All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 25, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:29
68 Helping the Poor

Benevolence, charity and the welfare state

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It is 8.19am on the 25th of January.
That would be Wednesday.
2006, and I hope you're doing well.
I have received a number of interesting emails, well, always receive a number of interesting emails, and the latest flurry, the latest cluster bomb of self-righteous indignation, to some degree, to some degree I understand where people are coming from, but to some degree I do view this idea that, you know, the free market won't help the poor, to be somewhat Self-righteous in terms of, you know, people just not looking into the facts.
Now, I do sort of understand that, you know, relying on people's goodwill can be a dangerous thing, right?
I mean, one of the most famous lines in theater of the 20th century was Blanche Dubois saying, I have always depended, sir, on the kindness of strangers.
And, you know, the reason for that, of course, is that it is a perfectly valid way from, I guess, an amoral biological standpoint To make a living, right?
To rely on the kindness of strangers.
But, unfortunately, it's parasitical, right?
I mean, and that's sort of, to some degree, what that's all about, right?
I mean, Blanche Dubois is like a brain without a body.
Stanley Kowalski is like a body without a brain, and together they make up one extremely messed up person.
But the reason that that line has become famous is that it does touch a chord among our gut-level instincts or lower brain-level instincts about what it is to be dependent on people.
That it does end in dissolution and madness, because it is fundamentally parasitic.
So, you know, people have been emailing me with, you know, shock and horror, as always, about the idea that the free market can help people.
And I really do find this rather baffling.
I've got to tell you, I just don't understand it.
I mean, maybe I could understand it in the 70s, you know, right after the welfare state programs went in and everybody thought things would be hunky-dory.
But boy oh boy oh boy, after seeing these things in motion for 30 years, it takes a special kind of self-will blindness to not see the obvious and to have so little compassion for the poor that you're willing to put sort of blind, blank ideology in front of the poor's self-interest.
I mean, my heavens!
I mean, if you want to talk about compassion for the poor, Anybody who defends the welfare state could be called, you know, about the worst abuser of the poor that exists and ever has existed, and they have absolutely no reason to.
for the blindness that they sort of mutter on about, or the perspectives that they mutter on about.
Because the evidence is all there!
I mean, the evidence is all there!
You know, to hell with ideology!
I mean, let's just be honest, to hell with ideology!
We work with logic, and we work with facts!
And, you know, take all your isms and put them in a big diaper bag and toss them in the garbage!
They absolutely mean nothing!
99% of what people call intellectual activity is confirming prejudices that they already have.
So, I mean, let's not bother with, well, will the free market help the poor, and will people be kind, and will people be nice, and we need the government because there's so many poor people, and blah blah blah.
Like, forget about all of that stuff.
It's just irrelevant.
You just deal with the facts.
Deal with the facts and deal with logic.
And stop spouting off gibberish that you learned at your mother's knee and passing it off as some kind of intellectual wisdom.
Because nobody who emails me with these kinds of opinions gives me one single, solitary fact!
And it just gets a little frustrating, I've got to tell you!
And it's not just people who email me.
Of course, there's everybody in the media, just about everybody you ever talk to.
They just spout off these things without any reference to facts, without any reference to logic, without any reference to premises.
You know, no logical constructs.
All they do is repeat the sort of mealy-mouthed slogans that they all heard all their lives.
And look, don't get me wrong, I've done it too.
I'm not, you know, preaching from any mount of intellectual perfection here.
But, you know, at least have the responsibility, if you're going to start getting tangled up in a topic, to do some research in...
It's not that complicated.
Just do what Charles Murray suggested.
Just look at the charts.
That's all you've got to do to begin with.
Just look at the charts, people.
Sorry, I'm trying to do my Mickey Mouse and Helium imitation, also known as the Madonna imitation.
But, you know, just look at the facts.
You know, I mean, you want to trace the evolution of poverty, say in the post-war period, just look at the charts.
I mean, these facts are available for a couple of clicks away on the Internet.
Are the poor doing well under the government?
Well, just look at the facts.
It's really not that complicated.
And then, you know, if the facts don't agree with your theory, then you've got to start mucking around with your theory and try to improve it.
I mean, that's sort of what I've been trying to do for 20 years.
I mean, I have all these theories, as you may or may not be aware.
I have all these theories, and I mean, I have to keep constantly going back to the facts.
And, you know, people will correct me on facts that I've gotten wrong, which I always appreciate, because, I mean, my opinions don't matter, my theories don't matter, what matters are the facts, and what matters are things which logically explain and predict the facts.
I mean, people!
Let's be scientific here!
So, the general criticism of the idea that the free market will help those in need is that people... It's sort of twofold.
One I've already dealt with, so I'm not going to deal with again, but the second... So the one is that, you know, the free market is only about profit.
There's no profit in helping the poor, and therefore You know, if there's nothing but a free market, nobody's going to help the poor.
And, I mean, that's obviously very silly, and I talked about how complex people's motivations are before, and to reduce them to simple economic gain is sort of inhuman and faintly sociopathic.
But the other way to approach that thing, of course, is to recognize that... I've hammered this point before, so I'll be relatively brief.
Relatively, for me, means I'll probably get my first half a thought out before I get to work.
But, you know, bureaucrats are not a different species from capitalists.
Politicians are not a different species from factory owners.
You know, those in the public sector are not a different species from those in the private sector.
Right?
There's no moral group of humanity you can carve off and dump into a power-hungry, power-mad structure called the government and just have them act virtuously.
So, I mean, I've made this point once before and I've written an entire article about it on Lew Rockwell, but You know, the basic fact is, any moral judgment you apply to capitalists, you also apply to bureaucrats.
Any moral judgments you apply to people in the private sector, you also apply to people in the public sector.
With the caveat, I mean from the public sector side, that those who are in the public sector are generally going to be worse than those in the private sector.
Simply because, you know, their power is founded on violence, right?
So the odds of somebody in the public sector being more virtuous than somebody in the private sector It's not very high, if it's at all possible.
I mean, you don't get to have any power in the public sector if you're sort of a healthy person.
And I'm not saying every capitalist is healthy either.
Heaven knows, I've met some crazy people in the private sector, but generally they'll pay for their own mistakes, whereas in the public sector everybody else pays for their mistakes, so there's that much less, I guess, checksum error correction going on.
So I've never quite understood... I mean, I've made lots of errors in my life in thinking, but this is the one I've never really quite understood, and maybe somebody can help me to understand it.
Somebody out there, help me!
And what it is, the question that I've never really understood, or the problem, is that if you say that people in general are motivated by power, are motivated by greed, are motivated by money, then you can't just apply that.
I'm not saying whether it's true or false, but if you do say that as a premise, you can't just say that to people in the free market.
I mean, you can't sort of slice and dice humanity and throw all of the greedy people into the private sector and all of the benevolent and kind people into the public sector.
It simply doesn't work.
If you're going to say people are motivated by greed, money and power, which is your condemnation of why charity wouldn't work in the private sector, Then, that's fine.
I mean, you can have that as a moral premise.
I mean, we can argue it, but let's just say that it's true, for now, right?
It's true that people are motivated by power, money, and greed, and they're selfish, and they don't give a rat's testicles about anybody else, and all they want to do is, you know, heap on glory and power and money for themselves.
Fine.
Then the private sector is very unlikely to help the people who are poor, right?
But, of course, neither is the public sector.
I mean, That's something that's very important to understand, and if you're tempted to email me and talk to me about how the free market won't do this because people are bad, I absolutely invite you to pause for a moment and think, OK, well, if people are like that in the private sector, what are they going to be like in the public sector?
So any judgment you make about anybody, that is general, right?
General enough to say that it's going to have a fundamental effect on people's behavior, i.e.
in the free market.
Well, you're making that argument for bureaucrats and politicians as well.
So if you say people love greed, money and power or whatever, then of course politicians love greed, money and power, right?
If people in the private sector aren't interested in helping the poor because they're greedy and selfish, then, by God, people in the public sector also are not interested in helping the poor because they're greedy and selfish.
So you have not solved the problem by calling people who are free Mean.
Because you're then saying that people are mean, and therefore people who have the incomparable power and might of the government, and the military, and the police, and the law courts, and the prison guards, and the prison system.
That these people are also mean and selfish, but with the incredible, absolute, universal, mind-bending power of the state at their beck and call.
I mean, it's something that I've always sort of made an argument for in the past, which is to say that if you believe that people are all good, then you can't have... there's no need for government, obviously.
If you believe that people are all bad, then we can't have a government, right?
Because the only way that you can control, or any kind of freedom can be eked out of a civilization where people are all bad, is for competing interests to nullify each other, right?
So it's sort of the balance of power in Europe in the 19th century that You know, everybody's bad and everybody's armed, so everybody's pretty nice, relatively.
Whereas if one person gets control of a bad society with the power of the military and all that, then you end up with like a Mao-Stalin kind of Cambodian nightmare.
So you can't have a government for sure if everybody's all bad.
Now, if the majority of people are good, but the minority of people are bad, Then you also can't have a government because bad people want to do evil and escape the consequences of their actions, right?
I mean, that's sort of a basic premise of bad people, right?
They don't just want to do bad.
They want to do bad and get away with it.
And if you have a government, then all that will happen is the bad people will be drawn to the power of the government so that they can put themselves above the law, do bad things, and get away with them, right?
So, I mean, the government power is an absolutely open invitation to bad people.
to come in and use the power of the government to get away with their badness, so to speak, right?
So you can't have a government there.
Now, if the majority of people are bad, but the minority of people are good, which is generally the argument for, you know, that the free market won't help people, right?
Because the majority of people are bad, minority of people are good, and, you know, you sort of artificially throw all the bad people into the pit of the free market, and all the good people become these virtuous, shining mandarins or bureaucrats.
Well, that doesn't make any sense, right?
Because then, of course, you need a dictatorship, obviously, and dictatorships just draw bad people anyway, so that doesn't get around the problem.
And the reason you need a dictatorship is if you have a democracy, and the majority of people are bad, then all they'll do is vote for bad candidates, and the minority of good people will never have any access to power.
So, I mean, there's no conceivable constellation of human virtue and vice that results in it being good for there to be a government, right?
Which is why no government has ever worked for any length of time in the history of mankind, because it's an absolutely immoral and illogical and violent institution.
So there's no constellation of human virtue and vice under which a government can be defended.
And if you want more on this, it's on my blog, I think.
I don't think it's been published.
Or, no, I think it might be on Lew Rockwell as well.
That's the part I've never understood about thinking that the government helps the poor.
But, let's say that we do accept this, right?
That everybody's kind of mean and selfish.
Well, what would you expect, right?
What would you expect if everybody's mean and selfish?
Well, of course, in a free market, mean and selfish is fine, but you still have to provide value to other people in order to get them to trade with you.
So you can be a misogynistic doctor like that guy on the TV show, but it doesn't really matter if people don't like you because you're still providing value to them by being a great diagnostician or surgeon or whatever.
So, mean and selfish doesn't really matter in the free market, other than from a general aesthetic standpoint, i.e.
it would be nicer if people were more cuddly, but if they provide value, Bill Gates may be a total jerk, but I don't care because You know, I kind of like being able to click around stuff rather than type in the black hole of DOS windows.
So, that doesn't matter, right?
It still is socially advantageous for people to be mean and selfish in the free market, because in order to survive, they have to find a way of providing value to others.
And that value is not always going to be great, right?
Because you can either do it in positive or negative economics, which is something that I got a question about, and I'll talk about when I do Emails of the Week, which I hope to do this afternoon.
It doesn't solve the problem to go back to the question of a bureaucrat's virtuous and free-market people bad.
It doesn't solve the problem to say that everyone's mean, certainly not in the public sector.
In the private sector, who cares, right?
People can be mean as long as they're productive and helpful.
Obviously, in any situation where Two equal candidates there.
You're gonna take the non-mean one, and I fired people for being mean in my career, just because I know what effect it has on morale, and you need morale for everyone to enjoy working there, so that you'll get them to work late, you know, when needed.
And, of course, as a good capitalist, I always give them time off when they need it, in return for their flexibility when we're working.
But meanness is sort of not that relevant in the private sector.
But meanness in the public sector is an entirely different matter, because you could force people to deal with you.
In the private sector you can't force anyone to deal with you.
You can't force people to give you a job, you can't force anyone to marry you, you can't force people to take your money, you can't force people to come into your shop, or sign contracts with you, or anything like that.
You can't force people to do anything.
So, what does it mean to be mean?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, you obviously live a diminished economic life if you're mean, so at least you pay for your own meanness, right?
You're going to have access to fewer jobs if you're a jerk.
Then if you're not a jerk, right?
And so therefore your salary is going to take a hit and your career chances of advancement are going to take a hit.
Nobody's going to want to mentor you.
Nobody's going to want to be mentored by you.
You're not going to be this sort of bitter cubicle corner dwelling loner.
So you're paying the cost for your own meanness.
But in the public sector it's the complete opposite.
The government can force you to deal with it and therefore there's not even the negative economic incentive of controlling your meanness.
So, you know, it's entirely different in the public sector.
Meanness is very powerful in the public sector and, you know, when you get those surly looks from the people at the vehicle office, what can you do?
It's like you can't do any competition, right?
So, you know, that's sort of important that if you think people are mean, then of course you really don't want a public sector because there nobody pays the cost for being mean and because it's a kind of vicious culture in the public sector Meanness is actually often rewarded through promotion for a variety of reasons, which we can get into another time.
Christina and I have written a whole novel about this, so I won't bore you with all the details.
But, you know, if you're interested in meanness, the last thing you want is a public sector.
But, of course, if we do sort of say that people are sort of mean and selfish and always want to act to maximize their own economic interest, then what we would expect What we would anticipate is that people don't want to... bureaucrats want to make sure that there's always a steady supply of poor.
In order to keep their coffers full of government money.
It's very common in the state, in the government, that everybody knows this.
If you don't spend your money, it's like use it or lose it.
If you don't spend your budget, you get that much less budget next year.
In fact, I've been in the Department of Public Works literally at year-end where there's people running down the hallway saying, you know, I've got five hundred thousand dollars to spend.
Does anybody have a use for it?
I have a million dollars.
Does anybody... I need to spend this money.
I mean, this is how things get Get managed in the public sector.
So, if we know that the, say, the Department of Welfare, or whatever it's called in your country, that the agency responsible for the poor, if we know for a fact that its funding is directly dependent upon the conditions of the poor, negatively, right?
Then we know for a fact that the poor is their product.
I mean, we're just looking at it purely economic terms.
I'm not saying everybody gets up in the morning who works at Health and Welfare Canada and rubs their hands together and says, ah, how can I make more people poor or trap more people in poverty?
It's just a natural fact of life.
I mean, it's just a natural fact of economic self-advantage that, you know, the poor is their product and that's what they sell to the finance minister and so on.
So, what they want to do is they want to at least trap The same number of people in poverty.
They may not want to increase the number of people in poverty, but for sure they want to arrest the decline of the poor.
And I've talked about this before, that the free market was very handily dealing with the problem of poverty, and when it dipped below a certain level, state charities or state-enforced redistribution agencies began to be threatened, and therefore they intervened with lots of government spending, which trapped people in poverty, thus ensuring that the bureaucratic class would last until the collapse of the state quite nicely.
So, if you say that people are selfish in the private sector, then you're saying that they're selfish in the public sector.
What that means is that in the public sector they are going to want to hang on to the poor as much as possible, and they are not going to want to help the poor out of poverty.
That would be the logical result of that theory.
And so, you know, given that you can't throw all this virtue on the public side of the fence and take it away from the private, because, you know, people are people, then it's far worse to have a public sector that's interested in poverty than to have a private sector that's full of mean people.
Because at least the private sector will have to offer the poor jobs in order to exploit them, sort of quote-quote.
But in the public sector there's just no incentive for that at all, and what they want to do is trap people in poverty.
And, you know, if that's the theory, then the statistics sort of bear that up.
It bears up both sides of the equation or the theory.
The one side is that if people are interested or motivated by economic advantage, which is a basic fact of economics or basic premise of economics, then you would expect that the numbers of poor people are going to be grabbed by all the capitalists to get them working for them so that they can exploit them at a penny An hour, but unfortunately everybody has the same idea of hiring those who work for cheap.
And so the price of those cheap people is going to be bidded up until some equilibrium is reached and blah blah blah.
And that's exactly what you see around the post-war period.
I mean we can go all the way back to the 18th century, but let's just deal with the post-war period.
You know, well the capitalists are bidding up all of the poor people's wages and everybody's getting richer and everybody's happy.
Except the bureaucrats, of course, who see the supply of their product, i.e.
the poor, dwindling away, and of course their jobs will be threatened.
I mean, if the poverty rate goes down to three people, it's kind of hard to imagine that there's going to be a multi-hundred billion dollar agency to deal with poverty.
I mean, the agency would still be there, right?
Because it's not like after the fall of the Soviet Union, military spending went down, or military operations overseas went down.
I mean, they actually went up, right?
Sorry, military spending went down to some degree, but military operations overseas went up, right?
We were supposed to be saving the world from communism, or saving the U.S.
from communism.
Then you would expect, after the fall of communism, for the U.S.
to bring its troops home, but of course that's not what happened.
What happened at all, right?
With the fall of the Soviet Empire, the U.S.
felt a much freer reign to begin its foreign policy predations elsewhere in the world without fear of Soviet retaliation.
But that's what you'd expect.
And the numbers bear you out, right?
So the private sector is dealing handily with the problem of poverty in the post-war period because they want to exploit the poor people, which bids the wages up and gets more people out of poverty.
Just based on their economic, you can call it selfish or whatever, but their economic self-advantage.
And you would predict, of course, that after the poor dipped below a certain amount, then the government would step in with poverty programs, which would end up stopping the flight of the poor from under the lid of poverty.
And that's exactly what did happen, of course.
And now, of course, to say that the government is interested in helping the poor is sort of funny.
It's a funny statement because, you know, they just look at the numbers, right?
And forget about what people say, right?
99.999% of what anybody ever says is just self-serving, self-aggrandizing, hypocritical nonsense designed to obscure their own motives from themselves and others, right?
So, I mean, I don't want to sound cynical.
It's just sort of a basic fact.
Like, flip through the paper and any topic you know anything about, It's described in entirely inaccurate and pseudo-moralistic terms that is a, you know, a mere sop for state power.
And this is true of people's personal lives in general.
I mean, that's just a brief aside.
Somebody that Christina knows, I mean, I was on the phone with Christina the other day for something or other and I said something that made her laugh.
And she hangs up her phone and she's like, oh man, Steph just kills me.
He's so funny.
And, you know, this other woman who's, you know, we've seen them, we've seen her and her husband together and it doesn't look very pretty, right?
They don't treat each other very well.
And she says, of course, oh, you guys are just like us.
You know, Christina's sort of eyes widened and we're still working out how best to respond to this kind of stuff socially, right?
I mean, so we don't have a big answer for that yet.
I mean, this is one tiny example of just, I mean, everybody just says stuff to prop up their own fragile, you know, false self, and, you know, it's all just nonsense.
So, I mean, whatever people say, forget about what they say, and forget about what I say, of course.
Look for the logic, and look for the facts.
I mean, my opinions, as I've mentioned before, are completely unimportant and irrelevant, right?
I mean, what I hope to be building here is some kind of logical framework that is consistent and, you know, refers to the facts, at least as many facts as I can refer to while I'm driving to work.
So, you know, you just look at the facts, and the facts, you know, follow that theory.
So I have no problem with people saying people are selfish and greedy, but, you know, just remember that you're talking about people in the public sector, too, who have, you know, the violence of the state at their disposal.
And therefore, the meanness might be a little bit more than petty, and a little bit more like socially destructive.
But even if we accept all of this, I mean, I have, you know, as I've mentioned before, all premise, like, all silly arguments, you can accept every premise, but, you know, every premise but the last one, every logical argument, it's always going to fall apart.
So let's say that all of this is true, that these people are writing to me about, that, you know, the bureaucrats are just these loving saintly people and all they want to do is help the poor, and there's this entire class of people who are not motivated by economic self-advantage but motivated entirely by altruism, and gosh, don't you know it, they all happen to end up in the bosom of the all-powerful state and all they're trying to do is help the poor.
And, let's say that they are helping the poor.
I mean, I'm willing to grant even that.
And say, yeah, you know, the welfare state is great.
It's populated by...
You know, people sitting in the lotus position and levitating around their cubicle spaces because they're just so stuffed full of virtue and altruism and all these wonderful goodies of the better angels of human nature and, you know, they really are just able to wisely use violence to redistribute money in such a way that doesn't have any effect on their own career and all they want to do is get rid of their own jobs and
You know, and they are able to magically figure out all of the complexities of poverty that I and other people have talked about before and they're able to magically use the wand of state power to lift people out of poverty and blah blah blah blah blah, right?
Let's say that all of that is true.
I mean, I don't care.
It's fine with me if you say that it's true.
Well, what happens when the state collapses?
Right?
I mean, it doesn't really matter if people are helping the poor or not right now.
Right?
The fact of the matter is That all Western countries have debts that are usually hovering around an entire GDP of the entire economy, even as calculated by the corrupt and state-serving economists in the public departments.
I mean, we know that the true debt is nothing close to what's actually told.
I mean, it's probably at least double.
Because, I mean, they're not going to tell us about any of that stuff.
I mean, you can't ever get the truth out of government and all they do is shred documents and get rid of stuff and, you know, then hopefully provoke people into running around with conspiracy theories rather than dealing with the morals of the situation.
But, you know, public debt is just catastrophic, as everybody knows, right?
And everybody knows that the taxation that has gone into dealing with or paying the public salaries, which has resulted in the debt...
The taxation has obviously caused fewer jobs to be created in the private sector.
Everybody knows that, right?
And what happens when the government simply cannot meet its obligations, right?
So what happens when those who, based on the existence of the welfare state, have sort of said, well, I guess I don't need a whole lot of skills.
I mean, unconsciously they've said, I guess I don't need a whole lot of skills.
And yeah, I guess I can have a couple of kids with a couple of guys because, you know, I'm sort of taken care of and they'll always be my welfare check.
And what about The people who were unable to get jobs because of the taxes have just destroyed a large number of jobs that the private sector would otherwise have created.
So I'm not saying that these people are just selfish, nasty, greedy parasites.
I mean, given the choice that the welfare state creates, which we've talked about before, that there are fewer decent jobs and more money available for not working, that there's going to be a large number of people who are going to look at that and make an economic calculation to their self-advantage.
And so, you know, those people may be perfectly legitimately on welfare.
I mean, I'm saying that they're all parasites.
There are going to be other people who they've been taxed for, you know, 5, 10, 15 percent of their income throughout their whole life and, you know, just for Social Security, right?
Just for their old age pension.
And, you know, so they don't have a lot of savings, right?
They don't have a lot of savings for themselves.
Well, what happens when the government can't send out Social Security checks?
If you don't think that's such a big deal, well, you know, we have a huge military in the States.
We being, I guess, the Royal We, third person, because I'm in Canada.
But you all have a big military in the States, you know?
And so what happens when the government finds itself a little unable to meet the payroll of its military, right?
I mean, this tends to be a sort of South American coup situation, right?
At some level.
Or maybe the people in the military will just be happy to get out of their duty and go home.
What happens when the government finds itself unable to pay the police?
And so on.
Well, you know, pretty bad things.
What happens when the government is unable to pay teachers?
And therefore the schools close, and therefore people can't go to work.
What happens when the government can't pay its debts back to the private institutions that have lent it money?
And those private institutions end up having to recall their debts from private firms, right?
Because you've lent money to private firms, and you've lent money to the government, and you're surviving off the interest.
And if the government can't pay you, then you have to collect your additional interest or principal from the private sector, or just go bankrupt.
Well, what happens to all of those companies when their loans get called in because the government's not paying these lending institutions well?
What happens when middle-class people find their bank accounts wiped out because all of the money that was invested in state bonds becomes worthless and so the banks go bankrupt?
What happens to the economy in general when currency is no longer backed by the sort of predatory force of the government?
I mean, all of these situations are not implausible at all.
Just look in history.
I mean, what do you think happened to the Roman Empire?
What do you think happened to the Weimar Republic?
You know, what do you think happened to the Greek Empire?
I mean, these things are not uncommon at all.
And, you know, they're the inevitable result of increasing public debt.
So it may be that there's some fabulous alternate universe where the poor are really being helped by these benevolent and kindly bureaucrats who just happen to love using force rather than charity to achieve their ends.
But so what?
It doesn't matter in the least.
When the state collapses, the poor are shafted worse than anyone.
I mean, if you have a shred of sympathy for the poor and the needy, the last thing you ever want is public debt.
Public debt and over-regulation and all the government power, the first thing it does is destroy jobs for the poor.
Because as soon as you get additional costs layered into the workforce through taxation and through regulation, The first thing to go are the lowest value jobs.
As soon as you raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour, I'm still going to have a job.
You're probably still going to have a job.
But there's going to be lots of poor people who don't have a job.
So if you have even a shred of compassion for the poor, A shred of concern for their future.
I mean, even if you forget about the present, the fact that they're trapped in this poverty, welfare poverty cycle, and the jobs aren't being created because of regulations and minimum wage and taxation and all this crap.
Even if you don't care about the poor in the present, and you're like, okay, well they can sort of rot in public housing and Continue to have kids and leave these miserable lives of dependence on the state.
If they can waste their entire human potential on being trapped into this poverty cycle, even if you don't care about the poor right now, then for heaven's sake at least have some compassion for the poor in the future.
You know, who are gonna just face the most unbelievably wretched and awful situations that you can conceivably imagine when the public debt becomes unmanageable.
I mean, they are the most vulnerable in society.
They are the ones who have the fewest skills.
They have the least social skills.
Sometimes they have poor language skills.
You know, sometimes they're not that bright.
I mean, you really gotta find it in your heart to have some compassion for these people.
And the idea that this situation of catastrophic and unbelievable public debt is going to do anything other than result in the most unbelievably abysmal conditions for the poor.
I mean, things that we can't even imagine.
Shantytowns, diphtheria, death.
I mean, all of these things that occur, that constantly occur when governments go bankrupt.
I mean, at least have some compassion for those people.
Because the system that you're advocating doesn't help the poor.
But even if it did help the poor, it only helps the poor for a generation.
And then it plunges generations of poor into the kind of poverty that you really don't see after the Industrial Revolution.
This is like three families to a room kind of poor.
This is the kind of poor that you just can't picture.
Unless you've, you know, really studied a lot of history and even then it's kind of hazy, right?
I never lived three families to a room.
That kind of poorism, you know, you just can't picture what it's going to be like for these people.
But I'm telling you, it is going to be absolutely horrible and, you know, then everybody's going to just look back and say, oh my heavens, how on earth, how on earth did we ever get here?
You know, when the public debt collapses, it's just astounding how bad it is, how much poverty there is, and how much risk of danger there is.
I mean, you can't pay the poor.
They tend to take to the streets, right?
You can't pay the army.
They tend to come looking for their money.
And the other thing, too, is like, if you have compassion for the poor, and you think that the government is the way to handle it, you then also have to sort of understand that what you're doing is directly creating a system wherein the poor are paid to become soldiers, right?
And even if you don't accept my argument that soldiers obviously start off not too healthy mentally and then are turned into sort of brutal sociopaths through military training and exposure to sleep deprivation and constant travel and emotional abuse and You know, the constant glorification of death and violence and so on.
Even if you don't accept that argument, then at least accept the physical risks that you're putting the poor in by having a government.
Which is that the poor are going to be offered jobs in sort of blighted economic eras, offered jobs in the army, and that the poor are the ones who go to the front lines.
That's pretty well understood, right?
I'm not shocking anyone there.
When you look at the number of people who are in the front lines, it tends to be the poor people, right?
The rich people tend to sort of join the Texas National Guard, Air Guard, and like not show up and then, you know, get hailed as military geniuses later on in life.
But it's the poor who go to these front lines.
It's the poor who get wiped out.
It's the poor who get killed.
It's the poor who get maimed.
It's the poor who get mentally destroyed.
It's the poor who are exposed to depleted uranium shells in the Gulf War where you end up with, what, 150,000, 200,000, 250,000 of them on disability with various genetic and neurological disorders.
I mean, that is what you're exposing the poor to.
If you don't like the poor being sort of brutalized and being turned into sort of cold, state-serving machines of violence, then I would certainly suggest that you have a look again at this idea of the state helping the poor, because I really don't think it does.
Even if you look at something like The police is the prison guard system, right?
I mean, if you're a policeman, and we'll talk about this more another time, but if you're a policeman, you have to do what the government tells you to, which means that you have to grab people who are sort of innocently smoking dope in their basement, and you have to haul them off to jail, and you have to throw them in jail, and you have to recognize in your conscience that what you've done is taken a peaceful person and hurled him into a fetid prison, where he's going to be subject to brutality, rape, violence for years, because someone else told you to.
I mean, if that's not cold and brutalizing, then I don't know what is.
And this is all stuff that you get as a big package when you get the state.
No government in history has ever not run up catastrophic public debt and then ever paid it off.
It grows to collapse.
And, you know, the only thing that's kept governments going these days is stuff like, you know, the computers and email and internet and all the stuff that where efficiency has increased vastly.
And fax machines and cell phones.
Efficiency has increased vastly to the point where, you know, the real wages have been stagnating for the last 20 or declining for the last 20 or 30 years.
And, you know, that's only even despite all of the efficiencies that, let's just say, the tech revolution has introduced.
All of this stuff, real wages have been declining.
And what that means is that you've just ended up propping the system up for a little longer with increased efficiencies, right?
In this sort of Atlas Shrug kind of way, increased efficiencies have just given the government a longer lease on life.
But of course, this is a battle that the free market always loses in the long run, right?
Because as soon as you can prop up the government for longer, the government gets bigger and gets more into debt and controls more and preys on the people more.
So any additional inefficiencies, sorry, any additional increase in efficiencies just swells the power of the state even more, right?
More taxation, more control, more bureaucracy.
So this is something... Freedom never wins against compulsion in the long run, except, you know, anything you can do is fight it intellectually, as sort of we're trying to do here.
So, to sum up my general argument about this concept that the state helps the poor and the private sector won't, I mean, any way you look at it, it just makes no sense.
Any way you look at it, it is a simple bias and a bigotry and a pretty vicious intellectual fraud to have an opinion called The state helps the poor and the free market won't.
It's a vicious bigotry, incredibly destructive towards the poor in the present and particularly in the future.
It's the kind of opinion that gets millions of people enslaved in the bowels of poverty, that has children raised in single-parent households, that It traps people in a cycle of abuse and despair, and gets them involved in things like wars, and the military, and police actions, and prison guards.
It dehumanizes and destroys people who are poor, who don't feel that they have any other options, because taxation and regulation have destroyed the capacity to create jobs which are profitable at cheap rates.
It's just the most vicious bigotry to say that the state helps the poor.
And the reason that it's vicious bigotry is because, you know, these people always have these opinions and they never have the facts.
They never have the facts and they never have any logic.
And they just arbitrarily divide people into these different moral classes with no evidence, no logical or empirical evidence of any kind.
And that's what it is to be a bigot.
I mean, if I just say, well, you know, the blacks are this, the orientals are that, and so on, I mean, unless I have direct, tangible, physical evidence, or impeccable logic that is founded on physical evidence, I'm just a bigot.
I'm just a racist.
I'm just a jerk.
I'm a... let's keep my iTunes rating.
I'm not a very nice person.
So it's just sheer, cruel, vicious bigotry to talk about how the government helps the poor and how the free market won't.
All you're doing is parroting propaganda, so really you should stop talking, because what you're doing is unbelievably destructive towards the poor.
And cloaking your, you know, empty rhetoric and prejudice in these sort of moral terms is pretty revolting, right, to people who kind of know the facts and who have, you know, worked a little bit more rigorously on the theory than, you know, just repeating, you know, pamphlets from the Socialist Internationale and stuff that you're, you know,
So, you know, I invite you to do a little bit more research and dig a little bit more into the facts and try and understand, you know, what it is to have violence applied to the problem of poverty and the natural results of all applications of violence, which is, you know, destruction, despair, cycles of degradation and abuse.
Followed by a social collapse, followed by conditions for the poor that we can scarcely imagine now.
So have a compassion for those who are still to come, even if you don't have it, for those who are already here, who are poor.
Thanks as always so much for listening.
I hope you're doing well, and I will try to get to emails of the week this afternoon.
All the best.
▲
Export Selection