1488 True News 58 - Stop Defending Freedom! Part 2
How to shift the burden of proof to a statist.
Oct. 20, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:16
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Maine Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing very well. This is Please Stop Defending Freedom, Part 2. | |
| Libertarians, voluntarists, those who prefer non-violent solution to complex social problems such as poverty and the provision of health care for the needy and the old and income support for those who have undergone particular hardships in their life. | |
| We face a lot of flack from what seem pretty much like pompous know-it-alls because we are perceived to not be caring about the poor. | |
| That when we say that the welfare state is a moral evil and a productive catastrophe, Then we said, well, then we want the poor to die in the streets, we want the old to starve, and so on. | |
| And I think it's worth, if you're faced with this perspective, and I'm sure that if you argue for peaceful solutions to social problems, that you will face this perspective. | |
| I think it's really, really important to ask the following question, which is, what's going to happen to the poor? | |
| I mean, we could talk about any group, but let's just talk about the poor. | |
| What's going to happen to the poor when the government runs out of money? | |
| Almost all governments in the world are running out of money, but we'll focus on the United States, just because this is where I think the greatest traditions of liberty live still in the world in many ways, and where the problems are so glaringly obvious that they don't really require much proof or discussion of, you know, the trends of the debt and the deficits and so on. | |
| What is going to happen to the poor when the government runs out of money? | |
| What is going to happen to the old? | |
| What is going to happen to the sick? | |
| What is going to happen to the children when the government runs out of money? | |
| Everybody wants the poor to be better off. | |
| Everybody wants sick people to get healthcare as much as humanly possible. | |
| Everybody wants these good things in society. | |
| The only question comes down to, are we going to provide these things through force, or are we going to provide them through voluntary interaction? | |
| Now, the problem with providing things through force is that I believe that violence It's the same as heroin, right? | |
| Insofar as violence will give you a brief respite from your ailments, right? | |
| So if you're a sad, depressed, or really miserable human being, taking heroin will give you a brief respite, but then the problem is there's a crash Wherein the consequences are worse than if you had simply patiently worked on building up your own happiness, confronting your demons, getting therapy, whatever it is that you need to do to become a happier person. | |
| When you take that shortcut route of a drug, you end up with more problems than when you started, although there does seem to be A high that is convincing for a short period of time, right? | |
| So somebody who's on heroin, when you say, no, no, no, you really shouldn't be taking heroin, you should go and see a therapist to get yourself right with yourself, they will say, well, you're crazy, I'm doing great, you know, you just want me to be miserable, right? | |
| You get all these kinds of things. And it's exactly the same when we see society from the perspective of voluntarism and violence, when we see a society addicted to violence to solving its problems, In the form of the welfare state and Medicare and Medicaid old age security, using guns to herd money and resources from one section of the population to another through this highly corrupt means of mob rule democracy. | |
| When we see this, we say, you know, this is going to crash and it's going to be much worse than if we had simply patiently built up the economy, built up the wealth in society so that those who wanted to have more money or more resources, so to say, for their retirement would have every available means and charity and so on would fill in the rest for those who'd been in Providence. | |
| Who could get help that way? | |
| And we've sort of been making this argument for many, many years, and the statistics certainly back us up if you look at the post-war period. | |
| The percentage of those under the poverty line was dropping by one percentage point a year until Lyndon Johnson's Great Society came into being, and then the rates of poverty decline stopped, right? | |
| So there was slowly and with difficulty at times, and certainly imperfectly. | |
| The problem of involuntary poverty was being solved. | |
| I mean, there is voluntary poverty, you know, like people who quit high-flying jobs as software executives to do crazy internet podcasts and videos on philosophy. | |
| There is a voluntary kind of poverty, which is not a problem. | |
| But there is involuntary poverty, people who can't pay their bills, people who can't put an adequate roof over their children's heads, and those things definitely need to be addressed within society. | |
| But when you do it through violence, through force, you will gain a temporary alleviation of the symptoms. | |
| And the problem is that in the long run, things will be much, much worse. | |
| A thief can go and steal $10,000 rather than get a minimum wage job, and he will be, you know, months and months of work will be in his hands in a single moment. | |
| But the problem is that he's not developing a work ethic, he's not developing a resume, he's not developing those kinds of habits, and so he's going to be that much more likely to continue. | |
| To steal. Although he's gonna, you know, when he's got that $10,000 in his fist, he's gonna dance past the guy sitting in the drive-through window at McDonald's saying, you know, nana nana boo boo, I've got the money and you're a sucker working for minimum wage. | |
| But if you look at these people 10 or 15 years down the road, it's a big problem, right, for the thief versus the guy who's, you know, doing the slog and starting the work and putting in the time. | |
| So, in the same way, when there's a sort of slow alleviation of the problem of poverty through volunteerism, through a general growth in the economy by having a small government or, you know, ideally, of course, a stateless society, but when you have that alleviation of poverty, what happens is people say, well, Now we have so much wealth in society, we can just get rid of the rest of poverty by taking the wealth, right? | |
| It's like, I'm doing so well in therapy, I can now take heroin without negative consequences because I'm so much happier now than I was before. | |
| But you take heroin, you backslide, you drop out of therapy, and eventually things are just even worse than they were before. | |
| And so when you look at the problem of poverty and you say, well, let's get a big government agency which takes 70% of the overhead and very little of the money gets to the poor. | |
| Let's end up with people getting stuck in poverty because you don't have to have a two-parent family to raise kids and you don't have to have a job. | |
| And Charles Murray writes about this, I think, very eloquently when he describes the different financial incentives that came in after the welfare state came in for poor people. | |
| That they were better off having children and being on welfare than they were getting jobs and all that kind of stuff. | |
| Not everyone doesn't do that, but enough people do it that it becomes a significant problem. | |
| So you have a multi-generational system that is in place where people's work ethics have decayed, their initiative has decayed, their confidence has decayed. | |
| Every muscle you don't exercise gets weaker and more flaccid. | |
| And when you have generations stuck in this underclass of the welfare state, you have a big problem. | |
| Because when the welfare state ends, as it will, right, there's always a crash. | |
| Violence will produce a high and then a crash. | |
| And the welfare state has produced a high. | |
| Initially, it was like, wow, look how quickly the poverty rate is going down. | |
| We, you know, look how happy I am now that I've shot up the smack. | |
| But the problem is, of course, that there is a crash. | |
| You entrench special interest groups, you get people stuck in poverty, you get massive bureaucratic overheads that really want to have a financial incentive to keep the poor. | |
| And the more cynical among us might actually say, and I've certainly thought of this myself, the more cynical among us might actually say that, unconsciously perhaps, to put it as nicely as possible, the ruling classes, when the problem of poverty was being solved, the ruling classes Stepped in to make sure it would never go away so that they could continue to justify their predations upon the general population, | |
| right? If the problem of poverty is solved, you know, it's never perfectly solved, but if it's solved as much as we could imagine it being productively solved, which is where the free market and volunteerism and charity was taking it, Then there's that much less reason for the state, right? | |
| So they wanted to make sure the poverty wouldn't go away, so they put in the welfare state and created this permanent underclass of poor people, which is another reason why they don't improve the schools, right? | |
| I mean, they don't improve the schools because perceptive, intelligent reasoning and questioning and confident, well-educated, really good thinkers would not put up with state predations in the way that they do. | |
| And it's another reason why some of the states don't ban corporal punishment, because without corporal punishment, they can't get the cops, the people who end up being cops and soldiers and so on. | |
| So the ruling classes very much move. | |
| Again, I'm not saying this is a bunch of people in a smoky room. | |
| People have a great instinct for ruling over others. | |
| It's a very productive thing to do from a biological standpoint to be a parasite upon the host of the middle classes. | |
| And so, the cynical might say, I'm not saying there's any proof for it, but they might say that just as the problem of poverty was about to be solved, the government came in and ensured that it was going to continue and grow, and that is why they did that in order to maintain their power, right? So I think it's really, really important to ask that question of people when they say, well, if you don't want the welfare state, you want people to starve in the streets. | |
| So ask that question and be persistent. | |
| Well, what is going to happen to the millions and millions of people who are on welfare when the government runs out of money? | |
| What is going to happen to them? | |
| What is going to happen to all the people in old age security, social security, old age pensions, when the government runs out of money? | |
| Right? What is going to happen to these people? | |
| And really push for an answer to that question, because it's a really, really important question, because we're always accused of not caring about people. | |
| I mean, I came from a very, very poor background. | |
| I haven't seen this stuff for many, many years up close. | |
| It is brutal what the effects that this stuff has on the poor, the welfare state and so on has on the poor. | |
| And when the government runs out of money, and it will, anything which mathematically cannot continue, lo and behold, will not continue. | |
| When the government runs out of money, what is going to happen to these people who have no history of work, no job skills, you know, three kids under six years old because they can survive that way, and they've made their life choices based on this belief that welfare is going to continue. | |
| What is going to happen when it is cut significantly? | |
| Say, well, they'll get a job. | |
| Well, but the problem is they can't get jobs because most of the low-skilled jobs have been moved offshore because of, you know, a variety of reasons like high minimum wages and unions and, you know, the bad kinds of unions, not the voluntary kinds of unions, the state kind of unions. | |
| So there are no jobs available for these people. | |
| What is going to happen to them when the money for public housing runs out, when the money for welfare runs out, when the schools can no longer function? | |
| What is going to happen to the poor when the government runs out of money, when you have generations of people addicted to the blood money of state largesse? | |
| What is going to happen when that runs out? | |
| And it's going to run out. | |
| That is incontrovertible. | |
| It will absolutely be within a lifetime. | |
| It will very likely be within the next five years, probably within the next three. | |
| Things are going to hit the wall, right? | |
| So what is going to happen to these people? | |
| And I think that's a really, really important question to To ask. | |
| Because societies like people, sadly, in the absence of reason, in the absence of philosophy, in the absence of wisdom and self-knowledge, you simply will only change because you hit bottom. | |
| This is how it works with addicts, right, as far as I understand it. | |
| If they're not willing to face up to their demons but simply self-medicate them with drugs. | |
| They will not change. They will only change when they hit bottom. | |
| And so I think it's really important, again, to stop defending freedom and to stop accepting that the status quo of statism either is productive or is going to continue. | |
| What is going to happen to the poor people, to the sick, to the needy, to the old, to those who cannot economically fend for themselves to some degree because of the state? | |
| What is going to happen to those people when the state runs out of money? | |
| I think then, the compassion of voluntarism, the care and concern for the needy, that is represented by voluntarism, by non-violent solutions to social problems, which are continual, right? | |
| You can actually continue a non-violent solution to a social problem. | |
| You can never continue a violent solution to a social problem. | |
| So I think the compassion of voluntarists needs to come first and foremost, and I think to do that we have to stop accepting that the state system is moral or productive. | |
| We have to accept and repeatedly amplify that the state system simply cannot and will not continue. |
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