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Jan. 16, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:57
59 Poverty Part 2
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Time Text
Good evening, everybody!
It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well.
It is, gosh, Tuesday afternoon, maybe the 15th at around...
1742 p.m.
And I hope you're doing well.
I just had a fascinating meeting that I can't tell you about just now, but probably one of the more interesting meetings I've ever had in my career.
And until the dust has settled, I really can't talk about it, so you'll have to wait.
Now, I was talking this morning about the poor and the problem of mimicry, right?
So I sort of divided the poor into three categories.
Those who choose to be poor, For a variety of reasons, the monks and the students and so on.
Then there are those who are poor due to their own fault, right?
So the drunks, the gamblers, the addicts, the, you know, the abusive, those who yell at people at work and seem to have trouble maintaining their job status.
And then there's category number three, which is those who are poor, who are poor not through any of their own circumstances, but rather through accident.
You know, the deserving poor, we can say, in terms of charity, right?
In the first category, it's unjust to give people money for charity, in my view, because when I was a student and I was Living on, you know, $5,000 a year and, you know, all the peanuts I could eat, then it would be sort of, I think, unfair to say, oh Steph, you poor dear, you are setting yourself up in graduate school.
It's costing you a lot of money, but you are, you know, you're gonna need our charity because It's a net loss.
Well, of course, it's not a net loss.
It was a huge gain for me to go to university, not because of anything particular that I got from university, other than fights and headaches and problems with professors, but in terms of what it means to have a graduate degree.
It gives you some, you know, sort of the short-change intellectual credibility that has served me well in my career.
It would be similar to say, and we probably would not say this, right, but we It would be similar to say, oh, those poor, poor doctors who are going through school, boy, they just don't have any money.
And, you know, we really should give them money because they are such poor dears and they really do need our support and assistance.
Well, we don't say that, of course.
We recognize that they're making a temporary trade-off in their income for the sake of a long-term advancement in their income and career and so on.
So, the second are those who are the undeserving poor.
In other words, and of course I put, to bring it back to the personal level again, because really, when you get right down to it, it's all about us.
My mother would be an undeserving poor, like she's poor, but she's poor because she chose not to restrain her temper at work, right?
So nobody would hire her.
She chose to avoid getting any sort of psychological treatment despite Increasingly in obvious psychological problems, and even as a kid I suggested that she get help because it wasn't too subtle.
So of course the net result of that is that she's poor, but it wouldn't have made any difference to subsidize her, as I sort of found out later on in life, because she just has become so corrupt and empty that money doesn't mean anything to her.
It doesn't give her any more pleasure.
She just, you know, hands it over to lawyers who waste it on pursuit of a frivolous A sort of hypochondriacal medical case.
And of course, so in that sense, you know, giving money to my mother was a bad thing, right?
I mean, it's like giving money to a drunk, then he goes and buys a drink, is a bad thing, right?
Charity in that situation is getting him nice and drunk so he can go home and, you know, beat his kids.
And sort of giving money to my mother gave her money to give to lawyers who It's a moral negative to give money to people who are going to use it badly to the detriment of others.
Charity then becomes a vice.
So the first situation, charity is irrational and unjust because people are sacrificing their income in order to gain more money later.
And in the second instance, charity is unjust and wrong, because you are giving money to people who are going to use it to cause destruction, right?
I mean, to do bad things, right?
So, in those two circumstances, I think we can safely say that charity is a net negative, right?
However, in this third category, of the deserving poor, well, I think that we can all say that these people are You know, deserving of our support, you know, that there are sad things that have happened to them and bad things that have happened to them.
You know, and of course in this category it's, you know, children whose parents have been orphaned and, you know, children who are babies who were born with medical defects, you know, that their parents, for whatever reason, didn't have insurance against.
And, you know, just the innocent, right?
The people who are justly, I think, deserving of our charity.
Now, That sort of distinction, right, between these sort of three groups, and they're really only two groups, right?
Those who deserve charity and those who don't.
The distinction between those is very important, and the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor is very well known among the undeserving poor, right?
So one of the problems that you have is that the undeserving poor wish to cloak themselves in the mantle of the deserving poor.
Which is fairly significant, right?
I'm just talking about, like, jerks, right?
To use the sociologically technical term.
I'm talking about, you know, guys who just won't get a job, you know?
I remember seeing, I think it was a... was it...
It's not Wife Swap.
It's like Trading Spouses.
That's it.
Wife Swap may be, in fact, an entirely different program on an entirely different channel.
But it was Trading Spouses and there was this one couple where the guy was just a complete burnout and he'd spent his youth drinking and, you know, all he wanted to do was go to concerts, man.
I mean, what's wrong with that?
Have some fun.
And, you know, of course, they couldn't pay their rent, right?
They couldn't pay their electricity bill.
So this guy was like, well, I'd much rather go to a concert and forget about the electricity bill, man.
And, you know, that's sort of somebody who is an undeserving poor guy, right?
I mean, it's not that he's poor because he can't work.
He just chooses the short-term gain of going to concerts over the long-term gains, say, of maybe having heating and electricity to cook his kids some food.
So giving that person money will simply result in them going to more concerts.
It certainly won't result in them paying the electricity bill.
So that's sort of important.
But those guys know that what they want to do is they want to portray themselves as the deserving poor.
As those who are poor, not Not because of their own choices and circumstances, but because of circumstances beyond their control.
A kid born with spina bifida is obviously not morally responsible for that issue.
If the parents haven't taken out insurance or haven't got a solution for that problem, then we might question the morality of the parents, but we certainly would not find it just to punish the child for that situation.
Now, it's very hard, of course, to Distinguish between parents who did not buy their child insurance against being born with spina bifida because, you know, they just didn't understand it or didn't know about it or were lied to or, you know, they did buy it but the company went bankrupt or they thought they'd bought it but they were bilked by an insurance guy or something like that.
And those people who are just like, eh, forget it, you know, we're not going to pay the 20 bucks, we're just going to go see a movie instead.
Right?
And that's sort of the difference between the deserving and the undeserving poor in terms of the parenting, right?
That the child is always a deserving poor.
But given that you can't give the money to the child directly, sort of based on economic reality, that, you know, babies are not very good at double-entry bookkeeping.
And, you know, a lot of them really don't understand capital gains.
Then, you know, you really can't give money to children directly, so the only way you can get money to children through charity, or in any sort of charitable situation, is to give the money to the parents, right?
And, you know, so parents know that if they can portray themselves like sort of jerk parents, or the undeserving poor, those who are not deserving of charity, they know that if they can convince people that they are, in fact, the hard done by poor, then they're going to get charity.
And one of the ways that they do this is to hold their children hostage, right?
I mean, we can sort of see that, you know, with the rise of the welfare state.
And I don't want to get into the welfare state as a whole because we're just talking technically.
But for those who find it horrifying that human beings would hold their children hostage in return for charity, well, you simply have to look at the statistics, right, and the economics, right?
We're not trying to sort of judge everyone here or come up with a final solution to all things related to poverty, but we're just looking at some general trends, right?
So if you look at the welfare state when there was no welfare state, in other words, if you're a young teenage girl full of, you know, hormones and happy juice, then if you get
pregnant, then, you know, you have to have an abortion, which is risky and dangerous, or, you know, the parents have to have a shotgun marriage, and they have to force some, you know, slack-jawed pimply yokelt who knocked you up to marry you, which is probably going to result in them living in your basement, in the parents' basement, for quite some number of years, and it's probably going to result in divorce or a bad marriage, and they're going to have more kids.
You know, so pregnancy, outside of a committed relationship, socially is, you know, economically, I'm just talking economically, you know, it's kind of a disaster, right?
I mean, it's kind of like a bad thing.
So, of course, prior to the welfare state, there was strict social controls on, sort of, teen sexuality, right?
And you can sort of debate whether that was a good or a bad thing, in terms of the ethics, and you can debate, well, you know, it was just religion and so on, but it did serve a very practical purpose, which is that it kept People from engaging in sexual behaviors that would result in pregnancy.
No, I mean, in my particular view it was sort of heavy-handed and they didn't promote enough alternatives to non-fertility based sexual practices.
Which is a catchy phrase perhaps I should patent.
You know, so they didn't sort of promote alternatives to intercourse with ejaculation so that, you know, the teens could get their sexual satisfaction, which is fairly important when you're a teenager.
I certainly can attest to that when you're a teenage man or teenage boy.
But, you know, so I thought it was too heavy-handed.
But of course it served a very elemental purpose, right?
Which is that the creation of life that's dependent for 15 to 20 years is a pretty... It's one of the most significant things that you can do, you know, outside of, you know, specifically immoral crimes.
And so social controls over this thing sort of made sense.
And so then what happened was, after the welfare state goes in, of course, women can survive without the income of the male during pregnancy and in sort of wet nursing and so on, sort of breastfeeding and so on.
And so, you know, two things happened.
Well, you know, society says, you know, I don't care as much.
Right?
I mean, it's not going to come directly out of my hide.
And, you know, it's not really that big a problem.
So, you know, what is it?
Like one out of a hundred teenage girls would get pregnant.
So, you know, the welfare state's only going to have to deal with one out of a hundred.
And, you know, it's not going to directly affect me.
And, you know, society's going to pay.
So, you know, I'm not going to sit there and nag everyone about keeping their legs crossed.
And so, of course, what happens then is that, because social control is withdrawn, or at least diminished, and then economic incentives are put in place, i.e., you know, instead of getting a crappy job, you can just have a kid or two, and that can keep you in gravy.
You know, poor as hell, but alive, which is sort of a key difference between poor and broke.
And so that sort of occurred, which changed the whole sort of demographic landscape.
And so that was sort of one effect of the welfare state.
And the other effect was that the women no longer have to choose economically productive men as directly, right?
So virtue in a man becomes a far less valued commodity, right?
I mean, a woman is going to want to have a baby with a man who's going to stick around to be responsible and, you know, comfort her and help her and, you know, get up to change the diapers and, you know, be a nice guy and a good guy and support and, you know, be a husband and all that kind of stuff.
And all of that stuff is difficult and requires, you know, some intellectual and virtuous, sorry, some moral rigor, right?
I mean, so, I mean, I've had some... I worked in a daycare when I was in my teens and I I've spent quite a bit of time around children and babies, and, you know, there can be some work.
Wonderfully rewarding little munchkins, but, you know, there can be some work.
So you want a guy who's just not interested in sort of getting his rocks off, but you want a guy who's going to sort of stick around and do the right thing.
So that, of course, and the guy who's just like the sleazy gunner, hey, how you doing, kind of guy, who just wants to have sex with a woman and not settle down, this guy is sort of frowned upon, right?
And so virtue is a valued commodity in a male when there's no state support of children.
That's just sort of one example.
And when there is state support of children, then virtue within a male becomes far less important.
And what becomes far more important is, you know, they're cool, they're dreamy, they're, you know, whatever.
I mean, whatever nonsense.
They're tough.
You know, they have a nice car.
My girlfriends think he's hot.
You know, all of this kind of stuff.
You know, basically then shallowness and vice become sort of sexually appealing and virtue is, you know, not that way anymore.
So, of course, you end up with far worse men having children.
You know, men who are pretty much guaranteed to not stick around and do the right thing.
And, of course, you get a big explosion in the number of people who are having children because social controls are lifted and, you know, having children is subsidized.
So, you know, it should be no shock to anyone that with the welfare state you get the rise of single-parent families and you get an explosion of early and premarital or non-marital pregnancies.
So, that was a minor tangent.
I guess we could classify that as a minor tangent.
But we will attempt to re-find the thread that we were working on and start up again.
We were talking about the desire for people who are undeserving of charity to portray themselves as those who are deserving of charity.
Ah!
It's all coming back to me now!
It's all coming back to me now!
And one other way that they do that is they say, well, look, I got pregnant and the guy left me.
Right?
That's one way that they do it.
Or, I got pregnant, I got married to this guy and he drinks and he beats me.
Right?
And, you know, something that Christina is endlessly, I'm sure, telling her patients is, well, did he display any of these signs while you were dating?
And, you know, oh no, he was a total sweetheart, he never touched a drop, blah blah blah, and then you start to dig in and you find, yes, he was a drunken beating lush before you get married, right?
So, the fact that you chose to get married and have children with this guy is terrible for the children, who are always the innocent.
Agents in this situation.
But, you know, the woman is totally responsible for that fact, right?
I mean, they don't care if her own father beat her or whatever, right?
I mean, I arose in a situation of violence and I'm one of the most gentle creatures you can imagine.
I've never been in a fight in my life and plan to never do that.
So, that's one of the ways in which the undeserving poor will attempt to portray themselves as the deserving poor, right?
And another way, of course, is the, you know, everyone's out to get me, I can't catch a break, my boss is, you know, a jerk, and, you know, I just can't get ahead, and, you know, all of that kind of stuff, right?
So somebody who externalizes all of the responsibility for his or her life in psychologically technical terms who externalizes their locus of control which i thought was some sort of buddhist cult locus of control but no apparently it's a technical term for psychology so they will attempt to portray all of their um the bad consequences or the bad circumstances of their own lives as the direct result of external forces that are they're out to get them.
So they are in fact the deserving poor because they are attempting to morally equate themselves with a baby born with spina bifida.
Right?
I mean, obviously that baby is not responsible for being born with that defect or some sort of defect.
But, you know, a grown man who just can't seem to keep a job just keeps having a succession of bosses who mysteriously take an aversion to him and he has no responsibility in the matter.
But, of course, if he can convince you that he is not responsible for his own problems or circumstances, then, you know, by golly, he's done a great job and he gets your charity and he doesn't have to be a decent person.
And so you end up then, of course, perpetuating poverty, right?
And so that's the sort of essential part, the essential division between these two things.
If you decide that you think it's a good idea to give money to people who are the deserving poor, those who genuinely want to get ahead.
Let's say that your neighbor needs to borrow a hundred dollars from you a month for a year so she can pay a babysitter so she can go out and get a decent job.
Sorry, so she can go out and take a night course in typing so she can get a job.
Of course, this person is... You face a risk there, right?
You face a risk that they are going to take your money and they're going to, you know, blow it on, you know, wine, women and song, and they're not going to do what they say they're going to do, but they're going to, you know, whatever.
Oh, I took the course, but the teacher failed me for no reason.
Or, you know, I took the course, but the school went out of business.
Can I borrow another hundred bucks for another whatever, right?
And in which case what you've done is you have postponed a crisis that will help them, right?
I mean, it's the old... I sort of had this tongue-in-cheek podcast and sort of way back in the dawn of time where I talked about, you know, we should try and get the government to raise taxes and get as much money as possible so that it will spend itself into oblivion because the only way that you can get free of, you know, an addict is to encourage his addiction to the point of self-destruction.
And, you know, that was sort of tongue-in-cheek.
This is slightly less tongue-in-cheek.
So, the idea is that if you erase the consequences of somebody's actions, then those actions need to be reinforced by different consequences, then you're actually sort of Drugging them in terms of their their feedback mechanism, right?
So if Let's say that somebody sort of has this belief that you know money should fall out of trees They shouldn't have to work.
They shouldn't have to produce and they should just do whatever they want Well, that's not true.
I mean sort of a basic factual reality in order to consume somebody you or somebody has to produce so It's not true that you can just sort of coast along and not work and you know Everything's gonna be fine and you hope for the best But if you subsidize that, right?
This is sort of the Atlas Shrugged thing, right?
Like, if you subsidize other people's fantasies, you really can't blame them for having those fantasies, and you're actually not doing any good to them, right?
You're not doing any good for them at all.
Like, if you have a sort of prototypical Chunky, bald bachelor with a missing front tooth who won't go out with a woman who's not a complete knockout and you say, yeah, you should go for it, right?
You're not really doing them any good, right?
At all.
I mean, you're not sort of speaking truth to them, which is going to help liberate them from their fantasies.
And so, if you sort of lend this hundred dollars to this, your neighbor, who says, oh, I'm going to take a typing lesson and get a good job, and they don't do it, then you actually have done a bad thing, right?
Charity is morally problematic if you are subsidizing people's erroneous and predatory and immoral and kind of thievy practices, right?
So, I mean, if you allow yourself to be taken advantage of people, it's not morally neutral.
To me, that's morally problematic.
I'm not going to say evil or corrupt or anything like that, because that's a discussion for another podcast, but it's morally problematic.
So, to take the prototypical example, if your neighbor is some woman who's a real drunk, and whenever she gets drunk, she screams at her kids, and she comes over and wants to borrow a bottle of whiskey, and you lend her that because you feel like being charitable, well, you're really not being a good person at all.
In fact, I'd say you're being a pretty bad person because you're now Getting her drunk and exposing her children to, you know, pretty brain-squeezing terror.
And that's really not a very good thing to be doing.
In a sort of less extreme example, if you lend a woman, this sort of same woman, money so that she just... and she just sort of has enough.
She gets it from a bunch of different people and she just kind of puts off looking for work.
You know, something's going to turn up.
I sent an email off a couple of days ago.
Something's going to come out.
You know, there's no real urgency or panic in her Her situation.
Well, you know, that's not really a good thing that you're doing.
Because, you know, she's going to not put the effort out that is required to get a job, right?
It's kind of tough to get a job.
And so she's not really going to put that effort out.
She is, and then, you know, months are going to go by, and her pay, you know, she then has even more gaps in her resume, and she has that much less to explain, she gets that much more to explain in an interview, she gets more lethargic, and she kind of gets sort of comfortable.
Right?
It's like, yeah, okay, it's kind of diminished, and I could probably be doing better, but, you know, I'm kind of getting by, something's going to happen, and so on.
So you're kind of blunting her consciousness, right?
You're kind of drugging her nervous system at a time when it needs to be kind of alert, right?
I mean, economic failure is like the last, except for the state, of course, is the last predator of the modern world, right?
So, you kind of need to be alert to it, right?
Like, you don't want to give someone a sleeping pill when there are lions prowling around at night, because you kind of want them to sleep lightly and be alert for danger.
So, if you give charity to people and it blunts their sense of urgency around rescuing themselves economically or coming up with an economic stand that is going to be productive and self-sustaining for them, Then you're kind of not helping them.
In the discussion of free will that I had on Sunday, I had talked about how pain is a good thing.
Pain helps people to change.
The pleasure-pain principle is very important.
One of the things that we do when we allow people to face the consequences of their own actions is that we kind of inflict pain on them, which helps them avoid doing those actions in the future.
So, charity is a very dangerous thing, right?
It can be actively immoral, like you give the drunk the drink who yells at her kids, or it can be sort of passively immoral, like, well, you just kind of give enough money for someone so they can get by, and, you know, they never face that sort of, oh my heavens, I'm absolutely out of money, I better get off my fanny and get something going here, because otherwise I'm really going to be in trouble, right?
So somebody becomes dependent.
So, you know, charity is sort of like a drug, right?
I mean, you want to apply it in moderation and in very specific circumstances.
So, you know, morphine is great if you've just broken your leg.
It's not so good if you just have a headache, right?
And you want to make sure that the person doesn't get addicted because it's a pleasant sensation.
So, you know, you kind of need to have Experts at the helm, right?
Why sort of the most effective charities do have means tests, do have home visits, do have, you know, you can't do this and you can't do that, because they're fully aware, like expert charities, and these mostly exist in the past rather than the present, but they were fully aware of the possibility of addiction to charity, they were fully aware of the possibility of mimicking, right, so somebody who is undeserving of charity mimicking them as somebody who is deserving of charity,
And so they would have, like, you know, if you want a charity, you'd have to run a gamut, and that gamut was pretty humiliating.
And, you know, you'd have to come and reapply every couple of weeks, and you'd have to be reviewed by a board of people who would assess every possibility.
And those people would then say, oh, I know someone who's looking for a seamstress.
Why don't you go there?
Well, you don't want that job?
Well, what about this?
And, you know, and they would really, it would be a tough process to go through, you know, as it should be.
Right?
It should be a fairly tough process to get morphine, right?
I mean, to some... I'm not talking about making it illegal or anything, but, you know, it should not be, you know, available in vending machines at school corners, I mean, or whatever, right?
So, and of course, you know, it would be very unlikely to be because people would just boycott companies who did that.
So, you know, this problem of charity is complicated.
And it's complicated because you really have to try and find those who are undeserving, so that you're not adding to the problems of the world.
Find those who are deserving of charity.
And of course, one of the ways that you know that people are deserving of charity is, you know, often they just won't ask for it.
You'll have to sort of find them in distress and offer to help them.
And, you know, it produces a flurry of activity.
I remember once I was a roommate of someone's and I bounced a check on them, which was ridiculous because I was making a fortune at the time.
I bounced a check and so what did I do?
I apologized 8,000 times.
I went out that very afternoon and got a certified check.
I offered to drive it to his bank and deposited that very day.
All these things, right?
Because if you do something...
That causes other people inconvenience.
You absolutely want to try and solve the problem and help them as much as possible and as quickly as possible.
So, you know, if somebody is responsible and has ended up in a bad situation, and I've borrowed money in my life when I was younger, and that's sort of an important aspect of things, right?
So I borrowed money, and then I would continually keep track of that money that I had borrowed, and I would say, look, I still owe you this, I still owe you that, we've still got to deal with this, would you like any interest?
And, you know, I tried to be as responsible as possible.
For the money that I had borrowed, right?
I mean, that's fairly important.
But, of course, you don't tend to have to keep borrowing money if you have that kind of mindset, that kind of responsible mindset, right?
It's a temporary thing, right?
I think I borrowed money, maximum, for like one month or two months.
I remember lending money to a girlfriend in university, and she took me like a year or a year and a half to pay her, and I really had to pester her, and she came up, oh, you know, my family, my father's unemployed, blah, blah, blah, right?
And all of that is perfectly understandable, but generally the way that you'd know that somebody's shafting you is that they're not proactive in their communication with you.
They just kind of hide and hope that maybe some magical fairy will erase your mind, right?
It's like, I think there's an opening of Bridget Jones's Diary or something where she gets her visa check, or it's no confessions of a shopaholic, I think.
She gets her visa check and she's like, oh yeah, I've heard that people accidentally pay off other people's visas because they just put the wrong number down in their payment or whatever, and maybe someone's done that for me.
I mean, it's that level of magical thinking that these people who owe money or who owe things to.
You know, just sort of imagine that you're just going to forget or that you're going to get tired of pestering them or that they're going to guilt you or embarrass you.
It's all, you know, predatory and thieving kind of stuff, right?
So, you know, the act of doing good with charity is complicated, very complicated.
And, you know, separating the wheat from the chaff is very important.
Making sure that you're giving money for the right things and that people are using it in the right way and they're not, you know, scamming you and so on.
And I'm not talking, you know, that all people on welfare, you know, like, I was going to get these emails, right?
It's like, you know, just about everyone on welfare is spending their money on really legitimate things like food and rent and all this.
And absolutely, of course, I fully understand that, right?
I mean, But the question is, how did they get there?
The question isn't, how are people spending their welfare checks?
The question is, how did they get there?
And, of course, the government can't answer that.
And that's one of the most significant aspects of the welfare state.
Which is that the government can't conceivably tell the difference between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor.
It's just figures in a database.
It's text in a database.
That's all they know.
And of course the government, in a sense, has no interest in...
In discerning between the two, right?
Because the bureaucrats simply want as many people on the rolls as possible and, you know, any solution to any problem always involves, right, just give us more money, right?
That's the only solution that government bureaucrats ever seem to have learned is, you know, oh, is there a problem where, you know, you gave us money and we're not doing better?
Well, you have to give us more money, right?
I mean, it's the one constant that you always know, which is why you know what the real client is of bureaucracy, right?
There's nothing to do with the people that they're supposed to serve, right?
Their clients are themselves.
Their own paychecks and their own sort of political fiefdoms.
So, you know, one of the major problems, I mean, other than the sort of moral problems of welfare, which I've talked about in an article recently, you know, a significant technical problem, even if you sort of accept the morality, a significant technical problem in the welfare state, or in sort of force-based charity, what do they call it, faith-based charity, force-based charity,
Is that, you know, from your lofty vantage point at the head of the sort of Health and Welfare Canada, or whatever the equivalent is, social services in the US, you know, when you're looking at the millions of people on welfare, or who are receiving state charity, how do you know?
How do you have any clue Who is deserving or who is undeserving?
And of course you can put in tests like, you know, whatever, you should only be on unemployment insurance for X amount of months or whatever, but what you don't know is, you know, how did they end up there?
Which is why, sort of, localized charities with knowledge tend to be the ones that are most effective, right?
Because withholding of charity is as important as the providing of charity.
I mean, that's sort of my essential point in this, right?
Everyone wants charity.
Oh, help the poor, help the poor.
And everybody just, of course, because they're so subject to state propaganda, all that does is in their head it translates into, give the poor money, give the poor resources, give the poor education, give the poor access, give the poor opportunity.
And that's absolute nonsense.
You know, I mean, we don't do that in other areas of life, right?
My kid wants candy.
Give the kid candy.
Give the kid candy.
It's like, well, of course, giving candy is important, right?
Because kids like candy and you treat them well.
But withholding candy is also important because, you know, they might want teeth when they're older.
You know, or to be able to fit through a door.
So, you know, the withholding of things is as important as the providing of things.
It's certainly true of love, right?
I mean, withholding love is very important when it comes to people who are acting badly, right?
I mean, because otherwise, providing love doesn't mean anything, right?
I mean, as I think I mentioned before, my mother, sorry, my brother was talking about, you know, after I stopped seeing my mother, my brother was saying, you know, well, you should see her, you know, Steph, because if you don't see her, then she has total control over your choices.
You're choosing not to see her.
You're not allowed to see her.
And so, you know, you're surrendering control to her.
You know, which is brain-bendingly baffling, right?
And so I said, okay, so what you're saying is, That we should see people that we like because we like them and we should also see people that we hate as well, right?
So basically we should just see everyone and there's absolutely no way that you can figure out who you should or shouldn't see.
Everybody has a right to your time, right?
And of course, you know, instantly change the subject and, you know, start talking about something else.
But that's sort of important, right?
To understand how important it is to withhold approval, right?
I mean, again, not to make this the Atlas Shrugged evening, but it's what Ayn Rand talks about in Atlas Shrugged, which is that the withholding of sanction, the withdrawal of sanction, is an absolutely essential thing.
And this is part of my argument with the argument for morality, is that You know, you kind of have to call people who are advocating your death or, sort of, your slavery, your economic slavery, as bad people.
I mean, you may or may not have listened to my, you know, impassioned rant about Christianity.
You know, which is still nothing compared to Christianity's impassioned rant about atheists, right?
So, you really do have to withhold sanction, and in the same way, withholding charity is as essential, and you could actually argue that it is more essential, than the providing of charity.
So you want to withhold charity if it's true that if you don't withhold charity you end up with far more people who claim to be in need but who actually have put themselves in need.
If you don't withhold charity you're going to swell those ranks and you're actually going to obscure or to blur or to hide the identities of those who are actually needy, right?
You want to make sure that you don't invite too many people into a situation of charity because then you won't be able to find Those who are actually needy, because you'll be so baffled and confused and overwhelmed by everybody else with their hands out for goodies.
So, you know, withholding of charity is absolutely essential in terms of really helping people, like on two levels.
One, because you want to focus your charity on those who can actually be helped by it.
And secondly, if you do give money or resources to those who are undeserving, you're actually subsidizing their, you know, bad lifestyles.
And, you know, that's not too bad if it's just them.
But, you know, you certainly shouldn't, absolutely shouldn't, if they have children, right?
So that's kind of important, in terms of being able to understand what charity means, and why it is such a delicate issue, and why, you know, just saying, well, what are you going to do for the poor, is such, to me, such an offensive statement, and such a bigoted statement, because it does not recognize that the poor are sort of like everybody else, right?
They have, you know, they have their motives, they have their economic calculations, they have benefits, you know, with a couple of differences, right?
There are a couple of essential differences about the poor that are important to remember when you're talking about charity.
One of them is that the alternatives to charity for poor people are usually a lot worse than the alternatives to charity for people who are better off.
Right?
So, if you're a poor person, you know, and you have no education or whatever, then charity gives you a life of, like, you know, you don't have to have a lot of things, right?
I mean, you can live in a, sort of, share a basement apartment with someone if you want, but, you know, it's not that bad a life, right?
I mean, you can go for walks in the park, you can watch TV, you can read books, you can, you know, do stuff that, you know, is fairly pleasurable and doesn't require much money.
But if you don't get the sort of charity that you want, then what are your options?
Well, you've got to go work behind the counter at a gas station.
Kind of not so pleasant, right?
Kind of not so much fun.
And so the upside of charity for poor people is, you know, that they can sort of live in this low-rent existence and kind of get by.
And, you know, the consequence is no charity is some crappy job that, you know, makes them explode with boredom.
For middle-class people, charity is bad.
If I had to go on welfare tomorrow, I would lose my house.
So if I'm poor to begin with, I can get by.
And the alternatives for me are pretty bad.
But if I'm in the middle class and I lose my job, then my lifestyle goes through a catastrophic downward degradation.
And also, You know, my job's pretty interesting.
You know, I have a pretty enjoyable career.
I don't love every minute at work, but, you know, I would say that for the most part I have one of the better jobs around, if not, you know, in the top five or ten percent of jobs, probably the top five percent.
You know, there's a lot of variety.
It's interesting.
I get to do coding and travel and business presentations and I talk at conferences and, you know, I get to write proposals and, you know, it's pretty interesting.
It's absorbing and there's always something new to learn.
So, you know, the negative consequences of charity for me in the middle class, eh, pretty bad, right?
I mean, I lose everything, pretty much.
And the positive consequences of not having charity are, you know, I get to keep my stuff, and also, you know, the job is interesting, you know, it's not like I'm, you know, sort of pouring coffee, you know, for eight hours straight.
So that's sort of another aspect.
And of course, for the rich, I mean, the charity is unsustainable, right?
Their entire lifestyle is unsustainable and so on.
So that's sort of one thing that's common.
And I'm just talking about broad economic incentives.
I'm not talking about individual choices of the poor.
But, you know, if you're poor and facing charity, well, you know, it's just less of a cost and more of a benefit than if you have sort of any other layer of income.
It's another very important thing, right?
Charity generally goes to the poor, and the poor have a much greater incentive to take charity than, you know, take one of these crappy jobs and spend ten years working their way up.
So that's another aspect that I think is very important.
When you start to look at all these nuances and the delicacy of charity, saying, well, what are you going to do about the poor?
It's kind of a stupid question, to be perfectly blunt.
It's like some guy coming in and saying, well, how are you going to build a space shuttle?
Well, look, it's complicated.
It really is.
And the fact of the matter, it is very complicated, which is exactly why the government can't do it.
I'm not talking about the space shuttle.
We're back on the poverty thing.
Maybe the space shuttle another time.
Now, I think I already did NASA in my third or fourth podcast, but that is pretty significant, right?
I mean, the more delicate and subtle a social operation, the less you want it to be run by brute force and bureaucrats.
I mean, that's just a bad idea all around.
Because, of course, we want to minimize poverty.
That's one of the basic facts of life, that we'd all probably feel a little happier if there were no poor people.
Or, at least, if there were poor people, it's those who chose to be poor.
Maybe we'd even be somewhat satisfied with those who are poor out of their own addictions or dysfunctions.
But, certainly, when it comes to the deserving poor, those who need help and so on, wouldn't it be great if we could just help them?
But it's complicated.
It's like, you know, it's like pickup sticks.
If you ever played that game when you're a kid where you've got all these sticks in a heap and you've got to pull one out without touching any of the others who are making the move.
I mean, it's very delicate.
It's like surgery.
It's like it takes years and years and years and immersion in different cultures and an understanding of economics and cause and effect.
You know, the tweaking of programs and, you know, the constant refinement of the charitable impulse and the money that's being transferred versus the services, versus the means test, versus the review.
I mean, it's an incredibly complicated thing to help the poor.
And the idea that, you know, what we should do is just tax everyone, throw a massive lump of money at bureaucrats, and think that we're solving the problem.
I mean, it's just absolutely lunatic.
It's absolutely you can't solve something as delicate and complex as poverty in a productive way in the long run by, you know, holding guns to people's necks and throwing their money around.
I mean, and we can see this absolutely in the statistics, right?
I mean, in the post-war period, you know, from sort of the early 1950s onwards, the number of poor people in America was declining by 1% a year, right?
So this is all very good.
People are getting out of poverty.
Everyone's happy.
And, you know, of course, this is one of the things the government doesn't like.
It's like, well, if we get rid of the poor, we don't need the government as much, right?
So they want to make sure that they don't lose their crop, so to speak.
So they put all these great society programs in, and, you know, this huge welfare state gets going, and training programs, and educational supplements, and all, housing, state housing, and rent control, all this kind of stuff, right?
And the goal, of course, had nothing to do with getting rid of poverty.
Poverty was being dealt with by the free market.
What they needed to do was to stop the poor from escaping from the clutches of the government.
The welfare state is a charity.
Sorry, the welfare state is a business, and its product is poor people.
So, and it doesn't make any money if there aren't any poor people, right?
So, if your stock is vanishing, you want to make sure it stops vanishing, right?
The same way you try and stop shrinkage or stealing in your store, you try and stop shrinkage in the number of poor people you're managing if that's your product that you're getting paid for.
So, you know, the Great Society programs were put in and lo and behold, you know, thank heavens it worked beautifully just as you would expect.
And now the poor people have stopped declining, right?
So the number of poor is declining, declining, declining.
Oh heavens, we've got to keep these poor people around to justify the state.
So then these programs are put in place and lo and behold these people stop getting out of poverty, right?
So I don't know if that's changed more recently.
These statistics are a little older.
Maybe it's changed to the point where more people are in poverty now than before.
I certainly think that would be the case, right?
Because, you know, the first round of the social programs were, you know, designed at keeping the poor where they were and, of course, allowing them and paying them to breed, right?
So now I bet you there's more people in poverty than there were in 1960 or 1958.
Or 1965, actually, because I think it was 66 or 67 that the welfare state came into being, just as I did.
So that's a pretty important thing to look at.
Helping the poor, there's a whole other aspect to it, which we'll just touch on here, because I think you'll all understand it as good free market propeller heads.
What have I done to help the poor?
Oh, what have you done to help the poor?
Well, you know what?
I think I did the best thing to help the poor.
I started a company.
I hired 30 people for eight years, and a good chunk of those people are still employed by the company.
I created jobs!
I mean, isn't that sort of the best thing that you can do for the poor is to create opportunity for them?
You know, and it's not like everybody who worked for me was poor, but, you know, most of them are coming out of school with significant debts because, you know, that's long before they know good employment practices and, you know, labor laws and health and safety and so on.
So you want to get them where they don't have any idea of their legal rights, of course, otherwise it's tough to exploit them.
So, you know, I created jobs.
I mean, I would say that I've done a heck of a lot for the poor.
A lot more than people who just, you know, drop a dime in a guy's cup on the street corner.
Or, of course, anybody who sends money to Health and Welfare Canada or to the local welfare agency.
Because that, for sure, is not going to help the poor.
That, for sure, is immoral.
The money that is spent by the government absolutely traps people in poverty and traps children in desperation.
There's no doubt about that.
There's no interest whatsoever in helping the poor from the standpoint of the state.
There's no interest in it whatsoever.
And so, You know, that aspect of things is something that we also need to focus on.
So, you know, the question sort of, what will you do about the poor?
You know, it's like, well, first of all, I'll stop, you know, libertarian society will stop creating poor people by taxing productive people.
And, you know, it will also help people sort of refine the delicate matter of how it is that we're supposed to help people.
In this very complicated situation of cold poverty and, you know, actual aid rather than just throwing money at stuff.
And, you know, you have to get the government out of that so you can really start helping people and not sort of fake help people by just throw money at them and, you know, which actually does a lot more harm than good.
So that is my take on poverty and, to some degree, charity and, to an even smaller degree, the welfare state.
So I hope that this has been of interest to you and of help to you.
It's certainly been a fascinating topic for me to talk about.
And I certainly enjoyed clarifying my thinking on this.
So of course, as always, if you have any comments, please give me a shout.
I'm at freedomain.blogspot.com or s.m-o-l-y-n-e-u-x at rogers.com.
Thanks so much.
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