 You want to stop sending poor young men from our country to get shot at by even poor or young men in another country? You just hate the poor. You want to dismantle regulations which create barriers to entry in the market, meaning poor people can't start their own business and instead have to depend on a salary for their entire life? You just hate the poor. You want to stop inflation which erodes savings and keeps people working longer into their life because they can't afford to retire? You just hate the poor. You want to stop over-policing of impoverished areas from the war on drugs? You just hate the poor. You want to end the welfare state because it works more like a trap of poverty than a social safety net? You just hate the poor. You want to stop corporate welfare and expansionary monetary policy which causes economic crises, making millions of working-class people unemployed, homeless and left without health care? You just hate the poor. I could go on for the whole video with that, but I think you get the point. One of the most disastrous effects of public education has been to give everybody this absurd idea that free-market economic ideals help the rich at the expense of the poor. That government is a benevolent, altruistic God who protects us from the catastrophic effects of just letting people exchange goods and services for mutual benefit. We hear all the time about how if it wasn't for the government our lives would be run by monopolies even more abusive than the state, so we have to accept its decisions as the lesser of two evils. Well, here is a single statement that should shatter that view. The government is THE monopoly. What a level of unadulterated double-think it requires to acknowledge that monopolies are bad for everyone, but especially the poor, and so we need an arch monopoly called government, but we're just going to cross our fingers and hope that it just decides to be good and help the poor. All you need to do is just get the right people in. But anyone with a shred of common sense knows you won't attract altruists into a monopoly, or at least you will absolutely never be able to attract enough kind-hearted altruistic people to come even close to outnumbering the unscrupulous psychopathic vultures who climb to the top of monopolies to take advantage of the unprecedented power at its disposal. Western liberal democracies have tried many things to curb the abuse of state power and inject it with false altruism, which claims the moral high ground by confiscating wealth by the barrel of a gun, taking the lion's share for itself and sprinkling crumbs on the poor while giving favours to the rich because they pay the most tax revenue. They have a total incentive to look after the rich and not you. But all attempts of these measures have been in vain. We've had absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, absolute republics, constitutional republics, and now democratic republics with supranational governing bodies, but the story has always been the same. More than anything else, we are told that democracy is freedom, when in practice democracy does nothing to stop the problem. Whereas a king had his whole lifetime to exploit his citizens, confiscate their wealth and land, wage war with them as chess pieces, and protect their special interest cronies, well now a democracy has only one election cycle to do it in, so it needs to speed up the process. So despite us being bestowed the gift of democracy, we're now still in wars for 20 years at a time. Terrorism is constantly rising as a result. Your rights to privacy, speech, and self-defense get beaten to a pulp, economic crashes become increasingly severe, unemployment climbs and wages fall. And so I ask you how you can possibly defend these things and claim that you are in fact a kind-hearted representative of the poor. In this narrative of government versus markets that we're constantly given, which side wages war? Ah yes, the government. Is war good for the poor? Only if you count death, physical dismemberment, and psychological trauma as good. Who performs no-knock raids that kill innocent people in the night over victimless crimes? Yep, that one's government too. Who in 2020 shut down the market, unemploying millions, crashing the economy harder than the Great Depression, while stocks of blue-chip mega-corporations reach record levels amidst trillions of dollars in bailouts at the expense of the working taxpayer? Well, the market didn't do that to itself, did it? The truth of the matter is that free market economic proposals help the poor substantially greater than any other economic class, of course including the rich. And it's just due to the simple comprehension that markets create wealth through the free exchange of goods and services to the mutual benefits of all parties involved. Governments cannot create wealth, they just take it and blow it on bombs and pedophilic sex trafficking rings. So allow me to end this rant portion and explain to you how you've been lied to for your whole life about how government economic intervention helps the poor. Number one, the minimum wage. Anybody who has done high school level economics can tell you that price controls are bad. If loaves of bread are selling in supermarkets for £1 and then the government says it's illegal to sell bread for more than 50p, you're going to have an enormous shortage of bread as the supply cannot possibly meet the demand. Simple stuff. It applies to labour as well. It's no coincidence that when cities like New York massively increase the minimum wage, one of two things happen. Everything gets more expensive or lots of people lose their jobs. When everything becomes more expensive, those bigger numbers in your bank account aren't actually worth more than you had before because you can't buy any more things so you're no better off. And when you lose your job, how the hell are you better off? Isn't working for something better than not working at all? This doesn't just apply to relatively high minimum wages. The existence of a minimum wage at all means that anybody whose work isn't possibly deemed valuable enough to meet it has only two options, welfare or crime. Again, how are they better off for sitting around wasting their life away on the scraps of welfare or on the streets, instead of working for a low wage, developing their skills, becoming more competitive, earning promotions and pay rises as they go. Number two, central banking. Among all the boogeymen of the private sector that exist, the banks are the most deserving of this status. But do you know what the Federal Reserve is, or the Bank of England? They are banks which are given a monopoly by the government to exclusively print and issue currency as legal tender. So, again, if banks are bad and monopolies are bad, how is a forced monopoly bank supposed to be good? In their task of deliberately creating inflation, these central banks give money to retail banks at a rate of interest that is extraordinarily far below the interest rate that would be seen if they didn't have a monopoly over money issuance. What does this mean? It means that at an inflation rate of 3% per year, your money becomes worth 3% less every year, because the supply of money is constantly being increased. This increase is achieved by these low interest rates, which literally means the government is giving the banks free money to splurge up the wall on risky investments, like subprime mortgages which created the global financial crisis of 2008, while your salary and savings are rotted away every year. Tell me how the government is at all an altruistic, caring, kind nanny to the poor when they are conducting this grotesque and enormous Ponzi scheme, which is literally taking wealth from the poor to give to the rich. 3. Bureaucracy and Subsidy Why does healthcare in both the United States and United Kingdom every year become more expensive and of lower quality, despite the billions the governments pump into them as either subsidies or through nationalised industries? The very fact that the government does that, presenting points on healthcare between the UK and the US is very difficult as they are totally different. In the UK, healthcare is nationalised under the NHS, but we're told that in America, healthcare is privatised. Interesting. Just look at this chart for a moment. Do you notice something peculiar there? Yeah, the US government actually spends more tax money per person on healthcare than the UK does. So when this is the case, it's inevitable to see a booming rise in administrators compared to physicians, as now healthcare companies have absolutely no incentives to keep costs down. They know they're going to get a fat government check regardless of what they do, essentially becoming too big to fail as the banks were in the last financial crisis. So couple this bureaucratic nightmare with government enforced IP and patent laws for drugs, which allow pharmaceutical companies to become monopolies over medicine, which makes drug prices soar, and you have absolutely no case to say that the problem with American healthcare is a lack of government intervention. The fact that there is technically more government interference in what is supposed to be a private market than a nationalised one is absolutely insane. Now all you need to do is take this example and carefully note the principles behind the points I made, point it at every industry like steel production, car manufacturing, animal agriculture, or any other industry that governments see fit to heavily involve themselves in, and you will find an identical or close to picture every single time. Because it all boils down to one simple fact, the market creates, the government takes. The market is good for the poor, the government is bad for them. If you are pro-government and you tell pro-market people that they hate the poor, you are in fact a hypocrite of the highest proportions. And even after all of these amazing benefits that capitalism and its markets have brought to the poorest of society, they are still secondary to the fact that free markets make free people. The actual justification of the existence of a free market is because it is the most moral, ethical, and right way for humans to live and organise society. It's because of this that the benefits emerge. The greatness of markets is their fundamentally moral position, and its outstanding track record is the result of this, not the cause. So I hope you see now that libertarians aren't the way we are out of some hatred of the poor, a statement which is such an empty, meaningless, and especially unfounded platitude that anybody who says it truthfully isn't worth taking seriously. We do this out of a love of freedom, and as it so happens, freedom is good for everyone, the poor include it. Take it easy.