in cash, number one, you’re starving the bank for about 1.5% to 3% on the credit card transaction, and the merchant gets to keep an additional 1.5% to 3% on the transaction. In addition, the merchant gets to keep a lot of that off the books by not reporting it to the lying, thieving, stealing government. So the number one thing you can do is you can pay in cash, especially with mom-and-pops.You need to understand that there’s an option that you don’t really need government. So I’m a voluntarist. What that means is that I believe that all relationships between human beings must be voluntary. No one has rights that other people don’t. No one has an exemption from morality, especially the government.And so you can’t really have government. And so government was either a scam from the beginning or the dumbest idea ever. No matter what your government textbook told you, no matter what you saw on C-SPAN, just think about it. You know, we’re now in the system that’s taking 58% of the money that you earn and save. That’s not a good idea.That’s not a great leap forward. That’s not anything. It’s been a scam. And so the good-news message of what we do is you don’t really need government. Now, there will be some transition costs.I’m not saying that getting rid of the government will be pie in the sky and everything like that. But what we need to have and what society needs to be working towards is a peaceful and orderly dissolution of the federal government immediately. So no more federal government. Everything goes back to the states. And then ultimately, privatization, because you can’t have a morally legitimate government.Now the good news is that the free market and mutual aid societies and nonprofits and armed protective service providers and dispute-resolution companies can do everything that the government does better, faster, and cheaper without the waste, fraud, and abuse. And so, as we transition away from the scam of government, you know, your dollar’s gonna go further. You’re not gonna be forced into paper tickets not backed by anything. You’re not gonna be forced into the government’s crooked justice system or crooked monetary system or crooked whatever. You’re going to have choice.You don’t have to fight it out at the school-board level. If everybody had $1,400,000 more, right, you could afford whatever kind of school you want for your kid. Right? And so you don’t have to go and waste your time at the school board arguing against, you know, LGBTQ, whatever. Okay? You just go buy your kid the education from the school that best reflects your values.Do you want Waldorf? Do you want Montessori? Do you want that? You get to choose. You want to put your retirement into gold? Or do you want to put your retirement into the stock market? You get to choose. You’re not forced into Social Security.And so that is the future. And we’re all going to be dramatically, dramatically wealthier once we get this parasite of government off of our back. But it is murder-incorporated organized crime at the top. And so they’re not going to go, you know, they’re not going to go…Douglas A. Barlow (Professor Barlow)…easily, and…Etienne de la Boetie²They got trillions of dollars to make you look over here and distract you over here and, you know, every screen and control, you know, everything like that. Their number-one weapon is that they’re going to try and distract you. But once you understand that real freedom is what you need, you go after it like a linebacker. If you wake up your friends, your family, your neighbors, your colleagues, if you explain to them what’s going on, all you gotta do—you wake up five people, and you have them wake up five people, and then we win.That’s all you gotta do. Wake up five people and get them to commit to waking up five more people each. And then we win. That’s it. It’s that simple.Douglas A. Barlow (Professor Barlow)Wow. Etienne de la Boetie², it’s just been such an exciting interview, and there’s so much more we could talk about. I had several more questions, but we’re gonna have to wind it up for today. We’ll have to have you back on. We thank you for being on today.So in closing, can you tell our listeners out there where they find you, what you’re working on now, how they can learn more about the Art of Liberty Foundation?Etienne de la Boetie²Sure. So we’re a startup public policy organization. We’re exposing the illegitimacy and criminality of government. That’s at artofliberty.org. You can find all of my writings at ArtOfLiberty.foundation.My new book is The Greatest Theft in Human History: How the Banks and the Government Will Steal $1,400,000 From the Typical American Worker “Legally”. And that’s at greatest-theft.com. My best-selling book is “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History at government-scam.com. And then I have another book called To See the Cage Is to Leave It at seethecage.com. (Get a bundle deal at ArtOfLiberty.org/Store)Steve BarlowWow. Awesome. Awesome work. We’re so proud of what you’re doing and so grateful that you’re shedding a light on this, the greatest theft in human history that we unfortunately have fallen prey to. But hey, thank you so much.We’re so grateful for your work, and go check it all out, folks, and we’ll have all of that down in the description of today’s podcast. And until next time, y’all keep it Florida.We hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode of the Palm and Pine Podcast. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. The views and opinions expressed by the host or any guest are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliates.Our opinions are just that, opinions, and are not legal or medical advice. But in our opinion, avoid lawyers and big pharma at all cost. Copyright 2026. Palm and Pine Podcast. All rights reserved.Please subscribe and share. Okay. Until next time. Keep it Florida, and we’ll see you soon.The EndPLEASE Support Our Work By Going Paid on Substack AND/OR Supporting the Foundation as a Sponsor (Get Perks!) @ ArtOfLiberty.org/SponsorThe Best “Go Paid” Deal on Substack! You Get REAL Stuff!!Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. 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