July 24, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:59
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| This is Why You Are Unemployed Part III. One thing that is really hard to understand simply because it's never been explained to you and there's very obvious reasons why it's never been explained to you. | |
| The moment I explain it to you, you will see. | |
| One of the reasons that is very hard to understand exactly why statism and taxation and hyper-regulation and over-complication and trade barriers and tariffs and forcible union contracts and the predations of the public sector and fiat currency why that makes everybody in the long run so catastrophically poor and you are poor you are absolutely in the red no matter what your assets are unless you're a millionaire because of the national debt that has been written in the blood of your future Let me explain to you why statism produces such grinding poverty in the long run and why it's so tragic and ridiculous to imagine that violence can solve the problem of poverty and a lack of education and a lack of security in old age and so on. | |
| You know that when you go for a job, you need to factor in your after-tax income, right? | |
| So if you want to make $30,000, you have to ask for $50,000, and this depends on where you are. | |
| Maybe it's $45,000, maybe even it's $40,000 in certain areas, but you have to ask for a salary over and above what you need to live on because so much of it is going to be taken away by the state. | |
| But that's something your employer has to pay, right? | |
| So a 30% taxation rate on income simply means 30% fewer workers will be hired. | |
| It's not a direct correlation, but more or less it means that salary has to go to the government rather than to additional workers. | |
| So there is one very powerful source of unemployment. | |
| And then, of course, most people have a sales tax on whatever it is that they purchase, and they have taxes on gasoline and cigarettes and liquor and just about everything else that you can imagine. | |
| The only tax that is not really a tax is when you tip your waiter. | |
| So, we all understand that what we're left with After the various forms of taxation, and there's property taxes, and you don't, of course, escape those if you live in an apartment or a flat. | |
| In fact, per square foot, despite the fact that it's easier to supply electricity and water to an apartment, per square foot, it's a higher property taxes on apartments. | |
| It's just built into the rent on apartments rather than But you've got to pay your property taxes for your houses. | |
| It just doesn't end. | |
| It feels like every time you get your head above water, another statist, wet concrete log is tied to your legs. | |
| So, when you're going for a job, you have to say, well, I have to pay $1,000 a month in rent, but what proportion of that is property taxes? | |
| Well, again, it varies, but it's quite significant. | |
| And you have to say, well, I have to buy food or I have to buy clothes or I have to have some entertainment and that. | |
| I have to calculate the taxes on that. | |
| So a lot of your salary requirements are hyperinflated because of taxation requirements. | |
| But that's just the beginning of it because the employer also has to pay property taxes. | |
| On the factory or the office building where you are, he's had to pay sales tax and other kinds of taxes on everything that he's bought for the office, which further reduces his ability to actually pay employees. | |
| And that is still only the beginning. | |
| It gets worse and worse from there. | |
| Because if you go and buy, let's say you're a business owner and I've been in this situation, so you're a business owner and you go and buy a printer. | |
| Well, how much do you have to pay for the printer? | |
| Well, you have to pay for the actual raw materials and labor and some capital costs for building the printer, but you also have to pay for the printer the taxes for the employees who build the printer. | |
| Do you understand? So it adds at least 30 or 40 percent to the price of the printer. | |
| And then there's property taxes, which can add another 5 or more percent to the price of your printer, and on and on and on. | |
| Now, most economic transactions have at least a dozen steps from the very beginning to the final product. | |
| And in each one of these steps, 30-40% or more has to go to the government rather than to each person. | |
| This is a cumulative effect. | |
| So you understand that by the time it gets to you, the actual money that is going between you and the person who originated whatever you're buying is pennies on the dollar. | |
| People, you're living on table scraps! | |
| You're living on nothing! | |
| You're living on fluff! You're living on dandelions! | |
| You're living off what happens to fall off the tables of your masters. | |
| That's why it's so ridiculous to use the state to solve the problem of poverty. | |
| I'll put the link to the spreadsheet at the bottom if you want. | |
| A friend of mine helped me with some calculations that on a mere four or five step process, The money that changes hands is only 30 and a bit percent of the actual sum. | |
| In other words, without the taxation between you and somebody, only five steps removed in an economic process, and that's not taking into account all the taxes, of course, and it's taking into account none of the national debt. | |
| In a mere five-step process, you would be almost three and a half times richer. | |
| Your dollar would be worth three and a half times more without this constant shaving-off decapitation of your economic interaction through taxation. | |
| And that's what's so ridiculous about using the state. | |
| The state takes its pound of flesh on every single transaction. | |
| So by the time it's gone to half a dozen or a dozen transactions, you're looking at ten times or more the money that you would otherwise need in a non-status society. | |
| And that's how you know in a free society People would not be poor. | |
| If you had three or five or ten times the actual purchasing power of your money right now, would you consider yourself poor? | |
| Let's say you were making $20,000, when in a free society, you would almost immediately go to $100,000 or $200,000 of purchasing power because this continual Extraction of taxation on every step of the economic process would be taken away. | |
| Your wealth would immediately go up multiple times. | |
| Your purchasing power would go up multiple times. | |
| This is not even counting the fact that there'd be no inflation in a free society because the first thing a private currency provider would have to do would be to provide a stable currency for people to even be interested in adopting it. | |
| So I just really, really wanted to point this out, that you're not allowed to get a job because your employer has to pay so much in taxes, both to his employees to get the building and everything he buys and everything, his accountant is another overhead that's ridiculous, tax lawyers, tax accountants and so on. | |
| This is why you don't have a job, and this is how it's so ridiculous to think that you can use the guns of the state to bring about a utopia, to bring about plenty for the poor. |
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