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Oct. 5, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:53
2228 Taxes, Statism and Families
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Hello everybody, it's Stefan Wallen from Freedom Aid Radio.
Some thoughts about what is going on down the planet.
So, the debate continues to rage about whether women can have it all.
Can they be great moms and great professionals and great lovers and great wives and great friends and superstar levitators and Olympic champions and all this kind of stuff.
Am I the only one who is rather surprised at the level of the conversation that is occurring?
So, for instance, I think it's fairly well understood by your average two-year-old, maybe even 18 months or so, that you cannot be in two places at the same time.
Is this really a shock for anyone?
Is this really surprising to everyone?
If you spend a lot of time at the office, traveling, working nights, then you spend less time with your children.
You cannot be in two places at the same time.
So why are people surprised that if they spend a lot of time at the office, they're less fulfilled as parents?
I don't understand why this is a complicated issue.
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious.
Please feel free to comment and let me know.
So this woman, she works in the State Department.
She works with Hillary Clinton and she's an academic and a law professor and so on.
And she's been traveling and working.
I think her kids are in New Jersey.
She's in Washington for the last couple of years.
And her son is doing really badly in school and acting out and this kind of stuff.
What can you say?
You spend your life in the service of politics.
Her husband is a political professor and therefore has the time to do the stay-at-home dad thing more, I guess, than she does.
And this has been my role.
I'm the stay-at-home dad, so I hope you will forgive me for my suppositions in these areas.
But you can't have it all.
Of course not.
That's ridiculous.
I mean, the debate about women, career and kids is as ridiculous, to my view, as a fierce debate among men about can you get married and continue to have promiscuous cheap sex at the same time?
The answer would be no.
You can't do both.
If you want to have your promiscuous cheap sex, call me.
And if you want to have your promiscuous cheap sex, go do it, but don't get married.
So I don't really understand what the difficulty and the challenge is.
Women also don't seem to really understand the history of feminism.
It's a largely state-funded and state-created entity.
There are sinister sources of funding like the CIA and Gloria Steinem and MS Magazine, but there's also just the generic Media pumping and academic positions and grants to feminists, which total, at least in Canada, in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
So it is a very artificial and state-created situation, this hostility towards the traditional family, this hostility towards marriage, this hostility towards raising children, which is, I believe, the most deep and noble occupation or calling that a human being can ever And this is not a free market situation.
This is state-created and state-sustained.
And the reason that women were convinced to go into the workforce, not given the option to, not given the choice to, because that was already done.
Discrimination against women in the workplace and in academia was banned already in America by 1964.
It was almost a decade before feminism came along and changed the picture, largely by saying that motherhood and wifedom and running a household was somehow less, and to be more, you had to go into the service of other people, right?
You know, you're going to have to serve somebody, as the song goes, and for some reason, women were convinced that serving anonymous corporate masters, your boss, the dean, the provost, whoever it is in the academic world, that this was somehow better and nobler and superior to Serving your children and your husband as I serve my wife and my children, my child.
And the reason for this was very simple.
Two-fold.
Two-fold things.
In the 1960s, you saw a massive expansion of the welfare state at a time when a war was going on.
Hmm.
Massive expansion in government spending while a war or wars is going on.
Rings a bell.
Oh well.
Let's just keep going.
So the government, of course, when it starts to bribe people with a lot of money, can't tax them immediately.
It cannot tax them immediately, otherwise the game is up.
If I say, I'm going to spend $10,000 on the poor, and to do that I'm going to need to tax you $50,000, everyone's going to say, well, that's ridiculous.
I mean, I give $10,000 directly to the poor.
I still have $40,000 for myself.
So, no thank you, Mr.
Bureaucratic Statist.
I think I will pass.
Well, of course, that's not what happens.
What happens is the government promises to take care of the poor, the sick, the old, whoever, and they don't immediately raise your taxes.
Now, that is a big problem.
Because if you start going into debt catastrophically, that gets pretty obvious.
Then, of course, interest rates go up, the government can't pay the debt, and the whole gig is up.
So, of course, the government has to seize control of the interest rates and continue to drive them low, which creates a whole lot of other housing market distortions, like if interest rates are artificially low because the government doesn't want to pay money on its debt, well, you get a housing boom followed by a crash.
But again, we've seen that recently.
So what is another way that you can pay for all of these social programs that are Fundamentally destroying the lives of poor and encasing them in a permanent underclass like prehistoric mosquitoes in amber.
Well, what you do is you have to raise your tax base.
Now, you can raise your tax base without raising your taxes by...
Bing, bing, bing!
Yes, you've got the right answer!
Convincing massive sections of the population to turn from non-taxable activities to taxable activities.
That is another way that you can raise your tax base to pay for the social programs which don't work.
This has a two-fold benefit.
First of all, you move women from non-taxable activities, you know, the important useful ones and powerful ones for the continuation of cultural society and Everything, the human race, which is you take them away from their children and you put them in the workforce.
So non-taxable to taxable income.
That's only the first.
The second great benefit of that, of course, is that you get the children have to go into daycare, have to go into some sort of childcare.
And that, of course, is taxable activity as well.
So you get a double plus.
Double plus good for the state, double plus ungood.
For literally everything else in the known universe.
So women go to work, they start paying taxes.
The women put their kids in daycare and the daycare workers are licensed, regulated, and the workers there pay taxes.
And of course it's another area where government sector unions can get their vampiric little fangs into the jugular of the economic system and drain it until we all collapse.
So that's the first great benefit, massively increasing the tax base.
Please understand me.
I have no problem with women being professionals.
My wife is a professional.
I think it's absolutely wonderful.
I think it's great.
I'm simply pointing out that women being herded into the workforce had massive benefits to the tax base.
What do governments love about having women in the workforce other than two massive sources of taxes that they didn't have before?
Well, it loves, loves, loves getting its snaky, smoky little tendrils of propaganda into the children sooner rather than later.
If you can get the kids into government-run daycares, the kids will bond like ducks with an orange balloon.
They will bond with the state, and they will be suitable receptacles to propaganda, to sharing, to a lack of respect for property rights, and through having a rotating series of caretakers.
I worked in a daycare for a number of years when I was a teenager.
There's a lot of turnover in daycare.
It's kind of an underpaid occupation.
I shouldn't say underpaid.
It's paid relevant to its market needs in general, but you don't get paid a lot, I should say.
And there's a lot of turnover, which creates instability, lack of bonding, which, if you have a child who has a lack of bonding, he's got this massive waving hole that needs to be filled, which should have been filled by the mother or the father being there on a full-time, caregiving, loving basis, as nature, God, and Darwin intended.
So you have this massive emotional hole because of the lack of attachment.
Ah, who's going to rush in to fill that hole?
The state!
Yes, of course, the state is going to give you nationalism and patriotism and all this kind of stuff so that the government can be the mommy and daddy who abandoned you in daycare and that way they get to propagandize you and they create an emotional vacuum that can only be filled by the state.
Yes, it's just tragic and horrible and wretched.
So I've been reading a bunch of these articles about how women just can't have it all.
What do we find in common?
Not, oh man, I wish I could read them all.
It would take too long and it would turn your stomach.
But what you never hear, I've read probably a dozen of these articles about women and work and family balance and so on.
Never heard one mention of one rather salient little point.
Well, because the women are all tortured.
Well, when I'm at work, I want to be home, and when I'm home, I want to be at work, and I want to be fulfilled as a career professional, and I want to be a great mom, and blah, blah, blah.
I mean, it's all this narcissistic, navel-gable, pseudo-dabbling bleh.
Because what's not present in all of these equations is what do the children want?
What do the children want?
Do they want mommy to be working for Hillary Clinton?
I really submit that they could give two royal shits about it, and probably do.
They want mommy or daddy to be home.
They want a primary caregiver, hopefully two, to be home to be caring for them.
That's what the children want.
That's what they need biologically, psychologically, emotionally, physically.
The studies are complete.
The studies are pretty much as certain as you can get at this kind of field that The kids need the mom.
The kids need the mom.
And if you don't want to be a parent, it's actually quite simple.
I have a great suggestion to people who want to dump their kids in daycare for 40 plus hours a week.
I've got a great idea.
You know, spare me out.
It's kind of complicated.
I'll try and step you through it slowly.
Don't have children.
If you don't want to be monogamous, no problem.
Don't get married.
If you don't want to be a parent, if you don't want to be in the day-to-day parenting details, don't be a parent.
It's really not that complicated.
And of course, the great challenge, the great question is, do women have children first and then a career later?
So like Phyllis Schlafly went to law school at the age of 50 and I think one of the, Ginsburg, the Supreme Court judge, she started her real legal career after her children were grown.
So do you have your children first and then your career later?
Sure, you can do that.
Or do you have your career first and then your children later?
Well, then you run into the problems of being in your mid to late 30s, or possibly your early 40s, and going on the biochemical money pit treadmill called Let's Have a Kids When My Eggs Are Stale.
That's not a whole lot of fun.
So, what do you do?
Well, if you want to have kids, then what you need to do is to plan to be around them a whole lot, at least for the first five years.
Look, we take time off from work to go to school, to go to college for four years.
Why not take a couple of years off from the major activities in your life and spend time with your kids?
I think that would be a good idea.
I mean, if you're going to raise kids, look, it's a 22-year proposition if they're going to go to college.
It's at least an 18-year proposition, and they need full-time dedicated care.
There's just no getting around from it.
You can't get by it.
I'm telling you, I'm telling you, as a stay-at-home dad for now, three and a half years, there is no escaping the massive amount of resources.
So my daughter is now at the point Where I can do something else for five to ten minutes at a time, but it took three and a half years to get there, and she certainly wasn't that case before.
It is a huge amount of effort.
I'll also tell you that, you know, we have all our own needs and preferences and desires and wishes and this and that and the other, and that's all fine.
But I'll tell you that when you become a parent, those all go aside.
You become It's sort of like an ice statue or a glass statue.
You become invisible because everything has to be focused on the needs of the child.
And then as the child grows up, you can begin to assert your own needs so they get a balance in their relationship and so on.
But for the first couple of years, I'm telling you, it is all about your child's needs and your child's preferences.
You know, we want to be Whitney Houston, the singer.
I believe the children are the future, and we want to be Whitney Houston, the singer, not Whitney Houston, the actual mother, right?
Let's start to live our ideals a little bit more.
But children take a huge amount of time, energy, and resources.
I think there's a wonderful payoff.
I couldn't trade it for the world.
My daughter is the absolute fountainhead, rocket sled up in the sky, joy of my rainbow existence.
But the reality is, it's a massive amount of investment.
Your needs go to one side, and if you don't want to put your needs to one side, that's fine, no problem.
But you're going to have to serve someone.
When you go to work, you're going to ask yourself, what does the boss want?
What do the clients want?
What does the business want?
What do my co-workers want?
How am I going to serve everyone's needs?
So you already know how to serve people's needs.
We already know how to serve people's needs when you go to work.
But...
but...
You have to survey at home.
When you go to work, you're going to survey your customers.
I mean, the pizza place down the road surveys me to find out if I like my pizza.
Just sit down with your kids and say, what do you want?
What do you want?
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