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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:39
The Truth About Poverty
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Hi everybody, Stephen Waller here from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So, this is some truth about...
Poverty a couple of days ago I was on the Joe Rogan experience.
Thanks Joe again for such a great conversation and I mentioned some facts which startled people like the gripped icicle of an over-friendly prison cellmate.
And I would like to verify or back up some of the things that I said and tell you a little bit about the agenda of the rich.
Now, a little bit about myself first.
For those who don't know me, I don't often tout my working-class hero origins, but I was born in significant poverty.
My family split up when I was an infant, and I was raised by a single mother in a series of Extremely low-rent apartments.
I had no money.
I couldn't even join a swim team for seven bucks when I was a kid.
I was regularly scrounging under the couch to find food.
I had to eat food that had gone off.
And I got my first job when I was 10, and then I worked in a bookstore, and then I had a paper route, and then I cleaned offices, and then I was a waiter, and so on.
And I sort of climbed my Way up.
The only inheritance I ever got I spent on a computer and learned how to program and ended up as a software executive by hook and by crook.
So I did kind of come out of enormous and significant poverty.
Mental illness was a huge problem in my family.
My mother was actually institutionalized, and I've been on my own since I was about 15 or so.
So I know a little bit about it.
I grew up in the depths of the poor, in the white single mom ghettos of the West, and I know a little bit about what it is to be poor.
And if people had told me that there was no chance to get out, that there was no chance for a better life, I would have been appalled and insulted and not believed them for a moment.
So be cautious in telling the poor how screwed they are, because you can walk away maybe, but if they imbibe or internalize that lesson, it really does become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Not to say that there aren't huge barriers sometimes to getting out of poverty, but People have said, oh, well, Steph, you know, you're a smart guy and so on.
I actually quite disagree with that.
I really do.
I'm an ambitious guy.
Whether I would consider myself a very smart guy, I would actually say not so much.
I was an indifferent student when I was younger.
I was good in languages, but never, I was always 52% in math, just because they didn't want my lummoxy head back wrestling with numbers.
And did okay in school, ended up getting a master's, but Until I discovered philosophy at about the age of 16, not smart in any particular way, not outstanding in any particular way.
For me, philosophy is sort of like the scientific method for the human race.
People weren't dumb in the Middle Ages, but their science was pretty retarded, because They were mystics, they were religious, they were superstitious, they didn't have the scientific method until the Baconian Revolution of the 16th century and more or less.
And medicine, up until the 19th century, it was actually worse for your health to go and see a doctor than to stay away from one.
Medicine has vastly improved over the last 150 years because of the scientific method, you know, the double-blind experiment and so on.
And so we weren't dumb as a species, but we lacked a consistent methodology and what has driven my capacity to think is philosophy.
Not any sort of innate ability.
I am not doing what I'm doing, running the biggest philosophy show in the world, because I'm smart.
I have traction with my mind because I apply the principles of philosophy on a daily basis.
So, I just sort of wanted to mention that.
I'm not coming out if I just... I find it sort of amusing the number of people who assume that I come from some sort of silver spoon background, when the accent, of course, is completely fake.
When I was talking on the Joe Rogan show, I was talking about how a lot of poor people don't really work, and to some degree, poverty is a choice.
This goes against the socialist propaganda of modern times, so let me... These facts are compiled from a variety of sources.
Not all of them are current.
Some of them are a few years old, so take that into account.
Nonetheless, I wanted to share them with you, and the sources for these will be in the low bar of this video or the notes of the podcast.
So today, the spending per person of the lowest one-fifth of households equals that of the median American household income in the early 1970s after adjusting for inflation.
So what is considered really poor now was middle class in the 1970s.
So that's important.
Forty-three percent of poor households actually own their own homes.
Not too bad.
The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three, count them, three-bedroom house with one and a half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning.
By contrast, in 1970, only thirty-six percent of the entire U.S.
population enjoyed air conditioning.
Only six percent of poor households are overcrowded.
More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.
The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, or London, Vienna, or Athens, and other cities throughout Europe.
And again, this is poor Americans versus average income Europeans.
Nearly three quarters of poor households own a car.
31% own two or more cars.
I don't think that they count the Arkansas cars on cinder blocks littering the front yard.
What's a great pick-up line in Arkansas?
Sorry, just had to.
97% of poor households have a color TV.
Over half own two or more color televisions.
78% have a VCR or DVD player.
62% have cable or satellite TV reception.
89% own microwave ovens.
More than half have a stereo and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.
And these are poor households.
So, not too bad, not too shabby.
This is the kind of wealth, of course, that would be, and the kind of labor-saving devices that 50 or 100 years ago would have been unimaginable.
I would rather be among the poorest of America than be the king of France 100 years ago.
And these are some of the things that what's left of the free market has been able to maintain or create.
About 1% of all American households and 2.3% of poor households have other severe physical problems, repeated heating breakdowns, multiple upkeep problems, and so on.
As you may have noticed from the torso shots of America's obesity epidemic, America's poor are far from being chronically undernourished.
The average consumption of protein, vitamins and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle class children and in most cases is well above the recommended norms.
Poor kids actually consume more meat than higher income children and have average protein intakes 100% above recommended levels.
What we call the poor in America now are super nourished and in fact grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.
Now, the poor are generally well nourished.
Of course, some poor families do experience temporary food shortages, but this condition is relatively rare.
Almost 90% of the poor report their families have enough food to eat.
Only 2% say they often do not have enough to eat.
Now, in good economic times or bad, the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work in a particular year.
800 hours.
This is 16 hours of work per week.
A poor family with children is supported By 16 hours of work per week.
If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year, which is the equivalent of one adult in the family working for 40 hours a week, almost 75% of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.
And because it's in good economic times and bad, it's not like when the jobs appear, or the jobs are more plentiful, that the poor then go and get these jobs.
So it's not just the state of the economy that is causing these problems.
This is what I mean when I say, for a lot of poor people, it is a choice.
So, we'll talk about a couple of reasons why poverty exists.
So, not working very hard is one of them.
Father absence is another huge cause of child poverty.
Nearly two-thirds of poor children reside in single parent homes, basically single mother homes.
Every year, an additional 1.5 million children are born out of wedlock.
Now, if all that poor moms did was marry The fathers of their children, again, almost three-quarters of poor children would immediately be lifted out of poverty.
Now, this is somewhat of a new phenomenon, as you're probably aware.
The majority of kids born to women under 30 these days are born out of wedlock.
Marriage is a massive protection against poverty for children.
It is an ancient institution, has noble and productive and valuable and ethical origins, and not being in a marriage is pretty catastrophic for for children.
This is relatively new.
The welfare system is very hostile to working and, of course, to marriage.
So food stamps, public housing and Medicaid penalize marriage and reward not working.
So in some places you can see statistics where to get the equivalent that you get on welfare, to get the equivalent benefits that you get on welfare, you'd have to make $60,000 or $70,000 a year.
And welfare, of course, when you don't work and so on, it decays your capacity to work.
It decays your human capital and so on.
Now, another reason why there's a lot of poor in America is they are imported.
Each year through both legal and illegal immigration Hundreds of thousands of additional poor people come in from overseas.
One quarter of all poor people in the US are first-generation immigrants or the minor children of those immigrants.
Roughly one in ten people counted among the poor by the Census Bureau is either an illegal immigrant or the minor child of an illegal immigrant.
That, I think, is sort of important.
One of the things that happened in the 60s was government policies were changed to encourage more immigration from third-world countries.
Before, the majority of American immigrants came from Europe.
Now, the majority come from third-world countries and bring low human capital and poverty with them, often through no fault of their own.
Of course, third worlds are monstrous dictatorships and so on, as I mentioned in Joe's show, somewhat to do with US arms sales and foreign aid to their governments.
Now, for those who say, well, poverty is just involuntary and you can't change it, well, it does get changed quite considerably.
When you change welfare requirements or welfare rules, magically, a lot of people on welfare are suddenly able to find jobs.
So, in the late 1990s, the US established a pretty good record for reducing child poverty.
How did they do that?
There were real anti-poverty policies partially implemented in the welfare reform legislation of 1996.
There was an old Aid to Families with Dependent Children and it was replaced with a new program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.
And what this required was some welfare moms either had to prepare for work or get jobs as a condition of receiving aid.
And as this requirement went into effect, what happened?
Welfare rolls plummeted and the employment of single moms increased in an unprecedented manner.
And, of course, as employment of single mothers rose, child poverty dropped rapidly.
So, in the quarter century before this welfare reform, there was no net change in the poverty rate of children in single mother families.
After the reform was enacted, the poverty rate dropped in an unprecedented fashion from 53.1% in 1995 to under 40% or 39.8% in 2001.
1.1% in 1995 to under 40% or 39.8% in 2001.
That is quite a considerable change.
And so, yes, the jobs are available.
Unfortunately, the incentives tend to be counter.
But still, when the incentives change, people go to work.
So, in general, children born and raised outside of a marriage are seven times more likely to live in poverty than children born and raised by married couples.
A marriage is one of the most healthy and productive and socially necessary institutions if you want to have kids.
And, again, it doesn't have anything to do with the government license, but fundamentally it is an essential commitment.
So that, you know, what is causing poverty?
If you could even call it poverty, which again would be the middle class as just 40 years ago.
Well, low levels of parental work, high numbers of single-parent families, and low skill levels of incoming immigrants.
That is a big problem.
So, again, you can read more about this.
I'll put the links below.
I want to get to the important topics.
I talked about generosity and how Republicans tend to be much more generous and religion tends to be the reason for that.
So, based on a study of the 2008 data from the IRS, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported, quote, the eight states where residents gave the highest share of income to charity went for John McCain in 2008, Republican, of course.
The seven lowest-ranking states supported Barack Obama.
So, the people who give the most tend to vote Republican, and the people who give the least tend to vote Obama, or socialist, left-wing, liberal.
Middle-class Americans, households with earned income between $50,000 and $75,000, were actually more generous than households that earned $100,000 or more.
A key factor in charitable giving was religion.
So the Chronicle said, religion has a big influence on giving patterns.
Regions of the country that are deeply religious are more generous than those that are not.
So Utah, with its Mormon population, tops out.
Now, although liberal families Sorry, for those who don't know the American terms, those are left-leaning or socialist-leaning.
Liberal families' incomes average 6% higher than those of conservative families, so they earn more.
Conservative-headed households gave on average 30% more to charity than the average liberal-headed household.
$1,600 a year versus $1,227.
Conservatives also donate more time and voluntary taxes.
They also give more blood.
Residents of the states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 gave smaller percentages of their incomes to charity than did residents of states that voted for George Bush.
Bush carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average.
In the 10 reddest states, in which Bush got more than 60% majorities, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5.
Residents of the bluest states, the Democrat states, which gave Bush less than 40% donated just 1.9%.
So that's quite considerable, that's quite significant.
So people who voted a lot for Bush gave a little under twice those who voted more for Kerry.
People who reject the idea that, quote, government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality give an average of four times more than people who accept that proposition.
So this is very important.
The people who reject that the government should help the poor end up helping the poor.
I reject the argument that the government should force everyone to go to government schools and force people to pay for government schools where the teachers can't be fired and the educational standards are abysmal and they're built by the same people who build prisons with fundamentally the same purpose.
I reject that the government Should run education, and I give all of the knowledge that I've accumulated over 30 years of study away for free.
My books are all free, the podcasts are all free.
I do ask for donations, which I certainly appreciate, but it's given away for free.
It's certainly not a requirement.
So if you do stuff for yourself, then you don't need the government to do it.
So when people say the government has to do X, Most times what they're saying is, I'm not going to, but it kind of needs to be done, right?
So if you actually give to the poor, you don't believe in the welfare state in general.
To reinforce the point I made on the show, the single biggest predictor of someone's altruism or generosity is religion.
It increasingly correlates with conservative political affiliations because, quote, the percentage of self-described Democrats who say they have no religion has more than quadrupled since the early 1970s, as I mentioned on the show.
America is largely divided between religious givers and secular non-givers, and the former, i.e.
religious givers, are disproportionately conservative.
One demonstration that religion is a strong determinant of charitable behavior is that the least charitable cohort is a relatively small one.
Secular conservatives, they are the least charitable.
Democrats represent a majority of the wealthiest congressional districts and half of America's richest households live in states where both senators are Democrats.
So again, that's important.
And again, I'll put the link for the source of this information in the low bar.
Okay, so enough facts.
Let me just tell you a little bit.
People get I'm kind of confused about what it means to really, really help the poor, and I really want to blow your mind a little bit with, I think, a very important perspective about this.
First of all, understand this.
If you understand or care about nothing else that I talk about, understand this.
The rich are terrified, terrified of the poor.
The rich are terrified of the poor.
Why?
The poor are hungry, the poor are ambitious, the poor are motivated, and the poor will work for less.
The poor have less overhead than the rich.
Once you become some middle-class fart who's got a wife and 2.2 kids and a car in the garage and another one on the way, well, you kinda need, you know, $60,000, $70,000 a year in any reasonably sized metropolis to make ends meet.
If you're some poor kid coming out of high school, you're willing to work for a heck of a lot less.
And so once people become wealthy, their incomes go up, their expenses go up.
And then the capacity they have to lower their income, to accept less money, goes way down.
So think of plumbers who make, you know, $60, $70, $80, or in some places $100,000 or more a year.
How long does it take to become a reasonably competent plumber?
You know, what, six months of on-the-job training or so?
So if you're a plumber making $100,000 a year, some 16-year-old kid who's bored of high school wants to go out and make some money, how much is he going to accept and be happy to make as apprenticing and then becoming a plumber?
Well, a heck of a lot less than $100,000.
The middle class and the rich are really scared of the poor because in a free market there's a constant churning.
The poor become wealthy, the wealthy get lazy, the wealthy get incompetent at parenting and don't instill the same work ethic.
It used to be called shirt sleeves to shirts to shirt sleeves in three generations.
You start off as manual labor, you become middle class, your kids are lazy and blow all the money.
This used to be a lot of social churning in the free market or the more free market America.
That's to some degree diminished largely as a result of Federal Reserve Bubbles and busts which disproportionately move income up to the financially skilled and politically connected sections of society and leave the poor more destitute.
But that's the result of the state and its predation using fiat currency and inflation rather than the free market.
The rich are terrified of the poor and there's two basic ways that the rich keep the poor at bay, keep the poor from competing with them.
The first is through licensing and regulations and over-complicated tax codes and corporate charters and trust funds and all of the polysyllabic accountant-laced gobbledygook that spiderwebs the brains of the less financially literate.
And so the plumbers want to make licenses, and they want to be big unions, and to keep the people out, and it takes years to become a plumber now, and you've got to apprentice until your brain rots off from reality TV-induced style abortion, uh... mental distortion, and laziness, and so on.
Sorry, I didn't mean to say abortion.
They use licenses to keep people out, and they use trade restrictions to keep people out, and they use tariffs to keep people out.
And that way, once you become Wealthy in the trades, or at least middle class in the trades, you've got to keep the poor and the young and the ambitious out of your market, otherwise it drives the price down and makes it harder for you to compete.
So you use licenses and restrictions and all that kind of stuff to keep the poor at bay.
That's sort of number one.
Number two, if you are a very smart intellectual, What you do if you're rich and you want to keep the poor out of the marketplace is you tell them something like this.
Oh, you poor, poor, poor, poor people.
What a shame.
I mean, the system is rigged.
You'll never be able to get ahead.
Poverty is your destiny.
Poverty is your tragedy.
Poverty is your fly-in-amber, trapped circumstance of revolving door, hysterical inevitability.
You can never get out.
Sucks to be you.
Here's a little bit of money.
Well, it's not your fault.
And you can't get out.
And your willpower means nothing because, you see, the game is rigged against you.
Can't get out!
Poor, poor, poor, poor people.
Here's an Xbox.
Well, that's how you keep the poor from competing.
Is...
You tell them that they haven't got a chance.
You keep them out of the marketplace by building their resentment, by stoking class warfare, which the Democrats, of course, are very, very good at, and that way the poor Don't develop friendly human capital, in other words, how to win friends and influence people, how to be kind and effective and useful and positive and enthusiastic.
You make the poor cynical about their opportunities, and you make them angry at the market, and you tell them that the game is rigged.
And then, lo and behold, they are too bitter to find and get gainful employment and to keep the jobs and to be enthusiastic and show up and be happy and be nice to customers.
You know, it's all that.
You know, Janine Garofalo played this woman who worked in The Gap who was just resentful and bitter.
You just keep playing that over and over and over again in the film Reality Bites.
You just keep playing that stuff over and over until there's this track going on and you can do this with Zeitgeist movies and stuff like that too.
The game is rigged, you can't get ahead, the rich are laughing at you, you're stuck in poverty.
This, if you're very intelligent, lots of
Intellectuals on the left and some of the right have done a great job of disemboweling the economic enthusiasm of the poor by telling them how badly the game is rigged and how impossible it is for them to get ahead and to make them cynical and that they're above doing labor jobs and service jobs and they're a slave to the man and you know I mean just keep repeating this and massive swaths, massive sections, entire populations
sink into the resentful basements of their increasingly embittered parental units, unable to summon any enthusiasm for getting ahead.
You disembowel.
The financial and economic opportunism and enthusiasm of the poor, and lo and behold, not that many poor people coming out to compete with the rich.
It's beautiful, as you'll do.
A lot of the studies that come out of left-wing, intelligent, high-ranking, high-income intelligentsia in academia and so on are constantly telling people, can't win.
It's all rigged.
Corporations own everything.
Don't work for the man.
Employment is slavery!
That's all sad and pathetic nonsense.
And I'm sorry, I mean, I know you've been told this by so, so many people, but don't believe it.
My God, don't believe it.
There's huge economic opportunities out there.
You can still make things happen.
Yeah, it's tough in America.
It's tough in Canada.
It's tough in America.
Sorry, it's tough in the United Kingdom.
It's tough in Western Europe.
But so what?
You don't have to go get your head blown off fighting Nazis, do you?
Not this generation anyway, right?
You don't have to get your head blown off fighting the Huns in World War I. You don't have to fight Napoleon.
There's not typhus.
There's no bubonic plague.
There's no smallpox.
There's no cholera.
There's no polio, really, anymore.
So, yeah, it can be a little tough to get a job.
You know, as far as opportunities go throughout human history, we're kind of doing some pretty amazing stuff.
And there still is massive opportunities out there.
People are still getting rich all the time.
You know, I started with my first job at the age of 10.
I was painting little molds for Queen Elizabeth II's silver jubilee.
This was 1977.
And my first job, I was getting paid about two bucks an hour in a bookstore to put together the New York Times on a Sunday.
And then when I left my job as a software executive to start this crazy philosophy show, I was making $160,000 and because I just worked and worked and worked and just keep working.
Kind of basically three things you got to do to get into the middle class.
Number one, finish high school.
Number two, get and hold a job for at least a year.
Number three, do not have children until you get married and certainly not before the age of 21 and hopefully a little later than that.
So, for those who think that you're helping the poor by telling them how screwed they are and how working is slavery, wages are slavery, and so on, bullshit.
You're holding down the poor while the rich screw them.
You are not helping the poor by telling them that they have no possibility, no responsibility, and everything is screwed, and everything is rigged, and why even get out of bed.
You're not helping the poor.
You're disemboweling their opportunities.
You are serving the The power hunger and the money lust of the rich by telling the poor that they're in no way responsible for their own condition.
You are joining with the oligarchies, with the powers that be, to hold the poor down while they get screwed.
No, no, no, no.
And for years, people have been sending me emails saying, I'd love to help out with your show, I love what you do, Steph, love to help out with your show.
And in my salad days, when I was young in philosophy, or at least young in this show, I would say, yes, great, you know, I'm making a documentary, people, like 50 people offered to help out.
We had conference calls, got everything set up.
How many people delivered?
Zero.
Zero.
Mike, the guy who works with me now, did a whole bunch of stuff that was valuable.
I'm like, hey, let's pay you.
And now he's getting paid and working full-time, and we have a great working relationship.
It's a real pleasure to work with him.
He would be terrible working for anybody else.
I mean, he steals, naps, but for me he works really well.
I'm just saying this to, you know, destroy any competitive capital for his value.
Sorry, Mike, but, you know, I really need you to stay.
But the vast majority of people, at least 19 out of 20 people, like 95% of people who offer to help on this show are young people with time on their hands.
Waste our goddamn time.
Promise to do stuff and never do it.
And never tell us they're not going to do it.
Oh yeah, I'll have that ready for you in three days.
Fantastic!
And we pay, too!
I'm happy to throw money about.
I'd love to employ ten people on this show.
But finding people who will actually get things done?
It's a little rare at times.
Looking for a blonde person on a Tokyo street.
And so...
Why are young people just not getting things done?
My God, if somebody whose show I admired when I was young and unemployed offered me the chance to work on stuff and was willing to pay, I'd be working night and day to make sure I did a fantastic job.
Excuse me.
So nobody's preventing these people from getting things done and I have interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people and hired probably a hundred or two hundred people over the course of my career.
Finding people who are committed and hard-working and understand that you work to get ahead and there's no shortcuts and just do a good job and be enthusiastic.
My God!
And that was among rich, poor, and middle-class people that I hired.
So, yeah, I need to keep reinforcing this message.
You know, get married, get and keep a job, do a good job, be enthusiastic, be open to opportunities for advancement.
People would love to make money off you, and if you can make money for people, the door will always be open for you to advance.
So work on your human capital, read, learn, learn social skills, learn to be positive, and fuck everybody!
Who tells you that working is slavery and you can never get ahead.
Those are the people holding you down with their boot on your neck, rather than opening the trap door out of poverty, which you can take 19 times out of 20 if you want it.
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