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July 24, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:55
1708 Why You Are Unemployed -- Part Two
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
This is Why You Were Unemployed, Part 2.
Let's start with some basic statistics to put things in perspective.
83% of US stocks are in the hands of 1% of the people.
61% of Americans, quote, always or usually live paycheck to paycheck, up from 49% in 2008 and 43% in 2007.
This is an evisceration, a gutting of the middle class.
66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to 1% of all Americans.
This is why your salary has not increased or has declined since about 1980.
36% of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
A staggering 43% of Americans have less than $10,000 saved for retirement.
24% of Americans say they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, a 32% increase from 2008.
Only the top 5% of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1.
Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 and 500 to 1.
As of 2007, the bottom 80% of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
The bottom 50% of income earners in the US now collectively own less than 1% of the nation's wealth.
Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17% when compared with 2008.
In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% more than the average worker in the private sector.
The top 1% of US households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
And of course, what kind of negotiating position are you in when you try to get a job after looking for that long?
More than 40% of Americans who are actually employed are now working in service jobs, which are typically very low paying.
For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps.
And the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
In China, a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour, and in Cambodia, a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour, which some people feel is a competition issue.
Approximately 21% of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010, the highest rate in 20 years.
Despite the financial crisis, or I would say because of it, the number of millionaires in the US rose a whopping 16% to 7.8 million in 2009.
The top 10% of Americans now earn about 50% of the national income.
I mean, this is gruesome, my friends.
This is tragic.
This is hideous. This is monstrous.
If this doesn't make you angry, then you have no fuel left in your veins for anything.
If this evisceration of an entire generation's possibilities, both past, present, and future, if this gutting of the middle class, if this radicalization and Sovietization of the wealth spread does not enrage you, doesn't piss you right off, then nothing will in this world.
So what the hell is going on?
The statistics that I quoted you, and I'll put the sources below, are very, very important.
You will always be told by everywhere except me and a few other people, you will always be told that this represents a failure of capitalism, of the free market, of the greed.
People say, ah, it's greed that has caused this.
Or saying that greed has caused problems is like saying gravity has caused a plane crash.
Greed is a constant in human affairs.
Why would it have changed so much recently?
It's not freedom that has failed.
It is not voluntarism that has failed.
It is violence that has failed.
These horrible statistics, these shredded, destroyed lives, your shredded and destroyed life, comes at the end of more than three decades of massive government efforts To smooth out inequalities, economic inequalities in society.
Do you understand? This is at the tail end of a massive multi-trillion dollar government program called Let's Raise the Poor and Let's Lower the Rich.
Let's raise taxes on the rich.
Let's provide better education for the poor.
Let's provide welfare. Let's provide Medicare.
Let's provide Medicaid. Let's provide Social Security.
Let's do all of this to make economic equality shrink and narrow.
Now, anybody who's studied this in any reasonable depth, and anybody who's been through goddamn kindergarten will tell you that violence is not the way to solve complex social problems.
The initiation of force does not solve complex social problems.
Let's say you, in a free society, you can't find a job and you're poor.
Well, if you go and steal $10,000 from someone, it certainly is true that in the short run you've solved your financial problems, but in the long run you've only created more problems for yourself psychologically, emotionally, financially, and so on.
And so, yes, it certainly is true that if you steal money from a whole bunch of people who are better off and you give it to a whole bunch of people who are worse off, in the short run you narrow that gap.
But in the long run, in the long run, All you do is you wake up the rich to the power of the government.
And who is going to have more influence and effect on the government?
The rich or you and I? Come on, it's not even a brain strain to think of the answer, is it?
When the government begins to prey upon the rich in order to bribe the middle class and the poor, in order to purchase votes, all that happens is the rich go, oh...
Political power is interested in me.
I am now suddenly very interested in political power.
And they bend their will and they bend their lobbying efforts and they begin to control the machinery of the state and the violence of coercion and the violence of laws and the violence of taxation.
The rich begin to control it.
Of course they do. Of course they do.
Wouldn't you? And so the end result of all government programs, of all applications of violence, of all applications of violence, It's the exact opposite of its intended goal.
The goal was to raise the poor and to lower the rich and to create a more egalitarian society.
That was the great program of the 1960s.
And now, a mere few decades later, the exact opposite is occurring because that's what happens when you point guns at people.
You get the opposite of what you want in the long run.
Violence works.
It doesn't work at all.
Violence achieves the exact opposite of what you want.
Violence creates a future clusterfrag of galactic proportions.
And we're seeing the effects of that now.
And people will say, "Oh, it's the free market." Oh, it has nothing to do with it.
Government power, government redistribution of income, rules, legislations of every kind, regulations, controls, licenses, forms, fees, protections of this, that, and the other have all exploded massively.
Let me tell you what, this is so important.
Please, please, please keep watching because there's so much misunderstanding about my position, about rational position, and I'm sorry that so many people are pissed off by what I'm saying, but a philosopher only has to make friends with the truth, not with anyone else.
Let me tell you the reality of the world that you live in because you don't say it, you don't see it, you don't see it, but I'm going to help you to see it.
I'm going to help you to see it. After the Second World War, poverty was declining by 1% every year.
I'll put the sources below.
These are valid statistics.
Poverty was declining by 1% every year.
It was massive, massive lifting of people out of poverty.
And then when the social programs went in, that all stopped.
Poverty stopped, of course. Anything you taxed diminishes, everything you subsidize increases.
Tax productivity, buy bad productivity.
Subsidized poverty, hello poverty.
These are just the facts.
You can get mad at me, but these are the facts.
I know that everyone out there is good and I believe that you're all absolutely brilliant.
I really do. I really do.
You're brilliant. You're untrained.
It's okay. But you're brilliant.
So let me tell you the reality of the world that you live in.
The government is a gang of sociopaths.
And what sociopaths do is they exploit you by finding out what you care about.
What do you care about? So if somebody wants to blackmail you, they have to find you something that you care about and threaten that.
If you don't care about anything, you can't be threatened.
So whatever you really care about, the government will say, hey, I can solve that for you because you really care about these people.
So if you care about the poor, the government will say, hey, I'll set up the welfare state.
I'll take care of the poor because you care about the poor.
But they don't care about the poor.
The government doesn't care about the goddamn poor.
If the government cared about the poor, they would have revisited the disastrous effects Of the welfare state, of subsidized housing, of public housing, of absolutely brain-crushing public schools.
They would have been revisited that years ago.
But they don't, because they don't care about the poor.
What they care about is that you care about the poor.
So they can use the poor as a big piñata club to beat the money out of your wallet with.
That's all they care about. Oh, do you care about old people who are living on cat food?
Hey, I'll take care of that for you.
So I will take your money, keep most of it for myself, and dribble a little bit out to keep people dependent on me and buy my votes with your hard-earned money.
Oh, do you care about sick people?
Oh, absolutely. I will set up Medicare and Medicaid for you.
I'll keep the majority of the money for myself and dribble out a little bit so that people become dependent on me and will vote for me.
Are you afraid of other countries?
No problem. No problem.
Bend over, I'm going to extract half your goddamn income to protect you from non-existent enemies or enemies that I have myself invented through my aggressive foreign policy.
Whatever you're afraid of, whatever you love, whatever you care about will be used and manipulated.
By these people, not because they care in the same way that you do about the poor or the sick or the old, but because they know that you care about it and so you will surrender your liberties and your property and your rights and your freedoms to these people because you care so much.
But they don't care. They only care that you care and that they can use that as a crowbar to pry your money, your future, your freedoms out from your twitching hide.
And we can see that evidently the failures of government programs are so omnipresent and universal that the fact that they're continuing means that they were only just an excuse to steal your life to begin with.
That's the first reality.
The second reality is, fuck the Cambodian workers who work for 22 cents an hour.
Do you know why they work for 22 cents an hour?
Because they have no human capital, because they have no skills, because they have no education.
Can you imagine if I graduated with an MBA from Harvard?
And I said, listen, I really want to get a job at this investment bank, but I'm only going to charge them 20 cents an hour because Cambodian garment workers work for 22 cents an hour and I want to undercut them.
I understand that would be a ridiculous thing to say.
Why? Because I would have a huge amount of human capital in me with this Harvard MBA. Let's just say it's objectively valuable or whatever, right?
But because I would have this human capital, because I would have these skills, right?
You don't see a surgeon competing with a waiter for the same job, because a surgeon has skills which are economically much more valuable.
Right? So the fact that people with no skills and no education work cheaper overseas has no bearing whatsoever.
On the wages of American workers.
But I'll tell you what does have bearing on the wages of American workers.
The fact that the government swallows you into its monolithic, pseudo-educational government for 12 or more years.
For 12 or more years, from the age of 5 to the age of 18, you are in the government training camps.
And what the fuck are you trained in?
A little bit of algebra, a little bit of math, read a couple of books.
Ooh, don't forget, the government saved you from Nazism and the Great Depression, because the government makes things better for blacks, and the government makes things better for women, and the government is necessary because we need roads and national defense.
We're taught just bullshit, lies, and propaganda.
You weren't taught any real skills to actually compete in the world.
You weren't taught any entrepreneurial skills.
You weren't taught how to run a business or how to be a good employee or how to go for an interview or how to get a job or how to write business reports.
You weren't taught how to do accounting.
You weren't taught any of these things.
You could have been taught virtually all of them by the time you graduated from high school.
You want to know what public school is?
Public school is a holding pen to keep young, hungry and ambitious people away from competing With fat, old, middle-aged plumbers and lawyers and accountants.
It's a holding pen to keep you out of the market so that people can raise their rates without being competed for by young people who don't have families and have lower living expenses.
No kids, right?
I mean, do you not think that within six months any...
Average 14-year-old could be a highly competent plumber and electrician.
Of course they could be. But you want to try and set up shop as being a plumber or an electrician or anything like that?
No. You get shot unless you join the union and spend years slaving away at low-rent wages for bullshit knowledge that you could acquire 100 times faster.
So the fact that you've graduated at the age of 18, after 12 or more years...
Being educated by a government with virtually no useful skills in business whatsoever.
That's why you can't make any goddamn money.
If you had spent 12 years learning stuff that was actually useful, why doesn't the government teach you how to negotiate?
Why doesn't the government teach you about contract law?
Why doesn't the government teach you accounting?
If you wanted. So if you were interested in being an accountant, you could start becoming an accountant at the age of 12.
Why not? We had royal court astronomers in the middle ages who were 11.
Children and teenagers can do the most incredible and amazing things.
I got my first job when I was 11.
I've been working ever since.
Nothing wrong with that.
You see, you can't be taught any of these things.
Because if you're taught these things, if you're taught amazing skills, Really economically valuable and important skills, the moment you come out of school, you're going to start undercutting the wages of people who voted when you were still a teenager.
And so they're not going to let the government do that.
Imagine! Imagine that the government says, hey, you know what?
We are going to institute a plumbing program for people who want to become plumbers, and you can start when you're 12, and you can graduate when you're 15.
You can go and be a plumber. What do you think the Plumbers Union would do?
I don't know. They'd riot, they'd boycott, they'd lobby, they'd shut that thing down in a moment.
See, that's what school is for, is to keep you penned in so that you don't learn anything useful, so that by the time you come out, you don't have the skills to compete with other people.
That's what government schools are for.
They're not to train you, they're to keep you away from competing with other people, to the point where your brain is so bored and fried and futzed up that you can barely put two coherent thoughts together.
I don't mean you, I mean the guy behind you.
But that's why you're unemployed.
It's more than just taxes and regulations and so on.
It's... Why do you need a job that pays you $20,000 a year?
$20,000 a year was a billionaire's fortune 100 years ago.
It's because the dollar's lost 96, 97% of its value.
Because this evil, monstrous, blood-sucking, tentacled cash monster called the Private Federal Reserve...
Has inflated money and blown away the currency and sold you out to the Chinese for the sake of a few dollars in the here and now.
You can't be employed because you have to charge so much because you need to live on the scraps of after-tax income.
And if you try not to do that, you risk being thrown in jail.
Violence doesn't work.
Violence doesn't work. Violence doesn't work.
Violence always achieves the opposite of its intended effect.
The violence that was supposed to bring greater prosperity has killed the prosperity that was already growing.
There was no minimum wage in the 19th century and wages rose multiple times.
A dual income family now earns less after-tax income than a single earning family a generation ago.
And that, of course, is so that you have to hand your children over to the government For even more and more and more indoctrination about the virtue of institutionalized violence.
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