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July 30, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:40
3767 False Promises, True Failures | The Daily Argument
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux.
Welcome to today's daily argument.
Ammunition in an increasingly fractious and exciting world.
Now if you ever want to experience a special kind of existential pain, and hey who doesn't, what you want to do is you want to go back to the origins of government programs and look at what was promised.
I mean we've seen this obviously recently with Obamacare where you were supposed to save 3500 bucks a year in your premiums like you were supposed to keep your doctor and you could keep your plan and and all of these lies lies I mean of course if if Barack Obama was such a genius that he could figure out how to save people 3500 bucks a year in health care I mean he'd have been an entrepreneur from day one instead of a community organizer which is code for well let's just say something else entirely but look back at say the welfare state the welfare state We're supposed to accelerate the ending of poverty,
right? This is important to understand.
150,000 year history of our species, give or take.
12 or 13 minutes on either side.
150,000 year history, most of it grinding poverty.
At one point the glaciers and the ice ages ground us down to about 10,000 or 11,000 souls and then we bounced back from there And now, given the obesity in America, it's not so much that I'm worried about the oceans rising, I'm just worried about America sinking into the sea under the weight of human flotsam and jetsam and carb-fueled obesity.
But 150,000 years we existed as a species, we were within 10, 20, 30 years of eliminating poverty as an institution.
It doesn't mean no one would ever be poor, obviously.
You've got crazy people.
You have people who have made bad choices, bad mistakes.
You have people who they want to be poor because they're deferring gratification, right?
They're working part-time so they can write a great novel or they want to be a monk or something like that.
But as far as systemic poverty goes, we were within a couple of decades of eliminating it completely.
You look at the post-Second World War period.
The Second World War was fought against, obviously, the Axis powers and so on.
But it was really fought against and liberated the West from a lot of the terrifying and terrible economic restrictions that were put in place during the grinding 13-plus year monstrosity of the Great Depression, which of course occurred after the disasters of World War I and the bleeding off of the gold from the Allies, which helped to prompt fiat currency, which created hyperinflation and then created a Great Depression.
In the post-Second World War period, because of an increased march of the free market around the world, you could see poverty going down one percentage point every single year.
Poverty going down one percentage point not a decade every single year.
Now that's a really interesting challenge for people on the left.
See, the theory of Marxism went something like this, that you get feudalism, and then you get capitalism, and then you get communism.
And this is supposed to be sort of a natural progression.
So if you come across a primitive economy, a more primitive economy, something like, you know, what happened in Cuba, or Korea, or Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Russia, of course.
Primitive economies. I mean, Russia only abandoned serfdom in the late 19th century.
If you come across a primitive economy, you're supposed to help promote the free market within it, because you have to go through that process to get to communism.
However, by the post-Second World War period, particularly early to mid-1960s, well, there was a big problem.
Capitalism was doing very well.
Capitalism was eliminating poverty, just as capitalism had helped to eliminate child poverty.
Now, of course, before you eliminate child poverty, Child labor looks really bad, right?
This is one of the aesthetic problems of progress, is that you say, oh, well, there were all these chimneys, these kids in these Dickensian situations, they're going up chimneys, they're breathing soot, they're working 16-hour days.
It's like, well, yeah, but the alternative before was they just would have died.
Infant mortality, starvation, disease, and so on.
So when you start saving people, things look a lot worse aesthetically for a while before they start to look better.
So when kids died in the distance, when kids died on farms, And weren't in any aggregated photographed kind of way or didn't impress themselves upon the sensibilities of urban authors like Charles Dickens and so on.
Well, they just passed down remarks.
But when you aggregate kids together and they're working rather than dying, everyone can see them and, you know, provokes this aesthetic recoil of socialism and communism.
So there was supposed to be this process.
You go through feudalism to capitalism to communism.
It's supposed to be fairly automatic.
But the problem was, of course, that Capitalism hadn't collapsed.
Capitalism was producing more wealth, and communism was not working out at all.
And you could keep this lie going, right?
A lot of the lefties, people at the New York Times, the New York Times, Walter Durante got a Pulitzer Prize, I think it was, for covering up the crimes of Stalin, pretending that people weren't starving to death en masse after the mass destruction of particularly the farmers in Ukraine, in what's called the Holodomor.
And After a while though the cracks begin to show, cracks begin to show and what happens is you start to see all of the horrors of communism and the word began to get out and of course in the post-second world war period you had this amazing horrifying terrifying experiment called east and west germany right so they split germany into two parts one stayed in the freer west the other was under the heel of soviet communism and this didn't just occur for the whole country In Berlin,
you had East and West Berlin, Berlin deep in the heart of East Germany, you had a free Berlin and an enslaved to communism Berlin, and people were dying, being shot to death, trying to get out of the communist hellhole of East Berlin and into the West.
I mean, it was truly an astounding phenomenon to see.
And then when Khrushchev began to reveal the crimes of Stalin, when Solzhenitsyn's writings began to get out and other people's writings began to get out, then the hell of communism became became very clear so then you know leftists socialist communists not entirely known for their honor and their willingness to admit fault and and be wrong so what happened was capitalism was eliminating poverty and there was grinding endless poverty and want and starvation and death and concentration camps and disaster and invasions and Every kind of human iniquity,
corruption, and horror that you could imagine in the communist world.
So what happened? Did the leftists say, well, you know, there must be something to this free market theories.
Maybe von Mises and other people have something important to say.
Maybe Ayn Rand had some right.
No, they didn't. What they said was, well, communism appears to be doing badly, so we're going to cover that up.
Capitalism appears to be doing well, so we're going to sabotage it.
So the way that they sabotaged it was the institution of the welfare state.
The institution of the welfare state arrested the elimination of poverty.
It stopped the elimination of poverty and it kind of trundled along from there.
And of course, in the 1960s, to further sabotage the free market, they began shifting immigration from Europe to the Third World, which has created welfare dependency and voting for the left and importing more primitive political belief systems that don't focus so much on the highly theoretically complex world of free market.
Capitalism and its justifications and its requirement for the deferral of gratification.
It's like free speech, right?
You maybe want to squash other people's annoying, bad, destructive, or immoral speech, but you recognize that as soon as the government has that power somewhere down the road, it might be used against you, so you defer that gratification and moral issues as well.
And so what happens is they make all of these claims.
Well, we know that poverty is being eliminated, but if we put in the welfare state, we can get rid of it that much faster.
And of course, what happens is the poor are much worse off now than when the welfare state first came in.
When the welfare state first came in, the poor were becoming middle class, just as it's been happening in China and in India over the past couple of decades, as the free market reforms Have gone in, we've seen the greatest easing of human poverty in the history of the planet.
Tens and tens of thousands of people going from poverty to the middle class every single month.
The leftists don't want to talk about that because it comes out of the free market or free market-ish.
And so the poor are much worse off now.
You've had a couple of generations of dependence on the state and the destruction of human capital and work ethic and deferral of gratification that that involves.
You've seen destruction of the family and then you have single moms dependent on the state.
You have the destruction of entire communities through diversity.
Diversity destroys people's sense of community, which is why people cocoon and stay home and get aforementioned, get fat and so on.
And so if you really want to understand the agony of the left, the agony the left inflicts, go back and look at what was promised in these programs and look at what was actually achieved.
What was actually achieved was the destruction of the free market and the creation of an entire group of people who are now being bribed to not riot.
There's nothing no one ever talks about, the welfare state eliminating poverty.
Now it's just like, well, These people are going to go crazy if you try to reduce or eliminate the welfare state.
So just it's bribery for peace now.
It's appeasement for potential urban violence.
It's got nothing to do with ending poverty anymore.
That has been off the list for as long as I can remember.
So this is what's important.
You look at What the results are.
Look at what was promised. And hopefully this will help us stop believing these promises from here on in because that is a sure path to cultural suicide.
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