Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - How You're Screwed in the West

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July 21, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

08:08

How You're Screwed in the West

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	All right.
	Let us count the ways in which you as a young man are screwed in the West.
	Let's talk about economics.
	So manufacturing jobs, which were the traditional ways that lower to middle class men provided for their families, have dropped from 17.2 million in 1980 to 12.8 million in 2020.
	Later figures were a little hard to come by, but that is not at a time when the population has declined.
	So the traditional stepping stone out of the lower class, the poor class to the middle class, was manufacturing, which has been absolutely eviscerated in America.
	Now, of course, I'm not just going to talk about America, but I'm going to focus on America because that's where the majority of my listeners are.
	And I want to follow the audience and hit them where they live, right?
	Real median earnings for men aged 25 to 34 have remained nearly flat since the 1970s.
	While median home prices have risen from 2020, from 2000 to 2020, adjusted for inflation, real wages are flat.
	Median home prices have risen 121%, right?
	That's much more than doubled.
	Absolutely catastrophic.
	So this economic squeeze, where wages have remained stagnant, job opportunities have declined while house prices have gone through the roof has completely screwed young men in terms of their confidence in their ability to provide for a family.
	Because if you're not confident you can provide for a family, what are you bringing to the table?
	And this inability for tens of millions of young men to effectively provide for a family has driven women into the 666 thing, right?
	Six foot tall, six figures, a six pack.
	They can now afford to look for the pretty boys because they don't need or can't get the providing boys.
	So that's how men, one of the many examples in which men have been shafted in the modern economy.
	At the same time as men's wages have been depressed, women's wages have been wildly artificially elevated to truly stratospheric levels of HR email job fantasy nonsense.
	This is why people got so mad at the dancing women in the office, you know, this itty bitty titty sitting bar, all of that kind of stuff.
	Because it's like, really was starting in the 1960s where you had equal pay for work of equal value, which was a bunch of legislation that made it illegal, illegal to pay women less than what was called equal pay for work of equal value, which makes zero sense whatsoever because you get what you negotiate for, not what the government forces people to pay you.
	That's a form of fascism.
	That's a form of economic tyranny.
	And of course, one of the reasons why women were paid less is because, oh, I don't know, continuing civilization seems like a pretty decent idea.
	I know for a lot of young men, not at the moment, but continuing civilization seems like a pretty decent idea.
	Now, to continue civilization, which is not just about dropping pops, squeezing out pops and dropping them off at daycare for people with bizarre accents to raise.
	No, it's actually having children, staying home with the children, putting some of the man's values and the woman's values into the minds of the children.
	Men don't pay women to raise their children.
	We don't pay women to raise our children.
	We could pay anyone, and it would be cheaper to just raise our children, to feed and clothe and play with them.
	We pay women because 90% of a married man's income when he's got kids goes to his wife and children, 90%.
	So what do we pay women for?
	We pay women to transfer the values we both share into the minds of the children.
	That's the civilization is not the buildings, it's not the houses, it's not the roads, it's not the money, it's not the GDP, goddamn GDP, this God that everyone sacrifices their juggulars for.
	Civilization are the values that we have fought to achieve and maintain.
	So if you want civilization to continue, women don't just have to have babies, they've got to stay home and raise those babies so that the values of civilization can continue.
	Now, if you have three kids and you give birth, you breastfeed for a year and a half, which is the recommended amount, then you look to have another baby, takes maybe a little while to get pregnant, you've got nine months of pregnancy and then another 18 months and so blah, blah, blah.
	We're talking at least to get the kids to school age, three kids?
	Six to 10 years.
	At a bare minimum, to get the youngest to the age of five.
	And often longer.
	So that's six to ten years out of the workforce.
	Now, if you are an employer and you have the choice between a young man and a young woman, when you have a Fecon society, a fertility-based society, do you want to hire the young man knowing that he's going to work harder when he has kids?
	Or do you want to hire the young woman who's going to quit, probably?
	If you want your civilization to continue, someone's going to have to transfer the values to the children.
	And it ain't going to be the daycare workers, bros.
	I worked in a daycare for years as a teenager.
	This was not the trivium.
	This was not a monastery where the intense and dedicated values of Greco-Roman Christian civilization would pass on to the tender minds of the young.
	No, it was wrangling kids so that they didn't stuff Lego blocks down each other's throats.
	But in order to lure women out of the home, the government had to artificially raise their wages, which meant that if you are a woman and you're at a particular position, you can take your employer to court if he's not paying you what you think you're worth.
	In other words, the eternal cry of the younger sibling and others in society, ah, no fair, suddenly got the armed might of the state behind it.
	Women were lured out of the home so that the government could take over the raising of the children And indoctrinate them with status values, the women were lured out of the home with a bunch of things, right?
	One, of course, old age pensions, the welfare state, and artificially high wages, and then endless initiatives.
	I mean, I worked in an HR department in my early teens, and the DEI stuff, which we'll get to later, and all of that was in sort of full fledge and swing.
	And of course, when businesses are forced to hire a lot of women, they have to create what are called the pink ghettos, which is the HR departments and training departments and all other sorts of things, which didn't really need to exist before women were lured and bribed into the workplace.
	Now, just to be clear, I mean, this is sort of the steel men argument.
	My personal opinion for what it's worth is that, yeah, women should be absolutely economically free to do whatever they want.
	Absolutely economically free.
	But at the same time, they shouldn't have access to men's taxpayer money through the power of the state.
	So old age pensions meant that women didn't have to worry about getting old.
	In other words, they didn't have to worry about having a very close bond with their children so the children would take care of them when they got old.
	Artificially high wages meant that they didn't need men to be providers.
	The growth of daycare meant that they could dump their kids in daycare, where kids go through elevated stress levels and have a terrible time of it overall.
	And of course, women pouring into the workforce lowered the amount of money available to pay men.
	Now, if you get highly productive people into the workforce, then everybody's wages go up.
	But when you have people who kind of come and go, they don't work as hard.
	Women don't work as hard as men statistically.
	There's no hate on women.
	I'm just talking about facts, right?
	Women don't work as hard.

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