All Episodes
Previous Next
June 6, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
50:28
WHY WE ARE SILENCED
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
It's a funny thing when you think about it.
So many people on the left, particularly on the hard left, really work hard and focus on, you know, getting people shut down, getting them de-platformed, targeting their employers, targeting their advertisers, working feverishly to try and silence other people.
Other people making arguments they disagree with, using data that they don't like, using premises or conclusions that they find offensive.
And it's really asymmetrical because most people on the right don't really think of doing that.
I mean, how many of you, if you're on the right, sort of wake up and say, oh, you know, I've got to find a way to de-platform this person and I've got to find a way to silence this person by any means necessary.
It's just not the way it works.
And sort of trying to puzzle that out has been a big focus of my Intellectual life, certainly recently as things seem to be escalating.
So I've got a framework.
I sort of put it out here.
Let me know what you think.
The framework goes something like this.
If you are a sort of competent and productive person and you can make your way in the free market and you can earn the resources that you need, that your family needs, your children need, Then, well, A, you're kind of busy, and B, you just get this kind of odd security or competence.
And confidence in your competence, that's kind of hard to miss.
I mean, speaking for myself, as everybody knows, I got my first job when I was 10.
And I've worked at a wide variety of things.
I worked in a bookstore, a hardware store.
I worked at Swiss Chalet as a waiter.
I worked at Pizza Hut as a waiter and other restaurants.
As a waiter, I cleaned offices, I cleaned dog hair off carpets, I gardened, you know, and then I ended up escalating into more professional occupations as I got older.
But once you've been out there in the market and you've earned your daily bread by the sweat of your brow and the competence of your hands, you just get this kind of confidence that you can handle life's vicissitudes.
Because you're competent in your capacity to generate your own daily bread, then you're not dependent upon other people.
Okay, well, you know, you're dependent upon the restaurant, but if one restaurant doesn't like you, get a job at another restaurant.
But you're not fundamentally dependent on the kindness of strangers, as the old Blanche DuBois line went from the play Streetcar Named Desire.
You're just not dependent on other people.
You can go out and earn your own stuff.
That is a very... and it's not the world I came from.
In the world that I came from, which was a very poor and generally welfare-dependent single mom environment, not, you know, quite a ghetto, but, you know, definitely in the bottom 10% of income.
In the world that I came from, there were so many people who were so dependent upon the kindness of strangers, who were dependent upon The welfare state.
The welfare state is the kindness of strangers, right?
That's the problem.
Because if it's charity, then they know you, they care about you, they'll work to try and get you out of charity, they'll work to try and rehabilitate you, get you back into the marketplace, whereas, you know, the government just fires anonymous gold over the fence and just knows that by doing that you'll vote for a bigger and bigger government.
And the number of people When I was growing up, who were dependent upon the state, and there's a lot of people who depend on the state.
About half the population of the modern Western economies, they really depend on the state.
And there's some direct, some indirect, some poor, some very rich.
Not a lot of the middle class quite as much, because they're the ones paying the majority of the taxes.
But you know, the poor depend on the state for health care, as they perceive they couldn't afford it any other way, and given the current system, it's hard to argue that they could.
But, yeah, the poor depend on your welfare, unemployment insurance, and which, you know, if you're relatively decently well off, you can save for your own unemployment and all of that.
And you've got, you know, child benefits, benefits for having more kids.
You've got SNAP and Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program.
You've got just a wide variety of government programs that shovel money largely from the unborn through debt to the poor, and they've become so used to it.
These programs, I mean, the old age pensions came in in the post-war period, the modern welfare state kind of grew out of the Great Society programs under LBJ in the 60s, so now we're talking, you know, two, three generations of people who've grown up with this kind of dependence.
And, of course, the other ways in which people are dependent on the state is government protections for employment and, of course, direct government employment, right?
I mean, lots of people dependent on direct government employment.
And they're just not in the free market, right?
They are really heavily protected.
Often there's no competition allowed.
It's almost impossible to fire them.
And they get massive pensions and benefits and so on.
And teachers get all this time off in the summer.
They get professional development days.
I mean, there's a lot of government cheese out there for people.
And of course, among the very rich, There's massive amounts of government money that flow their way.
I mean, there's been studies that say that by far the biggest investment you can make is not R&D, it's not expansion, not building new facilities, not upgrading capital equipment.
The biggest and most profitable investment that you can make is lobbying.
It's just basically rent your own congressman, rent your own congresswoman, and get preferential legislation your way.
Of course, open borders, or relatively open borders, drives down the wages of people.
This has been very well proven, and so that helps the rich.
And of course, if there's crimes committed, or the value of housing goes down, that's not borne by the capitalists, so to speak, themselves, the corporations themselves.
So if there's crimes committed, right, the taxpayers are on the hook for, you know, the police, the courts, the prisons, and so on.
So the super-rich, the military-industrial complex, of course you make a massive amount of money selling stuff for the military to go test on Middle Eastern people for, well now, many decades.
So, you know, the poor very dependent, the super-rich often very dependent on the power of the state, the middle class often, you know, in general, is funding it through taxes, the productive middle class.
If you have confidence in your ability to make your own money, to compete and succeed to some reasonable level in the free market.
You know, you can't really replicate that kind of confidence.
Now, that doesn't have to be direct participation in the free market.
In the free market, so to speak, of sexual market value, a woman, a wife, who is raising kids and running a household and providing great advice to her husband and helping him in his career and so on, well, she's loved and worshipped and treasured and praised and Is indispensable to his life, his happiness, the success of the family.
So, you know, she's not going to get fired, right?
She's got the security of productivity, of confidence and fundamentally of competence.
So if you have that security, you don't feel that a strong need to silence other people.
Directly, because the words of other people don't directly threaten that security.
However, the people I knew growing up who were dependent upon the state were fundamentally in a continual state of stress and anxiety.
Because they were dependent upon the kindness of strangers.
And they also knew, as we kind of all know, deep down in our bone marrow, that the system can't last, right?
It's so heavily in debt that the system can't possibly last.
As mathematical reality, as the reality of imaginary fiat currency infinity debt begins to we begin to wake up from this initial dream slash paralytic nightmare of pretending that we have infinite money there is great deep foundational terror at the money running out and that terror of the money running out
It's so hard to express if you've not sort of witnessed it or seen it directly.
It is so hard to understand that mindset, how panicked, how terrified, how manipulative, how hysterical, how aggressive you can get.
It's like that old line from the movie Risky Business, you know, in a recession never frack with another man's business, never frack with another man's income.
Attack upon income, attack upon resource availability, is considered to be an extreme act of aggression.
And so those who are saying, look, the welfare state can't last, the debt is too great, we need to find a way to have a soft landing, we need to transition people out of this kind of government dependence, Those people are viewed as... a farmer would view someone setting fire to his crops when that's all he's got to eat for a long winter.
Like it's a direct threat upon survival, really.
And when you are dependent upon the kindness of strangers, when you're dependent upon the whims and pushes and pulls of an utterly unsustainable income redistribution.
I hate the term redistribution because it implies it was somehow distributed in the first place when income in the free market at least is earned not distributed.
But just imagine being that dependent on others There's so many things that you need to establish in order to have that dependency maintain itself, right?
And this is the sort of fundamental lies that occur within society.
The moment you become dependent upon coercive government transfer of wealth, well, you have to hide the fact that it's coercive.
You have to pretend that you have no agency.
in the creation or maintenance of your own poverty right which is where you get all these lies uh... you know from from people uh... well you know we need the military industrial complex to defend america it's like now america's being overrun uh... particularly from the south and what's the military doing is over protecting people in the middle east and uh... you have this uh... this falsehood uh... that uh... you know if there's a single mom she'd be like well you know i couldn't possibly know he was a nice guy and then he wasn't he just left me and you know then you have to pretend that that you can't choose a good
father for your children but somehow you can choose a good politician to run your country, right?
So you have to pretend all this helplessness and you have to pretend that there are these large malevolent forces out there that you're just a leaf in a wind of larger social movements and you're not fundamentally responsible, you can't choose, you can't decide, you're betrayed, you're a victim, blah blah blah.
All of these things, all of these falsehoods need to be sewn into the Salted fields of social discourse in order to maintain the money flowing, right?
And it's brutal!
This sounds cold.
I'm really not.
I think it's an absolutely terrible situation that we've kind of been backed into here after multi-generations of massive income transfer through the state.
And it's really debt transfer, but let's call it income for now.
It's really, really terrible.
And, you know, you can think of, I mean, just the single mom, right?
She's got three kids by three different guys, and she's really dependent upon the welfare state as she perceives, right?
I mean, there are other options and alternatives, which we're going to have to explore one way or another.
We're either going to do it proactively or reactively, which is going to be the worst possible situation.
So, yeah, there's some woman, and she's got three kids by three different guys.
And she's getting thousands and thousands of dollars a month in direct and indirect subsidies from the state.
Now, as a parent, I mean, I put myself in her shoes and say, okay, well, if something threatens the welfare state, if property rights are re-established, if income, coercive government transfers, if the ethics of them are questioned, then the stress that that subject someone to is extraordinary.
Extraordinary.
The foundational panic that exists in those who are dependent upon the kindness of strangers.
There's a reason Blanche goes nuts at the end, right?
That there is a real existential terror of change in the system that they believe is required for them to live.
You gotta give your kids food, they need shelter, they need healthcare, they gotta get to a dentist, they, you know, they might need braces, they need to be educated, like all these things.
And if you don't have a provider, there's a reason why married women vote for a smaller government in general, right?
Because a smaller government means more resources for their family.
There's a reason why single moms or single women vote for a larger government, because they need someone to provide resources and they don't have a husband to do so, right?
I don't know if the same is true for single fathers.
There's very little data on single fathers.
They're also quite rare.
But just picture that, right?
So you've got three kids.
Doesn't really matter how many dads, but you know, you've got three kids.
And the welfare state is being questioned in some way.
Right?
Is it productive?
Is it moral?
Is it virtuous?
Is it actually helpful in the long run?
Is there enough money to fund it in the short term?
Or even medium term, I suppose.
So there are these abstract discussions about morality and sustainability and so on.
And utility.
But you don't really process those discussions as important.
What's important is you need that check to pay your rent.
You need that check to buy food.
You need food stamps to get food.
You got three kids.
Let's say that they're all under the age of six or eight or whatever.
Well, you're going to go get a job?
I mean, it's really tough.
A lot of people have gotten some very bad social cues.
You know, it was not much more than half a century ago when only 5% of children were born outside of wedlock.
Now it's 40% on average.
It's three quarters in the black community.
It's like people have gotten really, really bad social cues.
And I'm not going to blame them 100% for that.
Of course not.
When you change social cues and human behavior changes, you can blame every individual for making, quote, bad decisions if you want, but then you have to explain why a whole bunch of people all of a sudden kept making, quote, started making, quote, bad decisions, right?
I mean, if the environment changes, if the social cues change, if you no longer need a husband to provide for your family, And, you know, in certain echelons of society the government is much more reliable in terms of income provision than a husband, right?
The government's going to fire that money every single month.
The husband might leave you, he might get disabled, he might get injured, he might get fired, he might start drinking, you know, whereas there's real reliability on the part of the state, for moms in particular.
You know, even if you have insurance, right?
I mean, insurance, the company can deny your claim, you can go broke, and so on.
The government can deny claims too, but generally they find it easier to just approve everything.
There's less paperwork, less hassle.
So people have made some really bad decisions.
The rich have made really bad decisions, morally, right?
I mean, in terms of immediate productivity, it's fine, it's good, even, you know, if you just look at sort of base utility and profit.
For spending five minutes in a booth once every two to four years, you get, you know, I did a show some years ago called The Welfare Cliff that pointed out that A woman, a single mom, would have to get a job paying more than $72,000 a year just to break even on the benefits she gets from the state.
Because she doesn't pay taxes on the benefits, she would pay taxes on her income.
So she has to get a job that pays $72,000 or more, just to break even, to get the same income that she's getting under benefits.
She has to go and work at $72,000 a year job.
Those jobs aren't that common and they're kind of tough to commit to when you have kids at home who need your resources and so on.
And this is the trap, right?
This is the trap, right?
You just start going on welfare and then you basically get taxed at a hundred percent if you start to work and we all know from communism getting taxed at a hundred percent is not the most efficient way to set things up.
So, yeah, people have just, they've made really, really bad decisions and now they're kind of cornered, right?
They've got the kids, they've got the government job, they've got the income that relies upon all of that.
And it's really, it's really tough.
It's a horrible, horrible situation to be in.
There's no pleasant way out.
There's no easy way out.
Because we either kind of sit and wait until the money runs out, and then there's chaos, there's rioting, there's, you know, people swarming the grocery store to strip it bare so they can eat tomorrow and starve the day after.
I mean, it's just horrible what happens if we don't think this through proactively and figure things out.
So there's two poles of looking at this that I don't think either one of them help.
One, of course, is the poor are always victims and they just get shafted and screwed over by the man or the woman got left by some guy or whatever.
And therefore they're always victims and they just deserve every piece of social goodies that can be hurled their way, right?
And that's not true.
It's not true.
There are some people who are genuine victims.
I don't know the percentage because charities have an incentive to figure out who's deserving of the poor and who's undeserving.
Like who's poor because of something beyond their control and who's poor because of something within their control.
Like maybe they gamble or they drink or whatever.
Something that they can control.
And you need to differentiate between these two, because if you give money to people who are poor through little or no fault of their own, you help them out of a bad situation, you set them on the right path.
If you give money to people with bad habits, you tend to be subsidizing those bad habits and thus making more of people like that, or sustaining those, or exacerbating the bad habits of those who receive that money.
Government has no incentive to differentiate between these two types of people who are needy.
In fact, they have every incentive to just try and capture as many people in the sticky net of the welfare state so that you consistently get votes for more and more money.
And, of course, the welfare state, the vast majority of the money doesn't even make it to the poor.
It just gets clogged up in the bureaucracy and, you know, these sort of middle class salaries of people who work for the welfare agencies.
Very little of the money actually gets to the poor if it was a charity.
I think it would be considered a complete scam.
I've heard, you know, three quarters and sometimes more of the money that gets paid into or for the welfare state Only a tiny minority if it makes it to the actual poor.
If it was a charity, I think it would be considered an out-and-out fraud.
But this dependence is really terrifying for people.
Because they have the kids, right?
They have whatever it is that is causing them to be dependent on, say, the welfare state.
And the one poll of, well, they're all victims, versus the other poll of, you know, they're 100% responsible, they shouldn't have made those bad decisions, and they should just go and get a job.
I mean, good heavens, that's, that's kind of cold, right?
I mean, the money is there.
And yes, look, some people who are super smart, like I knew a guy who kind of spent a summer on unemployment insurance, and then he's like, well, enough of that, that's bad.
I gotta go get a job, right?
I'm going to make more money working.
But you know, other people, you know, go on welfare, unemployment insurance, and so on.
Well, they don't have the great jobs or the great potential waiting for them on the other side, for whatever reason.
And so for them it makes good economic sense to have kids, go on welfare, get assistance, right?
And trust me, I mean, people know this stuff very well.
As I said this in the show years ago, I was in a park with my daughter listening to two women
discuss like commodities brokers talking about futures they were saying well you know if you have one more kid you get on this program and then you get supplements for this and you know if your kid gets diagnosed with this you get this money and blah blah blah blah blah and they were just openly talking about wow but if you if your boyfriend moves in you lose this like they knew the whole game the whole scheme it really was an astounding thing to to listen to like like farmers discussing the weather and fertilizer and how many birds there are floating around the crops
This season, I mean, they really were just navigating this amoral, here's how you can get this benefit, here's the cost, and, you know, how to make decisions in that matrix of redistribution.
So, yeah, there are some times when, you know, people have made bad decisions and you can hold them accountable.
There are other times when people have made bad decisions because they've got really, really bad social cues.
It's, I mean, just if you really want to get it, look at the difference between, say, a free market and A communist environment, right?
It's an old joke, a couple of old jokes from the Soviet Union.
You ask a kid from the Soviet Union, what do you want to grow?
What do you want to be when you grow up?
He says, a foreigner or a bunch of women waiting in a line for bread in Moscow in 1957.
And one of them turns to the other and says, man, it's cold.
I can't believe how long we have to line up for government bread.
And the other one says, it's even worse in the capitalist countries.
In the capitalist countries, the government doesn't distribute any bread at all.
And of course, the oldest one, which is they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work, right?
So somebody who has a lot of ambition and Dr. Zhivago style, you know, is a hard worker and so on.
And then he gets socialized, and there's no profit incentive for him anymore, and he gets paid the same whether he works hard or not, and so on, well, his work ethic is going to decay.
Do we suddenly say, well, he's 100% responsible for his laziness now?
Well, we wouldn't say that.
I mean, if people didn't respond to incentives, which is one of the foundations of economics, right?
That and all human desires are infinite, all resources are finite.
If people didn't respond to incentives, then communism might work.
Well, no, it wouldn't work because you don't get the price mechanism to help you allocate goods efficiently.
But some aspects of communism would do better if people didn't respond to incentives.
So, when the incentives change, as when you socialize an economy, people stop working as hard.
Do you then say they're lazy?
No.
Now, if it's a free market and people aren't working that hard, you could say, well, they don't seem to be overly focused on work, right?
But that's not the way that it works when the incentives change.
So we do have to have some forgiveness, some understanding, some sympathy for people who've made bad decisions in an unsustainable system where the social cues, the economic cues are completely messed up.
That they're being paid to make bad decisions.
And they're being penalized for making good decisions.
Now we can say, yes, but they should have their own internal ethics and blah blah.
It's like, okay, but that's like saying that the work ethic shouldn't change when the profit motive disappears.
But it always does.
Almost always.
Again, there's a few outliers, right?
There are people who are lazy in a free market and people who are very industrious in a socialized economy, but you can't run a society based upon tiny outliers.
I mean, you could try, but you're just, you're gonna fail, right?
So we need to have genuine sympathy for the system which people have grown up in that is subsidizing bad decisions, right?
We all know the one, right?
I mean the marriage penalty, right?
People are penalized for marriage and if a woman has children outside of wedlock and without a live-in boyfriend or husband or anything like that then she gets more money.
If a man moves in, the money is sometimes deducted from her welfare estate.
So you're paying women to not have Men in their children's lives.
And as we know, and I've talked about this with single moms, about single moms, not having a man in a child's life is pretty bad.
And that's why I sort of encourage single moms, you know, if you've got your father or a brother or an uncle or, you know, just try and get male influencers in your children's lives.
You'll be happier for it.
Your children will be much better off for it.
Father absence is Really not good for kids on average.
It's really, really bad for kids.
So, you know, just try your very best to get some kind of male influence in your children's lives.
It will make, particularly their teenage years, so, so much easier.
So yeah, that's the situation.
Now, if you understand the panic of people who feel That they're utterly dependent upon an unsustainable system, and because they're, quote, addicted to this free money from the state, what do addicts do?
Well, they manipulate, they lie, they threaten, they bully, they wheedle, they cajole, they, you know, they play the victim, they, you know, they just mutate into whatever they need to get A resource, right?
I mean, to take an extreme example, right?
Someone who's addicted to cocaine and doesn't have any money, they'll go over to the coke dealer's house, they'll pretend to hang out, they'll laugh at his jokes, they'll manipulate, you know, just to get what they want, because they don't have their own drugs, so they have to try and find some way to get it.
This panic of dependence on the kindness of strangers is something that really, really needs to be understood.
It's what drives the censorious, aggressive, milkshake-throwing, threatening behavior.
Why do people threaten?
Because they're terrified.
I'm not saying they're not dangerous.
This is not like, you know, necessarily, you know, embrace your enemy all the way.
But it is really, really important to understand that people out there People are genuinely, existentially, foundationally terrified of the changes that are inevitably coming to a society that can't even remotely pay its own bills.
You know, unfunded liabilities in the U.S.
are $180 trillion plus.
I mean, it's like 10 times the actual economy and the deficits are ridiculous and the debt is insane.
Right?
So people are genuinely terrified.
It's one thing to be, quote, an addict, right?
I mean, it's another thing to be addicted to a substance that's going to run out.
And so when people talk about the free market, people don't see opportunity.
Like you and I, we all, free market, that's great!
More opportunity, more competition, more chance to go out there and challenge other people with their expertise to win more client resources and attention.
Like, we're excited by it, right?
It's cool.
But other people, what they hear, free market, and they hear threat to government income.
That's what they hear.
They hear privatization, and they don't hear, wow, from a customer standpoint, privatization is fantastic, right?
You get better services, you get more improvement, more technology, more investment, faster, quicker, cheaper, stronger, whatever, right?
It's great for the customer.
But privatization, if you're working for that particular government agency or department or whatever, I mean, you can say to people, well, in the long run you'll be better off, But from a pure security, finance, benefit standpoint, it's really tough to make that case.
It's really tough.
I mean, you know, bird in the hand versus two in the bush, right?
So understanding these two sides of the same thing, like Scott Adams' great analogy, it's in the movie Hoaxed, hoaxedmovie.com, you should check it out.
But he talks about, you know, same, you know, same movie, but two different screens, right?
So if there's a movie about the privatization of some government agency, Some people are saying like, yay, free market, more productivity, blah blah blah, right?
Cheaper services and more efficient, and that's why.
But other people who maybe work for the government are looking at that and seeing, well that's it, I'm going to fall from the middle class into the poor, if I'm lucky.
Because I don't have the protections.
of the government.
I don't have the job security of the government.
I don't have the benefits, the high pay.
Government workers make 40% or more, more than private sector workers.
So it's like, okay, there's a massive cut in pay.
Now, for people who don't work for the government, great, you know, I get to save a couple hundred bucks a year by not having to pay all this overhead.
But for people who work for the government, they may be losing $30,000 plus job security plus exorbitant benefits and retirement packages.
And, but you could say greater good and, but you know, that's not, I mean, you can say greater good to someone in a communist economy and say, work hard, greater good.
It's like, that's not how people work.
People don't really work for the greater good.
They work for the benefit of themselves.
Now, people will claim the greater good if the greater good coincides with their own consumption of benefits and security.
Well, sure.
But I mean, that's just...
More falsehoods to cover naked self-interest.
So these two movies, right?
Some people say, you know, free speech is great.
You know, free speech is wonderful.
But if free speech threatens government transfer of money, well, that's terrible for the recipient.
They don't want that free speech.
They don't want that.
Free speech.
If free speech advocates for private properties and free markets and so on then there's vast sections of the population that view that free speech as directly injurious to their economic security and welfare and at some level they may even and probably do perceive it as threatening Their very sustainability.
Their survivability.
How can I feed my kids?
How am I going to get my kids dental visits?
How am I going to pay my bills?
How am I going to pay my rent?
Right?
Now, when it comes to abstract principles versus direct survival, we all know that human beings will choose direct survival over abstract principles.
And we know that because of evolution, right?
That those who chose abstract principles over direct physical survival generally didn't survive to pass that preference on, and you know, there's almost no aspect of personality and choices that has no genetic basis, right?
So, it's just not how we work.
So, of course, with all of this understood, the panic, the anxiety, you've got to silence people because the words of those people are cutting off your survivability, your income, your whatever, right?
It's the same thing like foreign governments, right?
Where you are in the recipient of a massive amount of foreign aid from say america and america spends an ungodly amount of money on foreign aid that is almost exclusively destructive to the countries who receive it at least to the people of the countries who receive it but of course if you're a government in recipients of a huge amount of foreign aid and someone comes along and starts saying america first We've got to take care of Americans.
We've got homeless vets.
We've got homeless people.
We've got people who can't get access to social services and so on.
Forget sending all our money overseas.
So if you're the recipient of billions of dollars of American foreign aid and someone starts talking about America first, I guess you could say, well, in a purely moral universe, you'd say, well, I can understand that.
It's been a fun ride, but I do understand that Americans need to spend their money on Americans first.
But that's not how people work.
It's just not how people work.
And so, all over the place, there is this terror of the downing of the system.
It's like the feeling after you feel that weird, deep, terrifying tremor in the hull of the Titanic when you're sailing with Leonardo DiCaprio.
It's like, mmm.
Well, we can't all fit in the lifeboat, so we better start doing something.
So I really wanted people to understand there is this genuine downright terror, and that's why people focus so much on silencing, on deplatforming, and so on.
There's this terror that the words are going to block the resources that they believe their survival directly depends upon.
And they're simply guarding their food stocks from the winter from who they see as wolves who want to come and take what they need to survive away.
And that's the difference in incentive.
It's the old thing like, you know, there's, I don't know if there still are, probably still are, but there were these sugar subsidies, sorry, sugar tariffs in America, right?
So there was pretty big tariffs on sugar coming into America.
One of the reasons, I think, why you ended up with this high fructose corn syrup, Satan blood in so much food.
Now, the sugar manufacturers in America, they make millions and millions and millions of dollars because foreign competition allows them to keep their prices high, like a foreign competition, right, because of the tariffs.
So they have huge incentives to lobby the government to keep these tariff walls up, whereas, you know, your average consumer is losing, what, 10, 20, 30, 40 bucks a year?
There's almost no incentive to oppose it because it's not really worth it, right?
These disincentives that if you're out there working being productive in the free market or the remnants thereof raising your family and so on you're really really busy and it's like yeah, you know if if this department gets privatized or or you know, they stop so the Department of Education originally the Department of Public Education until people realized that the acronym was too accurate If, oh, we shut down the Department of Public...
Oh, great, you know, okay, that's going to lower my taxes, it's going to allow more school choice locally and so on.
So you're like, yeah, that's a positive.
How much are you going to fight for it?
Yeah, somewhat, but probably not hugely.
I mean, there'll be, again, outliers, people who won't care and people who care enormously because of principles, but most people are kind of in the middle.
But, of course, if you work for the Department of Public Education, you're terrified...
Enraged!
Right?
Fear and anger are two flip sides of the same thing.
And, of course, when activists try and get people deplantful and silenced, we see the anger, we see the rage, but I'm trying to sort of lift that mask and see what's underneath.
What's underneath is this terror that you can't survive without government money.
You can't make it without government money.
Now, for some people that's probably true, and I think those people need charity, they need help, we need to be sensitive, and we need to take ownership as a society, not collective ownership, but, you know, ownership as a society to understand that we've given people really, really bad cues and incentives for decades, generations, and we need to Be aware of that, and just not blame people for being in this kind of situation, but recognize that underneath the aggression is a kind of terror.
A terror that you can't survive without the resources, and that people are threatening the resources.
And the way that you deal with that terror is you attack people, right?
This is why fear and aggression are so closely linked, right?
It's fight or flight mechanism, right?
Because you run away from the bear, but if you can't run away, you've got to turn and fight.
You've got to be pretty aggressive to do that.
So the aggression is masking a kind of fear, and the fear is coming from people who don't know if they can survive without government redistribution or government distribution of income.
It's really a terrifying situation to be that dependent on the state, on the kindness of others, because, you know, people could change their minds.
People could say, you know, the welfare state, we can't sustain it.
It's ridiculously inefficient.
Very little of the money gets to the poor.
It's a vote-buying mechanism.
It's destroyed the family.
It's harming children.
Unsustainable.
We've got to find a way out of this.
And then there'll be this transition, right?
Well, you know, we'll allow more of the free market to produce more and more resources, which can then, once people understand, it's not the fault of the poor exclusively and directly, yet irrevocably, that they're poor.
Right?
You've got terrible government education in a lot of these communities.
Well, in general, right?
You have really, really bad incentives being applied to the family.
You have just a huge, you've got all these people out there telling the poor that they're screwed, that there's a terrible system, that they can't escape, that they're going to be ground down, that they're going to be profited from, that wealth is evil and entrepreneurship is exploitation.
All of these people out there, you know, whispering all of this terrible stuff into the ears of the poor, which goes a long way towards paralyzing them in achieving their own opportunity or possibilities or potential, I guess.
So, you know, we've got to have some sympathy.
I mean, the humane transition out is to say, look, the system is wrong, and I'm sorry that you got caught up in it.
Genuinely sorry that you got caught up in it.
But we do have to recognize when a system is wrong.
It's immoral, fundamentally, because it's a violation of property rights to have a coercively redistributionist state.
And, you know, the fruits of immorality are generally... I mean, the only reason immorality, like chocolate, has any sustainability is it's great at the beginning.
It's great at the beginning.
You know, if you go off the gold standard, you can print all the money you want.
You can have a war in Vietnam.
You can have a giant redistributionist welfare state.
You can have affirmative action.
You can have all this stuff.
You get a massive expansion in government agencies and taxes don't have to go up proportionally because you can just print the money, borrow the money and so on.
The only reason temptation is at all tempting is because it gives you fantastic stuff in the short run.
Now, with a very advanced economy and a lot of wealth and a lot of collateral from future taxpayers and so on, That short run can be a half a century, it can be 60 years, it can be whatever, right?
But it's, you know, the longer you delay the course correction, the worst and more harsh the course correction is going to be.
So we can say, look, you know, people who are dependent upon the state, both rich and poor, like, sorry, this is a terrible situation.
We made a huge mistake as a culture and we've really put people in a terrible bind.
Now some people we're going to help out and trust me like you'll feel so much better.
You'll feel so much better not having that existential terror of being dependent upon the kindness of strangers on The whims of an unstable and absolutely unsustainable political redistributionist system like you'll feel so much better with the confidence of knowing that you can go out and you can earn your own daily bread.
I mean it gives you such confidence such relaxation such a sense of security to rely on your own competence rather than having to manipulate other people and bully and play the victim and all of this nonsense that isn't going to work in the long run.
And the long run is now, I mean, we're not that far off from when the money's going to run out.
I mean, come on, we know all of this, right?
So, people will be so much happier.
You know, like the people who get off drugs, right?
It's hell in the short run, but they're happier in the long run.
Plus they're alive, which is also a huge plus.
So, it is a terrible situation.
The morality of it was absolutely wrong from the very beginning, and many people spoke out about it, but it was too tempting, right?
It was too tempting to have all of this free stuff.
Like, wow, the government can pretend to add value in society by just borrowing.
By just borrowing, you know, like if I'm at a party and I pay for the pizza using someone else's credit card, it only looks like I'm paying for the pizza.
I'm really not, right?
So, yeah, we're going to recognize that there's been really, really bad incentives, that people have made bad decisions based upon social cues, economic cues that are very much against their self-interest in the long run.
It's not 100% their fault.
And I have a lot of sympathy for people like that.
But it's not sustainable.
So some people will be able to help out of that quagmire, and they will look back and say, oh man, thank goodness somebody helped me out of that, because now I can rely upon myself to survive, I can rely upon myself to make my own daily bread, I'm competent, I'm confident, and thank heavens, right?
But you know, those people need the state a lot less, so the government doesn't want too many of those people.
And there are some people who can't get out of that situation.
Like, either they're too old, or they're too broken, or their self-esteem has been too crushed, or they've developed mental health problems, or maybe they've got physical disabilities and so on.
Those people, you can't just tell them to buck up and, you know, go get a job doing a roofing contract.
And those people we need to... I want to help.
And the only way they can be helped is through private charity.
Private charity will go in and really encourage them and where they can't be transitioned out of dependence they will make them as comfortable as possible in a humane way as possible in terms of giving them resources and health care and income and shelter and so on.
And look, the welfare state has kind of ground over and broken a lot of people and we can't just abandon them.
I mean, that's cruel and inhumane to the nth degree.
We need to take care of those people.
But of course, the only way we can take care of those people in the long run is to actually have a productive economy.
And the only way we can actually have a productive economy is to break down the barriers to wealth that allow the most competent people among us to gain access to the most resources and thus maximize productivity to the point where we can afford to take care of the people who've been broken and smashed up by the welfare state.
And you understand that I've always come from a position of love and caring and wanting the best for people.
If we just allow things to drift, if we allow ourselves to be bullied out of or silenced out of speaking an essential truth, the suffering will be, I mean, Beyond calculation.
The suffering when the system runs out of money will be beyond calculation.
And pretending that it's going to go on forever is, I mean, mathematically that which can continue won't continue.
You know, just the way I would think of it.
Think of it like this.
I'll sort of end on this note.
I hope this is helpful.
It's really, really been helpful for me to sort of clarify.
And I thought a lot of this stuff over the years, but sort of putting it together in a package I hope helps people understand why I'm really coming from a position of love and wanting the best for everyone, particularly the poor and particularly those Who have become dependent on on this terrible system But think of it like this.
You've got some favorite uncle.
He's a jokester.
He's fun.
He's engaging.
He's charismatic He play fights with you when you're a kid and and gives you sage dating advice when you're a teenager And it's just a great guy all around But he's a chain smoker, right?
And you, you know, a couple of times you say, yeah, you know, probably not best at best if you don't smoke and blah, blah, blah.
Right.
But you don't really push it because you don't want to upset him.
Right.
Then of course the inevitable happens as it does for one out of every two smokers.
And he gets some, I don't know what emphysema or, or lung cancer or something.
It's going to kill him probably.
Right.
Now not having been straight with him.
How do you feel about that now?
Do you wish you could have gone back in time and been more direct and assertive with him about the need to quit smoking when it could actually have saved his life?
Is he going to look at you and say, well, I'm really glad you were so sensitive about talking to me about quitting smoking.
I'm glad you didn't really push that issue because now I've got lung cancer and I'm going to die and I'm like 55, right?
No, he probably would have said, I wish you'd punched the cigarette out of my hand, you know, metaphorically.
I wish you'd been really emphatic in getting me to stop smoking because then I'd live now.
Now I'm facing a long, expensive, painful, difficult death and I wish people had told me the truth even if it made me uncomfortable because it's a lot more uncomfortable to die.
So yeah, I mean I'm telling truths we all know deep down.
I know it makes people uncomfortable.
If it's any consolation if people had listened to me Thirty-five years ago, when I was talking against the welfare state, well, we would have a much, much less of a problem to solve than we do now, because it would be a heck of a lot easier to reverse the issues of the welfare state, you know, in the 80s than it is, 1980s, than it is now.
So, you know, my, again, I don't want to, my conscience is clear, I've been talking about this stuff for decades, but it is, it is uncomfortable.
And there is this kick-the-can-down-the-road, defer, defer, you know, let's not make discomfort now.
But that's only because you're ignoring the costs of not telling your uncle to just stop smoking.
Like, I have to pick these cigarettes up and throw them over the balcony.
I have to flush them down the toilet.
Like, if I follow you around for a week making sure you don't smoke, I'll do that because I love you, man.
Having grown up in this kind of environment, I guess, I don't know, maybe I have more of a personal connection to people and know how much harm it did, having access to all of this, quote, free stuff.
And again, I understand the terror.
I really do.
And this is why people who are competent don't want to de-platform others or never really think about it.
But people who, for whatever reason, believe that they need the system to survive will attack anyone whose words might threaten that system.
But the system is threatening itself.
Math is threatening the system.
Reality is threatening the system, pointing it out.
It's like, you know, in a weird way, it's kind of like your uncle says, well, you're the reason I have lung cancer, because you didn't make me quit smoking.
Well, okay, but it was the cigarettes that caused the lung cancer, but, you know, let's not pretend that we love someone and then not oppose their worst habits.
Right?
Not oppose an environment or a situation.
You know, like, Did it really help the poor to get access to mortgages that they couldn't afford?
Right?
In the 2000s, right?
When the mandate came down and said, give more poor people homes.
Mandate came from the government.
So the banks had to do it.
Banks gave a lot of poor people loans.
They got into houses.
They couldn't afford them.
They lost their down payment.
They lost their mortgage payments.
They got kicked out.
And now they're really mad at what they think of as the free market.
It was the banks.
It was the corporations.
Like, yeah, no, no.
It was greed!
Blaming the financial collapse or the financial crash of 07-08 on greed is like blaming a plane crash on gravity.
Greed is a constant factor in human life.
Something changed and that was the government mandates.
So, those of us who were saying, well, stop giving loans to people who can't really afford them should the interest rates go up after the initial low rates, after the variable rates kick up, they're gonna Not be able to afford it, and people are like, well, you hate the poor because you don't want them to have homes.
It's like, no!
Oh my God!
Oh my God!
Like, help these people.
Help people, particularly if you have sort of understanding and you know the consequences and you're not embroiled in the day-to-day gotta-survive stuff.
I mean, really, really try to help people.
Because what's happened to the poor, particularly the minorities, is they got these cheap, subsidized, kind of enforced mortgages.
They spent a lot of money, went into a lot of debt, got completely shafted.
You know, billions and billions of dollars were sucked out of the poor community, and then massive amounts of money were poured into the banks to cover all this stuff up.
Incredibly disastrous and damaging.
And now what's happened is a lot of the poor now are like, yeah, you know, democratic socialism looks pretty good because I remember the raw face of capitalism coming and kicking me out of my own home and, you know, it wasn't capitalism, but then they're going to go more for socialism and then you get Venezuela and the poor are even more harmed, right?
So love is a complicated thing, my friends.
Love is not appeasement.
Love is not telling people what they want to hear.
Love is telling the truth.
Kindness doesn't always feel good.
Come on, we know this.
Dieting doesn't feel good, sometimes you need to.
Exercise doesn't always feel good, you really really need to.
So kindness and love which really has informed me since I very first started this and even before.
I love the people that I grew up with.
I love their potential.
I love what they could have been and I mourn What stood in their way, right?
The lies, the system, the bad incentives, the enabling of their worst habits.
To love people means to encourage them to do the right thing and to tell them the truth.
Deplatforming isn't going to solve the unsustainability of the current system.
Silencing people is not going to change the mathematics of that which can't last.
It's not a kindness.
It's not a kindness to silence people who are genuinely trying to help what is going to be a very difficult transition.
Who are pointing it out and saying, this can't last.
We really need to understand this issue, take care of these people.
It is not kindness to just silence those people.
And if we are silenced, right?
Our capacity to speak is taken away.
It doesn't change the direction.
▲
Export Selection