[FirstClassSkeptic]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... 67_imEHTPE

[rerevisionist]

I found this painful to watch; I hadn't heard of Stefan Molyneux before - he seems to be educated Anglo-Americanly and to be someone who made some money in computers bfore trying his website, freedomainradio.com - established I'd guess before cheap bandwidth made videos more popular than just audio. This video is just a couple of old films which are not specifically relevant to the voiceover.

I fear he's like many techies - one of these people who got excited about simplified views of reality, but who don't seem to have either enough general knowledge to criticise - there's a lot of suspect statistics and 'research' - or to have the skill to describe their beliefs - the two videos I saw were agonisingly slow and failed to clearly make their point.

The 'Ownership' thing has a sort of Freudian Marxist start - cannibalism attributed to everyone, ruling classes as pillagers, slaves as inefficient, 'the Church' doing various things - it's a Eurocentric 2 millennia interpretation of religion and the world. He has no grasp of science and technology: like many scribblers, the chap thinks money or power generate wealth. He also seems to have no idea that communities or groups or sets of people are essential to any sort of education or planning or construction. I thought the second half was better, because it's more recent, so that the wearying Marxist stuff ('feudal system', 'classes', 'mode of production') is necessarily reduced. it's absolutely cruclal that 'the state' i its various meanings and manifestations should be understood, and at least he tries. But I don't think the video as a whole is helpful; he's not a revisionist so much of the content is anyway suspect - as regards this site, he has no idea about nuclear weapons.

And the second part of the title - 'A manual for New Tax Farmers' - doesn't seem to have been met. He's like a pyramidologist, predicting the past, but, strangely, not the future.

I quite liked his voiceover style, though.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

The manifesto of the man in New Hampshire that burned himself to death at the courthouse might be a more accurate description of how the system works.