April 5, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:27:11
2944 Neurotic Human Vending Machines - Call In Show - April 4th, 2015
It has been said that the reason for the low birthrates in Europe is the high level of taxes - how does Stefan explain nations such as Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore which have lower taxes and lower birthrates? | As a parent - do you think it’s important to make an effort to ‘socialize’ your children? | What are your thoughts on the morality and implementation of the “Unconditional Basic Income” welfare system both now and in the future?
No, Domain Radio Free, FDR, Franklin, Daniel Roosevelt, some damn show.
So, hope you're doing well.
Welcome to your Saturday evening.
I am eagerly awaiting the calls this evening.
And let's start off with a listener.
Yeah, the show is in a different direction.
Go!
Go!
Alright.
Well, up for us today is Emil.
He wrote in and said, I'm thinking Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore in particular.
These countries generally have lower taxes than Europe, but also have some of the lowest birth rates in the world.
How does Stefan square that circle?
A fine question.
Emil, did you want to add anything more to the question?
I thought, well, first of all, I should say, great show.
If anyone has taken any lessons, it means that you should be critical and, of course, question the things that you say, if you think some explanation might be oversimplified or borderline wrong.
I think, first of all, maybe I should make sure I understand your position correctly so I'm not attacking a straw man.
And I looked at the video again, and to all fairness to you, You do say in the quote in the video about the terrorist attacks in France, and one of the reasons why the birth rates have declined so significantly is because of the crushing tax burdens, so on and so on.
So, I mean, to give it to you, it's not like it's the only reason why the birth rate is declining.
I think one thing that I also noticed is that you say later in the quote, because it becomes so expensive to live in the West and people are having fewer children, if any.
But if you look at, again, Asian countries, you have quite low birth rates over there, actually lower than Europe.
And I think it intuitively makes sense that people would have fewer taxes, fewer children if taxes are very high, but I looked at the data that doesn't really quite support it.
I mean, for example, I come from Denmark, which is the highest tax country in the world, and yet we have actually fairly high birth rates.
In Denmark?
Yes.
All right, but...
Yeah, go ahead.
Then I should of course mention there are a number of caveats to this because mass immigration changes this.
If you import a lot of people from different countries, particularly the Middle East, who have a lot higher birth rates than the indigenous population, this will then skew the birth rate a little bit.
A little bit?
Yeah, a little bit.
I mean, for example, it depends on how many you import, but for example, people from Somalia, first generation, get on average four children.
So, if you add even a few percentage points of those into the mix, it does change the average a little bit.
That's just my point.
Well, I mean, it's not just the Somalis, right?
I mean, isn't there the issue in Europe as a whole that immigrant populations, either from Africa or the Middle East, and particularly Islamic populations, have birth rates significantly greater than domestic Caucasian populations?
Yes, that's true.
I was taking out the most extreme example because the Somalis are sort of the ones that deviate the most from the local population.
Right.
Well, so this is a good example of critical thinking approaches, right?
So I make a claim which says that taxes are disproportionately – well, I shouldn't say disproportionately – taxes are encouraging people to have fewer children.
And so then what you would have to do, I would assume, is you would have to correlate that not with the population as a whole of a country, but rather with the most taxed population in that country.
Does that make sense?
Yes, it makes perfect sense.
And I was actually looking into this a little bit.
I was trying to figure out Where the most taxed countries are and there's actually a number of problems...
No, no, no, no.
Hang on.
Sorry to interrupt.
You didn't hear what I said.
It's the most taxed individuals within that country, not the most taxed countries.
Because the whole reason you tax people as a government is you are taking from one group and you are giving to another.
So you would assume that the people who are paying the most taxes Which would be the middle classes, the people who are paying the most taxes, because the rich, they pay a lot of taxes, but they still have money left over to have kids if they want, right?
It's really the middle class that gets squeezed.
So where there's a high tax rate in a country, they're taking money from one group and they are giving the money to another group.
Now, you wouldn't want to co-mingle those two groups in terms of fertility, right?
Because the whole point is that the people being taxed the most are most likely to have the fewest children, and the people on the receiving end of the taxes and the welfare state and so on, those would be the people who would be having more children because they would be on the receiving end, not the paying end of the tax sword, if that makes sense.
I understand and agree with this point completely.
What I was sort of getting into is that I tried to find this data and I don't think it's possible to look at this data because just finding the tax burden for the population as a whole, although that's an imperfect measure, was actually a little bit more difficult than I thought.
Because you cannot just go to the World Bank that only measures the central government tax intake.
So the only data I could find was from the Heritage Foundation.
I think it's a whole side discussion of actually measuring the burden of tax because it's generally measured by GDP, as a percentage of GDP. And this is highly problematic because it's some number that the government pulls out from its behind.
Well, and of course the information is hard to find, right?
Because it's politically incorrect information.
Right?
So, I mean, it's like trying to find statistics on male domestic abuse or African-American crime.
I mean, these things are, they go counter to a particular narrative.
So, of course, they're very hard to find.
You could, of course, find out, say, for instance, you could look at, I'm just off the top of my head, you could say, okay, well, what percentage of people are on welfare?
Is there any breakdown of fertility by welfare rolls?
And I don't know how you would...
Or you could at least look at the poor and say, are there different fertility levels for the poor as opposed to the middle class, as opposed to the rich?
And the thesis would hold true if fertility among the poor were higher than fertility among the middle classes.
And my understanding is that the higher you go up in income, the fewer children you have.
This is part of the dysgenics that's occurring in the West, this sort of idiocracy stuff, where the least intelligent are having the most children for a variety of reasons we've talked about before.
And those who are more intelligent, they look at the cost-benefit analysis of having kids, whereas the poor are like, well, I don't have much to lose.
I might as well have some kids.
It gets me more money, and it's not like I'm going to become CEO of some bank anyway, so why not do it this way?
I don't think necessarily just saying, well, in Denmark there's a higher fertility even though they have, what is the minimum tax rate in Denmark is 46%, the maximum tax is 61%, the average tax rate is 53.5%, and the fertility rate is 1.73%.
Now, that correlation that you're talking about would hold firm if everyone was being taxed at the same rate.
But, of course, as I mentioned, taxation is entirely so people don't get taxed at the same rate and entirely so that some people receive massive subsidies and other people pay massive taxes.
And if you could find that data, then it would be a way of countering the thesis I was putting forward.
Yeah, I agree with your point.
It's just I don't think – I think it's a whole sort of a master's thesis project in itself just doing this in one country.
To figure out how much certain individual groups are taxed.
I think it intuitively makes sense, but I just thought when you look at the macro data, it wouldn't really make sense.
But you explained that point quite well.
Do you think there's also...
Well, and also, if it didn't make sense, then economics wouldn't make sense.
Right?
When you tax people a lot, then their more expensive purchases, they generally decline, right?
If you're taxing people at 50%, then their more expensive purchases are going to tend to decline.
I mean, all their purchases as a whole will decline if you tax them a lot.
And children are very expensive, right?
So if you tax people a lot, then they will have...
Fewer children.
And if you give people money to have children, then they will have more children.
It's not anything too radical.
It's sort of Econ 101.
Sorry, if you had something else to add on that, there's another factor I think that's important as well.
But go ahead.
Unless you have something more, I'd just like to talk a little bit about fertility in Asia then.
Sorry, there's one UK study that found there was a 15% increase in births among families receiving welfare.
I'll just move on a bit to Asia then, because it's my area of specialty.
I also live in China now.
I appreciate the point that you make about which groups are taxed within the population, but you still have some countries where the general tax rate is significantly lower.
Let's take Hong Kong, Singapore and other Asian countries as well, Japan, because they're just borrowing all the money and the bill hasn't really come due yet.
I mean, they've had over a 20-year recession with pretty catastrophic job opportunities.
For young people.
And of course, the young people in Japan have seen their fathers mostly just working 70, 80 hours a week and barely being able to see their kids.
And some of them even wrote Karoshi, death by overwork, one of these issues that happens.
So that's one of many factors.
But I don't think it's fair to say that they haven't received any of the negative impacts.
Because, I mean, they have been borrowing as well.
But what they've been doing in Japan is printing money like crazy.
And that, of course, has created all these zombie industries and zombie banks which can't be killed and release productivity and capital and resources and labor to more productive areas of the economy.
So I don't think it's like, well, they shouldn't have any negative effects yet because the bill hasn't come due.
I mean, after being the economic powerhouse of the 80s and 90s, they've had 20 years of a really bad recession.
That I agree with, especially the money lending, the zombie banks, so on.
But the point I want to make is still the income tax for most people in Japan, the taxation.
I mean, the VAT is not that high.
When you compare it to government services, or rather, how high the taxes should be if they would have to balance the budget, it would have to be significantly higher.
But this bill has just been postponed into the future, although I don't think they can keep this game running much more.
Or much longer.
But as for the point within the population that you talked about, there are a number of Asian countries that have very, very little welfare, and yet you have this quite low birth rate.
I know Hong Kong and Singapore are not particularly good examples because those countries are extremely, extremely cramped.
And in my background research, I found that some Hong Kong researchers found a pretty significant impact of Real estate prices on fertility because you can sort of squeeze one child into a small apartment but then the second child you need to buy a bigger place and it's just so prohibitively expensive when you live in one of the top five most populated countries in the world.
By area, I mean.
Right, right.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, go ahead, please.
And I would assume that some of the Some of the real estate prices are due to restrictive zoning.
Because normally when the prices go up, you build a whole bunch more units and drive the prices back down.
But I assume there's some restriction on building.
Yes, rather crony capitalism.
I studied in Hong Kong last year and I was shocked to find out that this country, which is extremely cramped, around two-thirds of the area is natural parks, at least half of the area.
A lot of Hong Kong is not even built on.
And, you know, it's nice to have a national park or whatever, but, I mean, when people are living in cages, it seems like a little bit odd priority.
So, I mean, there's definitely some of that.
Yeah, I mean, now, I don't want to try weaseling my sort of definition, but tax doesn't always mean direct tax.
Right?
So there are indirect taxes such as zoning restrictions and so on, which artificially drive up the price of housing.
Also depressed interest rates, and I assume because Japan has a huge amount of debt, there are depressed interest rates also drive up demand for housing, which is a kind of indirect tax.
And I don't want to weasel it because obviously tax is only one component of the general – So I'm not trying to sort of weasel out and say, well, I'm going to define everything as tax and therefore my...
But it's just one aspect of whatever is going to depress your income is going to depress people's capacity to have children.
But if you use this definition, I know you're not trying to weasel out, but if you say anything that the government does that sort of affects people's opportunities, life negatively will depress birth rates.
I feel like the whole explanation just boils down to, oh, it's capitalism, a government intervention that ruins this thing.
Is that correctly understood?
Well, anything which takes away your money, either directly or indirectly by raising costs or lowering salary, is going to interfere with your capacity to pay for kids, right?
Okay.
I will just move on to one more thing, a little bit related to this.
You mention often, I'm really intrigued by all the theories you have about the woman staying home with the child the first six years, so on, the bump in the brain, that whole series.
And, well, you sort of ruined my life plan because I never thought that I would have children unless I could hire sort of a mate to do all the grunt work.
But now it seems it has a lot of consequences if you do that.
Anyway, then I look at, again, the Asian societies, I look at pretty traditional societies such as Japan and Korea, where it's much more common for the woman to stay at home with the children.
After doing some great research, I found that in Japan around 50% of the households, the woman stays at home, but yet they don't seem to be doing that well.
So to use a phrase that you often use, this sort of I don't know how to summarize it in one sentence with the mother staying at home with the children for at least the early part of their life.
It seems like a necessary but not sufficient condition to have a good society.
I don't know if you understand what I'm getting at here.
Not quite.
If you could go on with it.
We have some industrial societies, such as Japan and Korea, that are a bit more traditional, where the children stay at home with their mother for the first couple of years.
That's sort of the norm.
It's not enforced by the government, as in, for example, Saudi Arabia.
And still, these societies are sort of collapsing demographically.
I'm thinking here of podcast number 644, where you sort of try to take the listener through a day Of a parent in Canada where you have to get up, you have to get the children fed, you have to drive them to work and you're super stressed and so on.
But even in societies where a lot of mothers stay home with their children, people don't seem to want to have children.
But maybe this comes back to your other explanation that it's because of taxes, government intervention and so on.
Yeah, I mean, having children home is not a magic panacea insofar as if the children are home abusing the children, then that doesn't do us a whole lot of a sort of magic benefit.
And of course, remember as well that, of course, I don't know the degree to which radical feminism has spread to Asia.
But there is this sort of idea of like, well, what do you mean you're staying home?
Aren't you better than that?
Aren't you supposed to be more important and all that kind of stuff?
So that could also be a factor in why people, even though they could stay home, I don't know the exact data.
You mentioned that a lot of the cause of crime is because of adverse childhood experiences, such as being physically abused.
The crime rate in Japan is actually extremely low, or quite low for violent crime.
That's true of all Asian countries, right?
And that's true of Asians in non-Asian countries.
There's a general step up of the prevalence of violent crime, the lowest being Asians, the next highest being Caucasians, the next highest being Hispanics, and the next highest being blacks.
So that probably has more to do with a variety of constellations of factors to do with different characteristics of different races than it does to do with child abuse.
That's a pretty intriguing theory.
So you're saying it's because of Asian culture, Asian, like, I'm not sure I want to use the word race here.
Asians are a race, I would say.
I mean, I think that's not too...
Using the word race doesn't make you a racist, right?
No, no, no.
I mean, it's not what I mean like that, but I'm not really sure what you mean by...
By the course that is in something like Asians are less aggressive because of some developmental factors, some evolutionary factors or whatever?
Or is it all because of culture?
Well, there do seem to be some evolutionary factors that are at play.
No one knows the degree to which they are cultural or are genetic or biological to any specific degree.
It's hard to think it's 100% of either one or the other.
Like most of these things, it's probably a mix.
But in the sort of R versus K reproductive strategy approach, and again, I'm not an expert in this, so take it all with a grain of salt.
I can't verify it.
I'm just reporting what I've read.
But in the R versus K reproductive strategy, Asians tend to have much fewer twins.
Asian women have fewer twins.
Asian men have less testosterone.
Again, the testosterone tends to rank up through the race is kind of in proportion to propensity to criminality, which is, again, just tendencies.
They're not any kind of absolute proofs.
Asian women seem to have a slightly wider birth canal, slightly wider hips to accommodate a slightly larger brain.
And Asian babies develop more slowly than Caucasian babies.
They're able to walk, I think, about a couple of weeks to a month later on average.
And, of course, it's kind of one of these weird paradoxes of genetics that the more delays that an organism has in its development, usually the further it can develop.
So one of the theories as to why there's this worldwide or fairly worldwide tendency for Asians to score the highest outside of certain Jewish populations, for Asians to score the highest in IQ is because of this K reproductive strategy that the Asian race or Asian culture or whatever you want to call it,
nobody knows again for sure, has pursued, which is that the They have fewer children, fewer twins, somewhat lower sex drive, apparently, which also has something to do with why fertility is lower in Asian countries,
and that Asian kids develop in a much slower manner than kids of other races, but end up, of course, at the higher, slightly higher levels in IQ. Can you just explain to me why is this thing with Asian women having fewer twins relevant?
Oh, because it is an R versus K reproductive strategy that you have fewer kids that you invest more in.
So the fact that Asian women have fewer twins, Asians have the fewest twins, whites or blacks have the most twins.
So it's one theory to explain why this would be the case, that there's these R versus K reproductive strategies in place.
Oh, so it's...
The K reproductive strategy is have fewer kids but invest more in them.
And the R reproductive strategy is have more kids but invest...
And inevitably invest less in those kids.
Okay, I do get that point with the twins then.
I do think all this...
Yeah, it does explain quite a bit of it.
I just think it's a little bit problematic to use the sort of word Asian culture because it's a quite diverse group of countries.
And I mean, even within Asia, there are huge differences.
Yeah, that is entirely fair and I withdraw that.
That was a not very nuanced statement on my part.
I know someone from Singapore who, as you know, Singapore is around 80% Chinese, and then most of the rest of the population are Malaysian Indians.
And even within Singapore, there's a huge difference between the people of Malay culture and the Singaporean culture.
And, you know, and how well that they do.
So, yeah, it could also have to do with religion, though.
But it's just, maybe it's too broad a brush.
I think often when people say Asians, they think of Japan, Korea, and China, sort of East Asia.
Because, I mean, should we include Vietnam, Thailand?
What about Indonesia?
I mean, where do we draw the line?
I'm definitely the wrong guy to ask about that, so I couldn't possibly tell you.
Okay.
Let me see if I had anything more.
One found house prices.
I did come upon one little bit interesting thing.
I'm not sure if I'm beating a dead horse here.
But again, Hong Kong.
One guy said that...
One guy found that actually the birth rate when people did get married did not really decline that much.
It's just people did not really want to get married anymore.
But maybe you already touched upon that.
People don't think it's a good option to get married.
Yeah, that certainly is an issue.
And again, it takes sort of being able to see around the corner, being able to see over the hill.
It takes a higher intelligence and, dare I say it, a stronger dedication to your children doing well to say, look, If I get married, there's X percentage of chance of divorce and divorce is going to cost me X amount of money.
And I think in America, somebody just wrote and said, oh, it cost me $22,000 for my no-fault divorce and now I'm on the hook for...
$1,000 a month until my kids are 26.
Apparently, you're now 26 if you're a dependent.
And he said, thanks, Obama.
I don't know what any of that means.
I mean, I know that you can stay on health insurance for your parents if you're 26, but maybe that's what that guy means.
But smarter people are going to say, well, look, it's a very risky business to get married, particularly, and this is why we keep putting information out about how to choose better partners to get married to, because if you can't choose better partners, then it's really Russian roulette with your own Twigs and berries, right?
And so smarter people are going to say, well, it's not that great an idea to get married.
And smarter people, of course, I mean, people of various intelligences, of course, love their kids and want to do the best by their kids.
But most people I would say there's a higher incidence of single parenthood among less intelligent people.
And certainly it's divvied up by class and poorer people.
And poverty and wealth are somewhat associated with intelligence.
Of course it's not a perfect correlation but they're somewhat associated.
So if we take...
Less wealthy as a rough proxy for less intelligent, which again, I know it's controversial, but the data is the data.
Then we could say that the more intelligent people will be less likely to have children out of wedlock than less intelligent people, right?
Yes, I do agree with that.
So poor people, if they don't get married, they may still have their kids.
And again, the welfare state has something to do with that.
But the smarter people, if they don't get married, are much less likely to have kids because they'll look it up and they'll say, wow, that's not great for single motherhood and single parenthood and all that.
So again, when you diminish marriage, you encourage the less competent people to breed.
And again, it's not 101.
Lots of smart people who are poor and lots of less smart people who are rich.
But as a rough correlation, the tendency does seem to hold.
I don't claim to be an expert in marriage law in Asia, but I'm pretty sure that the United States is a little bit particular in this thing with alimony and how much money the wife can get and so on.
And I don't think the laws, because Asia is in general pretty old school.
You mentioned the feminism before that has not really taken hold in most Asian countries.
It's still a very traditional society.
But isn't divorce fairly socially frowned upon?
I mean, it's getting more and more now.
What I'm talking about is more the economic consequence, how much money you can get.
I think it's a bit more, maybe use the word balanced here.
I think the United States...
Right, but as far as I understand it, I mean, it is considered to be a negative thing, a highly negative thing to get divorced in Asia.
Sorry, certainly I'm thinking in Japan, from the little that I know and the few people that I know who've lived there, that, I mean, The stereotype of the sort of socially conformist Japanese doesn't come out of nowhere.
It doesn't mean, of course, they're all like that.
But if there are negative social consequences to divorce, then that's going to be problematic for people, of course, because they don't want to be negatively judged.
And, of course, it's become sort of girl empowerment time in the West.
Okay, so in the West you pay with your money and in Asia you pay with your reputation or your social standing if you get divorced.
Yeah, I mean, aren't there these bill collection agencies in Asia that just follow you around in a yellow suit so that everyone knows you owe a bill you're not paying and that's enough to get most people to cough up.
Certain segments of the West people wouldn't even bat an eye or they'd just throw rocks at them.
I do get that.
Fascinating stuff.
Well, I don't think I'll take up much more of your time.
I'll just say, yeah, I think you need to spread the show more in China because your webpage is not blocked yet.
You can still access freedomandradio.com, which means you're not trying hard enough.
But I can see if I can spread the show over here.
That's funny.
So we've been blocked in certain sections of the U.S. Army, but not in China.
I guess that tells you something about the U.S. Army in China.
If people want to know what the government controlled internet is like, they can just come to China and see what this net neutrality thing will work out to be.
So many webpages, you can go on them, but for example, I cannot stream from your webpage at home, although I have 30 megabit internet.
The government just slows everything down and makes it difficult, but they don't explicitly try to block it.
They just make it difficult and just try to get you to give up.
Right.
Well, thank you very much.
You're certainly welcome back any time.
Very interesting conversational topics.
Okay.
Thanks a lot, Steph.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you, Emil.
Up next is Alexa.
She wrote in and said, I've always been very shy.
I've often found it hard to make new friends, more so with women.
But now I have children, and I have been told that I need to make more of an effort to socialize and make friends for them.
Do you think that it's important when you become a parent to socialize more for the interest of the children?
Hmm.
No, what do you think?
I don't know, really.
I don't know, it's like...
It always seems that people always, especially as soon as they find out you're pregnant, they're always giving you advice, telling you what you should do and things.
Most of the time, especially with my family, they always seem to say, you need to do this, you need to do this.
To, I don't know, maybe fit in with a more what's socially acceptable as sort of normal, I suppose.
But it always sometimes seems to contradict what I feel comfortable with or how I would naturally go about doing things.
I think It is perhaps important so that they can, if you meet other people with children around the same age, so they can socialise with children and you can go through the same things together.
But in this society, I find it quite difficult because I don't seem to fit in with a lot of the sort of people that I'm surrounded by most of the time.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I mean...
This question of socialization is, to me, a non-issue and a non-starter.
What I want my daughter to see is that I stand up for what I believe in, I make a good case, I change my mind when better arguments and evidence produce themselves, and I am not going to conform to general prejudices that are unverified and unvalidated.
So the idea that socialization is just some magic benefit, it's a way of other people saying, well, I have value to you because I'm a carbon-based bipedal life form with somewhat of a neofrontal cortex.
I mean, what does it mean to socialize with others?
I mean, the people I've known who've had the most friends tend to be the least self-aware.
I mean, once you have self-knowledge and you become who you are and you individuate and you become authentic to your own thoughts and original ideas and perspectives, then what are other people in general going to have to offer you?
If you speak reason, what's the point of socializing with people who speak only superstition?
And I don't mean sort of religion in particular, but just I mean, there are religious people who've thought far more deeply about things than a lot of atheists that I've met.
But what does it mean?
And of course, it's really important to recognize that culture looks at pregnant women like...
Fresh meat.
They're going to give us fresh meat.
We must get in there and tell the child how valuable we are and tell the child how they must socialize and we must get control over that unimprinted brain because otherwise it might spiral off into some Andromeda galaxy arm wrestling of individual thought and then culture dies and we're revealed as superstitious and irrational and patriotic.
But I repeat myself.
So when you're pregnant, everyone's like...
Mmm, mmm, fresh brain!
Brain, fresh brains!
I must get my cultural teeth into those brains and drink deep of anything that remains original in the spinal fluid of the offspring!
And I think that aspect of it, you must socialize the children!
Send them to Publix, socialize the children!
It's like, I don't know, I mean...
What do people think that kids are doing with their parents?
They're socializing.
Except they're socializing with, I would argue, hopefully, at least of people who listen to this show, healthier people than they would if they went down to some local park.
And so, yeah, it's...
You know, if you have the right friends who are good, rational, sensible parents and they raise their children peacefully and reasonably, yes, it's great fun to socialize with those people.
But the idea that just blobs of human skin filled with prejudice, you must expose your children to them so that they get...
Right?
I mean, it's...
Yeah, I mean...
I don't know.
You know, I got to go to prison so I know how to socialize with people in prison.
It's like, well, you will learn social skills there, but who wants to, right?
Yeah, I mean, I remember, especially when my mum was saying, oh, my eldest, she's nearly three now, she was saying for ages, oh, she won't know how to socialise with other children because she hasn't socialised with other children.
She doesn't socialise.
She won't know how to.
Recently, because my partner, he's on low wages, we get a certain amount of free nursery care.
And so, you know, everyone's like, oh, she's got to go to nursery.
Otherwise, she won't be able to socialise with other children because you don't socialise enough with other families and whatnot and all this stuff.
This, that, and the other.
So she did go, and to be fair, she does really enjoy it, and she's fine.
She socialized with them fine.
I mean, it's not like she's never seen another child.
It's not like she saw these tiny people and was like, what's that?
You know, she's fine.
Midgets!
Drooling midgets that pee themselves!
Run!
Run!
Well, the other thing, too, you know, I mean, because I didn't join a car-thieving gang when I was a teenager, I didn't learn how to hotwire a car.
I just don't...
It's not...
There's this general blob called socializing.
You know, socializing.
But it doesn't...
It's who you socialize with.
And what does the child see?
You know, children...
It's like, you know, in Lord of the Rings, there's that all-seeing, flaming vagina eye of Sauron.
Mm-hmm.
And it's like, sees everything, knows everything.
And this is what children are.
I mean, always watching Wazowski.
Always watching.
Like Roz from Monsters, Inc.
It's like, they're always watching.
They're always watching.
I'm just working on the book on peaceful parenting.
I was working on it today.
And it was just reinforcing what I was sort of writing about and thinking about that children will watch and watch and watch and watch and watch.
And children, like the bodies that they are largely driven by, are empirical.
You know, thinking of food does not make your belly full.
And your kids are always watching you, always watching you.
And what do you want to show them?
Do you want to show them that other people, regardless of their quality...
Have value because of this magic word socializing.
But that's like saying, well, other people who are English have this magic quality called Britishiness.
Or other people who are white have this magical quality called whitiness.
I mean, you don't want your kids to see that.
You want your kids to see that you are discriminating.
That's, of course, right after I just talk about race.
But...
But this...
What do you want your kids to see?
You want your kids to see that quality means infinitely more than quantity when it comes to your relationships.
You know, otherwise Hugh Hefner would be the best known human being in the multiverse rather than the nexus of a wide variety of antibiotic treatments.
So...
You want your kids to see that quality matters, that values matter.
And so if there are people around who you can socialize with, who reasonably approximate your values and you have good relationships with and so on, then your kids will see that.
But if you're just like, carbon-based life form, come to my house, magic word socialization, tick it off the list, then they'll say, okay, well then people...
People don't have to have value.
But mom and dad are manipulated by this magic word socialization to bring lower quality people into my life.
And that means that you are not in control and in charge.
See, kids are like water in reverse.
Water goes from the highest to the lowest level, right?
But kids are always sniffing and looking and seeing who's really in charge.
Who's really in charge here?
Right?
And if you take your kids to some church and then the priest says, do this, do that, and your parents do this, do that, then they say, okay, well, my parents, I guess, they don't have the real power.
It's the priest who has the real power.
And if you send your kids to government schools, why am I going to government schools?
Well, there's a law.
The government has to.
We're taxed to pay for it, so we've got to send you.
It's the rule.
Okay, so then the kids go, okay, so my parents aren't really in charge.
The teachers are in charge, and the government, whatever that is, is more in charge.
And kids, they're constantly sniffing, and this makes perfect sense, you know, we grew up in a hierarchical pyramid tribe, always sniffing uphill to see who's got the real power.
Now, if your kids see that when your mom uses this magic word socialization, that you end up Spending time with lower quality people, they'll say, oh, okay, so it's not my mom who's really in charge, it's grandmom who's really in charge.
And that's who they will then begin to conform to, because children conform to whoever has the greatest power in their environment.
And they're hardwired, I believe, to sniff up the hierarchy and figure out who's at the top.
Because they either want to appease that person or become that person in the long run, right?
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, yeah, I know.
Yeah, it does.
Well, I mean, we haven't really.
I guess, especially since we've had children, we've become very, very picky with people now that we make friends with.
Quite cynical.
I mean, I suppose I've always been kind of seen by my family as a bit of an unsocial, sort of cold, unsocial, strange person.
And I mean, like I said before, even having children, they'd be like, oh, trying to make you to be more of a sort of extrovert rather than more of an introvert, which is...
Given the fact that I really don't much like small talk, I'm like, no, it just makes me uncomfortable.
It just seems like a lot of effort for a bit of nothing.
It's not like I don't like to socialize, but if I socialize with someone, I want the conversation to be meaningful and interesting and not just ending up talking about the weather or something.
Wait, wait, wait.
Meaningful of interesting.
Did you hear that giant scimitar swipe?
Yeah.
98.9% of people have just vanished from your social.
Meaningful and interesting.
Decapitation, you're holding one hair of the human body, of the human social body.
But no, I mean, your standards do have to change, of course, when you have kids.
Like, while you were talking, I was thinking of sort of two examples.
One is that when you were single, well, I should say with you, when I was single, you know, like all single guys, you pick up a pita or a sub or something.
I didn't want to cook at home that much because cooking for one is a bit of a hassle.
But every now and then I'd be sort of hungry, pop open the fridge, you know, find three pickles and some fairly dubious looking yogurt cups.
And for me, you know, part of me is like, oh, yeah, well, expiry dates, that's just a marketing ploy to get you to throw out food and buy more.
I mean, really, what could go wrong?
And so I'd rip over it, you know, stir it up a bit.
And if nothing, you know, if no eyeballs or tentacles pop to the surface, it's like, yeah, I'm sure I'll be fine.
Good to go.
And it's mostly fine.
You know, every day you'd get a little queasy.
But for the most part, it would be fine.
So these are the standards for yourself.
And I had those standards when I was socializing as well.
But now, you know, the idea that I'd rip open a yogurt cup a week past its due date and hand it to my daughter, it's incomprehensible.
Like, it would never, ever happen.
You have to just have it up to standards.
When it's you who is potentially suffering the negative effects of your choices, that's one thing.
But when it's somebody else, particularly a child, that's another.
And I think that has something to do with socializing.
I also remember once I was living in an apartment and...
I was just in my shorts.
I just had shorts on and nothing else.
And I was hungry.
And the light had gone out in my kitchen and I hadn't gotten around to fixing it.
And I wanted some bread and peanut butter and I found the bread but I couldn't find the peanut butter.
It was sort of somewhere in a cupboard and it was nighttime and I tried opening the fridge to see if I could sort of, I don't know, push the light around the fridge door so I could see but I couldn't.
And so what I did was I got a piece of rolled up newspaper and I turned on the stove and I lit it.
On the stove.
And I was sort of squatting down with this fiery torch in my shorts looking for peanut butter.
And I realized I was actually about three frames distant from the opening of 2001 when all of these apes are trying to...
Oog want peanut butter!
Oog have fire!
And that's when I realized that maybe I should up my game just a little bit in terms of my living conditions.
But I could do that.
I was a single guy.
You know, willing to eat tree bark and whatever I could find under the sink with a piece of fire in my hand.
But of course, it's incomprehensible.
You can't do that when you have kids, right?
So the fact that your social standing would increase and your social standards would go up when you have kids...
I think is important.
Also, I don't like the idea that as a parent, you're somehow different with other people than you are with your kids.
So, like, you know, Izzy and I have, I mean, pretty good chats and great chats about some pretty important stuff.
And the idea...
So that's our standard, right?
But then the idea that every time I got together with other people, we would talk about the weather or whatever boring stuff is going on in the world...
That would be kind of weird because then it would be like, well, wait a minute.
Is our depth of conversation some sort of guilty secret that can't be shared with everyone else?
I think that would actually be like anti-socializing to her.
You know, well, this is the stuff we talk about.
This is stuff we enjoy talking about.
But when we're around other people, we never mention it.
It's a secret.
Do not let people know we have depth.
They'll kill you.
Right?
I mean, I think that would be...
If I can't be myself around...
My friends, then I don't think I'm teaching her anything positive about friendship, if that makes any sense.
Nice.
Yeah, that's one of the things I always wanted them to be, not have to pretend to be someone else, because that's what they're, you know, it's not something, because, well, I tried that in my teenage years, and it just didn't make a big difference, you know, it was still horrible, so it didn't make any difference whether you tried to be what you felt people wanted you to be.
Oh, and you just lose.
You lose to the empty.
You empty yourself out.
You don't fill anyone else up.
There's just one more empty person in the world.
And, you know, guess what?
You die either way, right?
You can either be yourself or you can empty yourself out so other people don't feel empty.
Either way, you're going to make the big dirt nap biting eternity in worms for, you know.
So, yeah, I mean, that's tempting, but it doesn't mean anything.
And small talk is like the germ-ridden casual sex of social intercourse.
I think it's really bad for you and I think it's bad for other people.
And I think it's a way of killing time until time kills you.
But anyway.
Yeah.
I just want them to think for themselves and not be heavily instrumented by peer pressure and make mistakes that you really...
In some of the public schools and things like that they go to, you just don't want them to be bullied or anything like that, but you want them to think for themselves and not feel like they have to do something because everyone else is doing it.
Right, and the best way to avoid them being bullied is to not be bullied yourself as a parent, right?
Yeah.
By anyone.
And that's, you know, bullying proof is just don't be bullied and then, you know, they won't be bullied any more than they would learn how to speak Gaelic if they'd never been exposed to Gaelic.
So I think, but just, yeah, you just don't let people push you around as a parent and then their sort of uphill power-seeking stops with you And they then won't be bullied.
I think it really just generally creates this magic shield around kids.
So, no, I get it.
You want to not be the kind of parent or person really where people around you can see, oh, if you push this button, they'll do X. And if you push that button, they'll do Y. You know, like if you push the guilt button, they'll come and help you move and drive you to the airport.
And if you push the sexual inadequacy button, then they'll do this.
And if you just, yeah, I mean, we want to disarm as many of those buttons as possible because otherwise you're just playing human shield the whole time rather than interacting with people.
Yeah.
Whereas if people say to you, oh, you know, you're antisocial or this, they're just trying to find some button.
It's like this cold, clammy, sociopathic robot hand groping.
Ah, can I find a button?
Must find button to push to get what I want.
You've just become this giant neurotic vending machine that people are trying to shake candy bars out of.
And I think that's a terrible way to...
To live, and it certainly is a terrible example for your kids, right?
Because then they'll find these buttons and push them too, and then because they're pushing your buttons, other people will end up pushing their buttons, and it's just a mess all around.
Yeah, it means like when I was in my late teens, early 20s, it was always you feeling pressured to be like what would be socially acceptable, like behavior.
Yeah, you didn't get invited to this party, so no one threw up on you.
Yeah.
So you didn't go out partying and drinking.
What's wrong with you?
Like, why did you not do that?
I did it.
Yeah, I did it.
I did it about three weekends.
About three weekends when I was 16 or 17, I got drunk.
And first of all, I ended up throwing up in my brother's shoes.
Still sorry about that.
And secondly, it's like, it was kind of fun.
Don't get me wrong.
I mean, drinking is, I get it, right?
Drinking is kind of fun.
It's just, it's not so much fun that a headachy, empty, expansive Sunday is worth it.
You know, because I'm pretty susceptible to alcohol.
You know, like that old Dean Martin joke, I'm not drunk if I can lie on the floor without holding on.
But I get to spin something fierce.
And, you know, lying in bed, it's like, oh, somebody stuffed the bed going right around.
And I eventually, I sort of get bad sleep.
I wake up with a headache and I just feel like cotton-mouthed and achy and not happy.
Can't really concentrate.
So I'd have this whole Sunday of like, can't really do anything.
And it's just the cost-benefit, you know, just wasn't worth it for me.
So I think that was about it.
I got drunk, not to throwing up, but to the spins once at an after Cast party for a play I was in, and that was it.
Since then, I don't think I've had more than two light beers in any 24-hour period, and rarely that.
But yeah, no, it's like, well, you won.
And I get it.
So when you're young, of course, you want these things, and it makes sense.
And of course, there's a huge amount of propaganda that if you don't have these things, loser, introvert, right?
I mean, loner, unliked.
And of course, because we're social animals, we want to fit in.
Our genes are like, hey man, if you're not liked, that's the end of the road for us.
Find eggs!
Sperm!
Find something!
Be liked!
Be liked!
Otherwise, that's it!
I mean, anybody who didn't care about being liked didn't keep those genes flowing for very long, right?
That all terminated, right?
But no, and the standards, of course, what is it that people...
I mean, nobody says, wow, you know, you didn't come to that dinner party where we discussed crime and punishment and no Moby Dick.
Loser!
You didn't come to that place, you didn't come to that park where we sat down and talked about our hopes and dreams and fears.
Loser!
It's always something that is like, you didn't take a giant social apple corer, jam it up your nose, and turn it around until your higher cognitive faculties fell out your eyes.
I mean, it's always like, you didn't destroy enough of your brain cells.
Loser!
Because the more people that are around in any social gathering, Quality is inversely proportional to quantity.
Carabana.
But the more people who are around, the lower the common denominator of interaction has to be.
Which is why there's this proportion, more people almost always means more alcohol.
Almost always means more alcohol.
Because you have to reduce everyone down to like, Three brain cells above mere simian in order for people to have any kind of compatibility.
You have to shave off anything important that anyone could talk about so that this illusion of a tribe can be maintained.
This illusion of a community can be maintained.
And that's why it's like, come wreck your brain, live our life and future with us.
Or loser!
I think I'll try the winning part of the equation, which is not to do what you guys are doing, right?
I'm not jumping into the bacteria-ridden, frothy bubble fest known as the Jersey Shore Hot Tub, partly out of fear of scabies and also just partly out of, like, I've got a book to read.
I mean, I remember when I was in theater school, we had a tour to go to Stratford, which is sort of Canada's Stratford-on-Avon.
And we were there to see, like, I think we saw 12 plays, we toured, we chatted with the actors and so on.
And a friend of mine, who was a very good actor, and I've actually seen him act professionally since, he's very good.
He's like, you know, let's go out and do X! And it was something, but I was reading Modern Times by Paul Johnson, and I'm like, I really want to finish this This chapter.
And he was really upset.
And a nice guy.
He wasn't dumb or anything like that.
A nice guy.
But it is incomprehensible to people.
Now, if he'd sort of come into the room and said, well, why don't you tell me, you know, what is it you're reading about that's so interesting, we would have had a chat about that.
But, you know, he was an actor.
Not to characterize too many actors in too many other ways, but it's like, How can I get ahead?
Who do I have to be?
Do I have to practice fencing?
Who do I have to lie about being able to ride a horse?
Okay, I'm going to act like that.
You know, I can't believe I got a pimple on my headshot.
I have to do it all over again.
I can't believe it.
Just, you know, with some exceptions.
Actress, not always the deepest of people around.
But still, deeper than dancers.
Anyway, that's another story.
But yeah, it's just been a continual thing where there's this beer commercial that you always see on television and everybody wants to peel back the LCD and climb inside to all of these people who wear yellow shorts and do nothing but sit-ups.
Hey, lots of beer and abs.
Well, in my experience, lots of beer and abs don't tend to go that well together.
But if it wants to climb into that beer commercial and have all the fun that these people seem to be having, you know, slowly bouncing up and down in unison doing woo-woos while lights flash around and some DJ listens in one ear and spins some platters and all that, some platters that matters.
But that's not the reality.
The reality is if you've got any brains whatsoever, you go to these kind of simian pulse light disco brain death fests.
And for me, it's like a ferret in an aquarium trying to claw out.
I did come on as a teenager.
I used to love going to discos.
And from the age because I had a pretty high forehead from a sort of mid-teen.
So I was able to get in and go to clubs.
And I used to love because I love the dancing.
And I used to go clubbing sometimes two, three nights a week.
And I remember one time I was at a club, I don't think it's still around, called Nuts and Bolts.
Yes, it's very subtle.
It took me a while to figure it out though.
But I was at a club and some guys from my high school came and it was I guess their first time in a club and they couldn't believe that I knew everyone and I was doing all these moves and it was just great fun.
And I remember they never, well, it was my rep at high school sort of took a massive, oh man, he's been going clubbing for like two years and it's our first time here.
But I didn't go there for conversation or anything like that, just great music and dancing.
But the idea that you can go and have some great conversation while screaming at people under pulsing lights and disco beats is kind of a misnomer now.
Even then, you know, my friends and I used to get together for what we called the decadent dinners or the decadent dinners.
We'd go out and buy the most expensive conceivable things at the grocery store and then cook it ourselves, like the most expensive coffees, the most expensive shrimp, the most expensive whatever.
We'd just make these huge decadent dinners and consume like 3,000 calories.
At a go, but actually have some pretty good conversations at the time.
Sorry for this long rant fest about my history, but in general, try not to get too deceived by, you know, through this veil, through this veil of social appearance is paradise.
There are no 72 virgins in this paradise.
But...
Through this, you know, part this, wow, paradise.
Through here, it's paradise.
Because you sort of step through and, oh, wow, this is socializing.
This is paradise.
This must be great.
And you sort of, and it's like, okay, there's some sweaty people with fairly big bellies and greasy hair and one of them's throwing up at a corner and it's like, I think I may have taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque, right?
This does not look like paradise to me.
Also, I mean, I never really took that advice because when I got into my relationship, I was still fairly quite young.
And we've been together for about, I think, about a year or so.
And people in my own family were saying, you're too young to be in a serious relationship.
What are you doing?
Why you shouldn't be in a serious relationship?
You should be out having fun.
And I was like...
Are you telling me to go out and sleep around?
Because that's not very good advice.
No, no, no, not sleep around, but, you know, you should have a bit of fun.
So you're telling me to be a tease.
That's not good either.
See, we want you to tease unstable guys until you get beaten up, or we find that you're depressingly disease-free at the moment.
And without a pregnancy scare, what is youth all about?
So get out there and get terrified and get some antibiotics.
Yeah.
I was like, well, I don't want to do those things because I'm quite happy where I am with him.
Why would I want to go out and fool around with some guy I barely know?
I mean, I know so many girls when I was in college and stuff who lost their virginities on one night stands and they were like, oh, why did I do that?
And Even members of my own family lost their virginity really young to some guy they don't even remember.
They were like, oh, it's horrible because obviously you didn't really care about them.
It can be rather painful for women the first time, so it was really uncomfortable for them.
I was like, why would I want to go?
Why would I want to do it?
You're telling me to go out and do these things when I've seen the repercussions of it and it's not good.
Oh, yeah.
It's like you've got this beautiful flower of your womanhood, this beautiful bouquet that has grown after menses, and you're walking down the street.
Oh, these are the most beautiful flowers I've ever seen.
Who am I going to bestow these beautiful flowers to?
Who am I going to love enough to share this bouquet of myself with?
And then some guy in a milk van truck just grabs him out of your hand when he drives by.
Ha ha!
Got him!
It's like, well, that was lovely, wasn't it?
There's a Hallmark moment for you.
See you.
Yeah, just always amazing.
It didn't seem very good advice to be given out, really.
It shouldn't really be...
I mean, I know this, all the protection now, and it's like, I mean, I'm not...
I wasn't like saying, oh, I don't think...
I'm not saying I have to be married or anything, but...
There should be something there.
I mean, people were saying, oh, it's so much better if you care about one another.
So why would I, you know, it just always seemed to baffle me.
And it never seemed to end well for the people who did go out and do those sorts of things.
Yeah, I'll take advice on how to have fun from people who are happy.
But if they don't seem to be that happy, oh, come on, have a bit of fun.
It's like...
Yeah, it just doesn't seem believable to me.
This idea like, well, don't fall in love and have monogamous sex when there are so many careless, half-drunk people out there who can pass out on you.
It's like, I think, why would you want to sit up in first class when there are sweaty, farty, fat people in the back eating hummus you could wedge yourself between?
It's like, I think I'll just stick with first class.
Actually, I've never flown first class in my life, but I hear it's nice.
Yeah, I hear it.
Well, yeah, it's like they had tons of...
And I'm still in the same relationship now, so it's all worked out for me.
Right.
No, and that's good.
I mean, that is choosing quality over quantity, right?
Yeah.
Good for you.
Listen, do you mind if we move on to the next caller?
I have this...
You know, I have this...
I watched the movie Wilds the other night with a...
Non-made-up Reese Witherspoon.
And I sort of feel like if she can get to the end of the PCT, I can get to the end of a caller list once!
Once!
And with less cold gruel.
But yeah, it's a great chat.
Let us know how it goes, but I'm with you.
I want them to learn that I have standards of social interaction and I'm free and easy with people who have reasonable values, but I don't feel the need to stack the house with carbon dioxide exhaling bipeds just because we share the capacity to walk on our hind legs.
Good for you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Alright, well up next is Chris.
And Chris wrote in and said, I live in Europe where there is a lot of talk and push for unconditional basic income, which is pretty much welfare on steroids.
It would be for every person over the age of 18.
That would be money you get from the government for doing absolutely nothing.
I'm wondering, can this actually be good if you're smart enough to take advantage of it?
The idea is that taxes would be raised and the poor would have more money to spend, which means that if you're a large corporation like Google, Apple, etc., you can use tax havens, like they already do, to reduce your taxes to less than 2.5%, maybe less.
So those large corporations won't be affected by the tax raises that much.
But then, if the people have more money to spend on iPhones, that means that your corporation will be able to raise the prices of their products without much problem and backlash from the people.
And with the current robotics innovations, others will be able to fire more people and replace them with robots, and higher profits mean higher stock prices and more bonuses.
It will be catastrophic in the long term, especially for the poor, but will it be profitable for the corporations?
And is it bad if those corporations do that?
If I was Google, I would use that exploitation called welfare of the future generations to make a profit from it.
I mean, if the government and the public wants unconditional basic income, what's wrong if I change my business plan to make more profits?
Or do you think that's immoral?
Because if others are foolish enough to make these decisions, is it really bad or evil to take advantage of it?
Sorry, that was my ad lib.
This idea that businesses should pay people more...
So that those people will have more money to spend or that the government should give people money so those people will have money to spend.
It's so ridiculous.
I'm not saying this is your idea, but the only question you have to ask people is, okay, let's say that you run a convenience store and some guy comes in and says, hey man, give me 50 bucks out of the till and I promise I'm going to spend it here.
And what would you say?
I would say that's crazy.
Well, no, but you see, you've increased economic activity because you've made some sales.
Yeah, but that's not what I meant.
The idea of basic income is not that, for example, Google is going to pay more taxes, but it will be by printing money or borrowing.
So the corporation won't lose any money, but the people will have more money to pay.
No, no, the people won't have more money.
Transferring money does not make more money.
If I give you a diamond ring, I don't get two diamond rings, right?
The mere transfer, not only does it not increase the amount of money in society, but it decreases it because there's all the overhead of collecting and enabling and enforcing the transfer.
So there's simply no way that transferring money can result in more money in society.
And the fact that very few people seem to know what actually creates wealth, what actually creates more money in society.
I mean, it's sad how few people know that.
It's basically when you can use the same amount of resources and produce more goods.
That's how wealth increases in society, right?
So, I mean, one big example is up until, I think, the 11th or 12th century, they had this bridle around horses and oxen that went around their neck.
And what that meant was the more they pulled, the more they choked.
And so you couldn't get them to do much.
Whereas when they got the shoulder harness together for horses, they figured it out.
It's like, hey, let's give them a shoulder harness.
They could pull significantly more.
And they could plow more.
They could plow more deeply.
You needed fewer horses to produce the same amount of crops or with the same number of horses and oxen, you could produce far more crops.
That's an example of the same amount of resources producing much more and much better of an outcome.
That's how you end up with, that's an example of how much, how you end up with more things in society.
And the idea that, well, you're just going to pay people money and that's going to stimulate economic activity is falling for the oldest trick in bad economics.
No, I didn't say that.
Sorry, what did you say?
I thought you said that they'd have more money to spend if we gave them some sort of guaranteed income.
Well, they would have more money to spend, but all the companies would just raise the prices, so they'd spend the same amount, but the companies would make more money, you know.
They would have less money to spend?
Well...
I mean, sorry, the individual, society as a whole would have less money, but the individuals would have maybe a little bit more money, but society as a whole would have less money.
Okay.
Yeah, kind of.
I mean, yeah, it's a bad idea.
Now, I can see a case wherein you could make a practical argument, and this is probably where you're coming from, a practical argument for a guaranteed minimum income.
No, I'm not.
Actually, my question was different.
It was, is it immoral to basically take advantage of people in that way?
For example, if people are given basic income, let's say 10,000 or 15,000 euros every year, would it be morally wrong if, for example, Apple raises the price of their iPhones just so they make more profit because people think they have more money?
Why would that be morally wrong?
Yeah, that's what I was asking.
That's like saying, listen, if I lose a lot of weight, is it immoral for me to date more attractive people?
No?
Because you can, right?
So, you know, that's the way it works.
So basically, you're saying that if you're a bank, it's not immoral to abuse people, you know, the future generations.
Hang on, hang on.
No, no, no.
You went from raising prices because people can afford to pay more to using the word abuse.
That's a bit of a different situation.
Well, it's kind of abuse because that basic income won't come from, I don't know, God or something like that.
It will be borrowed in the future generations.
Wait, no, hang on, hang on, hang on.
So, wait, wait, wait.
So you're saying that poor people who were offered 10,000 to 15,000 euros that they didn't earn...
That's not abuse and corruption.
But if somebody charges $20 more for an iPhone, that is corruption.
But the people who are poor who are getting this guaranteed minimum income are receiving far more money for doing nothing.
Then Apple would by increasing the price of its iPhone.
At least it's producing an iPhone.
I mean, how is one corruption and abuse for the Apple company, but it's not corruption and abuse to vote for politicians who are going to give you 15,000 euros of other people's hard-earned money?
Okay.
Yeah, that's what I was wondering.
Is it immoral or not?
I guess not.
No, it's immoral for the people to say, I want the government to use its guns to go get me 15,000 euros and give it to me without me earning it, either through being nice and helpful and people giving it to me voluntarily or through doing some hard work or even easy work or anything like that.
The immorality is, hey, Mr.
Politician, go use that great military army and gun power that you have to go and take money from other people and give it to me.
Well, that's living as the recipient of stolen goods.
There's nothing moral about that.
Well, people have more money and the poor people have more money.
Therefore, there's a higher demand for iPhones.
Therefore, the price of iPhones is going to go up.
But that's just basic econ, right?
All other things being equal.
When you increase demand, the price will generally rise.
That's nothing corrupt about that.
What's corrupt is taking the money by force to give to the poor people.
Okay.
Okay, I see what you're saying.
I honestly thought that you were trying to convince me that he was immoral or something like that.
That what was immoral?
Well, for companies to make profit from people suffering, you know.
What do you mean, make profit from people suffering?
I don't understand what that means.
Who's suffering in this situation?
Is someone suffering because they can't afford an iPhone?
Is that really what we've come to define as suffering now?
That they have to buy a Galaxy Tab or something, a Windows phone, or something slightly cheaper than an iPhone?
This is now what we're calling suffering?
For all good people, yeah.
I think, I mean, I hope that that's not your definition of what suffering is, you know?
I don't mean to pull the C-card, but I went through chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
There was some suffering involved in that, you know, the degree to which my heart is going to go out for like, hey man, I didn't make a lot of money.
I got to use a non-Apple product.
It's like, oh my God, the apocalypse is upon us.
Let me send you a Hallmark card called, oh, I'm sorry, you had to go Android.
How terrible.
Throughout most people in human history and most people across the world right now, first world problems, man.
No, what I mean is that, for example, Apple won't go lobbying, say, hey, basic income, you know, is bad, you know, listen to Stefan Molyneux, stuff like that.
You know, they'll just, you know, say, okay, if you want to give people more money, you know, we'll just raise our prices.
They won't try to, you know, change anything, just try to profit from it.
You say profit like this is some sort of bad thing.
You have some, oh, they're profiting.
It's like, okay, yeah, of course they're profiting.
I mean, you're hoping to profit from this phone call or at least this conversation.
At least I hope you are.
I don't understand why profit is a bad thing.
People who vote for this guaranteed national income or minimum income are hoping to profit to the tune of 10,000 to 15,000 euros for the mere act of casting a vote.
I mean, I don't understand why profit is automatically this negative thing.
So then why are you making this show, you know, instead of running a business and making more money?
I mean...
Because, I mean, a business is defined by its, well, sorry, a business, the success of a business is defined by its capacity to generate profits.
But that doesn't mean that every decision every human being makes is about profit.
I mean, the mere act of having children is cash negative for just about everyone who doesn't sell them for parts and Brooklyn.
And so, you know, the fact that you have kids means that there's things that you're looking to do that are more to do with mere material profit.
But profit in general means that I am better off, I'm happier, I'm more fulfilled, or as Aristotle would say, I am using my capacities in the greatest pursuit of excellence, and in particular moral excellence, which is the best and surest path to happiness, according to many philosophers, myself included.
So I am profiting from this show.
I certainly wasn't making as much money when I quit my executive career in software to start this show, but I was happier and what I was doing was and remains more meaningful and better for the world, so I am, quote, profiting in terms of happiness, and that's really what Profit comes down to is you expend resources and in return you hope to get happiness and sometimes we do it right and sometimes we don't.
But that's the plan.
It's just that happiness in business tends to be ledger based, tends to be profit and loss based.
Okay, okay.
And one other thing, what do you think about increasing taxes for the rich?
You know, that's something that They're talking a lot about, you know, for example, they...
I can't remember where, but I remember one politician or someone who was talking about a $1 billion cap, you know, meaning that no person should be allowed to make more than $1 billion.
You know, and I think that's so challenging, you know, I think if politicians want to propose that, I think that's a reasonable proposition on one condition, which is that if no person is allowed to control more than $1 billion in the private sector, then nobody should be allowed to control more than $1 billion in the public sector.
Which means no more projects more than a billion dollars.
No more loans or borrowing or allocations or anything that is more than a billion dollars per politician per year.
And if no one's allowed to have a billion dollars over the course of their lifetime, fantastic!
Then no politician is allowed to allocate or spend or borrow more than a billion dollars over the course of his entire political career.
I think that would be...
I would actually take that deal.
Are you sure?
Yeah, but it would never happen because politicians end up spending far more money than people in the private sector could even dream of.
I mean, what did they just lose?
$45 billion in Afghanistan?
I mean, they don't know where it is.
Just gone.
$45 billion.
They just shipped a whole crate loads of money over there.
It's just gone.
So, yeah, I think that's just one tiny sector of one tiny country of one war that the U.S. is involved in.
They lose more than that behind the couch in the Department of Defense every three months.
Okay, but if they do that, who's going to, you know, be the future innovators, you know?
Who's going to create the next Microsoft or Apple, Facebook, if you can have more than a billion dollars, you know?
Oh, no, I get all of that.
I mean, I only say that, what I was saying facetiously.
Of course, it's immoral.
Yeah, I agree.
I was also thinking that it would be really interesting if, you know, voting was like, you know, In companies, you vote depending on how much taxes you pay.
That's how much your vote is worth.
That used to be how voting worked.
In most societies up until the 19th century, the later part of the 19th century, that's how most democracies voted.
If you wanted to have a vote, you had to have at least a lower middle class income.
And the reason for that, of course, was the well-known problem in democracy, which apparently was forgotten for the 10 billionth time in the West, in the 20th century, the well-known problem in democracy is that if you allow everyone to vote, the poor people who outnumber the rich will vote to take away the property of the rich, and then everyone ends up poor.
And this happens repeatedly every time democracy is implemented, and that's why there was a property restriction on voting.
And that, of course, ended, and, well, everything played out, as we've seen.
I just wanted to ask you something else.
How do you think that this is going to play out in the future?
You know, poor people wanting to take rich people's money, you know, and stuff.
Would there be like a revolution in France or something like that?
You know, crucifying...
I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, there is a problem which...
Charles Murray has talked about in a book called Coming Apart.
And I touched on it in a recent show, so I'll just touch on it even more briefly here.
But there's divergent IQs in society.
And that is a big problem.
Like, what is called this divergence of income, income disparity, has a lot to do with IQ disparity.
Higher IQ correlates pretty well with job performance, 0.54 correlation.
Increased wealth, increased income, economic growth, livability in the US state is a 0.8 correlation.
Cooperation, life expectancy.
IQ and life expectancy is a 0.85.
Infant mortality is a minus 0.84.
In other words, it's inversely correlated.
And that is a big factor.
High IQ... Equals a high living standard.
So the U.S. has an average IQ of 98.
It has a GDP that's 58 times that of sub-Saharan Africa where the average IQ is about 67 for a variety of reasons.
I'm sure a lot to do with culture, environment, and health.
So it's not wealth that makes people smarter.
It's smarter people generally tend to equal some increase in productive capacity.
So every time, each 10-point increase in IQ approximately doubles economic growth, providing, of course, that the country has a market economy, unlike, you know, early China and all of that.
And so...
The degree to which IQ, or intelligence, is genetic, it seems to be quite strongly correlated.
And it is a complicated topic, and again, I'm scarcely...
I'm an expert on this, but the correlation of the IQs of identical twins is high at 0.86.
One is a perfect correlation, zero is none.
0.86, so it's 86% correlated, you could say.
Even when they've been reared apart, IQ of identical twins.
Fraternal twins and siblings have a 0.6 correlation.
And it tends to be pretty constant throughout life.
So the same IQ test was given to the same people at ages 11 and 77.
The correlation between the two test results was 0.73.
So there was not a huge amount of environmental influence on intelligence during the intervening 66 tests.
A test for the intelligence of babies predicts their later intelligence, which further indicates heritability.
The odds are about two to one that an individual's adult IQ will fall within three points of his IQ at age eight.
So there does seem to be some pretty strong genetic or biological bases for intelligence.
And if that's true, then as Charles Murray points out, this increasing capacity of or this increased migration of more intelligent people to cluster together through Ivy League schools, through particular zip codes, through particular high intelligence requiring occupations through particular high intelligence requiring occupations and so on.
That they tend to get hoovered up and move to particular enclaves means that high IQ people tend to be breeding with high IQ people and lower IQ people these days are breeding with lower IQ people.
This is creating a gap within society.
And he's actually made the case for the sort of guaranteed national income.
I don't know.
I've not read it.
I just know that he's made the case.
And I would assume it's because it...
The lower IQ jobs tend to be replaced obviously more quickly than the higher IQ jobs and some higher IQ jobs it's incomprehensible that they could ever be replaced.
But when lower IQ people have their jobs displaced by machinery, it's not like they say, okay, I'll be a lawyer, right?
I mean, because their IQ is a limiting factor, just as, you know, my follicles are a limiting factor in me running a mohawk across the top of my cranium.
Or height, you know, is a limiting, or whatever, right?
So there are limiting factors, and intelligence is a limiting factor.
There is some neuroplasticity, but it does not appear to be the case that you can take someone from An IQ that is 80 and make it 120.
That doesn't seem to be the case.
And Head Start, which was supposed to get all this stuff done, has had just massive amounts of flaming wreckage come out of the high hopes that were originally behind it.
So the idea that there is a fixed human intelligence that to some degree is fixed by genes that seems to be somewhat impervious to significant environmental impacts and that there may be a growing divergence between smart and not so smart means that the more intelligent people are creating automations then Those automations,
those, you know, you don't need a postman because there's email.
And most postmen couldn't invent email.
And so lower IQ occupations are steadily being diminished.
But that doesn't mean that lower IQ people can train themselves for higher IQ occupations.
And so I don't know what his argument is, but I could see a case being made that at some level, whether it's government or not, but at some level...
Society gets sophisticated enough that lower IQ people can't do a whole lot to contribute economically to that society.
So much has been automated.
And so I could see that being a case to be made.
Obviously I wouldn't want it through a government, but I could see a A case to be made to say, look, society has been automated to the point where anybody who doesn't have an IQ of 110 or more isn't really going to be able to contribute that much.
But of course, you know, they're still human beings.
We care about equal rights to everyone.
So let's set up a situation where the products of this automation can flow to people in some sort of guaranteed minimum income.
And, you know, smart people who love what they do can continue to do the smart things that they love to do, but, you know, given that we don't need...
We've got robot janitors, we've got robot nurses, we've got robot cars that drive themselves, we've, you know, whatever.
We've got robot plumbers, you know, all of this stuff has been eliminated.
If society ends up in a place where...
There's a widening gap between IQ levels and I can see it, again, this is all theoretical and who knows when and who knows how or who knows if, but I could see where if there's more and more automation and lower and lower IQ people are having trouble finding ways to contribute to an increasingly technologically advanced and sophisticated society, I could see where it'd be like, yeah, you know, Voluntarily, hopefully, it gives you some money and, you know, go have your life and we'll do the stuff that we enjoy and so on.
Implementing it, of course, would be a huge problem and there's lots of different things that could go wrong, as they inevitably would.
But, nonetheless, I think it is certainly possible that I could see situations where that could be conceivably advantageous.
No, I'm actually against it.
I feel like, you know, survival of the fittest, you know, if you can contribute to it.
No.
So, what do you mean by survival of the fittest?
Are you talking about, like, if there's no jobs available for people with lower IQs that, what, they should starve or what?
Maybe, who knows, you know.
I mean, if there are no taxes, you know, no welfare, you know.
You say that charity can do all the work, but...
No, I seriously doubt a charity can raise trillions of dollars.
You think that charity would not be enough to help those situations?
Yeah.
Alright.
Well, I think that if there aren't jobs for people, and we already do this, right?
I mean, if there are people who have IQs of 70 or whatever, and if they can't do anything particularly productive, then usually people are there to sort of help them out.
And I think that's fine.
And I contribute to that kind of stuff.
I think it's great.
So anyway, we're talking extremely theoretical stuff many years in the future.
So I really appreciate your call.
Listen, feel free to call back in anytime.
Okay, bye.
And I think that's it for our show tonight.
I'm looking forward to the next one already.
Please, please help us out at freedominradio.com slash donate.
This don't work for free.
And if you consume resources contributing to their maintenance, I think is a reasonably just and fair thing to do.
Don't have to do it for the first bunch that you listen to.
But at some point, you know what the right thing to do is and you know when the right time to do is it.
