June 11, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:48
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| Hi everybody, it's Devan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing very well. So, false dichotomy time, my brothers and sisters. | |
| The budget deficit in the United States. | |
| So what is being talked about here? | |
| Well, we're either going to raise the debt ceiling, you see, or we're going to slash Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. | |
| These are the only two options that are presented. | |
| And whenever the government and the mainstream media provides you with two options, neither of which is particularly palatable, You always know that there's a third option, or more, that is much more palatable to the majority, though not palatable to the minority, that is not being talked about. | |
| And I'm here, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, to talk about it with you, my favorite, favorite people in the whole wide world. | |
| So what am I talking about? | |
| Well, we have many, many more options when it comes to the size and power and fiscal irresponsibility of government than either borrowing more or slashing spending. | |
| These are not the only two options available, and the fact that nobody's talking to you about the other options is pretty telling. | |
| So don't be caught by false dichotomy planet. | |
| Break the orbit and come to the deep seas and stars of philosophy. | |
| I'll give you one example. | |
| So, what about just having a flat tax and cutting regulations? | |
| Let me give you some figures that hopefully will put this in perspective. | |
| The annual cost of federal regulations is just federal regulations alone in the United States increased to more than 1.75 trillion dollars in 2008. | |
| If every U.S. household paid an equal share of the federal regulatory burden, Each would have owed almost $16,000 in 2008. | |
| By comparison, the federal regulatory burden exceeds by 50% private spending on health care, which equaled $10,000 per household in 2008. | |
| Now, all of these regulations are quite uneven. | |
| Let's play Anarchy 101 and ask ourselves whether regulations are more punitive to large businesses who contribute a lot of money to political campaigns or, shall we say, to small businesses who contribute relatively less? | |
| Bing, bing, bing! Let's find out, shall we? | |
| Ah, here we go. The small businesses, firms employing fewer than 20 employees, bear the largest burden of federal regulations. | |
| As of 2008, small businesses face an annual regulatory cost of $10,585 per employee, which is 30% higher than the regulatory cost facing large firms, with $500 or more. | |
| Ah, do you see? | |
| Regulations favor the large companies at the expense of the small companies. | |
| My goodness, what would you expect from a decaying democratic fascistic state teetering on the edge of collapsing on its stilts? | |
| So this regulatory burden per household far more than the income tax. | |
| It's the GDP of Italy that is being paid to comply with these crazy and ridiculous federal regulations. | |
| So the Federal Register stands at 81,405 pages. | |
| See, people question how a state or society could work. | |
| I mean, just look at these numbers, people. | |
| This is insane. 81,405 pages. | |
| That's some good bedtime reading. | |
| In 2010, federal agencies issued over 3,500 more rules. | |
| Amazingly. Proposed rules in the Federal Register have surged from 2044 and 2009 to 2439 in 2010, a jump of almost 20%, almost 20% more regulatory rules in one year during a time of extreme financial crisis. | |
| Anyway. So, regulatory costs exceed all 2008 corporate pre-tax profits, right? | |
| So regulatory costs, remember, $1.75 trillion, and all of corporate pre-tax profits were only $1.463 trillion. | |
| They dwarf corporate income taxes of $1.57 billion. | |
| Regulatory costs tower over the estimated 2010 individual income taxes of $936 billion by 87%. | |
| It's nearly double the cost to comply with these crazy regulations as people pay in taxes. | |
| So do you need to raise taxes in order to solve the deficit problem? | |
| Of course not. Regulatory costs of 1.75 trillion, get this, absorb almost 12% of the US gross domestic product, which was 14.649 trillion in 2010. | |
| Almost 12% of the GDP is going into complying with almost 82,000 pages of regulations. | |
| I'm not going to say it again, it's too obvious. | |
| So if you combine regulatory costs With 2010 budget outlays, the federal government whose share of the entire economy now reaches 35.5%. | |
| So, let's look at healthcare regulatory costs. | |
| There have been estimated references for all of this will be below. | |
| Almost $400 billion in healthcare regulatory costs. | |
| Twice the people die from the effects of regulations than from a lack of health care insurance. | |
| As you understand, this is what the state does. | |
| Double the people die from regulatory problems than from a lack of access to medical insurance. | |
| And that's really quite astounding. | |
| So the tax code, I mean, it's crazy, crazy. | |
| $338 billion per year in tax compliance costs. | |
| And all of these is not just costs, but it's opportunity costs, things that could have been done with the money otherwise. | |
| We're talking about a couple of trillion, two and a half trillion, three trillion, who knows? | |
| But it's a massive amount of money just complying with a bunch of crazy-ass regulations. | |
| Now, I'm not saying that we need no oversight in the economy, but the oversight should be provided by individuals, by private agencies, voluntarily, because that's the only way To keep these mountains of regulations from growing and growing and growing is to have the efficiency principle of the free market cut them back over and over again. | |
| Because regulations and bureaucratic assholes are like fungi. | |
| They're not really fun guys. | |
| Anyway, let's not get lost in language tricks. | |
| They will continue to grow until paired back by free market competition. | |
| So, it costs over 11% of the total tax collections to comply. | |
| Total tax to compliance, $163 billion in 2008. | |
| That's for individuals, other agencies like corporations, almost $338 billion per year. | |
| I mean, it's sad, but it's funny. | |
| The tax code is huge. | |
| It's almost 4 million words. | |
| It's constantly a moving target. | |
| There have been more than 4,000 changes in the tax law over the past decade and 579 last year alone. | |
| Nobody, nobody understands it. | |
| And there's other stupid shit that goes on, right? | |
| So a car made with parts from the US and Canada crosses the border six or seven times during production, incurring compliance costs on each pass. | |
| In contrast, a fully built car imported from Asia. | |
| Faces those same costs only once. | |
| Only once. All right. Let's move to the middle, shall we? | |
| So just a tiny little wrap-up. | |
| See, you're not talking... Nobody's talking about this stuff, right? | |
| Nobody's talking about cutting all of this stuff. | |
| And I'll give you the basic reasons why. | |
| First of all, this focuses on the government rather than making us fight amongst each other, right? | |
| So if they can threaten Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid, Then they turn the tax livestock on each other in a baying, feral mass of shark attack splashing. | |
| And that's what they want. If we fight amongst each other, then we don't look at a master's. | |
| They throw a few scraps down on the livestock floor and we go and eat those, and then we don't look at the actual hand that rules the rudder of society. | |
| So that's productive. | |
| Secondly, a government is about providing benefits in a concentrated fashion to the minority at the expense of the majority. | |
| At the expense of the majority. | |
| Simple example. Simple example. | |
| So if I can pass a law that everyone in Canada has to send me a dollar a year, then I get 30 million dollars a year. | |
| Whereas everyone in Canada loses a dollar a year. | |
| I have $30 million worth of incentive to keep this law going. | |
| Everyone else has a dollar's worth of incentive to stop it. | |
| So obviously the law is going to keep going. | |
| So the government is about stealing from the majority and concentrating benefits on the minority. | |
| And so if you put in some sort of flat tax or if you cut these regulations or eliminate these regulations, then any politician who proposes that simply isn't going to get campaign contributions. | |
| Or if they do, they're not going to get elected. | |
| It's like trying to join the mafia in order to turn it into a charity. | |
| That's not the point. The point of the government is to create moral falsehoods, false dichotomies, to turn the livestock against each other so that the pillaging of the majority for the sake of the minority can continue. | |
| That's democracy in a nutshell, as I've been arguing for many, many years. | |
| So, you know, the next time you turn on the news and you see this, well, are we going to raise the debt ceiling or are we going to cut these entitlement programs? | |
| Well, just ask yourself, Why are any other options not on the table, which do not harm the majority of people, which only harm a minority of concentrated influences of power, because those concentrated influences of power are the only reason we have a damn government. | |
| So their interests are not going to be thwarted. | |
| It is the majority who will suffer. | |
| Until such time as the majority goes tired of suffering and wakes up! |
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