All Episodes
Dec. 1, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:11
2049 Public Sectors, Private Predations - A Plea Across Generations
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well. This is to the UK listeners.
Hello! Hope you're doing well.
So you're suffering from these public sector strikes.
My massive sympathies, and I'm going to give you some facts which are a little hard to come by, and tell you what I think you can do that will be exciting and effective.
So first, public sector pay has risen at twice the rate of private sector pay of the past four years.
Public servants have almost 8% better pay but they also have pensions that are worth an additional 25% worth of their pay.
Do you know that if you work in the private sector in England you pay more into public pensions than you do into your own pensions over the course of your life?
Because in the public sector after 30 years when you retire you get half of your final pay for the rest of your life.
Almost 90% of government workers have a pension plan compared to just 14% of private workers.
You know, it's so funny, by the by, that you see many socialists and Marxists decrying how corporations exploit the workers.
Never hear about government workers.
Also, recent surveys found that the average government employee works for 30 hours and 42 minutes per week, which is a couple of hours, three hours or so less than people work in the private sector.
Public sector employees work nine years, nine years less.
than their private sector counterparts, but are paid in total 30% more.
And what about job security?
What tangible benefit is job security?
Well, the chance of being made compulsorily redundant in the civil service is an astonishing, wait for it, 0.00007%.
Public sector pay costs have soared by more than a third in real terms over the last seven years, three times faster than the private sector.
And that doesn't count pensions.
Between 2002 and 2009, the number of people working in the public sector increased nearly five times more quickly than numbers in the private sector.
Medically, we would call this cancerous.
So, civil servants over 50 qualify for compensation of three years' pay if they're redundant.
Funded by the taxpayer, of course.
While those who join before 1987 can qualify for six and a half years' pay on top of their pensions for being made redundant.
See why it doesn't really happen? So, government forecasts is that the deficit is going to soar to an eye-watering 1.1 trillion pounds by 2011.
Now, in 1976, the UK went effectively bust and had to go hat-in-hand to the IMF when it was running a budget deficit of 6% of GDP. In 2010, that deficit was over 11%.
It's almost twice what it was when the UK went bankrupt last time.
In 2010, the interest on the national debt would cost £42.9 billion per year.
That's more than it's spent on defence and not much less than the entire education budget.
In 09 to 10, the UK government spent almost 700 billion of taxpayers' money.
Tax revenues were less than 500 billion.
Under current spending plans, the national debt will top 79% of GDP by 2014.
And this is new labor, right?
It's the issue.
The government that doubled the national debt from 40% of GDP in 1997 to 80% in 2014.
So that's the battle. That's the war that's going on, right, between people who create wealth and people who consume wealth.
Now, I understand that in a free world, in a non-compulsory world, that you'd need nurses and you'd need doctors and you'd need firemen and you might need security guards or policemen or whatever, for sure.
But that's not really the issue that is going on.
So I've always argued that The political is the personal.
The political is the personal.
And people often say to me, well, Steph, you have a pretty keen eye for diagnosing ails, but what solutions do you have to these ailments?
Well, I have a solution that is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do in the world.
It will cost you maybe 20 minutes of your time.
It's free, and it's the most powerful and effective thing you can do.
And I will tell you.
You can sit down with your Aunt Mabel, who's been a mid-level government manager for the past 30 years, and say, Mabel, so you're 50, and I guess you want to retire 55 or 60 or whatever, and I'm 18.
You know that That there's no money, right?
You know that there's no money for you to retire on.
And so the only way that you're going to get to retire is if you're willing to steal from me.
Do you think that's good?
What? The government has mismanaged the money?
Okay. Doesn't matter.
There's still no money. There's still no money.
Government signed a contract with you, that's true.
There's still no money.
There's still no money.
What? Oh, tax from the rich.
First of all, the rich always pay a disproportionate amount of taxes anyway.
But if you tax corporations more, all that means is my pay is going to go down when I work for those corporations because they're going to have to pay off their tax bill or I'm not going to get a job.
Taxing the rich is not revenue neutral to me.
It's a negative. Taxing corporations is fewer jobs, less pay.
It doesn't solve the problem. You're still taking from me.
Right? Because, Mabel, it's real easy to want stuff and to demand stuff and to march for stuff and to hold up signs and placards for stuff when you're kind of reaching through this foggy entity called the state and laws and unions and you're just getting magic money coming down to you from this foggy tunnel, funnel from nowhere.
But it's not from nowhere, Auntie.
It's not from nowhere.
It's from me.
It's from...
It's from my future.
You're not getting a pension from the money that you paid in, because there's no money.
You are getting the pension from me by force.
How do you feel about that?
Do you think that's right?
Do you think that's fair? Is it my fault?
That you bought into a system and demanded things from this system and had the union demand extra things on your behalf from a system that is now out of money?
Is it my fault?
Must I, at the tender age of 18, be forced to pay for the rest of my life for your bad decisions, for the wrong that was done on your behalf?
Is it right for you to steal from me to fund your pay, to fund your benefits, to fund your pension, to fund your retirement?
Is it right? Yes, it's a big mess.
I know it's a big mess.
I understand that it's a big mess.
But you could vote. You could vote.
You could have spoken out.
You could have quit.
You could have rejected it.
You can reject now some of the money.
You can do anything.
And I'm not going to tell you what to do.
But I remember when I was a kid, when I made a big mess at the age of five, I was damn well expected to clean it up.
Because I'd made the mess.
And I had to clean it up.
When I was 15, I left a bunch of dirty dishes lying around.
It was like, oh, that's a big mess!
You must go clean it up!
And do the right thing. Don't shift the burden onto other people.
That's selfish. That's entitled.
That's immature. That's wrong.
That's what I was told. You know, if I went to some rich kid who had lots of money in school and I bullied him to give me half his lunch money so that I could have Extra food?
You wouldn't have said, well, I can understand that.
He's richer. You should take from him.
Good for you. Let's do more.
Let's call it welfare.
No. No, I mean, I remember very clearly the one time that I did bully a richer kid.
You said, no, what's right is right.
You've got to give that money back. You've got to give that money back.
It's not your money. It's wrong to take.
Because I tell you, I look at my future and it looks pretty bad.
You know, it looks pretty damn bleak.
I am 40,000 pounds in debt or more just by drawing breath.
I went to some really bad schools, you know.
I wasn't taught probably a tenth of what I could have learned.
Everyone seemed to think that was fine.
Everyone thought that was great.
Uncle Jock, school teacher, everyone praised him.
Loves the kids. There for the kids.
Hero. Schools were really bad.
And I feel like my head's filled with ignorant cotton.
You know, empty cinemascope images.
Off color, out of focus, propaganda.
I don't think that anyone's really told me the truth.
My whole life, I think there's been a lot of shadow puppets and plays and morality fictions wedged in between my ears, but no one ever basically said, look, there's no money and we're just running out debts at your expense because we want stuff.
And there's no stuff, so we're going to take that stuff from you.
I mean, I'm already...
40,000 pounds in the hole before I've even started working on any real jobs out there.
And it's just beginning.
The huge bulge of you people retiring is just starting.
So it's only going to get worse from here.
And I just want to know, I mean, when are you going to take some responsibility to You didn't know...
Oh, come on.
You didn't know about the debt?
No, no. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. That's just not true.
I mean, you've been voting for over 30 years.
And you can't conceivably know.
Sorry, you can't conceivably be ignorant of the fact that there's a national debt.
There's a huge deficit. You just...
You can't be. I mean, then you've been a completely ignorant voter.
And then you're just...
Then you're like a guy who drives drunk.
I mean, you may not be responsible for what you do because you're drunk, but you are responsible for getting drunk and getting in the car.
And if you voted with no knowledge of the debt, then you had no idea what you were voting for.
You were an ignorant voter, which means that you exercised the power of voting without doing any research into the facts of what you were voting for.
But that's wrong. I mean, that's just flying blindfolded.
That is, you know, if you crash, it's like, holy crap, are you crazy?
You can't. So you knew.
I mean, I mean, it would be ridiculous to say that you didn't know.
It's been all over the papers. It's been all over the media.
It's been all over the news. It's been all over the internet for decades.
You knew. You knew.
And, like, it's not an abstract thing.
This national debt is not just some mosquito cloud of abstract numbers floating around in La La Land.
It's, I mean, it's a very real thing.
It feels to me, I'm a tender age and all, but it feels to me, Auntie, like I'm a slave.
I didn't choose it.
I don't want it.
I don't like it. I don't agree with it.
It's not fair. It's wrong.
It's theft. It's predation.
It's parasitism.
On the young, on the innocent, on the guiltless, on the freshly minted.
It's wrong.
And I was always told as a child and as a teenager that it's wrong to steal, that ignorance of the law is no excuse.
That if you don't know the facts, if I know I have a test, I mean, yeah, if I knew that I had a test coming up, somebody said, you have a test in two weeks at school, and I just forgot about it.
And I went in, I'm like, oh, no, there's a test, that's terrible.
Well, I had to take the test anyway, and if I got an F, if I failed, I got a fail.
Forgetfulness or lack of knowledge was never an excuse for me when I was a little kid.
Five, six, seven, if you forgot something, that was too bad for you.
So your ignorance of the basic realities of the political system that you've been involved in for decades, your claim of basic ignorance, even if it's true, it doesn't matter.
And if it's not true, I would appreciate you not just stealing from me but lying to me as well.
I would really appreciate that because we really need to have an honest conversation about this basic reality that you're going to have to steal from me to get what you want.
That you're going to have to steal from me.
And all I'm really asking for is the possibility, just the possibility, that you might...
I don't know, I feel funny even saying it.
It's a hard thing to say.
Because I'm really terrified of the answer.
It's a hard thing to say. My hope, you know, maybe it's my whole generation's hope, I don't know.
My hope is that you can look us in the eye and you can say, no, let me say it like I'm asking it.
Will you say to me that you love me More than your stuff.
Can you say that to me?
That you will reject some money because you don't want to take it from me.
That you will say no to some benefits, to some stuff, to some money, because blood is thicker than water, because I'm family, because I'm innocent.
Will you say no to stuff for the sake of love?
Because that's really what is necessary, is for you to find enough love in your heart for the innocent to reject that which has to be forcibly extracted from them.
I mean, I'm already in debt and you haven't even retired.
Is there any way that you can find the love in your heart to say no?
To say no to the stuff.
Export Selection