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Jan. 16, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:56
58 Poverty Part 1

The complexities of alleviating poverty (Part 1)

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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well.
It is Monday, January the 15th?
Something like that.
As you can tell, I feel obsessed with saying the dates at the beginning of every podcast.
Although, of course, I can barely remember what month it is, let alone what.
Dates really aren't my thing, man.
I'm a bit more of a free spirit, you know what I mean?
I think you do.
So, I'd like to talk this morning about the poor.
I have been receiving some emails based on my article on lewrockwell.com, which is, I think, catchily titled, The Application of the Argument for Morality to Welfare, or something equally gripping and metaphorical.
And the poor are... You know, if you've ever been a libertarian, and you've been a libertarian for more than, say, three, three and a half minutes, somebody is going to ask you the same question.
And that question will be, what will you do about the poor?
What would a libertarian society or an objectivist society or a free society do about the poor?
And that is a particularly interesting question, in my view, because of the number of ethical errors that it contains.
So, the idea that the poor are sort of passive livestock, that one must do something In order to have them have a chance to have a decent life, I think is entirely insulting to the poor and displays an extraordinarily callous lack of humanity to the choices that people make in their life.
I just have never really understood what people mean by that, and it actually makes me pretty angry.
Although I promise I won't yell at anyone this morning.
It makes me pretty angry to have complexity of human life and human choice reduced to like four letters.
That bothers me, you know, more than I would probably care to say, because the question of poverty is very complex, as is the question of human choice, as is the question of economic preferences.
And the idea that the poor are a sort of group of sick people who need our help, like their wounded livestock.
And you say to the farmer, well, what would you do?
What are you going to do about your wounded livestock?
And, you know, the farmer is, I guess, supposed to leap into action and go get a vaccine because the livestock are completely unable to do anything for themselves.
I just find it's just absolutely horrible.
It is an absolutely ghastly way to view human life.
And why?
Well, as I've asked before, what on earth is wrong with being poor?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with being poor, and I find it just bigoted and biased in the extreme to look at poverty as a species of illness that needs to be cured by violence towards others.
So, there are a number of approaches that I would like to take to this complex problem.
I guess, first of all, I'll spend two seconds maybe... You know, I've had lots of emails from people who guess I assume that I'm some sort of, you know, born with a silver spoon aristocratic rich guy because I've got an accent and some education and, you know, I guess some verbal abilities.
And, you know, let me put that notion to rest.
I have probably more exposure to poverty than most people who ...are listening to this.
And I don't say that with any sense of pride or benefit or that makes me an expert or anything like that, but, you know, if you want to talk about a particular subculture or a particular group in society, of course it does help if you spent, you know, 15 to 20 years living among them.
My parents separated when I was very, very young, like six months old or something like that.
And my father is a geologist and he moved back to Africa because he'd done his PhD there and being a geologist is sort of like being a lawyer.
You can't just sort of flip countries because the geology is so different between different countries that you can't just go and sort of settle in Ireland.
And it's not a whole lot of gold mining being done in Ireland these days, which is what my father's expertise is.
so he uh... and he also moved to uh... to uh... africa uh... because my mother was you know threatening to sue him and you know full of rage and so on right because of course my mother being sort of irrational and crazy is is very much like oh you know this this this poor this man and and he had the degree to which he abuses poor me and she sort of stoked to the fires of her rage like somebody kneeling in front of a fire with a pair of bellows
She had this whole thing about how she had supported him through his PhD and now he was leaving her behind and he was going off to make a fortune and she was going to be left in poverty with two children after supporting him.
You know, the typical thing that, you know, crazy divorcees do, probably on both sides of the gender line, you know, she just created this story wherein she could stoke her rage at any time because, you know, her rage seemed to enjoy being stoked, I guess you could say.
And we didn't live too bad a life financially in England.
My mother was a secretary and we lived on a subsidized housing estate.
But don't get me wrong, it was no hole in the wall.
We had a pretty nice apartment with a great view of London and we had nice stuff.
We weren't rich, we didn't have a car or anything like that, but we didn't really have significant poverty in our family.
And then, you know, my mother just, you know, had this fear that socialism was getting worse and worse, so she decided to abscond to Canada.
This is in 1977, so shortly before, three years before Thatcher got in, right?
And I think I've mentioned the irony of all that before.
And I do remember pressing her, even as a child, saying, well, why would we move?
Why would we move?
And my mother was, you know, somewhat evasive but seemed to sort of be quite passionate about the need for the family to make a new start.
We're gonna go to the new world to make a new start.
And, you know, as I grew older and understood abuse, parental abuse, a little bit more, What I realized, of course, was that we had friends and relatives in England that we visited, and the abuse that my mother was perpetrating on my brother and I, she wanted to move us away, as we sort of entered into puberty, she wanted to move us away from people who we could talk to, right?
Who we could communicate with.
So she wanted to move us to a place where we had no social network, no relatives, no friends, no uh... you know no sort of uh... extended family support so that we would not say anything about uh... the abuse and now i'm not sure that anybody would have done anything But, you know, that is something that people are pretty good at doing, right?
I mean, if you're abusing a child, then you're going to have a pretty strong motive.
And I'm not saying it's, like, consciously whiteboarded out, but you're going to have a very strong motive to move them around.
Like, I went to, like, six or seven schools by the age of, like, 13.
And so, you know, that's just a pretty typical thing, right?
Which is another reason why you know that these people are evil and not confused.
So then when we came to Canada, my mother, who's a classic hypochondriac, decided to go in for a little bit more recreational surgery and she flew back to Germany where she had, I believe as a German citizen, she had access to the healthcare system and she went back and got some operations done for her.
And my brother then went to England and I went to stay with a friend of mine's grandparents that I barely knew for a summer.
And then, when my brother stayed in England, my mother came back from Germany and, you know, within a month or two of coming back, she just fell into a sort of catastrophic depression and a sort of destruction of personality, which, you know, to me is sort of the result of accumulated years of just being a bad person.
and she couldn't get out of bed and and so on and and so of course I got as many jobs as I could and you know paper route I worked in a bookstore and I soon became a waiter and you know just just put as much as as possible together to keep us going but I mean it was a pretty desperate time and we had eviction notices and I remember I was on a swim team for one summer and I just could not come up with seven dollars to to join the swim team so I had to keep going and saying oh I I forgot it you know all of the standard stuff that
It happens when you're, you know, absolutely and completely broke.
You know, like there's stuff that you need for school trips, money that you need for school.
You just can't.
You just can't pay it, right?
So you just struggle through.
And that's not a particular emotional issue for me.
The poverty wasn't the problem.
I mean, I didn't really like it, of course, and it was pretty humiliating, but the poverty wasn't the problem in so much as it could be survived.
You know, sort of, I think what was the problem for me was Just the degree to which, you know, I mean, my mother got institutionalized, right?
I mean, she dragged herself to a doctor who, you know, I don't think the best doctor in the world, but...
He at least has a sense to get her committed, because she was just unable to function.
And, you know, so she was in an asylum for quite some time.
You know, the thing that was amazing to me, and this is, you know, I hope this isn't uncomfortable hearing this personal stuff, but, you know, if you want to sort of have some idea where some of my ideas come from, you know, which is not to say that this is any proof of them, it's just, you know, sort of the cauldron from which we establish certain approaches to life.
The, you know, the problem for me was that the entire infrastructure of supposed help for people just did not occur, right?
I mean, I went to visit my mother in the asylum and, you know, nobody ever said, you know, they knew she was divorced, they knew she was pretty new to the country, they would have done some sort of history, and they knew she had a child and they knew that she hadn't worked for, you know, I don't know, months and months at this time.
So, but nobody, like no sort of social network sprang into action.
And this is true at the school, this is true through social services, and so on.
And I think, you know, if I look back into my history, I think this is where I sort of became somewhat skeptical about the proactivity and desire to help of, you know, those in the sort of social services of the welfare state.
Because, you know, I mean, there was a whole cluster of, sort of, wolf children living in my apartment, you know, relatively, sort of, in our early to mid-teens.
You know, these were people who had, you know, been kicked out of home or had left home voluntarily because situations were unbearable.
And, you know, we weren't on welfare.
We all had jobs.
We just sort of scraped by and made it work.
And, you know, we went to school and all.
We did our laundry and, you know, we were obviously, you know, you could say that we were growing up a little too early, but I think that That wasn't the problem, really.
I think that, you know, teenagers are much more competent than people think.
I think we baby people far too long.
But, you know, the issue is that no social community, you know, stepped in.
This sort of reminds me as well.
My mother, you know, went... I can't remember.
This is sort of later on in my teens.
She began sort of wanting to get dates through personal ads.
So she went on a, like, a two-week date to a guy in Houston and left my brother and I with 30 bucks.
So, you know, of course we ate for the first couple of days, and then we couldn't eat because we didn't have any money, and so we'd sort of hang around friends' places to try and get food.
And, you know, I mean, you'd kind of think that maybe somebody, somebody along the whole line would have asked about, you know, what's going on with this family?
And, I mean, I understand sort of why, in hindsight, that, you know, people have their own lives to live.
And also, it's pretty complicated and messy getting involved in someone else's family life, right?
Especially with somebody as volatile and aggressive and legally pugilistic as my mother.
So, you know, you don't want to tangle with, you know, the crazy, paranoid, aggressive woman who's, you know, suing three doctors and all that, right?
You know, a word of comfort or whatever would have gone a long way, but this sort of social heart of stone that I experienced, and not just sort of in an isolated sense, but for many, many years, to me was just quite remarkable.
Nobody sort of asked and said, you know, there seems to be a lot of children living at your place or, you know.
People in their early to mid-teens, what's up with that?
Or, you know, well, son, your mom's been institutionalized.
How are you getting by at home?
You know, all of this kind of stuff.
Just nothing.
Not a whisper, not a word for, you know, the entire sort of seven-year period or six-year period that I was sort of going to school and working and, you know, getting by.
And, you know, then my brother came back a couple years later and, you know, we worked and we worked in the summers to make things
Happened and so it just the entire time period just not you know from from teachers from Families from friends not a thing about anything now I mean you could say and it's something I've thought about and it would be a reasonable question you could say well You know maybe people were getting a vibe from you like you didn't want to talk about it And I do understand that and of course that's certainly possible it would have been a delicate matter to talk to me about this problem
Because, you know, there was such a degree of, you know, especially after a couple of years, right?
Because there was humiliation, there was, you know, overwork.
I mean, I had significant sleep problems because I was just working so much, dragging myself through school.
And, you know, there was also significant, probably, frustration.
I don't think I was really conscious of it, but just frustration.
Like, I felt very much like I was in a social bubble.
Like, I just didn't have I was sort of in the world, but not off the world, if that makes any sense.
Like, other kids had lunches packed for them and, you know, other people, other children had, you know, clothes bought for them and so on.
And I was just showing up in the same clothes every day, you know, with sort of minor variations, because I just didn't have that.
And I do remember, I guess, one One friend's father, who is a doctor, and this is a guy I went over to his house after school, and he sort of took me into his office one day and said, you know, you're in puberty now and your body's emitting smells, you need to use deodorant and, you know, shower every day and so on.
Which, you know, I don't really remember as a kid being that much of an issue, but I guess you get a little more fruity when you get hormonally flushed.
And, you know, I certainly appreciate, you know, that gentleman's gesture.
But, you know, at the same time, wouldn't you sort of have some questions about the level of home care that you were receiving, right?
I mean, that's, you know, to me it was great that he said, you know, you know, Pigpen, maybe you should slap on some deodorant.
But at the same time, I think a sort of honorable, decent person would have gone a little further and said, well, what's, you know, what's going on at home at the moment since you sort of seem to lack some basic self-care?
And, you know, that all makes, that would all sort of make sense to me.
And, you know, when I've had those situations in life where I've seen that sort of kid out of the social norms, I think what people generally, like I've tried to do something, but I think what people generally do is they say, you know, there's something wrong with that kid, right?
I mean, that would be the standard response.
You know, he may be a little autistic, he may have emotional problems, he might be whatever, right?
But, you know, to some degree We are a product of what we struggle with, right?
I mean, there's some truth to that.
I mean, I don't think that eliminates free will because, you know, many people go in many different directions even when they're in very similar circumstances.
But, you know, so I was poor.
I mean, I would say ridiculously poor throughout my teenage years, and then I got a job gold panning and claim staking, which was great, right?
I mean, finally, finally enough to eat, right?
And so I went through all of that.
I worked for a year and a half off and on, sort of seven days a week, and then take some time off.
And, you know, I was living in a tent, they bought all my groceries, and so I had enough to eat, and it was outdoors, and it was exercise, and it was just great.
And then, of course, I went to school.
And, you know, then, of course, you enter into the poverty pit of school, where, you know, the money that I'd saved from working up north, I had, you know, managed to get me through a year or two of school.
And then I worked again, and I did take some government student loans and student grants.
You know, after struggling, I was sort of forming the ideas, my ideas about the government and the free market back then.
But I took the money after struggling with it and conversing with some friends about the morality of it.
And I'm certainly glad I did because, of course, having founded a company, I've returned much more than I ever will.
I've contributed much more than I will ever receive from the state in using the term contribution very loosely.
So, you know, I went through that, and then I ran out of money at the end of my undergrad, so I took a year off, a year and a half off, and I tamped and, you know, made money and so on.
And then I put myself through my master's, without any help at this point, so... And then, you know, I got a job, and I was really broke at the end of my master's.
Like, I just couldn't make... I was paying 270 bucks a month in rent because I was living in one room in a big house.
And, you know, I just couldn't make... So I had to sort of call and beg for jobs, and fortunately I did get a job as a computer programmer.
And I mean, I've never taken any computer training, but I've sort of loved computers since I was 12, so I knew a fair amount about how to work them and how to program them.
So, you know, then it all sort of took off after that.
I had, you know, some good money and, you know, then I started a company and so, and now, of course, financially I'm pretty comfortable.
And so, you know, I do have some pretty strong understanding of what it is to be poor and I lived in an environment with other people who were poor and I lived in a community where, you know, it wasn't a particularly wealthy community by any means.
I mean, the majority of people just didn't have cars or, you know, There was lots of single mom families around and so on.
So I do have a pretty strong understanding of what it is to be poor and I do have a pretty strong understanding of the barriers to helping people out of poverty.
So, you know, some more personal stuff.
Again, I'm just sort of putting this in to, so you can sort of, you know, full disclosure, right?
This is sort of the perspective that I'm coming from, so if that's had any, if that produces any irrationality in my thinking, it's sort of good to know where it comes from, right?
This is sort of the personal experiment that we're working with as the foundation of some of these theories.
So, of course, when I got older, my brother and I had a company.
We gave my mother money.
And we gave my mother money, you know, to sort of help her, right?
To sort of get her to do things that would be a little bit less, you know, poverty-stricken or so.
I mean, she lived in a nice little apartment, which she turned into, you know, an obsessive-compulsive crap heap.
By just, you know, obsessively getting books, photocopying books, highlighting things because she was involved in a big lawsuit against her doctors, which, you know, every time it came to a hearing or a trial, she just would vanish and never show up.
So, you know, that was all... She was comfortable, right?
But, you know, she just... We thought more money would help, and all she did was she turned around and gave the money to her lawyers.
You know, to a bunch of sort of sleazebag lawyers who would say, oh yeah, you know, we'll be all over that court case of yours, honey, don't you worry.
And of course nothing ever happened, so my mother, you know, giving my mother money was not an option in terms of getting her help.
So, and of course I knew of other examples of, you know, since I sort of kept in touch with some of the wolf children who sort of, and by that I just mean sort of kids raised by wolves or kids raised without parental influences.
You know, we kept in touch over the years and, you know, they had the same problems, similar problems with their own parents and Anytime they tried to give them resources, they just would get frittered or wasted, you know.
So, these people were sort of money resistant.
I guess you could say they had sort of an invisible shield that, you know, amount of help, financial help could penetrate.
So, sort of that's where, and I don't, I certainly don't say this is true for all of the poor and so on.
So, to abstract from my experiences through theory to something that may be a little bit more transferable, what I would say is that You know, there are two categories of poor in the world.
And, you know what, it always has to be three.
I'll take three categories, Jim, for $500.
And the first category would be those who choose to be poor.
You know, the monks and people who have just decided to reject a career and enjoy the personal freedom of getting up and going and, you know, hitchhiking and, you know, whatever they want.
And who have rejected the sort of standard bourgeois existence of career advancement and so on.
And those people have chosen to be poor.
You know, they may even have a good education, they may have intelligence, they may have whatever, but they've just chosen that kind of five easy pieces approach to life wherein you just kind of avoid, maybe avoid the challenge of a career or avoid the problems of a career and you just, you know, live this sort of free and easy life where you work and then don't work and start and then stop and take a contract here or there.
And of course, those people can't be, you know, I'm sure they'd prefer more money, but it's not a problem to be solved.
Lifestyle choices are never problems to be solved, especially solved through violence.
Now, the second group of people who are poor are the undeserving poor.
These are people who are poor because of their own actions.
This is the drunk who refuses to deal with his drunkenness, the drug addict, The woman who had six kids with seven different fathers, or something more mathematically appropriate.
They're sort of poor by their own actions and choices.
They chose to party all the time rather than completing high school.
They just don't choose to work.
Every time they get any money, they go to the racetrack and blow it, or whatever.
And there are other people who are poor, undeservingly poor.
And, you know, the biggest category of those, of course, is children, right?
I mean, the children of the woman who had, you know, six kids by seven different fathers is not poor by his or her own choice, right?
I mean, I certainly wasn't poor because, you know, I was a bad person or anything like that as a child.
It was just bad luck.
Luck is sort of the wrong word because you can't ascribe luck to, you know, simply base material circumstances.
So it was just the situation that I was in.
Other people had better situations.
Other people certainly had worse situations.
So, you know, it was just where things were in my life.
It was just sort of a fact of matter and a fact of reality.
So, the greatest category of people who are poor, and they're not deservingly poor, are children, but of course there's a subsection of adults who are poor, not by choice, but by accident or whatever.
Now, to some degree, and I say this with caution because I know that it's a very Swollen category, metaphorically for people, to believe that there are these poor people who are, you know, noble and deserving and so on.
I watched a bit of North Country the other day and, you know, Charlize Theron is playing this woman who has kids and wants to work in the mines and, you know, she's sort of noble and hard-working and she left an abusive marriage and so on.
And, you know, psychologically this is just Nonsense, right?
I mean, it is, you know, you don't have two children by an abusive man unless you're severely disturbed yourself.
And, you know, to me, of course, it is perfectly valid to accept that this woman had a bad template for marriage, right?
Her own father may have been abusive, it may have been commonly accepted behavior in the community and so on, but nonetheless, you know, this idea that there's this sort of noble wounded heroine trying to raise her kids with this bad husband in her wake You know, it's just nonsense psychologically.
She is very likely to be beating her own children, right?
She is very likely to be abusive, either verbally or in some other manner, to those who she has power over.
And of course, the greatest power disparity in the world is between parents and children, which is why, you know, the power tends to get abused so much.
So, you know, this idea that there's this sort of noble struggling poor, and it's usually a woman, but occasionally it's a man, like hard-working and diligent and, you know, but just can't get ahead and, you know, with wonderful emotional skills but no capacity to make a living, right?
So, you see this in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, right?
That there are these two wonderful parents who are warm and friendly and compassionate and loving and so on, but, you know, they work in these precarious low-rent jobs.
And that's really not the case, right?
I mean, if you have emotional skills and intelligence, then you are going to rise if you apply yourself to some degree or another.
I mean, you're not going to rise to the top necessarily, but you're not going to live, you know, this sort of low-rent subsistence existence of menial labor.
I mean, unless you choose to, right?
But if you choose that kind of life, if you have the capacity for more and you choose far less, then, you know, you usually are doing that because of emotional problems, right?
A lack of self-esteem or self-hatred or, you know, that's going to translate into how you interact with people.
So, I mean, I know that there's this theoretical Marxist entity of the noble proletariat who struggles to get ahead but is beat back by the capitalists all the time.
You know, it's completely false.
I mean, if you just look at people who live in these kinds of environments, you know, they tend to be coarse, they tend to be completely unenlightened in terms of introspection, they tend to be, you know, disturbed personality structures of differing degrees of significance, but never insignificant.
They tend to have bad relationships.
They tend to be bullies.
They tend to be... You know, and people are going to get mad at me and say, oh, my father was... It's fine.
Absolutely.
I fully accept that.
But having known quite a number of these people, both in the mining world and in the world of low-rent menial jobs, which I had when I was a teenager, and, you know, the entire social environment that I grew up in, you know, I'm not speaking out of turn and with no experience in the matter.
And I'm not speaking from any abstract political sense.
I'm just simply talking about my experience that There's not one among them who I would put in the same category that you often see in these movies about the noble poor.
It's a fiction.
It's a fantasy.
It's like the noble soldier.
It's like the well-meaning bureaucrat.
It's like the honest politician.
These are just categories of emotional fantasy that are put in place to silence critiques.
So the poor, you know, there is a category of the undeserving poor and there is a category of the deserving poor.
You know, this is the woman who, you know, she had kids with a great guy and, you know, he was on his way to mail the life insurance when he got hit by a bus and, you know, and so she's poor through no fault of her own and, you know, she needs help and so on.
And, you know, one of the problems, so given there are three categories, right?
Those who choose to be poor, those who are poor by their own fault, and those who are poor by circumstances or accidental and, of course, the majority of those being children.
So, you know, there's a lot of complexity when it comes to one's income.
One's income is an effect of a lot of different choices, some of which are perfectly respectable, in my sort of humble opinion, and some of which are not, right?
I have no problem with somebody who drops out and makes very little money because they want to pursue their dream of being a painter or a playwright or an actor or whatever.
More power to you, right?
You're rolling the dice, and if you win, then you're going to be doing fantastically, right?
I mean, if you get to be a movie star, you know, millions of dollars, you know, you can... Obviously it's fun, because people work even after they've made millions of dollars, so this is jobs that people would do for free, in a sense, because they're being paid so little relative to their net worth.
That, you know, we know that it's a fun job, right?
So, you know, more power to you.
Roll the dice, and if you can get there, you know, fantastic!
Now, the odds are that you aren't going to get there, but I don't have any problem with people who want to try.
I mean, that's fantastic!
But, you know, if they don't make any money, or they make very little money, they're not, you know, the sort of noble heroic poor who can't get ahead because of circumstances beyond their control.
So, I would say that it's sort of important to distinguish these.
It's important to distinguish between these and to recognize that all categories, except for the last category, are kind of permanent and kind of impervious to help.
You know, that's sort of important.
We don't want to just sort of categorize people as the poor.
I mean, to me, that's sheer conceptual bigotry.
You know, that's like categorizing everyone as blacks or Chinese or whatever.
I mean, everybody's an individual and everybody has a wide variety of choices and, you know, they have personalities which, you know, point them in one direction or another and they, you know, they can measure sort of long-term gain, short-term pain.
to different degrees of success and to different degrees of preference.
So, you know, the idea of being able to carve off an entire section of humanity and just call them the poor and be able to make decisions about them in general, you know, it's just bigotry and laziness of the worst kind.
And it tends to produce, you know, pretty terrible effects, right?
I mean, like racism or any other kind of collective judgments, you're always going to have problems when you do that because it's just not true, right?
So anytime you come up with theories or posit things in society that are based on, you know, aggregate generalizations that are false, anything that you do is just going to be, you know, have a terrible effect and, you know, produce the opposite of what you want and all this and that.
So, the first two categories are absolutely impervious to help.
You cannot help people who choose to be poor.
And you can't help people who are poor through their own failings.
But you can't help them with money, for sure.
I viewed my early twenties to mid-twenties as an investment in my future.
I was willing to accept the poverty there.
And that poverty was still better than the poverty I had as a teenager.
But I was willing to accept that poverty in return for getting a master's, which would give me More capacity to make money later on.
So, I mean, I would never expect anybody to give me lots of money, you know, based on the fact that I was poor because it was an investment.
But those who are poor by, you know, as a result of their own actions, then you can't help them either because you can't undo People's histories, right?
So money is not going to erase the fact that my mother was abusive, right?
Sorry, money is not going to erase the fact that my father sort of wandered off to Africa and Betty was in contact and left us with this, you know, crazy abusive woman that of course he knew was crazy and abusive because he left her.
He was married to her, right?
And so, you know, my perspective here is that If it's true, and I think it is true, that my mother had a mental collapse because of the accumulated evil of her actions, then it's not true that money would help her.
And money didn't help her, in point of fact.
When my brother and I gave her money, it just didn't do her any good whatsoever.
And the reason for that is that you simply can't undo people's histories.
You can't turn her into somebody who'd never been abusive.
The facts are the facts.
You know, everything we do is sort of recorded in our conscience.
That's sort of my perspective.
And that's why it's sort of important to be a good person, right?
Morality is a habit that you develop like exercise.
And you want to sort of make sure that every time we don't go to the gym, it's sort of recorded in our bodies through flaccidity of muscles and accumulation of, you know, cholesterol or whatever.
And every time we do go to the gym is recorded in our bodies through, you know, slightly better health.
And it's the same thing is true with our moral actions, right?
I mean, our moral actions are recorded.
In our conscience, right?
I mean, everything that we do, we remember.
And if we just reject it, it doesn't matter.
It's still there, right?
You can swallow food and say you didn't eat, but it's still going to be processed by your body.
So, you know, you kind of do people's history by giving them money.
And, you know, if the self-flagellation of their actions has produced poverty as their natural state, you really can't do anything about it.
And I've seen this in a number of examples where, you know, money just doesn't change people or help people.
And, you know, those who are poor because they have bad habits, then those people you can't help with money either, right?
You don't give a drunk money and, you know, think that that person is no longer going to be a drunk, right?
Well, they're going to use it.
They're going to use it to buy alcohol, or they're going to use it to, you know, take time off work so that they don't have to get up and go to work with a hangover.
So you can't give money to people who are poor by habit, by bad habit.
And expect them to change their habits and get better.
I mean, that's certainly the case.
And, again, I've seen that in a number of situations and circumstances as well.
So, you know, if we get to the third category, and I don't have any idea to what degree the third category exists, except as sort of an artistic construct that we've seen countless times in movies, and, you know, not so many countless times in life, in fact.
Never.
I've never seen that in life.
This third category, you know, theoretically can be helped.
They're vastly in the minority.
And, you know, the problem with this issue of deserving versus undeserving poor is that the deserving poor are always obscured by the fact that the undeserving poor are always trying to pass themselves off as, you guessed it, the deserving poor.
And that is that sort of problem of mimicry.
is a significant problem, and one of the reasons why state programs always grow and always get corrupted and always corrupt the poor, even those sort of theoretical but possible deserving poor.
So I think what we'll do, let's have a chat about that this afternoon, because this problem of mimicry is significant, and it's important to understand it so that we can understand why violence doesn't solve poverty.
So thanks again, as always, for listening, and I hope that you're doing well.
Steph signing off.
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