Dec. 28, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:36
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| The most persecuted and in many ways the most horrendously treated refugees on the planet are people's precious life savings. | |
| You know, you pour your life into work, you You defer your consumption, you defer your happiness, you defer your gratification, you save and you hoard like squirrels with nuts for the winter, and then the Federal Reserve prints money, people borrow like crazy, and it all gets inflated away to nothing. | |
| Your precious life savings are on the constant run, hide, dodge, and dither to get away from the giant predators of fiat currency. | |
| Fiat currency is hunting the precious years of your life that you have saved up in order to have money later, and it's constantly hunting. | |
| So where do you have to go? | |
| Well, you can't leave your money in the bank. | |
| You can't leave it under your mattress. | |
| It just gets eaten away. | |
| Constant gnawing. | |
| Like, every piece of grain you store gets gnawed on by rats. | |
| Always, always, always. | |
| So you've got to put it somewhere. | |
| You've got to put it somewhere. | |
| So where do you put it? | |
| Well, you put it in the stock market. | |
| You put it in some retirement savings plan, 401k, RSPs in Canada. | |
| So you're constantly being hunted. | |
| Your savings are being hunted. | |
| Everything you save gets evaporated by inflation and changing taxes and regulations and so on. | |
| So you can't put it in the bank. | |
| Your money dies. | |
| Your money should stay. | |
| Your money should stay. | |
| On the blockchain, it can. | |
| In the bank account, it evaporates and dies. | |
| So where do you put your money? | |
| Well, you have to put it in the stock market. | |
| Why do you have to put your money in the stock market? | |
| Because it's the only thing that can possibly give you a chance of at least keeping pace with inflation. | |
| People put money in the stock market, not to make money, but to avoid having their money stolen through inflation. | |
| That's why people put their money in the stock market. | |
| So there's way too much money in the stock market. | |
| And it's all charging around, right? | |
| So people should be in the stock market because they understand the industry, they know the people maybe, they know the variables, they're in it for the long haul, and there should be very little money in the stock market as a whole because people should be able to hold on to their money by keeping it in the bank or keeping it under their mattress if they want. | |
| In fact, hopefully the money should increase in value over time. | |
| So, because you're saving money when productivity is lower, and then as more money gets invested into businesses, productivity goes up. | |
| Worker productivity is the only real measure of an economy. | |
| So you're saving money when worker productivity is low, and then you're spending that money in 5 or 10 or 20 years' time when worker productivity is much higher, so your money should gain in value over time. | |
| Instead, it gets pillaged and robbed by the endless termites burrowing into the basis of dollars. | |
| So, massive amounts of money are driven as refugees from inflation into the stock market. | |
| Way too much money in the stock market. | |
| So, what happens is, the money is just charging around, looking for the tiniest little disparities, right? | |
| The tiniest, oh, this guy made 0.02% more. | |
| Oh, this guy made 0.02% less. | |
| Oh, this person has a big plan. | |
| This person cut their payroll by 8%. | |
| And you're just charging, buying, selling, buying, selling at all times. | |
| And the CEOs of these companies have stopped thinking about their customers, have stopped thinking about long-term plans, have stopped thinking about the general trends in the industry, and they're thinking about and rewarded and punished by very, very short-term changes In stock price, based upon massive amounts of money charging around, sniffing out the slightest disparity in data, income, and so on. | |
| So any company that can cut its payroll gets a massive increase in the stock price. | |
| Stock prices should not massively increase in a short amount of time, in general, because The CEOs who are responsible for that often make enough to retire in two days. | |
| And it's just wretched for the economy as a whole. | |
| Nobody can plan for the long term. | |
| Everybody's looking to create some tiny advantage to get the stock price up rather than planning for the long term. | |
| And of course, a lot of these buying and selling of stocks is automated. | |
| I know this because I worked on these very programs myself. | |
| And I also have taken... | |
| I've been in the process of taking a company public, so I've seen what short-term swings in stock value does to a company. | |
| It makes everyone kind of mental. | |
| And everyone's simply focused on the short-term. | |
| So, what are they doing? | |
| Well, they want to bring people in who can't talk back, who can't fight them on anything, because if you lose your job, you get deported, really. | |
| So... | |
| They just want people they can control, and they also want to change the numbers briefly to get themselves super rich on stock prices and so on, right? | |
| So in 2020, 70% of H-1B visa workers were in computer-related occupations, while 9% were in engineering, architecture, and surveying. | |
| 2021, 74.1% of H-1B visas were approved for Indian nationals, while 12.4% were approved for Chinese nationals. | |
| 2022 was the highest number of H-1B visa issuances in the program's history, with 206,002 new and initial visas issued. | |
| Fiscal year 2007, the H-1B cap was reached on April 2nd, with petitions submitted by May 26th. | |
| Excellent. | |
| So, the cap is reached almost immediately, just about every year. | |
| 2009, according to the Department of Homeland Security's report, the top occupations for H-1B visa holders were computer and mathematical occupations, 44.1%, engineering occupations, 21.4%, architecture and engineering occupations, 6.3%. | |
| One in four H-1B applications do not require a bachelor's degree. | |
| Highly skilled, apparently, do not require a bachelor's degree. | |
| Average age of an H-1B worker, 33. Well, and also, America since the 1960s, as is the case in most of the West, have shifted from a meritocracy to, you know, ethnicity and gender-based quota systems. | |
| So, that's also a big problem, right? | |
| So, this is from the American Immigration Council. | |
| The H-1B is a temporary non-immigrant visa category that allows employers to petition for highly educated foreign professionals to work in specialty occupations that require at least a bachelor's degree or the equivalent. | |
| Jobs in fields such as mathematics, engineering, technology, and medical sciences often qualify. | |
| Typically, the initial duration of an H-1B visa classification is three years, which may be extended for a maximum of six years. | |
| Before an employer can file a petition with USCIS, the employer must take steps to ensure that hiring the foreign worker will not harm U.S. workers. | |
| It's a little hard, like once you understand some basic economics, it's a little hard to understand how it's possible to hire hundreds of thousands of foreign workers without it affecting U.S. workers. | |
| That's just supply and demand. | |
| The more supply, the lower the cost. |
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