Gene Epstein critiques Richard Wolff's debate performance, arguing that Wolff avoided the resolution's core by focusing on historical death tolls rather than addressing worker self-management's practical failures. Epstein contends that mandatory democratic socialism would stifle innovation through bureaucratic resource allocation and ignore cultural diversity, noting most people prefer wage labor over managing enterprises. The discussion highlights the contradiction in condemning socialist experiments while defending capitalist wars and concludes with a eulogy for Don Smith, underscoring libertarian views on individual choice versus state coercion. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Roll Back The State00:10:26
Fill her up!
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Heart of the Problem.
I am super pumped for this episode.
Usually we do the interviews, the one-on-ones on Wednesday, but I moved this one up because I was just too excited to do it.
And Gene Epstein, the great Gene Epstein, is here, head of the New York family of libertarians, is here with us.
Of course, you know him currently as the director of the SOHO Forum and fairly frequently debater in the Soho Forum.
Five debates.
Five debates.
Five victories.
Five victories.
I took the negative all five times.
I won all five times.
And three of my wins have been among the biggest wins of the Soho Forum.
Enough of bragging.
I just wanted to.
Not bragging, just stating facts for the record.
My recent victory was one of the bigger wins.
It sure was.
And there were two others that were pretty big.
Well, that's what we wanted to talk about, this debate that you just had just the other week.
And I was going to wait till later in the week to do the episode, but Reason put out the podcast so you can go listen to the debate.
I had a lot of people on social media talking about it.
So I was like, why wait?
Let's get to this because I really wanted to discuss this debate.
So by the way, what we're talking about, there's a debate.
The resolution was socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes liberty, equality, and what was the third one?
And prosperity.
And prosperity.
Okay.
And it was a debate between you and Richard Wolf, who is one of the most prominent Marxists in the world.
I mean, a guy who really has incredible credentials, was at Yale and Princeton, great Ivy League schools.
And I think that's a good idea.
He's an American professor from UMass.
He now teaches at the new school.
He is 77, 78.
And I had been originally accused when I debated Baskar Sankara, who was only 29, of not picking on someone my own size.
And so I figured Richard, who is very prolific, he's written an entire book, a manifesto about socialism called Democracy in the Workplace, Democracy at Work, Rather, a Cure for Capitalism.
And so he is formidable, one would think.
On the other hand, many people didn't think so.
We could get into that.
Well, I would count myself in that group of people who didn't think so.
But going into the debate, you know, we were all very excited about this because here you have, as you said, okay, you kind of slapped around Baskar Sankara, you know, intellectually speaking, and physically.
It almost bordered on physically.
And people, all of you older people who did not like the way I yelled at Baskar, Dave didn't mind the way I yelled at Bascar.
No, that's an understatement.
I loved it.
It was one of my favorite things ever.
So, however, I figured I could still please Dave and then please the older folks and not yell at Richard.
And I was happy that my critics, after the debate, said, you kept your cool, you didn't yell.
He actually lost his cool more than I did, although he didn't really yell.
No, but he was upset, certainly at some points.
Well, I should say this.
Let me start off by just mentioning that we did, I got to meet Professor Wolf before the debate started.
He's a very lovely guy, really charming, and we were joking around.
He was not at all, he, at least to me, this is just my own opinion, but he came off in the debate as a curmudgeon, like as someone who is, and he wasn't like that personally before the debate.
So that's the best I could do as a compliment to his performance.
But I was really, I was blown away.
Now, I'll say a couple things.
Unlike the debate with Bhaskar, and what those two debates had in common, well, obviously you were debating socialism versus capitalism, but they also were debates that were big events for the Soho Forum.
You moved from the normal subculture theater to bigger theaters, both attached to college campuses and had big crowds, and it was a mixed crowd.
Usually at the Soho Forum, it's a debate series that's, you know, kind of mostly a libertarian or at least libertarian-leaning audience.
It's issues that people who are libertarians care about.
This is different.
This is where you have a room that's kind of split.
There's a lot of socialists there and a lot of libertarians.
And there's something fun about that.
Now, you, I think, as you blatantly stated in this debate several times, you actually said, and I quote, I'm here to recruit you talking to the audience.
I think that's a big part of why you like doing these debates.
Am I wrong about that?
Because you want to talk to these people.
Go before a socialist audience.
And then Dave Smith himself, a heroic stand-up comedian, when he appeared at the Basco Sankara debate at John Jay College, he told a joke, a great joke.
And maybe you want to do that because we want to talk about Dave Smith's role in this because you're always crucial to the evening because you are the warm-up act.
You're the guy who frames it.
And so perhaps you want to repeat the African joke.
Well, I made...
They can go hear the joke, but the joke just referred to Africa as being poor.
And that's what somebody got very affected about.
It was a funny joke, and even I could get a laugh from it.
Dave said to the socialists, the first thing he said, this was the Basco Sankara debate.
He said, yeah, look, you go to Times Square, and what do we all think?
Consumerism, decadence, disgusting.
But then the guy from Africa is in Times Square, and what is he saying to himself?
Food!
Cheap food just everywhere.
So that's how he put his foot in shit with the socialists.
That's right.
And then what happened was the socialist heckler ordered him off the stage, ordered Dave off the stage.
And Dave said, sorry, sir, because of what you just said, I can't leave.
I refuse to leave.
Yeah.
That's the best way to get me to stay on stage is to tell me I have to leave.
And then what Dave did, and you go into theseoulforum.org.
It is recorded so you can catch the moment, although it's just a record, not a video.
Dave said, sir, in the future, I suggest give me a list of things that I should refrain from saying in my stand-up act.
And then, what did you say?
Oh, I said, take the list and shove it up your ass.
Sick.
And then I got off stage.
And then he got off the stage.
That was my exit.
So now.
Well, now I had fun.
Now I didn't inspire Heckles this time.
This time I went a little bit easier on it.
But they were very good to me.
This time they laughed at me.
It went over well, but Dave has a wife and kid to support now.
He's become a family member.
You can't be pissing off these socialists.
I can't be.
Well, I also didn't want, you know, I was a little bit conscious this time of not trying to, you know, I want to have fun and be provoking up top.
But the evening is about the debate.
So I didn't want to get these socialists too riled up before you're one.
But I will say, Richard Wolf, Professor Wolf, was very kind to me about the opening, and it went over well.
So I was pleased with that.
Dave just decided I'm not going to tell the Africa joke.
I'll lay off the Africa joke because I don't want to offend.
That's right.
Those socialists.
Because Africa is a very rich, very rich continent.
We all know that.
But Dave's file cabinet of great jokes is so immense that he brought out his whole litany, basically, of political jokes.
Jokes at the expense of Trump, at the expense of Hillary, and to some...
The expense of Elizabeth Warren quite a bit.
At the expense of Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren.
Who I find, I actually find something interesting about that.
There's a little aside, and then we'll get into the debate.
But I find something interesting where when I've talked to socialists or democratic socialists, as they like to call themselves, for the most part, socialists in America, that's what they call themselves now.
They're not too keen on Warren.
So I asked the room about Bernie.
I love Bernie.
Not too keen on Warren.
And I find something interesting there where she just does not have the street cred with them that Bernie Sanders does.
Even though she's out there, I mean, her new proposal for her, as you've seen, is a $52 trillion Medicare for all proposal, which is just, I got to say, I actually love it because as, you know, you'll have these proposals that cost a trillion, $2 trillion, and then they just go, well, we can afford it.
I mean, we spent $2 trillion on this other.
But now she's actually proposing.
I mean, you're talking about more than doubling the budget.
It's like, okay, let's have this conversation.
Anyway, that's not enough.
Doesn't seem to be winning over that hardcore.
They were much more, the socialists in the room, much more Bernie Sanders than Elizabeth Warren.
And then Dave, because he's a family man, he takes fewer risks.
You still did great, Dave.
You earned your $250.
So I'm not really complaining.
And I was fearful for you going out there because I was sort of like dreading but looking forward to a very raucous, a bunch of hecklers attacking you.
Yes, but it wasn't that at all.
Sorry.
Of course, you took the hierarchy.
You told a nice sort of softball Bernie joke.
Well, I was kind to Bernie.
He just had a heart attack, so I figured I'd be kind to Bernie.
Well, that's right.
But you know, that was, to me, I was expecting something possibly like the last debate.
It didn't go that way.
And I'll say everything about the debate that I was expecting did not go the way I anticipated.
And really, I was, well, I'm trying to be generous, but it's hard to say this in any other way.
I was really blown away by how weak Richard Wolf's performance was.
There was almost nothing there.
Baskar, actually, I thought, did a better job.
At least he argued.
Weak Debate Performance00:02:48
At least he was like, this is what I'm arguing for.
And then you guys could debate about that.
Whereas Richard just kept moving away from, would not address what your very clear critique of his system was.
You were like, hey, I'm okay with this part.
I'm okay with this part.
But this is what I object to, the state involvement.
And he would not address that.
So what were your, before we get into the specifics, what was your kind of the bigger picture?
What was your general takeaway from the debate?
How'd you feel about it afterward?
Well, yeah, just as you say, he has a narcissistic streak, I think.
It's really almost impossible to have a conversation with Richard about his background or his experience without his saying within a couple of minutes that he not only studied at Stanford under the great Paul Buran, but he has a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Yale.
He wants to parade that, and it sort of like sustains his ego.
And I think that that kind of narcissism gets in his way.
And so in the first half of his presentation, by the way, we allotted, I allotted 90 minutes for this debate.
You felt time constrained, Dave, when you debated Nick Sarwalk because I gave you the normal 80 minutes.
Although, again, you know, tomorrow night there's going to be a debate at Intelligence Square, perhaps you know, Catherine Mangu Ward teaming up with John Mackey, and the two of them are going to debate Baskar and Richard.
And they're each going to get six minutes to speak.
Just six minutes.
Again, I've been in communication with Mackey.
I told him, I don't even know why you said yes to this.
It's almost impossible to have this.
It's such a...
a complex.
You're talking about how to structure the economy.
To do this in six minutes to me just seems almost impossible.
Yeah no, you have to just favor the sound bites.
On the other hand, you yourself, of course, used to uh, being uh the uh the my the, the guy who puts on the part of the problem, who can talk in paragraphs yeah, who can have a conversation with people.
You yourself felt constrained by the 15 minutes you were given.
Yeah, you know, nearly three times as much as you'd be given at uh at at uh the uh, at Intelligence Square, uh.
Getting back to Richard, I found that in preparing my remarks uh I I, I read his tome, his big book on what he wants for a social society, democracy in the workplace, secure for capitalism, and I felt that, in order to do a deep dive into it, to quote it copiously and fairly, to zero in on why, it was basically uh old, uh new wine in the old socialist bottles.
Sponsor Break Moment00:02:20
It was really just a warmed over version of the same kind of socialism.
But the only way to explain that to an intelligent audience I had to quote from it and and speak about it fairly and talk about what he was really saying.
I found that it was almost impossible, in blocking out my, my talk, to do it in less than 17, 17 and a half minutes.
So I gave myself extra time and I gave him extra time 17 and a half minutes apiece rather than 15 and then seven and a half minutes uh, for a conclusion.
So it was a 90 minute evening.
So i'm sitting there, Richard is the first to go on, and it's like six or seven minutes into his presentation and he hasn't even discussed the resolution.
He's mostly talking about fdr.
Well, he told he, he went with telling stories yes, stories of history yeah, and and there was something.
Now it as, as you mentioned, it had, it was beside the point of the of the resolution.
All right guys, let's take a quick second and thank our sponsor for today's show.
It's a brand new sponsor, MR Alpha, and it's incredible.
We're happy to have them on board.
MR Alpha is the one-stop shop lifestyle brand for the modern man.
I recommend checking out Mralpha.com.
They're making it easy to look good.
They've got apparel, nutritional products, hair care products, everything you need to stay ahead of the pack.
You know, I was gazing uh, at my, my co-host, Robbie The Fire Bernstein, the other day and I realized i'm lucky to have hair, so I have to protect it.
And now i'm using Mr Alpha volumizing shampoo for men really great stuff.
It's made in an FDA registered facility and contains proprietary formulas for hair loss prevention.
It features caffeine, rosemary extract, sage Age oil and aloe vera to work together to hydrate and promote hair growth.
They've got a full line of hair care products, including conditioners, hair and beard serum.
So, if you're one of those guys rocking a beard, you can actually have a full robust beard, biotine supplements to prevent hair loss, and more.
Like I said, go to mralpha.com.
Mr.Alpha has the products you need to become a better man, mralpha.com.
And if you use the promo code POTP20, you're going to get 20% off your entire order.
Once more, that's mralpha.com, and the promo code is P-O-T-P-20 for 20% off your entire order.
All right, let's get back into the show.
Educate Yourself First00:15:19
Now, he said that he said, I have to do this because we've been so poisoned on this term socialism that I kind of have to tell this story.
I'll say one of the things that I realized, which I did not realize until going in, until actually after the debate with Nick Sarwak.
And it's funny because I've seen so many of these Soho Forum debates, and I've watched other Oxford-style debates before.
But I actually thought going into it, actually doing it, the most challenging part of it to me was that you have much, you have, you know, like in our case, 15 minutes opening and then a five-minute rebuttal.
So the rebuttal is very challenging because you have to on the spot listen to 15 minutes and then rebut it in five.
So you have to, in real time, choose what's the most important thing for me to focus on rebutting here, whereas you don't, I can't go through everything you said and rebut it because I don't have the same amount of time you did.
And of course, the same was true for you.
So I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about what he said in the opening, although, as you pointed out, you kind of almost had to ignore a part of it because it had nothing to do with what you guys were there to debate.
But the story he opens with is basically that since 1945, the term socialist has been poisoned.
Because at the end of the Second World War, I guess we were in the.
And so once the Cold War began, along with it came all of this anti-communist, anti-socialist propaganda.
But before that time, the socialists, the communists, had a seat at the table and they were in respectable positions.
And that actually, you know, the New Deal was very influenced by socialism.
Something I think me and you wouldn't really disagree with.
Certainly the New Deal was influenced by socialism.
I just want to hang on to that thought because that comes up later in the debate.
I think he contradicted himself in a way that he didn't realize.
But so he says, so he tells this whole story about how socialism was, you know, it was doing so great and now it's been poisoned and that we've had 70 years or whatever of, you know, not being able to talk about socialism.
And then he tells his story that there's basically that he was nobody in higher education even knows about Marx.
You'll never hear about Marx.
There's no Marxist, no Marxism taught in the economics.
And he said, and by the way, I want you to know, I'm talking about Stanford, Harvard, and Yale, where I went.
And he said, and if they didn't talk about social media, obviously no one else would, though.
But I do want you to know about my anyway.
Yes, no, that's right.
And he managed to insert his Ivy League credentials in there.
So there was something that, you know, I found there were a few things.
My reaction right away to it that I thought most libertarian or most free market types would feel is when they say you can't learn about Marxists in, or you can't learn about Marxism in college in America.
I just think, I mean, you got to be fucking kidding me.
The idea that Marxist thoughts are being suppressed somehow.
I mean, I like from I, it just, it did not comport with my lived experience, to use a lefty term.
I mean, I was taught about Marx in high school, and there were lots of Marxists at my college, where I went and dropped out shortly after going there.
Whereas libertarianism and an honest defense of the free market was something that I had to figure out kind of on my own.
At Berkeley Carroll, you pay school.
We read excerpts from Karl Marx.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And my history teacher told us about what a great guy he was and how his heart was in the right place.
But, you know, sometimes he made some errors or something like that.
But he really wanted to solve problems.
He was a good person.
At the time, it seemed somewhat reasonable.
But the import of it was that don't close the door on socialism.
Kind of the message.
Yes, there was still a lot to be learned from Karl Marx.
I know he got some things wrong, but at the heart of it, there was a real problem with exploitation.
And the idea that, look, I mean, I just think if you were to go to just about any college campus, the vast majority of them in America in 2019, almost 2020 now, and to say you're a socialist or to say you believe in free market capitalism, I think anybody who's being honest would say it's a much riskier position to say you're for free market capitalism.
That's the position that's like, oh, you want people to starve.
Ironically, they would say, oh, you want people to starve in the streets.
Why don't you just become a commie?
Where no one ever starves.
But anyway, so I found that to be like, did you, just in terms of his telling of history, was there, did anything stick out to you about that?
Well, yeah, no, it's what's interesting about our discussion, Dave, is that on the one hand, I think it's valuable for you to react to the broader issues.
And on the one hand, we're talking about that, the broader issues that were brought up by Richard, even though he wasn't addressing the resolution, all interesting.
Of course, the other track we could talk about is how is I strategizing my remarks given the time constraint, given that I'm aware of the time constraint and aware that I'm trying to address the approximately one-third of the audience, students and others, people who came in on the Wolf promo code, a number of people came in on the Jacobin promo code.
I know about one-third of the audience are socialists, and I want to be able to find a way to talk to them and to talk about, to take socialism seriously.
And I figured those are the people I have to address if I'm going to win this debate.
With that said, what that meant was I'm sitting there wondering, why is Richard doing so much throat clearing?
He could talk in 30 seconds.
Socialism was not, nobody paid attention to it.
Now we are paying attention to it.
He could easily have just given that 30 seconds of discussion.
So therefore, several minutes.
Well, several minutes of talk about this.
Which also, by the way, just the other, and then we can move on to a little bit more.
Oh, go react.
No, no, no.
Indeed.
No, no, I knew that.
I knew that, by the way, if you recall, a question is asked from the floor.
Nick Gillespie takes a lot of interest in it.
Nick actually made a remark about that was more or less along your lines, by the way, where he said, and you asked him about Bernie Sanders.
And then Richard said, oh, well, the first socialist candidate comes along in 70 years, and you're expecting me to cheer.
And then Nick actually tossed off the remark.
When is a libertarian candidate going to?
Of course, obviously, although, of course, it is true that Ron Paul was getting a certain amount of attention in the Republican Party, but that was, of course, the brilliance of Ron Paul.
He is the outlier.
I mean, there's no one else.
There was no other candidate like him.
Yeah.
But I either of our lifetimes.
Of course, going through my mind in part is that I wonder these NYU students who are talking socialism all the time.
Yeah.
They're saying, well, you know, I never heard that.
Professor Wolf is saying, you know, who knows what they would have reacted.
But it didn't.
It probably did not jive with their experience.
Well, yes, but there's something about, and I've noticed this in my time, that there's something about left-wing college kids that are able to exist within this illusion where they go, I'm the counterculture.
It's almost like this 60s mentality that's still with kids today.
So they feel like they're the counterculture.
And I've pointed out to some of them before where I'm just like, if you agree with all of your college professors, with pretty much everybody in Hollywood, you're not the counterculture anymore.
Like, you can't be like, oh, I'm going to take this ballsy position and say what everyone around me says.
But they still do kind of have an air of like, I'm taking this edgy position.
So I think they like this underdog mentality.
We're buying Richard's story.
Even though it's demonstrably not true.
Maybe he was charming them with that story.
Yeah, indeed.
I was only wondering when is Richard going to actually grapple with the resolution.
And then when the QA started, I thought, I don't want to go down that route about arguing, well, maybe Marxism isn't popular because Marxism was discredited by Baum Bauerk over 100 years ago.
Or maybe Ludwig von Mises and Rory Rothbard have been ignored even more in the area of the world.
Well, right.
So that's the other obvious point, which I think Nick did make at one point, where he said, look, I mean, like, you're right.
There's not a lot of Marxist economic departments.
There's like two in the country.
There's like two Austrian economics departments in the country.
I think that, look, if I were to say, look, I think the work of Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard has been completely buried by the establishment, which I do.
But then people would say, well, that's just because it's wrong.
It's been disproven or something.
So you can always kind of, you know, I don't know.
You can argue about these things.
I think personally that Marxist economics has, you know, it's almost fairly objectively been debunked, at least many of the core tenets.
I mean, like the labor theory of value or the falling profit.
What is it?
The falling profit tendency or the falling rate of profit.
All of these things have been debunked.
I mean, they're all just like it's not even up for debate anymore.
We just have better ways of understanding.
And that's why Marxism is popular in English and sociology departments.
Yes, exactly.
Although, even with that said, Mises and Rothbard should be much more respected by those economists.
So if you recall, I felt that the only thing I wanted to toss off was the first thing to tell this kid: look, in the age of the internet, or even before that, whatever you really learn, you teach yourself.
Nobody's stopping you from reading Marx.
You can listen to Richard Wolfe's lectures.
You could listen to my interviews on the tape Smith.
I said, just educate yourself.
Well, you had a great line.
Don't let school get in the way of education.
I thought I was the one who originally said it.
Then I heard that Mark Twain said it before I did.
And then it turns out.
So that was the only thing I wanted to say.
But then also, of course, I was criticized for trying to say, I agree with Richard.
I said a number of times how much I agree with Richard.
I was criticized for that.
I don't know if I made a mistake in saying that.
In that particular case, I said, I agree with Richard that there's a lot of problems with the mainstream departments, maybe for a slightly different reason.
They're corrupted by the fact that they want to sit at the circles of power and they want to pretend that economics is a branch of math.
And so that's all I wanted to say about that.
And then just kiss it off.
And then that got go down that route about why Marxism is popular or not popular.
Yeah, no, I thought you were fairly specific in what you said you agreed with him.
I was just listening back to his.
Well, if you recall, there were those, I got criticism by saying Richard was able to say, you see, that was in his summation, if you recall.
He said, socialism is on the rise.
Just the very fact that I'm here tonight indicates that.
And I've been getting many invitations, more invitations over the past few years than in my entire career.
And the fact that Gene Epstein agreed with me so often is also an indication.
Well, I thought that was cheap.
I thought that was just a cheap shot.
Because none of what you agreed with him was at the heart of the disagreement.
I thought it was a pathetic ploy on his part.
And I said, in my summation, I said, Richard and I agree about a lot.
We're both radicals, and I'm a libertarian.
Libertarians often agree with Levy.
So anyway, that's the problem.
No, I thought you handled that very well.
But I did think the other thing, and then we can move on.
But the other thing that I just, I had a problem with with this narrative, which is really what the first like six or seven minutes of his opening was, just a narrative, a story about how communism and socialism has been treated in America.
And he's not completely wrong in the sense that, say, like being a communist in the 30s was maybe more socially accepted than it was by the 1980s.
I mean, like, there's some kernel of truth to it.
Now, you can say that this is because of the propaganda.
And me and you would both, I think, agree that certainly we are no fan of the Cold Warrior, you know, precursor to the neocon war hawk Republicans who did use a lot of propaganda to bash the Soviet Union.
But a big part of it was also just that the crimes of the communists came out.
I mean, it's kind of hard to separate why did the term communist fall out of favor.
I mean, a lot of that was like Stalin and Mao Cedong and, you know, the fact that it was a disaster.
So that had an effect, too.
It's very hard to parse these things out.
Well, but there's still no, I mean, just to get back to my mommy Mozakami's story, it does come up, I guess, a little bit in what you just said, Dave.
I guess I could have had a lot of people weeping in the audience by pointing out that my mother lost custody of her two sons, me and my brother, because my father was able to prove that she was a card-carrying communist.
Now she compounded the problem because he was also able to prove she had affairs with a couple of black guys in the party.
But okay, now you got to lose your kids.
Yeah, she was, get this, in her FBI file, the FBI agents are constantly writing a memo saying, we're thinking of approaching her to see if she wants to be a double agent.
You know, they would approach Communists and say, you want to spy for us.
He said, but she is a deeply immoral person, and therefore we can't.
And they got that from the judge who made the ruling against her.
The judge said when he made the ruling that the father gets the kids, he said, we know that it's not usual to give the kids to the father, even when the woman has been committing adultery.
But this is a deeply immoral woman.
By which he meant she's a commie and she's sleeping with black guys.
That is deeply immoral.
So look, the fact that she was deluded about communism and that she supported Stalin, you could regard that as ugly.
You might shun her personally, I guess.
But still, I do think that those people were given a very hard time.
Any involvement with the Communist Party, if you know the history, they appeared before Huak, Huak.
Their careers were wrecked in Hollywood.
But the bottom line was that, again, 10% of the Communist Party were FBI agents.
They were so deeply infiltrated.
We didn't need HUWAC to worry about how far the Communist Party was going to get in taking over the country.
The FBI agents had them in a stranglehold.
Huak was a shameful episode.
It condemned people who were foolishly communist.
Anyway, that's a digression.
So, therefore, that if you want to go down that history, there's no question that that part of our history, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party, is a shameful episode.
Hollywood Communist Agents00:14:58
And my mother got shafted by it.
And so, I just wanted to tell that story.
No, it's a fascinating story.
You've lived quite a life, Mr. Epstein.
All right, let's take a quick second and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Quip.
I loved Quip.
It's the best toothbrush I've ever owned.
Quip, of course, are the makers of the best electronic toothbrush out there on the market.
And they want you to know that one single discovery that matters most for your dental care, it is simply this: that if you have good habits, you're good to go.
And that's what the Quip toothbrush is all about.
It's got a timer that goes off every time you change quadrants.
I've never noticed until I had the Quip toothbrush that I was never brushing evenly across all sides of my mouth across all four quadrants.
It's kind of gross, but once you realize that, you feel great about yourself because you're getting a good brush.
This means brushing for two minutes twice a day and flossing regularly, no matter what brand you use.
Quip makes that simple.
Starting with an electronic toothbrush, refillable floss, and anti-cavity toothpaste.
Quip's electric brush has sensitive sonic vibrations with a built-in timer.
It goes off every 30 seconds.
It pulses.
So you know you get an even clean.
The quip floss dispenser comes with pre-marked string to help you use just enough.
Plus, Quip delivers fresh brush heads, floss, and toothpaste refills to your door every three months with free shipping.
So your routine is always right.
Join the over 3 million healthy mouths and get Quip today, starting at $25.
This is just a great product and an incredible deal.
And if you go to getquip.com, that's getq-u-I-P.com slash problem.
So getquip.com/slash problem.
Go there right now and you're going to get your first refill for free.
Your first refill for free at getquip.com/slash problem.
Once again, that's G-E-T-Q-U-I-P.com/slash problem.
Quip, the good habits company.
All right, let's get back into the show.
But I also do think, just in terms of the history of it, the other thing that I kind of objected to is this idea that he'd say, well, socialism was like right at the heart of the New Deal, of all these great reforms of the New Deal, which I don't think me or you would object to that characterization.
That like, yes, obviously these were very socialist collectivist practices that FDR instilled in the New Deal.
We might argue with Richard Wolfe about, you know, whether they were good or bad.
Prolonged the Great Recession.
Right, exactly, which they certainly certainly did.
I think that's fairly objective to say.
But then it's like, oh, they went away after World War II.
But the truth is then, okay, well, if there was socialist influence in the creation of, say, Social Security or in the New Deal or something like that, well, what about the 60s and the great society?
What about the creation of Medicare and Medicaid?
I mean, what about all down to, you know, what about the fact that FDR was praised by even the Republicans would praise.
I mean, even Ronald Reagan referred to himself as an FDR, you know, Republican.
And George W. Bush, these people would never disparage.
I mean, George W. Bush was passing Medicare expansions.
So from our perspective, I think you might go, well, yes, okay, I'll grant you socialists had influence on these horrible programs, but their influence didn't go away.
I mean, maybe the Communist Party never picked up, but certainly the idea of growing government programs, the welfare state, all of these things stayed with us to this day.
So I thought at the very least this narrative is a little bit one-sided and not all very true.
All very true, what you just said, and useful because, again, in a way, of course, we're going to get to the substance of the debate a little bit more.
But in a way, part of the reason to discuss the debate is all of the side issues that did come up because some of them were interesting.
Even though they were just a case of Richard doing a lot of narcissistic throat clearing and not realizing that he's got somebody to debate.
And then I think that when I did get up and I'm quoting from his book and trying to get away from the- Well, this was let's get to that in a second.
But then I'd say the heart of when he actually did make what I guess would be considered an argument in his opening was that he said that, you know, his problem with libertarian, or with capitalism rather, is that there is this kind of hierarchy to it.
It's employer and employee.
He compared this to slave master and slave or lord and serf.
That basically this is what we've been trying to move away from for all of human history, a very Marxist way that this has always been the struggle, this class struggle, and we still have it when we have employer, employee.
And then you went up and gave your opening, which I thought was fantastic.
And you mentioned some similar themes from the Baskar debate, but where you were basically saying that people, workers can choose and have all of the means available right now to them.
And you actually expanded a little bit more, I thought, then in the Baskar debate, where you said, look, I mean, the evidence is that they're not choosing to do this, that this doesn't seem to be something that workers actually want to do.
But if they want to do it, then you're all for it.
Like, sure, organize your company that way.
There's no problem.
You have all of the means to do it right now under capitalism.
What did you think of, you know, maybe one of the takeaways that I took from the debate was that he was basically saying that free markets are anti-democratic because even if you have elections in the political sphere, that, well, you don't have elections in the workplace and you have this kind of employer-employee relationship, and that basically this is a kingdom, essentially.
This is a monarch.
And it, oh, you know, the one thing which I kind of knew already going in, but it kind of made me realize, you know, I mean, he is right to some degree in the sense that we are kind of for, we are kind of not for democracy.
We're not for everything being decided by a vote.
And we are for mini kingdoms in a sense.
It's just that we want every individual, ideally, to be their own kingdom.
So, yes, in the same sense that if what conversation happens in my apartment is not up to a vote of my neighborhood, that is my decision, and it's my decision who comes in and who leaves.
And in your apartment, it's your kingdom, and in someone else's, it's theirs.
I just didn't feel like there was anything that objectionable about it.
Oh, of course, but even more strongly, you know, again, you know, democracy is the right of 51% of the people to piss in the soup of the other 49%.
Hans Hermann Hoppe, I know you're familiar with his thought.
Of course, he's taken it all the way and made the argument that a monarchist state, if it's a forced choice, better to have a monarchy.
Better to have a king than to have an elected president.
That argument makes me a little bit uneasy, but at least I think that there's something plausible about it, even though I may not agree with it in the end.
But obviously, the idea of democracy is only that democracy is at best a necessary evil.
Sometimes you do take it to a vote.
I live in a co-op building, six units, and we take it to a vote.
Right.
And so that's, obviously, we can make dumb decisions.
And if I don't like what goes on, I might want to move out of the co-op.
And in fact, over the last few years, half the people in the co-op have moved out because they don't like what's happening.
And so I could have gotten into the weeds and pointed out that the idea that each firm is run by a king is obviously a grotesque exaggeration because if you don't like what's there, you can quit.
They do want to get decent productivity out of you because they have to motivate you.
There are lots of firms where there's clearly a lot of say, a lot of initiative on the part of the employees that's encouraged.
But indeed, there's usually somebody, a guiding leader there.
But certainly the idea that he's a king, I think, is a grotesque analysis.
No, I agree because he's not ruling over people who haven't consented to be the over.
And who, if we only made sure that the labor markets were really free, who could leave and get another job.
Well, this is kind of my point that if you agree that, say something that even I don't think even the Democratic socialist would disagree with, but my example about your home, like in the sense that you get to choose who can come and who can leave your home at all times.
And you get to make all decisions about what goes on in your home.
That's your own.
Now, if someone were to describe this as your system is basically everyone's the dictator of their home, you could say, well, yeah, I mean, technically, yes, you are.
But don't you see where this is so misleading to describe this as a dictatorial institution because you're almost, you know, you're invoking these terms of past dictators where people had no escape and had to live in their way.
And in this system, it's like, well, no, everybody's just, this is the only way to have freedom is for people to be able to dictate the terms of their own living.
Plus, if you experience viscerally, as I have, I've lived in two co-op buildings and then I've also lived in landlord buildings.
And on balance, I prefer the landlord buildings.
Those lords, that crazy terminology.
My wife owns a building.
I am a landlord working with my wife.
And we don't feel like lords, certainly not in New York.
No, quite often you feel like more the slave or the serf than the lord.
In New York City, if somebody doesn't want to pay their rent, it takes a year of legal action to get them out.
So that, of course, it's really bad in New York City.
But the point about co-ops and the point about organizations where you take it to a vote is that you usually have a bunch of loudmouths at the margin who want to spend all their time making trouble and passing down stupid decisions and getting a majority to go with them.
That's what happens in co-ops.
Crazy fights, real tension, real problems.
No, it's not a very efficient way to run things, as it turns out.
Yeah, exactly.
And I got to say, as somebody, it's always funny to me.
I think I talked about this after your debate with Baskar, but because I was talking about it with my wife, she came with me to that debate.
She was pregnant at the time.
And she came to that debate with me.
Now we've got a young child to take care of.
So she didn't make it out to this one.
Someone had to stay with the kid.
But I remember joking around with her afterward, after the debate with Baskar Sankara.
And he was, you know, it's like the way democratic socialists talk about these things.
They're like, under capitalism, you're either the owner or you're the slave.
And it's like we both rent an apartment.
It's like, oh, I guess we're slaves.
Like, I didn't realize we're slaves because we like to rent it.
We rent an apartment on the Upper West Side.
Pretty good for slaves, by the way, not bad.
But it's just funny because it's like, if we have, if our, if our, you know, if our bathtub is clogged, I'm one text message away and he's there later that day because he knows he's got to do that.
I'm actually paying him.
And it's not like, you know, with this taxation bullshit where I go to jail if I don't pay him.
Like I'm the one giving him money at the end of the month.
He knows he's kind of working for me.
I've never felt like the relationship with my landlord was anything other than him working for me.
It's like, hey, I pay you.
You got to get this window fixed or the plumbing done.
It's the only issue.
Absolutely.
And plus, if we freed up the real estate markets, there would be even far more competition.
It would be a truly landlord serving us on all levels of real estate.
Absolutely.
But see, bear one thing in mind.
I didn't want to go down that route.
No, I think it's good you didn't.
I think it's good that we have the podcast now to talk about it, but I think it's good that you kind of just.
And then beyond that, of course, we could have gotten into the old idea of how we workers are exploited.
They take the surplus from us.
That's the Marxist idea.
They take the surplus and they have no right to the surplus.
We know Bon Barwerk addressed that.
It's fairly simple to explain it.
The capitalists put up the money.
They take risk.
I'm perfectly happy.
I was perfectly happy to let the people who ran Baron's and where I worked for over a quarter of a century and the people who ran the larger corporation, News Corp, to take on the headaches of managing the organization so I could do my thing.
And right here, I mean, at Gas Digital Network, it's a great example for me.
I mean, I'm not an employee of Gas Digital Network.
I'm technically, I believe, an independent contractor, and I own this show part of the problem.
Like, I can leave the network with it if I want to.
But truthfully, the reason why I don't leave and why I'm very happy to stay here is because I have absolutely no interest in the headaches that Ralph and Lewis, who run the network, deal with every single day.
I like to focus on the content that I put out and collect a check at the end of the month.
And I have no interest.
I have people who take care of everything else here for me.
And it's like, why?
This is not a, you know, it's not a hierarchy in the sense that I'm being exploited somehow.
I mean, it is a hierarchy in some sense, I suppose.
But it's not like in this, it's like, well, no, this is much more convenient for me.
And the truth is that the vast majority of people don't want to be business owners.
I mean, it's not like this thing that they just don't have the opportunity or the means to do it.
It's like it's a certain type of person that wants to run a business.
And some people don't.
Some people just want to work and collect a check.
Yes.
And they are always a fairly significant minority.
They're fairly numerous.
They're in the millions.
And of course, Louis Gomez started this business, and he has some authority over you.
He can make certain demands.
You have a deal with him.
He's a businessman, and you have a business relationship with him.
But there too, the only thing, as you know, I said with Baskar and I said with Richard is indeed what you just echoed, which is that, look, let's cut to the chase.
Again, there's an enormous amount of financial firepower that workers have.
The old numbers I went through, the bottom half accounts for one-third of all consumer spending, the bottom four-fifths for nearly two-thirds, a trillion dollars in pension fund money locally.
There's an enormous amount of financial firepower.
And on top of that, Richard himself celebrates the million, the thousands or tens of thousands of workers who are already in co-ops.
He started talking about Mondragon in Spain that does get a lot of government support, I was told.
But still, it exists already.
So build on it.
That's what they're afraid of.
Right.
Because all I needed to do was call Richard's bluff, just like I called Baskar's bluff.
Called their bluff by saying, go ahead and do it.
Don't use the iron fist of the state to bring it about.
Turn Equity Into Cash00:02:18
I think that my argument was strengthened a little bit by my analogizing with this, with the idea of a Marxist revolution from below, that you don't use the power of the state to bring about a revolution from below.
You want the same people who want to be a part of that change who embody it to engineer that change.
And that's why I said, ironically, capitalism rather offers you the avenue whereby if you want to just turn the entire country into worker self-directed enterprises, then workers can do it and workers should do it because they are the ones who presumably want it.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's take a quick second and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Cash Call Mortgages.
Thank you to them for making today's show possible.
If you're a homeowner, I have some great news for you.
If you bought a home more than a year ago, chances are you have equity in your home.
And with the help of Cash Call Mortgages, that equity can mean cash in your pocket.
If you have an interest rate higher than 2.99%, they may be able to lower your monthly mortgage payments and get you the cash you need for the upcoming holidays to remodel your home or just to keep in your pocket.
Cash Call Mortgage is a direct lender and can close your refi in as fast as 20 days with no upfront deposit.
If you qualify, they'll even pay your closing costs.
So, for a free quote and to see if you qualify, visit cashcallmortgage.com backslash problem.
Again, go to cashcallmortgage.com backslash problem.
Impact Mortgage Corp, DBA Cash Call Mortgage, NMLS I D 128231, equal housing lender, not licensed in all states, including New York, offer not available in Washington.
Thanks again to Cash Call Mortgage.
Let's get back into the show.
Another point that you made, that you made in the Basque debate, and you made again here, and you quoted from some other people to make it, I think, is one of the most devastating cases against Democratic socialists in today's current kind of the popular Democratic socialists of today, who are all very left-wing culturally speaking.
They're all kind of culturally leftists.
And there's something that actually I think the fascists recognize that the Democratic socialists don't.
Fascist Cultural Leftists00:11:31
And it's a point that you kind of got to is that you go in this model, in this model that you want, you know, worker democratic control of the economy, how many Qurans are going to be printed?
How much birth control is going to be available?
You see, they've got this problem where the workers are not as culturally leftish as they want them to be.
That's why they kind of went for Donald Trump in this last election.
You know, like, go, go, you know, if you, you know, some of these industries don't necessarily exist anymore, but go like take a vote amongst truckers or take a vote amongst you know like the steel industry or like these millions.
And you're, are you so convinced that they're going to be really concerned with like, I don't know, birth control for 20-year-old women or that they're going to be so concerned about like mosques or, you know, Qurans being printed for this minority of people?
I mean, we're deciding this on a democratic basis now.
Well, the majority of people have no interest in Qurans in this country, but you made the point: like, wouldn't it be preferable for somebody who is culturally on the left that, hey, even if there's just a tiny minority of people who want something, well, someone can come along and produce it, and the will of the majority be damned, as you said, they have a right to produce it for the person who wants to buy it from them.
Of course, this was never addressed.
Richard never responded to this criticism, the whole debate.
As a matter of fact, I mean, this is a funny backstory to that.
I was quoting Connor Friedersdorf, who I don't know, a journalist, a pretty smart journalist, although I don't know him personally.
He wrote this in The Atlantic, and I thought it was well put when he said that, do you want to live in a society where birth control is available if and only if a majority of workers assense?
You know, that's it.
That's because if they don't agree, then that's democracy for you.
No birth control.
So that was well put.
And then, as a matter of fact, in my initial, when I debated Baskar, I lifted that line and I didn't mention him.
I didn't say I was quoting him.
To my astonishment, he sends me this angry email that I plagiarized him.
I said, I did, I did, but I, but I wasn't sure I was going to use it.
And I had very little time, so I didn't cite your name.
But in fact, I posted a little note on the sofa for him website that I lifted a few words from Connor Petersdale just to make him happy.
This time around, I did use his deadline.
And now you've apologized and shown remorse here on part of the problem.
So I think you've made it.
I'm plagiarizing him in my little talk.
I thought, well, I'm just reading these lines out.
So I didn't think I had to quote you.
But this time I did quote him.
The if and only if was a very good way of putting it because that's indeed what they're saying.
That other way.
And then I managed to pick up on his line, the same if and only if about dissenting journalism.
You know, the part of the problem is only going to be around if and only if a majority of workers agrees to allocate the money, the funds, as well as the labor.
Because that was the other part of it, which is that in Richard's book.
Oh, no, and the other thing.
Not yet.
No, no, no.
Well, I just wanted to point out, and we'll get to this in one second.
Just wanted to point out that, by the way, in case anybody was saying that, you know, like what I was saying before, that actually I think the fascists realized something that the communists didn't in the sense that they realized that the workers might actually have very conservative social values and not these kind of left-leaning, you know, social values that the democratic socialists want to see come out of the workers.
The libertarian perspective is more kind of like, look, let people be free.
And you may have a preference whether they're socially liberal, socially conservative, but we're willing to roll the dice and see what people want to do.
And if they want to do this, then it's not really going to work to force them out one way or the other.
But I would just make the point that even to fascists, say like modern-day fascists, you better have a big problem with this too, because fascism is a very dissident minority opinion at this point.
So that would be one of the first things that would be squashed by a majority vote right now, anyway.
So I'm just saying for either of them, it's about all of you guys should embrace liberty, is more or less my point.
But the other argument, and then I want to get into you quoting his book, because this is actually where I thought, I thought his opening was strange and it was bizarre that he was just telling stories and not really addressing the resolution.
But I actually thought the debate started spinning off the wheels during his rebuttal period.
That's well, not from your perspective.
I thought, listen, we were talking about this before the show.
I thought that this was, I thought you did a very good job, but in some ways, your debate performance against Bhaskar was more impressive because you had an opponent.
Where in this debate, it was almost like, it's like if you're in a boxing match and your opponent lays down and you're kind of like, well, what do you want to do?
You want to punch it air here?
I mean, there's no one really to hit.
And then it's almost like, well, obviously Gene won.
There's no debate about that.
But you go, man, did he really land any great blows?
And you're like, there was nothing almost to hit.
It was, you know, just as an analogy, like there was, so he'd knock out because I couldn't even punch him.
Well, that's right.
That's right.
I mean, you won almost by default.
I was chasing him around the room.
Well, that's right.
It did kind of seem like that at times.
So the other point that I thought that you made in your opening, which is truly, to me, the most devastating takedown of it's very similar to what Murray Rothbard wrote this piece.
I can't remember the title of it, but he wrote a piece attacking anarcho-syndicalism, like Noam Chomsky's style, anarcho-syndicalism.
And you make this same point, a very similar point, which is you're like, practically speaking, how would a society of worker democratically control a worker democratically controlled economy, how would this deal with creative destruction?
How would an economy ever...
And the example you used is, so Steve Jobs comes along and says, hey, I have this new tool that is going to put out of, you know, it's basically a flashlight, a calculator, a phone, a camera, and button that says just rattle.
There's like 70,000 other things that this machine does.
It's all of these things.
How do you think all of those individual industries would vote on the creation of this new industry?
My guess is not for it.
And the fact that you realize that this creative destruction happens all around us all the time.
How would an economy run this way, again, was never addressed, never responded to by Richard the entire time.
Now, what you did was, as you said copiously, you quoted from his book and you were like outlining, like, look, this is the system that Richard Wolf is advocating for.
And these are the major things that I have a problem with.
And some of these things were state-run financing of business and other...
Well, basically, state-run financing and allocation of finance and allocation of labor.
On top of that, he wanted the turnover of labor to be run by a state-run.
So the state has a luck on labor and a luck on finance.
But by the way, since you mentioned the great Murray Rothbard, I actually did read in preparation for my debate, Murray's essay, again, I don't remember the title either, on anarcho-syndicalism.
And he used the example of the automobile, that the automobile never would have replaced the horses and the horse and buggies because it would have been an enormous threat to an enormous industry.
And there's so many industries we could do this with.
I mean, like podcasting to radio.
You could look at the computer to the typewriter industry.
I mean, you could look at, you know, like there's, and these things are really major.
I mean, they've happened so many times in my lifetime.
Like, just me, and I'm only 36 years old.
But when I was a kid, I mean, there was video rental stores were a huge thing.
Every neighborhood had your mom and pop video rental store.
And no, I mean, I remember when Blockbuster came in and put the mom and pops out of business.
And then, of course, Netflix came in and destroyed Blockbuster.
There was Barnes and Nobles weren't around.
There were all these little community bookstores.
These things happen all the time.
You know, and Kodak, Kodak, one hour photos.
All of these things are gone.
They're gone from our economy.
How would any of this happen?
How would any of this progress happen if you had to rely on either a state deciding this or workers voting for these changes to be made?
It seems to be a very real practical problem with this system that I still have not heard a sufficient response to when I didn't get one of these.
If Richard is actually making the argument that he made in his book, a similar argument that Baskar makes, it's that we need this government intervention in order to review these ideas, because after all, they do take away the livelihoods of a lot of people.
That's their bleeding heart, understandable concern that a lot of people lose their jobs because of this and they have to start doing something else.
And the only response I think that, and the proper response on the part of people like you and me should be that, first of all, if you're going to give government any sort of power over these things, you really are going to obliterate 90% of the good ideas that come along.
They'll have a perfect excuse to oppose them.
First of all, because most good ideas don't work out.
They'll say, hey, look, this looks like another, this thing with the smartphone looks like another pie-in-the-sky idea anyway.
Secondly, the other part of it is that we do live in an economy of scarce resources.
Look, look, it sounds like a good idea, but we don't have the funds right now.
We've got all these other stupid things going.
You know, we still got the horse and buggies that are.
So they'd have perfect excuses.
So therefore, you're doing that.
And it would sound plausible and reasonable.
No, I think you're absolutely right.
And by the way, I do to some degree sympathize when some people don't like the changes.
But the truth is, this is, and this is something that I think you recognize that you've talked about many times, is that this is, whether you like it or not, a true bottom-up grassroots phenomenon.
So in other words, listen, just to take an example of what I just named that I don't like so much, but then I'm kind of a hypocrite in it too, is that I kind of like the community bookstores.
Oh, yeah.
You know, there's something about the local bookstores that I really like.
And now there's these Barnes and Noble.
So there's way fewer of them can, you know, make a profit and stay in business.
But then the other thing is that there's a Barnes and Nobles a few blocks from where I live.
I go there all the time because it's super convenient.
They always have what you want.
You know, you don't go there and like have the book that you're looking for most of the time because it's this huge store.
Amazon, I order a ton of things off Amazon.
So I may, in some idea in my mind, say, I like the little local bookstore, but I find myself going on Amazon and ordering the book that I want or going to Barnes and Nobles more often than going to these stores.
So it's kind of like, yeah, if you want to keep that place in business, you got to convince people to shop there and actually do it.
And anyway.
Well, that's all important.
And absolutely.
But I do also want to file the point that Baskar and Richard are completely tone deaf to the libertarian free market concern with the need to free up the real estate markets,
to free up the labor markets, to make it possible for somebody with a high school education to practice divorce law because you can learn it in a few months to make it possible for people to be mobile in the labor markets and for people to move to high-wage cities like New York and San Francisco.
So that too is important.
Counting Dead Bodies00:14:56
And that's the other part of it that they are overlooking.
No, I think you're absolutely right.
You're absolutely right.
They never address that and they seem unwilling to even entertain those ideas or examine them.
So here's where, to me, where I thought the debate, I was really, I actually, I was sitting in the front row and I had to consciously stop myself because I was making faces.
Like I couldn't believe that Richard Wolfe was going down this path and I was like, oh, I don't want this to come off disrespect.
You remind me of the reason why when the Q ⁇ A starts, actually, Nick did the same thing.
The Q ⁇ A starts.
I used to sit between the two people and I would get these angry texts from my son.
Stop making faces.
No, I know.
It's hard not to sit down because someone says something so baffling and you make a kind of baffled face and then you're like, oh, okay, I guess I shouldn't be doing that yet, especially as moderator.
As an audience member, you can.
You can nick all the faces.
But I just, I felt like, oh, I don't want to be disrespectful.
But so you quoted several times from his book.
And now, what's interesting is that it's one thing, and I've found this in my experience before with some professors.
They're kind of used to lecturing to an audience that is somewhat beholden to them.
Ironically enough, for someone who's so against employer-employee, doesn't seem to have a problem with professor-student relationships.
Anyway, but so you, they better be telling you everything you say is great and soaking it up and repeating it to you if they want a good grade or they want to pass this class.
And so you just kind of talk and you can tell your own narrative and you can do it.
So the opening 17 and a half minutes, Richard Wolfe is spitting out his narrative.
He's not really dealing much with the resolution, but he's telling you his story of how communism and socialism has been perverted and propagandized against throughout the last 75 years.
But now it's rebuttal time where he's actually got to respond to somebody else who's a formidable opponent who's been making counter ideas.
And in his rebuttal, he opens by, and I am not exaggerating.
I encourage everyone, go listen to this debate.
He opens by saying, you know, a book is kind of like a child and you think it's yours, but then it goes out into the world and it becomes its own thing.
And, you know, I'm listening to Gene quote back this book and I don't even know who he's quoting and it sounds like someone I'd never even want to meet.
I almost verbatim.
He said that to open his thing.
So he just dismisses you, quoting his book, and then says, listen, all we're saying with socialism is that we can do better.
We want to move away from capitalism.
We want to move away from all these problems and we want to do better.
And I think that you, this, I mean, I was taken back by this.
I think you were too, because it's a very surprising, it's the guy laying down in the middle of a boxing match.
And you're like, wait, I thought we were, I thought we were going to be throwing fists at each other.
And now I'm realizing that as your analogy was probably better.
Now I'm realizing I'm chasing you around a ring.
I wasn't really prepared to do this.
And so you just kind of said, well, okay, if you want to just abandon your book.
I mean, I read your book and I'm responding to what you advocate for socialism here.
And you said, which I thought was, this is why, I mean, it's almost kind of like he just laid down and you just get the victory without it.
You just kind of said, well, if you're going to tell us we need to embrace socialism, you're going to have to give us a little bit more details than just we should embrace socialism.
You're going to have to lay out why and what you're advocating because every time we've embraced socialism in the past, it's been quite a disaster.
So we're not just going to follow you down this because you say, let's do it.
And that to me, it was just very, it was kind of surreal.
Like I couldn't believe this guy with such who's got such great credentials, who's so renowned as this like kind of, you know, world-renowned Marxist, that this is what he came with.
Yeah, I want to add almost the funniest thing that Richard said was that, look, you could go to a fortune teller.
The fortune teller predicts the future, and it's just for laughs.
That's all.
And so he was analogizing that with his book that, yo, who can predict that?
Well, I can't predict what socialism is going to be.
Like, who can tell you?
I can just tell you we got to do better and we got to do socialism.
That's it.
Which it was very strange.
And he also said in there, which is in the kind of condescending, narcissistic way that he goes, if anybody were to take a fortune teller seriously, you seriously need help.
And which I also thought was very like, well, that's not really true.
I mean, like, I don't take fortune tellers seriously, but I know people who believe in their periscope, or not periscope, but horoscope being read and all these things.
And it's not necessarily an indication that they need psychological help.
It's just people have some goofy views.
And that's, you know, anyway, that's completely aside and almost unnecessary to mention.
But the idea that it's like, well, I'm sorry, but if you're advocating some system, the onus is clearly on you to at least try to explain how this might work.
I'm not saying you're going to predict the future.
Certainly, I don't think any libertarian would say that we can predict exactly what's going to happen in the future.
But the onus is to some degree on us to explain why we think moving in this direction would be preferable to moving in a different direction.
And then he does what I hate, which is my, probably my pet peeve from democratic socialists that they get when debating libertarians, particularly libertarians like you or me, is that he says, you just like the status quo and you just want to keep things exactly as they are, which is to, I mean, that is just in no way a fair representation of either me or you or anybody who shares our views.
I mean, as you said in your closing statement, we're both radicals here.
And if you actually got down to each policy that you wanted to change from the status quo, it's a pretty radical change.
I mean, the federal government currently spends over $4 trillion a year.
I think if Gene Epstein had his way with that budget, it'd be close to $4 trillion smaller than it is right now.
So, you know, so I mean, it's like, that's a pretty radical change.
It's funny that the same people, if someone like Paul Ryan proposes, you know, as I don't know if people remember, but Paul Ryan got famous with what was called the Ryan budget.
This was around 2010, 2011.
And the budget called for a decrease in the rate of growth of spending.
And there were no actual cuts, but it would decrease the rate of growth of spending.
And everybody in the establishment said, these are radical.
This is a radical budget plan.
Well, I'm talking about cutting trillions out of the budget as we know it.
Right, right.
So if that's radical, how do you describe us as now defending the status quo?
It's just, it's so muddled and ridiculous.
So that was his response.
And so at the rebuttal portion, I was really surprised already at where this debate had gone.
But actually, I think the thing that caught me the most that stuck out to me the most was in the question and answer segment, which then follows the rebuttal section.
And me and you spoke on the phone about this briefly the next day.
But he said at one point, I guess you had mentioned that there were millions and millions of people who had died when socialism had been enacted, that these economic policies, you know, and it's twofold, right?
And you made this clear when you made the point.
That you said, well, there's basically twofold.
It's like, number one, for economic reasons, people are starving to death with this collectivization of the economy.
And the other thing is that you were like, it's the power structure that you necessarily have to create when you bring the state in allows for someone really bad to get in control and kill people.
So it's both by starving to death and just by the government killing them.
And that there's all these millions of people who have died.
And he said, this is just so ridiculous and perverse that people would count up dead bodies.
And this is how you judge a system based on the people who died.
I was blown away.
And then, by the way, again, go listen to the debate.
I'm really not exaggerating this.
And then without missing a beat, he starts counting up dead bodies and goes, well, look at World War I and World War II.
Look at when the British colonized India, millions of people died there.
So do you really want to play this game where we count up dead bodies?
But what's funny is like, well, now you're entering your only way to respond to counting up the dead bodies, which I think is a very reasonable way to judge a society.
Like, it's as if you went, you know, see, let me not ramble on too long here, but I think libertarians, one of the things that's the essence to me of libertarians and the way we look at the world, right?
In the same sense that in economics, we reject this micro-macro distinction, you know, where like a lot of mainstream economists will say, well, here's this stuff on the macro, you know, supply and demand, capitalism, all kinds of works, but or on the micro, rather.
But here then we get to the macro and all the rules are off and it's a whole different thing.
And you're like, yeah, I don't really buy this.
And in the same sense, we don't look at like an individual case of justice or injustice that much different than a collective case of injustice or justice.
And so it's almost like going into a murder trial and somebody's like, well, this is a very bad person.
He killed three people.
And you go, you want to count up the dead bodies?
Is that what we're going to focus on?
Counting how many people he killed?
And then we're going to judge him based off that?
You're like, yes, that is exactly how we're going to judge him.
But he seems to throw out that this was like unfair.
That last thing you just said actually would have been a good way to respond.
I thought you were going to say something else.
Bear in mind that forts what a lot of commentary I saw on your Facebook page and Tom Woods and as well as the Mises Caucus got very interested in that topic.
And Richard did, as you may recall, said that these were capitalist wars.
Oh, yeah, that was the other thing.
He wanted to make the point then that since all of these wars are capitalist wars, that the body count.
You're right to say, of course, then he starts counting bodies.
But he wanted to make the point that, well, look, the body count is not.
It's capitalism.
So could I argue with him about the body count?
And then a lot of people were saying, you didn't argue with him enough about whether they were capitalist wars.
And a lot of people are trying to point out that they weren't.
But as you recall, but the way you put it, I like your analogy with saying that it's a murder trial, three people are killed.
And then Richard Wolfe, the expert, testifies.
But what about those wars?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then maybe a lunatic I mean gets up.
Well, what about all those people the socialists killed?
Well, it's all good.
Well, first of all, and here was what I was laying out before that I thought was just an interesting, also another interesting contradiction.
Now, by the way, I'll also, I got a lot of comments when I debated at the Soho Forum, like, oh, you didn't, you know, you should have said this or this, or you didn't address this.
And the truth is, when you're up there, you have limited time.
You want to laser focus on the resolution.
You can't, you don't, and especially when you're focused on the resolution and someone else is dodging it, you don't want to go down every tangent because you want to get back to what we're here to discuss.
There is, yeah, well, absolutely.
Yes, you want to do that.
But then, of course, the two side points that obviously you and I have got to acknowledge, having been on the firing line, that, well, maybe we did miss an opportunity.
Sure.
But and then, so, you know, even in terms of the resolution.
And then the other part of it, which is a slight modification, is that if the other side is going to take the tack of making a lot of arguments that are off the resolution, and in a way, I did because a question came from the audience.
And if you recall, I spoke about Richard saying the idea about the non-aggression principle that Richard would say, I answered for him, Richard would say, well, you're free to starve.
If you don't get a job, you starve in a capitalist economy.
I said, that's the usual thing you hear from people like Richard that after all, the aggression that's committed against a person who doesn't have a job, because that person's going to starve, that's what Richard would normally say.
But then it's odd that they talk about starvation when all the starvation seems to take place in the socialist economies.
That's what sparked Richard to make that point about death.
So I started it in a way because you can't always tell somebody in the audience to stick with the resolution.
Well, sure, yeah.
It makes it look as though you're ducking things.
Well, no, you're right.
You're right.
It does come off that way, that you're ducking the other argument.
So that's the other part of it.
So if someone makes a separate argument and you go, well, I'm not here to debate that.
I'm here to debate this.
It comes off like you don't have an answer for it.
Exactly.
So it is an argument.
That's the reason why you do have to stray from the ranch every once in a while when you're making these debates.
Because if somebody brings something up, you have to make a judgment about the possibility that maybe you should address it, even though it isn't on the resolution.
So that's the other part of it when it comes to Monday morning quarterbacking.
Now, I thought you were going to say, and a lot of people came down on me for not saying, look, come on, Richard, those weren't capitalist wars with that bullshit.
The government is a social institution.
But that would have been a big argument.
Well, the thing that I thought, and you're right, I get your point.
But there was also something that I thought was really strange was he's saying that, you know, it's like, this is what I thought was weird, right?
Is that he opened up with this narrative that the commies and the socialists used to have a seat at the table and said that the progressive era, I mean, he was talking about FDR, was like, oh, we had all of these government plans and we were right there and we were involved in all this stuff.
And yet somehow still World War I and World War II are laid at the feet of capitalism.
And you're like, well, I mean, look, if you just want to look at it, it was Woodrow Wilson and FDR.
These were also the same leaders who really, I mean, really the kind of the original New Deal kind of mentality started with, or at least was to some degree implemented under Woodrow Wilson.
I mean, obviously, this is not, it's not completely disconnected that you had in 1913 a Federal Reserve created, in 1914, the income tax created, and a few years later, we're in a world war.
So there's a lot there that I just thought was very strange that he gets to pick and choose what was, you know, the good period in time and what was the bad period in time.
Now, of course, if you're talking about the Second World War, I mean, to reduce the major players.
Okay, I mean, if you want to call America and Britain capitalists, okay, but the Nazis and the Russians, are they also capitalist countries now?
And I'm sure he would say they were state capitalism or something like that.
Yeah, having been raised, you know, by, I used to argue with my mother's boyfriends.
Many of them were actually not black, but white.
And they made their arguments about World War II were a real piece of work about how it was all about the capitalists.
We could go down that route.
But indeed, I was a little bit surprised that Richard was talking about World War I and World War II as the capitalist wars that he wanted to choose.
State Capitalism Question00:14:43
I guess he sort of...
I thought this is when labor had their, you know, like, I thought this was like the golden time back then.
Because he started by saying 1945 and after is the bad time when, you know, communists were purged or whatever.
But the other point, too, that I thought was just that really stuck out at me was that he starts by saying you're counting up the dead bodies and then goes on to these other policies.
Now, if you were, let's say you in any way were defending the two world wars and defending colonialism and then saying that, well, look at all these people who died under socialism, then okay, it's a reasonable retort to say, well, look, but look at all the people who died under the systems you're defending.
Of course, you were never defending colonizing India or either of the two world wars.
So it's like, but the bigger picture than that to me is like, well, why was the British colonizing India wrong?
Why were the two world wars wrong?
Precisely because so many people died.
Like, there's no way to get to why you think they're wrong without counting up the dead bodies.
Like, he's relying on this same metric that he blasts you for relying on.
But I assume his argument, although I don't know how he would construct it, is that these wars would not have happened but for the evils of capitalism.
I think he was sort of saying that.
Yeah, I suppose.
I mean, that's what a number of people took him at his word, and Anthony Samarov was arguing.
Well, there were people clapping.
There were these like 20-year-olds, something like that, college students behind me who were clapping behind me.
I almost couldn't believe it.
Like, you're like, wow.
This is convincing people.
If I recall, I thought, I mean, Pete Raymond thought I did have a good retort.
But I said, the only thing I said, if you recall, was that I'm opposed to those wars.
I didn't get into the capitalist part of it.
I'm opposed to those wars.
I'm a libertarian, just like Richard is.
We hate America's wars.
I mentioned the Iraqi war.
I said, the difference, Richard, is that this mass murder was done by government to its own citizens.
The sins of omission and commission to their own citizens.
That's what's unique about it.
That's why I stressed it.
So I thought that was a good point.
I mean, maybe you were less impressed with it than other people.
Well, I just, I thought it was a fine point.
I thought there was an opportunity even quickly for you to have, you know, like a home run line or something.
Which I probably would have gone in the moment with, well, my murder trial one, I thought it was pretty good.
But I also thought you would have gone like, I mean, all these people who talk about Hitler killing six million Jews, this is so petty.
They just want to count up the dead bodies.
I mean, like, why do we have to focus on this?
I don't know.
I guess the murder trial, it's too good a way of putting it not to have made that point.
And I'm sorry you weren't.
I didn't have an earpiece, and you would have been watching.
Next time.
Next time we'll get you on.
Yeah, and you were making so many faces out there.
You were distracting me.
But that aside, but bear in mind that he did say that these were capitalist wars.
And I've been there with people.
I know that they think that every war is waged by capitalists.
And there's been, again, an awful lot of discussion on Tom Wood.
Lots of discussion in different directions.
Somebody was saying on Tom Woods' Facebook, well, gee, Venezuela and Cuba didn't really wage any wars, and neither did a couple of other social.
But of course, don't tell me, I know, I know, the Soviet Union waged a war on Afghanistan.
And indeed, they're actually, it is true.
You know, we can get into that a little bit.
The justification for the Iraqi wars, you may recall, was that democracies don't wage wars.
Right, right.
I mean, I actually, Hans Hermann Hopkins.
It's kind of ironic as a democracy is waging a war.
It's kind of ironic that as a democracy is waging a war, we're convincing people that democracies don't wage wars.
Yeah, I know, exactly.
So that was a problem.
No, but Hans Hermann Hoppey made the argument only that it seems to correlate with how rich an economy is.
Right.
And in that sense, Hans Hoppe was actually indicting the richer capitalist countries.
Obviously, we don't want to, but he was saying that we're more in danger of waging a war because we can afford it.
The poorer socialist countries, they're really strapped and they can't afford wars as much as that.
That's at least well, there's definitely something to that.
I mean, you're not, nobody's too concerned about Cuba attacking their neighbors right now because, I mean, they can't even get it together to run their own society.
And Venezuela as well.
And in fact, the Soviet Union really was a weak country militarily, just like China was, because indeed there were relatively poor economies.
So that's factually true.
So that at least is interesting.
But my God, to argue that with Richard.
Yeah, no, no, no, that's a whole can of worms.
My point is only that he was saying, I was stunned to hear him say, oh my God, he's like one of my mother's boyfriends.
The capitalists fight.
Capitalism causes all war.
If I'd gone down that route, I don't know where it would have stood.
No, no, I understand not wanting to open up that can of worms because it's just too much.
But that was to me one of the most, that was probably the moment that really stood out of the debate.
Well, but I would have made you a good trial point because indeed I hear that all the time about people sort of like kissing off this and well, that's trivial and that's it.
Well, I just, I certainly would have said that.
I think if you are, I think counting up the dead bodies is not only legitimate, but like the only way to really judge these policies.
And that I say, I think the points that he made about the world wars and imperialism in general were absolutely correct.
The fact that a lot of people died there makes it really bad.
If you're killing a lot of innocent people, that is something that you have to take into account morally.
That being said, you also have to take into account what Mao Zedong did to his people, what Stalin and Lenin did to their people, and what Pol Pot did to their people.
I just don't understand why that is going to get a pass.
And you pointed out at one point in the debate that he did seem to be waffling between, it's kind of like, are you defending these old socialist states or are you condemning them as state capitalism?
Like, which one is it?
No, no, indeed, because he was, that's exactly what did happen.
He was bobbing and weaving between different socialist points.
You know, socialism means a lot of things.
It means, you know, and so on.
And indeed, at times, he did say things like, we've had the benefit of these experiments.
And we've learned from the past.
We've learned so many years.
And I wanted to, having heard that again when I listened to the debate on the podcast, I thought I could have come up with the, well, the first time around, we only killed 100 million people with these experiments.
Let's only kill 10 million the next time.
It's going to be a tenfold improvement.
That would have been a good line.
That's a good one.
No, well, believe me, I thought of several good lines after my debate as well.
Yeah, that's just part of the game.
But there, in the Richard Wolf spirit, you're learning and getting better for the next time around.
Down to 10 million, yeah.
That's right.
Down to 10 million.
But it was, you know, there's just something about that.
You know, like this is the core of the argument that it's become kind of like a meme online, the um that wasn't real socialism, which is kind of the defense of socialists in general, right?
It was never real socialism.
It was always something he wrote a whole book about the Soviet Union.
And there is like, okay, fair enough.
You, you can make the case that this was not truly, you know, Marxism implemented the right way, or that this example or this example or this example go down the list.
This was not real socialism.
But the point is, you would want to get down to the specifics and go, well, what was it about socialism being implemented in these countries that went so bad?
Because you better have a damn good answer for that if you're advocating we try this again, right?
And what I thought was like you got to some specifics in this debate, which he never really grappled with, but where you're like, look, just think this through.
If you're going to put the state in charge of financing, look at what the state already does.
You brought up Barack Obama's war on whistleblowers and war on journalisms and him using the, what's it, the sedition act to prosecute journalists and things like that.
And the Espionage Act to prosecute journalists.
And you go, so now you're going to say that every news publication needs to get their funding from the government.
Well, what about the ones that are critical of the government?
I mean, it's like, obviously, if you're going to create this power source, of course, you're going to, it's going to be a very high likelihood that it gets corrupted, that people who wish to rule over other people, that predators get in charge of this power source.
And so it's like, well, that's what happened in every single one of these experiments.
What about your experiment is going to be different?
And then, you know, he just never really seemed to grapple with this.
Yes.
And again, it was Rothbard who made the point and why I wanted to push it again that the reality is that if you are in charge of allocating scarce resources to publications, you actually do have to make a decision.
They're always in scarcity.
As I said, you have two golden excuses.
This idea sounds stupid anyway, and most ideas don't pan out.
And look, we just don't have the money this month.
We don't have the money this year.
Those would be realities because we do live in a world of scarcity and we do live in a world in which most new ideas don't pan out.
So there's a multitude of excuses, good excuses for the powers that be to choke off anybody they don't like.
I think that's an important point to make because it isn't as though it's not going to happen as an afterthought.
And then on top of that, I wanted to avoid the Donald Trump story.
That's why I went after our most beloved president Obama, who was the real scourge of dissident journalism.
Because I know, of course, the socialists of this world believe, oh, under socialism, we'll never get a Donald Trump elected, but we could get another Obama.
So that was the reason why my father's going to be aware of that.
No, absolutely.
It's a more powerful example.
So one of the things, I guess what, you know, at the heart of your argument, because I don't know what else to go over here, because again, I really just felt like Richard did not grapple or respond to any of the very concrete arguments that you put forward.
But right at the heart of it is the stuff that you argued with Baskar about.
It's also what you debated here on this show with Ben Burgess about is the idea that it's like, well, look, you can get what you want, or at least a very large degree of it right now under current situations.
I mean, you can get workers, worker-owned businesses, they exist, and you could have a lot more of them if you simply convince people, convince those workers who you claim to be representing to go for it and to do it.
It's as simple as you always say the bottom half controls one-third of the consumption.
So if you just said to listen to the bottom half of the country, forget the top 1% or the top 2%.
Get rid of the top 50%.
We're just talking to the bottom 50%, the ones who are really getting screwed here, right?
Presumably, right?
We are the 99%.
I'll even get rid of the top 49 of that and just give you the bottom 50.
Just say, hey, we're only going to shop at worker co-ops.
We're going to form worker co-ops.
This is all we're going to do.
You can go do it.
You could have your revolution peacefully and there's no risk of a dictator killing tens of millions of people.
You can just have everything you want.
But there is a problem with this idea, which, as you know, is that it ain't happening.
And it's not happening for a reason, right?
And isn't that kind of the takeaway at the end of this that people, it seems like, don't really want this business.
And you did, I thought one of the most powerful points of the debate was when you started looking at the details of what this is what Richard distanced himself from, oh, that was just that stupid book.
Who cares about that?
But when you said, it's like, so take me through how this works exactly.
So now in addition to going to work, everybody's also got to be a part of a meeting where they're making all of the decisions about what the company is going to do.
I just don't think most people want to be a part of this.
But they'd also, beyond that, as you know, they'd also be reviewing, they'd also be working on the worker-controlled banks and the worker-controlled labor allocation agency.
So really, of course, nobody would do it.
It's a dystopian nightmare to be spending all your days having meetings about the company matters and then having to review the reports of the labor allocation and banking agencies in the evening and weekends and then discussing it with other people online.
That would be your entire life.
You'd have nothing left in your life.
But of course, what would really happen is that the elected representatives and their appointees would just be running the show.
Well, that's right.
It would always happen.
We'd have the labor allocation czar and we'd have, and his epigenes.
So really, it would just be, again, new socialist wine and old bottom.
Well, in the same sense, and a great example for that is just, look, we do have a democratic, I mean, they would disagree that we have a democracy, but we have the democratic process in the political sphere.
But how does that actually work out?
Does that actually work out to me and you sitting around deciding how the federal government is going to allocate resources?
No, it's we get one stupid vote over one representative or the other.
And then these oligarchs sit around and they decide how the money is where we spend more time.
Which is what every company would be.
Most of us are going to spend more time worrying about which book we're going to buy at Barnes ⁇ Noble, which person, all our personal decisions in life and our consumer decisions, that we have control over and that we focus on.
But obviously we can't affect.
We're not too interested in it.
Well, there's something.
And the other thing that I wanted to mention that stood out to me in the debate, and it's funny because the dynamic at play here is that we both, both you and I and Richard Wolfe and Bhaskar and Ben Burgess and those guys, we all feel like we're the dissident voices.
We all kind of, you know, and maybe in some senses we all are.
We all feel like the propaganda is kind of against us, that the corporate press and people like that are keeping us out.
We've all got a persecution company.
Well, that's right.
Well, we do, though, to some degree.
And we all feel like we represent the bottom-up kind of grassroots movement rather than a top-down, you know, kind of forced, you know, organization, you know, way to organize society.
But there's something interesting where obviously, you know, I just think it's pretty blatant that what you're advocating for in this debate here is genuinely bottom-up.
You're saying, hey, if the workers choose to do it this way, you have my blessing.
Then great.
Work Hours And Choices00:10:14
And if they don't, then also great.
Like either way, it's just they get to choose.
And this also came out to me at one point where he was talking about the 40-hour work week or whatever came up and the idea that because of capitalism, people have to work so much and that these greedy capitalists would always want more and more out of you.
And this is something to me that I think is really, you know, it's interesting that the Democratic Socialists never seem to acknowledge that these are a reflection of choices that people make and that people actually can work a lot less or work a lot more and some choose to do both.
And it's not a matter of us sitting here saying, oh, we think this is what people should be working every week.
It's just that we recognize that people kind of can decide what they want to do.
Now, if a Democratic Socialist heard me say this, they would be like, are you out of your mind?
People can't choose what to work.
They'll starve if they don't work.
But I wonder at a certain point, you're like, what level of wealth do we have to get to before you recognize that people wouldn't starve from cutting back a few hours of work?
There has been, well, of course, as you recall, that really got Richard inflamed about all those fights that labor has waged against capital to shorten the work week.
By the way, speaking to your point directly, empirically, we have a huge increase in the share of the labor force that are voluntary part-timers that work less than a 34-hour week.
So that has been a choice over the last 20, 30 years.
So we have a big increase in that regard.
People who are working part-time.
And that has been voluntary.
It evolves.
If workers want to do it, employers see the opportunity.
They get good employees who want to work part-time.
Of course, obviously, my main person who runs the SOA Forum wanted to work for me because it is a part-time job.
We do 12 events a year, and so it's not a full-time job.
And that's what she likes.
That's the wonderful Jane Metton.
She is great.
We love Jane.
Who has a child and who's able, who was attracted to the job because it's part-time.
And that often happens.
But if you recall, Richard really just got inflamed that I was taking it for granted that it's possible to move to a 20 or 25 hour job.
Well, it's funny.
You know, there's one example that our good mutual friend, the great Tom Woods, that he uses.
By the way, congratulations to Tom is off in Austria getting a lifetime achievement.
He's off in Austria, but he is going to take the time.
Babai still alive at 75 birthday parties.
Is he going to be here for that?
Well, he can't make it, but he's going to send a video.
But he's going to do a YouTube, a whole tribute to me.
It's probably going to be a two-hour extravagant.
Oh, my God.
There'll be an e-book attached to it.
I know it.
There's going to be a whole thing.
Well, no, he's going to, he wrote that he wants to do a YouTube tribute to me, and would I please play it at the party, which we plan to do.
Oh, very good.
I'm looking forward to that.
By the way, Tom, also, free plug, he has a new e-book out, The Pentagon versus the Economy.
Oh, really?
Which I haven't gotten a chance to read yet, but I will be reading very soon.
Tom's e-books are always fantastic.
Anyway, I want to get to the point.
By the way, Tom, a little bit young to be getting a Lifetime Achievement Award.
I felt like he's only 47.
Yeah, that's very young.
He's only got 11 years on YouTube.
So I guess he just takes off now.
Once you get a Lifetime Achievement Award, that's it.
Your work's done.
It's not really called a Lifetime Achievement Award.
I believe it is.
It's an Austrian.
Austrian economics.
Anyway, whatever.
He's getting some big awards in Austria, right?
Lifetime achievement.
Yeah, I thought so.
All right.
Anyway, so his example, and this really does, to me, I think it gets right at the core of it.
So he uses the example of the honeymooners and the show, The Honeymooners, with Jackie Gleason.
I'm familiar with it.
So he goes, so Jackie Gleason's character.
Well, yeah, but I used to watch the repeats on Channel 11 on WPIX.
They used to have him on.
I love that show.
But so he goes, Jackie Gleason's character obviously is a cheapskate.
Like, that's part of it.
Ralph Cramby.
But yes, Ralph Cramp is a cheapskate.
But it's not beyond the pale of what could be considered reasonable that this is a guy, right?
It's a 50s marriage.
He lives in a home without a telephone, with right, like without like all these basic things, like the level of poverty.
He talks about like, I don't think they have a refrigerator and they have like all these things.
Iceboxing.
Yeah.
Like it's, and, and this is like, you know, like, this is the way they live.
Now, if somebody wanted to today live at that standard of living, you could quite easily only work, you know, 10 hours a week or something like that.
It's so it does, in the kind of Mississian sense, you can kind of deduce the fact that people work the hours they do today that they don't want to live at that standard of living.
Now, by the way, personally, in real world examples today, I find some of it to be batshit crazy.
I know, like, I live on the upper west side of Manhattan, and there are, I know all of these, like, um, these like couples, like who have children, uh, they'll have like two, three kids.
The husband and the wife both work.
They're making like four or five hundred thousand dollars a year.
They summer vacation here.
They do this, there, they do that, there.
They both work like crazy, and they're basically not, you know, like the kids are raised in by nannies or daycare.
Like, this is like kind of the normal thing up there.
Personally, my personal preference, I think this is batshit crazy.
I'd be like, cut back on your hours.
Who cares about having a summer home?
Who cares about this?
Like, spend time with your kids and raise them.
But the truth is that this is what people want to do.
They would rather live at a higher standard of living and work longer hours.
The fact is that we are so much richer today than Americans were in the 50s.
We could easily, living at that standard of living, have one person work or have people work part-time.
But the truth is, you look around, people don't really choose to do that.
So you're kind of left to deduce that, well, people would rather have the latest iPhone and the latest technology and have a vacation home and all these things.
Of course, you could make an additional argument from the libertarian perspective.
That's like, you know, that the cost of living could be drastically reduced if the government wasn't propping up the housing market and all these other things, which I think is fair.
You know, education costs, healthcare costs, these are all greatly inflated by government intervention and regulation.
But the truth is that you just wonder what standard of wealth we have to get to before people like Richard Wolfe would admit you don't have to work like crazy.
Well, yeah, no, people would make their choice.
And indeed, as the transition really is that, is that essentially the economic message is that you can employ two part-timers who would charge you just $15 an hour, but the full-timer, they have to charge less per hour to make it worth your while to employ them.
You might have to pay a full-time or $20.
So the point is that part-timers will say, look, I'll work for you for less per hour because I want to work part-time.
That's how I'll compete with the full-time because the full-time has value to you.
I don't know if you ever met Laura Blotchett on the Contra Cruise.
Laura Blatchett lives in Idaho with her husband.
She raised seven kids.
They moved from California to Idaho to live a simpler life.
And she homeschooled all her seven kids.
She quit working.
They lived off their husband's salary.
They made that direct choice to live on a cheaper, simpler level so that she could homeschool the kids.
When I asked Laura Blodgett about it on the Contra Cruise, I said, well, you know, there are a lot of people, the woman has to work and the man, so they really can't homeschool their kids.
So Laura, of course, gave me this stern expression and she said, the woman doesn't have to work.
That's just a choice.
She was absolutely right.
Well, no, I mean, look, I certainly think so.
And I know for a fact that if I, you know, excuse me, if there was a choice between me, like, I don't know, if there was something about my current life that I was like, wow, you know, we really can't afford this.
So what we're going to need is for both me and Lauren to work full-time and be away from our baby to afford this.
I would go, well, no, we're going to downsize then.
I mean, that's like, we're going to find a way to cut our bills because that to me is just, that's just where my values are.
It's way more important that we are raising our daughter together than it is that we have nicer stuff.
But again, it's just, I just don't like, and I'm not saying there aren't some people who are in difficult situations.
I'm just saying that, like, don't take the personal responsibility or the personal choice element away completely.
Don't pretend like that isn't there.
Because you really can choose, especially giving everything we have today.
It's like, I'm sorry, my, you know, my grandfather was like a refugee.
He was a Jew in Germany at a time that it was a really bad time to be a Jew in Germany.
He came to America with nothing but the clothes on his back.
They were far poorer than anybody you know is today.
And they raised their children together.
So don't give me this kind of bullshit that you can't raise kids in 2019.
Even in real time, I told the joke, you know, what's a Jewish lawyer, a kid who couldn't get into medical school.
But not all Jews are like that.
Just to go back to the Jewish theme, there was a very good article about the Hasidic Jews who are managing to make a living through Amazon, of accumulating second or brand name stuff and selling through Amazon.
The Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, by the way, by and large, the message is that we don't want a whole lot of doctors and lawyers because then you mingle too much with the Gentiles that way.
They have a couple of doctors and lawyers to defend their legal rights and to make them healthy.
But by and large, they work as merchants.
And that's Jews.
Jews are supposed to be so materialistic.
And that is a choice that they make because they want their wives to stay home and raise the 10 kids, as you probably know.
Yeah, they have a lot.
They a lot of kids.
And then, in addition, they want to have time and they don't want to mingle with the Gentiles.
They just want to be in their own communities.
So that's a choice that they make, not necessarily the choice that we make.
But of course, it does indeed get you and me a little bit annoyed, to say the least, when the left wing says that, oh, you have no choice but to work like a dog.
There are choices.
You can move to Idaho like Laura Blodgett did.
And you can be a Hasidic Jew like some of those Jews in Brooklyn are.
Yeah.
You sure can.
Jewish Community Isolation00:05:43
All right.
Well, is there anything else about the debate that you want to do?
No, I guess nothing about the debate.
And I want to have a moment of silence for Don Smith.
Oh, yes.
So Don Smith, who was a really great guy who I got to meet a few times at the Soho Forum, and he's a big part of the reason why the Soho Forum has been able to exist.
He was one of the funders.
He is the funder.
Don died at the age of 78 a week ago.
That makes him just a little bit more than three years older than I am.
So, of course, you feel your own mortality when a great guy like that dies.
Don was born a poor hog farmer.
His parents were hog farmers.
And he bought his first stock when he was 15.
And he came to the big city.
And about 40 years ago, let's see, that would have been when he was in his late 30s.
He started his deep value investing firm.
And then he started to finance Cato Institute.
He gave me the start, and he has been the financier of the Soho Forum.
I am told that they will continue the tradition and continue to finance me.
But the great Don Smith story, as I've mentioned to you, was that when I read Larry McMurchie's novel, The Last Picture Show, it's set in a small Texas town.
Some of you may have seen the movie, but if you read the novel, there is a scene in that novel in the small Texas town where the Texas boys line up to have sex with a heifer.
And then there's another passage in the novel about the high school boys who live on a farm, who are not the townies, who go home early, who rush home to have sex with their favorite animal.
And I thought that was a fascinating bit of lore that you don't read in the sexual behavior of the human male books.
Only a novelist like McMurchie can report on those little known facts about what teenage boys are capable of.
Teenagers raping animals.
Well, I don't know.
Okay, the animal might have wanted it.
So, okay, you're right.
I didn't know what that animal was wearing or what that animal was.
The makings of a solo form debate.
Very possibly.
We'll see.
But anyway, the point is: yeah, we don't, maybe they are, maybe they're exploiting the animals.
Maybe the animals like it.
That's a good question, Dave.
That is a tough one to answer.
You're right.
Good point.
Dave always raises the psoo form debate questions.
But my point, though, was that I was struck by this because, indeed, Dave and I were talking about the young British boys who are gay in college, and then they become heterosexual when they graduate.
Just the testosterone of young men do it with animals, do it with other boys.
So I thought it was a fascinating story.
So I asked Don Smith, well, you were raised on a hog farm.
Did you have your favorite sow that you had sex with?
Don honestly was not the least bit upset by that question.
And he said, nah, no, I didn't do it with hogs.
He said, it was just like when you were growing up.
It was just all circle jerks.
So I said to Don, well, you know, I never did a circle joke, but I did read in Portnoy's complaint by Philip Roth, the circle jerk, the guys are doing a circle jerk, and the first guy to come gets the pot.
He said, the first guy to come gets the pot.
Oh, that's Jewish guys doing a circle jerk where it's all for money.
So Don, the great Don Smith, came out with a slightly anti-Semitic point.
And that segues.
But he gave money to Jews.
So we overlooked that.
We overlooked that.
That's my point.
There's a lot of ambivalence on the part of people like Don Smith.
I had a boss back at my big job on Wall Street.
I was hired to be director of commodity research by a Gentile.
After I left the job, he was recalling me to another employee who informed that the guy said to the Gentile, a friend of mine, that Jew boy who used to work here, that's what he called me.
He was very nice to me.
He gave me a good job, but he called me the Jew boy who used to work here.
And so they're nice to us, Dave.
But don't forget, don't forget that they never forget that they think of us as Jews.
They think that we have.
So that would be a discussion for another day.
Because when you were talking about dealing with anti-Semites, I thought you were forgetting some of the lessons I taught you.
So we might be able to talk a little bit more about Jews for another session.
I want to be able to recall a section from the King from Samuel, which is a very libertarian tract.
When Samuel is telling the Jews, you really don't want a king because of what he's going to do to you.
It's actually a libertarian passage from the Bible, which we could also discuss.
Rabbi Epstein will preside next time we meet, Dave.
All right.
I'm looking forward to it.
I appreciate you coming on, breaking down the debate, and giving the most bizarre eulogy I've ever heard ever.
But R.I.P. R.I.P. Don Smith at the same time.
He did a memorial service to Don Smith this Friday at the First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue.
I'm not going to be able to tell that story at that church.
Probably.
I'd say we'll keep that to part of the problem.
That's why I wanted this eulogy.
Oh, good.
You got it out on part of the problem.
Anyway, he was a really great guy, and he really helped a lot of great work get out there.
So it's, you know, it's a sad loss.
But I will say, he was, what, 78, 79?
You are turning 75.
I'm still alive at 75.
This is next week.
Still alive at 75.
And you're doing great.
Okay.
No signs of slowing down.
You're still our debate champion out there kicking butt.
I can't wait till the next one.
I'd like to be a response to 36-year-olds like you.
You sure are.
You sure are.
You look 20 years younger than Joe Biden, if that helps at all.
Unlike Biden, you've kept all of your mental capabilities intact.
So that's very good.
It looks that way.
All right.
Thank you very much, Gene.
I really enjoyed this episode, and we'll do it again soon.
Thank you, everybody, for listening.
We'll be back on Wednesday with a brand new episode.