1857 Freedomain Radio - Schooled in Wisconsin!
The grim facts behind the massive protests to come. Iources: http://www.fdrurl.com/wisconsin
Feb. 22, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:24
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| Time | Text |
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| This is Schooled in Wisconsin, the truth behind the protests. | |
| You can check out more philosophy shows at freedomainradio.com. | |
| So, we're going to compare private and public sector unions. | |
| Let's look at some basic economics. | |
| This is the theory behind private sector unions. | |
| So you have a bunch of Workers, and the workers have wage demands. | |
| They, like everybody, want to be paid more. | |
| And you have the capitalist... | |
| Oh, hang on, wait, let's... | |
| There we go, let's give him a monocle. | |
| You have the capitalist, and the capitalist, in his hot-blooded pursuit of profit, wants to keep the wage demands of the workers down, because the less he can pay his workers, the more he can make in profit. | |
| Now, because the capitalist is the employer and the workers are the employees, the capitalist is perceived to have a disproportionate amount of power. | |
| Therefore, the workers need to get together and have collective actions so that they can avoid the downward pressure from the drive for profit. | |
| And that's perfectly fine as far as it goes morally and philosophically and ethically. | |
| That's all good stuff as long as you don't use the initiation of force or fraud to force people into a union. | |
| Why not? Band of brothers gather together and fight the capitalist. | |
| Good for you. The problem is that when you get to a public sector union, there's some real challenges with the theory, right? | |
| So you got a bunch of workers here, they're I guess working on the roads, and they have upward pressure of wages because they want more wages and benefits like everybody does. | |
| And you have a politician. | |
| Now, the politician doesn't have the profit motive. | |
| The politician doesn't have the same drive to keep public sector union pay down for a number of reasons. | |
| First of all, we'll get to this later. | |
| He's dependent upon union contributions, particularly if he's a Democrat. | |
| For his re-election campaign. | |
| And secondly, he doesn't have personal fiscal responsibility or legal responsibility for deficits and so on. | |
| So there's no downward pressure. | |
| And because there's no profit according to the theory of unionization, there really shouldn't be any need for unions. | |
| Also, because unions generally have a legal monopoly on the provision of services, then if the politician goes against the unions, it severely disrupts the economy and his chances of re-election go down. | |
| So... This is one of the reasons why public sector unions get more and more benefits. | |
| But let's look at the political economics, or you could also say the money laundering. | |
| So public sector workers, they have to pay, you know, $700 to $1,000 a year in union dues, and most of that money, I think 95%, goes to the Democratic Party. | |
| So all of this money It's flowing up to the union bosses. | |
| Now the union bosses then transfer some portion of that money to the politician. | |
| And the politician, in return for getting elected, gives money to the union workers, who then can pay more to the union boss, who can then give more to the politician. | |
| Now this money is all coming from the taxpayer, which is why you see a diminishment of growth in the private sector and a huge increase in the public sector. | |
| This is inescapable in terms of its logic. | |
| So let's look at Wisconsin, in particular the teacher's strike or the teacher's action. | |
| Look, two-thirds of Wisconsin public schools, eighth graders, cannot read proficiently, despite the fact that Wisconsin has the highest per-pupil spending in the Midwest. | |
| So it is not a shortage of money, and this is catastrophic in terms of education. | |
| So in real dollars, from 1998 to 2008, Wisconsin public schools increased per-pupil spending. | |
| By $4,245, this did not add a single point to the reading scores of their 8th graders. | |
| This is a significant increase in the amount of money spent on education with no corresponding increase in even the pretty crappy government reading scores. | |
| So they say two-thirds of Wisconsin can't read proficiently. | |
| This can't read proficiently according to government standards. | |
| You know, go back 100 to 150 years before Government education and, I mean, you can look at those textbooks and see just how much dumbing down there is. | |
| Try giving those students tests from when there was private education in America, say the 1860s, and see how well they would do. | |
| In 2008, federal government provided $669.6 million in subsidies to public schools in Wisconsin. | |
| This is, of course, to keep the teachers' forced union dues to flow towards politicians. | |
| The best in the nation, Connecticut, still had 58% of 8th graders scoring below proficiency. | |
| So it's really, really bad overall. | |
| This is just terrible. Those who know the system best generally take their kids out of it. | |
| So nationwide public school teachers are almost twice as likely to choose private schools for their own children. | |
| Isn't that interesting? | |
| In Philadelphia, 44% of the teachers put their kids in private schools. | |
| In Cincinnati, 41%. | |
| Chicago, 39%. | |
| Rochester, In New York, 38%. | |
| San Francisco, Oakland, 34%. | |
| And 33% in New York City and the New Jersey suburbs. | |
| Isn't that interesting? | |
| And those who run the system, they also tend to keep their kids away from it. | |
| 37% of representatives and 45% of senators in the 110th Congress sent their children to private schools. | |
| Now, this is all self-reporting, so it's probably a low number. | |
| This is almost four times the rate of the general population. | |
| 96% of Democrats who practiced their own school choice by sending their kids to private school voted against a voucher program that would give poor families the right to do the same thing. | |
| Ugh! Hypocrisy, doesn't it? | |
| Just tastes like batteries. Here's a quote, and all of the sources will be in the links below. | |
| If all of the members who exercised school choice for their own children had supported school choice in policy, every major legislative effort in recent years to give parents school choice would have passed. | |
| But you see, public school education is for you, to keep you in the lower classes, not for the rich. | |
| Alright, so this is a nationwide problem in terms of state deficits. | |
| There's a $140 billion shortfall in fiscal year 2012. | |
| California's got a shortfall of $25.4 billion, almost 30% of the fiscal year 2011 budget. | |
| Illinois $15 billion, 44% of the fiscal year 2011 budget. | |
| Nevada $1.5 billion, which is 45.2% of the budget. | |
| New Jersey $10.5 billion, 37.4% of the budget. | |
| Texas $13.4 billion, 31.5% of the budget. | |
| So it's a $140 billion shortfall. | |
| The annual military budget of the US is about $700 billion. | |
| It's five times the total deficit of the US states. | |
| But do not hold your breath for the empire to come to the rescue of the poorer. | |
| Unfunded liabilities. This is the great elephant in the room when you're talking about US debts and deficit. | |
| It completely dwarfs any of the numbers that are floating around now. | |
| The state's unfunded obligations mean stuff that you've promised to your workers and to others that you don't have the money to pay for. | |
| So the state's unfunded obligations were 22% of the U.S. GDP. And remember, GDP includes government workers who are net takers from the system, not deliverers to the system. | |
| All but 10 states and the District of Columbia have total adjusted unfunded liabilities above 15% of their state GDP. Four states, Alaska, Hawaii, New Jersey, and Ohio, have adjusted unfunded liabilities above 35% of their state GDP. The U.S. unfunded liabilities as a whole, | |
| this is almost exclusively Social Security and Medicare, total amount of the unfunded liability comes out to just over $100 trillion, trillion, trillion dollars, or approximately $33,000 for every man, woman, and child. | |
| In the country and you spread that, I guess you rather concentrate that to people who are actually contributing to the economy through free market productivity and it is a ridiculously unpayable sum. | |
| The private net worth of all Americans together is estimated at just over 50 trillion dollars by the Federal Reserve. | |
| So you can see there's a little bit of a problem, but this isn't the whole story. | |
| How many people are actually paying into the system? | |
| Economist Gary Schilling has calculated that 58% of the US population is dependent on the government for major parts of their income. | |
| 1950, this was just 29%, so it's almost doubled. | |
| Including teachers, soldiers, bureaucrats and other government employees, welfare and social security recipients, government pensioners, public housing beneficiaries and people who work for government contractors. | |
| By 2018, Schilling estimates an astounding 67% of Americans could be dependent on the government for their livelihood. | |
| This is absolutely unsustainable. | |
| So I don't have any particularly great endings other than the ride is over. | |
| I mean, I understand that it must be frustrating and frightening. | |
| And enraging for the people in the public sector to recognize just the degree to which the cancer has overgrown the body politic. | |
| But this is all wildly unsustainable, and I think that we need to come together and try and support each other to recognize and understand the reality of what is occurring, and to really look at what is going to have to happen to the U.S. economy to restore to any kind of health. | |
| And the sooner we do this, of course, and I say we as a Canadian, because yeah, we're We actually have a higher per capita debt up here. |
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