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June 18, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:38
285 Losing Ground Part 2: Theory
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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph. Eleven o'clock.
Hope you're doing well. Just finished my housework for the morning.
Wanted to finish off this losing ground review or evaluation.
So this is a part two.
If you're randomly skipping around in the podcast, you naughty little thing, then you might want to go to part one, which is 284, I believe it is.
This all being 285.
Well... Of course, I mentioned that crime and education were two other things that are dealt with in this book.
And for juvenile crime, there were some significant changes.
The two sort of major ones is that you didn't get arrested much, and if you did get arrested, you didn't get punished.
And also, if you did get arrested and punished, or punished, then what happened was when you became 18, your permanent record was no longer so permanent, and it became expunged.
So there really wasn't much consequence, at least perceived to be much consequence, in terms of other people knowing your own history as a youth.
And this is not true, of course, because you're forming your character in your teens, at least the first round of your character, and so the fact that nobody knows about any criminal activities you may have partaken of in the past doesn't matter as much as the fact that you're doing them and having some sort of effect on your character.
So, the punishment of juveniles in Cook County, which includes the city of Chicago, in some relevant statistics, in 1966, when the juvenile crime rate was entering its highest rate of increase, approximately 1,200 juveniles from Cook County were committed to the Illinois state system of training schools.
For the next ten years, while the rate of juvenile crime in Cook County increased, the number of commitments dropped steadily.
In 1976, fewer than 400 youths were committed, a reduction of two-thirds at a time when arrests were soaring.
A single statistic conveys how far the risk of penalty had dropped.
By the mid-1970s, the average number of arrests for a Cook County youth before he was committed to a reform school for the first time was 13.5%.
Six. The risk of significant punishment for first arrests fell close to zero.
Now, I'm not at all suggesting that this number should be higher.
I have no idea what the optimum solution is to the problem of crime.
I mean, I have some ideas, but I certainly have no proof.
So, I'm not saying that this is necessarily for the best, but it is a change which is, I think, important to understand.
Now, as far as education went, of course, everything changed as well.
When students come from a good background, they're pretty easy to deal with, right?
A bad grade or a comment on a report card, you're going to get some parental reaction from back home.
But when students have no backup at home, then these tasks are always difficult.
I certainly remember for myself that when I had a school trip that required my mother's signature, she had no idea even what grade I was in.
She had no idea what homework I was supposed to be doing.
Until probably around...
Some aspects of grade 12 and grade 13, I basically did no homework.
From the time that I came to Canada, when I was in grade 8 for a while, but when I first moved to Canada, we lived in Whitby with my uncle on my mother's side.
And I was put in grade 8, because my reading skills and language skills were pretty advanced.
And then when I came to Toronto, there was a big program about keep people with the right age group, and so I was put back in grade 6, which was sort of age-appropriate.
And spent two years going through this.
I mean, boy, you think public school is boring to begin with.
You just see what happens when you get to do it over again for two years.
But that's something that is quite important.
I mean, I had no backup at home, and so I had no interest in doing homework.
Of course, my home life was too chaotic to do homework.
So as the teachers always said, if age...
Sorry, if... What did they used to say?
If... Work matched ability, you'd be an A+. And of course, this was always thrown over to me as a child, as if I was just lazy.
This is how people deal with the problems of moral corruption, is they blame children rather than see the nature of society.
That's almost inevitable.
It took me a little while to figure that one out, but now I'm pretty much at peace with it.
Now, in 1960, sanctions you had, like you could hold a student back for a year, there were in-school disciplinary measures, suspension and expulsion.
By the 1970s, the use of all these sanctions had been pretty heavily circumscribed.
That's fairly important.
There was a Supreme Court case, Galt, not the Randian Galt, but G-A-U-L-T versus Arizona in 1967.
The case involved a juvenile court, but the principle enunciated by the court applied to the schools as well, as the American Civil Liberties Union was quick to point out the school systems nationwide.
Due process was required for suspension, and the circumstances under which students could be suspended or otherwise disciplined were restricted.
Teachers and administrators became vulnerable to lawsuits or professional setbacks for using the discretion that had been taken for granted in 1960.
Urban schools give up the practice of making a student repeat a grade.
Social promotions were given regardless of academic progress.
Now, the interesting thing is that fortunately, of course, that's exactly the same issue with the country clubs that politicians go to, that if you're found stealing or you don't pay your dues or you're cheating or something like that, or you turned out to have gotten in through fraudulent measures – then you get to keep coming.
Oh, no, wait, that's different. Sorry, because those are...
Those are private situations, right?
So you have a private property you can choose to do and to participate with who you want.
Can you imagine a store that was legally forced to let chronic shoplifters back in, regardless of the amount of money or goods that they'd stolen?
That would be kind of funny, right?
But of course, the rules are not for the leaders.
As I mentioned before, the rules are only for us.
Now, what happens, of course, is that you get a breakdown in the family, in the 60s, right?
You get an increasing breakdown of family structure, increasing disruption in the classroom, And what this does, of course, is it begins to drive decent teachers or teachers who have options out of the public school system.
Because, like a bad student, a difficult student, a troublesome student, can make life a whole lot more tough for the teacher than the teacher can for the student.
You can do disruptive behavior in class, physical threats, even through official channels you can complain.
To the administration that the teacher was unreasonable, harsh, or otherwise failing to observe their rights.
And any... Particularly in the inner cities, right?
In the 60s and 70s, any teacher who demanded performance was just asking for trouble.
It's dangerous minds. Michelle Pfeiffer fantasy is just that.
It's a fantasy.
Now... This is, he has the same sort of approach that I do, this Charles Murray fellow, and he says that the real question is sort of what would I do, right?
Did everything change? Did everything, right?
I mean, what would you do?
Given the changes in risks and rewards, if you're a student in the inner city school of 1970, are you going to behave exactly the same as you would have in 1960?
If you were a teacher, would you have enforced the same standards?
If you really love teaching, would you have remained a teacher in the public schools?
Well, no, of course you wouldn't have changed, right?
So, what sort of happened, right?
1950s and 1970s, right?
The big difference in the experience of growing up poor in these two decades, 1960s and the 1970s.
So all the changes and incentives that we've been talking about, they all point in the same direction.
It's easier to get along without working.
It's easier for a guy to have a baby without being responsible for it, and for a woman to have a baby without having a husband.
It's easier to get away with crime.
Because it's easier for others to get away with crime, it's easier.
To obtain drugs. Because it was easier to get away with crime, sorry, it was easier to support a drug habit.
Because it was easier to get along without a job, it was easier to ignore education.
Because it was easy to get along without a job, it was easier to walk away from a job and thereby accumulate a record as an unreliable employee.
And the real danger, of course, is doing this to people who are young is a really, really horrible thing because you're forming their character and their history and the years between sort of 15 and maybe 22, 23, 24 are absolutely crucial in founding your future viability as an employee or as an entrepreneur or whatever.
So these changes in behavior where you remove consequences.
In other words, you remove the choice of other people.
This question of consequences is complicated.
No, I won't get into it a big deal here, but suffice to say that from my standpoint, at least, the question of consequences is nonsense.
You don't inflict consequences on people when they're adults.
You don't have people running around saying, ooh, that's bad, ooh, you shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that.
That's nonsense. What you do is you make sure that society is free and that all association is voluntary association.
That's how you get consequences in society.
So, if you don't want to get an education...
Nobody has to inflict consequences on you at all.
Nobody has to run around wagging their finger at you and nagging at you to get an education.
Simply people won't want you as an employee in any kind of decent job if you don't have not an education.
Who cares about an education?
What you need to have It's the capacity to think, the capacity to reason, the capacity to do basic math, the capacity to put a sentence together, the capacity to understand instructions, the capacity to communicate instructions, all of these sorts of things.
I mean, just if you want tech support in a software company, you have to have decent language skills.
You have to have the ability, you have to have patience.
You have to have the deferment of gratitude.
You have to have the ability to write up issues.
You have to have the ability to detect patterns.
If you want to move up in that position, then you have to have the ability to take initiative.
You have to be able to problem solve.
You have to say, look, I'm going to put together a frequently asked questions because here are the top ten questions I've been getting.
Here's the way that I think we can communicate them.
Here's the best way to put it forward.
I've already got a plan.
That's the kind of initiative that gets you to move up in an organization.
So forget about it. Education, at least as we understand it now, is virtually useless.
I mean, 14 years learning the most nonsensical garbage.
And we're only taught math and science because it's useful to the ruling elite and also because it helps us to believe or to make the dichotomy between reason and life.
Rationality is considered to be something that's useful for Euclidean geometry and math problems and physics problems, but not for ethics.
Never for ethics, right? Ethics are always subjected, put into this world of person and society and so on.
So the problem that occurs when you break freedom of association is that you're now forcing people to deal with and to subsidize people whose decisions they wouldn't subsidize or deal with otherwise.
It's a terrible, terrible thing.
It's a real trap. So if you get into your mid-twenties without a record as a good worker, well, you're kind of stuck.
Unless you're going to become an entrepreneur, you're kind of stuck.
Because his own personality is formed, right?
The mid-twenties is not accidental because it's when your brain stops developing finally around your mid-twenties, right?
If you're a teenager, you have kids, and you've got to rely on the state to support you, you've really struck a Faustian bargain with the system that pretty much ensures that, as a woman, you're going to live in poverty for the rest of your life.
This is pretty important, right?
The interconnectedness among the changes in incentives we've been talking about, or that he talks about in the book, They've really grown.
The interconnections among the changes in incentives and the behaviors, they're pretty significant.
And the consequences for the people who've been seduced into long-term disaster by the most human of impulses, the pursuit of one's short-term best interest, that's pretty bad, right?
So, what happens, basically, is that the message is...
Should be, I mean, in voluntary association, if you're in school, if you're in a school and you don't study and you don't work hard, then the school is going to say, like a private school, is going to say, well, this isn't the place for you, right?
You're going to bring down our averages, you're consuming a lot of resources, and you're going to make it harder for us to attract good students, right?
Unless we're one of those kind of charity schools.
So, that is a really bad situation overall.
Now... He also talks, I think, very intelligently about what consequences accrue to the poor, or negative consequences accrue to the poor in this kind of environment.
And he's got a very good example, I think, where he talks about students that do poorly, or the consequences for whom...
Wait, reboot, let me try that again...
If you have a school where the students face no negative consequences for disruptive or aggressive or lazy behavior, Then what happens is, does that cost anything to the upper class kids or the middle class kids who are going to better schools and whose parents are shouldering the burden of raising the children, as of course they should be primarily doing so, rather the teachers can't do squat relative to the parents.
What happens to the poor kids?
Well, the poor kids who have ability and talent and drive and all that, well they end up In a situation where the teachers' resources and the general quality of education is deteriorating, where the disruptions in class are causing the good teachers to leave,
the fear of physical safety causing the good teachers to leave, and the constant amount of problems that are being created because you no longer have the capacity to discipline students or to give them consequences for their actions, What happens is that the middle class and upper class kids in other schools, they don't face any huge problems, but what happens is the poor kids who have drive and ability end up being really badly educated.
So this issue where we're trying to shield people from the consequences of their actions by violating freedom of association...
This results catastrophically in the poor kids getting a much worse education relative to the middle class and upper class kids, right?
It is an absolute way of keeping the poor down, and not accidental either, as I'm going to argue in a minute or two.
And then there's a famous bit on a smoking program, which I'll talk about another time.
And then Murray sort of comes up with, in the Rethinking Social Policy section, comes up with some laws of social programs.
They're interesting, I think. The first law is the law of imperfect solutions.
Any objective rule that defines eligibility for a social transfer program will irrationally exclude some persons.
I'm sure that's fairly clear.
The law of unintended rewards is the second one.
Any social transfer increases the net value of being in the condition That prompted the transfer.
That's fairly important, right?
So if some guy loses his job and he's on unemployment insurance, he may hate every penny of it.
He may not want to continue on it.
But let's say, for instance, that he can't find a job in his town.
Well, he's going to stay there if he's on unemployment insurance.
Whereas if he's not on there, then it would seem to me...
Or it seems likely that he's not going to take a job in another town, he's not going to unroot himself, and so on.
So there is quite a difference in how people behave once you get this kind of social program in place.
The third law is the law of net harm.
The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.
Now, that's fairly important.
The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that the program to induce change will cause net harm.
And what that means is that if you really want to become a doctor, say, you can end up in the current system, of course, being forced to work like crazy long hours as an intern.
And if you really want to be a soldier, then the marines are going to be able to scream at you for like two years, right?
So if your desire to do something is really high, then people have a certain amount of control, I guess you could say, to use the word somewhat loosely.
I mean, people have a certain kind of control over your motivation and what it is that you'll be willing to do.
If you don't want something, like if you don't want to work at a minimum wage job rather than sort of sit home and watch TV, then what is it that people are going to be able to make you do?
Well, nothing, right?
So, of course, as the means test and as the sort of what was inherited from charities to begin with, which is that you've got to separate the deserving poor from the undeserving poor as your first order of business and charity, As that falls away, and you no longer have any controls over your lifestyle, and you just get the money, and you don't want to go and get a job, then this is going to cause net harm.
So the worst kinds of motivations, which is bad job versus staying at home, or working sort of off and on and getting all that kind of stuff, the less that people want that kind of stuff, The less you are going to be able to stimulate their positive behaviors, and so the greater net harm you're going to end up doing.
So the paradox is that if you don't offer a lot of benefits to get someone to change, then the likelihood of them changing is very low.
But if you do offer a lot of benefits to get someone to change, then you're going to invite more people into the program and cause it to grow, which is going to keep your success rate very low.
So if you want to help someone back into the workplace and you've got counseling, training, guaranteed jobs, other kinds of supports, what happens is that people will then start to be motivated because the rewards are very great, but you're going to draw lots of other people into the program because it's a lot more pleasant to do that kind of stuff than it is to go out and sort of carve your own way in the world.
So the net harm is going to be quite high as the taxes go up.
Fewer opportunities are generated in the free market because of High taxes and national debt and so on.
So the net harm capacity for social programs is, even if we exclude the moral element, just looking at it pragmatically, is very, very high.
There's a lot of problems with those. So that's a brief overview of the book.
I've also listened to an audiobook version of his What is Libertarianism?
And I think that as a minarchist, he is in the fantasy camp that I inhabited as well for 20 years, that words will turn violence into virtue.
And pieces of paper will restrain governments from growing and so on.
And so I can understand where he's coming from.
This was in the 80s and he was putting all the data together.
This kind of book is both very exciting and very sad at the same time.
It's very exciting because it's great to see all the data.
It's very sad when you realize that this 25-year-old book did absolutely nothing to even slow down the increases in these social programs.
So... The fascinating thing that I found with this book, well, there's a number of fascinating things, but what I really liked about it was that everybody knew in the social programs world that this crap didn't work at all, or they knew it within 6 to 12 months of starting these programs, because, of course, you have objectives, any plan you put together, even in the public sector. You have to have objectives, and none of these objectives were met, even in the first 6 to 12 months.
So they knew, right back in the early to mid-60s, that this crap didn't work.
And yet, of course, it continues to grow.
Now, there's lots of reasons that people say for that.
You know, it's often interested in bureaucracy.
Government likes to, you know, they always feel that if you shovel more money at the problem, it's just another billion dollars and suddenly it's all going to turn around.
But I have a slightly different interpretation, which I'll share with you, and you can let me know if you think it makes any sense.
Or not. Here we're leaving the world of data, and we're entering the world of theory, but I think the theory is supported by the facts.
So there's a couple of facts. One is that poverty only became an issue.
These are the facts that I'm going to draw on.
Poverty only became an issue when it was almost solved.
Poverty is a solution.
Poverty only needs to be solved through opportunity.
And it may be some hardcore charity for people who are really in the dirt.
But poverty only needs to be solved through opportunity.
You can't eliminate it as a function of society because it's a choice.
Some people prefer poverty, sort of physical poverty, because there are other opportunities as well.
You don't have to work for a living.
You have to worry about a career. You don't have to get up early in the morning.
You don't have to shave every day.
I mean, it isn't... There's an upside, as I've talked about before, to being poor.
And of course, I've chosen it in my life when I was a grad student.
I've chosen it when I chose to take a year and a half off work and write books.
So there's nothing wrong with poverty at all.
It's a perfectly valid choice.
But what you want to do is you want to make sure that the people who want to succeed and increase their lives and life have that opportunity, right?
And of course you can't do anything to make sure of it other than to have free market, no government, private property, and so on.
So the tragedy of poverty is when people want to get out of it and they can't, right?
Because there's no opportunities.
Well, the fascinating thing to me about this is that Poverty became an issue when it was about to be solved.
Now, we know for a fact that if somebody were to snap their fingers tomorrow and come up with a perfect solution to the problem of society that would require no government, That, I mean, the government would put a horse's head in your bed and pay you to become a consultant so that you never talked about it, right?
That's what everyone thinks about the oil companies with the electric car.
Government exists. Let's just say that the cover story for governments is that government exists to solve problems in society.
Well, one of the things that was occurring in the post-war boom is that poverty was becoming virtually a non-issue.
I mean, as far as what they call systemic or embedded or structural poverty.
So anybody who wanted to get out, given the post-war boom, particularly in America, anybody who wanted to get out pretty much could get out.
But there were some people who remained, right?
So my question is, government should have been thus shrinking.
All of the programs that were put in place through the Great Depression, caused and sustained by government policies, all of those social programs should have been eliminated.
I mean, just logically.
I mean, if you were a DRO, if you were a charity, then that's what you would do.
You would shrink, or if you were a donor, let's just put it that way.
If you were a donor and you saw that the poverty rate had gone down significantly, and that the national wealth had gone up three times in 20 years, by 300% in 20 years, you'd say, okay, well obviously there's much more opportunity, many more jobs.
Much greater, higher income, real income.
And therefore, I don't need to give as much to charity, right?
We're sort of, we're over the storm.
And that's, I'm going downhill now, so I'm going to stop peddling, right?
This is a basic function of the conservation of energy and resources, that you don't continue to go to chemotherapy when your cancer is cured.
I mean, it's sort of important.
That's never how it occurs with the government, but that's how it would occur with donors, right?
So, as the economy gets richer and the number of poor who want to get out of poverty are getting more and more opportunities, then obviously those who remain are those who are choosing to be poor in one form or another.
I mean, excluding those who are mentally ill and so on.
So, and charity can't help those people.
I mean, this is sort of important.
Charity helps people who want to get out.
Charity harms people Who, for whatever reason, are choosing poverty, right?
And you're subsidizing their choice.
It makes it that much harder for them to get out.
And that's, I mean, not even that tragic for them, right?
Because they may be hopeless in this sense, but the real tragedy is for their children, right?
Who get to see that you can survive quite nicely, thank you very much, without necessarily getting education and work.
It blunts their, it's all about the kids, right?
Blunts their work ethic. Blunts everything that they view of as useful and productive in life.
Now, the reason that you can't have a self...
The most reflective charity organization or a charity organization like the government which works on the principle of force is because everybody who's in it has an incentive for this situation to continue.
This is why you need voluntary association.
You can't have forced association because everybody's incentive who's dealing with the problem, who's trained and specialized to deal with that problem, their incentive is to have that problem continue.
This is not anything paranoid.
This is just a basic fact of human nature.
So to take an example, which some people believe, my uncle certainly believed was the case, but I don't necessarily believe and certainly haven't seen any proof, is if you train as a cancer specialist and you do your undergrad, you do your MD, you do your specialization, you do your internship, and you're now like 50 or 45 years you do your internship, and you're now like 50 or 45 years old or whatever and your income is now $300,000, $400,000 a year because you're a
and you're working in a research lab, and you're doing cutting-edge work on solving the problem of cancer, well, the sad fact is that if you come up with a cure for cancer, Then you have just destroyed your skill set.
I mean, that's a sort of basic fact of life.
Not much you can do about it in that sort of particular isolated area.
Very few people will work very hard to put themselves out of a career.
So if you snap your fingers and cure cancer, then you can get back to being an MD or whatever and doing some other kind of work, but...
The vast majority of your specialization, the vast increase in your income, a vast chunk of your income is just going to evaporate.
That's why the oil companies aren't going to look for substitutes for oil.
Their whole capital infrastructure and business processes are centered around oil.
They might as well go around to all the gasoline stations and say...
We're really keen on the electric car.
Do you want to get in on this action or not?
Well, they're going to say, good Lord, no. I mean, I put my whole investment...
So the conservative forces within society are those who've invested a lot of capital, time, energy, equipment, and resources into a particular problem.
They don't have any positive incentive to solve that problem.
In fact, they have a negative incentive to solve that problem.
And the way that you deal with this issue in...
The private sector is through a combination of incentives and punishments, or I guess you could say incentives and disincentives.
So if I were a private charity who was trying to come up with a think tank to cure cancer, then I would sort of set it up something like the following, right?
So I would say to people, I get the best cancer specialist in the world and give them $5 million apiece if they solve the problem of...
I mean, there's sort of one way of doing it, and maybe a declining funding situation if they don't make progress.
Like, there's lots of ways that you put these incentives into place to make sure that people are going to actually deal with what they're dealing with, right?
So, security companies don't have a strong incentive.
I'm just talking economically.
and we're not talking about that sort of objective ethics and so on, which are a factor, but more in designing the system in this case rather than changing each individual's motivation.
So if you set up security alarm systems, if somebody could snap their fingers and get rid of the problem of crime, then you're not going to be that keen on that, right?
Because people are just going to stop using your service.
So it's very important to understand that these conservative elements in society want problems to continue just from an economic advantageous standpoint.
It's not bad.
There's nothing wrong with it, because we want people to solve problems, and we want them to invest their capital into problem-solving areas.
We want people to come up with alarm systems, and we want people to solve our problems.
We want oil or gasoline or whatever.
We want people to solve our problems, but we have to recognize those people don't have an incentive to eliminate the problem.
They want to solve the problem, not...
Eliminate it. Now, in charity, this is, of course, the issue, which I've talked about in the podcast series on charity.
I'll just mention it briefly here.
The reason that you need voluntary association, other than the fact that it's ethical and moral, is that you need to make sure that the voluntary nature of freedom of association acts as an oversight on the problem of perpetuating the problem that every institutional system gets involved in, right? So what you want is competing charities all experimenting with the best ways to help the poor, the best ways to differentiate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
You want a bunch of schools constantly innovating on the best and most efficient way to educate children.
You want people in the medical sphere to be constantly innovating on the best way to prevent ailments rather than to profit from curing them.
And you need to have the incentives in that for that situation.
So, I mean, if I were funding a charity or if I were running a charity, what I would do is I would pay people a base salary plus a bonus for the number of people they got off the rolls.
And of course, you have to make sure that you put in further checks and balances to make sure that people don't just arbitrarily drop people from the rolls to increase their bonus.
You'd have to have it be verified by somebody else.
You'd have to have testimonials.
You'd have to have the people who they got off the rolls vote on whether it was positive or negative for them.
There's lots of things that you can put in.
To make sure that you're not just paying people to tweak the numbers, right?
So if you're running a school, you'd want to pay your teachers based on the marks that their students were getting over time and the amount of university entrance exams that they passed, their SAT scores, whatever.
But you'd also have to make sure that the teacher wasn't just jigging the numbers.
This is common.
You deal with this in sales all the time, particularly software sales.
As I mentioned before, are you stuffing the pipe?
Are you just offering discounts to people which will get them to buy something now, which causes everything to dry up in the future?
Well, there's lots of ways that you deal with this kind of stuff.
This is not brain surgery to figure out.
But you need voluntary association if you want to help people so that you get all of these checks and balances in, so that if you're giving money to a charity and it turns out that their success rate is half some other charity and their overhead is twice as much, that you're going to start shifting resources to that new charity so that the new charity can be more effective.
Or maybe you're very excited about a charity which halves the number of people that it's helping, but then...
You go to their website or you do a search and you find out that everybody who they've helped feels pillaged and destroyed.
If the long-term success of these people isn't really achieved and you want to go with the charities that have worked with people for a year or two and then tracks them for five years and show how successful they are, they've weaned them off support and so on.
Those are the charities you want to deal with because if you find out some charity that is half the people have done it through some sort of harm...
Then you're going to be less inclined to give to that charity, right?
So there's this constant incentive.
Freedom of association breeds optimization.
That's why the free market works so well.
Now, the sort of thesis that I'm going to put forward, which is I guess kind of unusual, but I think worth talking about...
Is that the government social programs, and I'm not talking consciously, this is just, I mean, because the majority of our brain activity goes on below our conscious awareness, this is just an intuition or a skill set or a talent that human beings have to maintain power structures, right?
Because power structures are enormously beneficial from an economic standpoint, right?
There was very little problem breeding among the aristocracy, but a lot of the poor people couldn't make it, right?
It's economic, sorry, biologically it's very advantageous to be at the top of a brutal pyramid of social hierarchy and to shift all the costs of enforcements to other people.
So let's not say that Dick Cheney's kids or Paul Wolfowitz's kids or Tony Blair's kids are going to have a whole lot of trouble getting ahead in life, right?
So the fact that these guys have worked their way to the top, sorry, they have hoored their way to the top, has done quite a bit for the status of their gene pool, right?
As you can look at George W. Bush, where he born to a poor family, would probably be the rather incompetent manager of a mid-level McDonald's rather than where he is right now, which is the rather incompetent manager of a nuclear power.
So there is a biological advantage to these kinds of hierarchical power structures and because human beings are incredibly adaptive and resourceful, we have instincts around perpetuating those power structures because they are so advantageous here.
It's nothing that is sort of a big cabal.
It's not all whiteboarded and reasoned through.
It's just people have an instinct for maintaining their power.
Now, one of the things that is remarkable is that despite the increases in wealth that occur within a capitalist economy, the government never shrinks.
So every time the private sector comes up with a solution, the government should get smaller.
So, for instance, the eBay model of dispute resolution could displace quite a bit of government taxation and control in the area of dispute resolution.
There's lots of other ways in which solutions within the market could get rid of, in a voluntary situation, could get rid of government institutions.
So, of course, the government does all this consumer protection stuff, but I don't go to those sites.
I don't go to the government sites when I want to buy an MP3 player.
I go to look at all the reviews.
I go to look at the user experiences, and that's the way that I get my information on the quality of the product and the safety of the product.
When I want to look up the particular drug, then I go to the internet.
I don't call telehealth or whatever because I just assume that it's the government, so it's going to be sort of incompetent and twisted.
There's lots of ways in which you can get solutions that can displace government power.
They never do, of course. So roads can now – you can have a transponder on your car, but you can track where you go.
That's how I pay for the private road that I use to get to work.
But, of course, it's not like the budget for roads and services.
It's not like that's now expanding into the government area because the government area is protected by force.
So, the basic issue that I'm sort of putting forward here, the basic argument I'm going to put forward here is that the social programs are put in place by the government to protect...
If the problem of poverty is solved, enormous chunks of the government would fall away.
If the problem of education is solved, then enormous sections of the government are going to fall away.
If the problem of dispute resolution and prisons are solved by the free market, then enormous sections of the government would fall away.
If the problem of, say, national defense or even the concept of the nation state were solved by the free market, huge sections of the government would fall away.
So every time that capitalism or freedom comes up with a solution, the government acts swiftly and decisively to ensure that the problem will not be solved.
Because the government survives and flourishes in its evil way based on the continuation and perpetuation of social ailments, ills, problems, and so on.
So when the free market starts generating enough jobs for poor people that the only people who are left in poverty are those who are choosing it, Then the government has to act to perpetuate and increase poverty.
Because the government is there as its justification for taxing you based on its ability to solve the problem of poverty.
Let's just say one example.
And so every time that the free market comes up with a solution that would theoretically reduce the size or requirement for government, then the government must act in order to ensure that the problem perpetuates and gets worse.
So it's because poverty was going down that the social programs were put in place, and they were put in place to protect the size of government.
They were put in place to protect the revenue of government.
They were put in place to ensure that taxpayers felt that government power over them was justified.
Because if the government had not acted in the 1960s to perpetuate the problem of poverty, then poverty would be a non-issue now.
Poverty would be eliminated in all practical senses now.
And if they'd waited too long, then the fact that there was no poverty left would make poverty programs sort of ridiculous.
It would be like the government wants to put forward another big round of smallpox inoculations.
Well, we'd be like, well, smallpox has been dealt with.
What the hell are you people doing? So when the problem of poverty is about to be solved by the free market, the government has to invent this huge problem of poverty Before it's eliminated, right?
So they've still got photographs, they've still got some statistics that show that there are poor people around despite all of the wealth.
The fact that the poverty was about to be solved means that the government has to invent all of this systemic poverty, leap into getting rid of it, which then causes it to perpetuate an increase.
Institutions which are based around, quote, solving problems.
Now, in the government, it's just the cover story, right?
Institutions which are based around solving problems will always have a tendency to work to perpetuate and increase those problems.
And there's nothing that threatens those institutions more than problems that are imminently about to be solved.
And this is a very, very important thing to understand.
And it's how we can really grasp the fact that the wealthiest nation in the history of the world has massive amounts of poverty.
Because the government has stepped in to create that poverty.
And there's a complex interrelationship here.
And this is part of the genius of the power instinct or the power lust within the human soul.
That it's a complex web of things that produce and perpetuate poverty.
So it's a combination of education.
Poor education will tend to do it.
Breaking up a family will tend to do it.
Getting people pregnant when they're young will tend to do it.
Rewarding them for not working or for working intermittently will tend to do it.
There's lots of ways, and not having consequences for crime will tend to do it.
Raising the profits of crime through the war on drugs will tend to do it.
There's lots of ways in which the state can create and perpetuate an underclass, which can grow perpetually and which it can continually use as a justification for raping and pillaging the taxpayer's wallet.
And the genius of the social programs is that they did all of this.
They did all of this.
They were absolutely perfect in the way that they approached creating and maintaining an underclass of people who are poor, who break people's hearts, who are dependent upon the state, who make people feel that there's something unjust in the free market, like the free market that created poverty, because Lord knows there was no poverty before the Industrial Revolution.
So this is something you really have to kind of savor.
It's like an evil but perfectly flavored consomme.
It is a nine-course exquisite meal of corruption.
This is an amazing thing that the state has done to create a wide variety of conditions wherein an underclass can be created and perpetuated, which it can then use to justify further expansions of its power.
And we know this from 9-11, right?
I mean, the government is continually creating problems to justify its own existence.
And every time the free market comes up with something wherein you can solve problems, the government will then create another problem to further cause issues, right?
So when the Soviet Union goes down, there's a sort of decline in state spending on defense for certain reasons.
And then it doesn't take them very long to come up with a bunch of NATO things, peacekeeping missions, and then, of course, now we have 9-11.
And partly this has come about because the Internet has created enough information that a lot of government issues become sort of redundant.
We'll sort of get into that another time.
But the technology revolution has done quite a bit in terms of information sharing.
The technology revolution creates things like transponders, which can track where you go, and which can create a positive environment for private investment in roads and so on.
And we can sort of get into how technology has made large sections of the government redundant because of information sharing.
One example being, of course, that you can very easily find out about jobs in other cities now because of the internet.
You don't need personal knowledge of it.
You can just do a search for any... I mean, these are things that make people's capacity to get jobs that much greater, which means that any charity, the first thing that they would do would be to set this up to get people off the charitable roles and get them to a job in any city if there was nothing available in their own city and so on.
But I really would put this forward as something to mull over.
I think it's very true that...
It certainly is true that the incentive for institutions which, quote, solve problems is for those problems to perpetuate.
Now, in the private sector, it's for them to be managed but not eliminated.
If they get worse, there are going to be problems, right?
But in the public sector, because they're based their taxation on the problems themselves and they don't have any competition, they definitely have an incentive to make all of these things work.
So I would...
I submit to you that if you look at the big picture, and we'll talk about this more another time, if you look at the big picture, you can see that the major expansions in government power were always, always, always preceded by massive increases in productivity within society.
I think this is a very important thing to understand.
So at the end of the 19th century, you had, through the benefits and beneficence of the robber barons, you have the creation of, like in the early 20th century, you have the creation of the Fed, and you have government taking over huge sections of the economy and the progressive movement.
Why? Because the problems which were considered to be problems in the early part of the 19th century were almost completely solved.
And in the middle of the century, everyone was getting educated And that couldn't occur, right?
Everyone was getting educated about freedom, so you had to have, you know, the Civil War, you had to have the creation of public school systems and so on.
And then even the market comes up with more solutions and economic growth continues, so then the government is in danger of becoming redundant from all that standpoint.
And because, you know, people who are better off don't become criminals.
People who are well-educated are productive.
They just don't need state services as much, right?
And so what happens then is you get the creation of the Fed, and in Europe, of course, you get World War I, which cashes in on the public school corruption from the previous generation, but also creates a huge justification for the state, because the free market was really in danger of overwhelming and eliminating the state, especially when you look at the experiment of the United States, where the smallest government produces the least need for government.
That changed pretty quickly.
And then in the post-war period, so the First World War, especially in Europe, creates millions of dependents, right?
All these women and children and broken up and broken down men.
Millions of dependents and so on.
The free market starts to do very well.
It starts to solve these issues again.
So you get the Fed screwing up the money supply, especially in America, which creates the boom, which then creates the bust, which then...
It creates the depression which the state then exacerbates and begins to collect more power to itself this way.
In Europe in particular, the economies were beginning to get better again, and then you get the Second World War, and then you get this huge boom in the post-war period, which is followed by...
The Great Society programs.
So every time you get this expansion of government power, you get a rise in freedom, which the government has to respond to.
So when the Soviet Union fell at the end of the Cold War, there's no threat.
Surely we can reduce the size of government, but then it doesn't take long for them to get involved in peacekeeping missions, followed by provoking all of these problems in the Middle East.
You go around poking the hornet's nest, and then you claim to be shocked when you're stung.
It's always been surprising to me.
And then, of course, now we've got all these problems with terrorism, which is the perfect war.
Never be fought objectively.
And as an internet caption read recently, Bin Laden is still free.
How about you? So this is sort of something to understand.
I'm sure Charles Murray would disagree with me because he thinks these are all sort of well-intentioned people.
And I'm sure that's the cover story, right?
They are well-intentioned people, but there are lots of people who have come out of the social sciences in the 60s who needed something to do.
And they sure as heck weren't going to find a whole lot to do in the private sector because poverty was being eliminated by the free market.
And so what they need to do is they need to all run to the government to arrest the reduction in poverty rates to create systemic poverty, which is what they claimed they were there to fight.
They actually created it. That's the funny thing, right?
But it's not accidental. They all rushed to the government to protect the power of the state and the reason d'etre for the state.
By slowing down the reduction in poverty rates, which is one of the reasons why the government is supposed to exist to help with the poor, you slow down that reduction, you entrench a poverty class, and then you begin to grow it like a farmer with an evil weed that he lives on.
This is what the state does.
So that's sort of my way of looking at it, and I think it can be quite a useful thing to think about.
Certainly let me know what you think. I would appreciate that as well.
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