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Sept. 2, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:08
3812 WHAT CONTROLS THE WORLD

While many people point to specific problems in society and demand they be addressed - the failure to understand how and why incentives run the world prevents true progress from being made. 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

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Hey everybody, it's Savan Mullen from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing well. Have you ever noticed, I'm sure you have, have you ever noticed how hard it is to do good for the people in your life, to help them to become better people, to give up bad habits?
It's really, really tough to do it with ourselves.
It is really, really hard to do it with other people.
Maybe the difficulty of charity is We're good to go.
And the undeserving poor.
Now the deserving poor were people who had become poor through no particular fault of their own.
You know, they had a sudden illness or, you know, they were laid off without warning in a job that hadn't paid very much and so on.
They needed help to get back on their feet.
They needed resources because they wished to resume a productive life and it had an interruption through no particular fault of their own.
And these were the deserving poor.
Now the undeserving poor Are people who have become poor because they have made really bad decisions that were obviously bad, that people had warned them were going to be bad and so on.
So, you know, having kids out of wedlock, not bothering to finish high school, you know, assuming not massive amounts of trauma in the home, having addictions, pursuing a life of crime, you know, things like that.
This doesn't mean that those people didn't need help, but it means that financial help wouldn't benefit them, but would in fact make things worse.
And this is really important to understand, this distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor.
The reason being that the undeserving poor have a great incentive to camouflage themselves as the deserving poor.
In other words, if they can convince people that they are poor not because of their bad decisions, but because of...
Bad luck? Well, then they can get the sympathy and the resources that normally would be reserved for the deserving poor and have them applied to themselves.
And this game of cat and mouse between charitable agencies, the deserving poor and the undeserving poor, is a very big, complicated sector of human history and charitable history, the history of philanthropy, the annals of the Good Samaritan, so to speak. This complexity requires the free market.
This is why charities can be so effective, whereas the government just, you know, writes a check and sends it off.
It doesn't really differentiate between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor.
And I'll give you an example. So, in the past, a woman who had a child outside of marriage, outside of wedlock, outside of having A stable and reliable provider to give her the resources she needs to help raise the children.
Well, this was considered the undeserving poor.
It was not an accident you got pregnant, you knew what you needed to do to get pregnant, and you got pregnant, you had the child to term, and then you kept the child rather than say giving it up for adoption.
And so this was automatically, almost automatically, an example of the undeserving poor.
And this was not something that people wanted to subsidize.
Because if you give money to women who have children out of wedlock, then you're paying them to have children out of wedlock.
In other words, you're paying them to not have a father around, and then they become dependent on the state, vote for bigger government, no longer care about the moral qualities of the men they sleep with, the society disintegrates, neighborhoods collapse, burn.
It's, well, let's just say there's a few negative consequences to all of this.
Now there is a theory or I guess an area of economic thought called public choice theory and basically it deals with the economic decisions of politicians and voters and people in the public sector.
We generally think of economics in the private sector but it works equally equally well and morally horrifyingly in the public sector as well.
It's really really important to understand this because You know, basic principles, I guess two basic principles of economics.
One, people respond to incentives.
And two, human desires are infinite, whereas our resources are finite.
And these two collisions is why we need a free market, basically.
Resource allocation decisions are either going to be made voluntarily or through the coercive power of the state.
And we want them to be voluntary as much as humanly possible, I would say, to the max.
So the reason why this is so important and imminent now is governments are pretty damn close to running out of money.
And this is going to cause a mad scrabble for the few remaining scraps of resources in the public sphere.
And this is going to become a huge deal over the next five years or so.
I mean, unfunded liabilities just in America run well north of $150 trillion or close to 10 times the GDP.
There's no possible way, you know, as all of these promises were made to government workers regarding old age pensions and regarding health care in their old age and other kinds of benefits.
No possible way, no possible way to pay for them.
Or I talked about this with an expert from CalPERS close to 10 years ago and not much, of course, has been done.
So I want to talk a little bit about how this works because I want to sow the seeds of despair and futility into your heart with regards to the idea that governments can do real good in society.
Because that's a funny thing, you know.
We are running a 21st century economy with 15th century economics and political theory.
It really is astonishing.
16th century, maybe 17th century, a little bit.
The basic idea of a free market, of a free society, is the government is only there to protect your personhood, your property, and protect you from fraud.
Like, that's it. If somebody initiates the use of force or fraud against you, then the government leaps into action and deals with that, but the government is just sitting there completely passive.
It's not there to make you better.
It's not there to make you a better person.
It's not there to make you more honest or more healthy or more charitable or nicer.
It's not a nagger, right?
It is a pulling case of emergency reactive device.
And that was really the foundation of modern Western politics.
It comes out of John Locke and a couple of other thinkers.
On the other side, though, there's this progressive idea that Which goes all the way back to Hobbes, which is that the government is there to make you better, to protect you from yourself, to protect you from circumstances.
It is there to make your life better.
It's not a pull in case of emergency fire alarm.
It's like a guy who runs around, follows you around day and night and nags you into better fire safety habits or whatever.
And this Paradigm can't possibly last.
It can't last.
So this idea, you know, we have a problem, people need to be better, call the government, get them to write a law, and magic, like anti-voodoo, everything gets better.
It doesn't work.
And Charles Murray has written about this quite a lot, and I'll refer to one of his arguments in a little bit.
But let's look at Philadelphia.
So Philadelphia, I guess like a lot of places in America, big problem with obesity and diabetes and healthcare costs and so on.
And so recently they jacked up Sin taxes, you know, is an old idea.
People are doing bad things.
People are doing bad things, so we want to raise taxes on them to deter them from doing those bad or unproductive things.
And it's funny, you know, because they do this all the time.
Cigarette taxes, liquor taxes, and so on.
They say, oh, well, if we raise taxes, then people would be disincentivized for doing that.
And then they raise taxes on businesses and wonder why there are fewer jobs.
Or they say, well, Obamacare only applies if you work more than 30 hours a week, and then they wonder why full-time jobs are split into two part-time jobs, right?
So governments fully understand that taxing things reduces the incentive to consume or supply them, but then they completely forget that when they want to raise taxes on businesses.
Of course, they love to raise taxes on businesses because it's less visible to the consumer.
So recently, Philadelphia raised their soda tax, or pop tax if you prefer, you know, like a wide variety of bubble drinks with sugar.
So they raised this soda tax, jacked it up pretty high, because, you know, it has to be high enough to alter behavior.
It's like one penny a can.
It's not really going to alter behavior.
And... Well, what happened?
I mean, it's funny because there's like a severe empathy deficient mental position, which is human beings are inert.
You know, they currently buy five million cans of pop a day.
If I raise the taxes, a dollar a can, oh, look, I get five million.
Like people won't change their behavior based on what you're doing.
It is weird. It's a weird mindset to assume that You change incentives, but people don't change their behavior.
And it's a really chilling and cold and kind of sociopathic mindset, to me at least.
This idea, well, I'm going to raise taxes or I'm going to give subsidies, but no one's going to really change their behavior.
And this is all these projections. It's looking at human beings like they're pieces on a chessboard.
It's really chilling stuff.
You know, you don't sit there and say, well, I want to move that chess piece two pieces more forward because it's the first move of the pawn.
But I better ask him if that's okay with him or if he has a better strategy or if he wants to go and take a shower or browse the web or sit in a hammock and read Descartes, right?
You just move the piece. You never expect the chess piece to do anything other than because it's a nerd.
It doesn't have consciousness.
It doesn't speak back. It doesn't have free will.
It's just a piece of wood or marble or something.
So you just move the chess piece and it just stays there.
And this is how rulers, this is how politicians so often see us.
They don't understand that we're human beings.
We will alter our behavior based upon what they do.
And anybody who sees human beings like that is fundamentally unfit to rule.
But it seems like quite often they're the only people who get to rule.
So they raised this soda tax in Philadelphia.
And what happened? Well, the soda sometimes became more expensive than beer.
So what do people do? Well, they buy beer.
They buy beer instead, and they get their carbonation fix that way, which of course has its whole other issues.
What else happens? Well, local manufacturers cut back on their workforce, laying people off, which means, of course, unemployment insurance needs to be paid out, people lose their job skills, manufacturing moves out, you get less tax from the people who are working, Because they don't have an income and now you pay out more tax in the people because they need unemployment or retraining or who knows what, right?
Oh, also because the tax was local to Philadelphia, what do people do?
Well, to get their pop, they get in the car and they drive outside of the city limits to do their Groceries.
What does that mean? Well, it means more congestion on the roads.
It means people sitting for an hour or two sometimes to go and get their groceries, which, you know, sitting is the new smoking.
It's unhealthy. It means increased consumption of gas.
It means reduced air quality.
It also means that there are going to be occasions when people get into accidents.
There are accidents wherever people drive.
People are going to get into accidents because you want to make them more healthy by increasing Taxes on soda with the hopes of reducing calories and reducing body mass index and so on.
And I mean, it's horrible.
It is a tax, of course, on the people who are too poor to have their own car, right?
Because if you don't have a car, it's hard to get out and get your groceries and so on.
And this is kind of the inevitable thing that happens.
It happens when the government begins to take over healthcare, right?
Because once the government is responsible for paying your healthcare bills, then they have a huge incentive to make sure you're healthy, to become proactive rather than reactive.
And again, this is back to progressivism.
It's the government's job to make you better.
And it's a gruesome, gruesome idea.
And the studies are pretty clear on this soda tax.
Pop tax doesn't matter at all.
One study said that the homes with an obese head of the household were the least affected by any changes in soda prices.
And so what? Soda tax?
Okay, maybe a few people will stop buying soda.
Maybe more than a few people.
So what? They're used to a certain number of calories, so they'll get them from beer or milk or fruit juice or, I don't know, whatever energy drinks that weren't covered by the tax or anything like that.
So the elimination of soda doesn't really have any effect on their calorie consumption or their weight.
Now, what does happen is, like a lot of these government programs, there's a little bit of initial success, like soda consumption diminishes to some degree, and then it usually bounces back the next year.
And the same thing happens if you fire a bunch of money at the poor.
Poverty will go down the first year and then people will say, wow, you get a lot of money for being poor.
I think I'm going to go and be poor.
And then it bounces back and starts to rise after that.
So Mexico, huge problem with diabetes and they actually have about one of the highest soda consumptions in the world.
They did a study. They said, okay, we got the soda tax and that means that...
It increases the overall cost of calories by 4%, but it only reduces calorie consumption by 1% per week.
And then they examined body mass index before and after the soda tax implementation.
No discernible difference.
Also, of course, in Mexico, as in other places, you can just make your own sugary drink if you want.
2013 study in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics said that a half cent per ounce soda tax, yep, it does decrease consumption, but people switch to other drinks or other foods to get their calories, so it will decrease your consumption of soda, but it increases consumption of fat and sodium because of other substitutions.
And six million different ways this isn't going to go well.
Also, of course, governments...
Expect, like they make these calculations, and they say, well, we're going to get $70 million from this soda tax.
So what do they do? Well, they plan to increase their spending by $70 million.
So they put all these things in place.
Now they don't get the $70 million because people change their behaviors.
And then what? When people go shopping outside of Philadelphia to get their groceries because they don't want to pay the additional tax, they don't even get the sales tax on the other stuff.
Oh, also, in some places in America, it's illegal to tax people on food stamps.
And so, is this tax applicable to food stamps?
It's a huge headache for the grocers, and some of them will just simply say, I'm not carrying pop anymore.
Forget it. It's not worth it.
So, it's a real mess as a whole.
So, when the governments say, well, we're going to get $70 million from this soda tax, they plan to increase their spending, or maybe they plan to decrease their deficit, which never seems to happen, but...
So they make all these plans, and we're going to spend all this money.
And then what happens is they only get $20 or $30 million if that...
From the soda tax and then it diminishes over time.
So now they have, if let's say they planned on 70 million income, they get 20 million, but they planned an extra 50 million of spending over and above what they're getting from the soda tax.
So now you have a 50 million deficit from a measure that was supposed to increase your income.
It's a complete disaster.
And this is why these kinds of people change their behavior.
I know how to get this across to people.
Not you guys. You guys are great. But the world as a whole.
People change their behavior based upon what the government does.
It's really, really hard to catch people.
Human beings for 150,000 years have been playing cat and mouse with the rules of authority.
I mean, we're good at dodging rules.
That's how we have survived in an oligarchical, hierarchical, tribal system for decades.
So long. So let's take an example from Charles Murray.
And you can, it's actually, it's a really, really good dinner conversation topic.
So tuck this away in your charming and eloquent lockbox of being interesting.
Charles Murray has a challenge which says, okay, let's say that you as a government, you want to reduce smoking.
You want people to stop smoking.
What are you going to do? And I just run through a couple of examples.
You can come up with any number of them yourself and then pick them apart to see if they're going to fail.
Your challenge, of course, is you want to reward people for not smoking.
So you want a reward that's big enough so that existing smokers will quit.
But not so big that other people will start smoking or continue smoking or maybe even increase their smoking in order to become eligible to get whatever reward it is that the government is offering.
So let's say, let's just say, you have to have a reward.
It has to be big enough, right? If it's a buck, nobody will do it.
If it's a million dollars, you can't afford it.
So let's see. Charles comes up with $10,000.
$10,000 for people who quit smoking.
Now, What does this mean?
What does being a smoker actually mean?
Is it five packs a day?
Is it one cigarette a month?
I mean, what does it mean? You have to come up with something.
Now, if you make it five packs a day, well, very few people smoke that much, so you're really not going to be doing a lot in terms of reducing overall costs.
And, of course, smokers, while they cost in terms of short-term health care, long-term health care, sorry, long-term health care, Retirement costs are lower because they don't make it.
You know, certainly there are costs around people's daily healthcare, but, you know, the vast majority, if you sort of look at your whole life, the significant majority of your healthcare costs are at the end of your life.
You know, like half your healthcare costs, I've read, since the last six months of your life, half the healthcare costs of your whole life.
So whether that's later or sooner, it doesn't change it much overall.
So... So let's say that you come up with some middle-of-the-road plan.
You say, okay, a smoker is someone who smoked at least a pack a day for five years, right?
It has to be for five years.
Now, how you measure this, let's just sort of pretend you have a way of measuring this.
Maybe this is a doctor's history or something like that.
So you say, okay, a smoker is someone, they smoked at least a pack a day for five years, and you're going to pay them $10,000 to quit.
Now, Charles wrote this first essay quite a long time ago.
It probably would be, I don't know, $40,000.
It's some significant amount of money.
So here's the problem. If you just take the statistical slice of the number of smokers who fit that standard, then you can calculate and say, well, some X percentage of people will quit, we'll have to pay out this much, we'll save this much.
As if, again, they're just pieces on chessboard with no capacity to react to what it is you're doing.
So, let's say you pass this and everyone's enthusiastic because there's going to be fewer smokers and that's better and all.
So what happens? Well, if you're going to pay...
People who've smoked a pack a day for 5 years.
$10,000 to quit.
What is your behaviour if you've been smoking for 4 years?
The incentive is very clear.
If you get paid 10 grand for stopping smoking after five years and you've been smoking for four years, then you're going to be paid $10,000 to smoke for just one more year.
If you quit at four years, you don't get the $10,000.
So somebody is paying you $10,000 to smoke for a year.
You see the trick? You see the challenge here?
It is horrendous. And if you're a three-year smoker, then pack a day or whatever, right?
Then you're getting paid $10,000 to smoke for another two years.
Now, let's say a pack is 20.
Sometimes I think it's 25.
There used to be poverty packs, 15.
I don't know if they're still around. But anyway, so let's say it's 20 cigarettes a day in order to get the reward.
So if you smoke 19 cigarettes a day, well, you want to increase it to 20, don't we?
Right? Almost everyone who smokes 18 is going to smoke two more.
In order to get the reward, you're going to actually increase smoking in order for people to get the reward.
Now, let's look at young people.
So young people, you know, kids who are at the fork in the road, should I smoke, should I not smoke, and so on.
Well, what they could say, and I'm sure what some of them would say, is they'd say, wow, man, dude!
I don't know. It's really rude to characterize teenagers that way, but I can't help myself because I'm getting older.
I envy the knees.
Anyway, so the teenagers are going to say, okay, well, that's cool.
So let's say I start smoking.
Smoking is fun and cool for some people.
So if I am a smoker, For five years.
I can start when I'm 18 or 19.
I can stop in my mid-20s and I get $10,000, bro.
That's great.
So, you know, they enjoy smoking.
Smoking obviously has positive rewards for some people.
Testosterone replacement. Testosterone lowered by single motherhood.
I think I solved the problem as to why it keeps going down.
So they say, okay, well, I'll smoke now and then I get 10 gram and I quit.
Ah, easy peasy, nice and easy, right?
But the problem is, since you're paying people to smoke longer, and you're paying people to smoke more, and you're actually paying people to start smoking, when they come to quit, they might not find it as easy as they want.
Also, how long do you have to quit?
What if you start again? If you say, well, it doesn't matter if you start again, then what happens is, If you're paying people 10 grand to quit and they quit for a month and then start again, well, first of all, if you pay them every time they quit, then you're just paying them to stop and start smoking all the time.
But if you pay them one time to quit, then just start up again, right?
You're paying them $10,000 to not smoke for a month.
Some people can do it. And some people will stay after cigarettes and other people won't.
So how do you do it?
And you can work the six different ways from Sunday.
Everything you come up with, people will adapt their behavior.
And it's really, really hard.
It's really hard to design a government program that actually ends up with people not smoking.
Reducing smoking. Smoking has a higher relapse rate than heroin as far as addiction goes.
It's really, really addictive.
And so if you get a whole bunch of people to increase their cigarette intake, if you get a whole bunch of people to start smoking who otherwise wouldn't have smoked or to smoke for longer than they would have because the five years pack a day is where you get the money, There'll be a pretty significant portion of those people who think they can quit for the 10 grand and turn out that they upped their smoking, they extended their smoking, or they started smoking, and they can't quit.
They can't quit. Also, of course, they'll be cheating, right?
I mean, if it's a blood test to show no nicotine, you know, people do this all the time with drug tests, right?
They get somebody else's urine, they do all of this kind of stuff, right?
Cheating will be rampant and, I mean, you name it.
Blood will be for sale, you know, that you can use to send in for whatever it is, right?
You can't control things that way.
Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't things that society can do to minimize.
Smoking. I mean, insurance costs and social ostracism for smoking and nagging people.
Maybe that has some benefit over time.
The question is, can you do a government program that pays people to quit smoking without ending up with more smokers?
And the examples are pretty continual.
I mean, as I've mentioned before on this show, poverty was going down by 1% a year in the post-Second World War period when the government anti-poverty programs came in.
It stabilized and has actually been rising.
A little bit since. And if you count the massive hole of the government debt and deficit, it's much higher than it was before.
So here's the challenge.
You're going to transfer money to people.
We'll just stick with the $10,000 figure.
So the transfer occurs because the recipient of the transfer meets a certain standard, certain criteria, is in a particular condition.
You know, smoking or poverty or a child with no father around or something like that.
So the government would rather you not be in that situation, or you could say the voters would rather you not smoke or be a single mom or be in poverty and so on.
And so they give you money when you're in that situation.
Now, you can say, well, you're paying people to not be in that situation, or you're paying people to get out of that situation, but that's not the reality.
The reality is you're paying people to be in that situation.
If you pay women who are in the condition called single motherhood, you are paying women to become single mothers, and people respond to incentives.
People in general—I'm working on it, everybody, with your help—people in general are amoral mammalian resource seekers.
I mean, I was at a park, I guess, probably about a year ago.
I was at a park with my daughter, and I was listening.
And there were these two women, very stereotypical, overweight type pants and all.
There were these two women who were there with their kids.
And they were talking about all of the benefits they could get.
Oh, you can apply for this, and if your kid has this, and if this happens, and if this happens, you can get this.
And they were just like people trading Pokemon cards.
They were just trading information about how to get various benefits.
And it was always, well, if you do this, you get this benefit, so you should do this, right?
Just chatting away.
Just chatting. I actually had quite an interesting conversation after that.
But that's anecdotal.
I understand it's not proof of anything.
But if you ask around, you can always ask these questions yourself.
Of course, I grew up in a welfare neighborhood.
I grew up in a single mom neighborhood.
I grew up in rent-controlled dives and all of that.
So I grew up around all of this stuff.
People always knew what their benefits were.
They always shared information about how to get more benefits.
And they changed their behavior to get more benefits, right?
Just look at how much more money people get for kids who are on SSRIs.
It's brutal. It's rough.
But we are, for the most part, still as a species in the infancy of our ethics.
We are amoral mammals seeking resources.
And so every time you give money to people because you don't want them to be in a particular situation, you are paying them to be in that situation.
So that's important as well.
Also, no matter what standard you set up, there's always going to be somebody who's excluded from that standard.
And people will say, well, that doesn't make any sense that this person is excluded.
And so you have to keep changing the definition and expanding things in order to avoid the photo ops of the sad-eyed person who doesn't get some particular benefit, even though it seems manifestly just that they should.
It just expands, expands, expands.
And this idea that you can pay people to get out of a situation when the reality is you're paying them to get into that situation It ends up with just corrupt vote buying.
We all know how that works, right?
So there's this idea, well, you know, we only have a small number of single moms, right?
So when the poverty programs first came in in the 1960s, LBJ's Great Society and so on, there was only a small, small number of single moms, right?
It's like it was in the low to middle single digits for a lot of groups.
Tiny number of single moms. Oh, it's not really going to cost that much and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
But... The moment that children turn from a liability into a resource, in other words, the moment they no longer cost you money but make you money, a very, if not the most fundamental decision matrix for humanity as a whole is completely reversed.
It's like building a house, assuming gravity, and then somebody flips the switch and gravity is reversed.
It all falls apart because you've built for downward pressure, not upward pressure.
The moment that you change...
Children from a liability to an asset, you change human society fundamentally.
You change decision-making, you change reproduction decisions, you change male work ethic, you change commitments to integrity, you change the value of a moral person.
It's such a foundational thing.
Of course, because children are liabilities, and women being home, breastfeeding and raising the children, it's a liability.
You need resources coming in.
If you're not getting them from the state, then you need to get them from a good man.
Therefore, you need to keep your legs crossed until the good man comes along.
You need to commit to him. There needs to be marriage.
There needs to be social reinforcement of that.
And there needs to be social ostracism of people who break those rules.
In the past, of course, if a woman got pregnant outside of wedlock, You know, there were kind of three solutions, like way back in the day.
Number one, she would try and have an abortion.
Number two, she would go away and give birth to the child.
The child would be given up for adoption, or it might be raised as a, you know, surprise, later sibling, because this is back when kids were born for women before their 30s.
Or you just keep it.
Now, if you keep it, then who ends up having to provide the resources?
To the single mom. It's the parents of the single mom who now have to provide all the resources.
And a man won't want to marry her because she comes as a liability.
You know, here's $200,000 liability, a much smaller chance for me to have my own kids, and the fundamental anti-biological principle of paying for a gene set, not your own.
It's kind of not how evolution works, I suppose, I guess, except for cuckoos.
the parents would be very strict on chaperoning and keeping an eye on the young, fertile asses, right?
Because they would be on the hook for the costs of raising an illegitimate child.
So you've got a whole social network, and you see religion did this, and ethics as a whole did this, the whole social network of, you know, don't be alone with a boy, a kid, Keep the door open. Both your feet have to be on the ground if you're in a bedroom at all times and so on, right?
Which I guess just challenges the gymnastic possibilities of the situation.
But when you change children from a liability to an asset, everything changes.
Parents no longer really care that much about...
Children out of wedlock. Now, richer parents are.
Richer parents generally tend to be smarter.
Smarter people see around the corner to negative consequences.
So these kinds of situations, these kind of programs, they don't affect the rich that much.
Because the rich are like, no, of course you finish high school.
Of course you get some higher education for the most part.
Of course you're not going to have kids outside of wedlock.
Of course you use birth control because they're smart, right?
And this is one of the reasons why, when you have government intervention in these situations, the inequality gap continues to rise.
Because smart people will continue to make good decisions, but less smart people who need, who really desperately, I'm telling you, desperately need.
The immediate feedback of negative consequences start making worse and worse decisions.
If kids are an asset...
Then you don't need a provider.
And you can just have sex with whatever ab-toned doofus happens to be slouching around.
You can follow lust rather than virtue.
And this changes the genetics of the poor as a whole, because so many of our personality traits are inherited genetically.
That, you know, conscientiousness is a genetic personality trait.
And if you turn children from liabilities into assets, then conscientiousness goes down in sexual market value.
And then you end up having more and more kids with less and less conscientiousness.
It's called the employment-resistant personality.
And there's a wide, it's not just conscientiousness, a wide variety of other things.
So you change the genetic composition of the poor, you create an entire group of people dependent on the state, and it's no longer About helping the poor.
It's just now about avoiding riots and buying votes.
That's what it's all about.
And it gets so desperate now that people are willing to give up free speech to avoid these kinds of arguments.
So I really wanted to impress upon you.
It's a great mental exercise.
You know, try and sit down the pen and paper with friends.
It's like a role-playing game of doom disaster and the salvation of civilization.
Sit down there, try and design a government program.
And then, okay, imagine if you're on the other side and you're an amoral mammal seeking resources.
How would you find a way to get these resources and what negative consequences might it have?
You change resource acquisition.
You change the species.
And this is why it's so hard to undo.
Thanks everyone so much for watching.
Hey, I'm also a mammal seeking resources if you'd like to help out the show.
freedomainradio.com slash donate.
I really, really appreciate your time, your energy, your attention.
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