July 21, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:56
3750 THEY ARE EXPLOITING YOU | The Daily Argument
Do you believe that Social Security or other entitlements will be there when you retire? If you think you can count on the government - think again! Stefan Molyneux explains the failure of social security and the strange incentives politicians face when it comes to addressing this massive problem. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Good morning, good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
Get ready to have your coffee blown out of your nose.
It is time for The Daily Argument from Freedom Aid Radio.
So, let's start with an anecdote.
So, many years ago, during the beginnings of government Ponzi schemes such as old age pensions and so on, Friedrich Hayek, a very famous free market economist, said that it was a Ponzi scheme because you continually needed new taxpayers coming into the roles in order to pay for existing benefits.
Now, the German minister, the German prime minister at the time, said...
So what? People will always be having more babies.
Six months after that, the birth control pill hit the market.
Ooh! That's a little rough.
Now, just so you understand, old-age pension schemes run by the government.
There used to be a private old-age pension scheme called one of two things.
One, save your money.
Put your money aside. 10% of your income, like a sensible, rational, waspy, Protestant person.
Put your money aside, and then you can live on your savings and your retirement plans.
On that, right?
I mean, if you just forego $3.50 a day, like a coffee and a muffin, and you invest it at a reasonable rate of return over a couple of decades, that's the easy $100,000 right there.
So it used to be that people used to save for their own retirement, or what would happen is they would be really, really great parents to their children, thus filling their children with happiness and love and functionality and negotiation skills.
those children would go out and succeed in the free market.
And then the children would be so grateful to their parents that they would take care of their parents in their old age.
So, yeah, you save your money, you invest in your children, they love you, they're wealthy, and they can take care of you as you age.
But for people who were mean to their children or for people who decided to spend rather than save, well, they were in kind of a pickle, right?
They wanted to retire. And life expectancy, of course, was going up.
You know, when old age pensions first came in, in the West, there were like, you know, 30 or 40 or 50 taxpayers for every person who's retired.
And now we're in this ancient granny panties, top heavy Japanese style civilization, where there's just a couple of taxpayers for each retired person.
Plus, you have also socialized medicine throughout most of the West.
That is adding to these costs.
And people say, well, I paid into this system, I paid into the system, and you owe me the money back.
Well, I mean, I hate to laugh, I don't know what to say.
The money's not there.
The money's not there for old age pensions.
You paid into a system, I guess you could say, but the government has spent the money.
I mean, the money is long gone.
Because governments use the money that you give them as collateral to borrow And so you give them a dollar, they use that as collateral to borrow five dollars, and then you get four dollars of value in the economy, right?
You lost a dollar, you're giving it to the government, the government uses collateral to borrow Borrow $5, and so the net is $4.
Positive impact to the economy.
Of course, it's all predatory and vampiric and feeds off the unborn by selling them after foreign banksters at highly lucrative rates of interest, but there's no money.
The government took the money, and they spent the money, and there's no money.
It was a Ponzi scheme. It was a con.
And this happens sometimes, right?
Sometimes you invest in something and the value of it goes down.
I mean, I invested quite a lot into a software career as a software entrepreneur and executive.
And then, lo and behold, in the late 90s, I got out just before there was a huge crash.
And then all of that investment didn't really pay off so much.
So yeah. Sometimes, sometimes it happens.
Sometimes you go a hundred grand into debt for an arts degree and it turns out it doesn't really get you much other than resentfully staring at customers at a coffee shop as you serve them.
So yeah, there's no money and there's no money in entirely predictable ways.
So people who want their old age pensions, I understand it.
You know, people, you got to spend a whole bunch of money and, and, and because you knew you weren't going to be dependent on your kids when you got older.
Well, let's just say it's an incentive to not be as nice to your children if you know the government's going to pay for you anyway.
You know, it's an incentive to not be as nice to your husband and to work it out if you know you can take half his stuff for eternity after you've had some kids with him if you divorce him and he's wealthy and you didn't work, right?
In other words, if you get fired or quit from your job being a wife, you still get to get paid.
Now, if you knew that you got paid at your job, whether you showed up or not, whether you did a good job or not, what would happen?
Well, we know this from looking at idling Soviet factories in the 1950s, where the saying was, they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.
Well, human beings respond to incentives, so you don't have to be as nice to your kids if the government's going to pretend to take care of you in your old age.
And then it turns into not being nice to your kids to not being nice to everyone's kids, because there's no money in Social Security.
There's no money in old age pensions.
What that means, of course...
Is that you have to prey upon the young.
You have to massively raise taxes on the young to pay for your wrinkled old liver-spotted ass to sit in a hammock in Florida because you gave your money over to the government and you voted for more and more free stuff and the national debt has been handed down to the kids.
All of the Hundreds and hundreds of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities has been handed over to the kids.
And then you lecture them about respecting their elders.
Oh, come on. How about respecting the unborn?
How about respecting the children?
So what happened was, of course, It's very predictable.
Children are a net expense to society.
And children, of course, don't vote.
Now, children are a net expense to society because your kid gets born.
You need the healthcare resources for the kid to get born.
There are health issues. And the kid is going to spend...
These days, it seems like a quarter century before they even get around to paying taxes at all.
In the meantime, they consume vast amounts of housing resources, food resources, toy resources, educational resources, or rather government socialist programming resources.
And so children are an net expense to society.
And so if you're a politician, you want to have fewer children, of course, because if there are children around, you have to pay a whole bunch of money as a government and people aren't paying their taxes in the same way that you don't want stay at home moms.
Because if you have stay at home moms, they're consuming resources without contributing taxes.
And of course, this is the old Phyllis Schlafly argument, of course, they will produce taxpayers down the road, you know, in a quarter century after they're born or 20 years after they're born.
But how does that help you as a politician right now?
Right now, you want maximum number of taxpayers, maximum number of left-leaning voters if you're on the left, or pre-Trump and anyone in American politics.
So you want people who are going to be paying taxes, not Children who are going to be consuming resources, right?
I mean, if everybody... If there's a baby boom, you have to build a whole bunch more schools.
You have to build a whole bunch more hospitals.
You have to do a whole bunch of stuff.
And the more kids you have, the more time off women are going to take from working and paying taxes.
So if you're in the government and you've promised a whole bunch of stuff to people, you cannot afford to have...
Children. So then what happens is you're promising all of these people these massive benefits which require the continual conveyable production of new future taxpayers.
But as the government, what you want is fewer children.
In the moment, right? Your plans all need massive bushels fulls of kids down the road.
But in the moment, you want to, again, produce the illusion that you're creating wealth as the government rather than just borrowing and indebting people and printing money.
And so what you have to do is you will support, you will end up supporting a cultural narrative that tells people to stop having children at the same time that the birth control pill So you will end up subsidizing abortions.
You will end up saying to people, well, to be ecologically friendly, you have to stop having children.
Now, you will only do this with the group of people who want smaller government, which is whites.
But Macron recently got in trouble for saying that blacks in Africa should have fewer children.
But there's tons of people saying that whites should have fewer children.
So you want fewer children from the group that wants smaller government.
You want fewer children overall.
But you have promised people future benefits that require the continual production of children.
So what do you do? Well, you can't square that circle and the time is well coming nigh where this math is going to not add up in very catastrophic ways very quickly in the next couple of years, certainly within the next decade as more and more people retire and fewer and fewer people are entering into the tax rolls.
Why on earth do you want to work in order to support promises made to taxpayers long before you were born?
It didn't really make any sense. So now there's this illusion.
This delusion that is put forward that says well you see what we do because you didn't have enough kids you crazy white people you never kids so what we do now is we import massive numbers of people who don't speak your language who don't know your culture who don't have your religion we import millions of people from the third world and that's how your retirement benefits are going to be paid for but that of course is not the case it's not the case at all it's never going to work it's never going to work this has been a complete disaster But in a lot of ways,
it's a designed disaster.
Because if enough social chaos erupts, people won't have the right, they feel, to complain that they're not getting what they were promised.
But breaking promises is the essence of the state.
