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Jan. 14, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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2885 Free Community College! | True News with Stefan Molyneux | January 14th, 2014

This True News with Stefan Molyneux includes: Free Community College - Thanks Obama! Amazing NASA Incompetence: Space Tower to Nowhere! Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting attacked for Not Being a Feminist. Study Links Circumcision to Autism and ADHD. Sources: http://youtu.be/0BPxzAzyhTo

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	Welcome to my show Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Welcome to True News, where we examine current events around the world from a philosophical and principled perspective.
	First, order of business.
	President Obama has gone fishing for taxpayers with the baited hook of free stuff.
	Let's hear what he has to say about college.
	But what I'm also going to do is announce a proposal that I'm going to be making to make sure that community college is accessible for everybody.
	Put simply, what I'd like to do is to see the first two years of community college free for everybody who's willing to work for it.
	That's right, free for everybody who's willing to work for it.
	Well, there you have it.
	Free.
	The magic word that seems to take down any rational defenses of taxpayers against unreality.
	The magic word free.
	The F word with four letters that absolutely curses future generations with debt and inflation.
	So, what is this supposedly free plan going to cost taxpayers?
	Well, the answer, which I imagine is more of a guesstimate, and we'll get to that a little bit later when talking about NASA's massive and vacuous sky dildo, the answer is $60 billion over 10 years, according to White House officials.
	But that's only the federal contribution.
	The states are going to kick in more money.
	And given that...
	At a minimum, government estimates in terms of cost end up being usually two to three times lower.
	We can talk about a lot more money when it finally comes in.
	One of the things that is hard for people to grasp is the degree to which when a tsunami of money comes into...
	A neighborhood or a family or an entire business sector, as in community colleges, it's not the same as it was before, but with more money.
	I mean, if you live in a trailer park and you win the lottery for a million dollars or ten million dollars, you don't just live in a trailer park but have extra money.
	You change everything about what it is that you're doing, at least most people do.
	So what happens if These community colleges get all of this government money.
	Well, they're going to get a lot more customers, but fundamentally their customers are now going to be the state and federal governments who are paying their bills.
	They are going to increase their budgets.
	They're going to expand.
	They're going to build Versailles Palace cathedrals of non-education.
	In other words, they're going to do exactly what most universities in America did when governments started pouring money into them.
	And there is...
	A fascinating lack of understanding of correlation versus causation.
	So, people who are smart, people who just have a high IQ, which is measurable from very early on and tends to remain one of the most constant factors in your life, unlike, say, hairlines.
	People who have high IQs go to college and generally do well economically, quite well economically.
	Now, the argument could very easily be made and has been made by many people that if you have a high IQ, then you are more likely to go to college and make more money.
	However, putting someone in college does not give them a higher IQ and better financial outcomes.
	So, for instance, in the NBA, there are a lot of tall people.
	However, if you put a short person in the NBA, he does not grow taller.
	So, this is, I think, kind of fundamental to understand.
	There is this sort of magical blank slate thinking that everyone's kind of the same, and if we just put people in the circumstances that smart people develop within themselves or within their environment, they'll just suddenly become smart.
	So a representative for Obama said, quote, that is a significant investment, but it's one the president believes is worthwhile because we need to make sure that America's young people are getting the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century economy.
	Now, that is a staggering admission of unbelievable failure, and no one, to my knowledge, has mentioned anything about this, though when I point it out, it will stare you blindly in the face like having a cyclops in a no-blink contest.
	So, we need to make sure that America's young people are getting the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century, so we need to fund community colleges.
	Hmm, why is that such a jaw-dropping statement?
	Well, as you may or may not have heard and or experienced yourself, governments already have young people for 12 or so years, from kindergarten through to the end of high school.
	So basically, what Obama and this representative and this whole program is saying, well, we had these kids for 12 years.
	But we didn't give them any of the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century economy.
	What a staggering thing to say.
	What an amazing, jaw-dropping thing to say.
	We had them for 12 years.
	They're economically useless when they come out.
	So let's give them two more years, because after 12 of not helping them, two of helping them will turn it all around.
	Why not, if you wish to actually help these young people, take the skills that are taught In community colleges and, say, teach them in the last two years of high school.
	I mean, you're already paying for it.
	You don't need to spend any more money, but that's not going to buy enough votes.
	Now, there are a lot of thinkers who believe, I think it's a fairly good argument, that The student debt bubble is one of the big remaining bubbles to pop.
	There is over $1.2 trillion currently in student loans, which is almost double the outstanding credit card debt.
	I mean, this is a staggering figure to begin with.
	It's projected to rise to $3.3 trillion in 10 years.
	And lending information on student loans in deferment or default lead one to believe that at least one-third of the current student loans will already go unpaid.
	Unpaid.
	And if this continues, of course, in 10 years, it'll be $1.1 trillion of unpaid loans.
	How lending people $1.1 trillion that they cannot pay back I leave to the pixies and fairies that currently inhabit the brains of statist economists.
	So that is really quite astounding.
	The way that education should work, education is an overhead.
	Education is like going to the dentist.
	I mean, when I'm talking about education for particular skills, for particular economics.
	And it's something that we should work to minimize.
	Now, there's lots of different ways that you can get education or to get educated.
	You can review things online, just about all of the major courses at all of the major colleges are available online.
	You study that, you write the test.
	Well, that's a pretty cheap way of getting it.
	On-the-job training is very important and what used to happen.
	There's apprenticeships and so on.
	Now, for people who require specific skills, and they want to be a geologist or a neurosurgeon or whatever, then yes, taking out loans is important because people will only give you loans absent the government.
	They'll only give you loans if they have a reasonable belief that you can pay those loans back.
	So if you're studying to be a petroleum engineer, you're going to make six figures pretty much your first day out of school.
	Well, I guess up until the recent crash in oil, but there are, of course, these Occupations or professions which are going to pay you more, people will lend you that money based upon an anticipation of future earnings.
	That's a good way to tie education into economic value and it does not require the state.
	And, of course, a lot of these kids who are going to go into these community colleges are going to go into the softer disciplines if they're available.
	And they're just going to get more and more pro-government propaganda.
	You know, you don't bite the hand that feeds you.
	And once universities get paid by the state, they'll never tell you the truth about the state.
	So this is just going to be another one of these disasters.
	However, it is very productive and it's a great move politically.
	Because the general discussion, I can guarantee you, is going to go along the lines of this.
	Democrat.
	$60 billion for free education.
	Republican.
	That's absurd.
	That's a crazy amount of money to spend.
	We don't have that money.
	We shouldn't spend it.
	Democrat.
	You know, that's less than a tenth of one year's budget for the military.
	Are you saying that 10 years of free education for the young is unacceptable, but the fact that that amount is less than 10% of the current budget for one year of military spending is totally acceptable?
	Republican.
	Durr, durr, durr.
	Like guns, hate young people.
	Democrat.
	Victory!
	That's pretty much how it's going to work.
	So from a political standpoint, you know, you get to buy votes and you get to offer free things to people.
	And the only reason they believe things are free is because they've gone to government schools already.
	Nothing is more expensive than that which you do not pay for directly.
	So there is, of course, an enclave within the government.
	Where there are very, very highly educated people.
	The proverbial rocket scientists tend to congregate at NASA. In June of last year, NASA finished work on a huge construction project in Mississippi, which was a $349 million lab tower designed to test a new rocket engine in a chamber that mimicked the vacuum of space.
	When, of course, they simply could have tested the rocket.
	If they want a true vacuum, go to the economic knowledge of most politicians and you pretty much will have your eyeballs sucked out through your skull.
	Now, of course, how do you build a $349 million lab tower?
	Well, at the beginning, it was projected to have cost $119 million.
	And again, this is the general tripling of costs that occurs.
	Now, it was supposed to be finished by late 2010, which of course meant that it was finished almost three years later, almost four years later, sorry, in 2014.
	Now, as soon as NASA Finished the work, it shut the tower down.
	The project was officially mothballed, it was closed up and left empty without ever being used.
	Daniel Dumbacker, a former NASA official who oversaw the project, said, well, you locked the door, so nobody gets in and hurts themselves.
	The reason for the shutdown, well, the new tower, it was called the A3 test stand, was, in fact, utterly useless.
	And they knew it was going to be useless...
	Long before they finished it.
	The rocket program it was designed for had actually been cancelled in 2010.
	Now, the NASA bureaucrats didn't want to stop the construction on their own authority, because, you know, who wants to get in trouble when it's other people's money flowing through your hands?
	And then Congress, at the urging of a senator from...
	Wait, see if you can guess the state.
	It was built in Mississippi.
	Who was the senator who would...
	Demand the tower be finished.
	Yes, I believe it is from the spelling bee champion word Mississippi.
	He swooped in and ordered the agency to finish the tower no matter what.
	So, NASA spent almost four more years building something it didn't need.
	On the plus side, at least the agency only has to spend $700,000 a year to maintain a tower that it never used but finished anyway.
	Now, these are about the smartest people in the government and certainly have much more than a community college education.
	And this is the result of the smartest people in the entire government.
	So, these are much smarter than the people who are going to be in charge of the community college free tuition rollout.
	And this is what you can expect from your state.
	Kaylee Kuoko Sweeting of The Big Bang Theory, which I think is now the second most popular television show in history, has walked back a comment that she made recently claiming that she was not a feminist.
	Thank you.
	So she was asked in an interview with the U.S. magazine Red Book, no affiliation with the Communist Party that I know of, She was asked if she was a feminist.
	She said, is it bad if I say no?
	It's not really something I think about.
	Things are different now, and I know a lot of the work that paved the way for women happened before I was around.
	I was never that feminist girl demanding equality.
	Okay.
	Oh, Kaylee.
	What can we say?
	First of all, if you've had a boob job, I think that does not put you really at the forefront of feminist theory.
	Abortion, maybe.
	Boob job, not so much.
	Now, the work that was paid for women happened before I was around.
	She is considered one of the most sexy and beautiful women in the world.
	I think the work that paved the way for you, Kaylee, is biology.
	Male biology looking for specific fertility signals in the body of a woman, in the face of a woman, looking for even features, looking for lustrous hair, a hip-to-waist ratio, and so on.
	So, you know, you could thank Darwin, I guess.
	Not necessarily feminists.
	It's not really been very tough for beautiful women to get ahead in the world in the past.
	There was, of course, lots of famous movie stars.
	Who were beautiful long before and smart.
	Hedy Lamarr, considered the most beautiful woman in the world, had patents and worked on cryptography, an incredibly smart woman.
	So naturally, all of the women who are feminists, who have struggled, and so hard, they have struggled to ensure that women have choices, and the social justice warriors who all oppose intolerance in any and all forms, swarmed and castigated her.
	And to the point where the Golden Globes, she said that she was basically on her apology tour.
	So she went to Instagram to refute her comments.
	She says, oh, words have been taken out of context.
	And she says, I'm completely blessed and grateful that strong women have paved the way for my success, along with many others.
	I apologize if anyone was offended.
	Anyone that truly knows me, knows my heart, and knows what I meant.
	She added, some people have taken offense to my comments regarding feminism.
	If any of you are in the biz, you are well aware of how words can be taken out of context.
	So, she says that she enjoys cooking for her husband.
	She says, I cook for Ryan five nights a week.
	It makes me feel like a housewife.
	I love that.
	I know it sounds old-fashioned, but the idea of women taking care of their men...
	But I like the idea, sorry, of women taking care of the men.
	I'm so in control of my work that I like coming home and serving him.
	So, as far as I understood it, feminism was about giving women choice and respecting those choices, unless those choices displeave certain feminists, in which case, attack, attack, attack.
	I don't really think that's the patriarchy at work.
	And you know, it's interesting because there are lots of men who serve women in the world.
	There was Margaret Thatcher's husband, who was, you know, kind of like a ghost-like non-entity that went around serving her star power.
	And this happens, of course, lots of places and times, and don't really see a huge amount of castigation for those men.
	It's only a woman who likes to take care of her man.
	And I'm sure he likes to take care of her as well.
	But you see, the problem with this is there is a woman who has a very positive view of men and really enjoys working with and taking care of men and cooking for men.
	So naturally that's bad because, I mean, the point of a lot of radical thought in society from the left, and this includes feminism and cultural Marxism and so on, the point is to set us at odds with each other.
	It is to sow the seeds of conflict, to sow the seeds of dissent, to sow the seeds of opposition.
	The left has, for over a hundred years, recognized that it cannot win the argument of ideas.
	It cannot win, it cannot overcome ideas.
	What Ludwig von Mises identified as the calculation problem, that without price, there's no way to efficiently allocate resources.
	It cannot overcome the productivity and efficiency and wealth generation of the free market.
	And now, of course, the Soviet Union has crashed in ruins.
	It simply can't win the argument based on evidence.
	It can't win the argument based on facts.
	It can't win the argument based on theory.
	And so, like all people who are addicted to an ideology, Who have lost the argument, they simply come raging back to sow division and hatred among people.
	And it's actually very effective.
	It works very, very well.
	And they've done a wonderful job of setting the races against each other with race baiting, and they've done a wonderful job of making women feel that they live in a male victimizing society.
	The males will just victimize them.
	There's all this patriarchy and so on.
	And sowing the seeds of division, destroying the family, destroying harmony within society is the fundamental job of the left because they can't win any arguments.
	And so all they do is provoke discord.
	And again, it works very well.
	And I just did a presentation, The Truth About the Gender Pay Gap, which you can check out if you like.
	This is just another way of making women feel like they're hard done by and victimized, which sows the seas of resentment against men.
	And therefore breaks up the family and or causes families to not even be formed in the first place.
	And the purpose of that, of course, is that when families dissolve and communities dissolve, there is a power vacuum and a support vacuum that the state is more than happy to step in and fill.
	So by creating victims, they create dependence on the state, which generates votes for the left.
	And they rewrite the four horsemen of leftist apocalypse right off the cliff into the volcano of economic dissolution.
	So it is sad that this is happening.
	I think Kayleigh is a perfectly charming actress.
	And I wish her well.
	I wish her well in her marriage.
	And don't be cowed down by the haters.
	If you're a public figure, it is always quite astonishing how that happens.
	Just people who seem to have nothing better to do just decide to stop hating on you.
	Don't worry about it.
	Don't worry about it.
	It doesn't add up to anything.
	You keep going no matter what.
	So a new study has come as, And this is not proven.
	This remains speculative.
	And I merely put it out there for information and to make a point.
	And the study is that circumcised boys have a much higher chance of developing attention deficit disorder and autism by the age of 10.
	And this is research that came out of Denmark, and the risk is doubled.
	The risk is doubled for attention deficit disorder and autism if the boy is circumcised before the age of 5.
	Now, the link, they say, between the circumcision and the ADD slash autism is the stress caused by the pain of being snipped.
	Snipped is one of these tiny little words that brings to mind glue you can eat and scissors you can only cut paper with.
	But they examined 340,000 boys between 1994 and 2003.
	I mean, you never hear of female circumcision being called a SNP. I mean, SNP is such an innocuous word.
	So that's a pretty big sample size, 340,000 boys.
	Explaining the rationale behind the study, Professor Morten Frisch of the Copenhagen-based Institute says it was, quote, And a study showing a strong, positive correlation between a country's neonatal male circumcision and the prevalence of ASD or autism in boys.
	This means that the boy's perception of pain may become skewed for life.
	This characteristic is often found among children with autism.
	Almost 5,000 boys whose health was tracked specifically for the study have been diagnosed with autism by age 9.
	Frisch added that, quote, today it is considered unacceptable practice to circumcise boys without proper pain relief, but none of the most common interventions used to reduce circumcision pain completely eliminates it, and some boys will endure strongly painful circumcisions.
	When he says some boys, he basically means some babies.
	Now, there is some pushback on this, and of course, there is people saying, well, correlation and causation and so on.
	So, we'll put the links for this below, but...
	It is important to be aware of this, and we've got a whole presentation on Freedom Aid Radio on the truth about circumcision, which I would strongly urge you to watch.
	Whether you are male, feel male, circumcised or not, it is essential to understand and to examine the astounding depth of research showing the negative effects of circumcision.
	And Of course, we can't say that correlation is causation, but if there's even a hint of something toxic in baby bottles or toys, I mean, parents lose their minds.
	BPA was considered dangerous and so on.
	Now there's articles about Wi-Fi being dangerous for children.
	It seems to me, given that circumcision is completely unnecessary and extraordinarily painful and destructive, and that infants who are circumcised, baby boys who are circumcised, show a heightened pain response six months after the event, the idea that skinning a penis of one-third of its skin is not a destructive action is jaw-dropping.
	And it seems to me that even if you don't accept the moral argument, That circumcision is the initiation of violence against a helpless infant, hopefully recognizing that it seems to double the risk of challenging disorders in the mind, will cause parents to not circumcise their children.
	It certainly is my hope that that would be the case.
	So we're going to do a couple of questions on the mailbag because we just get these great, great questions.
	and So one was somebody wrote in and said, you've argued that me plus...
	Oh, let me show you.
	You can get more about this in the video that I made called The Truth About Robin Williams.
	Me plus is the idea that I have to be me and I have to be sexy and I have to be funny and I have to be rich and I have to pay for things and I have to be me plus something in order to be valuable to other people and relationships.
	So he wrote, you've argued that me plus is a toxic orientation for people to have in relationships.
	However, how do we get people to associate with us unless we are providing something of value to them?
	Can people truly love us only for who we are?
	Or do we need to provide something?
	Where do we draw the line between providing value and turning into a full-blown me-plusser?
	It's a great question.
	Now, of course, we wouldn't want anyone to be in a relationship with us out of mealy-mouthed self-sacrifice.
	Well, I really hate spending time with you, but you seem lonely, so I guess I'll come over.
	I mean, that's pretty gross.
	And, you know, we don't want the sloppy social seconds of people's guilt as the foundation for our relationships.
	So, yes, we do need to provide things of value to people, but we want long-term relationships.
	Now, if you go and see a comedian, the comedian may make you laugh.
	If you go and listen to this show, hopefully the show will stimulate you to critical thinking and teach you how to think, not what to think, but how to think and so on.
	But longer-term relationships require more than simply tickling your funny bone or tickling your brain stem in the moment.
	And longer term relationships are when you are with someone in your life who enhances your virtue, who provides inspiration for you, just as you hopefully provide inspiration for them who are deeply rooted in the values that you share, who can make your life better through honesty, through example, through motivation. who can make your life better through honesty, through example, And that is a value, but that's not somebody putting on a show to be entertaining so that you will find them a value because they make you laugh or something like that.
	So the me plus is when you feel you have to be something other than who you are in order for people to like you.
	And there are aspects of who you are that are essential.
	What Aristotle would call the essence rather than a sort of tertiary characteristic.
	So a baby is a baby even though some are taller and some are shorter.
	And you are who you are over time.
	The parts of you that stay the same over time is really the most essential parts of you.
	And I think back to when I was a little kid, and there's so much of who I was then that I still am now that I will carry forward through to the end of my days.
	And that is what you found the relationships on.
	So if you have...
	A good sense of humor and you make jokes, then there'll be times when you're very sad and you won't be able to make jokes.
	Will you feel anxiety?
	In other words, people come to you and interact with you because you make them laugh.
	When you're not in the mood to make them laugh, will they still want to come around?
	And if you're young and sexy, will people want to spend time with you because you're young and sexy?
	Well, that's going to change.
	You're going to age.
	And you're going to be less sexy as you age.
	And will people want to spend time with you?
	What about if you have lots of money?
	Well, you may not have lots of money or you might change your mind about spending money on people.
	Will they still want to be around you?
	So when you are loved and respected for who you are, it's not work to be who you are.
	In fact, it's when you kind of get the me plus phenomenon, it's more work to pretend to be someone else.
	It's more work to entertain people rather than be who you are.
	And entertainment of people, to me, comes out of a fear.
	It comes out of an insecurity, but it feeds that insecurity.
	In other words, you don't think that you're likable for who you are, so you entertain people.
	But the more you entertain people, the more people you have around you who aren't interested in who you are, which reinforces that who you are isn't worthwhile, which makes you want to entertain people more, and that is kind of a spiral, a death spiral of authenticity.
	Like all things, and I've got a free book at freedomainradio.com slash free called Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love, that the first virtue is always honesty.
	Be honest with the people in your life and don't attempt to manipulate them.
	Don't attempt to buy them with, say, free community college.
	Don't attempt to entertain them.
	It doesn't mean you can never be entertaining because if you genuinely feel like that in the moment, being honest about acting on that is...
	It's honest.
	It's perfectly fine, of course.
	So just unpack your hearts and minds and thoughts with those around you, and you will have built a very firm foundation for a lifelong relationship.
	We can grow in virtue as we age, and this is why love tends to grow over time if you are virtuous and other people are virtuous around you, as I've formulated on this show many times.
	Love is our involuntary response to virtue if we are virtuous.
	So I hope that helps.
	A fellow named Thomas writes, Whenever I argue for a free market, one of the first things I hear is, Oh, you want to return to old capitalism where the robber barons oppress the workers and children would work 12 hours a day for $1 an hour.
	Wanting a free or minochist society would stop this from happening again.
	Well, the real question, of course, is why is it not happening now?
	And generally, it's not happening now because we have wealth.
	One of the...
	Basic facts about the Industrial Revolution is not what came after it, which was, of course, a cessation of child labor for the most part in the West.
	It's not what came after it, it's what came before it.
	The population grew enormously in the countries that industrialized the most.
	And so what happened was, prior to the Industrial Revolution was the Agricultural Revolution, where, and this goes way back, they changed the harness.
	They used to have a harness that would choke the oxen or the horse that was pulling the plow.
	They changed it to a shoulder-mounted harness, which meant they could plow more deeply and more efficiently.
	They figured out winter crops.
	They figured out better crop rotation to not exhaust the earth.
	And agricultural productivity throughout the Quattrocento into the Middle Ages, Went up like 5, 10, 15, sometimes even 20 times.
	This provided all of the excess food that allowed for the development of urbanization.
	The development of urbanization led to a renewed interest in ancient philosophies, particularly Roman law, which is the foundation for a lot of the common law that goes on in the West.
	You can even still see echoes of it buried under the tumors of government hyperregulation in the present.
	And so with the rise of urban life, The increased interest in more ancient philosophies, and from there you got the Renaissance, you got the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and the founding of America, the growth of constitutionality, the idea of limiting the state.
	After a few centuries of religious warfare, you got the separation of church and state as the exhausted, shaken, and blood-spattered face of Europe turned away from the ancient unity of church and state that still characterizes many religions around the world.
	So that's a very, of course, brief sprint.
	But what happened was, with the excess food that was available in the cities, We're good to go.
	For their capacity to be mass murderers on behalf of the king or the royalty, which I guess still happens right now in a different context.
	But there was some people who left the land voluntarily because being a farmer in the 17th, 18th century was not a lot of fun, and they went to the cities.
	And they went to the cities for a variety of reasons.
	And so when they went to the cities, the excess food that awaited them there was what allowed for the development of what the Marxists would call the Industrial proletariat, or the urban proletariat.
	And so you had all of these workers who could live in the city because there was food, and with the workers came the capacity for labor, which characterized the Industrial Revolution.
	And the population grew because there was more food.
	Now, as Malthus kind of explained, although he was never right in the long run, agricultural productivity was rising in a linear fashion, human population was rising Now, he felt that this would always lead us to starvation, which is really not the case, at least in the free market.
	But what it meant was that as there was more food in the cities, people had more children.
	And those children, in order to survive, had to bring in money.
	And so the children were alive, not dead, right?
	So in the past, they would not have been born, or they would have died of starvation or some other ailment pretty early on.
	And as the food growth, the explosion of food growth and how it rained into the cities through the pay scales of the satanic mills, as they were called...
	They allowed for children to survive rather than to die, this excess food.
	And you can look at the caloric intake that occurred over the 19th century in England.
	It's been studied fairly well.
	And it went up significantly, that access to meat for often, consistent access to meat often for the first time in history and so on.
	So wages increased.
	And as soon as the wages increased to the point where the children didn't have to work, then the parents didn't send them off to work in general.
	So...
	It's interesting because people look at these working children, and I don't know, it seems that they have some princess bride fantasy that before the Industrial Revolution, there were just as many children, but they just flew kites through the wheat fields, trailing the wheat in their hands and so on.
	I mean, they had these wonderful bucolic pastoral lives and so on.
	And it wasn't the case.
	I mean, childhood was gruesome and brutal prior to the Industrial Revolution, and it improved through the Industrial Revolution.
	Children had to work, but they weren't dying.
	And success breeds criticism.
	I mean, there was a reason why in the 1960s the welfare state was put in, because there was really not much of an idea of the welfare state in the 8th century.
	There was Spenumland, which I actually talked about in a Peter Schiff show once, which I think is a very interesting...
	Illustration of how disastrous the welfare state was even in the 18th century in England.
	But in the 60s, like from the post-war period into the 1960s, poverty in America was declining by one percentage point.
	Every single year.
	It was the biggest reduction in poverty that had ever occurred in history prior to the liberalization of the economies from the 90s onwards in India and in China, wherein 700 million people have climbed out of poverty just in the last 20 years alone.
	Staggering.
	Astounding.
	Where the free market is allowed to operate, it reduces poverty.
	It's the most efficient allocation of resources, and nothing contributes—this sounds really boring, but it's very true—nothing contributes more to poverty than an inefficient allocation of resources, which is why I talked at the beginning about how bad free tuition for community college will turn out to be.
	And so when society improves, those who aren't improving— It's terrible.
	They're being left behind.
	We need to circle back and fix all of these things.
	And because the left, and I don't mean to bash on the left, and I'm certainly not a Republican, but the left has this idea.
	That culture and personal responsibility and so on don't matter.
	What matters is big economic forces.
	Lack of resources is why people are poor.
	It's got nothing to do with their culture.
	It's got nothing to do with what is promoted or denied within their specific belief systems.
	It has nothing to do with whether they believe in or don't believe in personal responsibility and hard work and integrity and adding to social capital and reciprocity.
	That doesn't matter.
	So the only reason that poor people would remain poor in a generally wealthier society is because they're somehow disadvantaged by some system.
	And therefore, that system needs to be changed to go back and give them the resources that they were supposed to have and that are being unjustly withdrawn from them.
	In all multicultural societies, some groups do better and some groups do worse.
	So, for instance, Germans in the 19th century in Tsarist Russia were 1% of the population, but more than 40% of the police forces because they just had that, hey, Germans like to impose order, at least they used to.
	And...
	So there's always inequalities.
	If you look at the Chinese in non-Chinese countries, they work very hard, they tend to do very well.
	If you look at Jews around the world, they work very hard, tend to do very well.
	And this has a lot to do with belief systems and culture.
	Whereas on the left, it's due to impersonal economic forces.
	And if you move the money around, everything gets better.
	Well, of course, this is not true.
	This is not true.
	The best way to help groups which are not doing well is to give them good arguments for better values.
	And again, I'm not trying to blame everyone who's in these groups.
	They're born into these groups and they need our help, which is one of the reasons why I give away everything that I have for free and merely ask for donations from those who can afford it.
	So, whenever you see something like, well, look, there are all these poor children who are, you know, working for 12 hours a day for a dollar an hour and so on.
	The question is not, is that worse than today?
	I mean, of course.
	They were inheriting all of the poverty that came out of a hyper-regulated and controlled medieval economy, where the guilds ruled everything, where private contracts were virtually forbidden, where there was no stock market, where the amount of control that was exercised over land...
	Capital and labor was staggering.
	Basically, from the fall of the late Roman Empire through to, you could really argue, maybe the 18th century in the Netherlands, we lived under fascistic, I mean, the world, and the West in particular, lived under fascistic medieval economic controls.
	That was one of the main reasons why.
	The economy stagnated for so long.
	You can look at China, 6,000 years of stagnation or a few thousand years of stagnation with the same kind of economic controls over the general population.
	So when the economic controls are relaxed, when people actually have the chance to buy, sell and trade Based upon their own personal preferences, you get a much more efficient allocation of resources.
	You get the growth of wealth.
	But the growth of wealth comes the growth of the population, right?
	Growth of food means growth of population.
	So it's not like everyone gets fed when the food doubles.
	Generally, it gets a little more than doubles.
	People are still kind of hungry, but there's more of them.
	So the fact that there are more poor people and more hungry people and more children in the Industrial Revolution is a mark of success.
	Now, it offends our sensibilities because we don't like the idea of, you know, eight-year-old chimney sweeps going up and down chimneys and dying of black lung by the time they're 25 or 30.
	I absolutely agree.
	That's pretty horrifying stuff.
	But it still was far preferable to what came before.
	So whenever you see people pointing out some historical monstrosity, go past the garish, scary clown mask of what they're shaking at you.
	Go past it and see what came before.
	And usually, what came before is far worse.
	And that would be my particular way of saying what would stop it from happening.
	Again, in a free society, a truly free society, economic growth would be 10, 20% a year.
	And people would only work a couple hours a week if they wanted, if they wanted to sustain a good lifestyle and didn't want to accumulate even more wealth.
	And the idea that when there's such wealth and such opportunity and such freedom in society, parents are going to be really keen on sending eight-year-olds down into mines is incomprehensible.
	That's just not the way that parenting works when people have any kind of resources.
	Well, thank you very much for watching.
	Please let us know what you think of the new format and the new approach from Freedom Aid Radio called The True News, resurrecting an old series that I did a while back that kind of fell by the wayside for a variety of reasons.
	We really look forward.
	We try to give you the best and most important and most useful information that you can find.
	Stuff that makes the world make sense.
	You know, for most of my education, I was just stuffed full of facts.
	I regurgitated them for tests and then they vanished, you know, like a Caesar salad three Sundays ago.
	And we try to give you information here that puts the world in a kind of context that helps you make sense of it.
	As I remember the theories that I first read that helped me really understand the world, I'm trying to give you that information as best I can.
	So we're always looking forward to your feedback.
	Please let us know what you think in the comments below.
	This is Stefan Molyneux for Free Domain Radio.
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