Jan. 15, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:55
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| So there's a war between rich and poor in the free market. | |
| In a free market, the rich are constantly tumbling down, like the churn between poor and wealthy is constant. | |
| And I experienced this directly. | |
| So when I was a broadcast student paying $270 a month for my room and board, and my room and board was pretty cheap too, I could afford to work for very little money. | |
| I could afford to... | |
| Take almost no salary for the first year or two of my entrepreneurial life, whereas rich people with a high burn rate can't. | |
| Right now, I mean, I remember working that the CEO of the company had a very high burn rate. | |
| He had kids in university. | |
| He had a home to be paid. | |
| He had two or three cars. | |
| He had a cottage up north. | |
| He had to spend a lot of money. | |
| It's a high burn rate. | |
| I could live on very little. | |
| So as far as competition went, the poor, the smart poor can out-compete. | |
| The smart rich. | |
| Now, the smart rich have their contacts, which is great, but the smart poor have low overhead, so they can charge less. | |
| So, it is the business of the corrupt wealthy to use the state to sabotage the ambitious poor. | |
| And the way they do that, it's multifold, but one of the ways they do that is to advocate for the release of criminals. | |
| Criminals get released into poor neighborhoods, screw up the lives of the poor, interfere with their sleep, and disrupt their education. | |
| You want to be an entrepreneur in the poor neighborhood? | |
| You're screwed because everybody would just steal your stuff, right? | |
| And I'm sure you've seen these videos of people in poor neighborhoods, you know, they're walking around with a PS5 box and people are like, hey man, I'll buy that from you. | |
| They're like, no, I don't want to sell it. | |
| And they just grab it and run, right? | |
| So you can't really be an entrepreneur in a poor neighborhood because the rich people are all advocating for the... | |
| Poor criminals to be released into the poor neighborhood, screws up people's entrepreneurship, screws up their education, screws up their sleep habits, because there's this constant yelling and gunfire when they're trying to sleep, and it screws up their exercise, because they've got to stay home, because it's too dangerous, so they can't go out and play, they can't learn social skills through spontaneous sports organization, as I did when I was a kid. | |
| I mean, we were poor, but I learned a lot of social skills just going out, being broke with the other poor kids, and roaming around, coming up with games, and all of that sort of stuff, the stuff that I write about in Almost. | |
| You also screw up the poor. | |
| As a wealthy person, you screw up the poor by advocating for government schools. | |
| You know that the schools are going to be much better in your neighborhood, and you're going to have the money to get private tutors and so on. | |
| The poor don't have that. | |
| The only chance the poor have, most of the poor, the only chance that they have to get out of being poor is to have good education, right? | |
| And so by advocating for government schools, Where the income and the teacher quality is based upon property tax receipts, sabotages the poor. | |
| Advocating for the welfare state has nothing to do with compassion for the poor. | |
| It is how the wealthy class sabotage the poor. | |
| So, you advocate for the welfare state, that takes the fathers out of the homes, which cripples the sons who might compete with you. | |
| So, most policies advocated by wealthy liberals in particular, Are there to sabotage the poor so they can't be outcompeted? | |
| Because rich people, when they become wealthy, they always want to build fences around their wealth, right? | |
| They don't want to lose it because they know that they're going to have not exactly idiot kids, but they're going to have regression to the mean kids, right? | |
| So someone's really smart, really entrepreneurial. | |
| Their kids will be more smart and more entrepreneurial than the average, but much less usually than the parents because there's a regression to the mean. | |
| So when you build wealth, You want to keep that wealth, and the best way you do that in a state of society is to create barriers to entry, right? | |
| So licensing and paperwork and bureaucracy and really complicated tax codes and corporate structures, and so you create massive barriers to entry, and then you just work as hard as you can to sabotage the poor who are going to out-compete you, because there's this churn. | |
| There's like the scattershot of brilliance and entrepreneurship goes wide, and you get this light landing on smart poor people. | |
| All the time. | |
| I mean, I grew up in fairly grinding poverty and have made a fairly decent go of things in my life, but against a lot of resistance, right? | |
| And so the wealthy people, particularly on the left, they're just trying to do what the old aristocrats used to just use the power of the state to get their hereditary lands and their titles and all of that, and then kill people, kill people who poached on their land, who hunted, right? | |
| Kill people who opposed them or questioned them or opposed them. | |
| My ancestor William Molyneux was hiding in barns in Ireland with his best friend John Locke being hunted by the king because he questioned some of the virtue and value of the king's commandments. | |
| So, the wealthy gaining wealth and then using the power of the state to sabotage the poor, who they cannot compete with in the long run, is a constant factor. | |
| And so, all these luxury beliefs, And they didn't think that the luxury beliefs would come back to bite them, right? | |
| They didn't think that the luxury beliefs... | |
| Environmentalism is a luxury belief, and I don't mean taking care of the environment. | |
| We've been doing that since time immemorial. | |
| Farmers have been rotating their crops and letting their lands lie fallow to protect the long-term value of... | |
| I mean, people take care of their cars so that they don't burn out and destroy themselves and so on. | |
| But hyper-environmentalism is a way of destroying the opportunities of poorer people, right? | |
| A bunch of carbon taxes and diversity also can do some of the same stuff by replacing something other than pure meritocracy. | |
| See, in pure meritocracy, the poor will out-compete the wealthy over time. | |
| Because their cost of living are lower, they can undercharge for the goods that the wealthy require. | |
| And plus, Nothing whets your appetite for success like being a brokie when you're young. | |
| And so the young, intelligent, entrepreneurial kids are hungry for success in a way that the offspring of wealthy kids just aren't. | |
| Just aren't. | |
| I mean, I desperately needed money. | |
| I was hungry to work. | |
| I had three jobs in high school, late junior high and high school, because I desperately wanted to get ahead. | |
| I wanted to date. | |
| I wanted to have some money for the things that I wanted to do. | |
| I had to pay bills. | |
| So I was just hungry. | |
| None of my wealthy, and I knew a couple of middle-class and upper-middle-class kids. | |
| Actually, most of my friends, yeah, most of my friends from about the age of 13 or 14 onwards, as was the benefit of having a brother, is I had some pretty illusory friends when my mother was depressed and institutionalized, as you can imagine. | |
| But then my brother had some slightly better friends, actually substantially better friends, higher status friends, so I did a certain switcheroo. |
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