- 5 days ago
Philosopher Stefan Molyneux discusses the relationship between wealth creation, economic education, and societal perceptions of billionaires. He critiques public schooling for failing to promote true economic understanding and challenges the narrative that billionaires hoard wealth, using Jeff Bezos as an example of positive economic impact through job creation. Stefan emphasizes the dangers of impulsive wealth distribution and stresses the need for sustainable investment over consumer spending. Stefan concludes with a call for educational reform, advocating for teaching economic principles to empower individuals and benefit society.
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LearningTranscript
00:00So, of course, the government isn't going to teach you anything that is going to make it possible for you to succeed.
00:08And universities are going to constantly rail against any improvements in regular school, public school, because they need public schools to suck.
00:20So they have something to offer. But the level of economic education, like, you know, I mean, Billie Eilish, right?
00:29I mean, what are you going to say? Good singer and all that, but kind of demonic in her tastes.
00:35But she's like, oh, just give away, give away your billions.
00:42If you're a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? Give your money away, blah, blah, blah.
00:45I'm going to make some bird hands here. And of course, she wouldn't have learned anything intelligent about any of this stuff in government schools.
00:54Government schools are run on communistic principles, which is why communism continually spreads the moment you hand over your children to the state.
01:02You know, it's the old argument that don't be shocked, don't be shocked if you send your kids to be educated by Caesar and they come back as Romans.
01:13So I just wanted to lay out to you why it's a generally bad idea.
01:17Now, of course, there are those who become wealthy because of the government and money printing and central banking and war.
01:25So all of that, that's fine. But you don't put billionaires in the same category.
01:31And yes, everybody has to make their compromises with the system that is.
01:35But I'm talking about the billionaires who have earned their money in the general free market.
01:44So you can only earn billions by creating trillions in value.
01:50Trillions of dollars worth of goods and services, efficiency, and jobs.
01:55It'd be nice if I could say the word efficiently, efficiently.
01:59So if you're worth billions, it's because you've created trillions in economic value.
02:03How have you done that? By serving people's needs and preferences and saving them money.
02:07So you look at Jeff Bezos. He has helped countless people because they can get goods cheaper.
02:11So he's already saving them money.
02:14He's already giving them extra income or giving them access to goods and services they may not otherwise get.
02:19If they happen to be disabled or can't easily get to stores, they can have everything delivered.
02:23If they're shut-ins, agoraphobic, whatever you want to call it, right?
02:27So he's already created trillions of dollars worth of value.
02:31He's already helped the poor enormously.
02:33And of course, Amazon, for example, has hired hundreds of thousands of people over the course of its history, thus giving them good wages.
02:43And of course, when you hire people, you help the wages not only, of course, of the people that you're hiring,
02:48but you help the wages of everyone else because you've taken hundreds of thousands of workers off the market,
02:56which will drive up the wages for everyone else who's still in the market because there's less supply.
03:02It's been sort of soaked up.
03:04So it's not the having the billions that matters, right?
03:13If you look at a statue and you look at its shadow, the primary cause of the shadow,
03:21the sole cause of the shadow, I guess, is the combination of the statue and the sunlight that casts in the shadow.
03:27So the shadow is the billion dollars.
03:31The sunlight of the statue is the creating of trillions of dollars worth of economic value.
03:39That's, I'm sure, pretty clear.
03:41And you've already helped the poor enormously, particularly companies like Amazon.
03:45You've already helped the poor enormously because you have helped save the money in thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars worth of purchases.
03:57They've saved money because they go to Amazon, which has created a much more worldwide competition for the provision of goods.
04:05Now, it takes a slow-eyed singer to imagine that if you're a billionaire, your furniture is made out of $100 bills and your house is constructed of gold coins.
04:23You have all of this money.
04:25So when people talk about billionaires, of course, they're not talking about people who got billions of dollars in the bank
04:30because if you have billions of dollars, the last place you'd want to put it is some kind of government bank
04:37or government-controlled and regulated bank because you're not going to get anything really in terms of interest, right?
04:49So why do people have billions of dollars?
04:54Well, they don't have billions of dollars.
04:56They have billions of dollars in assets, right?
04:59Again, that's a very different thing.
05:01So let's talk about Bob.
05:03Bob founds a company that's created trillions of dollars of economic value, and Bob is a billionaire.
05:10So Bob is a billionaire because he has a lot of money in his company.
05:17Let's call it ABC, right?
05:18Bob has created the key founder of the company ABC as a CEO.
05:22He's got billions of dollars worth of stock in company ABC, and company ABC has hired 10,000 people.
05:30There's probably more, but let's just say 10,000 people.
05:32Okay.
05:34So he's a billionaire on paper.
05:38He's a billionaire on paper.
05:40Now, of course, if he sells those shares, he has to pay capital gains taxes and so on, so he doesn't actually have that money.
05:46It's only on paper.
05:48If you have an asset and you sell it and you have to pay, I think, for businesses here in Canada, it's a 66% capital gains tax.
05:56Well, then you don't actually end up with your billion dollars, and so it's not a real asset that way.
06:04The other thing is that by founding ABC company, Bob has produced trillions of dollars worth of value, and he has a billion dollars worth of shares.
06:15If he tries to sell those shares, if he goes to sell those shares, people will assume that either he's ill, he's quitting, the company has big problems, it's going to be investigated, it's got some fraud.
06:26They're going to assume the worst, and they're going to sell the shares along with him, and the price is not going to end up being a billion dollars.
06:31He certainly doesn't get to sell the shares and take home a billion dollars because of capital gains taxes, but even if he tries to sell, unless he sells it really subtly staggered through third parties over many years, people are going to be saying, oh, Bob is selling his ABC shares, therefore, there's got to be something wrong with the company, therefore, I'm going to sell my shares too, and then the share price will go from 100 to 50 to 25 to 10.
06:54I mean, we've all seen this kind of stuff happen before in the market in various ways.
07:01So he doesn't actually have that.
07:04He doesn't actually have that money.
07:05It's just paper stuff.
07:07It's not something that he can give to the poor.
07:11He doesn't have a billion dollars that he can just go out to Alistair Simmsile and hand all of this money to the poor.
07:20I mean, it's crazy.
07:23Now, if Bob, let's say, listens to smoky-voiced Billie Eilish and says, well, I'm going to sell these shares, and I'm just going to give the money to the poor.
07:37Well, investments are when you give a company money with the goal or intention of that company investing that money to create value in the free market.
07:54When I co-founded a software company a long time ago now, post-dos, but Windows 3.1 had just come out.
08:05I think it was a while ago.
08:07But so we went around hat in hand.
08:10My co-founder and I went around hat in hand to all the people we knew, and we managed to scrounge together $80,000 that we used to start the company.
08:17And the initial investors got crazy returns, man.
08:21It was great.
08:22So they gave us $80,000, and then we turned that into a company that was worth more, obviously, than $80,000.
08:31So what we did was we turned those $80,000 into jobs for, I think, at the peak point, it was over 30 people.
08:48So a decent success, obviously.
08:50Not huge, but a decent success.
08:52And so we turned that $80,000 into a payroll of several million dollars a year over time.
09:02And that hired people.
09:04That gave them an income that, again, raised everyone else's income a tiny bit because we were taking people out of circulation.
09:10I would go down to the university, and I would interview students, and we would give them internships.
09:17And I would sort of train and coach them on business so that they were more than just code jockeys.
09:24And it was a very productive and positive environment.
09:26And I loved my business career until the boomers swooped in and corrupted everything.
09:30But that's a story for another time.
09:32But what happens if you sell your shares, right?
09:40Bob sells his shares in ABC Company.
09:41What happens is fewer people want to give ABC Company the money to expand, and fewer people want to work there because the stock price is going down.
09:54So you lose access to a lot of talent, right?
09:57And talent is the entire difference between success and failure.
10:02Talent is the entire difference between success and failure, right?
10:06And Queen loses Freddie Mercury.
10:08They never write any really good songs or decent songs again.
10:13I mean, the rest of the band is spectacularly talented, but that cohesion when Freddie Mercury was gone.
10:19If the movie has Brad Pitt in it, it's going to get investment.
10:22If it has a bunch of unknowns, it's probably not going to get – certainly wouldn't get the same level of investment because Brad Pitt opens and runs and sustains a movie.
10:28And because people are interested in Brad Pitt, you get some sort of free automatic marketing, and he can do the interview tour, all that kind of stuff.
10:35So if Bob sells his shares in ABC Company, and the share price goes down, which means the company is in trouble, which means it has a bad reputation, which means people don't want to work there, some people may get laid off, and so on.
10:59And what's Bob's incentive to go to work and work 16 hours a day as he has to build a multi-billion dollar company if he's just going to sell all his shares?
11:12People will assume that his motivation has gone down.
11:15His motivation has reduced.
11:18So they will assume that his magic Midas touch of economic productivity is going to be less, and so the belief is that the company is not going to do well.
11:27And a company does as well and badly in the long run as people perceive it's going to be.
11:32I mean, there's the consumers, of course, and so buying stuff and so on.
11:35But in terms of investment and talent, if the share price is going down, people don't want to work there, and you don't get those magic Pareto principle people that just produce between 25 – just a few dozen people produce between 25 and 50% of the value of the entire company.
11:49And if you don't have those people, and you can't get those people if the share price is going down, or if there's a perception that the company is in trouble, you can't get those people, which means that the company is going to fail.
12:01So if the company does badly or fails or is sold or something like that, that is a hostile takeover, then people get laid off.
12:09And the survival of the company comes into question.
12:16I mean, you can coast for a long time on momentum, of course, right?
12:21I mean, Apple has produced very little other than phones and tablets for the last decade, decade and a half.
12:30The innovation has kind of gone, but, you know, they can go along and coast along on talent.
12:36That's all right.
12:37Sorry, not on talent, on reputation, right?
12:40They can do all of that.
12:44So if Bob were to take all of his shares and sell them and convert them into some sort of cash that he could hand out to the poor,
12:56then Bob, his company would lose many multiples of the value of the share price he was selling.
13:06Because if you're the founder and you're selling, people think the company's in trouble, so more people sell.
13:11So the market cap of the company goes down enormously.
13:15Bob also, by the way, might get sued because you have a fiduciary responsibility as a CEO.
13:20So if you knowingly take actions that harm the share price, you are harming all the shareholders.
13:27And the value of their shares goes down enormously, right?
13:31So, I mean, if Bob has, let's just say, 50% or 51% of the shares he wants to keep control.
13:38Well, there's 49% of shares that are out there held by tens of thousands of people or more institutions.
13:44People rely upon that for their retirement.
13:46They rely upon that for their kids' education.
13:48They rely upon that for their emergency funds and so on.
13:52And so by selling his shares, Bob then causes a cratering of the share price as a whole.
13:57The continuity of the company starts to come into question.
14:00They can't get any more talent.
14:01They're susceptible to a hostile takeover because Bob no longer controls the company,
14:05which means lots of people are going to get laid off.
14:07There's going to be a whole restructuring, you know, the whole thing, the whole mess.
14:10So the net net, of course, of Bob listening to sultry-eyed Billie Eilish is that thousands
14:23and thousands of people are going to lose their job.
14:26Tens or hundreds of thousands of people are going to lose significant portions of their
14:29life savings.
14:31And ironically, Bob is going to create a lot of poor people.
14:36So I don't mean to laugh, but it's like, why we listen to people about things that
14:40they don't understand.
14:43I mean, she knows how to what?
14:45Wear baggy clothes, put up makeup, and sing the songs her brother wrote.
14:49I mean, why would we listen to her about anything?
14:52I don't know.
14:53It's a mystery.
14:54But, you know, pretty women can say a bunch of nonsense.
14:59It's why there's astrology.
15:01Because men just get disarmed by their attractiveness and don't tell them the basic truth.
15:05But, hey, I'm a happily married guy and way out of Billie Eilish's league.
15:11Listen to me.
15:12Anyway, so by trying to help the poor by giving away his bill, you say, ah, yes, well, he can
15:22just give away the shares.
15:24Okay.
15:24But then he's just giving it to other people.
15:26And the fact that he's transferring shares still causes the cascade effect of the shares
15:32losing value and people taking a massive hit to their life savings.
15:37They can't retire.
15:37They can't fund their kids' education.
15:39They don't have their nest egg.
15:40They, right, they've lost a lot of their money.
15:42And ironically, of course, if people put six months salary into ABC shares company, the
15:48company, the shares of ABC company, they put six months salary in and it goes down by 50%.
15:54They've just lost three months worth of labor.
15:56They've worked three months for nothing, which makes them poorer because then their actual
16:01salary, instead of being over, their actual salary for three months is now covering six
16:08months, which means they've made half their salary in the time they used to buy the shares
16:12have gone down 50% in value.
16:14So instead of making $40 an hour for that time period, they now only made $20 an hour
16:19instead of 30, 15, you get it, right?
16:22So they've actually become poorer in hindsight.
16:26So the other big thing that happens if Bob sells his shares to give money to the poor,
16:33let's say that somehow all of these cascade effects can be bypassed.
16:38It doesn't really matter.
16:42It's still catastrophic to the economy and it's catastrophic to poor people for Bob to
16:48sell his shares, even if nothing else happens, even if he just magically snap his fingers
16:52and have a bunch of money, which he can just then go and give to the poor.
17:00He just walks up and down the street and gives poor people $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, whatever
17:04it is.
17:04So he goes and does what Billie Eilish thinks that he should do.
17:14Because she gets up early and goes on Howard Stern and tries to hit notes.
17:17All right.
17:17So what happens?
17:21Okay.
17:22So capital versus consumption goods, right?
17:25There's capital goods versus consumption goods.
17:28Consumption goods are things that you buy that don't, that can't add economic value in the
17:37long run.
17:37And that, that those are consumption goods.
17:42And I'm like, I'm not an economist.
17:43So I'm just using these words colloquially.
17:46So there's consumption goods, which you buy that do not add economic value.
17:52So you're hungry, you buy a sandwich and it's fine.
17:55I mean, we got to eat, right?
17:56It's nothing, nothing wrong.
17:57It's no, there's no big moral thing one way or the other.
18:00I'm just talking about the division, right?
18:01So let's say the people who gave my partner and I $80,000 back in the day to start a company.
18:10Let's say that those people had instead taken that $80,000 and used it for a, to tour Europe,
18:18right?
18:19They each one, they all got together on a big bus or a bit more than a van, but they went
18:23and they toured Europe, right?
18:25Okay.
18:25And that's, again, there's nothing wrong with that.
18:28Travel is fun.
18:29You know, life is not just about maximizing economic opportunities, but also enjoying,
18:33you know, the fruits of your labor.
18:34So, so let's say that that had happened.
18:36Well, they would have taken all of their money and they would have given it to tour guides
18:42and they would have given it to hotels and restaurants and coffee shops and souvenir shops
18:47and bus charter companies and all of that.
18:50And that's fine.
18:51And it would have been consumed, consumed in the production of, you know, fun and memories.
18:55And again, I'm not a Protestant, you know, Calvinist work ethic guy.
18:59That's, that's fine.
19:00You go and enjoy your trips to Europe, but it would not have created the kind of economic
19:06value that investing in a company that grows and hires a lot of people.
19:11Now, of course you're saying, and you're right to say, yes, but they're going and they're
19:15causing jobs, uh, to, to, they're causing jobs, uh, in, in Europe and, and, and so on.
19:22And that's, that certainly is true.
19:23They, they're transferring, but it's a transfer of money.
19:25It is not an increase in money.
19:28It's a transfer of money, not an increase in money.
19:32By investing in the company, we created a company that was worth quite a bit of money,
19:37certainly more than $80,000.
19:38I think it was $80,004 and change, but inflation anyway, but by taking the $80,000 and investing
19:46in a company, they caused, you know, 20, 30 jobs to be created.
19:50The company sustained itself for, uh, decades and there was a net increase in economic value.
19:59When they take their money and they take it over and they pay a tour guide, uh, then nobody's
20:04investing in any capital improvement.
20:06And again, nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with it, assuming that the tour guide
20:09is not taking the money and investing it in companies and so on.
20:11It's just, let's say he, there's a tour guide, um, let's, uh, Konstantin, Konstantin, the tour
20:18guide, he is throwing them Europe in many ways with an unidentifiable accent.
20:23So they go over and they give a thousand dollars to Konstantin and Konstantin buys his lunch and
20:28he pays rent and, and, and, and all of that is great.
20:30You've got to live, you've got to have a shelter, but it doesn't, it doesn't increase the
20:33economic value.
20:34It's consumption.
20:36If you go out to a bar and you have your crystal bottle service and you pay a thousand dollars
20:47in some soprano style way, you pay a thousand dollars to, to drink and listen to music and,
20:53and so on, uh, you've not added to the economic value of society.
20:58You've had fun and fun is a value.
21:01So, um, again, I'm not being, uh, puritanical that way, but it's not an increase in value.
21:08If you take that thousand dollars and you invest in a company that then goes up in value 20 times,
21:13then you have a net increase in, uh, in value, right?
21:16So there's consumption and then there's capital, capital goods.
21:26So capital goods is when you invest in something that adds economic value.
21:32So if you have a big lawn, right?
21:35Uh, let's say that you, um, you make a hundred dollars an hour or whatever, a good, well-paid
21:41guy and you have a big lawn and you have a, a push mower and it takes you like five hours
21:49to cut your lawn with a push mower.
21:52And that's $500 of lost economic opportunity, right?
21:59Again, if you enjoy cutting the lawn, whatever, but let's say that you then go out and you
22:04spend some money to get a seated mower that allows you to cut your lawn in half an hour
22:08instead of five hours.
22:10Well, you got, you're $450 up minus the cost of course of the, assuming that you work the
22:14other times, right?
22:15So your, your, your, your, your time is, is up.
22:18You have more time to do other things because you've invested in something that saves you
22:21four and a half hours, uh, once a, once every week or two.
22:26So that would be an investment in something that saves time, adds value, and you're better
22:32off because of it, right?
22:34So, you know, to, to take a easy example, it takes you from five hours down to half an
22:43hour.
22:44So you're saving $450 worth of economic value.
22:46Let's say that the city seated lawnmower is $4,500.
22:50Well, you, it pays for itself in 10 mowings of the lawn, so to speak, right?
22:56So that's adding economic value.
22:59And if you invest in the lawnmowing company and then they invest in equipment, robotics,
23:06whatever it is that cuts the price of the lawnmower in half, then people get a lawnmower
23:13instead of $4,500.
23:16It is $2,250.
23:19Yeah.
23:202,250, 4,500.
23:22Yes.
23:22It's, it's morning, but I can do it.
23:24I can do it.
23:24I feel like it.
23:26So, so that liberates them to spend money on other things because of the investment.
23:31They have cut the price of the lawnmower in half.
23:34So, right.
23:34You understand how this happens with TVs and computers and all this kind of funky stuff
23:38all the time.
23:39So that is an example of investment that produces economic growth and value.
23:45That's why it's called capitalism.
23:46Because you need people to save money and invest it in labor saving devices.
23:51Because capitalism is when you invest in labor to improve the only metric that really works
23:57is worker productivity per hour, right?
24:00If you invest in a bunch of machines, that means your workers produce $200 an hour rather
24:05than $100 an hour worth of value.
24:07Then that's good.
24:09I mean, I remember this when I got my first professional job and I came up with something
24:14that saved some money.
24:15My boss was like, well, that's great.
24:17But, you know, come up with stuff that saves me this money every month.
24:20That's real value, right?
24:23It's got to save money on a continual basis.
24:24So I was continually working.
24:26I wrote code to validate the upgrade of code from COBOL 74 to COBOL 85 because it automatically
24:33added the end if statements that were absent from COBOL 74 that were available in COBOL 85,
24:38making it much more readable.
24:39And it worked really well.
24:40It saved hundreds and hundreds of hours to run this script rather than have to review
24:45all the code by hand.
24:47And so that was, and I made that case, right?
24:50So that was, I spent a day or two working on that script and it saved hundreds and hundreds
24:54of hours.
24:54That is a net positive, right?
24:57And it saved, I was a low-level programmer at the time.
25:00That was my first coding job.
25:01And it saved hundreds of thousands of dollars because it was the more expensive coders who
25:06would have to have reviewed all that code.
25:08So that's a net plus.
25:12And it actually, by the by, gave me the confidence to go and be an entrepreneur.
25:18So there's things, if you take money from people like Bob from ABC Company, who Bob is a genius
25:27at creating businesses, adding value, investing, he knows how to make the right decisions, like
25:33Jack Welsh.
25:34He's just one of these people who has a fantastic instinct for creating value in the business
25:42world.
25:43It's fantastic and good for him.
25:45So if you take money from Bob, or Bob takes money from his own business genius Pareto principle
25:56economic multiplier brain and gives it to the poor, then the poor will use it.
26:02I mean, if you've been to poor neighborhoods, right?
26:04And I grew up in a poor neighborhood, right?
26:05If you've been to poor neighborhoods, what do you see?
26:08Well, you see porn shops.
26:09You see nail salons.
26:10You see hairstyling places.
26:12You see liquor stores.
26:13You see convenience stores, maybe a couple of drab grocery stores without the best stuff
26:18in them.
26:18Again, understandable.
26:20But the poor, generally, generally, the poor spend their money on consumer goods.
26:31They spend their money on things that they consume.
26:34And of course, if you see how obese the poor are, you can certainly see that they're overspending,
26:40right?
26:41So if they're eating 4,500 calories a day instead of what they should be eating, which
26:45is 2,000 calories a day, there's 2,500 calories worth of food that they could have saved up
26:51or invested in or something like that, right?
26:54Especially online, you can do it fairly easily now.
26:57And then they would find ways to get themselves out of poverty, right?
27:00So they tend to focus on consumer goods, right?
27:03Nails, haircuts for the women in particular, liquor, cigarettes, drugs, right?
27:09All things that you consume without adding economic value, right?
27:13If you overeat, it's a transfer of money from you to the grocery store, to the supply
27:17chain, to the farmer, and so on.
27:19But it is not an addition of value in the same way that investing is, right?
27:27And investment is there so that companies don't have to charge too much to get the capital
27:31they need to improve.
27:32That's what investment is there for.
27:34So the fact that other people are investing in companies means that the companies can
27:39charge less for their goods because they're getting investment, which they use for capital
27:42improvements rather than having to charge the customer a lot to take care of capital
27:47improvements.
27:48Half a business is selling and half of it is thinking about how you can improve your processes.
27:53I mean, I wrote something called the Database Builder when I was in the software field that
27:58you would send out a spreadsheet of everything that the customer wanted changed, and they
28:05would check it all off and add things and so on.
28:07And then it would hoover in that spreadsheet and change the entire database, the forms,
28:11the queries, the data structure, the queries, the forms, the reports, and it would even automatically
28:19build and update the web interface and so on, saving, you know, at least, at least a thousand
28:25hours of labor per customized software job.
28:30So that's, you know, took me weeks to write it and it saved us months of work, six, six,
28:37eight months of work every year.
28:39So that's sort of an example of making things more efficient and so on.
28:43So if you're taking money from billionaires and you're giving money to the poor, you are
28:48taking money from economic improvements and you are handing money to, it's hard to, it
28:59is kind of economic decay, but you're taking money from people who create new money and you're
29:07giving it to people who simply consume money, right?
29:12If you take your money from a really brilliant investor and you give it to a gambler or somebody
29:18who's an overeater, then you are taking money from people who multiply money and you're giving it to
29:25people who diminish money, who consume money.
29:30It is, in a sense, like taking money from people who know how to invest and grow it and giving it to
29:35people who use it in a bonfire to create heat in the short term, right?
29:39It is a net negative.
29:42So taking money from the productive and the brilliant at economic productivity and giving
29:52it to the poor will harm your economy.
29:57I mean, it just is because you're taking it from people who spend money to create worker
30:04efficiency and you're giving it to people who simply consume money with no future productivity
30:09growth.
30:11Like if a woman gets $100 and goes and gets her nails done, that does not add to the economic
30:18value of the society as a whole.
30:20I mean, she likes getting her nails done.
30:22And I mean, I think that the nails can be a little poisonous, but what the hell?
30:25She enjoys the girly stuff.
30:27She gets her nails done and so on.
30:29It's not necessary.
30:32Like a haircut is a little bit more necessary because especially if you have a job, but
30:36she goes, gets her nails done.
30:38It's fine.
30:38She gets her nails done, whatever, right?
30:39But it doesn't add to the economic growth of the society as a whole.
30:42So you have taken it from someone who could create five jobs with that money over time,
30:49and you've given it to someone who pays a couple of nail salon workers to do her nails.
30:58So instead of creating five jobs, you are sustaining two jobs.
31:03And the five jobs that could have been created aren't created, the two jobs that you are sustaining
31:07without any further economic growth because the nail salon workers just go and spend their
31:11money on consumables rather than investment and growth.
31:14So you are harming the economy.
31:17You are reducing the number of jobs available to people.
31:22You are decaying the economy in particular because if you have a system where you are
31:29taking a lot of money from the economically productive and creative and giving it to the
31:33economic consumption factor.
31:35And again, consumption is fine.
31:36We don't want people to starve.
31:37I get all of that.
31:38But we just have to look at the reality of the situation.
31:41So let's say all of the billionaires in America listen to Billie Eilish, sell a bunch of their
31:46shares.
31:46You get these huge, terrible effects, tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of people will lose
31:50their jobs.
31:51People will lose their life savings.
31:52They will lose their retirement packages.
31:54They will lose their money for their kids' education.
31:56They will lose everything.
31:58But let's say to satisfy Billie Eilish, people do all of that.
32:01Well, you are in the world, of course, given that we have an international economy.
32:09In the world, what you're doing is you are wrecking your own economy and you are in competition
32:17with every other economy around the world.
32:21So if you are destroying your economy by moving resources from those best able to improve
32:31those resources and giving it to people who simply consume those resources, then you're
32:36in competition with other countries that aren't doing that.
32:39So if China is not doing that, then Chinese productivity will continue to grow.
32:43Chinese efficiency will continue to grow.
32:45The value of the Chinese economy will continue to grow.
32:49The quality will improve and the cost will go down because that's the purpose of automation
32:56is to reduce costs and improve quality consistency.
32:59The Six Sigma stuff.
33:01So China will be producing better goods for cheaper prices, which means people will buy
33:06from China rather than from your domestic manufacturing.
33:09And it is just a massive cascade destruction of your economy.
33:13Some people, if you have known people that got the green thumb, they're fantastic at gardening.
33:20They just have a real instinct, an affinity for plants, whatever it is.
33:23They were a triffid in their past life.
33:24I don't know.
33:25But if you take all the money from people who are fantastic at growing food and give it
33:32to people who are eating food, then everybody ends up starving.
33:37You have to leave.
33:41I mean, imagine if Billie Eilish sold a concert.
33:47It's going to be a Billie Eilish concert, right?
33:49And then she picks a random person from the audience to come up and sing her songs.
33:56It's the Billie Eilish tour.
33:58And Billie Eilish will pick a random person from the audience to sing her songs.
34:02Then how many people are going to go to the Billie Eilish concert?
34:08I mean, maybe once in a blue moon, you'd get some Michael Bublé wannabe in the audience
34:12who can sing like an angel.
34:14And maybe not Michael Bublé, but I don't know, Christina Aguilera, whoever's considered
34:19a good singer these days.
34:23I'm thinking of the song Vampire, a really good song by, the name escapes me.
34:29Anyway, she's a really good singer.
34:32Olivia Rodrigue, Olivia Rodrigue, I think it is, about a singer.
34:37Holy crap, listen to her do that on piano.
34:39The song is Vampire, really good.
34:41But so if Billie Eilish is doing the Billie Eilish tour and then just picks a random person
34:45from the audience to sing her songs, the Billie Eilish tour would not last.
34:49Nobody would go to the next one and she'd probably get sued for false advertising.
34:54It's like, hey, it doesn't specifically say in the ad that I'll be singing.
34:58It's just the Billie Eilish tour.
35:01However, I'm just sitting in an armchair, which I bring an armchair on stage.
35:05I didn't say I'd be singing.
35:07But the tour would collapse because you're taking from someone who has great musical ability
35:13and talent and popularity and you're giving the microphone to a random person in the audience.
35:17Well, that is like the billionaire selling his shares and giving the money to a random
35:22person in the world.
35:23It will simply decay and destroy the economy.
35:26What you want to do, of course, is if you care about the poor, you've got to fix the
35:31educational system.
35:32The fact that I can't even like I'll scream at the top of my lungs and still not be done
35:37for three days.
35:38But the fact that governments have control over children for 13 fucking years and then
35:46kick them out at the end with almost no economic skills.
35:49They don't know how to negotiate.
35:50They don't know about taxation.
35:51They don't know about entrepreneurship.
35:52They don't know about the law.
35:53They don't know about economics.
35:56They don't know about the provision of value.
35:58They don't know how to navigate a job.
36:00They don't know how to be interviewed.
36:01They don't know how to deal with bosses.
36:02Nothing, nothing, no skills whatsoever.
36:07After 13 fucking years, it's absolute carnage.
36:13It is napalm coating an endless school row of the minds of the young.
36:19It is absolutely beyond appalling.
36:21The real destruction of the poor occurs in government schools and almost nowhere else,
36:26almost nowhere else.
36:27Everything that I learned that was of value to me as an entrepreneur, I had to study for
36:34myself.
36:34I got nothing.
36:36Oh, mitosis, meiosis, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
36:38I got nothing from government schools that have any economic value whatsoever, not even
36:44the softest.
36:45I'm talking hard skills like chemistry or computer programming or something.
36:48I get nothing.
36:50I mean, I took one computer course when I was in junior high school.
36:54We had punch cards.
36:54We had punch cards, and it was really badly taught.
36:58Anyway, so taking money from the productive and giving it to the unproductive destroys your
37:08economy.
37:09Now, again, I get that we need to help people and that there are people who fall on hard
37:15times and so on.
37:16But the problem is not the billionaires.
37:20You know, if you and I are building a wall, we've got bricks, we're building a wall with
37:26the mortar and all, and you have some more bricks than I do, I can say, hey, man, give
37:33me some bricks.
37:35But what if I demanded you give me bricks from the bottom row?
37:39That's already hardened, right?
37:41And I said, you got to give me bricks, but I want the bricks from the bottom row.
37:45Well, that's like taking money from the productive.
37:47Taking bricks from the bottom row just destroys the whole wall.
37:50And, you know, it's really, really sad, of course, that people, it's not that hard to,
37:55what has it been, like 37 or 38 minutes?
37:57It's not that hard to explain.
37:58This would be like 0.00001% of your education to just learn these things.
38:04But that would mean that teachers would have to learn them, which means that you'd have
38:08to get smarter teachers or something like that.
38:11But it's really not that, it's not that hard to understand, right?
38:14It's not that complicated.
38:15So, it's sad that people don't.
38:21And there really isn't a word for the average person's fear, loathing, greed, and hatred
38:26of the successful.
38:27But there really does need to be a word other than communism, which is just the net effect.
38:32But, yeah, the fact that people don't think these things through and they just think that
38:36billionaires are just Scrooge McDuck hoarding a bunch of gold that they could give to the poor
38:43and the poor would be happy.
38:46If you've, I mean, the only people who think it's easy to help the poor financially are
38:49people who've never helped the poor financially or tried to.
38:51And I have spent a huge amount of money over the years trying to help the poor.
38:56And it's really tough.
38:59It's really tough.
39:00Because the poor are often poor because they just make really bad decisions.
39:05And giving them lots of money means that they have more money with which to make their
39:11bad decisions, right?
39:13Otherwise, everybody who won the lottery would be happy and successful.
39:16So, anyway, I hope that helps.
39:18Freedomand.com slash donate if you find these conversations helpful and useful.
39:21I really do appreciate that.
39:23I hope you have a wonderful day.
39:24Take care.
39:25Bye-bye.
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