July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:04
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| Hey everybody, Stephen Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| So this is a nag cast. | |
| Recession plague states have diverted scarce money away from pensions to pay off for more immediate concerns, leaving an almost 800 billion dollar hole in the retirement funds, covering millions of public employees. | |
| 34 states have failed to maintain safe levels of money in the pension funds, which most experts agree is about 80% of long-term obligations. | |
| It's made up by investments and profits and so on. | |
| Four states, Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, and Rhode Island, don't even have 55% of the money they'll need in the long run. | |
| This is if we even count the money that they've got invested in federal treasury bonds as money, which is just a big IOU. | |
| So, this is all for the most recent figure is 2010. | |
| Now, of course, a lot of these funds blew up in the crash of 2007 to, well, infinity. | |
| And they're trying to address the funding gap by cutting benefits for future employees or requiring workers to pay more of their own money into their retirement funds. | |
| And so some of them, of course, have gone after the benefits for employees which have triggered court battles. | |
| And, of course, governments have regularly robbed pension funds. | |
| I mean, the whole social security scheme is a Ponzi scheme. | |
| Governments have regularly raided all of these long-term funds because politicians want to bribe people in the here and now. | |
| And what do they care what happens 20 or 30 years from now when they're either dead or certainly out of power? | |
| Pensions aren't the only retirement problem. | |
| States also faced a $627 billion shortfall in health care services for retirees. | |
| Essentially, for every $1 the states will have to pay out in health care costs, they have set aside only $0.05. | |
| $0.05 on the dollar. | |
| 22.5 million public sector workers fall under these pension plans. | |
| What are they going to do? | |
| Are they going to tax the young? | |
| Young weren't even born when these decisions were made. | |
| This is economic abortion of their futures. | |
| This is wretched. | |
| Illinois has got the worst funding level at only 45%. | |
| Officials there say fixing the problem is a top priority. | |
| But a proposal to cut cost of living increases for current employees and retirees has stalled in the General Assembly. | |
| Pensions are the biggest mountain we have to climb, Governor Pat Quinn, a Chicago Democrat, said Monday. | |
| So, from 2009 to 2011, 43 states cut benefits for future employees, not current employees, future employees, required them to pay more or did both, and six states took similar action in 2012. | |
| So it's all nonsense and madness. | |
| And, of course, the public sector employees are going to clamor and claim that we must pay them, or it is disastrous morally, financially, and probably practically, as they storm the streets and throw bottles and block traffic. | |
| But it's all nonsense. | |
| People who think that if they go to the state, they can somehow bypass or eliminate the reality of risk are dreaming. | |
| You cannot eliminate the reality of risk. | |
| You can put all of your eggs in one government basket. | |
| These are wonderful governments, as you can see, how much they care for the poor, how much they care for the education of the young, how effective they are at fighting drugs. | |
| It's all wonderful how wonderfully peaceful and benevolent the foreign policy is, how great foreign aid has been for everyone in lifting countries out of poverty. | |
| So, if you put your faith in the government, you do not eliminate risk. | |
| You simply put all of your eggs in one basket. | |
| Now, are people responsible for this? | |
| Of course they're responsible for it. | |
| You know, when I was a kid, if I failed to study for a test when I was 7 or 8 years old, I got an F. | |
| I got an F. | |
| Even if I'd forgotten the test was coming, no matter what chaos was going on in my house, if I was unprepared for a test, well, I failed. | |
| Fail enough of those tests, they'll take away a year of your life by making you repeat an entire grade. | |
| Or you don't get into college, which is going to cost you hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost earnings over your lifetime. | |
| So I feel that if children at the age of five or six or seven have these iron rules about consequences for a lack of knowledge or a lack of preparation, I pretty much think that 50 to 60 to 70 year olds, I think it's fair that we apply the same moral standards that are inflicted on children to adults with all of their knowledge and independence and education and preparation. | |
| This funding shortfall, the national debt, has been known by everyone forever. | |
| I remember when I was, I think, 12 or 13, we got a long lecture on the Canada pension plan here. | |
| And my friends and I, who were not economically literate at the time, we laughed. | |
| We literally laughed. | |
| And there was quite a lot of laughter in the class. | |
| The idea that, you know, in 50 plus years, this money was all going to be here for us. | |
| It was all nonsense. | |
| We could not take it even remotely seriously. | |
| So this is all scurvy nonsense. | |
| Crazy stuff that people have only pretended to believe in order to pillage the unborn and the future. | |
| OK, first of all, we need to care a hell of a lot more about our children. | |
| Oh, we listen to Whitney Houston. | |
| I believe the children are the future. | |
| And how wonderful they are. | |
| And children are everything. | |
| And they're the leaders of tomorrow. | |
| And all the commencement speeches in the world come flowing down our brains like the molten lava of future animal husk sales on the foreign markets. | |
| Banksters. | |
| We've got to care a little bit more about our kids, people. | |
| We've got to live the values we espouse. | |
| Which means, look, you've all got to take some hits. | |
| Public sector workers, you've got to take some hits. | |
| You're responsible. | |
| You're responsible. | |
| This stuff has all been known for a long time. | |
| You have played into the system. | |
| You have ignored the reality, or you have bypassed the reality, or you've pretended not to know the reality. | |
| And look, everyone, a third of Americans claim to have read Ayn Rand. | |
| Libertarians are 10 to 20% plus of the population. | |
| So odds are in your storied life, in your extendo life, you have met or run up against a libertarian or two or an objectivist or two or a voluntarist or two. | |
| And so these ideas, these ideals, these problems, these solutions, this analysis has been available to you, and you have probably rolled your eyes and called and ran names, or called libertarians crazy conspiracy nuts, or, or, or called the idea of a voluntary society completely impractical and irrational. | |
| Actions have consequences. | |
| This was inflicted and taught on me when I was six years old. | |
| Now that you people are 60, it's pretty much bouncing back on you. | |
| You are responsible for this mess, and you're going to have to take some hits. | |
| Not because I'm mean, not because anyone else is mean, but because reality is reality. | |
| And it is not the fault of the young that you put your eggs in one basket. | |
| It is not the fault of the unborn that you are hoping to pillage as much as possible. | |
| You have to put aside that selfishness. | |
| I mean, you just have to. | |
| You have to be some people that we can even remotely admire as a society because the old become dependent upon the young and the middle-aged and If you're just a bunch of greedy hungry hippos You know, carving off the spleens, kidneys and futures of the young, then that's not really such a great and admirable thing for us as a society as a whole to see. | |
| So, you know, man up, woman up, recognize that you rolled the dice in the casino called the state, you came up snake eyes, which has been utterly statistically predictable for decades and decades. | |
| Anyone who claims ignorance of this, Is clearly unable to tie their shoelaces and walk out through a closed door without bumping their face. | |
| And so we don't need to worry about them. | |
| If you've made it out of the door and your shoes aren't currently tied to an armbar or together, then you have known about this for a long time. | |
| And you can pull a Wisconsin. | |
| You get all kinds of mad and upset and so on. | |
| But you handed your money to a bunch of thugs. | |
| And now, when they've blown it on hooker's blow and voting bribery, can you really claim to be surprised? |
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