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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:17:02
Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Peter Schiff and the War over Minimum Wage
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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.
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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.
Hope you're doing well.
This is Stephen Molyneux from Freight of Maine Radio, sitting in for Peter Schiff, who unfortunately can't make it this morning, but did have a showing on The Daily Show this week.
So back in December, he sat down for four hours of interviews with Samantha Bee, and this was about the minimum wage.
And I talked about it yesterday.
You can find it in the archives.
And he made four hours worth of, I'm sure, very sophisticated arguments against the minimum wage.
Practical arguments, moral arguments, it's wrong to use force to engage people in a contract they wouldn't otherwise engage into.
It's economic rape.
And they used 75 seconds of Peter's interview.
And in that, in four hours, everyone's going to stumble over something.
I mean, it doesn't matter if you're Cicero or God himself, you are going to stumble somewhere over four hours.
And he couldn't remember the term, the modern term for mentally challenged or mentally handicapped, and he said mentally retarded, which itself was a replacement when I was a kid.
The word was mongoloid, and that became offensive, and then they changed it to mentally retarded, and that became offensive, and they changed it to something else, and then something else.
So, yes, it can be a little tough to remember.
And this was in response to a question from Samantha Bee, i.e., who is worth two dollars an hour in your view?
Now, this is a weird question, which would only come from the deep economic knowledge of a comedian.
And the answer, of course, is it doesn't matter what I think.
It matters what the two people engaging in contract means.
Now, Peter's a big boy.
He can defend himself.
But I just wanted to mention that what they cut out of the interview was Peter's first response, which he said, well, who would be worth $2 an hour?
Well, unpaid interns.
So when Peter went into the Daily Show, he sat down.
The guy set up the lights and miked him and all that kind of stuff.
And the guy who did all of that was an unpaid intern.
Receiving what?
The minimum wage?
No.
The proposed minimum wage?
No.
Two dollars an hour?
No.
The big fat bagel, the goose egg, the bupkis?
Zero.
He was getting zero dollars an hour from the Daily Show while the Daily Show was out there thumping their chest talking about how magnificent it would be to pay workers more.
Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
Jon Stewart is the highest-paid late-night entertainer, netting about $25 million a year, with an estimated net worth north of $80 million.
Jon Stewart is kind of liberal.
I mean, he's a crowd-pleaser, as all comedians are.
They can't offend their audience, and the wider the audience, the lowest common denominator they have to play to.
So they're not exactly in the business of creating uncomfortable Socratic-style confrontations with the prejudices of their audience, to say the least.
They are not revolutionaries, they are followers of the general bias, with some exceptions.
John Stewart puts on something saying we need to raise the minimum wage because workers have to be paid a living wage, while at the same time paying interns on the daily show Zero dollars an hour.
And they have the damned nerve to accuse Peter Schiff of insensitivity and a lack of concern for the poor.
They start off the interview and say, you care about the poor, right?
Of course!
And they pay They're intern zero.
I don't think Peter has any zero dollar paid interns other than me.
But isn't it just astounding?
The whole show is about concern and care for the poor and the need for people to have a minimum wage.
And the daily show pays portions of its staff zero dollars!
Zero!
There is no hypocrisy like the hypocrisy of the left.
The right's, you know, I mean, I'm not a Republican, I'm not a rightist, but, man alive, to be able, oh, how do you, I mean, put yourself in this mindset, if you dare, if you can do it without going insane like Winston Smith on the table.
You've just had someone, a guest on your show, miked by someone you're paying nothing to, nothing, zero!
And then you say, well, we've got to have a minimum wage because it's really important for the workers.
They need a living wage.
The guy's in the room.
You're not even paying.
It's not an abstraction.
He's breathing in the room.
you're sharing oxygen with a man you're not even paying, demanding that your guests support a living wage for workers.
Ah!
Ah.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to lie down.
Please play old clips.
It's just amazing how people are able to segment their brains in this kind of way.
It literally is double-think, but not even double-think in the abstract.
Double-think with a living, breathing human being in the room that just miked the guy.
You're not even paying.
A friend of mine, when he was younger, I worked at a restaurant or something like that.
And he had a friend, a guy who was mentally challenged, who was working there for a couple of bucks an hour.
And it was pretty charitable on the part.
The owner of the restaurant knew the family and gave him a job.
And he was, you know, sweeping up and filling the condiments and stuff like that.
Got him out of the house, got him socializing.
He was not producing a huge amount of economic value because of the mentally challenged aspect of his life.
It's a tragedy, and we as a society, of course, care about such people, wish to provide them the very best lives possible.
It's not their fault.
And then the minimum wage was upped, and the owner said, I'm sorry, can't keep him.
Costs money.
Can't keep him.
Too expensive.
The guy had to go home.
Guns don't change mathematics.
You know, if I get a math test wrong, I don't get to shoot the paper and get it correct.
Maybe I'm obliterating the evidence.
Guns don't change mathematics.
If somebody's not producing economic value, you can choose to be charitable, which The Daily Show obviously doesn't want to do.
And you can't change the math.
You cannot make someone economically more valuable.
And it is an insult by forcing a minimum wage.
And it's like saying I'm prettier if the government forces women to date me.
Steph is not at the minimum date level, ladies.
So you gotta go date him, or we throw your butt in jail.
Well, first of all, that's an insult to me.
I get my own dates, thank you very much.
I don't need the government forcing women to go out with me.
All that's saying is I'm woefully unattractive.
Force people to date me.
When you force people to pay you, it's an insult to the poor.
Look, I grew up terrifically poor, abysmally poor, like off-the-charts, doesn't-even-get-captured-in-the-general-statistics poor, eviction poor, can't-scrape-together-seven-bucks-for-a-swim-team poor, eating food of questionable age poor because I'm hungry.
And if anyone had said to me, you can't get out without the government's help, and of course people did, this was the general zeitgeist of the modern world, I would have been enormously insulted.
There's one thing I sure as hell did not want to be when I grew up, and that was poor.
Oh, I saw what it was like.
Oh, it's not fun at all.
I am looking forward to your calls about topics.
Did you get out of poverty?
Did you not?
What did you do?
What did you not do?
I'd like to hear from you.
This is Stefan Molyneux for the Peter Schiff Show.
We'll be right back.
You've heard of Karl Marx, right?
Well now... Meet his worst nightmare!
This is The Peter Schiff Show!
Good morning, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Inn Radio, sitting in for Peter Schiff.
We are talking about growing up poor.
Did you get out?
Did you not get out?
I'll tell you something.
We're going to go to calls in just a sec.
We've got the lines lit up.
So, thank you for calling in.
Just indulge me for a moment.
You know, there's a natural cycle in the free market.
They used to call it rags to riches to rags.
In three generations.
Or no shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves to no shirt sleeves.
And what happens is people get some money and they start spending their money.
And that's why you get it, generally, is to spend it.
Unless you're like Howard Hughes or whatever.
But you generally get the money to spend it.
So your expenses go up.
And then your kids expect more.
But the kids of the poor, they'll work real cheap.
Oh, they will undercut you, because they don't got no bill payments like you got, right?
They don't have million-dollar houses.
They don't have Lexuses.
They don't have all of this nonsense, right?
So, one of the ways that the rich stay rich is they keep telling the poor, Oh, I'm so sorry.
The system is rigged against you.
Oh, you're just a victim.
Oh, you need the government because you have no value.
It is a way of emasculating the ambitions of the poor.
Tell the poor, go take what you want!
Go take it!
We do not live in the Soviet Union.
We do not live in Nazi Germany.
People had wars beforehand.
People had plagues.
People had starvation.
People had tyranny.
They had aristocrats.
We got some regulations to worm around.
Still opportunity out there, people.
For the poor, you can out-compete the rich almost every time.
You're hungrier, you're leaner, you're less expensive.
And the rich know that, which is one of the reasons why you get this constant drip, drip, dripping down of all of this Novocaine brain-deadening propaganda about how the system is rigged and you haven't got a chance and it's not your fault that you're poor.
It's the system.
It's structural violence.
It's whatever.
Social injustices.
You just don't have the ear of the president.
You can't get out?
We lock in the trailer park from outside.
Sorry!
You're stuck.
That way you don't end up having the ambition to compete with the rich and they can stay richer.
All who tell the poor they are helpless are the enemies of the poor.
Let's go to Monsieur Le Greg from Delaware, I think.
Are you on the line?
Oui.
Good morning.
Good morning.
How are you?
I grew up so poor.
I used to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning to feed cattle by hand.
500 cattle in Minnesota, freezing cold.
You had to work a 40-hour-a-week job, plus go to school.
And I used to have to beg my dad to work for other people.
Most kids, they would be like, Most families would jump up and down if their kids begged to go work somewhere.
And in spite of all that, I ended up graduating from high school back in 1975 when it was real money with about $3,000 in the bank.
Not despite that, because of that!
Yeah, and I mean, it was just a blessing.
And it's funny, because all the people in my neighborhood, I live in a farm community, I had a reputation because everybody knew.
I was like, you know, remember the movie Sgt.
York?
I was like Sgt.
York, I was the guy who would go do anything for anybody at any time for any of them.
If they gave me a dollar an hour, fifty cents, I remember the first time I got fifty cents an hour, I was like delighted.
Anyway, going back to Peter on the Daily Show, the minimum wage, I mean, it really isn't worth what, it doesn't even matter what somebody's worth.
In the Super Bowl this weekend, Peyton Manning is playing.
If for whatever weird reason he wanted to work for me, unless he's got some skills I'm not aware of, or I could use him for a celebrity spokesperson so people would come to my business, but if he just had to do my job, he'd probably be worth $3 an hour, you know?
I mean, in spite of being able to throw a football.
Or a rocket scientist probably couldn't do a whole lot to help my business, you know?
So somebody is only worth what they can bring to your business.
Yeah, if you want people to be worth more, then we should be obviously reforming schools so that kids get marketable skills, rather than, you know, geography, men in society, women's studies, or whatever nonsense that they're shoveling down kids' throats these days.
Yeah, kids should learn some valuable skills.
And, uh, that way they'll come out and be able to compete.
We should lower barriers to entry to the trades, so you can go become a plumber and an electrician and so on without having to apprentice for year after year at virtually nothing.
We should lower licensing requirements for things that should not require licenses.
Like the, uh, the government just shut down in America.
They shut down a kid selling a lemonade stand.
I mean, come on, people!
They just shut down the licenses.
Sorry, go ahead.
They were selling, um, cupcakes And they were doing it from their home.
And the local news station did a story on them, how good this, I think she was like 11-year-old girl, was doing.
And wouldn't you know it, the next day the government showed up to shut her down.
By the way, one thing also, when I went to college, I'd been in the Air Force first, so I went on the GI Bill.
Didn't really know what I wanted to do, so I found out about sociology.
I thought, wow, there's a job where you get paid to help people?
I do that for free right now.
I think I'll, you know, look into that.
And then once I got about one year into it, and they told me things like, rich people create poor people so they can sell them their used cars and so they can be janitors.
And then I would argue that if everybody was rich, we would just crush the cars and make new ones.
Or the janitor would either make $50 an hour, or the other rich people would just invent the machine that did the janitorial work.
They just could not conceive of that idea, and I switched over to business.
Well, good for you.
Listen, there's something important to recognize in society.
The farm analogy is very apt.
We are taxed livestock.
The world is not countries.
The world is taxed farms.
And there are farmers.
One of the crops is the poor.
And all who help the poor, and I'm certainly not impugning negative motives or anything like that, but all who help the poor need the poor.
And the people who sell you medicine to manage an illness are usually not the ones researching ways to prevent or eliminate that illness.
Right?
The people who make and sell insulin are not the people looking for a cure for diabetes.
Doesn't mean they're bad people.
They're great people.
I love the fact that people who have diabetes get insulin rather than a grave.
But the poor are a kind of crop.
And in particular, in the government.
The poor are necessary for government power.
Because so many people feel, well, the poor need help.
And for some reason, we'll vote for it, but we won't actually help them ourselves.
So we hand this whole problem over to the government.
And then the government creates bureaucracies that farm poor people.
And what does a farmer do?
They replant their crops!
Right?
They don't eat the seed crop.
They do not eliminate the crop which gives them their income.
Neither do government bureaucracies eliminate the dependents that give them their income.
Greg, I'm going to give you the last word before the break.
Last word.
That's why in inner cities where public schools cost a fortune, they won't give vouchers which would be less expensive and actually educate the kids because they would lose a whole crop of poor people.
That's the last word.
Well, I appreciate that.
Yeah, I mean, you could not set up a system to more perpetuate poverty than everything that goes on in the inner cities.
Governments control almost everything in the inner cities.
Public housing, public roads, public sewage, government schools, licensed businesses.
The government controls just about everything in the inner cities and they are literally hellscapes on earth, for the most part.
So that's who you're turning the poor over to.
You know, ten to twenty percent of the money that is taken for poverty programs ends up in the hands of the poor.
The poor are an excuse.
They are a crop.
They are something waved around so that you will give money and power to the government, and they have zero interest in eliminating poverty, which is why they keep moving the goalpost.
We've got more calls after the break.
What happened with you?
Did you grow up poor?
Did you get out?
How did you do it?
What wisdom can you share?
Stefan Molyneux for Peter Schiff.
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.
Good morning, everybody.
Stan Mullin, Peter Maid Radio, sitting in for Peter Schiff.
We are talking about Peter's appearance on The Daily Show, the distortions of comedy, the hypocrisy of complaining about workers not paying a minimum wage when at The Daily Show are a number of unpaid interns.
You know, for Jon Stewart, who's making only $25 million a year, paying someone a couple bucks an hour might interfere with the necessary gel to keep that middle-aged thatch in place.
So, Philip, you are on the line from Miami.
What's on your mind, brother?
Yes, hi, Stefan.
It's an honor to speak to you.
Thank you for everything that you do and to encourage critical thinking on people.
Yeah, I just wanted to Just to say that your thoughts about that with the excuse that it's a comedy show, The Daily Show pretty much gets away with anything.
But the thing is, the worrying thing is that a lot of people take it seriously to do the thinking for them.
And as an additional thing, I just wanted to congratulate you on beating cancer.
And I wanted to ask if you tried any alternative treatment.
Like B17, for example, and what do you think about the stranglehold that the government holds on any alternative treatment for cancer and some other diseases?
Thank you.
Well, that's a range of topics.
For those who don't know, this, I guess, April of last year, I was diagnosed with lymphoma, which is an aggressive form of blood cancer.
This is after I had to flee the Canadian health care system, which had misdiagnosed me for about a year, and which then told me it was going to be an indefinite amount of time to get my treatment, even if I did have cancer, which they refused to confirm.
And so I ended up going down to Oklahoma and paying for a surgery to have a lump removed.
And that's where it was actually diagnosed.
Now, I did go through some treatment, some fairly minor.
It was only four rounds of chemo and some radiation.
And I went with what statistically gave me the best chances.
I did not spend a lot of time looking into alternative medicines.
Because my diagnosis was quite positive, and so given that my chance of recurrence is quite low, and that the treatment regime was not terribly intrusive, I just went with what gave me statistically the best odds.
Now, I mean, if you're diagnosed terminal and you want to roll the dice, obviously everybody's got that decision to make, but I'm a big one for the scientific method, and I'm not sure the degree to which alternative treatments have Received the kind of double-blind experimentation that is necessary for establishing, right?
So everybody knows someone, oh, you know, I did X and then I got better.
Well, you know, correlation is not causation.
You really need the double-blind experiment to figure out what's going on.
Even then, it can be tough to separate things.
There's a lot of self-reporting and so on.
So I went with where the science led and where the most rigorous experiments had been done.
And so far, you know, all is well.
And I genuinely believe that that will continue to be the case.
It's strange, too.
I mean, it's just bad luck.
I don't smoke.
I barely drink.
I work out three or four times a week.
I maintain the weight pretty much the same as I weighed in high school.
Just some bad luck in the genes, I think.
So, as far as the Daily Show question goes, could you repeat your question?
I'm sorry, I completely forgot what it was.
I'm not going to fake it.
Yeah, sorry.
I know it's a range of topics, but I see that they get away with anything, saying that it's just a comedy show.
And with that excuse, they pretty much get away with saying anything, or manipulating, Editing the information to make someone like Peter look bad on purpose.
Yeah, okay.
There's a long tradition of comics speaking truth to power.
I mean, not to get overly artsy, but I played Gloucester in King Leo when I was in theater school.
Oh yes, I have a British accent, and I was in theater school.
Yet strangely, I'm married to a woman.
Anyway.
In the play, the fool is the one who speaks truth to power.
The court jester, the court joker.
Thou shouldst not have been old before thou wert wise.
And he's constantly teasing the king and goes with the king when he rages against the elements because his willpower cannot recover the love of his children or the strength of his youth.
So there is a tradition of comedians being able to speak some truth to power.
If you can amuse the king, you can tell him some truth.
But this is not the case.
And I used to watch The Daily Show more often.
I haven't watched it in a while.
I just, apparently, I ran out of a snark reservoir.
It began overspilling.
And so I find that he constantly takes moral positions, and then when challenged on inconsistencies, he claims the defense of comedy.
That is not philosophically consistent, to put it as nicely as possible, but he's not a philosopher.
He's a comedian.
So he's there to make you laugh.
Is he there to make you think?
I don't know.
I mean, I've never seen them take on anything that isn't general lefty stuff.
With an occasional change, like they'd ripped apart one union guy who hired scabs to protest and didn't give them any benefits and didn't give them any decent wages.
So they will occasionally do that stuff.
They're, of course, hostile to the military-industrial complex and to the war.
Of course, much more skeptical of Bush than Obama, although they're changing a little bit, as all the people on the left are changing a little bit with Obama's, you know, our first beanpole, jug-eared Monster of a tyrant.
It's just wretched, what he's doing to the presidency, but kind of inevitable.
I mean, I called it in 07, I think, when I did a video about Obama.
But yeah, this thing where you make these grand moral pronouncements, you take these strong moral stands, and then when someone confronts you on inconsistency, well, you know, it's just comedy.
It's exactly the same kind of people who insult you while pretending to make a joke, and then when you get upset, they say you lack humor.
Hey, man, don't take it so seriously.
It's just a joke.
So, it is a job.
And people want to have their funny bones tickled, and he does a great job.
He's very funny.
But you don't go there for critical thinking.
I mean, you go there to be amused.
And deflating the pomposity of sophists is not a bad gig.
But like most people on the left, he seems to entirely lack self-criticism.
So if somebody points out, as has been pointed out, that they're for the minimum wage but don't pay their interns, any reasonably decent human being, like with a smidgen of integrity and valuing of ethics and the truth, would say, you know what?
That was a great criticism.
It was completely hypocritical of us to rip into a guy who actually pays his workers when we don't pay some of our workers at all.
So we are now changing that program.
We are going to retroactively pay at the minimum wage we suggest.
14 or 15 bucks an hour I'm sure is what they want.
It's what some people on the left want.
We are retroactively going to send out checks to all of the people who ever worked at the Daily Show who we did not pay.
Because I don't know how we missed that.
Pretty obvious.
But we did the wrong thing there.
And we ripped into a guy who pays his employees while we don't pay our employees.
About the minimum wage.
Oh!
I still can't get it out of my craw.
It's like a Giant halibut sideways in my gullet.
So that's what they would do, and they'd say, you know, we got schooled.
And, I mean, I've done it, I'm sure Peter's done it, where you make a mistake, you've missed something, even if it's completely obvious, and you say, you know what, I've done entire shows where I've read out corrections and criticisms of what I've done, which, you know, generally are quite valid.
So, if you lack self-criticism, you simply cannot have integrity, because otherwise your standard has to be, what I do is perfect, and that is the standard of a megalomaniacal narcissist Everything I do is perfect.
And those who do not have self-criticism, and I've never seen Jon Stewart ever go back and say, I did the wrong thing.
He's a keep-on-moving entertainer.
Never look back!
But he makes all these moral pronouncements and claims this intellectual stuff.
But he's an entertainer, and you would go to him for philosophy as you would go to me for dental work.
Does that help at all?
Does that clear it up?
I hope so!
Let's move on to Pat from Philly.
Step on!
How are you?
I'm well.
Yeah, just in terms of the whole Daily Show debate going on right now, I just find it amazing that we have been, you know, we are now living in a society where it seems that any job, you know, you take, you know, I mean, I work at a convenience store, and I make Maybe nine dollars an hour.
But it's not a job that I'm going to be doing the rest of my life.
I mean, it's not a job that is going to be conditioned to support my, you know, well-being for the rest of my life.
Like, the argument for these minimum wage jobs is that, you know, I can't support my family on them, you know, but these jobs are not meant to, you know, support an entire family.
They're meant to just, you know, For people who are trying to achieve a better future, maybe pay for their education like I'm doing.
Sorry to interrupt you, but my first job, I was painting plaques at home when I was 10 years old, and then I got a job when I was 11 at a bookstore.
And I was paid like $2 an hour.
I mean, this is 35 years ago or whatever, so it's back in the day.
I got a job at a convenience store for $2.50 an hour.
Then I was cleaning offices for $2.60 an hour.
And then I got a job at a hardware for $2.75 an hour.
Right?
But that's almost like a fairly significant increase, right?
Just over a couple of years.
Because, you know, I worked!
And I got jobs as waiters, and I cleaned cars, and I've just been working since I was 10.
I got three jobs, paid for most of my way through college.
And it worked, and then, you know, started a business and was working 80 hours a week, as Peter was working like crazy to start his Euro-Pacific capital.
I mean, that's a massive amount of work.
And, you know, the great tragedy... Sorry, no, you go ahead.
I've had my... I've had my monologues.
You go ahead.
But the thing is, like, I just feel like it's just like this whole... it's just like the whole dumbing down of society.
You know, don't... don't... don't shoot for your goals.
You're fine where you are.
We will, the government will take care of you.
You want to work in McDonald's for the rest of your life, we will force people to pay you whatever you want, as long as you vote for us, as long as you keep giving us your taxes, as long as you keep giving up more and more of your freedoms.
You know, and I love how Peter Schiff employs so many people and pays for the well-being of so many people's lives, and that Jon Stewart would do a hit piece like that.
And it's funny, the argument he would make for why he doesn't pay his interns, he would say, because it's not going to be their permanent job.
Well, that's exactly right.
That's why we shouldn't have mandated, you know, coercive, you know, uh, like, payments for these people at these jobs that they shouldn't be working their entire lives at anyway.
Well, you know, and people say, sorry to interrupt, but people say, well, I can't support a family on minimum wage.
Why did you have children when you can only earn minimum wage?
I can't support Alexis on minimum wage either, which is why I didn't buy one when I was out of there!
I hear from the music.
We must take a commercial break or two.
We'll be right back.
Please call in, talk about your experience getting into or staying, getting out of or staying into poverty.
Stefan Molyneux for Peter Schiff.
We'll be right back.
Nine out of ten historians agree.
If Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were alive today, both would be Schiff Radio Premium Members.
Somewhere up there, Thomas Jefferson is looking down with great pride.
Schiff Radio continues right now.
Good morning, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux for Peter Man Radio, sitting in for Peter Schiff.
We're talking about The grindstone of poverty.
Did you grow up poor?
Did you get out of it?
Did you not get out of it?
What happened to you?
This is your Chatty Box Friday.
You can call in at 855-4-SHIFT, 855-472-4433.
Norway?
Ah!
We have not talked about Norway.
Low these many days.
Norway has no minimum wage.
McDonald's workers there make 95 to 140 kroner.
Which is 16 to 24 US dollars per hour, depending on their age.
No minimum wage.
And people make more.
There's this counterintuitive thing that happens in the world.
A lot of the progress of human knowledge is applying principles to the non-obvious.
The world looks flat.
Particularly In Manitoba.
Ooh!
There's a little gem for our Canadian listeners.
The world looks flat.
It is, in fact, round.
Do you know what looks the same size?
The sun and the moon.
They're both about the same size as a dime held at arm's length.
They are, in fact, vastly different in sizes.
Kinda looks like the moon and the earth go around the world.
But, uh... Earth goes around the sun.
Moon goes around the earth.
So there's a lot of things that are non-obvious, which we need principles to figure out.
There's a principle called the non-aggression principle.
Don't initiate force.
There's a principle called property rights.
Don't take people's stuff without their permission.
The government is founded upon violations of the non-aggression principle and property rights.
The government is a monopoly on force.
Chairman Mao, he of the rotted teeth and even more rotten soul, Said government power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
Barack Obama says government is a monopoly on violence.
It's not subtle.
And everybody knows this.
Government is an agency of force and wildly unpredictable.
Unlike fire, it is a terrible master and an impossible servant because it will never serve you any more than the farmer serves his livestock.
You get a call.
It's dinnertime, you get a call.
Pick up the phone.
It's somebody wanting to sell you a magazine subscription.
What do you say?
Hey, man, I'm eating.
Don't call me at dinnertime.
In fact, don't call me at all.
Take me off this list.
Click.
Look at that.
You've just exercised freedom of association.
Next night, phone rings.
It's the IRS.
It's the government tax department.
Hey man, I didn't sign no social contract.
Don't call me at dinner.
In fact, take me off this list.
Don't call me at all.
Click.
Yeah.
Good luck with that.
That's not how it works.
You have to listen to them and they will make you sweat because unpredictable things can happen.
The tax code in every country goes into the multi volumes of incomprehensible legalese.
You could be breaking the law at any time where they're having no idea
and ignorance of the incomprehensible is no excuse the law is incomprehensible there's no one in the world in any country who knows all the laws the laws are constantly changing and laws contradict each other looking for reason in the law is like looking for Aristotle in the Bible not really the same scene government is a monopoly on force
Government violates the non-aggression principle and property rights, not as a by-product, but as its central purpose, as its sole reason for being.
So if we apply moral principles, you know, the kind of moral principles that we demand from your average three-year-old.
I mean, we're not talking advanced physics.
Moral theories are not like trying to understand the mathematics behind the general or special theory of relativity.
The moral theories that we demand of three-year-olds, we should reasonably demand of society as a whole.
You know, adults.
You know, if a three-year-old can handle, don't grab, don't push, don't hit, don't take, share, be nice, then surely we can expect adults to do that, too.
But we don't.
We create a monopoly of violence at the very center of society, and then we wonder why things get worse and worse and worse.
And people get confused.
It's not confusing.
Let's picture this.
Let's call something Marxism.
Not with an X, but with a CK.
Marx.
Like school Marx.
Or skid Marx.
And let's say that in a university we have, you know, people with a bell curve, a wide range of abilities, and we say, You all can vote on who gets the marks.
You all generate your own marks, don't you?
You study for the test, you write your test, you get, you know, your A, your B, your C, whatever.
Your alphabet soup of varied competencies.
And then, you all can vote about who actually gets the marks.
You all generate your own marks, they can be redistributed according to vote.
What's gonna happen?
We all know what's gonna happen in that situation.
The kids who don't study, the dumber kids, the lazier kids.
They're going to vote to take away the marks of the smarter kids, the harder-working kids, the competent kids.
What's going to happen then?
Everybody gets a D!
Doesn't matter whether you study or not.
Everybody gets a D. Well, what's going to happen?
People are going to study less.
And the smarter kids are going to drop out of college, because they're going to guess that the whole thing is making the college degree worthless.
Because you're going to graduate with one of these all-round D college degrees, where you've had to share your marks with the idiots, and the lazy, and the incompetent, And everyone's gonna look at that degree and say, well, I don't know if you're smart or not, because all the marks got redistributed.
And so, in an attempt to gain the value of getting a good degree, this redistribution of marks, this Marxism, would destroy the value of that degree.
Would destroy the value of going to university.
Because no longer could we separate the competent from the incompetent, no longer would the less competent have something to work for, and no longer would the competent have an incentive to work within that system.
It's no different anywhere else.
If we think everything should be redistributed, if we think there's a minimum living wage, let's apply that to children in grade two.
Nobody fails!
Everyone gets a D. Nobody fails the test.
There's no failure for kids.
Nobody ever gets corrected on spelling.
Nobody ever fails a math test.
Can you imagine the massive amount of laziness and incompetence that would generate in children?
Are we surprised when the same thing happens with the big-legged people?
Of course not.
Looking forward to your calls, 855-4-SHIFT.
Let's talk when we return.
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I don't know when they decided that they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.
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The Peter Schiff Show.
All right, Stephen Molyneux back for Peter Schiff.
Now, we interrupt your regularly scheduled sophistry with a few facts about the poor.
Don't mean to shock you, still looking forward to your calls, 8554-SHIFT, but let's talk a little bit about some facts, shall we?
So, there is a group in America called the poor.
And do you know that the lowest one-fifth of households, their income equals the average household income in the early 1970s?
In other words, to be poor now is the equivalent of being middle class in the 1970s.
Not too poor!
Not too bad.
43% of poor households own their own homes.
The average home owned by persons classified as poor is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch, or a patio.
80% of poor households have air conditioning.
In 1970, only 36% of the entire U.S.
population enjoyed air conditioning, and they were all in Phoenix.
The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, or London, or Vienna, or Athens, and other cities throughout Europe.
Get that?
Average poor American has more living space than the average person as a whole.
Three-quarters of poor households own a car.
31% own two or more cars.
97% of poor households have a color TV.
Over half of them have two or more.
89% own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.
Ooh!
That's poverty.
Let me introduce you to a little place called the Middle Ages, where if you got a toothache, you freakin' died.
Would you rather be poor in America now, or say, the King of Prussia a hundred years ago?
Let me give you a hint.
Antibiotics.
Quite helpful.
They ain't undernourished either, the poor.
If you've seen any of those middle-of-the-body TV news spots about obesity, average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals, virtually the same for both poor and middle-class children.
And that's actually quite above recommended norms.
Poor children consume more meat than do higher-income children and have average protein intakes 100% above recommended levels.
Most poor children today are in fact super-nourished and grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the G.I.' 's who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.
They weigh the equivalent of 19 Justin Bieber's.
Only 2% of the poor say they often do not have enough to eat.
Now, in good economic times or bad, whether there's a recession or not, the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year.
That amounts to 16 hours of work per week.
The typical poor family with children is supported by one adult working 16 hours per week.
Hmm.
I wonder if there's a correlation between work and wealth, between not working and being poor.
Something to mull over.
So if one person just went full-time, so if the work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year, two parents going part-time or one parent going full-time, almost 75% of poor children would no longer be poor.
So, no workee, no money.
Father absence is another major cause of child poverty in the U.S.
Nearly two-thirds of poor children reside in single-parent homes.
Each year, an additional 1.5 million children are born out of wedlock.
A very central and strong predictor for poverty.
So, if poor moms, you know, did something as radical as, say, marrying the fathers of their children, Almost three quarters of those children would immediately be lifted out of poverty.
So, work and marriage.
How do you get out of poverty?
It's a 1-2-3, baby.
1.
Finish high school.
2.
Get a job and keep it for a year.
3.
Don't have kids till you're married.
That's it!
You're in the middle class!
Game over for poverty!
Not that complicated!
Of course, the welfare system doesn't help.
The welfare system is hostile to both marriage and work.
As I said before, the poor are crops farmed by government programs.
They don't destroy their crop base.
They don't destroy the source of their income.
Major programs like food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid continue to reward idleness and penalize marriage.
Ooh, why else are people in America poor?
Because they weren't born there.
Every year the U.S.
imports, through both legal and illegal immigration, hundreds of thousands of additional poor people.
Hmm!
You get more people having trouble getting rid of poverty.
Plus, of course, the standard of poverty just changes.
People get richer, they just move the goalpost, right?
About one in ten of the people counted among the poor by the Census Bureau is either an illegal immigrant or the minor child of an illegal.
In the late 1990s, the US did fairly well in reducing child poverty.
Successful anti-poverty programs were partially implemented.
So, they reformed welfare to some small degree in 1996, and what they did was they required some welfare moms to either prepare for work, like get training, or get jobs as a condition of receiving aid.
Hmm.
As this requirement went out, welfare roles plummeted, and employment of single mothers increased in a way that had never been achieved before.
As the employment of single moms rose, child poverty dropped rapidly.
In the quarter century before welfare reform, there was no net change in the poverty rate of children, In single mother families, after this reform in 96 was enacted, the poverty rate dropped from 53.1% in 95 to 39.8% in 2001.
Children born and raised outside marriage are 7, 7, 7, 7, 7.
You need to hear that number a few times.
Seven times more likely to live in poverty than are children born and raised by married couples.
Seven times more likely.
That is the ring of power.
Forget about Tolkien.
The ring of power is the ring of marriage.
It has the power to end poverty, to protect women and children.
Abuse in families from men not married to the mother are many times higher, like 30 times higher.
Women are the safest in established and long-term marriages.
Children are the safest in established long-term marriages.
The economics of the family is better in established and long-term marriages.
You can get mad at me But you can't get mad at the facts unless you are genuinely and generally insane.
So, poverty is not what you think.
It's not people living in a box under a bridge.
Poverty is, to a large degree, though not entirely, the result of lifestyle choices.
You know, a monk who dedicates his life to God is poor.
Does he need welfare?
No, he's making choices.
If you choose not to work, if you choose to have children outside of marriage, and these are choices!
I refuse to strip free will from the poor.
That would be to hate them entirely.
They're human beings, just like you and I. There was an old exchange between Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald said, the rich are different from you and I. And Hemingway said, yeah, they've got more money.
But it's true.
The poor are people just like us, and they make choices and they get benefits.
Wouldn't it be nice to work 16 hours a week?
Sometimes that would seem really nice.
So, the poor people make lifestyle choices, have kids outside of wedlock, and they change.
This is what happens when the circumstances change, when welfare changes.
It changes.
You know, in 1960, only 16% of black kids were born outside of wedlock.
Now it's almost 75%.
What's changed?
More racism?
No.
Welfare state.
855-4-SHIFT.
Give us a call, babies.
We'll be back right after the break.
To President Obama, Madam Pelosi, and all of the socialist econ professors across Madam Pelosi, and all of the socialist econ professors across America.
Hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molyneux, sitting in for Peter Schiff.
We are going to take a call, and then I am going to coat your speakers with fine, righteous libertarian froth.
of outrage.
I try not to do it too much.
You know, blood pressure is important.
But sometimes the politicians say stuff so outlandish, so wrong-headed, that it must be addressed.
But first, thank you for your patience, Chris.
What's on your mind?
Hi.
Hi.
Hi, yeah.
I just wanted to talk about... I was watching a debate you had with a Brazilian professor named Vladimir Safatle or something.
And, uh, it plays into the same theme that leftists seem to, you know, play about libertarians.
So they characterize libertarians as these corporate apologists and these people, you know, who just favor the rich.
And in the debate, I noticed that he was just so confused when you started defending the poor and, you know, and talking about the real causes of poverty.
And he was just, like, speechless.
He couldn't even say anything.
I find what happened to Peter Schiff on the Daily Show is like that.
It's basically propaganda to just smear libertarians as corporate apologists or people who are, you know, out of touch with the poor and desensitized.
So I just want to know what you thought about that.
Look, whoever insults first loses.
Whoever, and this is an iron law of debates, whoever resorts to insults first, loses.
Because it means that you don't have reason and evidence on your side, you can't muster a decent argument, and so you just start insulting people.
They could not respond to Peter's arguments about the minimum wage, so they made him look bad by selectively cutting out of four hours, 75 seconds.
You know, it's like anybody could make me look like a stumbling, a-verbal idiot by taking all of my errs and ums from any show and cutting them all together.
And that's just ridiculous and embarrassing to see.
So, yeah, people who insult, yeah, of course they lose.
I mean, no intelligent person looks at an insult and says, well, I guess that clinched it.
It's like saying that whoever hits the other person first with the tennis racket wins Wimbledon.
I'm not really good at sinking shots in pool, so I'm just going to hit the other guy with my pool cue.
Yay!
I win!
I'm the best pool player ever!
Now we're going to have Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus spar off with their nine irons and see who can club each other to death first and call that a rousing game of golf?
No, it's ridiculous.
So, yeah, I mean, of course, I mean, I thought that professor was pretty nice, but my argument is, you know, if you really care about the poor, go make some freaking jobs for them.
You know, go start a business.
Go hire some people who are poor.
Don't just thump your chest in self-righteous primal ape and moral self-congratulation.
Go out and start a business and help the poor.
Go hire them.
Go make jobs for them.
If you want to raise the minimum wage, raise the demand for poor workers, go start a job.
But everybody wants to feel like they're doing something for the poor because they're writing to their congressman.
Come on!
It's ridiculous.
Go ahead.
It's ridiculous.
And, like, it's just weird that people in North America especially just assume that the minimum wage is something that, you know, has to be in place.
Because a lot of places around the world, like you mentioned, don't even have a minimum wage.
And these are the same countries that people hold up as being, you know, paradises of socialism and, you know, great government intervention.
When Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage, Norway doesn't have a minimum wage, Singapore doesn't have a minimum wage, Iceland doesn't have one, Hong Kong, not until 2010.
Switzerland either.
And what they have are just, you know, normal collective bargaining agreements and these are all perfectly fine under the libertarian system.
So I don't know why they just naturally resort to coercive means of enforcing Uh, you know, minimum wages versus... Because they're Democrats, and Democrats like creating dependents.
Why do Democrats favor immigration from the third world rather than Europe, which has been the case ever since Ted Kennedy's championed the changes of the law in 1965?
Because people from the third world grow up in dictatorial, left-wing, socialist, or fascistic kinds of systems, and they tend to be more pro big government.
The statistics are very clear.
Immigrants overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, so Democrats want immigrants to come into the country.
They are growing a voting base.
And if you get people to an artificially high wage, which only the Democrats support, who are they going to vote for?
Democrats!
It's got nothing to do with caring about the poor, they're just farming some votes.
I mean, come on, let's be honest about what it is.
Why do they want immigrants from the third world?
Because they vote Democrat!
Why are they in favor of illegal immigration?
Because Hispanics vote Democrat.
Why do they care about the minimum wage?
Because if you can get someone up in wage and they praise the Democrats and think the Democrats are responsible, who are they going to vote for?
It's just vote buying.
It's just bribery.
It's got nothing to do with any principles or care about the poor.
Look, the poverty rate in America was going down by 1% every single year in the post-war period until The Democrats put the war on poverty in, thus preventing the free market from solving the problem of poverty, which it was doing.
There was the greatest poverty reduction in the history of the world outside of the modern examples of China and India, where tens of thousands of people are getting out of poverty every single day.
Nobody talks about it because it's not involved with government power, but a diminishment of government power.
If you want to help the poor, get out of their damn way!
That's all you have to do.
Stop controlling them.
Stop bribing them.
Stop regulating them.
Stop dumbing them down with stupid schools.
Just get out of their way.
The poor will be fine.
But the Democrats want to drip drug the heroin of state dependency into the veins of the poor, so they keep getting repeat customers and repeat votes.
Sorry, go ahead.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I agree with that completely.
And it definitely tells you about something about our psychology.
And, you know, on the point of just, you know, letting the poor, you know, rise themselves, allow them to liberate themselves, I mean, my dad came over to Canada on a boat, okay?
He was a war refugee from Vietnam, and now he's an extremely successful person.
And it's so offensive to me that there's these people out there who believe, you know, that they're liberating my dad.
Oh yeah, you know, like, because of us, now he can be, you know, it's because of our policies.
Like, you know, get out of his way!
You're getting in his way of liberating himself from poverty.
It's just ridiculous.
It's really offensive.
Yeah, and look, if the people who think that the government can help the poor just need to show us examples.
So that's a great point.
I really appreciate you bringing that up.
And now, if we could swing over.
We're going to listen to Barack Obama with Cut Ten for a moment, and the aforementioned promised libertarian flex of moral outrage will be yours.
So we'll start this.
Can you give this cut, Tim? - Income's wages have not gone up as fast as corporate profits and the stock market have gone up.
And that's a problem for the economy as a whole.
Because if all the gains are just at the top, ordinary folks aren't doing better, then they're not shopping, they're not buying new cars, they're not buying new appliances, they're not buying the new home.
And that depresses the entire economy.
When there's money in the pockets of ordinary folks, everybody does better, including businesses.
Listening to Barack Obama talk about economics is like listening to my daughter, who's five, explain how the television works.
Magic beams!
From space!
Oh, man, where do you even start?
Income wages have not gone up as fast as corporate profits and the stock market has gone up.
Do you know what I find interesting?
I find that if you send $700 billion to a bunch of banks and investment houses, well, you know, astonishingly, the value of their stock goes up.
You know, if you give anyone 700 billion dollars, they're going to be a little bit richer.
The TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program started by Bush and put in under, continued under Obama, has given 700 billion dollars to banks.
Banks have paid some of it back.
Over half of the money the banks have paid back has come from other government programs to benefit banks.
They give massive amounts of money to brokerage houses and banks and then they complain that the stocks of brokerage houses and banks are going way up and the average person is not getting richer.
This is not complicated!
Give jerks money, and they'll be rich, at the expense of everyone else.
But they know all this, they just don't want to talk about it.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Peter Schiff.
Please feel free to call in 855-4-SCHIFF.
We'll be back right after the break.
We now return to the Peter Schiff Show.
Call in now.
855-4-SCHIFF.
That's 855-472-4433.
We're on the radio.
The Peter Schiff Show.
Good morning, everybody.
It's Devan Molyneux, sitting in for Peter Schiff.
A segment or two to go.
I'd love to hear from you.
855-4-SCHIFF.
So we were talking about principles.
Oh, no, not the kind of people who end up managing kids' squirmy bottoms while they sit to wait to be disciplined in High school, but the principles, the moral principles.
We don't make decisions fundamentally if we want to be virtuous.
We don't make decisions based on consequences.
I don't give a rat's behind whether Scandinavia has a minimum wage or not.
I know that minimum wage is immoral because it is forcing people into an economic interaction that they would not otherwise have chosen.
You do that to a woman about sex, it's called rape.
It's wrong.
Do that to someone in the realm of economics, it's a violation of self-ownership, property rights, the non-aggression principle.
It's wrong.
It's immoral.
When we follow principles, surprising things happen and we gain great power.
You know, you can use Newtonian physics to navigate the ocean, but you cannot use Newtonian physics to navigate the solar system.
For that you need Einsteinian physics.
The more detailed, the more precise our principles are, the more power we gain.
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
For the world to be controlled, we must let go of the pseudo-control of coercion, of regulation, of laws, which are just opinions with guns, and prisons.
Let me give you an example, and I owe this to my glorious wife who brought this to my attention.
A New Zealand school principal has stopped enforcing rules on a primary school playground.
No rules!
Anything!
No rules!
Of any kind.
Now, of course, most people would imagine this ends up in a Lord of the Flies throw-piggy-off-the-cliff situation.
It's not true.
The ban on traditional health and safety-based playground rules allows children at Swanston Primary School in Auckland, Australia, to climb trees, ride skateboards, and play games such as Bull Rush, no idea what that is, something to do with hobbits, during playtime.
Children are also allowed to play in a loose parts pit containing junk pieces such as wood, old tires, and an old fire hose.
I'm sure under construction is the matches-and-steak-knives pit.
With snakes!
Principal Bruce McLachlan did away with the standard playtime rules as part of a university study conducted by Auckland University of Technology and blah blah blah blah blah, looking at ways to encourage active play among children.
The study, which ended last year, found pupils were so occupied with the activities that the school did not need its time-out zone anymore, and it didn't need nearly as many teachers patrolling the playground.
Hmm.
When you take away external coercion, what you get is not chaos, but spontaneous self-organization.
Seem a little counterintuitive?
Yet it's true, and it's been confirmed again and again.
In Europe, I think it's in Denmark, there's a town that had huge problems with traffic congestion and accidents.
You know what they did?
Took away all the road signs, all the stop signs, all the traffic lights, and they even took away the lane markers.
Accidents have dropped enormously and traffic throughput has increased enormously.
You take away coercive control, you get spontaneous self-organization.
That is moral and way cheaper.
Way cheaper.
Teachers have reported, in this, higher concentration levels from their students in the classroom.
Students aren't out there being bossed around by rules and timeouts and teachers snarling at them.
They get spontaneous self-organization.
McLachlan said, The kids were motivated, busy, and engaged.
In my experience, the time children get into trouble is when they are not busy, motivated, and engaged.
It's during that time that they bully other kids, come up with graffiti, or wreck things around the school.
When you look at our playground, it looks chaotic.
From an adult's perspective, it looks like kids might get hurt, but they don't.
Bullying has gone down enormously in this playground with no rules, and with dangerous things to play with.
Ooh, rubber hoses!
They might even have BPA in them.
Bullying has diminished.
Why?
Because the adults are not bullying the children by telling them what to do or putting them in a time-out, you know?
When there are bullies, they are echoes of adults bullying children, forcing them to do this, that, and the other.
So, the professor of public health, who was working on the team leading the study, said children develop their brain's frontal lobe when they are taking risks, which allows them to calculate consequences.
You shield children from risk, you shield them from learning and developing their brain.
So, children develop their frontal lobe when they're taking risks, which allows them to calculate consequences.
You can't teach them that, Mr. Schofield said, professor of public health.
They have to learn risk on their own terms.
It doesn't develop by watching TV.
They have to get out there.
Four schools in Auckland were involved in the experiment, and all reported similar findings.
Fewer injuries, less bullying, less vandalism.
The results have been so successful, Swanson Primary has opted to make the changes implemented during the experiment permanent.
Hmm.
Interesting.
Could the anti-bullying campaign Actually benefit from no longer bullying children and telling them what to do and giving them rules and monitoring what they do and giving them timeouts and punishing them and controlling them.
That's just bullying children.
Let them take risks.
As I mentioned in the show yesterday, two things foundational to the development of empathy in children.
Unsupervised outdoor play, which is exactly where this kind of stuff happens.
And the reason that develops empathy is when you have unsupervised outdoor play, you have to figure out how to get people to play with you.
How do you get people to play with you?
It's got to be fun for them!
You can't be mean, you can't be a bully, you can't poke people or punch people or push people.
They don't want to play with you.
If you're in some structured game, the adults will all make everyone play together.
If you're out there in unstructured play, you have to figure out what people want, what the other kids want.
You have to negotiate and find win-win situations which everyone gets to play with.
When I was a kid, I was a dirt biker.
I was broke, but I was able to build dirt bikes from discarded parts.
And we all had to meet together, our little dirt bike gang.
What was the name of our gang going to be?
Where were we going to go?
Who had any money?
What were we going to do?
We spent more time negotiating than we did actually riding our bikes.
But what is more valuable is a skill for me now, knowing how to ride a dirt bike a little bit better, or having spent countless hours negotiating with other children and trying to find win-win solutions so we can all have fun.
When you leave people alone, they don't just fall into the sand and try and breathe seawater.
They actually spontaneously self-organize.
The development of empathy requires the presence of a father and unstructured outdoor play.
Indoor play, it's all structured by video games and whatever it is you're doing around the board games, need unstructured outdoor play.
Go play outside!
No rules.
Go figure it out.
Or some YouTube video where the guy tells his children to go play outside and they take their wireless Xbox controllers and go play sitting up against the window.
Not really what we're talking about.
Get them out!
Get them outside with other children to figure out how they're going to have fun, to negotiate, to find the win-win solutions.
That is helping them develop empathy.
If you don't have empathy and you're in unstructured play with other children, no one's going to want to play with you.
It's different if you're playing something on a computer.
Because that's structured.
But even that, you know, if you're... And then there's parents to come and intervene, right?
Unstructured outdoor play means no parental supervision.
That's how we learn to negotiate.
And one of the reasons why empathy is diminishing is children don't get that opportunity for this weird idea that these predatory, child-raping Nazgul are circling every street waiting to pick up our children.
Children are far safer now!
than they were when I was a kid.
They have helmets!
My helmet was my skull!
And people think I may have tested it one too many times.
But that's how we saw things.
I think we have a call from Nate, from Lansing.
What's on your mind, brother?
Hi, Stefan.
Thank you so much.
I surprised you there, didn't I?
I'm like, chatter, chatter, chatter.
Okay, Nate, go!
Yeah, yeah, you put me on the spot.
Well, thank you.
What was my question again?
Yes, I have a couple questions for you.
The first one is, I came to the libertarian scene about four or five years ago, mostly through Ron Paul and then got more into the anarcho-capitalist through reading Rothbard and through hearing about you and everything.
And, uh, I've always had this little dilemma in my head, because I work for a local municipality here, and, uh, you know, I understand the structure of it, that, you know, they get their, um, they get their money through, uh, you know, obviously the force of a gun and everything, force of law.
And, um, I'm wondering, in your philosophical, uh, brilliance that you have, um, what, uh, If that would be considered immoral, or whatever, to continue with my job.
No, I wouldn't... Sorry, sorry to interrupt.
I would not consider it to be immoral.
Look, we're all trying to survive in this system that we have significant moral problems with.
And I think that we did not design the system.
We did not create the system.
We were born into it.
We're trying to make it better.
But I don't think any of us can extract ourselves from the system.
I mean, even if we say, well, let's go live in the woods and have nothing to do with the government.
Well, you're only living in the woods because of the government.
You haven't escaped it.
You're banished because of it.
So you cannot escape the influence of the state.
I mean, I don't think it's immoral to work for the government.
I mean, it kind of depends, right?
I mean, there's varying levels of degrees.
You know, if you are a prison guard in a Yeah, I mean to a certain extent.
defenders are there, then that's probably a little bit more dicey.
But my question is, we've only got a minute or so, so keep it brief if you can.
My question is, why would you want to work for the government?
I mean, isn't it horrible?
Yeah, I mean, to a certain extent, yeah.
I mean, honestly, a lot of times I feel that I don't really have the drive anymore to go out and find a free market job or whatever.
I've always wanted to start a business.
Oh, so they've broken you.
Finding the drive.
They have broken you.
They have won over and you no longer feel the confidence to go out into the free market and get a job on voluntary terms.
Well, I'm sorry about that.
I think you may be stronger than you think.
If you were cut tomorrow, you wouldn't starve to death under a bridge.
You'd find something, right?
So, think about it.
Think about it, just from the aesthetics of life.
All right!
The music is playing, which means I must be quiet.
We'll be right back after the break.
We got another call, another comment or two.
Sue, this is Stefan Molyneux for The Peter Schiff Show.
You're now enrolling in the Peter Schiff School of Advanced Economics.
Twice the education of a Harvard MBA.
For 1,168,000th the cost.
Good morning, everybody!
Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio, sitting in for Peter Schiff.
Ah!
We are at the end of the show, almost.
I could go all day.
But there are other people who apparently want the mics, so we will hand it over to them.
But before that, we have Dave from White Plains, you had a mind-bendingly brilliant point to make.
Dave, are you on the line?
No pressure there.
Yeah, I'm on the line.
My point is that I'm a part-time comic, so one hypocrisy or one contradiction that I know from whether it's Jon Stewart or Joe Rogan, I've seen him kind of give Peter a hard time about the minimum wage, is that comics don't get a minimum wage.
In fact, you work for free.
You work for free to begin.
I mean, amateur night, no one gets paid.
Yeah, exactly.
You're learning on the job.
You're not a killer when you first start.
It takes years to hone it down and all that stuff.
So Jon Stewart is very acquainted with that.
He has to be.
So it's just very odd for him to be slamming anybody.
About the minimum wage, when he clearly didn't feel the need to protest comedy clubs who pay him.
Right.
And look, I mean, we know that there's something called enabling, which is where you support the vices or the bad habits of people.
You know, like, oh yeah, I can understand why you need to drink.
You've had a tough day.
Here's your drink.
Right?
You're not actually an alcoholic, but you're making the alcoholism possible.
Like the woman who calls in for her husband and says, oh yeah, he's feeling sick this morning when he's just hungover.
She calls in and lies about what's going on.
She's enabling his behavior.
And with the poor, it sucks to be born poor in a lot of ways, but it gives you a lot of strength, too.
It gives you a lot of willpower.
It gives you a lot of hunger.
And it gives you a lot of marketability, because you're, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, your costs are low.
So you can really compete.
But all the people who hang around the poor are saying, well, you need the government because, you know, the system is stacked against you and you don't have a chance and, you know, it's just terrible and, you know, you can't get ahead because all the rich people know each other and they... I mean, you're just enabling the bad habits of the poor and poverty has something for a lot of people to do with bad habits.
So yeah, let's put in a minimum wage for comedians for, you know, $20 an hour for anyone to even go to amateur night.
And then all comedians have to get paid $20 an hour, $15 an hour.
That's a minimum wage.
What would that do to the comedy circuit?
It would put them out of business, of course.
But the other thing is, there's also kind of a paternalism about it, or maternalism, whatever.
You know, where you're talking to the poor and you're helping, but there's a level of superiority there.
Like you're giving them a bit of charity.
And with comics, they would never do that.
Comics are sharp people in general.
And they would call you out.
They would say, thank you, but no thanks.
Yeah, we should also impose minimum laughs as well.
Like, everyone has to laugh at everyone's jokes.
There can be no silence for anyone's joke.
I mean, how would you know if you're any good or not?
I mean, how would you get better?
It is, again, it's something, there's something is classism.
I mean, I could do a whole show on that, and if I come back, I'm, you know, maybe, because I think it's an important topic.
And classism is, you know, rich people are this, and poor people are this.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
We understand that with racism.
That it's bad.
White people aren't X. Black people aren't X. There's wide diversity in the races.
You can make very few generalized statements about races that aren't purely biological.
Yet we do this in class all the time.
Classism is the sort of socialist sanctioned bigotry of the modern world.
Which is, well the rich people are X.
The rich people are thirst and howl.
They are uncaring.
You know, they just want to eat off the backs of the poor and step over them to get into their limousines and helicopters.
They're all like this caricature of Daddy Warbucks monocled guy from the Monopoly game.
That's the rich, right?
And the poor are always hard-working victims.
Never responsible for their own poverty.
Never made any bad choices.
Never lazy.
Never avoidant.
Never lacking in self-knowledge.
Never illiterate or unread.
I was reading Dostoyevsky when I was 12 or 13.
I mean, and I don't think I'm natively that smart at all.
I think I've just worked really hard to develop some mental muscles that give me some agility and some perceptiveness.
I spent $20,000 going to therapy.
Because I wanted to have a clear relationship with my own emotions and with other people.
An uncluttered, undefensive.
And I was doing lots of new things.
I felt out of place a lot of times when I'm stepping into boardrooms coming from a completely broke-butt single mom household.
It's weird, but you deal with it.
You push forward.
You get used to it.
And if we think that the poor are X, without giving them the diversity and the respect of saying, hey, you guys can make some really bad choices, you can be jerks, you can be irresponsible, just like rich people can.
You cannot look at a huge class of people and give them any sort of label whatsoever without being a bigot.
We can say, well, the poor need help, because the poor never make any bad decisions.
The poor are never responsible for their own poverty.
The poor aren't lazy, can never be lazy.
The single moms, well, they can't possibly have ever chosen a better guy or to not have a baby.
No!
It is the ultimate bigotry to remove freedom of choice and moral consequence from any group of people.
We can rail against the rich for their political motivations and their buying off of congressmen.
Yes, absolutely!
The rich profit enormously from the military-industrial complex and from government spending and bailouts and the policies of the Federal Reserve.
Absolutely.
But let's be even-handed in our moral criticisms and let's not exclude entire swaths of the population from the concept of free will and moral responsibility.
Some poor are victims.
Poor children are victims.
It's not their fault.
It's not in the family.
I wouldn't have chosen the family I was born into.
Not even in the top four billion.
But sometimes poor people are poor or maintain their poverty because they make bad decisions, because they don't work.
Because they indulge in sexual licentiousness without birth control, and they expect other people to pick up the bills, and then the cycle continues.
But they're responsible.
If we're going to give them the vote, guess what?
You get moral responsibility with the vote.
If the poor are too dumb to figure out you need to work and have kids inside a marriage, then they're too dumb to vote for foreign policy and economic initiatives.
No.
They get the vote, they get the moral responsibility.
Sorry!
That's just the way it works.
Did you have anything you wanted to add to that rant?
No, that was pretty good.
My God.
I'm sure that would get me lots of laughs in a comedy club, which is why I'm doing this rather than working yuck yucks.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
If you like what I've got to say, freedomaidradio.com or youtube.com forward slash freedomaidradio.
Thank you, Tom.
Thank you, engineers.
Thank you, Peter, for giving me this opportunity.
Thank you so much for listening.
I will be back when I will be back.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Peter Schiff.
I'm out.
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