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June 14, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:16
278 Shuck the Poor
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Good afternoon. It's the 4th of June and I hope you're doing well.
Hey, I've got a rhyme for the whole month so I can through-sing.
The whole month long.
Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. I am heading home.
It's 5.30 on, as I said, I think the 14th of June.
So, good afternoon.
Well, I was going to give you a nice disquisition on Say's Law this afternoon, but I feel like I need something just a little more rousing for my drive home.
I've still got a little bit of a sniffle, and so I need a little bit of juice, so we will substitute good health with adrenaline and see if we can't find some way to keep myself alert on the way home.
So I got two emails on the weekend.
One email, one post.
And this is just something that...
It's been a long time since I've had to deal with this kind of stuff myself.
So I forget how pervasive or what a quagmire it can be to have these kinds of questions posed to you.
The way to deal with them is through rage.
So, I'm going to teach you a little something about rage today.
Rage. So, if you think I'm hoarse when I start, just wait till I'm finished.
So, the question, the first question, there are some people who are...
Arguing on a board about dispute resolution organizations, the state substitutes of this little corner of the market anarchy movement.
And so, of course, they get the usual clammy, claustrophobic, horrible little question, which is, but what about the poor?
Which is what anybody who's ever interested in freedom always runs into this wet, clammy, claustrophobic little cell called the poor.
And we are, of course, all supposed to throw ourselves into shackles and chains and bow before the state and God and all things high, mighty, and powerful, and Authoritarian, because there are the poor.
And we cannot have the poor be without anything, so none of us can be free.
There's actually a very good John Stossel bit on freeloaders, where he talks about a bunch of different kinds of freeloaders.
You can find this on Usnext.
And he does a sort of little study on it, and you sort of always have these kinds of questions around, okay, so if there's this guy who's begging on the street, and I don't give him money, he says I'm going to work for food, if I don't give him money, is he in fact going to starve to death?
Well, the answer, and I can say this with some authority certainly here in Canada, in Toronto, Canada, the answer is not in a million years.
That there's no conceivable way that anybody would ever starve in a modern city unless that was a choice of theirs.
You know, unless they were, I don't know, a supermodel or a figure skater or something.
Because there are so many shelters and so many charities and so many churches that we do not have to worry about the poor starving to death in the streets.
Never going to happen, my friends.
Never in a million, bazillion years.
Now... The interesting question, of course, around this is, well, what happens to these people?
Well, they don't need to be there.
They don't need to be on the street corner.
There are jobs, right?
So John Stossel goes into this shelter, and there are people eating there, and right next to it, right in the corner of this shelter, are jobs, right?
And they're not jobs that even require, like, speaking English very good or anything like that.
These are jobs that are sort of labor jobs and so on.
And nobody goes in. This is all state run, so they don't close down, but nobody goes in.
There was a guy around the corner who said he's got 75 or more jobs a day that he can't fill because he can't get the people to get out of the shelters and get off the food kitchens and the food and so on to get a job.
So, the thing to understand about the poor, and we're not talking about retarded people or anything like that.
I mean, we're talking about the vast majority of the poor.
That it's a choice.
It's a choice. Now, lots of people get mad at me about this, and I understand that.
This is based on growing up pretty poor.
I mean, I sort of had a weird dual-class kind of upbringing, because I grew up sort of lower middle class in England, but went to boarding school for a couple of years, which was very upper class.
And then, when I came to Canada, I was sort of lower middle class, and then we were definitely lower class.
And then, of course, I lived like a dog as a student and loved it.
No complaints about that.
And now I'm a pretty high earner, so I sort of run the gamut, I guess you could say, of the different classes, which has, I think, given me some kind of perspective on all of this.
Now, there are a couple of things that are important to understand about poverty, and I've done a series on poverty before, so I'm not going to retread old ground completely, but...
Poverty is what you buy things with.
This is sort of an important thing to understand.
Poverty is currency.
Poverty is what you buy.
Poverty is a consequence of buying things.
Now, if I wanted, I could work a part-time at a donut shop and live in a single room and not have a car or that kind of stuff.
And so then I would be buying less stress, less travel, to get up at four in the morning, get on a flight to New York or anything.
I could buy a much freer lifestyle and I would pay for it with poverty.
That would be the effect of me choosing to have a less valuable lifestyle.
Now, there are sort of the poor who are there by choice, and then there are the poor who are there by circumstance, and then there are the poor who are there by choice but don't want you to know that it's by choice.
And these are the manipulative poor.
So, since I can't, I guess, do a podcast about anything without using a family member as an example, let's talk about my mother.
You know, we haven't talked about my mother in, ooh, hours.
But she's a good example.
So my mother never worked on her sort of virtue or emotional life, so she was a very attractive woman, and so she had boyfriends, and they took her places, and she was coquettish.
And if you see those kinds of movies like Breakfast at Tiffany's with these girl women that I've talked about before, then you sort of have an idea of how my mother behaved around men, this sort of coquettish kind of Blanche Dubois, but even breathier.
And so she chose to be sort of parasitical, right, to trade on her looks, to take that sort of approach.
And I've seen this in a number of other, my sister-in-law is also doing the same thing.
She was pretty, had a nice figure, and she kind of traded on her looks.
She really rolled the dice to say, well, maybe, just maybe I can get by on my looks.
And so she went to be like a VJ, and then she tried making a music video, and then she tried singing a little bit, and she tried this and she tried that.
and And so what happened, of course, was, well, not of course, I mean, I guess it can work, but what happened in her situation is she's now in her mid-30s, so she's starting to get a little rough around the edges for the sort of youth and beauty-obsessed media world, and so now she's kind of hosed,
I think would be the economics term, because she rolled the dice and tried to get by on her looks, just as my mom did, but it never really quite panned out, as these things generally don't pan out.
And so she had this great deal of fun.
She didn't have to bother going to university.
She got to travel around the world when she was young and she got to hook up with guys and they'd take her places and so on.
So she had a lot of fun while, you know, other people were working hard and building their careers and so on.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
I have no problem with that at all.
I mean, okay, a little bit bitterness when I'm slaving away in grad school and other people are sort of sashaying down Easy Street.
But, of course, there are other people who are working even harder than I was in grad school who are looking at me in grad school saying, hey, that guy is sashaying down Easy Street.
And so there are people who just decide not to go for the economic productivity stuff.
And right now, like for the last six months, I would be one of them.
I mean, I've decided to spend my free time not going, like my free time outside of my relationship, I'm not going to night school to further get my executive MBA on the side, and I'm not doing this and I'm not doing that, and I'm not even working to full capacity at my job.
For a variety of reasons, we can get into another time, but also because, frankly, it's more fun doing free domain radio stuff.
It's more stimulating, it's more enjoyable, and I'm rolling the dice, right?
I mean, if I can find some way to turn this into a money-making opportunity, or at least something that I can sort of get food to mouth on, then that will really have paid off.
But if I get fired, for whatever, I don't think I'm working that badly, but if I did get fired for being unproductive, Then I would really, I guess, it would concentrate the mind wonderfully on free domain radio.
But if I got fired because I'm not as productive as I used to be, because I'm, you know, polishing off articles once in a while, I'm on the board a little bit, then it would just be a choice that I'd made.
I had chosen to trade the enjoyment of free domain radio for additional income, or maybe even my entire income.
Who knows? So, everything in life is just a trade.
And so what I find very bizarre about this idea of the poor is I'm not sure what the problem is with being poor.
I mean, maybe I'm missing something.
I do understand that people later on, they regret their choices, maybe.
But so what?
I mean, don't we all do that from time to time?
But this idea that there are these poor that we must help, because they're just poor, and they're sad, sad, poor people.
You meet my mother, I swear, if you don't have your unconscious moral antennae waving around like a guy trying to help a 747 crash land with those light cones.
Oh, that metaphor went on just a little bit too long, didn't it?
I think it did. If you met my mother, you'd think that she was the most pitiful and humble and broken and needy and helpless person in the world.
You really would.
Because there's a lot of manipulation in these kinds of people.
It's an important thing to understand.
They'll give you the sad eyes.
They'll give you the sad stories.
And I've known lots of people like this.
A friend of mine's father, a real drunk his whole life.
I mean, he could milk the blood and tears out of a statue with his tales of woe.
I mean, it's very common to see this kind of stuff.
When people have sort of run out of their coinage Then they have little choice, it seems.
They have some choice, but they have little choice but to turn to manipulation.
So, if you sort of roll the dice and you're some, I don't know, gigolo stud muffin, and you sort of roll the dice hoping to marry into that sort of political poodle, John Kerry, you hope to marry into a Heinz fortune or something, so you become some sort of stentorian, square-jawed senator guy, and you just hope to marry into money, or you just, you know, hang around the...
The Mediterranean or the Riviera, hoping to latch on to some fairly okay-looking heiress.
Well, great, you know, man, if it pays off, more power to you.
I mean, what a life that is.
You know, you're the Kevin Federline of the gigolo world.
That's good for you. But if it doesn't pay off, I'm not sure what anybody else's responsibility is.
I guess I am sure.
But you just kind of rolled your dice, right?
I mean, it's like feeling sorry for someone who took their money to Vegas and blew it all.
I mean, I'm not sure what the problem is with that.
I mean, I understand that they've taken all their money to blow it in Vegas, and they kind of want to get other people to feel sorry for them and give them money.
And I mean, if you want to give them money, that's fine, but to have it as some sort of principle and the reason that we should all stick our heads into the yoke of the state and shuffle around with the leg irons of altruistic duty obligation and forced income transfers is to me quite ludicrous.
I mean, the one thing that you can say to poor people is, well, you had fun, didn't you?
I mean, relative to whatever it was that would have made a choice for you not to be poor, I mean, I see these incredibly brave people on the Freedomain radio board who are really struggling with family issues, who are really struggling with relationship issues, who are really struggling to better themselves, as I struggle to better myself.
And so, let's say that...
This sort of works out for people.
Either they break from corrupt families or manage to find ways to turn their families around, and they become more effective at work, and they have better lives, better relationships, and so on.
Well, fantastic.
But it's not fun what they're doing right now, right?
Like, it's not fun to do an executive MBA at night, and maybe you'll make some money later on in life, but it's not fun to do it at night.
I mean, maybe it is for you, but it sure as heck wouldn't be for me.
And so, if people don't decide to do something, then I'm not sure, like, you had fun not doing it, right?
You obviously chose not to do it.
Like, I got a friend of mine who was saying the other day, well, sure, you have a great marriage, but how many Christina's are there around?
So, the implication is, to some degree, you happen to luck out and find a great woman, and so you have a great marriage, but I didn't happen to luck out and find a great woman, and so I don't have what you have.
Well, the reason that I was able to find a great woman is because I went through two years of therapy, spent $20,000 and worked 20 hours a week in the evenings and on weekends going through exercises to help me learn more about myself and develop into the kind of man I wanted to be.
And I've got to tell you, that really wasn't a whole lot of fun.
I mean, it was intense, and it had some great aspects to it, but, you know, if somebody said I had to do it again, I wouldn't be like, yay!
I'd be like, oh, really?
Okay, I guess I'll find some silver linings in those clouds.
And I know it's a hard thing to say, and it's one of these things that you're just not allowed to say, that the poor have chosen to be poor.
You're just not allowed to say it.
And I think that's a real shame.
But poor people get a lot of comfort out of being poor.
They get to stay within the same social environment because, look, there's a lot about poor people.
They keep each other down.
I mean, I'm not saying that the poor people are worse than the rich people.
I mean, the rich people are all whoring themselves to the state, to some degree, or some of the rich people.
But there's stuff about poor people.
They hold each other down, so you don't ever have to be perceived as uppity, right?
Poor people are very sensitive to people who put on airs, or, oh, you're better than us, or, oh, you think you're so great, oh, you're all that.
They really try and pull each other down, right?
They're not comfortable with their choices when exposed, right?
And so, you get to avoid having to challenge your social circle, having to get out of your family.
You also avoid having to deal with the pain of having such terribly low expectations in your family environment, right?
I mean, I will say this about both my parents, that while quite mad, they did have high expectations for me.
And so that helped, to some degree, me set my sights high.
Now, they, I think, wanted me to be the all-being master of time, space, and dimension.
And I really had to lower my sights because that's not until 2009.
So I had to sort of pull back.
They wanted it a little earlier.
And so I really had to pull back because they had really mad aspirations for me.
But they did have high aspirations.
It had nothing to do with me. It had nothing to do with my capacities or my nature.
But they did have very high aspirations for me.
So for me to aim high is not...
It doesn't bring me into conflict in that kind of way.
I got a lot of hostility for my particular beliefs, but for aiming high that wasn't the issue that I had.
Whereas for poor people, To aim high brings them in direct conflict with the low, petty expectations of everyone around them.
And the implicit or explicit hostility that they're going to receive from that is pretty considerable.
So if they choose to stay poor, I mean, what's wrong with that?
So all you're doing is you're saying, well, I don't want to confront my social circle.
I don't want to go it alone.
I don't want to deal with the pain of having been raised with such low expectations.
So I'm just going to kind of sit here and not attempt to raise too far, and I'm going to complain about the system rather than try and get ahead, or whatever it is that's going to occur.
Well, there's nothing wrong with that either.
That's just a choice. But this idea that we're just so...
It's like we're all trying to stay afloat in this world of ever-increasing violence.
And every time we get some buoyancy, somebody else heaps another body of another poor person and drags us down.
They're like these lead weights that just continually accumulate around us when we're trying to swim.
And I just say, shuck them off.
Shuck them off. Shuck the poor, is what I'm saying.
Because there's an innate injustice in poverty that doesn't show up until later on in life.
And the innate injustice goes something like this.
Well, if I end up working hard and studying and raising my income potential and so on, well, I'm going to make more money than you if you go out and party every night.
So we get to be 40 and I'm making, I don't know, like 100k and you're making like 30k.
Well, what can't be transferred is your fun, right?
So I can't say, you know, you had fun all the way through your 20s and I didn't.
I was in night school or whatever.
So I want you to give me some of your fun.
Well, that can't occur, right?
That's dead and buried and in the past.
Unfortunately, The extra income that I have earned by being sort of Calvinistic or Protestant and dutiful and so on is transferable.
This is sort of the basic injustice of poverty and hard work.
You can't transfer all the fun that the poor people have by not having to increase their skill set or their emotional maturity or challenge their social circle or anything like that.
You can't transfer all of that fun But you can transfer the money that people have made by being beautiful and responsible and all that kind of stuff.
And that's the basic injustice.
This is, of course, why you can't have a state, right?
Because the state will be susceptible to this kind of resentment.
So, of course, the poor guy who went out and partied all through his 20s now looks at the guy who's dutiful and is making lots of money and feels resentful.
Because he's forgetting that all choices are equal.
He's forgetting that all choices are equal.
It's just some people pay off earlier, some pay off later.
But they're all equal. If you smoke, you might be cutting an average of six years off your lifespan, but you get to enjoy smoking for your life.
Now, when you get lung cancer, you're going to say, I mean, if you do, right?
You're going to say, well, that sucks.
Boy, I really should get taxes from people who didn't smoke so that I can pay for my lung cancer treatments.
But you can't.
You can't morally transfer their money to you any more than they can practically transfer your 30 years of enjoying smoking to themselves.
I mean, you don't sort of say, okay, well, I'll give you 10 grand for your lung cancer treatment.
But you've got to package me up, you know, 10% of your pleasure of smoking and give it to me.
Well, that's not going to occur, right?
And the two are actually as non-transferable.
Memories are part of our body and property results from the actions of our body.
Neither can be morally transferred.
It's just that one can be transferred.
At the point of a gun, and the other one can't be.
And this is sort of the basic injustice that occurs with the problems between somebody who's dutiful and somebody who's having fun.
Then the fun can't be transferred, but the result of the dutifulness can be.
So these poor, they get on my nerves.
They really do get on my nerves.
It is something that any competent economist is going to tell you that poverty is not worse than...
I mean, involuntary poverty, like if you're in the Sudan and you don't have any property rights, that's evil, of course.
I mean, if it's involuntary. But if you're in a free market situation, and we're in largely enough of a free market situation that you can move somewhere and get a job.
I mean, no matter what's going on for you.
Assuming, again, you're mentally retarded or insane or something.
But that's not what people are talking about.
So, the interesting question that came up in the discussion regarding these dispute resolution organizations is, well, what about the poor who can't afford DRO representation?
What about them? You want them to have no access to contract negotiation, blah, blah, blah?
Well, it's all just kind of funny.
I mean, people just swing this club called the poor without giving it a moment's thought.
And there's sort of two answers that I would sort of...
I mean, three answers that I sort of would have.
And you might want to sort of take these out as your shield against this foggy club of manipulative poverty.
You might want to come up with something like this.
So they say, well, what about the poor?
The poor don't get access to DROs and so on.
Well, the first answer might be, well...
Do you think that the poor have access to dispute resolution organizations now?
Do you think that the poor are able to use the court system at the moment?
I mean, the poor are not at all able to access our lawyer-driven, tort-driven court system at the moment.
So, for instance, a friend of mine was dismissed and did not get severance and had to give the lawyer a $15,000 retainer.
Just to start the case.
It may go upwards from there.
Well, if you're poor, your severance isn't even going to be $15,000.
And yes, I know, you can go with legal aid, but I've seen my mother get ripped off by legal aid lawyers for about 20 years as she's pursuing her endless court case against her doctors, and that really is not a valid solution, right?
So, of course, the poor don't have access to any state justice at the moment.
Oh, my wallet got stolen, says the poor man to the cop.
And the cop says, or any man to the cop, really, except maybe the top tier of society.
And the cop says, oh, it got legs and walked away.
Did it? Well, let me jot down your name and your address and I'll give you a shout if we ever come across it.
Yeah, right. Now, so the poor have no access to any kind of justice system that makes any kind of sense.
So... If they're so concerned about the poor and the poor's access to some kind of justice system, then wouldn't they say, you know, that's interesting, because I don't think the poor have any access to justice system now, but how would that improve?
So somehow there's this belief, like if you go to a sort of free market solution for a justice system, That somehow, if the poor end up in this situation where everybody's competing to drive down the costs of contract enforcement, and everybody's competing for every dollar that everyone has, and the poor can band together to get a minimum.
You don't need a huge contractual lawyer if you're a poor guy.
You need, like, you know... Three or four things.
Mortgage, a car loan, some protection at work, and some insurance or whatever.
You don't need the same thing that a million dollar a year lawyer needs.
Because you're not going to have reciprocity with offshore banking institutions and so on.
So if you're some poor guy and you want access to a DRO, well, of course you want a free market situation where people are driving down costs as quickly as possible and as much as possible.
I mean, that's exactly what's going to provide to you the goods and services that you need.
So, this idea, what am I going to do about the poor?
It's just so ridiculous.
The best thing that you can do for the poor is to open up opportunities within the marketplace, to give them access to jobs, to give them access to higher wages, to remove the minimum wage, to remove the regulatory barriers that are in the way of wealth creation and job creation.
Because all you can do in this world is create opportunity for people, to create circumstances, To make the most opportunity available to people.
You can set the buffet.
You cannot jam food down people's throats.
As philosophers, this is a basic fact that we, I think, need to get the hang of.
Yes, it's absolutely great to give the poor access to contract enforcement and so on.
Absolutely! I think it would be great.
And so you can set up a charity DRO, you can subsidize your DROs, but not too much.
Charity is a very delicate thing.
Charity is something that requires a good deal of interpersonal knowledge.
That's why the state can never do it effectively, because all it does is mail checks out, but it doesn't know them intimately.
So, you want to make sure that there is charity, but not so much charity that people don't have any motivation to change their situation.
So, yeah, you can do that.
You can set up the charity DRO. You can suggest that the poor are all banned together.
But boy, if they care so much about the poor, there's nothing wrong with caring about the poor.
More power to you. If you want to care about the poor, fantastic.
But why do other people have to pay the bill for your conscience?
It's something I've never understood about this whole approach to the poor.
So what this person is saying is, well, we can't have a state in the society because I would feel bad about the possibility that the poor might not have access to a justice system.
Now, the fact that they don't have access to a justice system right now doesn't mean anything because it doesn't...
Inflict on people's conscience.
But what these people are always saying is, I would feel bad if there was a conceptual possibility that I couldn't live with that the poor would not get access to X, Y, and Z, or food or shelter or healthcare or whatever.
I would feel bad. Now, would I feel bad enough to really help the poor?
Well, yeah. I mean, I would hope that these people aren't that hypocritical and they would actually feel bad enough to help the poor.
But the real question is, and it's the same question, of course, for environmentalists, is like, well, why do I have to pay for your conscience?
Why do I have to pay for your conscience?
Because I'll tell you what I would do to help the poor get access to a DRO. I'd create some frickin' jobs, is what I would do.
I mean, I'm an entrepreneur, and I would go and create jobs.
And I've done that before, and I'll probably do it again before I'm dead.
So that's what I would do.
But what would you do? And of course, it always comes from people who are, like, in the arts, right?
Because they don't actually go and create jobs, and they're not generally aiming themselves at being the most economically productive members of society, let's say.
So, for a lot of these people in the arts, it's like, well, how do you help the poor?
It's like, well, I help the poor by creating jobs for them.
I mean, that's the best way to help the poor at all.
I'd hire a maid to clean my house.
That would be a good thing to do for the poor.
But it's always got to be charity, and it's always got to be that you have to pay at gunpoint, because other people feel uneasy about a moral quandary.
And it's the same thing with environmentalists.
It's like, if you want these frickin' old-growth forests, just buy them.
Oh, for God's sake, just go and buy them.
Stop coming after me with state guns for me to pay for it all.
If it's your conscience and your issue that you want to deal with, fantastic.
More power to you. Follow your star.
Follow your light. Follow what makes you feel virtuous.
But, you know, stand back for me with these state pistoles and get those daggers out of my ribs.
And the same thing with the poor.
So I think it's important to just recognize that the poor are fine.
The poor are fine. The poor in the modern West have everything that the rich in the past could never achieve.
And it didn't come about through redistribution.
Of course, it came about through freedom.
So the poor are fine, and by and large, the poor are responsible for their own condition, and that's fine.
As if somebody says, well, the poor are not responsible for their own condition, that's fine.
Then we can treat them as livestock who don't have any free will or any capacity to affect their own outcomes.
So we can pay for all of that, and then we can sort of put them in pens, like livestock, right?
Because they're not responsible for their own condition, right?
So we should put them in pens, right?
And herd them around like cattle and use them for grazing, maybe.
Because if the poor are not responsible for their own condition, then they really can't be allowed freedom, right?
And if the poor are responsible for their own condition, then I don't see why anybody should be diving in to save them from the results of their own choices.
I mean, they're choices. If the poor have choice and have free will, fantastic.
Then they're part of the human species, they're part of the human race, they should have every right that everybody else has, but with rights come responsibilities.
With choices come consequences.
And you may not like the results of your choices, but that's fine.
I mean, that's part of the risk of living.
Everybody makes choices based on their own criteria.
And so I pretty much have a huge amount of respect for the poor.
I think the poor are just like us.
They've just made different choices.
And I'm not going to run around rescuing the poor from their choices because that's really going to mess up their choice matrix.
And if you get to bum around in your 20s and then you get to be subsidized for the rest of your life through, I don't know, some sort of income transfer payments or whatever...
Then that sort of doesn't seem to be very respectful for the choices either made by the poor person, which is, you know, you make your bed and lie in it, or by the person who's been industrious and worked hard.
How is it respectful to each of those people's choices?
So I respect everybody.
I mean, you make your choices.
You want to go and live by your looks.
You want to go and bum around in your 20s.
You want to be a ski instructor and whistler, and then you want to go and pick grapes in Queensland, and then you want to go take a motorbike ride in Thailand.
Fantastic. I envy that.
Have a great time. But don't come to me when you're 40 and have no skills and say, now I need your money.
I mean, because I respect your choices.
And that means that I respect those consequences.
So this is just an important thing to understand about the poor.
They've made choices to be where they are, and those choices have generally involved not confronting the limited and low-expectation social circle around them, not going along with the discomfort.
And is it fair that you get born to a poor family or born to a rich family?
Well... For the concept fair to exist, an alternative has to exist.
Is gravity fair?
Well, it just is. And so being born where you're born, it just is, and there's no guilt, there's no shame, there's no honor, there's no praise or blame in it at all.
It just is. And you can either choose to try and drag yourself up by your bootstraps, or you can choose to stay within your social circle and have diminished expectations and complain and whine and feel resentful.
Or you can work to get up and out of it.
But either way, I respect those choices.
It's like respecting the poor.
It's like respecting women. I mean, if you're in an abusive situation, then you're obviously choosing to stay there relative to other choices that you might have in your life.
And if there is evil, it's in your parents, of course, for creating a situation where this is what you're comfortable with.
But as adults, we always have to respect the choices of other people.
The moment that we stop respecting choices and rush in and try and save people, rush in and try and help people, feel guilty for this, feel guilty for that, then we're no longer respecting them as human beings.
And by not respecting them as human beings, we're not giving them the possibility of change.
As soon as you, it's like somebody whines to you about poverty and you feel like you want to give them money, and don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there's anything wrong to do with that, I mean, if you're going to give someone five bucks to go get a meal because they lost their bus fare or something, that's fine.
But if you get into a chronic state of guilt about people's poverty, and not state-driven poverty, but the sort of poverty that comes in a relatively free market like we have now, relative to some kind of choice, then what you're doing is you are not respecting them as individuals.
If you remove the consequences from people's choices, you're not respecting their capacity to make different choices.
And so it is a case of not so much of tough love, but just of having respect for people and respect for their choices And I think that's important.
So I would really suggest don't get sucked into all of this guilt and weird stuff around the poor, but just understand that the poor are the poor.
They've just chosen that choice, and there have been real benefits for it.
There have been real benefits to it, relative to the discomfort or unpleasantness they may have felt through other kinds of choices.
So don't feel bad about it, for heaven's sakes.
Don't feel like you're guilty or that you've stolen something if you're not poor.
Just have respect for the poor as you would have respect for anybody.
And that's actually the best thing that you can do, to remind them that they have a choice.
And that even if they didn't choose exactly what they wanted in life, they might, by retaining that choice, they might be able to teach their children something different.
Well, thanks so much for listening.
Hope you're doing well. Look forward to donations to avoid me from being poor.
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