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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:09
American Violence: The Future of a Catastrophe
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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Wallenew from Freedom Made Radio.
Hope you're doing well. So this is a presentation entitled Violence in America.
It's going to be some very startling information, some startling cases to be made, but I hope that you will be patient and follow me through the data.
And also you can check out the sources to the video or the podcast in the notes.
So America as a whole is portrayed as a, you know, rootin' tootin', gunslinginging kind of violent society.
It's got high incarceration rates, high homicide rates, and this is considered to be a function of...
It's love of guns, it's love of violence, and so on.
But this is a generalization of the culture as a whole.
It's very, very unhelpful. We need to look at where the violence is high and where it's not.
So I'm going to make the following cases in this presentation.
Number one, America does not have a gun problem.
It has a gang problem.
It's important. Secondly, America does not have a gang problem.
It, in fact, has an illegitimacy problem.
And America fundamentally does not have an illegitimacy problem.
It has a welfare problem.
I'm going to make this case. So the reality is, in America, gang members commit the most crimes, in particular homicide rates.
80-90% of violent crimes are committed by gang members.
You can't talk about America as a whole when you're talking about specific urban gangs.
Gang members come from illegitimate families, and illegitimate families come from welfare.
Now, Please understand up front, these are not absolute statements.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule in sociology, but I'm going to use just for the efficiency of language, I'm going to say this stuff.
Please don't point out to me that there are exceptions.
I fully accept that, but putting caveats in every time I talk, we'll make this a 19-hour presentation.
So the caveats are going to be assumed as I go forward.
So let's look at the concentration of violence in America.
Twelve cities, only twelve cities in America, account for nearly 3,200 dead and nearly a quarter of all the murders in the United States.
Take those out of the equation.
If you start to take this stuff out of the equation, for instance, if you just look at the general white population, it has a murder rate equivalent to Belgium.
So, Chicago, where Obama delivered his victory speech, has homicide numbers that match all of Japan, one city, all of Japan, and are higher than Spain, Poland and pre-war Syria.
If Chicago gets any worse, one city will find itself passing the number of murders for the entire country of Canada.
It's not good. Let's look at Chicago in more detail.
It got a murder rate of 15.65 per 100,000 people, far greater than the American 4.2 rate, which it, of course, helps to raise, and the Midwestern 4.5 or the Illinois 5.6 rates.
Chicago's murder rates is actually quite equivalent to those in failed states like Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe.
To achieve this kind of murder rate, usually African countries have to experience bloody genocidal civil wars or decades of tyranny and so on.
New Orleans is mind-blowing.
72.8 murder rate per 100,000.
Astounding. If New Orleans were a country, it would have the second highest murder rate in the world, beating out even El Salvador.
And St.
Louis has a murder rate just a little lower than Belize, Baltimore has a worse murder rate than South Africa, and Detroit has a worse murder rate than Colombia.
And these tend to be Cities or regions that went to Obama.
I mean, this is an important thing, which we'll get back to you later.
He won St. Louis in Baltimore by comfortable margins.
He won Detroit, Swain County, 73 to 26.
So gangs are blamed for 80% of US crimes.
80% of US crimes.
And we would not say that gangs represent American society as a whole, and therefore we can't say that America is a violent society.
In Los Angeles and Long Beach gang homicides account for the majority of homicides among 15 to 24 year olds, 61 and 69% respectively.
In both the gang and non-gang worlds, homicide is the second leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 24.
Now, when we're talking about gun crime in America, we are almost exclusively talking about criminal-uncriminal crimes.
83% of those murdered in Chicago last year had criminal records.
This is not shooting little old ladies in the suburbs.
In Philly, the number was 75%.
Milwaukee, 77%.
New Orleans, 64%.
Baltimore, 91%.
And many of these were felons who had actually served time.
Again, 80% of the homicides were gang-related.
So the murder rate in America is mostly adult males from the ages of 18 to 39 with criminal records killing other males of that same age and same criminal history.
Now, the overall crime rate is similar to comparable nations.
For the crime of assault, 2.2% of Americans are victimized each year, not counting the IRS and the Fed, compared to 2.3% of Canadians and 2.8% of Australians.
For car theft, the US rate is 2.3%, Australia is at 2.7%, and England is at 2.8%.
88% of offenses nationwide in America are nonviolent.
Violent crime is relatively a tiny proportion of what occurs.
Only 3% of all crime results in an injury.
Homicide arrests constitute just 0.2% of all arrests in America.
Violent crime fundamentally does not drive the US criminal justice system.
The war on drugs drives the US criminal justice system.
And I would argue, of course, and I'm certainly not alone in arguing this, that the war on drugs drives the gang violence in America as well.
Other nations keep their justice systems under control by handling drug addiction as a social and medical problem, not as a criminal justice problem.
One thing, of course, that differentiates America from...
The rest of Western civilization is extreme religiosity.
It's fundamentalist religiosity, and religiosity has always had trouble with mind-altering substances, I suppose, for competitive reasons.
So this is Means Tested Spending, 1962 to 2011 in Carson Dollars, of course.
And we can see where the big bump starts to come up.
It's in the mid to late 1960s under the Great Society programs, the massive explosion in welfare spending that occurred in the 1960s.
We can see that it rises and it rises and it rises and it's gone from a few hundred dollars per person to close to $14,000 per person.
This is It has incredibly fundamental impacts upon society as a whole, so we will go into a bit more of this in detail.
This is the great tragedy.
It's one of the great tragedies of statism, of using the violence of the government to attempt to solve complex social problems.
If we look at these poverty rates, we can exclude, I think, the elderly to some degree because poverty can only be alleviated in most of the elderly by charity.
And so just look at the poverty rates, particularly children.
Poverty rates were dropping enormously from the 1950s until the late 1960s, early 1970s.
And then they leveled off and have begun to increase.
Now, one of the things that you can't see in this graph is, of course, the poverty rates have gone up much more considerably than this graph shows.
Because if you compare this graph to the growth of the national debt, Well, I mean, it's truly tragic because the national debt is simply deferred poverty, right?
So here you can see the lines go down.
Poverty was being solved at one percentage point per year.
People in most of the post-war period were getting out of poverty.
It was as radical a change as the 600 million or so people who've come out of poverty in China and India and other recently more free market-y kinds of places.
Poverty was being solved in the post-war period.
The government stepped in to intervene and has essentially arrested and added to the problem of poverty.
This is the great tragedy.
This is why, you know, you don't have to agree with it right away looking at one graph.
But this is why people who are into free market economics say that it is freedom that solves the problem of poverty, not government programs.
Government programs, as you can see, stopped the decline in poverty, and if we layer in the national debt, poverty has actually gotten much worse.
Now, except for Social Security, the only way to avoid poverty fundamentally is to work.
Government programs don't get you out of poverty.
So 1980 to 2009, the work rates for men went from 74.2% to 67.6%.
This is the percentage of people who are working in the economy.
This includes all the people in the government sector, which I mentioned in the last big presentation on this topic.
So at a time when the government steps in and takes care of women and children, to a large degree, most welfare payments go to single moms.
Men stop working. It's well known that there are two major boosts to a man's ambition and income.
The first is when he gets married, and the second is when he has children.
If he neither gets married nor has children, his ambition is going to be significantly blunted.
From blacks, it went from almost 61% to 46.9%.
A 23% drop in labor force participation.
As a whole, it was about 9%, but for blacks, it was much greater.
Poverty for families where nobody works is eight times that of a family where one person works.
In 1950, 6.3% of families with children were headed by a single mother.
And this would include widows, and particularly widows from the Second World War.
It would be an artificially high number.
In 2010, it's almost 24%.
It's a fourfold increase with no major war in previous to 2010.
It is a fourfold increase in the number of families headed by a single mother.
It has significant impacts on crime.
If America had the marriage rate that it had in 1970, the poverty rate would immediately fall by more than 25%.
There is a program called Getting Rid of Poverty.
It's called Finish high school, wait until you're 21 to have a baby or get married, and get a job and keep it for a year.
But that's the poverty program that works, that historically works, statistically works.
Now, race is an important issue to talk about, and I know where angels fear to tread, fools rush in.
But I think it's an important thing for us to talk about.
The recent developments in American society have been catastrophic for minorities, particularly blacks and to a lesser but significant degree Hispanics.
And I'm really interested in solving problems and I don't care about tensions about race.
What I care about is helping In many cities, half the young black men are under the control of the criminal justice system.
In Baltimore, the figure is 56%.
In D.C., it's 42%.
In a single year in Los Angeles, one-third of the young African-American men spend time behind bars.
By the time they reach the age of 35, nearly 8 in 10 black men can expect to have been arrested, making arrest one of the unifying experiences of an entire generation.
This is absolutely catastrophic.
I think you could make a very strong argument that the collapse...
Of the black family, the complete disintegration of the black family, and the increasing criminality and incarceration of blacks is the single biggest social problem the U.S. faced in the second half of the 20th century and, of course, the first part of the 21st century, and we need to look at these facts.
So, of course, African Americans, 12% of the U.S. population, only 13% of the drug-using population, but an astonishing 74% of the people sent to prison for drug possession.
From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed more than 52% of all the murders in America.
Is it racism? Well, this is a good question to ask.
It doesn't seem to be a very supportable argument that it is all racism.
So, for instance, when you file a report, you say, I got marked, I got raped, I got murdered, there was a murder, the race of the criminals reported by the crime victims matches the arrest data.
Now, if you get mugged by a white guy, you'd have to be a really insane racist to say, no, it was a black guy.
I mean, because you wouldn't catch the guy, right?
So when people call the police and say I was the victim of a crime, they report the race at a similar proportion.
In fact, it's almost exactly the same as the arrest data.
And of course, a lot of the people who are calling the cops who are victims of criminal activity are blacks in ghettos and in a disproportionately high crime neighborhood.
So to say that blacks are reporting other blacks as criminals because of racism is pretty unsupportable.
As recently as 1980, 0.8% of black men were incarcerated.
By 2000, 9.6% of black men were incarcerated.
Now, are we going to say that the racism of the police, if that was even a supportable argument, was...
You know, less than 10%, the police force was less than 10% as racist in 1980 as it is in 2000.
Well, of course not. Something else is happening.
There is an increase in criminal activity.
You can't just blame it all on racism.
Is it that they have more of a chance of conviction?
Well, 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country's 75 largest urban centers discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution after a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial.
After conviction, blacks were more likely to receive prison sentences, but that reflected the gravity of the offenses, as well as their pre-existing criminal records.
So people say, well, the crack war was racist because it targeted blacks.
Well, the meth war disproportionately targets whites, and so it's hard to say that the drug war is just anti-black.
In 2010, blacks were 31.8% of all arrests for drug crimes, but arrests for drug offenses are only 12.4% of all non-traffic arrests in the country, and accounted for 14.2% of the offenses for which blacks were arrested.
So the drug war has an effect, but it is not the majority effect at all.
And... Among black male high school dropouts with one to thirty years of experience, the incarceration rate was 1.4% in 1960, 1.3% in 1980, 14.3% in 1990, and an astounding 25.1% in 2000.
So, I think we can generally assume that with better ethics, better communication, a wider understanding of the negative effects of the historically ugly crime of racism, But things have kind of gotten a little bit better over time.
But the data says kind of the opposite, right?
So, the data...
If we assume it's racism, then clearly we're saying that racism was a tiny fraction...
In 1960 compared to 2000, but the opposite is true, right?
So if racism is slowly getting better, we would expect these numbers.
And if conviction rates or incarceration rates were based upon racism, then they should be going down.
But instead, they're going up. As racism is increasingly dealt with in American society, incarceration rates goes up.
So you can't really complain. You can't really say that it's racism.
The heightened numbers of murders committed by blacks during the great crime wave of roughly 1965 through 1995 is about twice the total American fatality toll in Vietnam.
You can't care about minorities without talking about them.
These aggressions, this violence, this criminality strikes blacks much more than it does whites, and so this is a truly catastrophic event.
And the economics – so there's a number of things that have made it tougher for blacks, of course, right?
The minimum wage, which was put forward by largely white unions to keep out black competition because blacks were disproportionately less skilled.
The minimum wage has been harmful to blacks.
And there was a change in the past where lower-skilled immigrants were encouraged and higher-skilled immigrants were discouraged.
And this, of course, had a negative impact on blacks.
On blacks as well. The economic adjustments unleashed by the large 1980 to 2000 immigration influx.
A labor supply shock that increased the number of workers in the United States by nearly 10% and the number of high school dropouts by over 20% reduced the employment rate of black men by about 5 percentage points.
Immigration is just another government program.
In reality, it's called moving.
Is the drug war racist?
Well, in 2006, blacks were 37.5% of the 1.2 million state prisoners.
If you remove drug prisoners from that population, the percentage drops to 37, right?
So half a percentage point. The JFA Institute and Anti-Incarceration Advocacy Group estimated in 2007 that in only 3% of violent victimizations and property crimes does the offender end up in prison.
That's just astounding.
Now, I'm going to make the case, and, you know, I just want to remind people who send me their outraged emails that, well, your argument is, it's like, no, the data is.
I mean, if the data is incorrect, please tell me, and I will put out corrections, but I'm going to make the case, based on the data, that illegitimacy drives criminality.
So let's have a look at growth of unwed childbearing by race in the United States, 1931 to 2008.
So it's always been higher for blacks, and we would argue, I'm sure, that this was an effect of racism and existing poverty, and slavery, of course.
But it was pretty steady.
It was pretty steady up until, well, you guessed it, the late 1960s, early 1970s.
So when the welfare state comes in, it's not like everybody then just immediately Crashes the family, right?
It takes a little bit of time for this rot to work its way through the system.
But as you can see, for all groups, black, non-Hispanics have gone from about 15% to 72.3%.
Whites have gone from a couple of percentage points to almost 30%, and Hispanics, the data is much more recent, but they're following a similar upward curve.
When you mess with resource allocations in society through force, government programs are either funded through three means, all of which are immoral.
The first is taxation, which is theft.
The second is money printing, which is counterfeiting.
And the third is a debt, which is deferred taxation or deferred theft, perhaps the most cowardly way of buying votes at the expense of the unborn.
And so when you start to mess with resource allocations in society and you start to forcibly herd money and resources around in society, it really smashes up the sandcastles of historical relationships like marriage and commitment.
And it's really, it's not good.
The effects tend to be truly tragic.
Marriage is essentially dying in the United States.
The bottom of this chart is 50%, so where the charts are adjusted, I'll try to mention it.
1929 to 2010. In 1929, just about everybody, percentage of children born to married parents was almost everyone, and now it's below 60%.
Growth of out-of-wedlock childbearing in the U.S., this is the same chart just for all races together.
You can see it just has skyrocketed.
This, again, is not a zero-based chart.
It goes from 94 to 108 million.
Over 100 million people in the US are now receiving some form of federal welfare.
This is welfare growth just in a few years, from Q109 to Q2 2011.
Catastrophic. Welfare spending equates to $168 per day for every household in poverty.
This is just astounding.
So, for instance, the median income per day in the U.S. is $137.
Welfare spending per day is $168.
The median income per hour is $25 in the U.S. Over $30 per hour is being spent on welfare recipients.
How much of that money is actually getting to the poor?
Depending on how you measure it, depending on who you ask, one-fifth, one-quarter.
It's... It's really tiny.
I mean, the overhead of government bureaucracies is astounding.
I mean, if you want to look at government bureaucracies related to the poor, then what you would do is you would look at the poor as hostages that are kept to pay for outlandish salaries and benefits for government bureaucracies.
It's not there to help the poor.
And remember, of course, the welfare benefits that you receive are untaxed.
So it's much greater if you take into account taxation, if you earn your money versus receive it from the government.
Let's look at disability recipients.
This chart goes from 6 to 9 million.
Disability recipients from 2005 to 2012, I mean, it's astonishing.
It's gone from 6.5 million to almost 9 million.
It's truly astounding, disability recipients.
Now, a lot of these, of course, would be Public sector workers, if they retire with a disability, then I think two-thirds of their income is not taxed.
And so a lot of public sector workers develop mysterious and untraceable ailments like back problems and so on in the last year before they retire.
And this is, of course, a lot of them are retiring if the boomers retire.
So whites, of course, are six times the population are more of blacks, and if you look at the race of temporary assistance for needy families, blacks are 38%, Hispanics are 24.8%, those greedy Asians, 2%, Native Americans, 1.5%, unknown or other, 1.9%, and whites, 31.8%.
So despite being six times the population, they're less in terms of that for blacks.
Let's look at the incarceration rates by race.
And I just wanted to mention that you can find the sources for these graphs.
They're not all the same date or time or year.
I just sort of mix around a bit.
2004 per 100,000.
Whites were 393.
Latinos 957.
Blacks 2531.
So if we link crime to poverty, right?
So people will say, well, the reason that blacks have higher criminality is that blacks are poorer.
Okay, but if we're going to link crime with poverty, then we must link poverty to fatherlessness.
I mean, this is blatantly obvious.
If you have half an orange, you have less than a whole orange.
And if one parent is missing, obviously the government both steps in to fill that gap and also creates the opportunity for that gap by reducing the need for responsibility on the part of fathers.
So in 2008, the poverty rate for single parents with children was 35.6%.
The rate for married couples with children was 6.4%.
Now, I understand the cause and effect is complex.
So you could say, well, people who are just more responsible and smarter or whatever tend to get married, and their poverty rate is not just everything's the same, but the marriage is the only difference.
But the reality is that because marriage has declined so significantly, we can't just base it solely upon forward thinking or intelligence because human genetics hasn't changed that much over a couple of decades.
So for white families, the single-parent poverty rate was 21.7%.
Two-parent poverty rate was 3.1%.
For Hispanics, 37.5% of single parents were in poverty, 12.8% of two parents.
And for blacks, the spread was even greater.
So for blacks, single-parent families were 35.3% in poverty, and married families were 6.9% in poverty.
So, okay, fine.
We can say that some of the crime may be driven by poverty, but the poverty is driven by fatherlessness, and the fatherlessness is not specifically a result of racism, right?
So two blacks choosing not to get married don't do that because they're racist against blacks, right?
So we have to give human beings the respect of choice.
If we say everything is environmental, then we're actually taking away their humanity in a terribly racist manner.
60% of rapists, 72% of adolescent murderers, and 70% of long-term prison inmates are men who grew up in fatherless homes.
The relationship between dysfunction and growing up in a fatherless home is the greatest relationship in sociology and the one that's the least talked about.
If you could choose one That shouldn't happen to your child.
You wouldn't care so much what his race was.
You wouldn't care so much what his income was.
You wouldn't care about the educational attainment of his parents.
The single greatest thing that is going to affect his life or her life is the presence or absence of a father in the home.
But, of course, men have become disposable in people's ideologies over the past couple of decades, and this is the price that we pay.
And I'll link a video to this that I've done on single-parent families where you can get more data on this.
So, the black poverty rate is 27.4%.
It's about three times higher than the white rate.
So, almost 12 million blacks in the U.S. live in poverty.
Blacks who are, of course, 13% about of the U.S. population account for almost half of all arrests for homicide, 31.8% of arrests for forcible rape, 33.5% of arrests for aggravated assault, and 55% of arrests for robbery.
A welfare Because if welfare destroys the family or undermines the family, and if the undermining or destruction of the family produces children, particularly young males, who are far more prone to crime, so young black males, sort of 18 to 30 or so, are 3% of the population but account for a third almost of all crimes in the U.S., Then welfare is actually driving the prison industrial complex.
And to support this, we can look at, again, welfare comes in the middle here.
This is the incarceration rates.
Welfare comes in the middle of this graph, and to the right of it, it just goes through the roof, which is kind of what you'd expect when this stuff starts to occur.
So, let's just have a look at the numbers around welfare.
They really are staggering. So, from 1965 to 2008, nearly $16 trillion of taxpayer money was spent on means-tested welfare programs for the poor.
What is that, just about the entire debt of the U.S.? Between the mid-60s and the mid-70s, the dollar value of public housing quintupled, went up five times.
The amount spent on food stamps rose more than tenfold.
So you are firing massive amounts of resources at the poor.
To think that this is not going to affect the decisions that the poor make is to be incredibly disrespectful to the poor.
The poor adjust their behavior just like everyone else does.
If you win the lottery, you change your behavior for the most part.
And the poor will adjust their behavior based upon the resources being fired at them.
From 1965 to 1969, government provided benefits increased by a factor of eight, eight times.
By 1974, such benefits were an astounding 20 times higher than they had been in 1965.
Government provided benefits were 20 times higher in the space of less than a decade.
Of course, this is going to have massive effects on how the poor organize themselves and the choices they make.
You can read Charles Murray's Losing Ground for a more detailed examination of this.
As of 1974, federal spending on social welfare programs amounted to 16% of America's gross national product, and it was only 8% in 1960.
By 1977, the number of people receiving public assistance had more than doubled since 1960.
Now, feminism had something to do with this.
Bad marriages had something to do with this.
But welfare also had something to do with the fact that you saw a massive, many-fold increase in divorces in the 1970s.
Welfare versus marriage.
For the next few decades, means-tested welfare programs such as food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, daycare, and temporary assistance to needy families penalized marriage.
So it's not just that there's all this money, which means that the economic and practical function of marriage as an institution for raising children, it's not that that just simply gets washed away by this incoming tide.
It's directly targeted by these programs, whether deliberately or not doesn't really matter.
But a mother generally received far more money from welfare if she was single rather than married.
So these programs do not want you to get married.
Remember, when you put a government program in place, you imply a whole bunch of people whose jobs require that people continue to need those programs.
So their incentive to encourage people to get off these programs is the exact opposite of what you want it to be.
What you want is to pay a charitable organization for getting people off charity, but in government programs, the economic incentives are completely reversed.
You pay people for maintaining people in You could make an argument that if the government intervened in the 1960s because poverty was about to be solved and the government needs the poor, the government needs the dysfunction that comes out of poverty, the government needs the crime in order to scare you into needing it and paying taxes and so on.
Now, once a mom took a husband, her benefits were instantly reduced by about 10 to 20 percent.
And Medicaid programs in 11 states actually provide infertility treatments to single women on welfare.
I'm not saying they shouldn't. I'm just saying it's kind of mind-blowing that they do.
So, the marriage penalties embedded in welfare programs are particularly severe if a woman on public assistance weds a man who is employed in a low-paying job.
When a couple's income near the limits prescribed by Medicaid, a few extra dollars in income caused thousands of dollars in benefits to be lost.
I mean, it's an effective taxation rate of about a zillion percent.
And this is really important, right?
Because if you are a woman on public assistance, you're on welfare, you've got a bunch of kids, you're not likely to go meet a bunch of lawyers and doctors and get yourself into a very high-paying marriage, so to speak, or into a high-income family.
Who's going to be around are either other people on welfare or people who have low-paying jobs.
So there's a huge fence put between a mom and a remarriage situation.
The two most important routes out of poverty, marriage and work, are heavily taxed under the current US system.
You are penalized significantly if you get married, and you are penalized enormously through an effective 100% or more taxation rate if you try to get out of poverty.
This is why I say, I've said for years, that the existing welfare system traps the poor into a permanent, near-permanent underclass.
It has hardened social mobility, which is why the gap between the rich and the poor is getting wider and wider.
It's one of the reasons. Now, cohabiting relationships where people, they don't get married and they have to basically lie about it and say, oh, we're just roommates or whatever, they are very unstable relationships.
Children in such homes are much less likely to thrive, more likely to be abused, and more prone to suffer serious emotional problems.
The only thing I fundamentally care about is the welfare of the kids.
Everything else is to serve that.
This is one of the reasons why this topic is so important.
Welfare recipients who enter the workforce or receive pay I think some congresswoman was saying when she was on welfare, she begged her boss not to give her a 50 cent an hour raise because it would have cost her too many benefits.
William Galston, President of Bill Clinton's Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, estimated the welfare system, with its economic disincentives to marriage, was responsible for at least 15-20% of the family disintegration in the US. Libertarian scholar Charles Murray has placed the figure at somewhere Around 50%.
And this all has a ripple effect, right?
I mean, social behavior tends to be highly contagious.
If almost everyone around you is married, then that's just kind of what you do.
If a significant portion of people are unmarried, then that really becomes a viable option.
You explore that and so on.
And it has a hugely negative effect on everyone around.
So the kids of single parents cause additional disruptions and dysfunctions even to the children around them who are from two-parent stable households.
And the best predictor of delinquency involvement is how you manage your kids, how you discipline your kids, how you are as a parent.
It's the single best predictor of the onset of delinquency involvement.
So if the way that you're parented is the best predictor of whether you're going to become a criminal, we can't blame, as a primary factor, the development of criminality on racism.
Because I don't think that a black single mom is hitting her kids.
And to my understanding, given the applause that President Obama received recently when he joked about I can't imagine he would go to a woman's group and joke about hitting disobedient wives, but he made this joke about hitting children and everybody laughed and applauded and there is a kind of, you know, whap them upside the head ethic to the black community.
They're not doing that because they're racist towards their kids, obviously, right?
Welfare versus legitimacy.
So a Harlem-based initiative in the 1980s known as Project Redirection aimed to persuade young women who had already born children or one child out of wedlock to avoid repeating that mistake.
So the evaluation report on that project said, many beneficiaries were beginning to view getting their own welfare grants as the next stage in their careers.
Careers, of course, here meant quite satirically.
It became apparent that some participants' requests for separate grants and independent households were too often a sign of manipulation by boyfriends, in whose interest it was to have a girlfriend on welfare with an apartment of her own.
And I don't know if it's still current, but it used to be the case that the housing projects were called by men girlfriend farms, right?
You wouldn't live with them, you wouldn't certainly get married to them, but you would visit either one or more of them because they would be set up very nicely to take care of you through the money of the government.
Welfare versus IQ. IQ, of course, is one of the best predictors for success in life, and a number of doctors compared children who were identical in terms of race, family structure, neighborhood, family income, and mother's IQ in education found that the more years a child spent on welfare, the lower the child's IQ. Do you understand?
The welfare state is toxic to children.
I mean, it's toxic to everyone in many ways, except for the bureaucrats who get lots of money for it, but it is an environment that is toxic.
I mean, we go nuts over BPA, we go nuts over women smoking and drinking through pregnancy, rightly so, but the welfare state is extremely toxic to the development of children.
I mean, imagine if there was something in the water that lowered children's IQ, we would go mental, and rightly so.
We don't have the right to lower children's IQ, but a social environment that does the same thing.
The more welfare income a family received while a boy was growing up, the lower the boy's earnings as an adult.
It fundamentally impairs a child's development and capacity for success in the world.
The absence of marriage increases the frequency of child poverty 700%.
700%.
This is the single most reliable predictor of a self-perpetuating underclass is the prevalence or absence of marriage.
Martin Luther King Jr.
said, nothing is so much needed as a secure family life for people to pull themselves out of poverty, and the welfare state and other government programs and the war on drugs undermines this enormously.
Poverty is fundamentally the result of government programs because it was being solved before these government programs went through the roof.
Illegitimacy and crime. So here we really get to the meat of the matter.
Children raised by single parents as compared to those who grew up in intact married homes are more likely to be physically abused, to be treated for emotional and behavioral disorders, to smoke, drink, and use drugs, to perform poorly in school, to be suspended or expelled from school, to drop out of high school, to behave aggressively and violently, to be arrested for a juvenile crime, to serve jail time before the age of 30, and to go on to experience poverty as adults.
You know, people go nuts over GMO foods, genetically modified foods.
Government-modified environments, GMEs, are much more reliably toxic to children, and we still praise them in so many instances.
So one study indicates that children who saw their mother being abused compared with those who did not are 24 times more likely to commit sexual assault crimes.
Not 24% more likely, 24 times more likely, 50 times more likely to abuse drugs or alcohol, 74 times more likely to commit crimes against another person, and 6 times more likely to commit suicide.
The safest place for a woman to be is in a marriage.
It's safer than being single.
It's safer than cohabiting.
It's safer than a series of boyfriends.
The safest place for a woman to be is in a marriage.
And if welfare destroys marriage, then welfare raises the risk rates for women to be abused, which therefore causes dysfunction, particularly among the children who see this abuse.
And these are the causes. This is the series of dominoes that fall down, crush the future.
Welfare versus blacks.
You know, we're kind of in this, you know, in 1984, Winston Smith goes into a bar, talks to some old guy and asks him what life was like before the revolution.
We're kind of in danger of forgetting what life was like for black families and black communities before welfare.
During the nine decades between the Emancipation Proclamation and the 1950s, the black family remained a strong and stable institution.
The astounding destruction of the black family was set in motion by such policies as the anti-marriage incentives that are built into the welfare system.
As George Mason University Prof.
Walter Williams puts it, the welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, what the harshest racism couldn't do, and that is to destroy the black family.
Hoover Institution Fellow Thomas Sowell concurs, the black family which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.
So from the UK, these are some studies, welfare versus children.
So the safest environment for a child is one in which the biological parents are married and the family has always been intact.
The rate of abuse is six times higher in the second safest environment, the blended family in which the divorced mother has remarried.
The rate of abuse is 14 times higher if the child is living with a biological mother who lives alone.
In single motherhood raises the rates of child abuse 14 times.
If you care about children, then you care about whether people stay married or not.
And if you care about that and don't talk about the welfare state, then you don't really care about it because you're not following the data.
The rate of abuse for children is 20 times higher if the child is living with a biological father who lives alone.
The rate of abuse is 20 times higher if the child is living with biological parents who are not married but are cohabiting.
The rate of abuse is 33 times higher if the child is living with a mother who is cohabiting with another man.
Everything which harms marriage harms children and harms society because when those children grow up, they're much more likely to become criminals.
This is how these cycles repeat.
A high school graduate from a married household will do better on average keeping his or her family out of poverty than a person who has come from a single parent household and has graduated college.
In other words, even going to college cannot overcome The dysfunction created by growing up in a single-parent household.
If you want your kids to do better, you'd want them to be in a married household and only go to high school rather than come from a single-parent household and go to college, graduate from college.
Children in father-absent homes are five times more likely to be poor.
I mean, this is what environmentalists should focus on keeping the families together.
I mean, the environmental destruction that is wrought by having families split up and needing two homes and two cars and more driving and so on is tragic.
But, of course...
For environmentalists to focus on actually saving the environment from the breakup of marriage would mean that they would have to oppose the growth of state power, and they're kind of used to expand state power, so it's not what they're for.
Almost 75% of American children living in single-parent families will experience poverty before they turn 11 years old.
Only 20% of children in two-parent families will do the same.
Children who live apart from their fathers are 4.3 times more likely to smoke cigarettes as teenagers than children growing up with their fathers in the home.
Children in single-parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems.
Three out of four teenage suicides occur in households where a parent has been absent.
We've mostly been talking about child abuse in this area, but child neglect, child abandonment is really tragic.
Richard Emery, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, has noted that neglected children often are more seriously disturbed than abused children.
And we know this because if a child is ignored, generally they will act out in a destructive manner in order to gain parental attention.
We kind of evolved that if parents were indifferent to us, we would die.
At least if they were angry with us, they would show us some attention and keep us alive.
We've really only, I mean, in a single-parent household, the father is gone most of the time.
In most of these, particularly among the poor, and it's not always because, certainly for the blacks, some of them are in jail, but a lot of times the absent father lives, you know, a block away.
Incredibly destructive. And, of course, neglect doesn't show up in the ER. It doesn't show up in child abuse reports.
It shows up in crime reports.
So, family disruption increased dropout rates for whites by 150%, for blacks by 76%, by Hispanics 100%.
So, family disruption triggers leaving school.
Okay, so let's look at the core of matter crime.
From 1980 to 2000, incarceration percentage per population for black men increased by 1,100%.
1,100%.
So, if welfare came in and people began to change their decisions around 1965, by 1980, you have 15-year-olds coming out of these messed-up households.
If a male is born to an unmarried teen mother, he is 10 times more likely to become a chronic juvenile offender.
And it's not...
Remember I was saying that single parenthood Is more important than other factors.
A white teenage girl from an advantage background, right, wealth and education and opportunity, is five times more likely to become a teen mother if she grows up in a single mother household than if she grows up in a household with both biological parents of any wealth group.
Of the 14 juveniles condemned to death in the US in 1986, 12 had been brutally abused as children and 5 had been sodomized by relatives.
That which harms the family harms children.
That which harms children harms society through increased criminality.
Crossing the pond, general marriage rates for males and females, England and Wales, 1979 to 2008.
This is astounding. This is a zero-based chart.
The marriage rate has gone from 50-60% to about 20%.
Single-parent families are so common in today's Britain that couples are actually now a minority.
We can see the results of this in increased gang and dysfunction.
UK births outside of marriage, 1845 to 2004.
You can see the two bumps here, the First World War and the Second World War.
The Second World War took it from about 5% to 10%.
There was a slight bump from 5% to 6% or 7% in the First World War.
We understand that the Second World War, which was the greatest, most bloody destructive conflict that the world had ever seen with 40 million dead and most of Europe in flames and burnt up.
That that only had the effect of doubling the births outside of marriage.
Now, of course, it's 45%.
I mean, this has gone up nine times.
It only doubled with the Second World War.
The welfare state has pushed it up nine times.
It has had a four or five hundred percent greater effect on illegitimacy than the greatest...
Human war and the most violent and destructive human war the world has ever known.
This is what I'm saying. It is such a significant impact that if you're not talking about this, you're not talking about much of anything.
Let's look at the recorded crime statistics in England and Wales.
As illegitimacy rises in the 1960s, 1970s, it just goes through the roof.
So this is from 1898, but there was almost no crime to millions and millions of crimes now, right?
Four, five, six, seven percent, four, five, and six million reported crimes just over the past few decades per year.
I mean, it's just astounding. And if you care about crime, you have to care about this stuff.
If you care about the poor, you have to care about this stuff.
Let's look at poverty before welfare, and this is the core tragedy of what we're discussing here.
As of 1965, the number of Americans living below the official poverty line had been declining continuously since the beginning of the decade and was only about half of what it had been 15 years earlier.
Half. Do you realize that as a society, America was within a stone's throw of eliminating involuntary poverty from the social landscape?
it was being solved.
The ancient edict of Christianity that the poor will always be with us was about to be disproven when the government stepped in to help them, thus entrenching the poverty that feeds government power.
Between 1950 and 1965, the proportion of people whose earnings put them below the poverty level had decreased by more than 30%.
The black poverty rate had been cut nearly in half between 1940 and 1960.
Are we going to really say that racism was far less egregious to blacks between 1940 and 1960?
Yet, the black poverty rate was cut nearly in half in only 20 years.
With a war!
In various skilled trades during the period of 1936 to 1959, the incomes of blacks relative to whites had more than doubled.
As I mentioned, unions had a lot to do with bringing in wage restrictions that harmed disproportionately blacks.
Could make an argument the Democratic Party has the strongest history of racism in the United States.
They're all part of the KKK and came from that sort of environment.
And welfare is fundamentally racist because...
It's pretending that you can just give stuff to blacks and they won't make the same decisions that everybody else does.
It is paternalistic.
It is disrespectful.
It is so unbelievably destructive as a result.
So, 1936 to 1959, the incomes of blacks relative to whites had more than doubled.
In the minds of racists, it may have been that they became uppity.
We better give them a welfare state to keep them down.
The representation of blacks in professional and other high-level occupations grew more quickly during the five years preceding the launch of the war on poverty than during the five years thereafter.
You understand? As of 1940, the illegitimacy rate among blacks nationwide was approximately 15%, scarcely one-fifth of the current figure.
Right? Were they experiencing less racism in 1940 than they are in 2010?
I don't think you could make that case.
So the illegitimacy cannot be coming from racism.
As late as 1950, black women were more likely to be married than white women.
And only 9% of black families with children were headed by a single parent.
Welfare and crime.
This is per 100,000 males aged 13 to 39.
If we can look here, in the mid to late 1960s, we see this massive rise in crime.
This isn't only the welfare state.
There was also a sort of a philosophy that came out of the left, which was, you know, let's just turn them back onto the streets.
Let's not keep the violent people in prison, probably due to a lack of understanding about the physiology of sociopathy.
That it's generally brain damage that is kind of incurable.
And so they just would put people back out on the streets.
That had something to do with it, but the welfare state certainly had other things to do with it as well.
And so for blacks, the crime went enormously through the roof.
And remember, this is disproportionately affecting other blacks.
So if you care about blacks, then you want them to have fewer criminals around, which means that you're going to start to at least question the supposed benevolence of the welfare state.
Being poor and being black.
So this is 1950 to 1980, crimes reported to the police indexes.
And as you can see here, violent crime and property crime again.
In the mid-1960s, when the welfare state came in, it went from stable, you know, maybe 150 violent crimes, 100,000 people to over 600 by 1980.
Massive, massive increase.
Same thing happened in Canada.
The welfare state came in in the 60s, and crime rose enormously.
Okay, so we'll just talk about one other little thing here.
Thank you for your patience. So, I'm going to make the case that violence in a community is proportional to its proximity to government power.
Right. I mean, ghettos are government institutions.
The roads are governments.
The public housing is governments.
Most of the utilities are provided by governments.
The education is provided by governments.
And so they're in a kind of government-run biosphere, and they tend to be the most violent places of all.
So violence against violence.
We make this case. Now, if we make this case, then we can also make the case in other areas where government power has vastly increased over a community.
We would expect violence and dysfunction to result from that.
Let's look at Canadian Aboriginals.
The crime rates for Canadian Aboriginals are hard to find, but I've read reports that say that in 1950, on an entire reservation, there was only one incident of drunken assault the whole time.
Now, in 1966, Canada Assistance Plan, the federal government accepted to pay half of a province's social assistance costs as long as certain conditions were met regarding access, including regular coverage for all Aboriginal persons except Indians currently.
Or in the previous year on reserves, which remains a federal responsibility, the massive infusion of government money towards aboriginals.
What have the results been? Again, they live on government-mandated reserves.
They get, quote, free university education, massive amounts of welfare, social programs, and so on.
So as government resources have flowed towards Canadian aboriginals, what has happened?
Well, they're 3% of the population, 17% of the men, and 26% of the women who are incarcerated.
Aboriginals in Canada have significantly shorter life expectancies, just like blacks in the U.S., higher risk of suffering from obesity, like blacks in the U.S., from chronic illnesses such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or heart problems, and infectious diseases like tuberculosis and chlamydia.
Proximity to government power is a toxin.
Correctional Services also knows that aboriginal offenders are more likely than non-aboriginal offenders who have experienced poverty, family violence, and substance abuse in the home.
And as children, they were more likely to have been involved in child welfare services.
First Nations children in Western countries live in third-world conditions, as you could certainly argue in ghetto conditions as well in America.
80% of urban Aboriginal children under the age of six live in poverty.
The number of Aboriginal children involved with the child welfare system is also growing, rose by 71.5% between 1995 and 2001.
Serious crime rates are three times higher for American Indian youth.
80% of Native youth drop out of school before completion.
Again, in the black community, another community that is highly proximate to government power, enmeshed and embedded in government power, the same things occur.
These have improved since, but I wanted to point out these is during the very height of the welfare state, because if you remember, Clinton cut back a lot on welfare in the 90s.
Tragically, that trend did not continue for spending as a whole.
During a time where welfare was at its height, the abuse and neglect of children increased 134% from 1980 to 1993.
All types of child abuse increased enormously.
Physical abuse, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse increased enormously during this time period at the height of the welfare state.
And these are the numbers. This is from England.
A child whose biological mother cohabits is 33 times more likely to suffer serious abuse than a child with married parents.
In Britain, a child whose biological mother cohabits was 73 times more likely to suffer fatal abuse than a child with married parents.
And you can see these numbers scale up on family disintegration.
US spending on federal welfare now exceeds one trillion dollars.
Medicare, $480 billion. Defense, $540 billion.
Social Security, $725 billion.
And welfare is over a trillion dollars.
This is why you talk about taming the debt.
I mean, if you don't talk about welfare programs, nothing serious is happening.
What's going to happen in the future?
Well, the feds are going to spend another $8.3 trillion on just 10 welfare programs over the next 10 years.
I mean, it's going through the roof.
And this doesn't count the other 73 welfare programs that go on.
These are just the 10 biggies. Let's wrap it up.
I really appreciate your time and attention.
I hope this has been helpful for you.
Look, violence is going to beget violence.
We know that.
We understand that.
If you go and start living a life of crime, your life is going to get more violent.
If you use the coercive power of a monopoly oligarchical hierarchy like the state to start forcing and herding money around at gunpoint, to print and counterfeit money, to borrow and enslave future generations, this violence is going to create more violence.
Firing resources at the family fundamentally destroys it.
The family is like a sandcastle.
The tide of money comes in.
It gets washed away.
This creates more dysfunction.
Government programs always increase.
They always get bigger.
They always create their own future demand.
And so by destroying the family, fundamentally taking the father out of the equation and replacing the father with the state, we get increased dysfunction, which requires more state intervention and more state spending because of crime and other kinds of dysfunction.
And so violence begets violence in an ever-increasing cycle until we identify the root violence and deal with it, eliminate it, which is the violence of statism.
Replacing fathers with the state has been a complete and total disaster.
I mean, society, particularly intellectuals, owes fathers a huge apology, owes mothers who were told that fathers are relatively irrelevant a huge apology, and in particular, owes all of the children...
The hundreds of millions of children whose brains, physiology, and opportunities were permanently damaged by family dysfunction driven by misplaced intellectual idealism, we owe those children a massive apology.
I do not expect that apology will be forthcoming, but we owe it anyway.
Proximity to the state is proximity to toxicity.
You know, Ellen Brockovich supposedly, I don't think it's true, found all this crap in the water and so on and everyone goes completely insane.
But proximity to state power is statistically incredibly toxic to human beings.
Proximity to free, quote, free resources is incredibly toxic to human beings.
Family dysfunction, family breakup provoked by proximity to state power is unbelievably toxic to children.
And we really, we do care about the children, right?
The state's proximity to communities, and you can look at this in a wide variety of communities, predicts and provokes criminality.
Morally, the state is criminal anyway, so having the mafia move in does not reduce criminality in your neighborhood.
It increases criminality in your neighborhood.
Having the state take over more and more of society provokes criminality.
Thank you so much for watching.
I really, really appreciate it.
This is Stefan Molyneux, host of Free Domain Radio, the largest, most popular philosophy show in the world.
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