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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:25
The Truth About Bernie Sanders
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Fine! All right, fine!
You want Bernie Sanders.
Let's do Bernie Sanders.
So this is an examination of the Democratic presidential nominee or guy who wants to become president, Bernie Sanders, a socialist, a Democrat, as he calls himself.
We'll unpack all of that as we go forward.
But before we start, a little bit of a big picture view.
Okay. Total gross domestic product for all of Europe.
Okay. Total economic output for everyone and everything in Europe in 1870.
Yes, it's relevant.
Just hang on for a sec. It's about a trillion dollars, give or take, right?
So the entire economic output of Europe in 1870 was a trillion dollars.
Okay. Okay. Now, socialism really started in 1860, 1870, and so on, and became very big with the progressive movement of the Fabian socialists at the turn of the 20th century.
But let's just, you know, pick 1870, where socialism was getting it started.
Now, if you said to socialists, we are going to take the entire economic output of all of Europe and give it to the poor, they'd have said, well, actually, that's kind of communism, but whatever, right?
They would have been completely thrilled.
So total European GDP... Gross domestic products in 1870 is $1 trillion.
All right. Now, the U.S. welfare state spends $1 trillion a year on direct transfer payments to the poor, like on the welfare to the poor.
Now, that is something to mull over, right?
When socialism starts, it says we want to help the poor by transferring money from the rich to the poor.
The equivalent of the entire European domestic product...
In 1870, it's being transferred to the poor every single year in America.
And the war on poverty really started in the 1960s under LBJ's War on Poverty.
Today, the U.S. government spends 16 times more after adjusting for inflation on means-tested welfare or anti-poverty programs than it did at the beginning of the War on Poverty.
Now, poverty was being solved in America in the post-war period.
You can see the charts. It's going down by about one percentage point every year until the government, God bless them, they decide to come in and help.
And then poverty stops declining.
And, um...
The decline in poverty kind of came to a grinding halt at the beginning of the war on poverty.
So the more that the government spends, the less progress against poverty has been made.
And we're just talking about the welfare state.
The education system, $621 billion was spent in 2012.
So overall, since 1960, America has spent at least...
Over 22 trillion dollars.
Like, just mold that over in your head.
Since 1960, America has spent over 22 trillion thousand billion dollars fighting poverty.
That is vastly more than anyone could have conceived of even in 1960, let alone when the socialists were agitating for more spending on the poor in 1870.
That's the big picture thing.
More money has been spent on combating poverty through the socialist model than could ever have been conceived of by even the most drug-addled, can't-figure-out-what-numbers-are socialists in 1870 or 1960.
And any socialist who's not currently addressing that issue is a goddamn con artist.
Because that's kind of an important thing.
You say, well, we need to spend more money on the poor.
Well, you've had more money, oh socialists, than any socialist could have conceived of in 1870 or 1960.
You are transferring the equivalent of the entire European economy of 1870 to the poor every single year.
And poverty is not getting any better.
In fact, poverty is way worse than it was.
Because the national...
Debt is far higher now, and debt is just deferred poverty, right?
I mean, if you can blow your visa now, it just means you're going to have less money to spend in the future.
So the poor are vastly worse off now than they were, certainly in the post-war period when poverty was declining, but they're vastly worse off now than they were in 1960.
Plus, we've had now multi-generations of people growing up where they've never seen anyone in their family working.
The amount of human capital, job skills, how to deal with bosses, how to deal with customers, all that knowledge has evaporated from entire gene pools.
So it is catastrophic.
So people who are saying, well, we need more money is just mad.
And you'll see as we go through this, Bernie Sanders is a big one for saying, free!
Let me tell you something. When someone comes and tells you something is free, this is an intelligence test.
And if you believe that something can be free...
You're either so greedy you're willing to lie to yourself, or you're too dumb to understand what I'm saying, so you probably should get back to some cats playing piano.
So this is the really important thing.
He comes along and says, well, college should be free, and healthcare should be free, and so on.
This is all nonsense. Nothing in this world is free.
He's appealing to, like, your child self, so to speak, right?
Because when you're a kid, mommy and daddy have all this money, and they're supposed to spend it on you, and you don't really know where it comes from, but they just have money, and you kind of want some of that stuff.
stuff, you want candy, you want toys, you want stuff like that.
And so when people come and say, oh, the government should pay for this, they're creating some sort of weird illusion that government has money.
Government has no money.
Government has no money.
Those four words are the essence of a free society.
Government has no money.
I'd like to put an F word in there, but I'm trying to keep it clean.
Government has no freaking money, people.
It has no money. So it can borrow, it can print, it can sell bonds, which again is just deferred taxation, or it can tax.
It has no money.
So the government can't pay for anything.
So let's start looking at Monsieur LeSander's French socialist injection into Anglo-Saxon capitalism, well, what used to be in America.
So in June 2015, good old Bernie introduced...
Legislation would raise estate taxes up to 55% for multimillionaires and billionaires!
And an additional 10% tax would be imposed on 530 billionaires whose combined worth is $2.6 trillion.
So he's going to tax. So when you die, the estate tax, right?
So... There's this weird thing that happens when people try to figure out how many taxes or how much they should have in taxes.
They say, well, here's people's existing behavior, and if we tax it double, then we get double the taxes.
And this is not true. You can look up the Laffer curve, L-A-F-F-E-R curve, for more on this.
But basically what happens is when you raise taxes on people, they change their behavior.
So if you're going to put massive taxes on the...
It's a death tax, basically, on the estate of people who die...
All that'll happen is they'll spend their money before they're dead and you won't pick that money up in taxes.
Or they'll find some way to shelter their money from the tax or whatever.
Like, you just don't get the money.
You don't get the money.
Raising taxes is like saying, wow, you send a letter to some guy and it says, you know what, I hear that you don't lock your car, so tomorrow I'm going to come and steal it.
Well, what do you think he's going to do? He's going to put the car in the garage.
He's going to lock the car and the garage.
You're going to show up there, and because you told him you were coming for his stuff, the stuff won't be there.
Anyway, I don't know why people think this stuff still after so much public choice theory, but anyway.
So Sanders laid out his justification for this tax hike.
I am a financial socialist zombie who enjoys drinking the drying blood of the dead.
Wait, sorry, that may have been a mistranslation.
What he actually said was, our nation cannot survive morally or economically when so few have so much while so many have so little.
We need a tax system which asks the business class to pay its fair share of taxes and which reduces the obscene degree of wealth inequality in America.
So there's no problem with power inequality in that he wants to be a politician.
Wealth inequality apparently is a really, really bad thing.
So, the first thing to understand about these lefties is that they sort of imagine that...
They talk about wealth distribution or redistribution and so on.
People just mysteriously have stuff.
They don't work hard.
They don't sacrifice. They don't defer current spending.
They don't save. They don't invest.
They don't work overtime.
They just... It's magic.
You know, money falls in various clumps from the sky.
The big clumps happen to land in people with gated communities and the little clumps happen to land in people whose kids play in the water spouts and all of that by the side of the street, right?
And they just have this weird belief that people have stuff and it's not like they work hard or earn it or get educated or defer gratification.
People just mysteriously have different stuff.
Now, he's a liar, too, because...
He says we need a tax system which asks the billionaire class to pay its fair share of taxes.
Well, I don't know about you, I have never had a denotion request from a tax agency.
It's basically pay up or go to jail.
It's a threat. Saying that taxation is a request is like saying that rape is lovemaking.
You are fundamentally confusing things.
Theft is not charity.
And beating up someone in an alley is not the same as someone voluntarily getting into the ring with you knowing what's going to happen.
So this lie.
Just be honest. You want to put guns to rich people's heads to take their money and to use it to bribe people to give you votes.
That you want is a shakedown.
Let's just be real about it.
Of course, it's socialism.
Socialism means A, never having to examine history.
B, never having to say you're sorry.
C. Never having to explain communism.
And D. Never, ever, ever being able to call things by their proper names.
Which, as the saying goes, is the beginning of wisdom.
Obscene! You see, it's obscene and fair share.
Fair share, the word fair share also hooks into, you know, if you grew up with siblings, everybody's obsessed with fairness and so on.
And if you say that someone's not paying their fair share, moral question came up for me when I was a teenager playing Dungeons and Dragons.
We ordered pizza and someone contributed a coupon as part of his payment for the pizza.
Fair share or not?
Discuss. Obscene degree of wealth inequality in America.
You know what's really obscene is the singing inequality in America.
You know, some people are really great singers.
Some people are really terrible singers.
And it's just obscene the degree to which singing competence is unequal in America.
Height! Two! Great hair!
Totally unequal!
I'm talking to you, Brad Pitt!
Right? It's just terrible, the degree to which there's inequality in a wide variety of things in America.
But we don't say, well, you know, some people are born blind, some people are born with eyes, so we're going to rip out some healthy people's eyes and give them to blind people because it's just their eye inequality in America.
Well, we consider that to be pretty violent and ugly.
Taxation involves greater levels of violence than that.
Bernie continued, the fairest way to reduce wealth inequality, rebuild the disappearing middle class, and preserve our democracy is to enact a progressive estate tax on multimillionaires and billionaires.
See, they're a hated class, right?
In communism, they're called the bourgeoisie.
In Nazism, they're called the Jews.
Among white supremacists, they're called the blacks.
Among black supremacists, they're called the whites.
It's just the class you're allowed to hate, kind of white males these days.
So when he says multimillionaires and billionaires, he's basically saying people you can uncork your entire spoiled, failed life resentment on and everyone's going to cheer you.
So basically he's saying the fastest way or the fairest way to reduce wealth inequality is to steal from the rich.
And what does it mean by fair share?
Let's pay the fair share!
Fair share! Okay, well, how much are the rich paying already?
Congressional Budget Office made the following remark in its 2010 report, wildly underreported by, say, the Huffington Post.
Quote, Because average tax rates rise with income, the share of taxes paid by higher income households exceeded their share of before-tax income.
And the opposite was true for lower income households, right?
So even if tax was like 40% or 30%, if you make more, you pay more.
But because taxes is progressive, in other words, the more you make, the higher percentage.
You pay of a higher percentage already.
So the rich are already paying more taxes on a percentage basis than the poor.
Far more. What do the numbers break down?
Well... We'll get to that in a sec.
But remember, wealth inequality is incredibly helpful for a lot of people.
Wealth inequality means people have capital to save and invest in building new businesses.
Wealth inequality is why you have a cell phone.
If you're watching this on a cell phone, thank a billionaire.
I mean, remember when I was, I think it was in my late teens, when a friend of mine called me from a car.
I can't tell you, like, just how mind-blowing that was, to be called from a car.
I mean, in the early 80s.
It just made no sense. You think of this limo with like a long cord running behind it.
Crazy. And those phones were like $10,000, $20,000.
Only crazy rich people could afford them, and that allowed the manufacturing process to continue.
Like your computer? That's because rich people bought computers way back in the day.
So, let's thank a little bit of wealth inequality as well, because that's why you have nice stuff.
In 2010, the top 20% highest income households earned...
51.9% of before-tax income and paid 68.8% of federal taxes, right?
So a little over 50% of pre-tax income, and they paid almost 70% of taxes.
And of course, they're not receiving much in the way of these kinds of services.
They're not getting rent subsidies, subsidized housing, SNAP benefits.
They're not getting food stamps.
They're not getting EBIT cards.
They're not getting all of the stuff that goes on with federal services, right?
So they're paying a lot more proportional to their income, get far less in services.
Ah, gets even better.
Let's go further.
The top 1% earned 14.9% of before-tax income but paid 24.2% of federal taxes.
So the top 1% is paying over 24% of federal taxes.
Does that seem like a fair share?
It's pretty high already.
The poorest 20% receive 5.1% of income while paying 0.4% of taxes, right?
So the rich pay vastly more in proportion to what they earn, and the poor pay vastly less in proportion to what they earn.
So, he makes a very telling insinuation.
He says, pay their fair share of taxes.
What does that actually mean in reality?
Not in this socialist unicorns are going to give me economic progress world, but...
Why does someone have a lot of money?
Again, let's sort of take out inheritance and stuff like that.
And there's a lot of social mobility in America.
Poor people regularly become rich.
Rich people regularly become poor.
It's quite a wash cycle.
It's a rinse and repeat wash cycle of economic progress and diminishment and so on.
So why does someone get paid half a million dollars, let's say, a year?
Well, it's because they produce much more than half a million dollars worth of value to their employer.
It really is that simple.
You get money because you have created value for other people.
And that's just important.
So, if the rich people were to take money without providing any value, and therefore should pay their, quote, fair share, then they're no different from thieves.
So, you have to be providing value in order to receive value in a free market.
And so, of course, the socialists pretend that the rich just steal and cheat and lie and all that kind of stuff.
And, I mean, there's some truth in that, you know, there's an old saying that the foundation of every great fortune is a great crime.
I don't think that's particularly true.
But... There is an argument to be made that as the free market diminishes and government controls more and more of the economy, rich people have to game the system by using political favors, political power.
I think that's true, but the solution to that is not to tax those who are already using the power of the state to gain unfair market advantage over others, but to eliminate the capacity of the state to rig the economic game.
Make the state an umpire, so goes the libertarian argument, rather than someone who can interfere with the game and choose who wins and loses.
And you'll find, once the umpire can't figure out, can't tell you who wins and loses and can't rig the game, they won't be bribed anymore.
So the best way to reduce corruption is to reduce the power of the states to change.
There's the economic outcome.
And there's also this weird thing about, like, a zero-sum game, right?
So I am pretty bald.
Not from the back. Not from the side, from the front.
Pretty bald. I mean, I'm like a very early on clown, right?
I mean, if I let that thing grow, it'd go straight out horizontal in full crusty the clown mode.
But I've lost my hair, but it's not because someone else took my hair, right?
They grew their hair, and my hair, because of an excess of testosterone and manliness, has gone the way of the Dota.
And in the same way, people think, well, someone else must be rich because I'm poor because someone else is rich.
Everyone should have $40,000 a year.
Some people have $400,000 because other people only have $4,000.
They've stolen. It's a zero-sum game.
This is not the case.
Money is created. Money is not transferred.
Money is transferred through the state.
Money is transferred through the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex.
It's transferred through a lot of financial voodoo evil thumb jiggery that goes on with the banksters on Wall Street, mostly dealing with government manipulation of the economy and government bonds and government printing of money.
But in a free market, wealth is created.
It is not stolen from someone else.
But of course, that doesn't really work in the socialist paradigm.
Now, of course, another class of people you're allowed to hate, the word corporations.
And corporations, I'm not a huge fan of corporations, and I've done shows on this before.
They are a government-created voodoo that keeps rich people from being held accountable for their actions.
But regardless, I mean, that's not why socialists dislike corporations.
Corporations is just one of these buzzwords.
You know, it's like this dog whistle to arouse your beta resentment of the successful.
Corporations! Red, literally red.
Red with a sickle, I guess.
Hammer and sickle flag in front of the socialist bulls.
So he proposed into his 2013 Corporate Tax Fairness Act.
He said, we're going to end all tax credits provided for foreign taxes on foreign income.
Corporations would essentially get double tax, right?
They have to pay both foreign and domestic tax on any revenue that was generated overseas.
So what does that mean?
See, tax credits is one of the end loopholes.
Well, first of all, if it's legal, it's not a loophole.
What they're trying to do is trying to get you to believe that other people are cheating and therefore you're not getting what you deserve.
And I know that corporations are complying with the law to a large degree.
And if you tax corporations more...
Again, there's this weird fantasy that there's just people out there like Scrooge McDuck sitting on enormous piles of gold and if you tax them, they'll just give some of that gold and it won't have any other effect on the economy.
But it's not true. You tax corporations and what do they do?
Well, they don't give their workers raises because they don't have the money to do it.
So, I'm not sure what people think.
Like, corporations aren't some...
Entity outside of space and time, right?
They're not in the end dimension of unicorn farts out in another universe where you can tax them.
It has no effect on the economy of this.
Raise taxes on corporations.
They grow slower. They also will spend more time lobbying for exemptions.
Just look at the number of corporations that were granted exemptions in Obamacare, particularly Nancy Pelosi's district.
Also known as the 21st layer of hell.
And they'll just find ways out of it.
They'll move money offshore.
And people will still stop investing.
They'll just save their money and keep it for themselves rather than investing.
And fewer jobs will be created.
There's no magic money.
You can't get taxes from corporations for free either.
It has a ripple effect on what they do.
So higher prices will be charged for you, the consumer.
Fewer job opportunities for you.
That's what's going to happen if and when this ever goes.
So... Resist hatred, right?
Just view people as people.
More recently...
Colonel Sanders has put forward a legislation that would supposedly stop profitable corporations from sheltering income overseas in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
Okay, so you can stop people parking their money in the Cayman Islands.
That simply means that they'll move their head offices to the Cayman Islands and abandon the U.S., throwing tons of people out of work and resulting in even less taxes for the American government, right?
I don't know. It's just completely bizarre.
It's like you're a kid playing tag, and there's a really, really fast person, and you say, okay, they're 20 feet away from me, but I can cover that in a couple of seconds, so I'm going to say, I'm it!
We're playing tag! And then you start chasing them, and you say, well, obviously I'm going to get there in two seconds because I can run that quickly.
Well, of course, you start saying...
Tag, I'm it, I'm going to catch you.
What do they do? They start running away.
And because people change their behavior based upon what you do.
I don't know how it is that, I don't know, like, if you walk up to someone, you hold your hand out to shake it, in a business meeting in particular, they're going to shake your hand.
Try it. Try it someday.
Someone walks out to shake your hand and you just stand there.
Whatever you do is going to affect what someone else does.
And just raising taxes is, okay, well, rich people aren't dumb for the most part.
Okay, Kardashians, Hiltons.
Anyway, outside of the reality TV universe I don't even remotely comprehend, rich people aren't particularly dumb.
And they're pretty good with money.
And IRS brain-dead cheese-eating dunderheads versus really nimble and smart rich people who really care about their money.
I think I know where I'd put my money.
So just this fantasy. Oh, I've got to change the taxes.
No one's going to change their behavior.
Sanders noted, quote, at a time when we have an $18.2 trillion national debt and an unsustainable federal deficit, at a time when many of the largest corporations in America are paying no federal income taxes, and at a time when corporate profits at an all-time high, it is past time for corporate America to pay their, what is it, yes, fair share, programmed, in taxes so that we can create the millions of jobs this country needs.
There's so much wrong with that.
I could do a whole show on that.
So we're going to take away...
Money from people who have a proven track record of creating jobs, i.e.
big businesses. And it's true that small businesses create a lot of jobs, but small business also destroys a lot of jobs.
It's a high turnover and not so great for family people who want more stability.
So we're going to take money away from people who have a proven ability to create sustainable jobs, and we're going to give it to a bunch of government bureaucrats, because that's going to be great for the economy.
That's just mad.
I mean, that's completely, completely insane.
We're going to take money from people, from U2, and we're going to give it to some karaoke guy because we want the stadium to be full.
And now in Bernie's socialist dream, corporate America will not contract its operations to offset the increased tax costs.
No, we won't take manufacturing overseas.
No, we can just keep piling regulation upon regulation on American businesses.
They're not going to go to China or Mexico or anything.
Why is he rushing so much to create jobs in China?
Businesses do not exist in a vacuum.
They change their behavior based upon new tax burdens and pass additional costs that they can't escape along to their consumers.
And so you are going to lose with this strategy.
So there's this pattern, right?
The rich are evil. And so we've got to take their unjustly stolen money away from them at gunpoint and give it to you not to buy votes.
Because, see, that would be bribery.
But because... I don't know.
That part always escapes me.
All right. But let's say that the rich people are idiots, have no capacity to protect their money, and what if we did get away with it?
What if we taxed the top 1% in the U.S. at a rate of 100%?
Took all of their money, the top 1%, the 1%, remember, 1%, We take them all of their money for a year.
Not all of their money saved, but all of their income for a year.
Okay. Is that a fair share?
Socialists, you can't go over 100, even with socialist economics, although generally that's called debt or money printing.
So 2011, the total income at the top 1% was $1.5 trillion.
You got 100% income tax on the richest Americans.
What does that buy you?
Well, it's... In 2011, it's even worse now.
Wealth for spending under Obama has gone up almost a third.
But the 1.5 is just enough to cover the U.S. deficit of $1.3 trillion for 2012.
So, if you tax the richest 1% at...
100%, you don't even cover the deficit, which is the deficiency in spending this year.
It doesn't even talk about the $18 trillion debt or the $100 trillion plus in unfunded liabilities, promises the government has made that it doesn't have the money to cover.
So even if you take the 1%, take all their income, which of course would never happen because they just leave, it wouldn't work.
Look, half of Americans provide 97% of all taxes, right?
The top half income earners in America are paying for just about everybody else.
So the bottom half are just leeching off all the people who make more than $35,000 a year.
The top 25% earners, those who make more than $70,000 a year, contribute 85.6% of all taxes.
The top quarter are paying more than three quarters.
Close to 90% of the taxes.
I mean, so the idea that, well, this is totally unfair!
Totally unfair! We've got to tax the rich more because they're not paying their fair share.
I mean, come on, man.
I mean, are people that blinded by, like, anti-wealth prejudice and hatred that they just have complete immunity to basic facts?
Are they like Superman facts bounce off my chest because socialist fantasy greed and a feeling of intense and immense failure and resentment and envy and Nietzschean underclass seething boiling hatred of anyone who succeeded makes me immune to numbers.
What does he say about education?
We need a revolution in the way higher education is funded.
In the United States, all people who have the desire and the ability should be able in this changing economy to receive all the education they need, regardless of their income.
This must be done not only to rebuild the disappearing middle class, But to make us competitive in the global economy, because, you know, his knowledge of economics, you know, he bombed out of biology because biology involved facts when he was younger, but he ended up taking political science.
I guess that's the same as biology, but opposite and unreal and imaginary and nonsense.
So, okay, so he's saying you should just get education if you have desire and ability.
Well, what if I want to get educated in...
Okay, I have ability.
I have desire. Does that mean that a million dollars should be taxed from hardworking people in order to indulge my whack jobbery hobby?
No. I mean, the business needs should be driving education unless you're just a dilettante who want to educate yourself for fun on your own.
Well... Of course, right?
Otherwise, there's a huge amount of waste.
The idea is good for the economy to fund everyone whose brain is still immature.
Men's brains don't mature until 30, women until 25.
And the idea that you can just fund them for whatever they want, if they show some basic ability.
And of course, if more people want to apply to go to school, you have to lower the standards so we don't even know if there's any ability out there at all.
But this idea that you're just going to take money from hardworking people to give it to people to pursue whatever education they want and that it has to be done through a university is all nonsense.
If you really want to help the poor, don't have them need to defer income for four years to pursue a degree with questionable market value, to say the least.
If you really want to help the poor, Lower barriers to entry for starting new businesses stop requiring, like a third of people in America require government permission to have a job.
And so get rid of all of those limits to people getting into the workforce and allow intelligence tests back into business, right?
So intelligence tests have been illegal for many decades in the United States, except for the government, of course.
And, you know, you can make some case for it, but companies basically don't want to do it.
So you can't really do intelligence tests IQ tests to get people to establish their ability.
And so now what happens is instead of a very cheap IQ test that the poor could easily take, now you need four years for a pseudo-IQ test called public education, college education.
It's all completely nonsense. He says, we must fundamentally restructure our student loan program.
It makes no sense that students and their parents are forced to pay interest rates for higher education loans that are much higher than they pay for car loans or housing mortgages.
Yes, because you know what the value of a car is.
You know to some degree what the value of a house is.
You have no idea what the value of a history degree is.
No idea. And they're forced to pay.
See, the rich are asked to pay when there's a gun to their head, but parents are forced to pay when their kids don't have to go to college at all and can learn online or start their own businesses.
See, now it's forced.
See, now when people are making choices that have consequences, they're forced, but when the government is pointing guns to people's heads to take their money, well, it's just a request.
You know, like, I'm going to put chloroform on you and you request that you have a date with me in my basement.
He said, we must also end the practice of the government making $127 billion over the next decade in profits from student loans.
Great! Then have the government start providing student loans, have them go back to businesses and banks so that you can make sure that the degrees have some sort of economic value.
So, he doesn't like forcing people to pay for stuff.
He doesn't like forcing people to...
So, taxes are fine, but interest is bad.
God, this is like a caricature of a Shakespeare.
So, when Congress passed a bill that would allow for the future rise in student loan interest rates, Sanders was outraged and furious, quote,"...at a time when the average student is graduating from a four-year college, $27,000 in debt,
when hundreds of thousands of capable young people no longer see college as an option." Because of high costs and when the US is falling further and further behind our economic competitors in terms of the percentage of young people graduating from college, this legislation will make...
Sorry, he's quite a speaker.
This legislation will make college even less affordable than it is today.
Okay, so making college less affordable is actually kind of a...
A good thing, right?
Because there's a trillion dollars in outstanding student loans.
It's a huge bubble that has been driven.
We've got The Truth About College Debt, a presentation on this channel.
We can put a link to it below.
But very briefly, the government started funding college, decided to give out, quote, free loans, and decided to encourage everyone to go to college.
And next thing you know, the college tuition goes up.
Hey! Limited supply, increased demand, the price goes up.
And so... So, students are already a trillion dollars in debt, which is more than Canada's federal budget and even Brazil's federal budget.
So, that's a bubble. Let's make it.
Let's get fewer people to go to college.
It would be much better for the economy. So, what's Bernie's answer to this problem?
Because the government has already funded so much college, it has become ridiculously expensive.
May 2015, he introduced the College for All Act, a bill that would make four-year public colleges and universities free for everyone because unicorns make money by sweating.
The federal government would cover 67% of the cost of education, while states would contribute the remaining 33%.
Now, of course, again, governments have no money.
So those who don't go to college would be forced to pay for those who do go to college.
In other words, those with a reduced earning potential would be highly taxed to pay for those with a higher earning potential.
That's exploiting the workers, Bernie.
I think you're not so pro on that.
In addition, the Act would cut student loan interest rates almost in half, not only for future students, but existing debtors as well.
When we bail out banks, everyone loses their mind, and rightly so.
But Sanders wants to bail out those who made unwise financial decisions regarding their education and charge those with money, those who made better decisions, to pay for it.
It's all a bunch of nonsense. And again, it's just the free, right?
It's just the free stuff.
Free! And if you respond to free, you know, I get we all do, but if you respond to free, it's your basic lizard brain, it's your monkey brain that's responding, not anything rational.
So he says he wants a Robin Hood tax on Wall Street.
So this legislation is offset by imposing a Wall Street speculation fee on investment houses, hedge funds, and other speculators of 0.5% on stock trades.
50 cents for every $100 worth of stock.
0.1% fee for bonds.
Wait a minute. Bonds? Why are bonds free?
Oh, right! See, governments sell bonds, and if you tax people buying government bonds, then they'll buy fewer government bonds, which means the government won't have as much money.
So, they're going to put a tax on stocks.
Now, again, there's a huge amount of problems with the stock market.
I've got a presentation called the Supercharged Stock Market.
So many people are in the stock market who don't want to be there, but you've got to put your money in the stock market, otherwise the government takes it from you by gunpoint.
So you've got to invest it in your 401k or in Canada, it's called the RRSP. Your pensions, if you're in a union, your pensions get invested in it.
You have reduced capital gains tax, profits you make on stocks as opposed to income tax.
So the government pays off the financial sector both with direct bailouts but also by forcing or herding huge amounts of money into the financial sector, creating all of these crazy bubbles and so on.
So, if you start...
So, the best way to punish speculators and so on is to get money out of the stock market by forcing everyone to go into the stock market or taking their money.
Right? I mean, basically, the government has a gun to your head and says, well, you can either give me $100 or you can put $100 on spin the wheel.
And of course you're going to say, well, I'll put the $100 on the spinning wheel because at least you might get something out of it.
And so that's why there's so much money in the stock market.
It's fundamentally changed the entire way the business is done.
Everyone's chasing these wildly short-term profits because there's just way too much money sloshing around in the stock market looking for way too few profits.
And this corrupts everyone involved.
No, but just taxing stocks?
Okay, so that just means that fewer people will buy stocks, companies will have less money, they won't be able to grow as much, new companies won't be formed as much, there's less profit in being an entrepreneur, fewer jobs are created, you know, all that kind of crap, right?
And look, I mean, hedge funds and investment houses, they are investing for grandmoms on fixed incomes, people who've saved for their retirement and maybe saving for their kids' future education costs.
The hedge funds and investment houses, what are they going to do if their stock trade cost goes up?
Well, they just pass those costs down to their customers.
So again, this is a tax on the average American, not some evil banker boogeyman in a shiny shark suit.
And this idea you can tax someone else and it has no effect on you, I mean, again, they just provoke this hatred to make the corporation and the rich person the other that you can somehow harm, right?
But there's a great quote from, I think, the guy who wrote William Golding, Lord of the Flies.
A spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.
You put it into someone else, it goes into you.
It's the same thing with taxation.
There's no other out there that you can tax that has no effect on you.
So, that's not good.
And again, if he wants the middle class and jobs to be created, then...
Of course, this bill has earned Bernie a lot of fans, particularly amongst the millennials.
Hello, take out your headphones and listen.
Stop playing World of Warcraft while you're listening to this.
It's important. But of course, you know, most of them have gone to government schools.
They're heavily in debt and they regret...
The English degree that they got because it's not doing what they want economically.
So he's basically like, I can rescue you from your bad decisions.
I can be an enabler.
And again, I have sympathy, right?
A lot of propaganda out there to go to college and all that.
But it's just a complete mess.
So of course, he's going to buy votes by promising to end payments for people.
And he's just using the magic word free to separate anybody with any brains from from people whose greed has overwhelmed their capacity to think In any way, shape, or form.
Now, of course, lots of college administrators are praising, shockingly praising Sanders for all of this stuff.
And they say, ah, free education means a free society.
I want to thank Senator Sanders for being a champion to students and working families.
So, yes, school administrators really like government subsidies, isn't that?
You can also, if you give $100 billion to a bank manager, he'll probably praise you as well.
So, they're basically saying, well, I like my job.
I like my career. I like being paid half a million dollars a year.
More students is great for me, so yay, Bernie Sanders!
What Bernie Sanders' socialist, I guess we could say mind, cannot comprehend is that mounting student debt and rising tuitions are actually caused by government education subsidies.
I mean, it's hard to get a good socialist to understand sort of simple market principles, but when you artificially expand demand, just the number of students by giving them free loans, without a corresponding increase in supply, educational facilities and teachers and so on, costs are going to rise.
I mean, tuition fees have gone up enormously.
The number of student to profession ratio has stayed the same, but way more administrators.
I mean, it's just mad, right?
I mean, how are you going to get stuff for free?
Are teachers going to take pay cuts?
Professors going to start working more than five hours a week?
No, of course not.
These all have economic consequences, routinely ignored, of course, by the lefty media in an attempt to buy votes with free goodies.
And you know, when someone dangles free, they're also inviting you to be like, again, Scrooge McDuck.
No, I don't want people to get free education.
It's like, why wouldn't you?
It's free. So, anyway, we've got the truth about the college student debt crisis on this channel, and you can go into more detail about that.
Ah! Jobs!
Ah! He's going to boost employment rates by giving people government-made work jobs.
He taxed people creating jobs, given to a bunch of know-nothing government bureaucrats to buy, dig holes and fill them in again jobs, and nonsense, right?
And, um...
That's just mad, right?
So, you know, we were talking about, I was talking about how much money gets transferred to the poor relative to 1870.
How much education, right?
People get 12 years of education now for quote free, right?
Subsidized by taxes usually on property.
So after 12 years of the government educating you, what are you qualified to do?
12 years is a lot of educational time, particularly if you look throughout history, right?
Shakespeare went to grade 6 and went to school for 12 weeks a year.
I think Ben Franklin went to school for grade 6 and so on.
So this is a huge amount of education.
And basically when they say, well, you've got to go to college, what they're saying is after the government has had you for 12 years full-time, you are useless as boobs on a bull when it comes to economic value.
And so then we're going to give you another four years of education and somehow more government education is going to magically combine to make you an economic powerhouse.
So, I mean, rethink government education?
Should we maybe get a little privatization in there?
No! Big daddy government just steals money from other Americans to give you a tiny allowance to do some random chores.
Madness. January 2015 bill proposed by Bernie sought Congress's authorization for a A trillion dollar program that would employ 13 million Americans to rebuild roads, bridges, and other infrastructure in the United States.
Yes, infrastructure is in a terrible shape in the United States because the government's in charge of it and socialism doesn't work.
But more socialism? Spend another trillion dollars!
Oh, man. A trillion dollars.
Where's that money going to come from?
From people who actually do create sustainable jobs.
And we're going to use it to pour it into the sinkhole of government crap.
The Senator noted, America once led the world in building and maintaining a nationwide network of safe and reliable bridges and roads.
Today, nearly a quarter of the nation's 600,000 bridges have been designated as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.
Let's rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.
Let's make our country safer and more efficient.
Let's put millions of Americans back to work because magic!
Yeah, let's do all of these things.
You know, let's have a world without cancer.
Let's have a world where no storms ever interrupt a woman's wedding, the most important day of her life.
Let's have a world free of childhood disease.
Just give me a trillion dollars and I'll get to work on that.
I mean, this just...
I mean, it's mad.
How many people didn't believe this stuff?
It's just astounding. I mean, his actual arguments are what's structurally deficient and functionally obsolete at this stage.
No word on how many trillions of dollars it will take to repair the damaged socialist brain which produced them, let alone the further damage this non-thinking will do.
You'll just destroy capital, right?
You've got to privatize all this stuff.
You've got to make the people in charge of these bridges economically responsible for their degradation.
Otherwise, it's not going to work.
So, and what happens to these jobs, these employed Americans, after the program ends, if it ever ends?
It doesn't concern him.
I mean, he's not going to live forever.
You know, the US led the world in building public infrastructure when the government was much, much, much smaller.
Much smaller! So let's go back to a small government so we get better infrastructure, because that works, right?
No! Bigger!
Bernie's Employ Young Americans Now Act.
I really, really want to break into that David Bowie song, but out of respect for the twin-eyed wonder vampire, I won't.
Employee Young Americans Now Act seeks to provide summer and year-round jobs for a million American youths at the taxpayer cost of $5.5 billion.
So again, hey, you've been in government school for 12 years.
We need to tax your parents to give you a job because you're so useless.
In a press release, he noted, quote, We cannot continue to ignore the crisis of youth unemployment in America.
We're talking about the future of an entire generation.
We've got to make sure that young people in Washington, D.C. and all over the country have the opportunity to earn a paycheck and make it into the middle class.
And there's just no way to do it without stealing money and creating useless jobs.
I wish we could name these bills for what they really are.
They punch unborn babies in the face and steal their future lunch money act.
Because this is what happens. These guys propose all of these crazy spending bills.
And what happens? They don't raise taxes to pay for it.
They just borrow or print.
So it's the next generation that has to pay for the steady diet of brain-eating government cheese in the present.
Because he's so concerned about the welfare and employment of young people, Bernie is also pushing for a $15 an hour minimum wage, which is double the current amount.
Why not $16?
Bernie, what's wrong? Don't you want people to make $32,000 rather than $30,000 a year?
What's wrong with $17,000?
What's wrong with $30,000? What's wrong with $50,000?
God damn it! If I was a socialist, I'd be offering a $5,000 an hour minimum wage!
Wait, what? That wouldn't work because at some point people become unemployable?
But $15,000, that doesn't happen?
Oh my God. People, people, people.
Put down the gun. See what happens.
He says, it is a national disgrace that millions of full-time workers are living in poverty and millions more are forced to work two or three jobs just to pay their bills.
In the year 2015, a job must lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in it.
The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage and must be raised to a living wage.
Okay, I think that the poor in America would actually do really well from a starvation wage, he said, tongue firmly in cheek, because the biggest problem among poor people is obesity.
Not really. Salvation wage would be a huge step up, because at least there'd be a third of Americans in the future not suffering from diabetes.
That might be a plus, because that's kind of expensive, and we'll get to health care in a sec.
Look, in the early 1960s, the silver content of the quarters was worth about $15 to $20, depending on fluctuations.
$15 to $20 an hour.
And so if the minimum wage had simply kept pace with the inflation, minimum wage right now would be way over $7.25.
It would already be $15 to $20 an hour.
So the problem is not the minimum wage.
The problem is the government keeps debasing the currency.
It keeps buying votes by printing money, and that's a problem.
Raising the minimum wage is just a way of covering up government inflation and the money supply and the useless tits-on-a-bull skills that people come out with after government education.
And if you can't provide at least 15 bucks or more an hour of value to your employer, you're going to not be able to find jobs.
That's okay, because, you know, at 15 bucks an hour, you can't get a private sector job, but we'll give you government jobs instead, thus making sure that your taxes will increase in the future, far beyond what you're getting from this job.
Okay, so... If this explanation of why the minimum wage reduces employment isn't enough for you, there's plenty of empirical evidence that supports this assertion.
By golly, yes there is.
A meta-analysis of minimum wage research that examined 102 studies from the United States and across the globe found that only 8 gave a relatively consistent indication of positive employment effects.
8 out of 102, or 7.8%, said that the minimum wage did anything even remotely possible.
85% of the most credible studies indicate that the minimum wage hurts.
Employment. Yep.
You know, think of it like minimum attraction, right?
If your attractiveness level on a scale of 1 to 10 is a 5, and you keep trying to pick up 10s, you ain't gonna get a lot of dates, because your minimum hotness scale is way out of balance.
And this is what they're actually seeing in Seattle, instituted a $15 minimum wage not too long ago.
Minimum wage workers are asking to work fewer hours so that they make under a certain income threshold and remain eligible for certain government benefits.
So, you know, government benefits, you start making money, you're taxed at 100% because they deduct it from your benefits a lot of times.
And what do you think is going to happen to the cost of goods and services?
If employers are forced to pay people more value than they produce, the costs are just going to get passed along to the average American in price increases.
And price increases, particularly in things like groceries and rent, and they hit the poor more.
I don't know.
It's just madness. Healthcare.
Oh, healthcare. The socialist madness called healthcare in the United States is just a complete nightmare.
I mean, and the amount of government involvement in healthcare in the U.S. is staggering, staggeringly high.
More than 50 cents of every healthcare dollar is spent by the government, and it's just a mess.
So, of course, if you're a sane thing, you want to make it back to free market principles, and that will drive down the costs of healthcare considerably.
But, of course, Sanders, who's voted for Obamacare, which was internally by socialists, discussed as a step towards single-payer or government-funded healthcare system, he loves that.
So, healthcare costs are covered by the taxpayers through the government, as opposed to individuals and private insurance companies.
Well... What could possibly go wrong?
He says, quote, I start my approach to healthcare from a very basic premise.
Healthcare is a right, not a privilege.
Unfortunately, uniquely among major nations, that statement is not true for the United States, where access to healthcare depends on how much money you have and what your employer is willing to provide.
Okay, so listen, Bernie, look, all those people who say, oh, education is a right, healthcare is a right, it's pretty simple, man.
You could have, I don't know, tried taking biology for the third time.
You could have gone through to get your doctor's certification to go and get your medical license.
And then you could have just given healthcare away for free.
Like you could have just set up your doctor's office and you could have said free healthcare and not charged anyone a penny for healthcare.
I mean, why this thing where you're just going to get the government to pass laws to give healthcare away for free?
Do it yourself. I think philosophy should be available and accessible to the masses.
You know what I did? Spent a huge amount of time, money and energy getting really well trained in philosophy and then I'm putting videos out which I don't charge people for.
So, try that.
You know, instead of wanting to be a moral hero by getting the government to point guns at people to fulfill a vision you have, go out and fulfill that vision yourself.
Go become a free doctor.
It's easy. He said it's simply unconscionable that the most advanced nation in the world has so many people who lack health insurance, it makes no sense that millions more are one diagnosis or car accident away from financial disaster.
And despite the trillions of dollars we spend on healthcare, the disparity in the quality of care between the rich and everyone else grows wider.
Okay, see? So, government's spending trillions of dollars already on healthcare, and the problems are getting worse.
So, another trillion or two will make it better?
You know, this, uh...
This fifth cup of coffee is making me kind of shaky, but I bet you if I have another 15 cups of coffee, I'm going to mellow right out.
I don't think that's how it works.
So, yeah, pointing guns at people's heads and taking their money has not made healthcare cheaper.
Do you know how many additional regulations doctors are forced to deal with under Obamacare?
People who got into the medical field to help their fellow Americans and make a reasonable income are spending time with accountants and calculators, worrying about endless billing issues and regulation requirements.
And they're doing this.
When they're doing that, they're not doing other things like, say, providing free treatment at a local homeless shelter, which doctors used to do when things were free.
And it's just become a complete mess.
The other thing too, of course, in the American system, it's not at all private because every lobby group tries to get the government to force everyone to pay for their healthcare needs by making general insurance have to cover everything under the sun, which is why old people have to cover pregnancy treatments.
It's why fertile people have to cover infertility treatments and so on.
Everybody wants the government to force everyone else to pay and that's why it's not even remotely a private healthcare system in the U.S. He said, our system doesn't make economic sense and it certainly doesn't make moral sense.
Yeah, okay. If he's talking about the political system as a whole, yeah, pointing guns at everyone.
I agree. He said, in a civilized democratic society, every man, woman and child must be able to get the medical care they need regardless of income.
Okay. But how do you achieve that, right?
Just pointing guns at people, running up debt and so on.
It's just not the way to achieve it.
It doesn't work. I mean, it never occurs to these guys the high cost of health care is the product of government meddling in the health care industry.
No. At the turn of the last century, the problem with the health care industry was too cheap.
That's why doctors started getting the government to regulate things.
So, in 1988, Bernie went to the Soviet Union for his honeymoon, because nothing spells romance like the Soviet Empire.
You know, that old joke, in Soviet Russia, people wait for bread.
In capitalism, bread waits for people.
Just go to your grocery store and look.
A British Guardian recently pointed out what the newlywed socialist observed on his trip in 1988.
After receiving a rundown of central planning Soviet style from Yaroslavl's mayor, Alexander Ryabkov, Sanders notes how the quality of both housing and healthcare in America appears to be significantly better than the communist state.
However, he added, the cost of both services is much, much higher in the United States.
But so is the income, Bernie. Just kind of wanted to mention that.
Given Bernie's incompetence regarding simple economics, he probably failed to factor in the different standards of living because Soviet healthcare was far, far from affordable for a lot of people.
Let's see what a woman who was born, raised and educated in the Soviet Union has to say about Bernie's Soviet healthcare system.
Quote, medical care in the Soviet Union became a producer-oriented industry instead of a consumer-oriented market that it had been in old Russia.
But even the state cannot kill the market just as the state cannot repeal the laws of God and nature.
The market was simply driven underground and thus became the black market.
The black market response to state rationing occurred immediately.
Doctor services and pharmaceutical products, both domestic and foreign-made, as well as access to medical testing equipment became available for bribes.
Unfortunately, only the wealthy elite could afford expensive black market medical services, while the poor majority could no longer count upon charity.
In the world of, quote, free medical care in the Soviet Union, people often had to have connections to obtain many of the medicines prescribed by physicians to save their family members and friends.
Indifferent and often hostile nurses and orderlies had to be bright to change a patient's bedpan or to provide ordinary attention that any American would take for granted during a stay in a hospital.
Hospital wards were crowded, and far from antiseptically clean.
Aesthetics and basic painkillers were frequently unavailable.
The crying of patients in pain could sometimes be heard from outside a hospital by passers-by.
So why am I bringing up the Soviet Union with regards to our carty old, wild-haired grandpa who wants to give people free stuff?
So, I mean, look, sinus has other public positions.
They're exactly what you expect.
Rich bad! I'll give you free stuff!
Rinse... Wash, repeat, same thing over.
So, look, people in the writing say, what is your opinion on Burley Saunders?
He's... I hate to say it.
I mean, we went through this presentation.
I went and reorganized this presentation so many times because...
He's boring.
He's predictable and dull.
Like all socialists, he's completely divorced from physical, economic, and human reality, but is very in tune with the discontented greed of the masses that anxiously look for scapegoats for their own irresponsibility and beg for politicians to give them free goodies that will be stolen from everyone's future children.
The fact that a socialist has recently surpassed potentially brain-damaged Hillary Clinton in favorability polls doesn't surprise me, given that the United States has already a massive number of socialist policies in place.
What's interesting is that Sanders is not even trying to hide his socialist agenda, unlike other politicians, yet his popularity is surging in the very country that fervently opposed the Soviet Union for decades.
Socialist is a dirty word for a reason, but hey, at least he's honest.
I recently put out a video.
On the causes behind the collapse of Greece.
It's called the fall of Greece.
Prepare yourself accordingly. I strongly recommend that you watch it.
Because I feel the same trend is repeating itself in the United States.
When someone offers you something for free, it starts off as a cobweb and it ends as a chain.
It's like a bad habit. It starts as a cobweb, ends as a chain.
It's like an addiction to a drug.
It starts as a high and ends with a crash and destruction.
The true freedom in life, what makes you truly free?
As in liberated, not deluded.
What makes you truly free is understanding that there's no such thing as free.
There's no such thing as free in this world, and everyone who tries to tell you that there's something that you can get for free is giving you the drug called delusion in order to enslave you forever.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Free Domain Radio.
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