 The US federal government spends about $800 billion a year on means-tested programmes in the war on poverty. That's about $12,000 for every man, woman and child in the bottom 20% of income. $48,000 for a family of four. Every year. How is there any poverty left? Okay guys, there's nothing left to say. Thanks for watching my video and take it easy. Haha, I was only joking. I bet you didn't see that coming. How wacky and uncharacteristic of me. So, let's get to business, and let's ask the big question. What is welfare? Of course, what we're told is that welfare is a social safety net, taking from the rich to give to the poor like a noble Robin Hood. This becomes harder to see when you make a point of who is undertaking this action, which is of course the government. In order for this Robin Hood narrative to work, there's one condition that needs to be met, that the government is a separate group from the rich. But how could that ever be the case? If the rich are too selfish and evil to help the poor and the government is divinity on earth here to bridge that gap seemingly out of the good of their hearts, wouldn't it be the case that in order to do that, they would have to either not be part of the rich or would have to do it entirely with their own money instead of somebody else's? We immediately know that these could not be farther from the truth, as the biggest proponents of the social safety net are obscenely rich. They don't use their own money, but worst of all, they are granted the most privileged of all social safety nets, the power of politics. Let's look at the net worth of a few examples here. According to Forbes, Elizabeth Warren had a net worth of $12 million in 2019. When he was the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn had a yearly income of £143,000 per year and a net worth of approximately £3 million. Bernie Sanders has a similar net worth to Corbyn. What is notable about these two is that they've amassed this by essentially only ever being politicians for their entire working lives, a job which is supposed to be a representative of the people with that high of a salary. Just in true-dose net worth is approximately $12 million. Hillary Clinton has a net worth over $100 million. Tony Blair has a net worth of $60 million. These people I've listed are certainly not billionaires, but all of these are huge amounts of wealth to be held by people who constantly demonise the wealthy. In my opinion, the funniest of all is Corbyn, the man of the tagline for the many, not the few, when he is certainly one of the few. Why do they do it? Why would these rich want to take from the rich and give to the poor? The answer is of course incredibly obvious. Either they won't at all despite what they say because you know politicians don't often do what they say they will or their own money will remain completely untouched by it. It's incredibly easy to spend other people's money when you know yours is safe under lock and key and even easier when there will be no real consequences if you fuck it all up. Those who control the level of taxes are in control of their own revenue stream. If they sign a bill increasing property taxes to increase welfare, why wouldn't they immediately sign a bill that increases their salary proportionally or even greater than? Nobody is going to vote against a pay rise. Because of course any time taxes are raised for any reason, a little bit more gets skimmed off for the pencil pushes to give themselves a pat on the back. And beneath this, there's an even more sinister argument that welfare doesn't actually do anything to help society's poor but is in fact a trap designed to keep the poor where they are and reliant on the government, remaining a constantly reliable voter base for more government power and control of the economy. When you look at just how completely ineffective most welfare measures are, it becomes difficult to argue against. As we all know what the definition of insanity is. Remember the quote I opened the video with. If the answer is just to throw more money at the problem, which is already receiving a ridiculous amount of money, what makes you think a little tweak here and there is going to make any sort of a difference? The fact is that anti-poverty measures don't reduce poverty. Increases to the standards of living across all classes reduces poverty. And this is only achieved by economic growth through letting the market work. When you move money from one pocket to the other, you are no wealthier for it. There is no more wealth to go around as a result. The easiest measure to understand is the minimum wage, which is absolutely a form of welfare. We all know what would happen if the listed politicians raised the minimum wage as much as they would like. Lots of people would go unemployed for a while and then everything would just become proportionately more expensive because of the new inflation. So not only is nobody better off, you make people unemployed and immensely worse off while the market needs to adjust to the change in purchasing power. Labour is just as affected by supply and demand as any other service and a minimum wage is a price control just like any other. Any form of competent economist must know what happens when you create a price ceiling. You remove the equilibrium and price out people who would have otherwise been willing to accept a higher quantity at a higher price. You literally make it impossible for firms to hire as many workers as they would like, making the firms worse off and the potential workers extremely worse off. But the MMT economists always point to one instance when a raise in minimum wage didn't do this despite all of the other empirical examples to the contrary. But regardless, empirical evidence means nothing if you can't present an a priori reason as to why it happened and unsurprisingly all of their attempts fall flat because it's just sheer probability. So other than the absurd notion that you can wave a magic wand and just make people earn more money with no consequence the typical idea of welfare is receiving money from the government if you are below a desired level of income. This presents a whole new host of problems. As I've detailed before, if somebody earns $500 a month and is provided $500 from welfare, if they then get a pay rise of $100 and their welfare is cut by $100 as a result, you've condemned this person to essentially a tax rate of 100% which is just mental. Then if people are given money universally as in UBI, you haven't created any wealth at all because all goods are just as scarce as they were before and all you achieve is massive inflation. It doesn't matter if you have an extra one grand in your bank account if there is no more actual stuff to spend it on because supply will meet the new demand and prices will just increase until equilibrium has once again reached. The common argument against inflation from this method is that the money wouldn't be withdrawable or will have some sort of similar catch. If that's the case, then you haven't really received any more money at all because you're ignoring the very thing that money is. It's a medium of exchange. If you can't exchange it for what you choose then it's not your money. I feel like this is just common sense that a child could grasp and I'm frankly amazed that I need to say this to adults. Now the most common way that welfare has done is that payments are segmented so that you get a little bit for food, a little bit for clothes, a little bit for medicine, a little bit for unemployment and so on. What this creates is an absolute administrative nightmare and is the biggest factor for why the great experiment of the welfare state is such an enormous money pit as we've already seen. Every little piece of welfare in this system will have its own department with local offices, administrators, bookkeepers, cleaners, support staff and so on answering to a regional department with all of those same employees answering to a national department with all those same employees. All of these people need salaries so that's one hell of a budget to try and maintain and with the power of jurisdiction comes even more ways to be absurdly wasteful with money with use it or lose it budgets which only incentivize a race to spend as much money as you can as quickly as you can. All the while we must remember that every last piece of this comes from the taxpayer. It's money that the taxpayer could have otherwise kept in order to create more wealth for themselves and everybody else in the economy. Now finally let's talk about the public's perception of welfare particularly the ever so altruistic middle classes despite all the problems I've shown are the receivers of welfare better off for it. Their instinctual answer is of course yes because where would they possibly be without it? A good question but let's rephrase it like this if people weren't taxed for welfare would they choose to give their money to welfare charities? Hmm in my experience when you ask people this you get back a very assertive and angry no. Interesting so I ask well wouldn't you and predictably they will say yes I would. My final question to them is so are you some sort of saint given to earth by the grace of god or would most people actually be decent enough to do the same? The conversation usually ends there or the person goes into a megalomaniacal fit whilst calling me the evil one. Yeah I know it's easy for me to portray a strawman argument in this way however I have done this exact thing countless times with similar results and it introduces my next point. Why wouldn't the rich which undoubtedly includes the politicians take it upon themselves to carry out their grand plans? With money like theirs they could devote vast assets to real businesses in order to expand the division of labour provide jobs create further specialization all of which contribute enormously to the massive decrease in poverty that the world has experienced since the end of socialism in the late 20th century. After all this is how the vast majority of the one percent gets rich they spend money to make money by investing and not by hoarding wealth as the left likes to tell you. The only reason a politician wouldn't put their wealth into business to create more wealth for themselves and others is that it must be more profitable to pursue politics. Politicians are granted literal exemption from insider trading laws like the notable US senators who withdrew their stock holdings when they found out before everyone else when the coronavirus lockdowns would be. They're afforded the wealth of political power which means they do not actually see consequences for their actions and in the worst case it simply grants them absolute power and we all know what that does to people. These are all essentially utilitarian arguments they don't get into the moral argument that of course taxation is theft. If there is something that people want to pay for they will pay for it if that is a social safety net I don't understand how you could possibly make the argument that people wouldn't pay for it people obviously want a social safety net what we don't want is a monopoly on the social safety net because the people who love the social safety net so much are the biggest proponents of monopoly despite claiming louder than everyone else how much they hate monopolies why do they hate monopolies because they are ineffective they're greedy they're wasteful and they prevent innovation yeah that's absolutely right so why do you make these things a monopoly by giving them to the government and taxing people taking away their money without their consent putting it places that they wouldn't have anyway therefore interrupting the market and attempting to redistribute wealth when you're just moving numbers around on a screen it's literally a redistribution of wealth normally from the taxpayer to the politician not from the rich to the poor and what is the point in redistributing wealth if you're not helping to create more wealth when there is more wealth to go around everyone is better off regardless of where they stand if you leave the market alone everyone will be better off and nobody will experience violence from the monopoly of the government so i'll end it here for the time being but this is of course a huge topic that i could and certainly will come back to several more times but for now take it easy