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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:17:28

The True Cost of the Minimum Wage - Stefan Molyneux Hosts the Peter Schiff Radio Show

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	Make no friends in the pits and you take no prisoners.
	One minute you're up half a million in soybeans and the next boom.
	Your kids don't go to college and they've repossessed your Bentley.
	Are you with me?
	The revolution starts now.
	Starts now.
	We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.
	Turn those machines back on!
	You are about to enter the Peter Schiff Show.
	If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to.
	This is the last stand on earth.
	The Peter Schiff Show is on.
	Call in now.
	855-4-SCHIFF.
	That's 855-472-4433.
	I don't know when they decided that they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.
	Your money.
	Your stories.
	Your freedom.
	The Peter Schiff Show.
	Good morning!
	Ladies and gentlemen, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	I'm sitting in for Peter Schiff.
	Peter sends his apologies.
	Couldn't make it this morning.
	His Brazilian wax didn't take.
	And so he's currently sitting in a fairly large tub of butter, attempting to recuperate.
	Our sympathies and best wishes, of course, go out.
	to him.
	So, we're going to talk... Oh, we've got so much to talk about this morning, I don't even know where to start.
	But, of course, we look forward to your calls.
	This is going to be the current events show.
	I will be back tomorrow to talk about the Peloponnesian War.
	Just kidding.
	Well, maybe.
	Well, let's see.
	So, I wonder, oh wizard tax-of-hours, if we could start off with cut 04, because I'd like to talk about the minimum wage.
	I haven't seen that, Peter.
	minimum wage.
	The Press: You spoke about some Republicans on the Hill, but the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Democrats, have written a letter to the President urging that he circumvent Congress and sign an executive order to raise the minimum wage for workers employed through federal government contracts with private companies.
	Mr. I haven't seen that, Peter.
	I would simply say that for those who watched or heard or read the President's speech yesterday, you know how strongly he supports raising the minimum wage.
	This has always been done legislatively.
	And it has been done with support from Republicans and not just Democrats in the past.
	Oh, yes, the minimum wage.
	Let's talk a little bit about that, because in politics, as in economics, the true intelligence is the art of the unseen, what's not being talked about.
	Okay, first of all, the minimum wage in America affects less than 1% of the workers, usually for less than a year.
	It's what happens when you get out of high school and you want a job and you don't really add much value.
	Because why?
	Why?
	Why don't you add much value?
	I mean the government has been educating you for 12 years.
	Now in 12 years you can go from not knowing where your hippocampus is to being a brain surgeon.
	12 years!
	You can go from not being able to tickle any ivories to playing Rachmaninoff with your forehead.
	12 years the government has been educating you And you get out of high school and you're only worth a couple of bucks an hour.
	Why is that?
	Because the government has taught you zero, zero economic skills, economic value.
	After 12 years of being trained by the government, you can only earn a couple of bucks an hour.
	Should that change?
	In Europe, you can decide to start going into a trade when you're quite young.
	I mean, the trades are honorable and worthy and practical and useful professions, which can earn you quite well.
	Of course, they're heavily guarded by government unions and so on, but nonetheless, you can come out of high school in Europe able to earn a decent, on your road to earning a decent middle-class wage.
	So why do we need something like a minimum wage when the government has been training people to be good citizens and economically productive for 12 years?
	That is ridiculous.
	And of course, nobody's ever talking about that.
	The problem, why are people only worth a couple of bucks an hour?
	Why are people only worth a couple of bucks an hour?
	It's not because employers are mean.
	People ask me, I was an entrepreneur for 15 years, I guess I still am as a podcaster, but people say to me, how do I guarantee my job security?
	It's like, it's easy.
	Just make more money for your employer than you cost and you've got job security.
	Pretty easy.
	Lack of quality, productive, useful, economically valuable education in America is a foundational problem for which the solution is offered, raise the minimum wage.
	You know, there's this old economic principle, interventions always lead to more interventions.
	It's like whack-a-mole or That old Mickey Mouse cartoon, The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
	One intervention will always lead to more interventions.
	You get governments in control of schools and then you need to start raising the minimum wage because the governments don't train the students in anything economically productive.
	How could most government teachers train someone in economic productivity?
	Do they train them in economics?
	Do they train them in entrepreneurship?
	Do they train them in contracts?
	Do they train them in negotiations?
	Do they train them in sales tips or anything like that?
	Anything which will give them some economic value when they get out?
	No!
	Absolutely not.
	What else is driving the demand for the minimum wage?
	Well, this is from the DonaldVigilante.com.
	Before 1965, quarters and dimes were 90% silver.
	So, quarters from before 1965 are currently worth a little over $5, and dimes are worth a little over $2, based on the silver content.
	But the government had to stop making money with any actual precious metals, because the Central Bank had been debasing the money supply for decades to fund the expansion of the warfare-welfare state.
	Roosevelt first debased the $20 bill, which used to be a certificate for one ounce of gold.
	One ounce of gold!
	Just picture it.
	$20 bill.
	One ounce of gold.
	Back before 1935, thirty years after the debasement of the paper dollar, silver coins had to be debased as well.
	A few years later, in 1971, Nixon would legally and figuratively remove every scrap of gold from paper dollars.
	But first, in 1964, all the silver was quite literally removed from all new coinage.
	The minimum wage from 1956 to 1960 was a dollar.
	It was $1.25 from 63 to 66.
	So the minimum wage in the two years before 1966 was five, 90% silver quarters.
	Buck and a quarter.
	That equates to about $25 an hour in today's money.
	In other words, if the government had not debased the currency, as governments always do, whenever they can, if the government had not debased the currency, the minimum wage would be $25 an hour.
	Even counting inflation and so on, minimum wage workers would have been about two or three times better off today in terms of real purchasing power.
	Even though they currently have a nominal minimum wage almost six times the nominal amount prior to 1966.
	Because of money supply inflation, right?
	Inflation refers to an expansion of the money supply relative to goods and services.
	The minimum wage is nearly six times as high, but it buys about half as much.
	So, a pre-debasement quarter from the 60s can still buy you a gallon of gas with change left over.
	A gallon of gas cost about 15 minutes of the minimum wage labor in the early 1960s.
	Gas is actually, you know, the price of gas, gas has gotten cheaper relative to gold and silver since then.
	A minimum wage worker in 1963 Could work for 10 minutes, then send the wages of those 10 minutes, 2 times 90% silver dimes, worth about 4 of today's dollars, forward in time and buy a gallon of gas.
	It takes today's minimum wage worker about three times as long to earn that same gallon.
	They teach us nothing.
	They pillage our money through inflation.
	They create horrible regulations that drive manufacturing overseas.
	They scalpel off all of the hanging vines that the poor can use to climb to the middle class.
	These are all government inventions.
	They lead to more and more and more, but we'll talk about that when we come back from the break.
	This is Stefan Molyneux for Peter Schiff.
	We'll be back right after this.
	Since the Peter Schiff show was last on the air, the national debt added another $7.89 million.
	Luckily, Peter's intelligence is growing twice as fast.
	Welcome back to your source of sanity in an insane world.
	It's the Peter Schiff Show.
	Good morning, fellow carbon-based lifeforms and anybody listening from beyond Uranus.
	I hope you're doing well.
	This is Sven Molyneux sitting in for Peter Schiff.
	We are chatting about the minimum wage and we have a caller.
	You are welcome to call in, of course, to chat.
	This is really a show where your opinions count more than my exhalations.
	So, Nick, do we have you on the line?
	Yeah.
	All right.
	So what's on your mind, brother?
	I just wanted to say that if you just, if they would cut like, I don't know, 70% of taxes, which is, it's all theft anyway.
	I agree with you 100% on that.
	There shouldn't be taxes, but if they'd cut it down 70, 80%, you don't even need minimum wage because you have thin growth in the marketplace because people don't have 70, 80% of their stuff stolen.
	They don't have that money stolen through taxation, so they can actually spend money so people can be more productive.
	They have more customers to sell things to, so they provide more value to their bosses and whatnot.
	I mean, that's certainly true.
	If you lower taxes, people have more disposable income.
	If you lower taxes on corporations, then corporations will have more money to pay employees.
	If you lower restrictions on the mobility of labor, Then there'll be more competition for workers.
	The best way to raise wages is to remove overhead for businesses, of which corporate taxation is a huge overhead, and it gives people the illusion that these mysterious space aliens called corporations are somehow magically paying the taxes at no cost to themselves.
	It's quite mad.
	Corporations lower salaries, they raise the prices of goods, and then they get heavily involved in lobbying government, usually to the detriment of the average consumer.
	There is no such thing as a free lunch.
	Corporate taxes come out of the employees' pockets and the customers' pockets.
	So why don't you think this has happened or is even being proposed?
	Well, aside from the fact that I think it was in the 1860s or 70s that you changed the legal definition of a corporation so it's like its own person rather than a board of people who are held liable.
	So now the corporation, which is shareholders and the employees, are held liable.
	No, but why, sorry, why don't you think that they, why don't you think that they offer this lowering of taxes in general, this sort of 70% as you're saying, why don't you think there's anybody out there in the public space really talking about that?
	It's interesting, because there's no censorship, right?
	You've got First Amendment rights, you can talk about anything, but nobody does.
	And I'm just curious why you think that is.
	Well, the major media is bought and paid for, and everything's, and bureaucracy's not going to change it because they get paid through that theft.
	And people think, like, the whole The whole concept of, like, uh... A lot of people are paid through, um... Well, either the theft and taxation via welfare, or via, like, the military-industrial complex, which pays out through that.
	Yeah, a lot of people on the receiving end of government money, right?
	I mean, half of Americans these days are getting significant portions of their income from the government.
	Now, of course, since the government doesn't have any money, they are getting blood money from the greatest criminal gang in the history of mankind.
	And so for them to say, let's lower taxes, basically they're saying, well, let's lower what we can pay you, and most mammals make resource-maximizing amoral decisions and just use moral language to cover up their naked greed, whether on the side of the rich or the poor or the middle class.
	So it seems to me that it would be kind of political suicide to talk about lowering taxes to that degree, because how would you pay all the dependents who vote for you?
	Well, Stephan, I learned a great lesson as a child.
	I had a fairly screwed up childhood, like most people do.
	I learned a great lesson from my parents.
	That is, never underestimate the power of delusion.
	That is a good lesson.
	I still make that mistake.
	You know, it's really easy to mistake the world for yourself.
	Like, if you're a rational and critical thinker and you don't take What the media says at face value.
	And there's a simple test for that.
	We're all experts in something.
	All you have to do, if you're an expert in anything, is go and read what the media says about it.
	And they always have it bias-ackwards, right?
	They don't have anything right.
	And trust me, that's not just your experience with what you're knowledgeable about.
	They don't get anything right as a whole.
	If you sort of want the truth in society, hold up a mirror image To what the media is saying.
	It's like at the end of Atlas Shrugged they said the only truth could be found in denials of the truth, right?
	There are no riots in Wyoming!
	That's how you know there are riots in Wyoming.
	And we are in this weird inverse matrix upside down Alice in Wonderland world where the media says all of this stuff which is almost the complete opposite of the truth.
	And they're saying it's greedy employers who refuse to pay people a living wage.
	A living wage?
	I mean, employers are so greedy.
	Let's say they are.
	I have no reason to disbelieve that.
	I think we're all greedy, and I think that's good.
	We're greedy and we're lazy, and what wonderful human virtues they are.
	Laziness is why I have a remote control for my television.
	Laziness is why I don't have to go down and cut 19 trees when it's cold outside, because somebody knew I was so lazy that I'd want a furnace in my house.
	Laziness is why we have air conditioning rather than have to sit there like Blanche Dubois fanning ourself with a rolled up newspaper.
	Laziness and greed, wonderful, fantastic.
	It's how we got out of the caves.
	It's how we mounted all the way to the top of the food chain.
	It's why we have all this wonderful technology.
	I'm too lazy to walk to your house and chat with you in person, fun though I'm sure it would be.
	So, you know, people who knew I was lazy built the internet for me so that I wouldn't have to walk to your house.
	Laziness is wonderful.
	Laziness and greed.
	Let's say the employers are lazy and greedy.
	Well, if an employer pays you $10 and you make him $50 in value, he's going to keep you.
	He's going to fight you.
	And if you say you're going to leave, he's going to raise your wage because he's greedy.
	But if you ain't providing the value, there's no point appealing to someone's greed.
	You know, there's not much point Margaret Thatcher going down to Rio de Janeiro in a thong and playing hard to get on the beach.
	Jemima just ain't there.
	Oh, I'd love to chat with the lady, but sadly she is no longer with us.
	But this idea that greed is somehow this awful negative, or the idea that everyone's greedy in the private sector, but in the public sector, oh, they're just these glowing, levitating saints of altruism with no self-interest whatsoever.
	Are you waiting for this, Nick?
	I don't know if he's still on the line.
	Are you waiting for this to become a topic, or have you given up yet?
	Oh, no, no, no.
	I was actually just thinking, I think the whole, back to what you said about why no one's talking about it, and what you said about Ask Backwards, when the media speaks about anything, is people don't know speech.
	They don't know how to speak.
	They don't know how to think about speech at all.
	Like, it's like what you said about spanking.
	It's not spanking, it's assault.
	Yeah.
	It's not theft, it's taxation.
	Yeah, Confucius said that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names, and the matrix is language.
	Language is just another government program, like the welfare state, like warfare, like the Federal Reserve.
	These are all just government programs, and language is the ultimate government program, because it shields the moral reality of what the government does from the average citizen.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I was going to say, actually, right now I'm working on an add-on.
	I'm trying to teach myself programming, and then I spent the next 10,000 hours friggin' programming this add-on for Mozilla, and I guess it could be easily changed into Chrome or something.
	It's gonna switch words, like in webpages, from like, spanking, it'll switch it to assault.
	Or, and so on and so forth, like war, to wholesale slaughter of innocent people.
	Yeah, it's like the ungovernmentanizer.
	I'm not a marketing guy, so don't expect me to give you a good name for it.
	But yeah, it's the parting the fog of sophistry and looking at the facts themselves.
	The industrial slaughter of foreigners is war.
	The industrial disassembly of innocent human beings is war.
	And it is going to continue until we take the fog of language away and look at it for what it is.
	Please feel free to call in.
	We will be right back.
	After the break, I'm going to tell you why you need to be terrified of birds.
	We now return to the Peter Schiff Show.
	Call in now.
	855-4-SCHIFF.
	That's 855-472-4433.
	We're on the radio.
	It's 855-472-4433.
	Rebel Radio, the Peter Schiff Show.
	Good morning, everybody.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Stephen Molyneux sitting in for Peter Schiff.
	And we are now going to make you terrified of birds.
	Ah!
	There's a thrush in my soup!
	Oh, it's okay.
	It's basted with a nice bouillabaisse sauce.
	And a side order of fava beans.
	But, um... I wonder, we're gonna just go to a cut here in a second, um... You got a smartphone?
	You like those little games?
	Well, they like you too, courtesy of the U.S.
	federal government.
	Why don't we have a listen to Cut5 this morning, ladies and gentlemen.
	NSA is lurking in the background of your game of Angry Birds, waiting to scoop up all your personal data as you lob hapless creatures into the air.
	I mean, it seems like this is the last bastion of American freedom that's been breached.
	I mean, there seems to be something particularly egregious about going after leaky apps.
	Well, I think that you need to understand that, of course, I'm not in a position to discuss specifics of intelligence collection, but to, as the President said in his January 17th speech, to the extent data is collected by the NSA, Through whatever means, we are not interested in the communications of people who are not valid foreign intelligence targets.
	Right.
	It's okay.
	He said so.
	So... don't worry.
	D'you know, in Europe, if you go to Europe with an iPhone from the States, some people won't even talk to you until you take the battery out.
	Because they're foreigners, you see.
	Foreigners.
	They don't want to talk to you because the NSA can turn your phone on even when it's off, can turn the microphone on and start recording.
	If you take the battery out, you're probably kind of safe.
	But, uh, your phone is, uh, you know, they used to say eyes are the window to the soul.
	Well, no, it's actually cell phones now.
	Cell phones, and not exactly the window, more like the drill blaster.
	to your soul.
	They can scoop up whatever they want from your phone.
	And this, you know, speaks to something that has always bothered me.
	Every time, every time that the remnants of the free market cough up some glorious hairball of useful technology, it gets taken over by the state and turned against us.
	Cell phones are fantastic.
	Amazing.
	I mean, I'm still, back in the day, I remember I don't know, I was like 13 years old, which is way back in the day, and a friend of mine called me from a car.
	This was incomprehensible to me.
	I'm still working on wireless internet in an airplane, but anyway.
	And all I could think of was this cord.
	Well, let's finish the conversation before the cord that's attached to the car runs out.
	It was just incomprehensible that you could call from a car.
	This is back in the day when they were about the size of a shoebox, and you had to go outside, and you had to actually point them at the satellite, and you couldn't be under a tree.
	Now you can call, like, from the bowels of a diamond mine.
	Sometimes you get fairly clear reception.
	I mean, there's amazing devices.
	That people have become cybernetically attached to.
	It seems like it's like Day of the Dead.
	You go to a restaurant, half the time you see the younger people all on their cell phones.
	Maybe they're texting each other.
	It's like, but they're right there!
	And this is a great technology.
	I mean, I use Skype and call anywhere in the world for almost nothing.
	Well, and if they have Skype, it is for nothing, pretty much.
	When I was younger, the bane of your financial survival was a long-distance relationship.
	Oh, I dated a girl from Vancouver!
	I lived in Toronto.
	$9,000 a minute to call over the Canadian Bell pseudo-military monopoly.
	Now you get video calls for free.
	I mean, it's crazy just how much things have advanced.
	And every time this great stuff happens, every time this great stuff happens, What do we get?
	We get the government coming in and saying, That'll be great for us!
	Yay!
	People are using credit cards!
	Ooh, great!
	Now we can track them!
	Cell phones with recording devices that can be turned on remotely?
	Ooh!
	It's like assigning everyone their own spook.
	Every time we get something good, you.
	The jerks take it over.
	Isn't that terrible?
	Government couldn't have invented any of this stuff.
	People say, ah, you see, but the government built the basis of the Internet!
	No, no, that was Al Gore.
	Yeah, government developed a couple of protocols.
	But the Internet is what is useful to the consumer, and that certainly didn't come from the government.
	And I don't even know if the Internet is the way things should be.
	I mean, if the free market had developed it, There probably would be a penny in email, and that way there'd be no spam.
	Like half the world's email traffic is spam.
	What a huge waste of resources that is.
	A penny in email, I'm sure, but there'd be no spammers, because I'm sure you'd get less than a penny's worth of value from each spam message.
	So I don't know.
	I don't know if the way it is is the right way.
	I know that it's not what the free market developed originally, but it's what the free market moved in on.
	And maybe people are fine with the spam.
	But given that you pay 50 bucks usually a year for some security system for your computer which filters out spam, do you spend that much in, uh, do you send 5,000 email messages a year?
	I don't know.
	So I don't know if it's the right configuration or what the free market would have developed, but sure, at sunrise, it wasn't the government that created value for the consumer through the internet.
	That was all private companies.
	And the idea that government spending on R&D, which is another big bugaboo that you hear talked about these days.
	Government needs to spend more on R&D!
	Because you see, government officials, having usually had no experience in the free market, I don't know any congressmen or congresswomen who come from a venture capitalist background.
	They can make really great decisions on investing when it's not their money and they have no experience.
	You know, the best card player is blindfolded and has never played a game of cards before.
	Well, guess he would be fairly unpredictable.
	So the idea that the government has all this money and could just go and invest it wisely in the right technology to grow the economy?
	Madness!
	If you're really great at investing, go be a bazillionaire by investing.
	Why on earth would you join the government and get no profit from it?
	Well, of course, you get political profit out of handing in money.
	And it's all of these seen benefits and unseen costs.
	The government invests half a billion dollars in R&D!
	Well, where does it get that money from?
	Inflation.
	Debt.
	Taxes.
	Inflation drives up the prices.
	The prices being driven up means less money available for R&D in other areas.
	Less money available to invest.
	Debt.
	Government scoops up debt.
	That's less money that's available for investment in new startups and new companies.
	Government's hoovering up all of the capital.
	And so there's much less capital available for startups.
	I started a company once.
	Co-founded a company.
	We had $80,000 to start.
	And people made like 5,000% ROI on that money.
	If they'd raised taxes more, we would have had less money to start with.
	Raised taxes enough, we have no money to start with.
	And then, because there are no startups, the government, you see, needs to invest more.
	There's the theme of the day.
	One control will always lead to more controls.
	So the government can go and spend money on R&D, incompetently, and the number of green jobs that were started by Obama's administration through funding that have gone bankrupt is too many to count.
	That money has all been wasted.
	Stuff was built.
	It gets sold for scrap.
	People were trained in skills that are now useless.
	The human capital destroyed is incalculable.
	The fixed capital that is destroyed is incalculable.
	We don't know what amazing thing would be there in the place of the smoking crater of a failed government-funded green jobs initiative.
	What would have grown in the absence of that deadweight government bureaucratic ham-fisted asteroid smashing into the delicate machinery of the free market?
	We don't know what would have been built there.
	But we do know that if it had been built and it was successful it would be because it was serving people's genuine needs in some way or another.
	How much wealth has been created by people like Google and Apple?
	We'll get back to the, after the break, we'll get back to more of All the horrible miscalculations.
	It's hard to even know if they just don't understand economics at all, or if they understand economics but don't care.
	I mean, if I were them, I wouldn't study economics at all.
	I mean, genuine knowledge totally gets in the way of nonsense.
	You know, it's harder to be a sophist, to just be a language manipulator, if you know something about the truth.
	You know, it's easy to be a bad actor.
	It's hard to be a good actor who pretends to act badly convincingly.
	Right?
	But this is the fundamental lack of information that people have.
	And people don't even understand the fundamentals of the economy that they're supposed to work in.
	This is another reason why the minimum wage has to be, quote, raised.
	Because what did you not learn in high school?
	No economics.
	Certainly not required, and wasn't even offered when I was a kid.
	No economics.
	Political science?
	No.
	Certainly not required, wasn't offered.
	Logic?
	Logic!
	Think that would be... Logic is quite a helpful skill to have in the world.
	But logic, you see, would make governing a little bit more difficult, as would the study of economics or political science.
	Law!
	In a society where ignorance of the law is no excuse, are you taught anything about law?
	No!
	Because it's really, really tough to teach modern law with a straight face.
	Just wheel in book after book after book and say, well, since we started wheeling these books in, two more have been added.
	These 900 volumes of the laws you're bounded by constitute a net that can yank you off to prison at any time.
	You can't possibly learn it all.
	Even if you did, it's changed by the time you finished learning it.
	But ignorance of the law is no excuse.
	People would not believe that you were saying or saying it with a straight face.
	We will be right back after the break.
	This is Stefan Molyneux for the Peter Schiff Show.
	Please call in.
	in.
	I would love to chat.
	If knowledge is power, then the Peter Schiff Show is a uranium-enriched 10,000-megawatt nuclear reactor. - Stay plugged in.
	Stay brilliant.
	This is the Peter Schiff Show.
	Good morning, everybody.
	It's Stephen Molyneux from Freedom Inn Radio, sitting in for Peter Schiff.
	Let's, shall we, talk about the ladies.
	Because I hear they vote and smell good.
	And so let's have a little chat about sexual.
	Politics and perhaps we can hear from our wise rulers.
	Let's have a listen to cut 11 and what they have to say to start off the conversation.
	There seem to be a tendency to talk about women in two ways when it comes to sex and sexual activity.
	Either they're terrible victims preyed on by older men, as in Monica Lewinsky.
	President Clinton did a bad, bad thing.
	Monica Lewinsky was not precisely an innocent victim.
	I recall some thong flashing there.
	So they're either innocent victims or they are sexually promiscuous Slutty, low-life women.
	There's no sort of, women get to have sex and sexual activity, and with that, use contraception responsibly.
	Nice.
	That song, Clinton did a bad, bad thing.
	Well, be responsible about sexuality.
	It's a fine, fine statement.
	Now, I'm not a Republican, but I do play one on television.
	I don't play one on television either.
	I am not a Republican, but if I understand the Republican argument, the argument goes something like this.
	Having a child is a big responsibility, and you should be ready for that.
	And by ready for that, it means you should have some resources, because women are kind of disabled in the later stages of pregnancy, and they're kind of tied to the child when they should be breastfeeding for the recommended minimum of six months.
	Breastfeeding is a It's a very essential thing for the health and welfare of children.
	It helps brain activity.
	It helps the immune system.
	There's myriad benefits.
	It also reduces the risk of breast cancer for women.
	So the Republican argument is, okay, so you want to have sex?
	Have sex!
	Go to it!
	With gusto!
	And baby oil.
	But what you need if you're going to have a child is you need a stable relationship and you need some money.
	Now, the statistics on out-of-wedlock births, pretty horrifying.
	And I say horrifying, literally horrifying.
	Lots of single moms working enormously hard with the very best of intentions, but they are fighting a losing battle with statistics.
	Which is that there is no single worse predictor for a negative outcome for a child than that he or she comes from a single parent household, and the vast majority of them are headed by single moms.
	The welfare state as we currently know it is fundamentally a single mother state.
	People say, well, it's immigration, that's the problem.
	Well, first of all, the rational term for immigration is moving.
	But immigration is not fundamentally the driver for the welfare state.
	The driver for the welfare state is out-of-wedlock births.
	Women need men, or other women, a provider, a partner, to take care of them, to pay the bills.
	The raising of children.
	I'm a stay-at-home dad and have been for over five years now.
	It's a massive consumption of resources.
	I used to write like two books a year.
	Now most of my writing involves a slow cursive rendering of the word cat.
	Hopefully spelled correctly.
	So sexual responsibility means not running to the government If you end up having children with a jerk.
	You know, when I was a kid growing up, I think it was, I can't remember who said it, Steinem?
	A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
	Well, great!
	I mean, I don't believe it.
	I think that men are essential to raising children.
	Two things that children need to grow empathy.
	Empathy is the most important resource in the world because it is fundamentally the resource from which all other resources are derived.
	Empathy requires free play in the outdoors and the presence of a father or male caregiver for the first five years of life.
	Those are the two things best predictive of the growth of empathy in a human being.
	Sociopathy, kind of the opposite of empathy, has doubled in the last 15 years.
	And I would argue that the absence of fathers is a main driver for a lot of catastrophes in society.
	I mean, what, two of the three last presidents grew up without dads?
	Barack Obama and Bill Clinton?
	I think Bill Clinton's dad was an alcoholic and violent and so on.
	I think Barack Obama's dad was violent.
	I don't think he was a drinker, but he wasn't around.
	In the early 1960s, out-of-wedlock rate was like 18%.
	It's always been higher for some minorities, blacks and Hispanics.
	It's generally been lower for whites.
	Now in the black community, it's 75, almost 75%.
	And the majority of women under 30 who give birth, give birth outside of wedlock, outside of marriage.
	The lifelong commitment to be together, to raise children.
	Now, if you don't have a husband, it's not like your need for resources vanishes along with your husband.
	My husband left, or never married me, or turned out to be a deadbeat.
	I guess the kid doesn't need food anymore.
	I guess the kid doesn't need health care.
	I guess the kid doesn't need babysitting.
	I guess the kid doesn't need his teeth cleaned.
	No, all of that marches on.
	The black hole resource consumption of children continues when the dad leaves.
	And some very important studies have shown fairly conclusively that once women got the right to vote, which I'm certainly not opposing, but once women got the right to vote, The massive growth in government began.
	Because when women make bad decisions about who they marry, about who they have children with, they run to the government.
	Which is largely, as feminists continually point out, a patriarchal institution.
	If you don't need men, stop running to the government!
	If you do run to the government, then you're saying you need men!
	So if you need men, forget the government, marry a great guy!
	There's lots of great guys out there.
	And we're all attracted to the crazy a little bit.
	Just ask Michael Douglas.
	Catherine Zeta-Jones recently confessed she has bipolar.
	Pretty.
	A little crazy.
	They're sexy and crazy.
	I get that.
	Marlon Brando.
	Nutty is a fruitcake.
	That's sexy.
	So, learning how to restrain your sexual impulses and point them at a stable relationship, point them at a man who may not be quite as exciting as Marlon Brando, maybe more of a Tony Randall, but who is going to be a stable and benevolent provider for you and your children?
	That, I think, is responsible sexuality.
	But unfortunately, by subsidizing bad mistakes, we simply insure more of them.
	In the past, when women got pregnant out of wedlock, particularly when they were young, they'd give the child up for adoption.
	Adopted kids have no worse outcomes than non-adopted kids, but kids from single moms do badly in general.
	So, through this, we are appeasing female voters and some male voters, but we're ensuring trouble for the next generation.
	I look forward to your calls.
	855-4SHIFT.
	That's 855-472-4433.
	855-4-SHIFT, that's 855-472-4433.
	We'll be right back after the break.
	Gold in a rainbow.
	If you said I'd say just let the pain go.
	You know what?
	No, what?
	Baby, I was talking to my friend.
	Make no friends in the pits and you take no prisoners.
	One minute you're up half a million in soybeans and the next, boom.
	Your kids don't go to college and they repossess your Bentley.
	Are you with me?
	The revolution starts now.
	Starts now.
	We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.
	Turn those machines back on!
	You are about to enter the Peter Schiff Show.
	If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to.
	This is the last stand on Earth.
	The Peter Schiff Show is on.
	Call in now.
	855-4-SCHIFF.
	That's 855-472-4433.
	I don't know when they decided that they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.
	Your money.
	Your stories.
	Your freedom.
	The Peter Schiff Show.
	Good morning, everybody.
	It's Devan Mullen, you from Freedom Aid Radio, sitting in for Peter Schiff.
	I hope you're having a fantastic morning.
	I know I am.
	It's always a pleasure to do this show.
	And yeah, please give me a call.
	855-4-SCHIFF, 855-472-4433.
	Whatever is on your mind.
	You know, if I don't get callers, I have to break out the hand puppets.
	And they always are very insulting towards me.
	And I don't know what they're going to say on air.
	So give me a shout and we'll talk.
	So we were talking a little bit earlier about how there's some suspicion that the NSA is using the game Angry Birds to spy upon you.
	In other words, the Angry Birds will actually turn to you and say, do you want to use that bomb, really?
	Do you know how to make it, really?
	Don't answer yes to any of that.
	That's my suggestion.
	But it's not just your cell phone.
	Did you know that in 1999 it was revealed that the NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special keys into the Windows software, in all versions from Windows 95 OSR 2 onwards.
	So, in 1999, an American computer scientist, Andrew Fernandez of Kryptonim, in North Carolina, had disassembled parts of the Windows instruction code and found a smoking gun.
	Microsoft's developers had failed to remove the debugging symbol used to test the software before they released it.
	Inside, The code with the labels for two keys.
	One was called key and the other was called NSA key.
	Fernandez presented his findings at a conference at which some Windows developers were also in attendance.
	The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their software but they refused to talk about what the key did or why it had been put there without users knowledge.
	Fernandez says that NSA's backdoor in the world's most commonly used operating system makes it orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer.
	According to the Snowden leaks, the level of collusion between Microsoft and the NSA is astonishing.
	Microsoft allows the NSA to skirt encryption protocols in Outlook, their email program and calendar program.
	Skype video and cloud services and data captured by the NSA is routinely passed on to both the FBI and the CIA.
	So you've got to be paranoid.
	This is the paranoid's dream come true, this world now, because literally your toaster is on the verge of being out to get you.
	So you've got to be careful of all of this stuff.
	In February 2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation, the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that the NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software.
	According to this report, quote, I won't use my outrageous Monty Python French accent, we'll just go straight.
	It would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, if not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the Microsoft MS-DOS operating system by the same administration.
	The report stated that there had been a, quote, strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumors about the existence of spy programs on Microsoft.
	and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates' development team.
	The Pentagon said the report was Microsoft's biggest client in the world, and for years there has been a Microsoft liaison office at the NSA.
	All companies face this Rubicon, this crossroads, when the government knocks at the door and says, Uh, hey man.
	We'd really like some help.
	And, uh, you know, we can pay you well if you help us, but, uh, it's kind of a nice building you got here.
	Be a shame if it was rezoned.
	Be a shame if something happened to your tax-exempt status.
	Be a shame if it was really tough for you to get your foreign workers coming in to work on your programming team.
	You know, the kinds who work for Lima Beans and Foot Rubs.
	It's always a carrot and stick with the government, right?
	They'll pay lots of money.
	And if you decide to say no, and some companies have really worked at it.
	Yahoo, I think, has really worked at trying to say no to the government's insistence that they turn over data, warrantless data.
	But it's really tough.
	You know, if you are the member of a board, you have a fiduciary and legal responsibility to maximize the value of your company.
	Going on crusades against the NSA and retaining data At the cost of your share price could certainly be considered irresponsible and will lead to your dismissal and might lead to a lawsuit.
	You have to maximize the value of your company.
	Libertarian arguments to the contrary, if you decide to go head-to-head with the government on privacy issues, the likelihood is that that is going to overtly and covertly undermine the value of your company.
	It's a real challenge.
	I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for the companies when the government comes a-knockin'.
	The government offers you something good, and if you don't go along with them something really bad, most people will choose what they choose.
	Can I blame them?
	I don't know.
	I pay my taxes.
	I don't agree with the taxation system.
	I don't agree with where the money goes.
	But I, uh...
	I don't do well in enclosed spaces.
	So I pay my taxes.
	And corporations pay their taxes.
	And what they've done, of course, and this is the phenomenon known as regulatory capture, what they've done, of course, is they simply start moving in on the government.
	And they start to get all of their lobbyists in to get the preferential treatment.
	So don't be hatin'.
	Well, how are you doing, Stephan?
	I've been a big fan for many years.
	I saw you in New York for the first time.
	I think it was the Anarchy in New York City.
	I think that's what the title of the whole event was.
	You did a great speech there.
	You know, I watched the Justin Bieber video you had, the truth about Justin Bieber, and it seemed to me that you took kind of a little too much pity on him for me.
	Like, I felt like you would have kind of gone a different direction because, you know, the whole world, you know, I see Justin Bieber as just being a distraction from what's really going on in the world and, you know, how, you know, the media is, you know, cutting off people on the air to go, we're going live to Justin Bieber, you know, getting out of jail when You know, we're bombing other countries, the Fed's trading more money, you know, inflation and all that.
	It just seemed like you kind of took a lot of pity on the guy.
	And I just wanted you to comment on, you know, why you took that route, you know, that you seem like you sympathize with him a lot.
	Right, so for those who... I did a video on Justin Bieber and was talking basically about, you know, the kid achieved global fame and multi-hundreds of millions.
	I don't know what he's worth, some crazy amount of money.
	When he was, he was discovered when he was 13, was flown down to to work with Usher and producers and became, you know, the superstardom pop phenomenon and so on.
	Well look, I would love a world where people would interrupt a Justin Bieber video to talk about Socrates.
	I would, like my entire video canon on YouTube amounts to about a tenth of a second of a Justin Bieber video in terms of views.
	But I think you've got to talk to people where they live.
	You've got to meet them where they are.
	So, hang on the line, because it's really, it's actually a shockingly important topic, but we'll be right back after the break.
	So hang on, Patrick.
	We'll talk in a second about the Beaconator.
	Beaconator.
	The Peter Schiff Show.
	All right.
	We are back with the Biebs!
	I am chatting about... I did a video on Justin Bieber recently and I think the first inkling of wisdom is skepticism.
	Humility and skepticism.
	I'm not sure I'm being told the truth, which means I don't know what I think I know, is the beginning of wisdom.
	Now, of course, a lot of younger people are following the Justin Bieber stuff, right?
	He was arrested, DUIs spat on his fans, and he just surrendered himself, I think, to Toronto police based on some incident, and he egged his neighbor's house and all other forms of Bad Boy, Pop Sensation, War Crimes, or whatever you want to call them.
	But what you need to do is to... This is what people are interested in!
	I'm a market-driven guy.
	I always have been.
	And, um... What can you say to people about Justin Bieber?
	Well, Miami Beach police officers may have exaggerated how much alcohol the pop singer had in his system at the time of his arrest.
	His blood alcohol level was reportedly 0.014, which is almost nothing.
	Law enforcement reported that it was .04, which is a huge difference.
	So .04 is about two light beers in an hour.
	And if you're passing out at .04, you should probably go get your liver checked.
	And his house outside L.A.
	was raided by police who were looking for clues related to an incident where Bieber allegedly egged his neighbor's house, causing $20,000 in damage.
	Oh, come on!
	What are they, Fabergé eggs with kryptonite inside?
	I mean, how on earth do you cause $20,000 in damage by throwing eggs, even if that actually occurred?
	Cops searching his home reportedly found drugs not connected to the singer, but to his friend Lil' Za.
	And, uh, that person was arrested.
	In the state of Florida, and in nearly every other state, the blood alcohol level for a minor is .02, because trace readings of alcohol will be read if the minor ingested weak products, communion wine, vanilla flavoring, etc.
	And the quote from the website is, uh, Miami Beach Police Department has had credibility issues in the past.
	The LAPD has demanded that Bieber turn over his cell phone password and Bieber has refused.
	Come on!
	That's a good libertarian stand, wouldn't you say?
	I refuse to hand over my password to my cell phone.
	Those are privacy issues.
	And people on the left dislike him because he said, I don't think that you should have sex with anyone unless you love them.
	Is this what we call controversial?
	And he said, I really don't believe in abortion.
	It's like killing a baby.
	Well, you're killing something, and it ain't a tree.
	And people say, well, he spat on his fans.
	The problem is there's actually no video of him spitting on his fans.
	There's a picture of him, I don't know if it's true or photoshopped, there's a picture of him looking like he's spitting over a balcony, and there's a picture of some fans.
	But there's no video of him spitting on his fans.
	Why on earth would he spit on his fans?
	I mean, it's just crazy.
	I mean, that's like saying that the Walmart greeters are now all going to start punching people who come into the store.
	I mean, that's his income, right?
	And, yeah, he's given the finger to the paparazzi.
	I mean, look, can you imagine life as a celebrity?
	I mean, you can't go anywhere without being swarmed.
	Someone got, someone, one photo photographer died.
	When a car backed into him, because they were trying to get pictures so badly.
	He wasn't in the car, but it was part of his entourage.
	I mean, this is brutal, crazy, insane stuff.
	And he said, whenever you see me getting angry or upset in the media, what you don't get to see on camera is how these people come up to me and said things like, Hey, Justin, why are you such a punk lately?
	Your mom is ugly and your little brother and sister are ugly babies.
	He's called for a change in the law to protect celebrities and photographers after a member of the paparazzi was killed while chasing his famous car.
	He was not in the white Ferrari, but... I mean, we all know from Princess Di, right?
	For those who are a little older.
	The celebrity culture is insane.
	You can get millions of dollars for the right picture.
	It's that insane.
	So you can help people who are younger to understand how much the media lies about things, misrepresents things.
	You can get them to understand how much the police lie about things and misrepresent things.
	And that's beginning to sow the seeds of skepticism and humility.
	So I think, yeah, is he a perfect guy?
	I don't know.
	I don't know the guy.
	I'm not a big fan of tattoos or his tiny Ken doll plastic abs, but you know, why not?
	But is he the monster that everyone's portraying?
	I mean, there's a petition now, Mike, wasn't it just accepted by the White House, a petition to get him deported?
	The level of hate for this guy passes all reasoning, passes all understanding.
	I got an email from the guy after I put out the video that says, oh yeah, it was the same with NSYNC when I was in middle school.
	Nobody could say they like NSYNC.
	Now apparently Justin Timberlake, who was of course in NSYNC, is a Bonafide artists these days winning music awards and so on, but he started in a boy band!
	So did Marky Mark, Mark Wahlberg.
	So, that is, uh, crazy just how much people hate him.
	I think there's a reason for it, which is, uh, not too tough to figure out, but, uh, Patrick, does that, does that make any sense as to why I'm sort of working on this topic?
	I haven't done the follow-up video yet, I'm gonna do that later today, but that's sort of why I think it's interesting.
	Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
	Just, I think the thing is, you know, what gets me is just that You know, I understand your point of view, and you know, I mean, you mentioned the video, like, anybody in our position, anybody in his position, you know, dare them to, you know, act differently.
	But it just makes me sick that we are living in a country now with all the problems going on.
	And I don't know if you watched Obama's State of the Union address.
	I mean, it was basically saying, I'm just going to take control where I don't, you know, I don't have the constitutional authority to take control.
	And we're talking about Justin Bieber, you know, spitting on fans who cares about throwing eggs at a house and be like, God, there's people dying in the streets and we're drone, droning other countries, you know, and just all along people are just hypnotized by this Justin Bieber, this deporting Justin Bieber.
	I mean, God, why don't we, there should be plenty other people of mine that should be deported way before him.
	You know what I mean?
	It's just, to me, it just makes me sick that this is what You know, clogging our airways with filth, you know, that's taking over the mainstream media all the time.
	And if it's not Justin Bieber, it's Anna Nicole Smith.
	It's not Anna Nicole Smith.
	You know, it's Alec Baldwin talking to some guy in New York calling him gay or something.
	It's just nonstop crap just coming out, you know?
	No, no, I agree.
	And this is the shallowing out of culture that happens when violent oligopolies take control of children's minds.
	It's just what happens when the government takes over control of education is people shallow out.
	This is what happens when you separate children from their parents through daycare and through government schools.
	They end up with this peer relationship.
	This is well documented in psychology that peers have far more influence over children these days than parents do because that's where they live.
	And so you end up with this lowest common denominator shallowing out of the human condition, getting people out of that by nagging them about the continued existence of two wars and quantitative easing.
	The de-shallowing, it occurs in stages.
	It can't be all at once.
	Does that make any sense?
	Absolutely.
	I just wanted to add one more thing.
	I think it's very important.
	It goes along with this topic of mental health.
	I had a friend who just went to El Salvador recently.
	She wasn't a libertarian per se.
	She believed in government, that government had a role.
	She said, how dare you?
	These people need help.
	These people need to be uplifted.
	These people, blah, blah, blah.
	And I got an email from her last night, and she says, the level of poverty in El Salvador, what these kids have to go through.
	She says, I became a libertarian overnight because people in this country have been conditioned so much to believe that they're helpless, that they're poor, when in reality, compared to other nations, the comparisons don't even level out.
	I mean, there are kids that are crippled in El Salvador who have no health care, no health care whatsoever.
	I mean, we live in such, still, a great country.
	The people have been brainwashed to think that we are helpless.
	We need the government.
	If we don't have our $10.10 an hour, where will we go?
	You're right.
	The rich love telling the poor that the poor are helpless so that the poor don't compete with the rich and undercut them with lower salary and overhead requirements.
	We're going to get right back into talking more about this after the break, and we've got another caller.
	We'll be right back.
	We now return to The Peter Schiff Show.
	Call in now.
	855-4-SCHIFF.
	That's 855-472-4433.
	The Peter Schiff Show.
	Alright, Stefan Molyneux sitting in for Peter Schiff, who called me last night and said, Steph, if you don't spend the majority of my show talking about Justin Bieber, it's over!
	You're never coming back!
	So, complying with Peter Schiff and his massive fandom, I will talk about Justin Bieber, and we'll take a call in a sec.
	Let me just take two seconds on the amount of... As I put this video out about Justin Bieber, and the venom and the music hysteria!
	His music is garbage!
	It's pop-manufactured corporate blah!
	I mean, people are literally going insane.
	This level of moral rage, which should be reserved for a Invasions of baby-brain-sucking aliens from Betelgeuse is being poured upon this fresh-faced young singer.
	It's mad.
	One guy's like, I tried to listen to one minute of his song and I couldn't take it!
	It was like, I mean, this is not somebody pushing a blackened deca through your inner eardrum, pal.
	This is just some music.
	You may like it.
	You may not like it.
	But lots of people do like it.
	And the idea that it's objectively evil music, I mean, it's insane.
	That's the national anthem.
	So, why are people so upset?
	Well, men know they can't compete, right?
	Like back in the day when, we talked about this a little earlier in the show, right?
	So, a woman wants to get married and have kids.
	Without the state, she has to choose a really good man.
	Because if the man runs off, she's going to be in, I think the Latin phrase is, deepest doo-doo.
	So she's got to choose a stable guy, maybe not the most exciting guy, but a good guy who's going to be around, who's going to pay the bills when she's pregnant and breastfeeding and so on.
	Unable to work as effectively and as efficiently as she could, she needs a good guy!
	But now they can run to Big Daddy Alpha state and get the resources through voting, through political action, the women can get the resources to raise the children of deadbeat guys.
	So before, women kind of had to choose good guys, and therefore there was a real incentive to be a good guy.
	Now, women, because the government will give them money, can choose bad guys.
	Or just pretty guys.
	Right?
	I mean, if you see this level of sexual hysteria at a Justin Bieber concert, I've not actually gone.
	Oh, I would go, though.
	I would totally go.
	I mean, it's great dance music.
	It's fun stuff, and they put in... Watch one of his live videos.
	They put on a good show.
	But you see the audience, I mean, women, girls are screaming, tears running down their faces, like Beatlemania on steroids.
	For the younger listeners, that's the Beatles, not Beatles in the Kitchen, which women might scream about.
	Now, a man can win the hand of a woman if she wants a stable, good guy who's a provider.
	Because he can go and get an education or be an entrepreneur.
	He can become a good provider.
	He can become a good person.
	He can achieve that.
	He cannot achieve what Justin Bieber has.
	That's like once in a generation, one in a million, right?
	Actually, one in hundreds of millions, really.
	You can't achieve that.
	And so I think there's this frustration among men that women are screaming over this guy when he's like, I'm a good guy, stable provider, good loving, be a good loving husband and father and so on.
	And they're like, ah, he's pretty.
	He's got Elvis hair.
	His skin has eerily elf-like non-blemishes.
	I mean, it's, it's crazy stuff.
	And I think men feel frustrated at that phenomenon.
	I mean, this didn't happen with Sinatra.
	That started happening a little bit with Elvis.
	It happened a lot more with the Beatles.
	But the rise of the welfare state and the faceless alpha male of the state giving resources to women who make bad choices in the fathers of their children has really, really lowered the standards for women.
	If you can't fail the test, you just don't really study, right?
	So I think there's a lot of complexity going on with this female adulation of Justin Bieber.
	And there's a reason why a lot of men just hate his guts.
	It doesn't have anything to do with his music.
	It has everything to do with women screaming over this guy who would, you know, pretty clearly not be a great boyfriend.
	Not because he's such a wonderful human being.
	I don't know if he is or isn't.
	I don't know the guy.
	I don't believe anything the media says, because I have three brain cells rolling around in the old cranium.
	But he would not be a great boyfriend.
	But they're screaming over him because he's pretty and he's rich and he's famous.
	A singer and a dancer.
	I mean, he is sexual junk food.
	And all the quality beefsteaks out there who actually have nutritive value, economically and emotionally, are frustrated.
	You know, the salad doesn't like it when you keep going for the Big Mac.
	All right, let's get back to our call list.
	We have a Haley, I think, on the line.
	Hayley, now is not the time to mime.
	Hi there.
	Sorry.
	Yeah, I'm here.
	Can you hear me?
	I didn't put you to sleep, did I?
	Were you dreaming of Justin Bieber?
	No, my question wasn't really about Justin Bieber.
	I just want to say thanks for everything you do.
	I've been listening for probably about a year, maybe a year and a half now.
	So I'm relatively new and really found your podcast informative and enjoyable.
	And I've changed my mind and opened my mind to a lot of things and particularly this banking issue.
	So thank you for that.
	Well, thank you for saying so.
	That means the world to me.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, so not really calling about Justin Bieber, but while you're on it, I just want to mention that I'm actually glad to see that there's a male celebrity finally getting the same scrutiny and criticism that all these female celebrities tend to get, you know, that we tend to put, you know, bad girls on front covers of tabloids, but the bad boys never seem to get scrutinized the way the bad girls do, at least not to the same degree.
	At least I'm glad to see that they're holding somebody, a male, to the same standard that they hold the female to, of angelic behavior.
	But that's not really my point.
	My question is more of a philosophical one, just from getting into the whole political thing, and we seem to be living in an information age, an age of information, but with a lack of knowledge.
	So my question is, what is truth?
	How do you come to truth?
	Because it seems like everybody seems to have facts and evidence on their side about, you know, climate change.
	Both sides seem to have the facts, you know, or about nutrition, you know, meat is bad or no meat is good or, you know, economics, no minimum wage is bad.
	I can prove it.
	No minimum wage is good.
	I can prove it.
	So, I guess, how in this information age do you sift through all the information and come to know the truth?
	Well, that's a...
	Do you have a more challenging question?
	I mean, stop lobbing me the softballs, lady!
	No, that's a great question.
	I'm somewhat new to listening.
	I'm sure you've covered it years ago.
	No, you can't talk about it too often.
	We have two segments left, so stay on the line in case I don't make any sense to you, because obviously I want to try to find something useful.
	There's truth and then there's goodness, right?
	So, Nietzsche reformulated Socrates' dictum, which is, reason equals virtue equals happiness.
	If you're rational, then you can achieve virtue, and if you achieve virtue, you can achieve happiness in a sustained way.
	Now, there are two fundamental kinds of truths in the world, I would argue.
	The first is the truth about the world that has no moral content.
	You know, the world is round, and ice cream contains milk, and these are all true statements.
	But they have no particular moral content.
	And then there's the moral content, you know, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not rape, thou shalt not assault, and so on.
	These have moral content.
	So, as far as the truth of facts go, that's really the province of the scientific method, of mathematics, of whatever consistent methodology can be applied to the maelstrom of sense data that we all receive through our senses, right?
	So those facts, you know, I don't know whether carbs are good or bad for you.
	Every time I talk about anything to do with nutrition, I get, you know, 10,000 people pushing blow darts of personal agendas in my general direction, and I don't know what is true.
	I try to eat a moderation of just about everything fairly sensibly.
	I don't really eat meat, but... So I don't, you know, I don't really know the truth.
	I think moderation is key, and, you know, just eat some vegetables, eat some fruits, and exercise, and, you know, that's my highly sophisticated diet.
	So, but we wait for the science to come in in that area.
	More important, I think, is the moral truths.
	The moral truths.
	Now, for the moral truths, first thing to look for is the gun.
	You look for the gun in the room.
	The question of the minimum wage.
	Everybody tries to argue from consequences.
	We should have a minimum wage because then people have more money.
	We should continue unemployment insurance because people spend money and that's good for the economy.
	We had to have a bailout to the banks because otherwise the economic system would have collapsed and that would have been bad for everyone.
	People would have lost more money in the economic collapse than they would have in the taxes that they have to pay for the bailout.
	It's all this consequentialism.
	All this consequentialism.
	You know, we don't apply that to children.
	I'm always suspicious of ethics that only ever seem to get applied to people who vote.
	You know, that's so corrupt.
	You know, if you don't pass a kid on his test, then he fails and he might have to stay behind a grade, he might not graduate.
	So you should just have him pass so he can graduate.
	That's a consequentialist argument, you know?
	Shouldn't tell someone about a negative test result because it'll make them upset.
	As a, you know, if it's a doctor and you get a medical test result comes back negative or bad, well, you shouldn't tell them to get upset, right?
	So, people will always try and focus on consequentialism, and consequentialism can never be resolved morally.
	Right?
	The results of something, whether it's good or bad, because, I mean, like all economics, if you cut subsidies to a company, it's good for some people and bad for other people.
	Generally, it tends to be good for the majority and bad for the minority, and that's why the minority is much more active.
	I mean, if there's a subsidy of a dollar taken from everyone and given to one guy, he's got, in the States, he's got hundreds of millions of dollars worth of incentive to get that subsidy and everyone else only has a dollar's worth of incentive to oppose him.
	So they will not oppose him and he will work night and day to get that money.
	So economics always talks about gains and losses.
	If the minimum wage is abolished, it will be bad for some people who will experience a temporary dip in income.
	The people who are currently hired for the minimum wage who don't deserve it.
	Or who haven't earned it, or can't provide enough value, basically.
	So every time you change a rule, you change a law, you abolish something, you create something new, there's winners and losers.
	And so the consequentialism is meaningless.
	It's meaningless.
	Saying there'll be some winners and some losers is meaningless.
	But we'll get back to how to connect this stuff to the fundamental moral questions that should be guiding our decisions.
	But first, we must make deference to those who doth pay the bills.
	We'll be right back after the break.
	We've got one final segment.
	We're going to talk about the good which leads to the joy.
	You're now enrolling in the Peter Schiff School of Advanced Economics.
	Twice the education of a Harvard MBA.
	For one one hundred sixty-eight thousandth the cost.
	All right, we are back for our last segment.
	I can't believe how much this time tunnel flies on the Peter Schiff experience.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomainradio at freedomainradio.com And I'm gonna do a second or two just finish up my thoughts about virtue and we got a caller so The future is unknowable.
	It's not unknown.
	Obviously, it's unknown, but it's actually unknowable.
	You can't predict, obviously, what's going to happen in the future.
	So how do we make decisions about what we're going to do in the future?
	Well, think of a ship sailing out to the ocean in, like, the 17th century.
	Out into the deep ocean.
	Now, when you're within sight of land, you can sail by landmarks.
	Oh, that lighthouse I take a left or whatever.
	I don't know.
	I'm not a sailor.
	Don't...
	Don't go into that reef.
	Here be dragons, whirlpools.
	You can sail by landmarks when you're within sight of land.
	But when you go out into the ocean, there are no landmarks, and you then must sail by your compass, by your sextant, by the moon and the stars.
	Once you are out of knowledge, you must make your decisions based on principles.
	The future It's beyond our knowledge, and we must make decisions about the future based on principles, not based on gains and losses which cannot be predicted, but on principles.
	The problem with the minimum wage is the violence.
	It's not the consequences.
	It's the violence.
	The fact that people who want to freely enter into a contract are not allowed to do so under threat of violence is the problem.
	Do I wish everyone could make a hundred dollars an hour?
	Sure, I guess I could, and the best way to do that is to let the free market build up everyone's wages through the efficient allocation of scarce capital and other resources.
	Boy, there's a bumper sticker.
	It's hard to be succinct and right.
	That's for sloganeers and sophists.
	The universality of the non-aggression principle, thou shalt not initiate violence.
	That's how we make our decisions.
	That is true.
	That is valid.
	I've got a whole book on my website.
	It's free if you want it.
	Universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
	Making the case for the non-aggression principle.
	Hopefully you'll check it out.
	But all future decisions must be based upon ethics, not based upon consequentialism, which is always open to manipulation, gerrymandering, bribery, corruption, or, as we call it, politics.
	Alright, let's get to our last call, and I'm back tomorrow.
	If you've got a question, you know, call in tomorrow.
	Happy to hear you.
	So we have a fine gentleman by the name of Philip, who would like to chat.
	What's on your mind, Philip?
	He dropped!
	Alright, perhaps we can go to Haley.
	Ah, no, David.
	David, David, David.
	Yes, Stefan.
	Hi, David.
	Yeah, how are you?
	I'm well, how are you doing?
	It's a nice change of pace from Peter.
	I really enjoy when you do the show.
	I also enjoyed a couple weeks ago, I took a couple hours out of my busy day in between making my kids lunch and making my kids breakfast.
	I listened to the debate you had with the Zeitgeist guy, Peter Joseph.
	I enjoyed the debate.
	I also enjoyed your post-fight analysis there that you had.
	What was really telling was his response to your post-debate analysis, and it seems to me that he believes that his audience is so frivolous and easily impressed that all he has to do is refer to you as a douchebag in any number of ways and in any number of occasions, and that's enough to impress his audience.
	But in listening to the debate, it occurred to me that What I'd always suspected was that his position, or this Zeitgeist movement, can be summed up as gibberish.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	And I think that's almost by intent.
	I think what Mr. Joseph does, he sees that people are disaffected and angry.
	And one of the biggest motivators of anger is feeling like you don't belong, or that you don't have control.
	And he kind of preys on that kind of audience.
	So they found him as this guy that has the belief that the man is coming down on them and they don't have any control over it.
	And he kind of preys on it, but he doesn't give them any direction.
	It's kind of like reading Noam Chomsky.
	Yeah, look, he's certainly not my favorite person to debate, though I think the debate was instructive.
	I think that I would hesitate to say that he preys upon people.
	I mean, I think he genuinely wants to make the world a better place, and he genuinely believes that he has useful things to add to the conversation.
	He believes he has the answer.
	I can't speculate as to his motives or why he's doing what he's doing, but he has a challenge which I've always tried to accept.
	The challenge is, if your philosophy can't be understood by somebody who's for, Then your philosophy doesn't really have much value.
	Because we need children to be good.
	Children to be virtuous.
	And I have been the moral instructor of my daughter, Lo, these five years.
	And she's down with it.
	She gets UPB.
	She understands the non-aggression principle.
	She understands all of that stuff.
	Now, the problem with a lot of the zeitgeist movement and so on is, like, I've been studying economics and philosophy and history, you know, for 30 years.
	I got a master's degree from an Ivy League school on the history of philosophy.
	Like, I really, really know a lot of stuff about this stuff, and I can't figure out what they're saying.
	So what that means is that, you know, and I don't have hostility to it.
	I mean, look, if they have some great answer, then I'd love to hear it.
	You know, they call me close-minded when I'm an atheist and an anarchist.
	Not exactly the most populous positions in the known universe.
	But if you cannot explain what virtue is to a four-year-old, then your system has no chance of being adopted in a widespread manner.
	And I've got, you know, I've got a podcast on my... The ABCs of UPB, which is how to explain Ethics to your average four-year-old, and I've talked about it with a bunch of kids, and they get it very quickly and very easily.
	I've always taken to heart the fact that Socrates never used the word epistemology.
	He never used the word metaphysics.
	He didn't use the phrase structural violence or social justice or any of that stuff.
	He explained things simply and clearly in a way that people could genuinely understand.
	So, look, I can understand a viewpoint and still oppose it, but I can't even understand the viewpoint.
	And so if somebody with 30 years of experience, and I've argued a theology position, I've argued the communist position, I've argued pro-social contract.
	I mean, I'm a good debater for the other side.
	I cannot argue their position.
	I don't know what it is.
	Now, you can just dismiss people who don't understand what you're saying as being dumb.
	But I think that that's not necessarily the best approach to how to change the world.
	You need to reformulate your ideas so that young people can understand them and be good.
	Virtue is a practice that should start early.
	And if experts can't understand what you're saying, you need to figure out how to explain it in a way that is comprehensible.
	As an old manager of mine used to say, explain it to me like I'm three years old.
	I can't believe I'm out of time.
	I will be back tomorrow morning.
	10 a.m.
	sharp.
	I look forward to it.

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