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April 28, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:49
2961 Black Lives Matter #BaltimoreRiots | True News
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
We're going to have a look at the Freddie Gray situation in Baltimore where riots are currently occurring and portions of the city are on fire.
State of emergency has been declared.
The National Guard is being brought in and all kinds of terrifying and exciting things are going down.
So, Freddie Gray, as you probably know, was taken into custody on April the 12th.
And at some point, either during the arrest or inside the van that he was being driven for half an hour from where he was arrested at the police station, he suffered a mysterious spinal injury.
Authorities have not explained why it occurred, and six officers have been suspended with pay.
So he could have been injured before he was arrested or during the arrest.
But it's also possible that he suffered what is colloquially called a rough ride.
And what happens is officers will throw you in the back of the van and you're handcuffed, of course.
And if they don't put a seatbelt on you, if they hit the brakes and steer the van violently, then you're going to be tossed around.
In a terrible way, in the back of the van.
And of course, I mean, if this happened, then the officers are guilty of murder.
It seems hard to imagine how any other situation, or at least of manslaughter, reckless disregard for safety...
And again, this rough ride, it's rare apparently, but it does happen.
And if the officers intentionally moved the van and this guy was tossed around in the back while handcuffed, while maybe injured already, with no seatbelt on, then clearly justice should be done and the officers should go to jail.
And everywhere up the line where this practice was known about and was not...
It was not sanctioned before.
This punishment should flow all the way up the line.
So, it is something Terrible and grievous and horrifying.
And putting these officers in jail, while it may well serve the cause of justice, will not solve the long-term problems.
We're going to take a deep dive into history, into big-picture stuff, really to help people understand just how relatively recent some of these terrible problems in the black community are and what can be done about them.
The answers, I guarantee you, while the information will shock you, the answers may shock you even more.
So let's go into some of the history of what is going on.
Why are there so many economic problems in the black community in America?
Well, is it due to police brutality?
I'm sure there is that aspect to some degree.
Police brutality has remained relatively constant over the past few decades.
In about 1% of arrests, there is violence that is used.
White suspects are actually a higher likelihood of being shot proportionally than even black suspects.
So there are problems with police brutality.
To me, there's no question about that.
But what is really the economic drivers that is pushing some of this stuff?
So, first thing we're going to talk about is immigration.
Now, immigration is unbelievably high at the moment.
According to a report from the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. has admitted 51 million immigrants in the last eight years.
Now, as immigration has expanded, the incomes of the bottom 90% of Americans has dropped and then went flat.
Now, I am not a big fan of rigid, controlled borders.
If you really want to make a dent in immigration, you've got to have this crazy, intrusive national ID program, you've got to make these raids on businesses, and you've got to spend billions of dollars building fences or hiring crazy amounts of border patrol guards and so on.
So that is not the answer.
But immigration is not being driven by freedom.
Immigration is being driven by coercion, by terrible government programs.
Big corporations, they want to bring in lots of foreign labor because it's cheaper than domestic labor.
So recently a group of corporations invited senators to a close to the press briefing.
That was dedicated to, quote, improving the H-1B program by tripling the number of visas.
And Rutgers professor Hal Saltzman has pointed out this enables the tech industry to fill 100% of its job openings with people who are brought in from China and India.
So when you have record unemployment, bringing huge amounts, millions upon millions upon millions of low-skilled immigrants to compete with low-skilled domestic workers is not a recipe for success in the labor market.
There's a record at the moment 12.2 million black Americans who are not in the labor force.
For black teens, 16 to 19, unemployment is 25%.
One in four blacks does not have a job and is actively seeking one.
Now, a White House spokesman recently telephoned friendly companies and told them, hey, don't worry, Obama's immigration policies would make it easier for them to retain foreign workers.
But what Obama told the public, in his Janus style, was a different story.
He said, oh, foreign workers, they're not going to compete for existing jobs, because don't worry, they'll be creating new jobs and new businesses and industries right here in America.
And in a free market environment, yes, people who come, generally, will start to work and create new jobs.
But we are not in a free market environment.
And that means that immigration becomes hugely problematic.
So, of course, we're just talking about tens of millions of legal immigrants and the 12 to 15 million illegal immigrants who are competing in primarily unskilled jobs.
And I've heard estimates that says, well, you know, officially, if it's 12 million, it's probably closer to 30 million.
So immigration is a huge, huge problem.
And studies have been done on this that are fairly conclusive.
And again, we've got the links to all of these studies and all of the sources below.
So, the 1980-2000 immigration influx is considered to be causal for about 20-60% of the decline in wages, 25% of the decline in employment, and about 10% of the rise in incarceration rates among blacks with a high school education, or less.
So a 10% rise in immigrants in a particular skill group trimmed the wages of blacks and white men alike.
For African Americans, it was 3.6% wage decline.
For whites, a little bit higher at 3.8%.
But outside of that, the black-white experience was way different, especially for low-skilled workers.
So take this, employment rates.
From 1960 to 2000, black high school dropouts saw their employment rates drop 33 percentage points.
This is, if you're still not catapulted out of your chair, I'm going to repeat it for you.
From 1960 to 2000, black high school dropouts saw their employment rates drop 33 percentage points.
From 88.6% to 55.7%.
These are the employment rates.
So almost out of 9 out of 10 to 5.5 out of 10.
And that is astounding.
Now, whites also went down from 94.1% to 76%.
See, this is when people say, ah, you know, racism and slavery.
Well, in 1960, blacks were a heck of a lot closer to racism and slavery than they were in 2000.
Yet, in 1960, 88.6% of black high school dropouts were employed, now down to 55.7%.
For white men, an immigration boost of 10% caused their employment rate to fall 0.7 percentage points.
For black men, it fell 2.4 percentage points.
The same immigration increase was also correlated.
Now, obviously I know correlation.
It's not causation.
I get all of that.
But nonetheless, these are important things to know.
Immigration rise also correlated with the rise in incarceration rates.
For white men, a 10% rise in immigration appeared to cause a 0.1% increase in incarceration.
For black men, it was nearly a 1% rise.
So nearly 10 times the rise in incarceration for black men as opposed to white men during times of high immigration.
And of course, immigration causes wages and employment to fall for black workers.
And when this happens, of course, some of those workers, especially those who are the least educated or with the lowest skills, turn to crime.
To increase their income.
There's a statistical link.
As immigration began to increase beginning in the 1980s, so did the incarceration and institutionalization of low-skilled black men.
So, lower-skilled black men.
In 1980...
1.3% of the low-skilled black men were incarcerated.
Okay, understand these numbers.
They are truly, truly shocking.
In 1980, 1.3% of low-skilled black men were incarcerated.
By the year 2000, it had skyrocketed to 25.1%.
So it went from 1.3% to 25.1%.
What happened?
Did everyone just become rabidly more racist?
Did slavery suddenly surge forward in time and cross over 1980 and land in 2000?
No!
No, this is a time of massive immigration.
Now, it's not just immigration.
We'll talk about minimum wage.
We'll talk about subsidies.
We'll talk about the war on drugs.
But they're all related in very complicated and fascinating ways that are easy to solve simply by granting people basic economic and civil freedoms.
So, 1980, 1.3% incarceration rates for lower-skilled black men by 2000, 25.1%.
Even blacks with a high school diploma saw incarceration rates go from 0.5% to 9.8%, so almost 20 times in the same time period.
Why is this increase?
Well, of course, part of it had to do with crack cocaine.
It first appeared in the 1980s, spread widely.
And African Americans were fairly involved in trafficking it because black gangs already policed or had control over many of the urban spaces and so on.
But it is a surge in drugs.
And it was in the black community that leaders were crying out for greater police involvement, tougher sentencing laws.
But after teasing out the numbers, researchers have found that crack has not enormously changed the results for the increase in black incarceration.
So, immigration creates huge amounts of competition for particularly lower-skilled work that drives down wages, or at least causes wages to stagnate.
So, we'll get to what effect that has in a moment on Minimum wage but let's just talk about farm subsidies.
Because why are so many people coming into America from Mexico, from the Central and South American countries?
I mean, the border was not exactly airtight in 1920 or 1910 or 1930, but there was not this massive influx.
Well, let's look at farm subsidies.
It's amazing to have this stuff all ties together.
Corn is massively subsidized in the United States, partly because environmentalists demand ethanol, which comes from corn, but there are massive subsidies combined with the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Therefore, This will blow your mind.
American farmers can sell corn in Mexican markets for cheaper, for cheaper than Mexican farmers can grow it.
Mexican farmers have a much lower wage.
They're local.
They're experts.
They don't have to transport the crop across borders.
But nonetheless, because of subsidies, U.S. farmers can sell corn in Mexico cheaper than Mexican farmers can grow it.
So you can't make a lot of money growing corn in Mexico, which of course a lot of Mexican farmers used to do, so they come to America as migrant workers.
So the poverty is driving migration.
Central and South American governments love to have people go to America as migrant workers because they send huge amounts of money back to those countries.
So one third of the agricultural labor force in the US is hired farm workers and half of those are in America illegally.
Now, not only is there massive subsidies that have destroyed domestic agricultural production in Mexico, driving people north because they like to eat, But also there's the war on drugs, which we'll touch on more later, wherein if you're a Mexican farmer and the DEA agents mistake your crops for, say, poppies or marijuana, you can get bombed.
And the amount of corruption in the Mexican government as a result of the drug war and 70 years of pretty much single-party collusion between the Mexican government and the drug cartels has resulted in a very unstable and violent society.
That violence has only increased lately as the new government has tried to take on the drug cartels.
But also there's massive amounts of subsidies.
It's not just government intervention that is driving people north.
There's a giant sucking sound of people coming up to get subsidies.
The subsidies, of course, lots of them are known.
There's welfare, education subsidies, and of course people who work illegally are consuming publicly funded taxed resources without contributing much in the way of taxation.
But also, a lot of immigrant businesses originate, they get preferential financing, loans set-asides from the Small Business Administration trying to hit its racial quotas.
And of course, there's Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which I talked about shortly after the housing crash in a video you can find on this channel called HouseMD, and was supposed to subsidize American home ownership.
And both of these corporations, state-run corporations, created by Congress, have focused on Getting immigrants into housing.
And Fannie Mae also, at least as of early 2000s, had a home mortgage program that was designed to provide mortgage loans to illegal aliens.
These aliens come in and get loans, and immigrants come in and get preferential subsidized loans, which drives up the price of housing, which is very expensive for everyone else, and contributed to the crash, which triggered the 07-08 economic Armageddon.
So, there are lots of economic and civil rights experts who say that the increased immigration spurred by President Obama's executive orders pose a much bigger threat to the black community than police brutality or racial profiling.
So that is pretty horrendous stuff.
And so immigration drives down wages for lower skilled people.
Unemployment rates therefore increase.
Black institutionalization or incarceration rates also increase.
And then people who don't have jobs, who don't have access to jobs, are less likely to get married or stay married.
And that means that there are more kids out of wedlock.
When you have a quarter of low-skilled blacks in prison or institutionalized, then women have fewer men to choose from, which means the players get more action and the kids get fewer fathers, which means that they have more dysfunction and grow up likely to join gangs and so on.
So it's pretty, pretty horrendous.
So, 6 in 10 adult black males have only a high school diploma or less.
And this is a report.
And black men are disproportionately employed in the low-skilled labor market where they are more likely to be in labor competition with immigrants.
Illegal immigration to the United States in recent decades has tended to depress both wages and employment rates for low-skilled American citizens, a disproportionate number of whom are black.
And this is the horrendous stuff, is that the black family was doing relatively well after the Second World War.
Poverty as a whole was declining by one percentage point every single year from the post-war period up until Lyndon Johnson's Great Society welfare programs of the 1960s, at which point it stagnated and started to increase.
And...
This is not what Americans want.
Now, it's what the Democrats want because the people who they import are not people from Europe who tend to be a little bit more conservative, at least relative to people from left-leaning countries like Central and South American countries.
Democrats like to import voters who will vote for them because they don't want to try and win the war of facts, arguments, and ideas because they can't.
And so they like to import left-leaning populations to vote for them.
It's not what Americans want.
A nationwide survey conducted between August and October of 2014.
If U.S. businesses have trouble finding workers, what should happen?
75% of Americans said businesses should raise wages and improve working conditions to attract American workers.
Only 8% of people said that more immigrants should be allowed into the country to fill those jobs.
So, three-quarters of Americans don't want more immigration.
They'd like for the wages to be brought up, which, of course, I understand that as well.
So, what happens is the immigrants come in and push down the wages.
And what do people respond with?
Do they respond with, maybe we shouldn't keep driving immigrants out of their own country and subsidizing them coming into America?
Maybe they say, well, maybe what we should do is just raise the minimum wage.
Just raise the minimum wage!
And that will solve all of the problems.
Now, the minimum wage, and this is part of the tragedy of people in America only knowing the wrong parts or less relevant parts of racist history, but minimum wages came into America as they came into many countries, including Canada and South Africa and Australia.
They came in as a racist measure.
So this is from Milton Friedman, 1979 book, Free to Choose.
They wrote, Milton Friedman and his wife, they wrote, After minimum wage rates were raised sharply, the unemployment rate shot up for both white and black teenagers.
Even more significantly, an unemployment gap opened between the rates for white and black teenagers.
We regard the minimum wage rate as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.
The government first provides schools in which many young people, disproportionately black, are educated so poorly that they do not have the skills that would enable them to get good wages.
It then penalizes them a second time by preventing them from offering to work for low wages as a means of inducing employers to give them on-the-job training, all in the name of helping the poor.
So there was pretty much free European immigration into America up until about 1921.
And so that sort of ended.
And so there was increasing opportunities in the North.
And this is called the Great Migration of Southern African Americans who were suffering under Jim Crow.
They moved North.
And so similar to this Hispanic migration that has happened recently, this is a clash between the labor that was established in the North who were worried about losing their jobs to those coming up from the South who are willing to work for less.
Samuel Gomper is the longtime leader of the American Federation of Labor.
The Caucasians are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by Negroes, Chinamen, Japs, or any others.
And this concern about lower-skilled wages competing, an influx of low-skilled wages competing with whites, was echoed by Congressman William Upshaw.
He said,"'You will not think that a Southern man is more than human if he smiles over the fact of your reaction to that real problem you are confronted with in any community with a superabundance or large aggregation of Negro labor.'" I don't even know if he was Southern.
John Cochran relayed that he had received numerous complaints in recent months about Southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics, getting work and bringing up the employees from the South.
And so what did they do?
Well, cheap black labor was outbidding white union labor.
So legislators in America looked to British Columbia in Canada, South Africa, and said, ah, we are going to put in minimum wages.
So in 1931, there was a law passed that shockingly is still on the books that said federal contracts have to be paid out at union wages.
Now back then, of course, blacks were not allowed to join unions by the unions.
The unions were racist, and they said, well, you've got to pay high wages, which means that blacks are excluded from the workforce.
And the degree to which minimum wages are driven by just terrible stuff all around.
I mean, the minimum wage in the 1960s would be over $20 an hour now if the dollar value had remained constant.
But of course, the dollar is constantly getting devalued, which means that wages have to go up.
Huge evidence that 10% increase in the minimum wage leads to a 1% to 3% decrease in the employment of lower-skilled workers.
And they just use teens as sort of the proxy for this.
So in the short run, there's a 1% to 3% decrease every time you increase the minimum wage 10%.
And there's a huge decrease in the longer run and rising unemployment.
The minimum wage does not help people as a whole get richer.
The people who keep their jobs are slightly richer, but if you get fired or you can't find a job, you have a wage of zero as opposed to six or seven or five dollars that you might have gone to work.
I mean, I first got my job when I was eleven.
Well, actually, I got a job when I was 10 painting plaques for the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. But I got my first job.
I worked in a bookstore.
And I think I was getting $2.40 an hour or $2.30 an hour and so on.
I had to get up at like 7 o'clock on a Sunday morning and I had to take the subway for over an hour to get to the job.
But I was completely thrilled to have it.
Now, the minimum wage has the largest impact on the least skilled workers.
You don't have a lot of alternatives.
And I've been a manager hiring people for many years, and hiring somebody who's never had a job before is really quite risky.
Somebody who's had a job at McDonald's for a year, okay, you know, they show up, they're on time, they provided enough economic value, they didn't fight with their boss, they didn't yell at the customers, you know.
But the first person you hire is risky.
And wherever there's risk, the wages tend to be lower.
And so when you can't get your first job, that has a huge impact on your lifelong earnings.
When New York State increased the minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.75 an hour, no $4.06, there was a 20.2 to 21.8% reduction in the employment of younger, less educated individuals, the greatest impact on 16 to 24-year-olds.
Now, black teen unemployment is more than 40%.
It's almost double that of white teens.
In 2007, prior to the Great Recession, the black teen unemployment rate was about 29%.
So it's gone from 29% to 40%.
The increase in the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour has certainly contributed to the higher unemployment rate.
Now, let's just look at the numbers big picture.
Let's just look at the numbers big picture.
Let's just say that the minimum hourly wage was lowered to $5 an hour.
It'd be great to have it eliminated completely.
I mean, Switzerland has not had a minimum wage ever, and it's shocking whether unemployment reaches 3 or 4%.
So, let's just say, lower the minimum wage to $5.
What would that mean?
So, let's just say, with the minimum wage lowered to that, 50% of the unemployed teenagers could get a job.
So a little over 5.7 million teenagers are unemployed during the first quarter of 2014.
So 2.89 million would find employment.
And their annual earnings would amount to $28.9 billion.
So just lowering the minimum wage to $5.
From $7.25 down to $5 has cost teenagers, would pay teenagers almost $29 billion, just to lower the minimum wage to $5.
So...
According to the Journal of Human Resources, the net effect of higher minimum wages is to increase the proportion of families that are poor and near poor.
Minimum wage tends to increase, not decrease the poverty rate.
And this is the grim irony, and it's a horrifying thing that I regret even having to put forward.
Under slavery, you had a job, but you weren't allowed to leave it.
Now, you're not even allowed to have a job at all.
So, unions like minimum wage laws because it pushes up the wages of unions.
It prices non-union workers out of jobs.
And large retailers, franchise restaurants, if they're already paying above the minimum wage, they like the minimum wage to be increased because it doesn't affect them, but it does drive smaller concerns out of competition.
It lowers their capacity to survive.
So, the war on drugs.
You don't put more Border guards.
You don't create giant electric fences.
You don't get lasers from space lighting up coyotes.
What you do is you jointly agree with Mexico to end the war on drugs.
That's what you do.
And that would take huge amounts of money but then remain in the public office that perhaps could even allow people to lower taxes.
If you lower taxes, you stimulate demand for jobs, which is going to stimulate demand for employment.
Mexico could be a more stable society.
The drug-war-free Mexico might become a much better place to live and work.
And then illegal immigration to the US is a little bit less appealing.
And although violent crime as a whole has plummeted since the early 1990s, a lot of the remaining crime is concentrated on the war on drugs.
And in Mexico, of course, drug violence has recently gone up significantly because the Calderon government is taking other drug cartels, which apparently means a lot of people like to hang from highway overpasses.
And of course, the welfare state subsidizes drug consumption as well and drives up the demand for drugs.
It's hard to get really into drugs if you've got to get up I just really want to point something out here as well.
Successful Americans now, they own no more of their income From what they produced then did medieval serfs or 19th century slaves.
We've kind of gone a horrifying kind of full circle where the government takes as much money away from you if you're successful than it used to when you were a medieval serf or a 19th century slave.
That is a huge problem.
That's having a massive negative effect on the economy.
Now people have talked about automation.
Has reduced the demand for low-skilled labor?
Well, duh.
Yeah, of course it has.
Absolutely.
But the question is, why is society not transitioning more gracefully to that new situation?
If you look at, in 1900, more than three-quarters of Americans were involved in farming.
Now, it's like 2%.
And so what happened was automation replaced a lot of the work that people used to do on farms.
The same thing happened in the 19th century in other countries where you went from guys picking cotton and hacking down wheat with a scythe to giant combine harvesters and other automated things.
There was not this huge problem because it happened more gradually.
When things happen slowly, people have the capacity to adjust.
You know, it's that boiling frog thing.
You put a frog in boiling water and it jumps out, and if you leave a frog in water and heat it up to boiling, it stays in.
I don't know if that's biologically true.
I've heard that it's not, but it's a great analogy nonetheless.
What's happened is, since the 1960s, massive waves of immigration driven by huge problems in government policies, both domestically in America and overseas.
You've had a massive increase in the price of US labor.
Way too much power granted to unions to have closed jobs and to keep scabs out of the labor.
You have massive increases in the minimum wage.
You have...
Occupational health and safety standards that drive up the price of labor, you have massive amounts of regulations, both from the Environmental Protection Agency and just the couple hundred thousand regulations that come out every single year from the American government, massively drives up the price of wages.
In that situation, you have increased globalization because, wouldn't you know it, China and India just decided to go full free market, or at least Pretty good free market.
The fall of the Soviet Union resulted in a significant increase in free market activity in Russia.
So at the same time as you have huge amounts of government policies driving up the price of labor in America, you have this massive giant sucking sound of outsourcing going to meet more free market locales that suddenly appeared, which is like a third of the world's population just suddenly went more free market.
Whoa!
You get this giant sucking sound of jobs vanishing.
From America.
And so it's happened incredibly rapidly.
And that's one of the central problems.
The President Obama, I'm telling you this, I'm telling you this, and you won't listen to this from someone as pigmentally challenged as I am, but I'm telling you this, he is not down with the concerns of the black community.
He is absolutely not.
You would want to end the war on drugs.
You'd want to limit immigration.
I mean, President Obama has sided with the teachers unions.
He won't even allow black parents and others to take their kids out of these unbelievably terrible Government schools and have charters or vouchers that allow them to make their own choices with regards to education.
So he wants power.
He wants power.
He's not concerned with the black community.
He wants immigrants because immigrants keep the Democrats in power, those from Central and South America or at least non-European countries.
He wants the support of the teachers unions, which is why he's willing to shaft black kids in order to retain power.
It's just horrendous.
So The last thing I wanted to say is that all of these pressures, all of these disastrous government policies that are like a hobnailed boot on the neck of the poor who are disproportionately black, blacks came out, of course, of underprivileged situations.
And unfortunately, all these laws coalesced to keep poor people down at a time when the majority of the poor, or at least the majority of blacks were poor.
And it ended the renaissance to some degree that occurred for blacks after the end of slavery, but before the 1960s, when blacks founded their own colleges, started their own businesses, were rising into the middle class, were congressmen.
I mean, there was a renaissance which then began to decay.
And now it's just a complete mess.
And...
It has, of course, changed culture.
You know, culture follows economics in so many ways.
So you have, of course, so many blacks who are being incarcerated because of fewer jobs and less opportunity.
And the schools are worse, right?
So starting in the 1960s, it became impossible to fire government school teachers or virtually impossible, which means the quality of education has decayed considerably as well.
And the quality of education in China and India has been improving.
Whereas in America, it's been declining because of globalization.
That means less capacity to compete.
And so black culture has changed.
Has changed considerably from the time of Martin Luther King.
Now there's a lot of this glamorization of thug culture and crime culture.
These accusations of being an Oreo, like black on the outside, white on the inside.
Like if you want to study, if you want to read books, if you want to learn stuff, if you want to get ahead, if you want to get, oh, you're acting white and, you know, this is terrifying.
It's terrible anti-intellectual, anti-success, anti-conformity, even down to the language itself, right, where you have some of the ghetto-speak or some of the ebonics, which is a challenge for putting people front and center, particularly in service-based industries.
So, listen, I mean, what happened to Freddie Gray in Baltimore?
Absolutely horrifying.
Absolutely horrifying.
We don't know what the facts are.
Apparently there's going to be the autopsy results and investigations going on.
Hopefully some more information will be released soon.
And, you know, we follow the facts here in this show as much as possible.
And if they took this injured guy, which even the Baltimore police have said they should have gotten him medical detention before putting him in the van...
I take them at their word, which means that they're criminally negligent for the injuries that happen.
Hey, I got someone in the back of my car, and I'm driving around like a madman while they're handcuffed and they're not buckled in, and he dies.
Yeah, guess what?
I'm guilty of killing someone.
And if these cops did that, I hope that they go to jail.
And it is my belief that they should go to jail, whether they will or not.
They should go to jail if they were complicit in these murders, if they were driving this guy around with no seatbelt, handcuffed, props, even injured.
Then absolutely.
If these cops go to jail, this will not solve the problems in the black community.
Of course there are problems with police brutality.
Absolutely.
No question about it.
Where does it rank on the scale?
Was police brutality significantly better in 1980 when many more blacks were employed and had a future?
No.
Police brutality, or let's just say, I don't want to equate all uses of police violence with police brutality, at least according to the existing laws, but up until 1987, police could shoot you if you were fleeing, and then that became limited significantly after a court case.
So, these six cops may go to jail.
And if they do go to jail, that's not going to put a single more job into black neighborhoods, right?
You've got CVS Pharmacy has said they're going to close some stores out there after being burned down because they're going to have liabilities if employees are killed.
Maybe they can't get insurance anymore.
I don't even know if insurance covers.
I don't think they cover riots and wars and other acts of God.
So, let's say that the people get their wish for justice, which is my wish for justice as well.
And if these cops drove this guy around violently or were negligent in his death, yes, go to jail.
Not going to create a single job in a black neighborhood.
What is going to fix things in all poor neighborhoods around the world.
And we do know a little bit something about reducing human poverty.
You know, in 1980, one out of every two people in the world lived on less than a dollar a day.
Now it's down to one in seven.
There has been, over the last few decades, the greatest decrease in human poverty that the world has ever seen.
We know a little bit about how to reduce poverty, and it has to do with increasing freedom, increasing economic freedom in particular, the freedom to trade, to buy and sell, to hire, to fire, to quit, to move.
All of these things are essential in rescuing the poor communities, and in particular the black communities, and returning black communities to what we all want, which is for them to continue to rise up into the middle class and do as well as they want to in competing in the free market.
That's what we need.
That's what was happening in the past.
That's what we need to get back to.
This massive left-wing-fueled collapse into the giant black hole of nihilism, drug, crime, welfare, single mom, dependency, rage, destruction, violence.
This is an effect Of massively diminished economic opportunities.
Let us return to freeing people.
To freeing people from all the different forms of chains that they have been put under.
The first chains that need to be released are in the mind.
When they break free with knowledge, with evidence, with facts, with reason, with benevolence.
When the chains of the minds break free, the people cannot help but rise.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Free Domain Radio.
Thank you.
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