The Moral Tragedy of Government Welfare

tight an encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. Today, we're going to start down a pathway that I expect to continue in the coming years, which is productive and useful charity, productive and useful philanthropy. Some of the questions that I'm going to discuss and explore in today's podcast are the questions that are most important to me. And while I don't have a lot of solutions yet, I'm going to begin by laying out some of the problems. And in this podcast, I'm going to explain to you why I believe and I'm deeply convinced that government welfare programs are not only ineffective, but flat out immoral. I'm going to defend that claim to you in this podcast. By the time you go away from this, even if you disagree with me, I think you're going to go away with new insight into things that you have taken for granted. I'm going to share with you this perspective from some of my personal experiences and personal stories. But first, let me ask you a question. When you were in school, did you ever actually understand algebra? Or did you just memorize a bunch of formulas, plug in the numbers and hope that you got the right answer and then as soon as possible after the test, just forget everything. Same about same for me. When I work with my children on their math homework, I'm just astonished at the idea that, you know what, I used to get this, but I flat out do not understand this and I don't recall this and I don't have any idea what this is used for. And when you watch your children do exactly the same thing that you're doing, it makes you think, what's the worth of this memorizing procedures that they don't understand, just kind of just doing random questions. This is a pointless waste of effort. Why should we spend years teaching people how to do something that they're never going to do and use in the future? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. One, you might just say, well, let's just do it anyway. Others might say, let's not do it at all. Or you might say, what if we teach things in a way that people will remember it? And that's what I think we ought to do. I think we ought to teach algebra and trigonometry and geometry and calculus to most students, but we ought to teach it in a way that is not just doing procedures that 20 years out of high school, they're not going to remember, but rather understanding. And that's why I bought a company called Life of Fred. In Life of Fred, your student will learn how and why the math works and what it's used for, what's actually going on. Your student is not just going to be drowned in drill and kill worksheets. Your student will understand why math works and understanding beats memorization every single time. Understanding goes with you for life, even when you have forgotten how to do the procedures. If you understand math and understand math and why it's useful, down the road, you or your child can just use AI to solve the problem, but you'll have the key human insight, which is understanding. Let me share with you a quick testimonial that comes in from one of our readers. I work for the Department of the Navy. Your statistics book opens the possibility of teaching a stat course here for all of the officers who report for two to three year tours of duty as test directors. I was not everyone to read a math book, but this stuff is fun. And at age 62, I actually feel like I'm starting to really understand what I have been doing for the last 40 years. View are like me. When I was younger, I did okay in math. I got good grades, but I didn't really understand what I was doing. Do yourself a favor for you and for your children. Pick up a math book. Try Life of Fred Math book. Pick one that interests you. Work through it as a hobby. Get smarter. Build the gray matter in your brain. You can read free sample chapters of all the books that we sell at lifeofred.com. Lifeofred.com. Go to shop.lifeofred.com to order one or 100 books, free shipping, no matter the size of the order. Shop.lifeofred.com. Now, too welfare. For the last couple of years, I've thought about the direction of my interest in financial planning. I have identified two distinct interests that I still have. I'm mostly disinterested in the vast majority of personal finance discussion at this point in time. But there are two things that I care deeply about. Number one is dynasty planning. And number two is philanthropy. Of the two, I consider both of them to be extremely difficult. Of the two, I think philanthropy is by far the hardest one. It is not easy to be given a fortune and then to use that fortune for good. If you are a mature thinking man and you recognize and you look around, you say, man, wouldn't it be great to just be given five billion dollars? I think as soon as you think about that and after you ponder on it for a few days, you probably will look around and say, no, I actually don't want that responsibility. Because if that were to happen, you would immediately be given the responsibility of being accountable for how you handle that five billion dollars and what you do with it. And you would be responsible to make certain that you do something that is good and not harmful with the money and friend that ain't easy. It's not easy at all. So I hope in the years to come to explore this issue, to learn about this issue and to share with you some of the things that I have learned. Because if you do all the right stuff, you're going to be wealthy and you're going to be in that stage seven of financial independence of called financial abundance where you have more money than you are going to be able to consume in any, any scenario. Which means now you have to figure out how do we do good with that money. And I want you to be thinking about that decades before it happens. So I'd like to talk today about government welfare. One of the things that is unique about the current fraud news story about the fraud committed against government welfare programs in the United States. And one of the things that is unique about the current issues with regard to race and culture of immigrants and refugees in the United States is that we have a rather fascinating look into what happens when you have a society and you inject people into that society who are not from and do not share the cultural values of that society. And then you start pouring money out on them. Now most people, if you think about it, recognize that there's a pretty decent chance to harm people when you give them stuff. If you've ever gone to a park, be it a local park where there's ducks and squirrels or a national park where there's bears and elk, you are aware of the fact that you should not give free food to animals because then they forget how to hunt and how to forage for themselves. And they just go after the free food. And you can kill an entire race of animals by giving them free food. You can wipe them out because after a generation or two, the whole population of that animal has forgotten how to be self-reliant, how to be independent. But somehow, although we know that and we do tofully instruct our children, you know, don't feed the squirrels, don't feed the ducks, that's going to create dependency, don't feed the bears. We do that and we teach our children that, but we think that somehow humans are immune. Humans who are much smarter than any of those animals, more able to figure out where the ones who magically, automatically are able to avoid all the negative features and all the downsides of being given free stuff. Now when we think about the animal example, we can understand that there's a difference between feeling good and doing good. If you see an animal that appears to be hungry and really needs food, it can feel good for you to go and feed the animal. But in many cases, you are not doing good. Undoubtedly, your parents taught you a similar version of this when you were a child. When you see a butterfly coming out of its cocoon, well, if you can go and help the butterfly, look, he's struggling to come out of the cocoon. And so if I go and help this butterfly out of the cocoon, then he can get out. Yeah, well, if you do that, you wind up killing the butterfly because the struggle of the butterfly coming out doesn't have, doesn't, they don't develop their wings enough as I understand it. And maybe there's just an old myth. I don't know what I was taught as a child that they don't develop their wings enough from the struggle. And then they're not going to be able to fly. And then they're really going to be going to be hurt. And so it feels good to give a hungry animal food. But the question is does it do good? Now, once you think about this animal example, as we go through it, because the very simple one is one you and I know intuitively from just general knowledge of our culture. And yet it's one that has a variation of the themes. For a For example, you can recognize the fact that there's a difference between a hungry deer standing in front of you and a deer with a broken leg standing in front of you. And you can recognize that this deer that has the broken leg and is hungry, if I do not feed it, this deer will die. And so there is a time and place in which you feed the wild animal with the goal of saving his life. In many circumstances, you're probably going to doom that animal to spend the rest of his life in a zoo rather than out in the wild. But in a very small number of cases, you might with skill and with focus, you might be able to rehabilitate the animal and get him back into the wild. And so in this simple animal example, you see the overwhelming, just the broad strokes of what I want to talk about with regard to government welfare. You see the fact that on the whole government welfare is going to harm most animal, sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. You see that on the whole, giving animals easy food is going to harm the majority of the population. And if you do it too much, you will destroy the population itself. You'll destroy the animal itself. You'll also see that without free food, some animals are going to die. And if you can give free food and care to some of those animals that would otherwise die, you might be able to save some of their lives. And they'll probably going to be most of them are probably going to be dependent on you for the rest of their life. And a very small number might be able to be rehabilitated and be sent back out into the wild. Now let's come to the topic of government welfare. Government welfare is a unique thing. We think, you know what, we're an enlightened people. We see that there are some people that have a hard time. We see that there are people who are hungry. We see that there are people who are sick. We see that there are people who are old. We see that there are people who are childless and abandoned by society. We see that there are people who are homeless. So let's help them. And what we have chosen to do in the modern era is rather than doing that work through other kinds of institutions. We have hollowed out our society of all forms of institutions except the nuclear family and the government. You was not always this way, but for a variety of reasons that I don't fully understand. I think I've got the general outline of them. We basically have taken everything down to the nuclear family and the government. The nuclear family itself has broadly under attack. We have some of the lowest rates of marriage, some of the lowest rates of procreation and lowest rates of sex in the modern age. So the nuclear family itself high rates of divorce. Those things are changing a little bit. The nuclear family itself is under attack. But that has been the basic institution of society that you've asked people about. You say, "What do you have?" "Well, I have my family." And then you have the government. Then we look around and we wonder at the fact that, man, this government conflicts stuff seems uniquely intense. You know, why is it so intense? Well, if you went back a century, you would see that you had all kinds of other community organizations. You had a broader understanding of family. You had a broader understanding of community involvement. You had a whole bunch of housewives that kept the whole community together because they had the ladies' aid society and they had all these civic groups and men had tons of friends and had tons of civic groups and they had men's clubs that they went to. And then society was rich. You didn't just have your isolated family unit in the government. So we've decided, well, the institution to solve this problem around us that is appropriate is government. We're going to create a government program. And so we're going to create a program that's going to give food to the people who are hungry. We're going to create a government program that's going to give housing to the people who are homeless. We're going to create a program that's going to give money to the people who are out of work. And we're just going to apply it. Well, what are the problems with this model? First, you have to face the reality of where does the money come from and the coercive nature by which government gets its money. Now I don't care very much for the libertarian platitude, taxation is theft. I'm not sure that's true. I don't believe it. I believe that there should be a level of taxation. And I'm open to a robust debate on what it should be. I have never said nor believed personally that taxation is theft. But I think a more modest version of that statement is one that I would be happy to affirm. So I would like to say something that like taxation is coercion. Taxation is coercive. The money may not be stolen from you, but the money is taken from you without much of your consent. Now that varies depending on what form of taxation it is. And you could argue, well, it's always by your consent. Normally the taxation that we have chosen to be the dominant form of taxation tends to be income tax, especially in a financial planning context that we spend most of the time. So you could of course argue, well, you don't have to pay any income tax, so it doesn't make any money. And okay, that's true. And so I think these hard line kind of fundamentalist ideological statements are not particularly helpful. What I want to simply, the broadest brush I would like to paint with here is just somebody to say that taxation is coercive. And you have not chosen voluntarily and freely to do this with your money. If you were presented and you had $100 that you have and you have a choice, okay, I could give this $100 to the government of the United States or to the state of Florida or to the county of Jonesboro or to the city of Oak Ridge. You know, you could you could go through this and you could choose to do that or with your $100 you could say I could give this $100 to my son or to my father or to my church or to my bowling league. I could do something else with it. That would be the kind of free, free exchange that would be totally voluntary. And taxation is never that and probably can never be that to the extent we're going to have some form of government that's probably always going to be a coercive element to that. But whenever you are involved to the government revenues, but whenever you use coercion, you should be very thoughtful about it. Because of father, I use coercion in my family. There are circumstances in which I coerce the people under my control, my wife and my children to do things. I can't think of much of what those are, but there are times in which I do that. But when I exercise that, if and when I exercise that authority, that right to coerc, I am very conscious of the fact that I'm doing something that probably ought not be done very much. If I'm doing it at all, I'm very, very sensitive to the fact that I should be super careful here. And I'm playing with fire when I coerce people to do something. And so I got, I'm just funny as I saying that like I'm sure that I've used coercion. I guess like again, how do we define coercion? I hope you understand the broader point. I can't actually think of any examples, but you know, when you pick someone up and you move them, right, there are times where the child where you pick the child up and you move him. A child's having a temper tantrum, right? You pick the child up from the floor and you take him to another place and you set him down there. You remove a child from danger. Someone is playing in the street. There's a car coming. You run out. You grab the child. You're forcing the child. You're forcing something to happen. And you only do that in extremists, right, when there's actually a very important reason for it. So we should deal, if you and I are emperors of the universe, we should deal with any kind of coercion on behalf of government with the same kind of serious consideration, recognizing that there's a time and a place for this. Perhaps I would say there is many people disagree. There's a time and a place for this. And that time is rare and infrequent and the place is carefully considered. Taxes are not voluntary contributions. They are enforced under penalty of fines, asset seizure, imprisonment and threats of violence if tax resistance escalates. Right. If a private citizen comes and demands a portion of your income and threatens to lock you up if you don't do that, that would be extortion. But when the government does the very same thing, it's legitimized as civic duty. What's the moral distinction? I don't think there is much of one. I think that the state's monopoly on force doesn't transform theft into something ethical. When we grant higher duty to a government entity, a higher authority to a government entity, we are simply making a collective transference of our own ability. So police officers, for example, we grant police officers a higher level of authority in the use of force than we grant to ordinary people. every day neighbors. And yet we would expect those ordinary everyday neighbors to exercise the same degree of force if they were in another situation. We just extrapolate it out. So you think back to the kind of the old west town where you had a town sheriff and something happened, some guy comes in and he murders and steals and the sheriff goes and he forms a posse. What is a posse? Well, you go around to the neighbors, you collect 10 men who have good with guns and can ride a horse and you say, we are neighbors. We have been victimized by a criminal. The sheriff is the organizing party who is elected by the people and he's given a higher duty and responsibility and there the people's authorities transferred to him. Then he deputizes each of those 10 men. Spins a tin star on their chest and says, you are now a deputy sheriff. Those 10 men plus the sheriff, they ride off into the hills, they catch or kill the criminal, then they ride back and they take the star off their chest and they go back to their everyday work. That is how law enforcement works. Right. Same thing with a king. What is the virtue of a king? What is the right of a king? Well, when a society crowns a king, they are saying we are going to give you an extra measure of authority so that you can perform this duty that we need. And as long as the king performs his kingly duties and performs his obligations towards his subjects, those subjects are loyal subjects. It's only when the king abandons his duties and does not and is derelict in them that the subjects then rebel. This is one of the things that's very important to understand about the American Revolution. Right. The Americans saw themselves as loyal subjects of King George. And then when King George abandoned his obligation, his moral obligation to defend the rights of his subjects in America, that is when the tide changed and that is when the people threw off their king because they said he has already abandoned his moral duty to us as a king. So therefore he is no longer our king. Right. They didn't see themselves as revolting against the king. They believed morally that the king had already revolted against them and had abandoned his duties to protect them. And therefore they were no longer his subjects. Or at least that's my understanding of history at this point in time. So taxes are not voluntary contributions. And if somebody is going to come and violate your rights, your property rights, right? Because your earnings did the fruit of your labor, your time, your choices. And so if I come to you and I force you to surrender the fruit of your labor, the fruit of your time, the fruit of your choices and I come and I take those things from you, then I need to do that with very, very, in a very careful way. By the way, let me talk about this. What are some areas and times in which I, Joshua Sheet's, I would violate your property rights and feel entirely happy about doing that. Well, imagine that your father and imagine that you're a drunk and imagine that your child is going hungry. Now again, we're just pretending that government doesn't exist. If I were your neighbor and I saw your child was hungry and I saw that you were a drunk, your worthless man, you're a worthless drunk, your child is going hungry, you're working an earning income. What would I do? Well, first, I would feed your child. I would invite your child over to my table. I would try to feed your child. Then I would go and I would speak to you and I would say to you, listen, Jim, your child is hungry. You are violating your moral duty before God to feed your child. You say, "I just got out of here. I don't care what you have to say. You know, get out of here." Well, at some point in time, I will come to your home. I would invade your home and I would steal your money and use it to buy food for your child. And I would be morally justified in doing so. I would feel content with myself. Now, I would want my, want the neighbors to be involved. I don't think that's something that I as an individual should do. I think that's something that I should only do with collective action. I would order organize a neighborhood meeting. We would come to you. We would bring you before the meeting. And if we discovered that you were unwilling to do that, I would take it to the point where we would throw you in prison. We would sell you into slavery to pay for your child. Right. And so I would feel morally justified. If we brought a jury of peers together in our neighborhood, I would feel morally justified in enslaving the drunkard Jim into a position where he is enforced labor and requiring him to pay for his child. That seems morally right to me because your duty before God is to pay for your child. And if you are a man of low character, then the use of force, the use of coercion in that situation is justified. It's the proper and right thing to do. And so that's basically what government does. We take these moral rights, these moral duties and these moral obligations and we take them and we bring them out and to a layer of government. Now ideally, we want that layer of government to be as close as possible to you. This is called the doctrine of subsidiarity. We want to use the appropriate level for that. So the person who should deal with a drunk is a neighborhood. Right. We should deal with that on the basis of a neighborhood of a town. Now we don't really know how to do this in the world of modern megapolises, big cities, mega polices. We don't know quite know how to do this. But if we use this image of a neighborhood dealing with the drunk, we always are going to have a neighborhood drunk. And so the neighborhood is the proper level to deal with that. We don't want to go to the United Nations and call for the United Nations to come and deal with the neighborhood drunk. That's the doctrine of subsidiarity. The family is the right place to deal with that. Let me give another example. Here's something I have done. Okay. Guns. All right. I'm a typical American. Been around guns my whole life. Always been around guns. I generally don't believe that people have should have their guns taken away from them. So I think that you have a moral right to defend yourself. And that means that you have a moral right to own firearms and own the the the things of the tools of defense. So I don't care much for licensing schemes and government permissions or any of that on-sense. I think you should just have the right to do it. Now the question is does that include children? Well the answer is no. Generally speaking, no. I am happy to have my children's shoot guns. I want my children's shoot guns. I give my children guns. But as a father, I have a duty, a moral duty to make sure that my children are protected from their immaturity. What about at the other end? Number of years ago, we had a neighbor and this neighbor was going slightly senile. He was an older man and he was a good guy, wonderful guy, lovable guy. But he was starting to show his age. I also knew this neighbor was typical American had guns. I made a point of going to the older man's son and saying and asking him and saying, does your father still have guns in the house? I went to him and thankfully the son had already removed all of the guns from his father's possession. So it was a simple and easy conversation. But in that kind of scenario, what I'm saying is if you are dealing with an older man who is mentally, increasingly mentally infirm and you realize that his behavior is erratic, you have a moral duty to remove those guns from him and that moral duty to your neighbor supersedes that man's rights to own those guns. So you can't look at most things with absolutism. You could take almost any right and you can say, here is a situation in which we have to invade and curtail this right because of this extenuating circumstance. But you want that to happen at the closest level possible in my situation where I was concerned about my neighbor owning guns. It happened in the nature of the family. I went to his son. I said, I'm concerned about your father. Does your father still have guns in the home? Son said, no, I removed all the guns in the home. Great. I slept easy at night. That kind of thing might happen in the context of should happen generally in the context of a family. A family, if you in May, take me involved taking away a car, taking away guns, taking away medications, all kinds of things. You want it to happen at a local level. Again, we don't want the United Nations to come in and say, y'all can't have guns because you might do something bad with them. They're not going to work. Wrong level of government. Maybe the right action, but the wrong level of government to apply the action. So back to the question of welfare. If we use taxation to extract money from people, then we now have a very high responsibility to use that effectively. And yet, can government do that? My argument is no. And because government can't do that and doesn't do that. What government does with the money is directly harmful to the people that should otherwise be cared for. Government is supposed to represent the people collectively. It's fine if I am the patriarch of my family and I work and I prefer my children over your children. That's what we expect. It's not fine if I am the president of a nation and I prefer Floridians over Washingtonians. That's not okay because when I am engaged as the president of the nation, my duty is to the people. I have a different set of duties. So therefore, government programs cannot discriminate. So instead of handling charity and support intelligently, governments are ham-fisted idiots. They don't look at the poor deer that has a broken leg and say, "You know what? This deer is going to die." But if we bring this deer in and put in the zoo and give it some food, we can keep it alive. We might be able to rehabilitate it or this might be a pet deer for the rest of its life. But we'll deal with this deer. They just got to go out and say, "Well, how much forages they're on the metal right now and let's just start putting out hay bales." Pretty soon we put out hay bales and the deer come and the sick deer come and eat from the hay bales and then the healthy deer come. Then all the other animals start coming up and they say, "Van, there's free dinner here. Let's just get some food." And so you cannot with government, government should not discriminate. It should not discriminate among people. It should not be the one who is saying, "Are you deserving or not?" And so therefore, you wind up creating these programs that are based upon, "Well, here, we'll just provide this. If you make under this amount of money, you have these benefits. If you go through this program, and you jump through this hoop, you have these benefits." Now, is there a time and place for this? I don't love to be an absolute elutist because what happens is governments have a very few number of tools and levers to push on to enact policy. And that policy, people want their government to be effective. And so if you want to see, I think of something like the opportunity zones, right, where you can go and have been able for a number of years now in the United States, to invest and build companies and make investments. And if you do that in certain zones, then you get tax-free growth on it and you can have tax-free investments. That's an example of government policy. Government is looking and saying, "These are areas and zones that are underserved. They need more business. What policy tool can we do?" And so I don't want to fall into a libertarian trap of saying, "There is no role for government." I think there is in the some intelligent policy. But from welfare perspective, government is uniquely terrible at this. And it creates this giant scam, this giant fraud. At every single level, you wind up with bureaucratic waste and you wind up with moral hazard. You wind up creating traps for the people that you are ostensibly trying to help. It's a nightmare. You destroy entire populations of people. And you create fraudulent systems where if anybody can just set things up appropriately, they can go and do it. Think about how you would handle this as a neighbor, right? If you're a neighbor across the street, we're hungry and out of work. I am absolutely certain that you would do everything you could to help him, to take groceries to him, to feed him because he's your neighbor. And you have a duty to him. And what would happen in that situation is when you have a duty to take groceries to him, you start digging into his life a little bit. Hey Tom, stop by with some groceries. I know you guys were struggling a little bit, brought some food over, wanted to help you out here. Hey, how's it going, man? How's your work search? How are things going for you? And he says, well, you know, it's been rough. I put in 15 applications for a job this week. I couldn't, I got a no, no answer. Don't worry about it. Tom, keep up the good work. I'll be back next week with another load of groceries. On the other hand, if you are sitting there talking to Tom and he said, Tom, how was your job search this week? That was okay. You know, you know, I went down in a Monday, I put in an application to the mill and that was pretty good. And he said, Tom, you sound a little drunk. Yeah, man, this is just rough for me and I've just been down at the bar most days. You would immediately withdraw support. You might still support Tom's wife and his children, but you would withdraw support because you have a moral duty not to enable destructive behavior. We live in a world of consequences. If you do the right thing, you get positive consequences. If you do the wrong thing, you get negative consequences. And you don't want to withdraw negative consequences from people that might be the path to their salvation. You don't just go out in the world splashing money around trying to solve problems. You try to send money to reward upright, righteous, virtuous behavior and you withdraw things when there is immoral, unrighteous behavior. And that right to discriminate is a fundamentally important component of it. Otherwise, you wind up destroying the deer. I want to avoid the ditch. So I've talked about kind of the libertarian ditch of saying there's no things. I want to avoid the ditch on the other side. Right. The truth is we need to have programs. We need to have safety nets. We need to provide for people who are unable to provide for themselves. We probably need to rescue the poor little deer with the broken leg. You might rescue it by taking it home and stringing it up in the tree and eating it for dinner, or we might rescue it and keep it as a pet for the children. I'll let you be the one to decide which of those things is appropriate. But we do need safety nets. But those safety nets need to be done in an environment of accountability. Accountability for results and accountability for proper moral good. And the fact that this is not done and has not been done for a very long time, even though this has been obvious for decades. I mean, we've known it for centuries. It's intuitive to anybody who's given money to anybody else for any purpose. But we've just gone on for decades in the United States of America with this idea that well, let's just ignore the fact that welfare has destroyed enormous communities of people. And let's just pretend we just did a little bit more of it. Maybe it would work this time. But it's worse than that because not only are we destroying our own people, but now we're destroying immigrants. And what happens is when you do this with immigrants, you destroy the immigrant population and you turn them into helpless idiots and you destroy their home countries as well. Here's a stat for you. I believe that this is accurate. I'd check this out with just AI verification. But so I believe that this is accurate. 89% of Somali immigrant households with children are on some type of welfare. 86% of Somali immigrant households with children are still on welfare after being in the United States for 10 years. This is a tweet that I'm reading. That's not integration and assimilation. That's long-term dependency. Okay? 86% of Somali immigrant households with children to the United States are still on welfare after being in the United States for 10 years. Are you helping the immigrants? Are you helping the refugees? Or are you hurting them? And here's what's worse. Are you hurting them when they're in the United States? Or are you hurting their communities back home as well? I've been more involved with most people in refugees, immigration, things like that for a lot more years than most people that I know. Not professionally just because of my personal story. And I have come to believe that one of the most harmful things that you can do is to encourage immigration. And I say, "Joshua, wait a second." That seems like a bit of a. That doesn't seem congruent. After all, Josh, why don't you open borders, guys? Well, yeah, I am. Again, that's not politically popular, really. And it hasn't been in 100 years, but it's not politically popular. But let me explain. And what happens is it's especially harmful if you do this with welfare. When you take an immigrant from his home country and you draw him to another country, I'll tell you one that I hate. I've spent not much time, but some time in the Philippines. My parents were missionaries in the Philippines back in the 1970s, spent seven years living there, learning the language and lived there. I've been to the Philippines, my parents spend the Philippines a number of times. Spent a decent amount of time in the Philippines, no significant number of Filipinos. Filipinos are one of the world's great cultures. Everybody loves Filipinos. Every white American I know who's married a Filipino woman has been thrilled with his wife. They have this cultural expression of being warm. They have all the benefits of a Latin culture. They're warm, they're kind, they're family oriented. This is fundamental to their culture. And yet they're not lazy, like a lot of Latins are. They work hard. And so you have these warm, kind, culturally adaptable people who are hard working, who are intelligent, who are really engaged. They speak a lot of English. The Filipino Tagalog is very related to Spanish because of the Spanish colonialization. You just have this wonderful culture and there's a lot of them. So you go all around the world and you find Filipinos. My son, this last weekend was in the ER. I did take him to the ER and two of the nurses were Filipinos. I spent a lot of time with Filipinos. I can instantly tell the accent. I'm never fooled. I know the difference between a Filipino and a Thai. Filipinos are wonderful. And because they're wonderful, the world loves them for their workers. And all around the world you will find Filipino workers, stalking to the Filipino nurse in the emergency room. Yep, she worked in Saudi Arabia. She moved to the United States a number of years ago. She got a nursing license here. And so she's happy to be in the United States. She was in Saudi Arabia before that. You go all around the world and you will find Filipino workers everywhere all around the world. Then you go to the Philippines. And I despise more than anything. The absolute destruction of the Philippines that is caused by the fact that Filipinos can go abroad and go be guest workers. You go and you spend time in a little rural village. The first thing is just like you used to be able years ago as in Guatemala. You can kind of see the same thing. Go to some little town in Guatemala and you find the nicest town on the, how do you know, how do you know who has family in the US and who doesn't? Well, you just go and look at the nicest houses, the ones that are two stories instead of one and made a concrete block instead of 10. And sure enough, yep, dad's gone. Dad's working in the United States. Same thing in the Philippines. You can always go and find, yep, dads in Saudi Arabia. He or dads in Dubai or dads in the United States or wherever. And you go into the culture and it destroys the culture because there's no fathers in the community and they're worse. There's no mothers. And you wind up, yep, you know, one person I know, moms in the United States has been for years. What's mom doing in the United States? Well, she's taken care of some rich dudes family, taken care of his children working as a nanny, being their, their mom there. And she has four children back in the Philippines. That is so immoral. It's not even funny. And yet it's just to stay apart for the course. It's so destructive to the Filipino communities. And then you're, let's say that you're an ambitious young person growing up in the Philippines. Do you ever look around and say, yep, I'm going to improve my town. I'm going to fix this town. We're going to solve this problem. No, you take the easy path. I'm going to go to Dubai and I'm going to go get a job. And this happens all around the world, between the rich countries and the poor countries. And you go and do it. Oh, I'm going to make so much money and you wind up being slave labor and Qatar, barely able to go home and see your wife for a week a year because, oh, we need workers. I hate it with a passion and destroys it. Destroy the Philippines. It destroys Pakistan. It destroys India because all of your best, most aggressive people leave and go somewhere else instead of actually staying there and fixing the problems. Now does this work out sometimes and would I do it? Sure. If you're a father and you can't figure out how to feed your children, sometimes you think, man, I got to go away and do it. Sometimes you do what you got to do. On my favorite historical example, I grew up reading, uh, Lorengel's Wilder. Right. And if you remember that story in, uh, what was it? On the banks of Plum Creek when Pa was living in Minnesota and the locusts come in and destroy his crops. And he's got nothing. And he's, and he goes and he walks 450 miles away until he can find a job. Sometimes that's what you got to do. But in that story, Pa did that for the season and he earned some money and he sent some honey home to support Ma and the girls and then he came home. And I think if memory is right, he had to do it two years in a row, but then he came home and he started building again. But what is happening in the modern world of people kind of going here and coming there is that now this is becoming a lifestyle. I have a weird fascination with aviation. So one of my hobbies I watch airplane videos, I watch airplane crash videos and I watch flight reviews and I watch Josh K. Hill and, um, no, what's his name and whatnot. They go on these flights and the world's most packed flights are always from Dubai to the Philippines, right? Or from Dubai to Pakistan. And they take these airplanes and they, they put like 450 seats in them and they're just miserable. And you go and you watch one of them and you see who's on those flights. Someday I'll take it, I'll take one of the suboo Pacific ones. Um, they're just absolute miserable. There's no business class, no community class, pure economy. And you got 430 seats and 400 of those seats are young men, young men who should be building their home cultures, who should be building their home towns. These are the people of, of, of, of intelligence and drive an ambition to smart enough people to go and get a job abroad. Sorry. They're the ones with ambition. They're not the town drunk sitting at home. They're the ones with, ones with ambition and drive. But instead of building something in their local home culture, the fact that you can just get on and get a $200 round trip ticket from Dubai to suboo or Manila or whatever the, it is means that you can just go and get a job of Dubai. And again, you wind up a slave labor. You wind up living there for years. You never get any permanence. You never get any, um, any sense of, of, uh, again, permanence or engagement. Uh, you're just always just making money and then the dream is to go home again. Tell you another story. Okay. Years ago when I was in high school, I worked on a sod farm in, uh, near Belgrade in western, uh, western south Florida. And I was the only white guy on the crew. Uh, everyone was Mexican Guatemalan. And I enjoyed, I've gotten practice with my, um, practice, my Spanish. And so I got to know the guys and I worked with all the guys and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the four men was kind of a typical example. Same was Fernando. Fernando was really, really good. He was smart. He was hard working. Uh, he was the trusted foreman for the owner of the company. And Fernando was Mexican and I think he had, uh, he, he had been in the United States for a number of years. He went back to Mexico every year, went back for about three or four weeks to Mexico and he ran all the crews across all the farms. He had built a good life for himself, but his plan was always to go back to Mexico. So I think he had two children as I recall and his plan was always to retire back to Mexico. He kept all his money in Mexico and he was doing this for 20 years. Now Fernando was one of the most successful, hardworking guys I knew. He was honest. He was a good man. He was a great form and he had the, the, the, my bosses total, total trust. But imagine living your life where you're building a life not in a place that you are and you're always going to go back to another place. That doesn't build an enduring community. If Fernando had been in Mexico, he would have been a lot poorer than he was working in the farms in Belgrade. But Mexico would have been a lot richer. We harm refugees and immigrants so deeply when we create these kinds of programs were ten years after being in the United States for ten years. You can have 86% of immigrants still on welfare. You are destroying the future of the Somali people with that kind of program. What's worse is you're doing it in the stupidest way possible. Now one of the reasons this is so, this is so unique is that the United States has been bringing Somali refugees specifically to Minnesota for decades. And what we're doing is, we're doing it in the United States. doing is we're being idiots and we're putting them all constantly in the same place. And that is fatal. You cannot have proper assimilation into a host culture. If you do not spread people around and keep them from being part of each other, the example I grew up with this was this what happened with Cubans in South Florida. Miami is not part of Florida, not in a cultural sense. Miami is a unique place, but it was all done. It all happened. Miami is the capital of the Americas. It's not really part of the United States. It is, but it is. Obviously I'm joking, but it's not. It's a very different place. And that is because you wound up with all of the people in Miami coming from Cuba and sticking together instead of spreading out. When you wind up with these cultural focuses, now some of this is nice, right? We like to go down to Coyote and eat a Cuban sandwich. I enjoy going salsa dancing and it's fun. It adds certain elements of it. And I've not spent any time at all with small groups in Minnesota, but I bet if I were there, I would really enjoy some aspects of it. I like that stuff. I'm into cultures, I'm into languages. I'd probably learn some Somali. I would be into that kind of stuff. I enjoy that. I enjoy debating Islam versus Christianity. I'm really into that, right? I like that stuff. But it's destructive to the community. And then you wind up with community people and you wind up with this weird, clannish stuff where instead of being integrated into American culture and being accepted into American culture, you put all these refugees together and then you wind up with little Mogadishu instead of little America. And that's a guaranteed pathway to resentment. There's not a culture in the world that can't bring other people in to some degree. All right. Some of the most ethnically homogenous nations, places like Japan, they can integrate certain numbers of foreigners. There's no culture that can't integrate foreigners. But there's no culture that can allow significant numbers of foreigners to come in and create an ethnic conclave and not wind up with violence of some kind. That's where we're heading in the United States. Even the UN itself recommends against concentrating refugees in a single community. And that is what is terrible. So not only do we destroy the Somali immigrants, we also destroy the towns where they're settled because now we create resentment among neighbors. And Somalia itself, which could be great, is destroyed by our efforts. And we're just idiots about all of this and all of our institutions break down because they say, "Wow, the government's got it." Let me tell you one more story. The hardest thing about it to me is all the stuff that I've said is somewhat a theory. But let me tell you just an example. In the year 20, was it 2020? 2021? The dates are a little bit fuzzy. But I was at the time living in Costa Rica and spending most of my time in Costa Rica. And there was a weird experience happening where we had a massive wave of refugees passing through Costa Rica. What had happened was the United States had an extremely liberal immigration policy at the southern border. It's unclear to me what the reality is. I never went to the southern border to figure it out. So I couldn't figure out what was actually happening with regard to the rules and the non-rules and things like that. So I don't know what was happening. But my family and I were in Costa Rica. And we were watching waves of immigrants and refugees come through, most of them from Venezuela. Now I've been involved with Venezuela's refugee relief work since before the pandemic. So I guess that's about six or seven, six years or so. And the details on how and why aren't, don't matter. But it's hard to get special interest in this. And at first, you started to see them. So let me explain what was like to be a refugee and how the rules were. So what was actually happening in the southern border was unclear to me. It seems to me that the United States government had a policy of a very liberal policy of allowing people to apply for asylum. Then you could come in and you could make an asylum application. And they had streamlined the asylum application. And basically it was, okay, come on in. Here's a set of identity cards that you can live and work in the United States. And you're going to wait for your paperwork, your court date to hear your asylum case is four and a half years from now, something like that. I had a friend of mine who was Haitian and he told me this was what he shared with me with his Haitian cousin. All right, his Haitian cousin had gone from Haiti to Colombia, Brazil, made his way up over land, applied for asylum at the southern border, had been given it, was given right to work, paper to work, southern border came into the United States and his court date was four and a half years away, something like that. So I'm at a number of guys in that we're in that situation. So as best I understand, that's how it was actually being processed at the southern border of the United States. So we had all these, so then there was some things happening. And again, I wish, I'm sorry, I don't recall exactly, but there was something happen where the United States was starting to pursue a different tack. And due to the pandemic, there was a change in the policy and then the border was closed or was closing. And so this easy asylum paper process was frozen. And so you had all of a sudden, there were thousands of people that were going from South America to North America who were basically stuck. They didn't have the ability to get to the United States. The borders were somewhat closed. They couldn't apply for asylum, so what did we do? So they all started filling up in Costa Rica and in every nation along Central America. I spent time in Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and they basically were just all starting to fill up. And so I started talking to the guys and they were all begging on the streets. And let me explain by the way about how this stuff works. If you are an American or a Canadian or whatever and you travel, the way that you travel is that you have a passport. And so if you want to go somewhere, you have a passport and you go and you buy an airplane ticket or a bus ticket or whatever and you go and you travel. Well, if you are broke and a refugee and you have no money, you don't have a passport. What most Latin Americans have is something called a Sedgilla. An Sedgilla is a national ID card. It functions like a passport for most nations in Central and South America. You can often travel with it. You can cross some borders with it, but it's not a passport. Passports are expensive. Sedgilla is a required. In most countries in the Americas, you're required to have a national ID card and that so everyone has it. They're cheap and everyone has them. But what you can't do with that is you can't get on an airplane and fly to the United States. First of all, to do that, you have to have a passport and also you have to have a visa. So the way that the United States handles travelers to the country is through visa applications and getting a visa to the United States is extremely difficult and is extremely expensive. So if you are, let's say, your Colombian and you would like to travel to the United States. Well, the first thing that you have to do is you have to get a passport and I don't know how much Colombian passport costs, but it's probably $100. So if you're rich, you can afford it. If you're poor, the order bucks is a lot of money. You have to get a passport. If you get a passport, then you have to apply for a visa to the United States. So you go to the US Consulate or Embassy and you apply for, you make a visa appointment. Now a lot of times you have to wait months and years for a visa appointment because the embassies are overworked and there aren't a lot of slots. If you are able to get one, you have to pay a fee for the visa fee and it winds up being, I forget what it is, it's something like $200 and something dollars. That visa fee is non-refundable. So whether you are approved or denied, it's a non-refundable fee. So again, it costs another couple hundred dollars. Then once you go to the appointment, you have to bring to the appointment sufficient evidence of non-immigrant intent for them to issue your visa. And so what you have to prove is that you are deeply integrated into the local community and the local, into the local life. So you have to bring all your financial records. You have to demonstrate that you have money, that you're not going to wind up being a burden to the state. You have to prove that you have a job, that you have a home, that you're connected to an address, etc. And you have to satisfy the US Consular Officer that you don't have immigrant intent to the United States. So a lot of people fail that because they can't present sufficient evidence. Now, if you are kind of a standard person, You're a somewhat wealthy Colombian physician and you work at the hospital and you live in a town and you're married and your wife and your children and Rolled in school and whatnot. It's not that hard to get a visa to the United States. It's just cost you a few hundred dollars in a bit of Hasill and some months of waiting but you can get your visa to the United States and you can get a 10-year visa and You're in and out all the time. Once you have your visa you can travel and you can get an airplane You can grab a cheap spirit flight from Bogotá to Miami and you go to Miami to go shopping every weekend if you want to simple and easy. If you're not In that social class you have no ability to do that. So what do you do if you're poor? What do you do if you're a poor Venezuelan? Your country is collapsed. You can't get a passport if you could get a passport at all It's going to cost you a few thousand dollars and I'm not by the way. I'm not exaggerating anywhere from 500 to 1500 or more dollars because you have to Grease the wheels of the appropriate people who can print the passports for a couple years Venezuelan passport are not even available If you can only you can't get them outside of the country and so if you're a Venezuelan I worked with people in the United States who were living in working in the United States passport expires They go back to Venezuela. They're gonna be arrested if they are not from Venezuela. They wind up If they're not from Venezuela I mean Sorry, they're gonna get arrested, but they can't get a passport without going back to Venezuela And so that's really difficult and so imagine that right you you have a work visa You're living and working in the United States. You've been there for seven years or whatever it is and now your your passports expired If you go to Venezuela you might get arrested and if you if you don't do it you can't get a passport So I had to figure out who do I pay two thousand dollars to to get my passport so I can go on it's a nightmare. So So if you're poor Venezuelan and you are starving and you are hungry you figure what's the solution? for some reason Poor Venezuelans became convinced that president Biden had said if you can get to the United States You can come in I don't know how that happened But I spoke to multiple Venezuelans who told me verbatim they said president Biden said if we can get to the United States we can get in Now I happen to know that president Biden never said that He never said that never implied it never said it. I speak English. I'm an American. I'm not an idiot president Biden never said that But somehow that was what they heard who Told that to them how they told that I don't know But over the years of the Venezuelan collapse Most of the neighboring countries around Venezuela have been filled up with immigrants So there's not a lot of great places for them to go and so they go to the United States But to get there is impossible By air because no passport no visa can't can't get on to an airplane and that's where the screening happens Can't buy an airplane ticket and can't get on to an airplane. You're screened out at the border So they have to go overland. So what do you do? We go from Venezuela to Columbia then From Columbia you have to figure out how to cross the Darian gap Which is this jungle that happens between Panama and Columbia So there's the Pan American highway that goes from Alaska to the tip of Argentina with one gap of like 50 or 80 miles in the middle of south of Panama that you can't drive through Oh, then that you can drive the entire Pan American. I've done it from from I've done a good bit of it. So There's this one gap and so the only way through is On foot and it's hell It's a hot tropical jungle. It's very difficult. It's a nightmare So the good thing is once you can get across if you can get across Then on the other side you're in Panama There was during this period. I don't know if it's still there. There was a like a UN charity aid tent Try to provide help to people who are coming in food medicine, etc And then once you're in Panama you can hop on a bus and you go from Panama to Costa Rica Costa Rica Nicaragua Nicaragua All right right on up to Mexico. You can ride the buses all the way Buses are pretty cheap and you can get to Mexico and get in get to the southern border and where you can present your asylum application and be allowed in So that was that that was what everyone was was doing and was trying to do So the hardest part is the Darian gap so and by the way in case you're curious the concept of immigration that many Americans have where you have to have a passport across a border and there's a sacrosanct thing This is something that does exist in some places, but it's not nearly as as rigidly held at as it is for many Americans and so if you are trying to do this with a Sedgilla and you're trying to get from Panama up to To Mexico what I was told by most of the Most of the people that I spoke with when I just asked them about is like how do you do this without a passport? Like well, you just go to the left the path around the left is for the people who don't have a passport and then the people have a passport Go straight through so if you're an American and you're crossing through the border from Costa Rica Nicaragua Which by the way is one of the worst borders in Latin America? Then you're gonna get you're gonna go through it all and you go through and you pay your fees and etc But if you're an immigrant they just say point to the left and look there's the footpath and you make a way around is that true? Is it not I don't know that is what I was told? So the point of all this was that when the United States stopped admitting asylum applicants They're wound up with this crisis of Refugees and migrants living on the streets of Costa Rica and There were thousands of them you drive downtown and there's just hundreds of tents and people there and It was absolutely devastating and there wasn't much there wasn't much available for them So I got some of my friends together and there were some people that were trying to do it if there was a businessman So and by the way, it's also super dangerous So you got wives and women and children who are on the streets not only is it uncomfortable just really dangerous Because women and children get preyed upon in this scenario and so I got in touch with a guy who was a businessman who had an extra Who had an extra property that wasn't rented out and so he turned it into a makeshift shelter and we collected a bunch of beds and mattresses and we were sheltering women and children there and he had hundreds of women and children in this very small It's a very small place and so I worked with him a little bit and then We got some people together and just went down and started feeding some meals and so I had a big brittle and Not much but a couple hundred but we got some friends together and I'd go down to make pancakes and bake in an eggs and We did it a few times and they gave me a good chance to go and talk to people and got my children out there I was happy to do that and just give some free meals to people and what was heartbreaking His you're sitting there talking to people and it's one thing to see the stuff on TV It's another thing to be sitting here talking to a father, right? In many cases I'm sitting here talking to Venezuelan father and here's his wife and here's his two children three children and He has just carried his children through the jungle Should imagine this if your father You are so desperate your country has one million percent hyperinflation The average person in your country has lost 30 40 pounds and You're so desperate you hear about the promised land in the north if you can just get there You can be rich because Americans are rich If you can just get there Now all you got to do to get there is walk and ride a bus for 1,500 miles across seven countries Okay, it's doable. It's not easy, but it's doable. So you start And you get to the Darian gap you got 50 miles of jungle to get through So you put your children on your back and you start walking through the jungle And the stories that a couple of these guys told me about the dead bodies to the side and the people that they started with didn't make it It just sounded like hell on earth in there. I'm scared to go. I wouldn't go And you've carried your children Remember you finally made it to Costa Rica. So this is a week and a half after you got out of the jungle So the wounds that you have the scrapes the infections the All the stuff the wounds that you have are still fresh They're not raw and open. They're starting to scab over, but you can still see it And I'm sitting here talking to these guys looking at their beautiful children and just In my heart, I just want to fall apart like what makes a man do this? And then the man says well president Biden said if we can just get to America we can get in And I heard from my cousin working in Miami That they pay $15 an hour working in Miami And if I can just get there It's the promised land I didn't say this to them just because you can't in that situation, but so many times actually I did this uncharted I did say this I was like bro 15 bucks an hour Ain't gonna make it for you You can't feed your family on 15 bucks an hour If you're a broke South American 15 bucks an hour sounds like heaven If you're living in Miami me. 15 bucks an hour is nothing. You cannot make it on 15 bucks an hour. And that's the eternal problem. The things that sound like, man, this is amazing. It goes back and it creates another problem. And so if you're a Somali immigrant in Minnesota, and you say, man, if you just get to Minnesota, they pay us $700 a month for this and they pay us $9,000 a month, all you do is just get everyone else there. And you destroy any possibility of good things. Right? Somalia is destroyed because you've taken all the good people out, all the hard working people out. And they've all gone to the other side of the world. Minnesota is destroyed because instead of Somali immigrants wind up integrating into the local culture and being part of the local community and then becoming American, you wind up creating little Mogadishu. It's a nightmare and it's all enabled by our stupid policies. And you create generation after generation after generation of poor people. Taking that government cheese, destroying the animal population. And we do the whole thing under the guise of benevolence and helpfulness. You guys ever watched those like my 600 pound life shows or whatever? Imagine those. Okay? I watched I guess a couple of them on YouTube. So I've never seen the full ones, but I've watched a couple of them on YouTube. Do you know what I think whenever I see that? First of all, the thing that's really unique about that is that you look at the fat man himself or the fat lady herself. And you think this guy is a pretty interesting guy. There was one guy, it was like 800 pounds and you listen to him talk. And every time I listen to these people, I'm just I just think he's just a normal dude. He's a nice guy. I like him. He's just a normal dude. You say, but why is this normal dude 810 pounds lying in a bed not able to roll over? All of a sudden you look around and you say, oh, this guy can't make his own nine orders of pizza a day. He has people around him that are doing it. And you look at the people around him. Now let me ask you a question. If you haven't watched one of these shows, go find one and watch one. Who is the guilty person in that scenario? Who is guilty of a moral evil? I place the guilt on multiple people. I place the guilt on the moral failings of the individual. We should never be escalated from our own guilt. If you are 800 pounds, it is your fault. Full stop. I also place the moral guilt on the people around. If your husband is 800 pounds, it is your fault. Full stop. If your father is 800 pounds, if your girlfriend is 600 pounds, it is your fault. Full stop. And you are committing a moral evil in feeding this person. The right thing to do is to say, no. There was this doctor that was part of the shows. I'm sorry, I don't know his name, but he seemed like a really great guy. He seemed really, really care. And one scene I watched when he shows one time where he doctor, doctor didn't pull any punches. He spoke to it clearly. And the guy is in the hospital. Some big fat guy is in the hospital. He's in the hospital. He's going to die. And the doctor cannot get some woman in his life to stop ordering and sneaking pizza into the hospital. What a morally disgusting and repulsive woman that lady is. To enable this, you are killing the man that you love. And painting it all over with, I just want to be happy. So I'm going to sneak pizza into the hospital. If you have fat children, you are killing your children. I've been a fat kid. So I know having fat kids is a form of child abuse. You should, that is your fault. And you are not doing well. If you are enabling this in other people, don't turn a blind eye to it. I'm using inflammatory language with the understanding that you are going to be an adult and you're going to recognize, oh, you know what? I need to think about this. And if Joshua says the form of child abuse, he's, he's using inflammatory language to get my attention. But he's not, he's not equating it with other forms of abuse. What I'm saying is that you are enabling and that is a form of abuse. And the right thing to do when someone is not in a good situation is to help the person get a better situation. I don't, I don't, I wasn't that fat, right? So I'm not doing this and I don't blame my parents for this. But what I would do, my, we have a great relationship. I don't blame them. Okay. Just be clear. But I really wish I had been forced to run. I really wish I had been forced to stay in the gym. Love in that situation is not feeding your child pizza and saying, oh, well, little Johnny, you know, he just likes pizza and I just can't do anything about this. And he's 300 pounds and eighth grade. And I just can't do anything about it. Love is taking 300 pound Johnny to the weight room and saying you will be here every day. I don't care if you like it or not. You will get under this weight. And when you do that in about two months or three months, Johnny starts to feel a little bit better. I was to add my children. Forgive me. I know I'm, I know this is inflammatory. Forgive me. It's got to be. I took my children to, well, they sporting good stores this last weekend or looking at the Christmas decorations. And they had an archery range inside the store. And they were shooting bows. I gave my children bows in the past. So they were, they were, they were, they were better. There was this little Mexican kid. Sorry, not little. This is big fat Mexican kid there. And he was there with his dad and his uncle. And he was kind of timidly watching on like he's interested in the archery. He saw the children were doing it. He wasn't there. So we reached, reached over and I, I called him over. Come on over. I forget his name, Angelo. And he came on over it. And I, I pated him on the shoulder. As I said, come on. No, he, I watched him and encouraged him. He jumped in with us doing archery in the middle of my children. And at the end, I said, good job, Angelo. And I pated him on the shoulder. You did a great job. Like this is super fun. My hands sank an inch and a half into his flesh. It was repulsive. He was so fat. And his, his skin was so soft. That just me patting him on the shoulder. It was like jelly. It was disgusting. And his father and his uncle right there, neither of them nearly as fat as him. Friend, that is, is a serious form of abuse for you to overfeed a child with such fat that a child who should be active and healthy. And as, as this like soft, disgusting, flabby shoulders, like that is wrong. It's one thing of a man does it to himself. It's another thing if you do it to a child. Now bring that back to welfare. I hope the point is clear. There is moral guilt associated with these wrongs by people around. And that's what welfare does. We don't help the people. If we help somebody, it's a tiny percentage. What we do is we wind up destroying the people. And we destroy the neighborhoods at home. We destroy the countries at home. Now, is it necessary? I believe in some cases it is. In some cases, it is meaning refugees and asylum and all of that. In some cases, it is. But we are idiots about it. We are so ham-fisted that we cannot get it right. And we are creating so much harm in the world while feeling virtuous about it. And we can't even reason with it. On the one hand, you have the, and now we're just, now we're just withdrawing into extremes on this. We do eight foreigners. Or, let's just feed all the squirrels and then we won't have any problems. We've got to figure out how to go up the middle. And the only answer that I have that would do that is individuals. If you look at it, we have to go back one solution. The only solution I see goes back to some version of the doctrine of subsidiarity. What do you do? Will you have some individuals who say it, we've got this problem in our town. We have this problem with these people. These people are homeless. And so you get involved. You're gonna have a social worker that's gonna say, "How can we help these homeless people?" And you're a guy who says, "I'll do it. I'll build some houses. I'll build some tiny houses. Let's bring them in." And that's work with them. And what is the success rate? I don't know. I have some friends who are involved in that. It's certainly not 100% and it's not 0%. And we should do that, meaning that we should provide a lifeline for people. And a well-run program is going to involve some version of significant handouts for a limited time. Significant handouts for a limited time. Those are the principles of a well-run program. If you took Angelo, right, just rollipoli Angelo. And you put him in my house. I'm not gonna put Angelo on some starvation diet. I'm not gonna bring him in and say, "Angelo, you have a moral failing. You're a rollipoli tub of lard. But if you'll just come in my house, then I'm gonna feed you bean sprouts and tofu every day. That'd be ridiculous." But I'm gonna bring Angelo in and I'm gonna start to put some protein in his diet. Put some meat in his diet. Pull back a little bit on the junk food. And we're gonna transition him and him off. It's my understanding that could be wrong and no expert on drug programs. But a lot of times the more successful drug addicts and addiction programs are gonna involve some form of tapering off. And some people have the ability to quit cold turkey. Some people don't seem to. These are hard problems to face. And so we have to work at them. And there are some people who are homeless, who are morally virtuous people, who are just there by circumstance. And if they had six months of help and a year of help and 18 months of help, then boom, they're back in society. There are some people who are homeless, who are morally un-virtuous people, who are six months of help, they can start to build some virtue. And they can, with two years of help, they can start to move to be independent. And there are some people who are never gonna be able to do it. And in some cases, you might say this person is going to be a ward of the state and we have to build provision for that. But it has to be done with people who are local, who can interrogate the moral qualifications of the person, and who can identify the difference between a man who can't work and a man who won't work. That's the difference. I don't know how to, I don't have any great solutions. The reason I'm talking about this stuff is to try to inject a little bit of texture into our conversations. My experience, people are all one side or all the other. People are either just like those immigrants, they're good, get them all out. Or they're like, well, just bring in the immigrants. Like let's just love them all. Let's just have everybody in. And those two extremes are unhelpful. Those two extremes are ridiculous. The people who are just flat out anti-immigrant have no concept of what it's actually like to be completely destitute. And I can guarantee you that 80% of the people who are anti-immigrant, if they were put in the exact same circumstances as the refugees, would be doing exactly the same thing that the refugees are doing. I would. That's what I would do. On the other hand, the people who are just not willing to impose any standards. Like, well, just bring them all in. You are going to destroy, and you're going to wind up with people murdering each other in the streets because of your stupidity. You cannot have little Mogadishu in Minnesota. Let me get to all the immigration numbers, the number of residents. And if you have residents, then look, I have more census representation. I get more seats in the house. You cannot have this stuff. And you cannot have these neighborhoods without winding up destroying the scenario. And those times, sorry, I'm trying to, I try to moderate sometimes, and then I wind up being unclear. You cannot have pockets of immigrants that are unassumilated into the, into the, into the culture, expressing things that are flat out offensive to the, the welcoming culture and not wind up creating a recipe for flat out violence. That's where we're heading. I don't want it to be there. So I'm trying to impose it to inject a little bit of texture into the conversation. Say, let's work on these problems. I don't know what to tell you to do with it. I don't have any hope that my voice is going to change any kind of government programs. I'm just trying to say, government welfare is immoral. It is immoral on multiple levels. It is immoral because it uses the power of coercion. It takes money from you and it does harm in the world. And people are not stupid. They wake up to that and they see it. I am not saying that charity is harmful, but welfare is not charity. Charity involves moral agents who have a responsibility acting of their own free accord. I will do everything I can to feed a man who is hungry. I will not allow a hungry man. So I will do everything I can to feed a man who is hungry. If a man steals from me who is hungry, I will not go and seek it back. One of my great heroes is the priest from Les Mis. I want to be like the priest and when Jean-Véagesche Stole from him, he forgave him. But what he did was he imposed on Jean-Véagesche, a moral duty, to take the silver that he had stolen and use it to become an honest man. I can do that when a man will steal from me. I can forgive that. A man who is desperate like Jean-Véagesche was, I can do that. But when you steal from me in the form of government coercion and you do that day after day and year after year and you create a multi trillion dollar empire of fraud and theft, where you take the money that should be used for deserving poor people and you give it to lazy fraudsters and you do that and you destroy the country that I come from that I love and you destroy other countries that I don't come from that I love because they are my fellow men. You destroy Somalia and you destroy Venezuela and you destroy these things and you suck all of the people that could fix those places and make them great and you plop them all down in the ghettos of Minnesota. That cannot continue. That is destructive. So I hope that some of my stories will help you. I wish I had more light but I just wanted to, I don't know how to solve it but one of the most important projects that we could work on in the next couple of decades is to try to discuss these issues of charity and philanthropy and we've got to figure out how to pull back government and insert people so that there can be accountability so there can be discrimination so that there can be the ability to judge virtue from unvirtue and at the very least we can start these conversations. Thank you for listening. I'll be back with you soon.