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Two Alternatives: Run or Controlled Life
00:02:16
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| I think if you can speak to what is socialism and what does this really mean of the direction that we may be headed into as a nation. | |
| The basic idea of socialism is that the state or the government controls things and runs your life. | |
| In a very simple way, I would say that's what it is. | |
| So there are two alternatives. | |
| You can have a free society, including a free market society, in which you run your own life. | |
| And when I say you run your own life, you don't run it by yourself. | |
| You have a family, you have a church, you have voluntary associations. | |
| But you live your life through your own choices and your own associations. | |
| Or the other option is that you have a kind of a centralized government, obviously run by certain people, and they form the sort of ruling elite, and they decide how everybody should run their life. | |
| They allocate the money and how it should go around. | |
| In a sense, they carve up the pie. | |
| And they also control the way that you live, what you think, what you say, what you write, what you believe. | |
| They control the churches. | |
| They control the education system. | |
| They control healthcare. | |
| So that is socialism. | |
| There have been different varieties of it, but it's the same basic idea of a state-run society. | |
| Yeah, we really, and the thing is, you write about it in your book just at the very beginning, and you make it so simple to understand. | |
| And because a lot of us have lived through it, is you take, you take, I think it was so brilliant how you said that, you know, one people, and we have examples of it with North and South Korea can become two different types of countries. | |
| And also one people being Germany, we have West and East Germany. | |
| That was fascinating. | |
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Socialism's Global Failure
00:01:45
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| And to think that all of a sudden one people as Americans were divided. | |
| And we literally are at that crossroads right now, aren't we, sir? | |
| Yeah, socialism has been tried. | |
| It's not like a new idea that no one has implemented. | |
| It's been implemented at least 25 times around the world. | |
| In the last century, over half of the world was under some form of socialism. | |
| And this would include the giant countries of China, Russia. | |
| Socialism was on every continent and it failed everywhere. | |
| It really collapsed. | |
| And it not only collapsed, but it killed a lot of people. | |
| If you look at the sort of death toll of socialism, it's about 100 million people killed by these murderous socialist dictators. | |
| The reason that I mentioned North and South Korea and East and West Germany is normally it's really hard to compare two economic systems. | |
| If you tried to compare, let's say, for example, America to India, then people would say, well, wow, these are two different people. | |
| They have different religions. | |
| They have different cultures. | |
| And their differences could be due to that and not due to an economic system. | |
| But the beauty of looking at North and South Korea is it's the same people with the same culture, except North Korea was socialist, South Korea capitalist, and we can see the results. | |
| South Korea has done massively better than North Korea. | |
| And the same is true in Germany. | |
| So socialism is really a failed and discredited idea that very weirdly, powerful people in America are now trying to revive or resuscitate. | |