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Sept. 13, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:04:14
Episode 661 Scott Adams: Democrats and Bad Arguments
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Hey Janice, come on in here.
What a great day it is.
I don't know about where you are, but here it's sunny and perfect, and I don't think I've had a better day lately.
A great day. You're going to join me on this great day, and however your day started, watch how it starts getting a little bit better.
It starts with a simultaneous sip.
You don't need much to join in.
All it takes is a cup of mug, a glass, a stein, a cellist, a tankard, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I love coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip.
Go! Alright, I have a fun update that's probably too much about me and not enough about you.
But some of you have been following my strange saga of regaining my sense of taste.
So for 12 years I couldn't taste anything or smell anything.
I thought I could taste, but I was really just picking up sweet and savory and texture.
But in my mind, it translated as taste.
I didn't realize that I couldn't taste at all.
Until my taste returned, just this week.
So I had some weird non-dangerous polyps in my eustachian tubes that for 12 years prevented me from smelling anything.
And it all came back this week and it just made me almost crazy because the smells were just overwhelming.
Just absolutely overwhelming.
So no matter where I went, I had super smell.
And my hypothesis is that your brain gets used to smells and then lowers them in your attention over time because you don't want to be diverted by every little smell.
But since I haven't had a sense of smell, my brain filter seems to have lost its knack To filter out smells.
And I'm just bombarded with smells.
It is the weirdest freaking thing.
I swear I can almost create a 3D map of my environment from smell alone.
I feel like a bloodhound.
But here's the funny part.
The reason that I went to the doctor in the first place was not to solve that problem.
I didn't even know that was a solvable problem.
I went because I'd lost my hearing.
So about a month ago, maybe more, maybe six weeks ago, I lost my hearing.
Now, when I say lost, it was down maybe 30%, which is enough that you can't hear in a crowded environment.
So effectively, I was deaf for the last six weeks.
And it turns out it was those same little harmless polyps that were in my eustachian tubes.
I took some prednisone to shrink them.
And yesterday, I regained my hearing.
How cool is that? So after a month of not being able to hear, yesterday, boop!
Yeah, it wasn't earwax.
We checked all that stuff out.
So I just suddenly regained my full sense of hearing.
And I think I regained it better than it was before I noticed the problem.
I'll have to test it, but it seems perfect right now.
So I got my sense of taste, my sense of smell, my hearing back, This week.
If you don't think I'm in a good mood, you don't know what a good mood is.
Because it's really hard to deal with the loss of hearing.
Anybody who's had it can testify.
But that seems to be solved, so I'm in a great, great mood.
Thank you for letting me share that with you.
And the weird thing is the prednisone actually is making my hair grow back.
Which is temporary, but it's funny.
It's just funny that this week, my hair would start growing back.
Like, literally. Literally, the bald sparts are starting to fill in.
But I'm only going to be on the prednisone for a few more days, so that won't last.
But it's funny. Alright, let's talk about the Democratic debates.
Um... I couldn't make it through the whole debate.
I don't know if you could.
But I don't think it's necessary to get a sense of where things are going.
Because there aren't that many people who are going to watch the entire debate, but there are far more people who are going to look at the clips and the commentary from other people after the debate.
So if you look at the clips and the commentary, and especially if you see what the left-leaning press decides to pull out as important, Well then, that's how you know if there's an impact from the debate.
So, as far as I can tell, it looks like the needle wasn't moved.
Is that the general consensus you're saying, the needle didn't move too much?
I'll give you a few observations.
Number one, Biden probably did enough.
To stay in the lead for now, there was some rumor that his dentures were falling out.
It did look like he was trying to hold his dentures a little bit, a little bit there.
But I also don't think that makes any difference because Biden's age is already factored in.
So the fact that a guy his age might have some, you know, denture issues, eh, you know, I mean, it makes a funny clip on TV, but yeah, his blood vessel, you know, you could start to imagine that if people sort of sum all these things up that they imagine that it adds up to something.
Maybe it does, but I don't think there was enough happening last night to move the needle too much.
Now, I thought Harris tried to come out strong, Meaning that she was trying to talk about Trump so that she could reframe herself as a general election politician, sort of taking the Elizabeth Warren page and the Biden page, which is to try to think past the primaries and frame herself as somebody to go up against Trump.
I don't think she succeeded.
I think she looked okay, but the places where she goes off the rails is she was jumpy.
If you're listening to this, you will not see me doing a dead-on impression of jumping up and down while I'm talking.
So she talks like this.
I think every time I say a syllable, I jump up in the air a little bit.
And it's very off-putting.
Because it comes across as a lack of confidence.
The other thing she did is, I forget the joke, so she made some joke that was a mildly clever reference to something Biden had said or his slogan from the past or something, it doesn't matter.
But then on national TV, she laughs like a hyena at her own joke.
If you want to be President of the United States, Never laugh at your own joke.
People hate that.
It's just not leadership vibe.
In our personal lives, people laugh at their own jokes.
I'm guilty of it more than just about anybody I know.
But if I were on stage trying to run for president, I'm not going to laugh at my own joke.
I mean, I might smile at my cleverness or something, but I'm not going to laugh.
I'm so funny. That's a bad look.
So I think Harris maybe broke even.
I thought Bernie... He had a little voice problem, which I think caused him to strain a little bit more.
I think that's what was going on.
Maybe he was getting a little hoarse.
But that caused him to strain.
And it might have been in my imagination, but it looked like he was going to sort of like red.
He looked like he was going to stroke out.
Now, I've said this about Bernie before, and it's terribly cruel, but it has to be said.
Here it is. Some people choose their preferred candidate based on policies and blah, blah, blah.
A lot of people, and I don't know what the percentage is, but it's enough to be important, maybe think they do that.
But they're really picking a fashion accessory.
Literally. Not literally.
Figuratively. Let's use the words correctly.
Figuratively, they're picking a fashion accessory.
I've used this analogy before.
If you want to pick a boyfriend or girlfriend and the boyfriend or girlfriend shows up at your house and you can't stand the car they drive up in, It matters.
Because what you want is the man or the woman, you know, who you're considering as your romantic partner.
But the car becomes sort of an accessory that's sort of defining you too, because you might have to get in that car.
I used to drive when I was in my 20s, had no money, and I had a car that one of my romantic interests called a Bondo car.
Bondo being that, I guess, the preparation you put on a car before you paint it.
So my car, like the paint had come off, and it just dripped oil.
It was a disgrace of a car.
Nobody should ever have to get in that car.
It was just disgusting, poorly made, Didn't have paint.
That's how bad it was. Now, if you don't think that car affected my ability to date, you've never met a woman, right?
Obviously, some women would not care.
But it is an accessory.
You know, the woman is not going to want to get made up for the night.
Hey, I'm looking pretty good.
And then get in the Bondo car.
And go to the restaurant and the valet parking guy opens the door and she has to get out of the Bondo car.
You know, if you ask, they might say, oh, I'm fine with it.
But the fact is, it would be human nature to care about that.
Now, I'm making it sound like it's, you know, the man with the car and the woman who's getting in and out.
But reverse it. It's the same.
The man doesn't want to get out of the...
Let's say the woman has a car that's a Volkswagen Beetle, you know, with a little flower in the cup or something.
There would be a lot of guys who would say, well, I really like the woman who's in the car, but I don't want to take a chance of ever being in that car.
So the point is that we think we use reasons and logic, and we think we care about things that matter, and we think we don't care about the cosmetics, but that's not human.
Humans do care about the cosmetics.
And here's where I'm going with this.
If you tell me, Scott, your president will be Barack Obama, I say to myself, well, I might like his policies, I might not like his policies, but he's kind of cool.
I like that association. You know, you could hate Obama.
He's still kind of cool.
He's a good accessory. I don't mind that my reputation is associated with cool guy, even if I disagree with some of his policies.
Bill Clinton? Same thing.
Kind of a cool guy, even if you don't like his policies.
President Trump?
He's cool in his own way.
But there's certainly some people who don't want to associate their brand with him for different reasons.
Bernie's got that problem.
Bernie has the problem that I think there's a natural cap On how popular he can be on the left.
And he's probably at it.
In other words, if the other candidates went away tomorrow, I don't think that Bernie's numbers will go up.
If Biden goes down, that's not going to make Bernie go up.
I think if Warren went down, it wouldn't make Bernie go up.
Because Bernie's a bad accessory.
When I see him, I say, yeah, I really love you, Bernie.
And I do. Like, Bernie, I think, deserves our respect, even if you hate his policies.
He deserves our respect.
Very effective, very consistent, seems to want what's best for the country, even if he doesn't have the right ideas for a get there.
Intention is good, energy is good, seems to be a patriot.
I love Bernie, and he's been, obviously, the most influential person for at least half of the country.
We're all talking about policies that are Bernie-like, or how far is it from Bernie, or is Bernie plus one or Bernie minus one?
I mean, he's really changed the country, and potentially in a positive way.
Potentially. You could disagree with that.
But my point is, he's not a good accessory, and I think he's capped.
I don't think you'll see him taking anything.
Here's my big question that came away from the debate.
One of the things that debates don't do is inform you, because it's not really that kind of a forum.
And there's a big question I have that I've not heard anybody debate directly, so maybe you can help me in the comments here.
There seem to be two general models of healthcare direction, you know, if you're just talking about the big picture direction.
There are the Bernies and the Elizabeth Warrens who would like Medicare for all, essentially.
So there's one provider of Medicare insurance, it's the government, and everybody gets it and everything's covered.
And then there are some other people, and I believe...
That category would be Buttigieg and maybe Harris.
I may have some of the names wrong, but they've got a model where they say, yes, Medicare for All should be available.
But at the same time, people should be able to buy private insurance if they prefer it.
And then those two competing systems would create a kind of competition that could be productive.
So in other words, if the government can negotiate better prices, you would expect that the private insurance people would say, hey, why are you giving that good price to the government?
And it should drive down costs over time.
Here's what I don't understand.
I've not heard the criticism of that plan.
I've certainly heard lots of criticisms of the way healthcare is now.
I've heard lots of criticisms of Obamacare that, you know, make sense.
I've heard lots of criticisms of Medicare for all.
But I've never heard And maybe I just haven't heard it.
I'm not saying that there are no arguments.
I've just never heard it, and I'm curious about that.
What is the argument against having Medicare for All, which would literally cover everybody who wants it, at the same time, you let people who want private insurance get whatever the heck they want.
They might have to pay more for it, and they might like that, because they get better service.
Has anybody offered Even an argument against that?
Because when I watch the Democrats compete, you know, you'd hear Buttigieg say, you know, we want some competition, and here's why that's good.
You know, two systems, a private one and a government, they're both out there, they're both competing.
And then you hear Bernie say, the way we should do it is this.
But what he doesn't say is what's wrong with Buttigieg's idea.
Like, Somebody says too expensive.
I don't think that's demonstrated.
So I'm curious.
So I have two parts of curiosity.
One is why is that argument just so conspicuously missing when it's literally the most important argument?
Isn't it? Somebody says paying for both only using one.
But you'd have the option.
So I see your point.
Your point is if you're buying your private insurance, you're going to be buying your own insurance at the same time you're paying for other people's insurance.
You should get some of that back by the fact that everybody's health insurance would go down.
That would be the theory.
So anyway, but my second part of that theory is why wouldn't the Buttigieg...
Let's call it his theory of having two systems and you can buy into one if you want to, but everybody gets covered.
Why wouldn't Trump support that?
Why is that not a Republican plan?
Isn't the Republican plan sort of big picture market competition?
And how is that not better market competition?
To have the government competing directly with private healthcare insurance and everybody can do whatever they want.
It's complete freedom.
You know, you can get the Medicare for All, you can get your own insurance.
And, to the previous point, the people getting the private insurance might not have to pay more if the net result of it is that competition drives down everybody's prices.
That would be the plan anyway.
So, I don't see an obvious reason that a Republican couldn't just say I like that plan.
That looks good to me.
Right? How does Buttigieg, his plan, not exactly match Republican preferences?
And that's a question, not a statement, by the way, because there might actually be some really good reason for that that's not obvious to me.
Somebody says, socialism versus capitalism.
Well, Buttigieg's plan is capitalism.
Because nobody has to do anything except pay taxes, but we already accept that.
All right, so that's everything from the debates and too much of that.
Have you noticed there seems to be this gradual change that now has gradually changed into something bigger, which is, remember when President Trump first came in the scene and everybody was saying, hey, you're a Reality TV star and, you know, you're just acting like it's a play or a TV show.
You're not even acting like a politician.
Of course, I was saying that the public didn't realize that although that's a true statement, that he was running things like a reality TV show, my observation was that was an improvement.
Because the act of leadership is getting people to pay attention and do what you want, and the way Trump employed his showmanship and his reality TV stuff, including all the tweeting and the provocations and taking up all the network time and everything else, it works.
So that's what leadership looks like.
But here's the thing that I'm starting to notice.
It seems to me that his model of treating it like it's an act, meaning that it's done for the benefit of the audience.
I guess that's the best way to say it.
Trump runs the administration.
As if it's a TV show and he's optimizing it for the audience.
Now at the same time, by optimizing it for the audience, he's weaponizing the audience so that he can get stuff done.
So it's not a senseless Redefining of how to do things, it's a very productive one because he can get the public quickly informed and on his side on a lot of stuff, or at least his team, which can be enough.
But here's the observation.
It seems to me that his critics and competitors have adopted his frame.
The frame meaning that the primary model of how we see this government interaction is as theater.
That's the best way to say it.
Because AOC knows theater.
In other words, she runs her political life the way the president does, which is she understands it's a show for the audience, and that if you do the show for the audience right, you do gain powers and capabilities to manage things, change actual real policies.
So she seems to understand that.
It seems that Pelosi and Schumer understand that.
I first got this idea...
Whenever it was that they were having a meeting in the Oval Office, and you saw Schumer, mostly Schumer, and he was in such a good mood bantering with the president, he looked like he just enjoyed the theater.
In other words, he looked like he was an actor playing a part who knew he was an actor playing a part for an audience who knew he was an actor playing a part.
He was still doing his job as politician, because that's my point, is that the theater is not useless.
It's actually very productive for doing the management thing.
But here's where this is heading.
The politicians seem to understand this theater.
But not all of the public has caught on.
Much of the public has, you know, most of you have.
I think most of the people watching this understand that when they're seeing the politicians act crazy and provocative and theatrical, that they are watching a show.
And they can sort of separate a little bit, what's the show, versus, you know, what are we getting, what are the policies, etc.
But there's a huge portion of the country that can't tell the difference.
They can't tell the difference between the show and what's real.
And for that portion, they feel they're living in a white supremacist hellscape in which everything's going to hell and the earth is burning up and the KKK is reinvigorated and all that.
Now, if you knew that you were watching a show, you wouldn't take much of that too seriously.
Likewise, if it comes out of Trump's mouth.
You know that Trump is putting on a show, so when he uses hyperbole, and the fact checkers say, uh, he just reached 12,000 factual inaccuracies, which we choose to call lies.
How much does it bother you?
Well, if you know you're watching a show, it doesn't bother you at all.
Because you're not watching the show to give facts.
And the show seems to work.
We seem to have a good economy, you know, things seem to be working pretty well.
So that's just an observation.
The observation is that the Democrats, the leaders anyway, understand it as a show and are adopting President Trump's model, but not all of the public yet knows it's a show, and that's very dangerous, because those are the ones who are experiencing TDS, etc.
If they understood their own leaders, To be putting on a show, they would not take so seriously their own fears because they are overblown.
All right. Yesterday I did something very provocative to make everybody hate me, as is often my habit.
So what I did is I put a thought experiment, and I labeled it that way, thought experiment.
And I said, what if...
Guns were subject to insurance so that demographic groups who have the greatest insurance risk of owning a gun would have to pay more.
What would that look like?
Now, those of you who have been watching me for a while, you know I usually have more than one reason for why I do things.
I don't do things for one reason, usually.
Sometimes I do. In this case, there were several purposes.
Purpose number one was to change the way we're thinking about the question.
I think you would agree that both sides are locked into their positions, wouldn't you?
And if both sides are locked into your positions, what can you do that's productive?
Waiting until they unlock themselves doesn't seem productive.
Right? Because they're not going to.
We have enough history to show that people are pretty locked in.
So what you do is, thank you, commenter Howard, you shake the box.
Now there are lots of ways to shake the box.
You see how the president does it all the time.
He shakes the box, changes the field, changes the variables, and then says, all right, with this new set of variables, now can we get out of our locked positions.
What I attempted to do, and you can tell me whether it was successful, was to create a thought experiment in which we changed the perspective.
I'm going to give you a little background story that will give you some framework to understand what I was attempting to do.
And it's something I learned from a drug dealer in college.
It was one of the most useful perceptual shifts I've ever seen.
I may have mentioned this sometime in the past, but it's worth explaining.
It's a very simple thing that is life-changing.
At least it changed everything about how I saw the world from this one little anecdote.
And it fundamentally did.
It fundamentally changed my entire understanding of reality and what works and what doesn't from this one little example.
And it was this. You've got two students.
They buy some marijuana.
They've put their money in together.
One of them goes to pick it up.
Now you're going to divide it evenly.
Because you paid the same.
So you get a little marijuana and you want to divide it evenly.
How do you do that if you don't have a scale?
How do you divide it in a way that's fair, that both people walk away saying, that was fair, when you can't measure it?
Now, even if you could measure it back in my college days, that wouldn't help you because one would have more seeds than the other, and that mattered, and that would change the weight, but you don't want the seeds.
So, you can't really know for sure if you've achieved fairness, which is the key to this exercise.
When you're dividing the two little piles, you can't really just look at them.
It's hard to tell. So how do you do it in a way that both people are completely convinced is fair?
Now, your first impulse is that the two of them would, you know, take turns, you know, adjusting the piles, and then they would look at each other and they'd say, all right, good for you.
Is your pile good?
My pile looks good. I'm okay with that.
But chances are that only works with the right people, people who don't care too much if it's exact, people who trust each other.
Under those conditions, it doesn't matter how you do it because it'll all work out fine.
Somebody says, flip a coin.
If you flipped a coin and you were the one who did not get the first pick, And the other person picked the pile that you thought maybe was a little better.
You're not going to feel exactly fair.
So the coin flip is a good idea.
Not quite where I'm going.
Here was a suggestion from the drug dealer, and it just blew my mind.
Yeah, somebody's onto it here in the comments.
One person divides the pile, and that's completely their responsibility alone.
The second person gets to pick.
Yeah, so I'm seeing in the comments you're getting ahead of me.
Right. If you use that process, neither person can complain whatsoever.
There's no way to complain because you've changed how you think about the problem.
You've taken the focus away from the outcome, which is who gets the bigger pile, and there's no way to really know if it were fair.
And you've moved your focus to the process.
The process is completely fair.
100% fair.
And if you can move somebody's attention, here's the insight.
If you can move somebody's intention from the outcome to the system, you can break free.
So that's what I was trying to do with the gun argument.
The gun argument is locked in the outcome.
There are people who want to keep guns and as many rights as possible.
There are people who want to get rid of guns.
They're talking about the outcome.
Not really talking about the system.
If you could move them up to talk about the system, that might work.
Now, some of you are saying, we have a system, it's called the Supreme Court.
Well, here's the problem.
If the Supreme Court were a clear system, I'm sorry, if the Constitution We're clear, meaning that it's simple, clear words told us all what to know and how to act.
We wouldn't need the Supreme Court.
Even the people who created the Constitution knew it would be interpreted differently by different people because somebody says it is clear.
I'm going to deal with you later.
Anybody who says the Constitution is clear doesn't understand what the Supreme Court is for.
There's an entire body of government just to interpret it because it's not clear.
If you don't know that, you need to go back.
Anyway, so take the drug dealer technique and the takeaway How can you change people's focus from the outcome, where you can never be sure it's fair, to the system?
To mix things up, I did this.
I threw in the idea that you could add an insurance model to gun purchases in order to incent or disincent people, and you would disincent people who were in the most dangerous group.
Now, the most dangerous group of gun buyers would be male, And young.
And we have an example in our national experience where those people pay more insurance.
If you're going to get a car, I'll talk about the details in a moment.
If you're going to get a car, you have higher risk or you have higher premiums if you're male.
And you're young, because cars are dangerous things.
Now, some of you are trying to throw ethnicity in there.
If ethnicity could legally be part of insurance, maybe it would be.
But since it isn't, and it won't be, it's sort of just an interesting question.
So I'll note it as an interesting question, but because there isn't any practical way that will ever be part of our decision making, can we just put that on the shelf for a moment?
I acknowledge that there would be lots of other variables you could find a risk with.
But since we've already agreed as a society that automobile risk can be discriminatory, and is, it discriminates greatly against safe young male drivers.
I was a safe, young, male driver, and I paid for other people's problems.
Now, I didn't like it.
It wasn't fair.
But I put up with it.
So the starting point here is that people can learn to put up with insurance which targets demographic groups, specifically young males.
So we know we can tolerate that even if we don't like it.
So it's not impossible.
It's toleratable.
We know that. Now, I'd like to talk about the worst arguments that people made in response.
And if we have time, I might put on my headphones and take some callers.
And I want to see if you can avoid the worst arguments.
And... Here's the first thing.
The first thing people said when I offered this thought experiment is they said, it's the worst idea, you're so dumb, and you don't know anything, it's so obvious why this is bad.
In words to that effect.
Now here's the first thing they should have noticed.
If they had looked at the other people who were complaining about the thought experiment, the first thing they would have noticed is that people had completely different complaints.
So if it's obvious what's wrong with the problem, you should expect...
That the complaints about it would be somewhat similar, or at least deeply overlapping.
In fact, the reasons were all over the place.
What if I told you is usually the case when the reasons are all over the place?
Do you know the answer? When somebody objects to something with one or two good reasons, they're probably pretty good reasons.
You might agree or disagree, but they're probably real reasons.
If somebody disagrees with something with this wide, eclectic bunch of reasons, what is usually happening?
What's usually happening is this cognitive dissonance so that people are not dealing with the real thing that's bothering them.
They just want their guns and they don't want to see a good reason not to have them.
And so it triggers them into cognitive dissonance.
So the first thing you should notice is that the reasons are just all over the board and they look crazy.
So that's the first thing. A commenter is also saying word salad.
That's the second tell.
So a number of people made comments that I actually couldn't even understand the sentences.
They had words in them.
And the words made grammar sense, in the sense that they had the right verbs and nouns and stuff in them, but they didn't make any sense to me.
And I'm trying to make sense of them.
And I'm reasonably educated.
So that's another tell.
But I want to go through some of the worst responses, tell you what makes them bad, so that when you're arguing, you can up your game.
Here's what I think is triggering me.
If I can give you my own personal irrational emotional connection to this topic.
I'm pro-gun. And that lumps me with people who are pro-gun, pro-Second Amendment, pro-gun.
My problem is, many of you are bad accessories, meaning that your arguments for pro-gun are so, so bad that I don't want to associate with them, even though I completely agree with you about the right to have guns, and lots of them. And easy enough access.
Completely agree with the general statement.
So I want you to try to improve your game by moving toward the arguments that are solid.
And there are plenty of solid arguments for, you know, wide gun ownership rights.
Plenty of them. But there's some that are so bad, I just need to help you escape them.
Alright. Argument number one that's bad.
Somebody said if you have insurance for guns, people won't pay the insurance.
That's a fair statement within the thought experiment framework.
Here's my answer. You could require that the payment is made at the time of purchase.
In other words, the gun seller could say, all right, the price of your gun is $300 and then the government attacks on some taxes, right?
You always pay taxes. Government can make you pay extra.
It's called taxes. And then the government is also tacking on some insurance.
This insurance is a one-time cost.
Because most of your risk is in the first few years.
So we just put a little insurance on it.
And that insurance would be paid to, let's say, your local police or responders, maybe your local healthcare.
It would be paying for society's expense when things go wrong.
You know, if there's a gun crime.
So, the first thing is, you can make people pay at the point of purchase.
And the government already makes people pay extra.
It's called taxes. Now, somebody says that's a regressive tax on poor people.
Yes, it is. It is.
Do you know what else is a regressive tax on poor people?
Sales tax? You know, it can be true that it's a regressive tax on poor people.
But that's not a reason not to do it.
There are lots of regressive taxes that we do for other reasons.
They're larger variables.
So you can acknowledge that there are defects with a plan, but you have to compare all the positives and minuses of any plan to all the positives and minuses above.
But I acknowledge that's a defect.
So let's acknowledge that's a defect and get on to the next point.
So you could make people who buy new guns pay, essentially it would be like a, what do you call it, a surety bond, which was broadly it's insurance.
A surety bond is where you're paying against you doing something bad to someone else.
Like a construction person would buy a surety bond if they're doing a project next to, let's say, a historical site.
And there's some risk that whatever they're doing will damage the historical site.
So they might be required by the town, again, the government making you pay something, to buy something called a surety bond.
That means you pay a little bit of money for a form of insurance, and if you do accidentally destroy the property next door, the insurance kicks in.
But it's temporary, and when you're done with construction, you don't have to pay insurance anymore.
So that's what a surety bond is.
You could do that with guns. Just make it payable at the time of purchase.
Now, here's the other bad argument.
People would say, well, Scott, how is that going to prevent the people who already have guns from having guns without insurance?
And the answer is, probably wouldn't.
Here's the bad thinking there.
If you have three problems, call them A, B, and C. If you know how to solve one of those problems, could be A, could be B, could be C. Should you not solve it?
Because it doesn't solve the other two problems.
In no world does that make sense.
But in the gun world, it's the primary argument.
The primary argument you hear from the pro-gun people is that if you can deal with some little bit of the risk and reduce it, You shouldn't because there's other and unrelated risk that it doesn't solve.
That's not thinking.
I don't want to be associated with someone who won't solve problem A because it doesn't also solve unrelated problems.
So if you can get the young person who's buying a gun because they're having bad thoughts and you could maybe discourage them with a high enough insurance premium If you could discourage them, that would put some friction on their likelihood of getting a gun.
But it doesn't solve other problems.
That's not a reason not to do it.
Here's the other worst argument I saw.
Somebody said that the founding fathers would certainly disagree with carving out one section of the public to have fewer gun rights.
Because that's, you know, you could say in a practical sense that's what this would do.
It would cause young males to have slightly degraded civil rights, civil rights?
Slightly degraded practical rights about getting a gun because their insurance costs would be higher.
Now is that fair? A critic said that the founding fathers would never agree with carving out certain parts of the public to have fewer rights.
Anybody agree with that?
The founding fathers would not agree that some people should have fewer rights than others.
The founding fathers owned slaves The founders didn't want people to vote if they didn't own land.
The founders didn't allow women to vote.
The founders were the most discriminatory people in the history of the United States, bar none.
They were the worst.
Absolute worst.
In fact, I'm going to introduce an idea I was thinking about.
You know, we treat the American Revolution as 1776, right?
That's the point of the revolution.
But black people say, hell no.
That wasn't my fucking revolution.
We became slaves after that.
Maybe some during, I guess.
Yeah, during and after. It wasn't their revolution.
Now, black people can say, well, maybe the Civil War.
It was the founding of the free country.
Maybe we should celebrate that as sort of our civil war, in a sense.
To which I say, nope, not there yet.
When the civil war happened, women couldn't even vote.
So if you were going to say, what is the revolution, the civil war on this country?
Maybe it was women getting the vote.
Oh, but wait, that's not far enough.
What about the civil rights of the 60s, right?
You kind of needed those because being freed as a slave wasn't getting you where you needed to be.
You needed something like the 60s and a pretty hard run of civil rights to get you anything too close to, within spinning distance, of equality.
So, I'm just going to throw that in.
If I were black, I would definitely see the Civil War as my revolution for independence.
And I'd feel pretty solid in that thought.
If I were a woman, I would see women getting the vote as my Civil War, as my war for independence.
And if I were black and woman or gay, I would see the 60s collectively as when my revolution began.
Anyway, that's a little off point.
Here's some other bad arguments that people gave me.
A lot of people are what I call analogy thinkers.
So I made the analogy that You know, we put insurance on cars, so let's talk about guns.
The bad analogy thinkers are looking for a difference between cars and guns and act like that matters.
Now, the analogy is just to show that insurance can be applied to people in different risk groups when there's risk.
That's all. That's the entire point of the car analogy.
What people say is, Scott, you know, you're wrong because people pay insurance only if they use a car.
You don't need to have insurance to own a car, Scott.
That's different than guns.
No, that's a stupid difference.
It's a difference that has nothing to do with the argument.
So if you're picking apart the difference between an analogy and the topic, you're not really part of the discussion.
The only thing you should take away from the analogy is, we can put different risks on different demographic groups and society doesn't fall apart.
That's it. That's the entire argument.
So, another argument was, somebody said, car insurance doesn't keep people from driving without insurance.
People still drive without insurance, Scott.
So, it doesn't stop people from driving cars.
That's a terrible point, and it's analogy thinking again.
Here's the difference between cars and guns.
Cars are not really optional for most people in modern society.
You know, not learning to drive a car, it is optional, but barely.
You know, I think Greg Gottfeld didn't drive a car until recently, because he was in New York City.
So there's special cases, you know, you can opt out of driving a car.
But mostly you have to have a car.
So it's price inelastic for insurance.
In other words, you will pay more to drive a car because you don't have much choice.
Guns are far more optional.
Now, they're less optional if you're in a dangerous situation, and those people would pay more, and they'd be happy to do it because it might save their lives.
But for all the people who are in not an immediate dangerous situation, You can imagine that higher costs would have an impact.
And even if it didn't have an impact, it would at least cause a fund of money that would pay for the police, the extra health care, and the damage, and maybe, you know, compensate the victims.
Somebody says, why do you have to debate the topic till boredom and agony?
Well, I'll put you out of here, agony.
You can be blocked.
Here's the deal. Well, I'm not going to go that way.
Somebody said...
All right, so the point is...
The point is that friction always works.
Anybody who makes an argument against insurance because it wouldn't work at all under any situation for any person, no matter what, that's not a real argument.
Because again... No particular thing solves every problem.
The only thing you should be asking yourself is, could it reduce the number of people doing it?
If the answer is yes, then friction worked.
If it doesn't change anybody in any way, it would be the first time in human history that's ever happened.
Friction always works.
If you're making an argument that friction doesn't work, where have you ever been?
Every law, every policy, every rule, it all creates friction.
And the reason that we're living in a society full of rules and laws and penalties is because it always works.
Just about always.
And when I say it always works, I mean it always changes some people's behavior.
It always changes some people's behavior.
Somebody says, did prohibition work?
Yes. Yes, Prohibition worked.
I guarantee that fewer people drank during Prohibition.
The reason Prohibition didn't work is because it had the unintended consequence of making it dangerous to drink alcohol and it empowered the bad people, etc.
But I guarantee that Prohibition caused fewer law-abiding people to take a drink.
It might have been a 5% change, but there's no way it didn't reduce the behavior.
No way. Because there are some people who will just say, well, it's illegal.
I don't need the friction.
All right, so for all of you who say it didn't work, what you mean is it didn't work in the entire package.
It did work, guarantee it, To make at least some people not drink because they didn't want to go to a speakeasy, there wasn't a public bar one block away, it absolutely reduced behavior.
There's no doubt about it.
Now, I'd be willing to be fact-checked on that.
I don't know if there was any way to actually measure such a thing.
But if somebody did measure it, it would be the one time in history that friction didn't work.
And even then, you should still try it in the future, friction that is, because it's worked every other time.
If you found one thing it didn't work for, that wouldn't tell you not to keep doing it, because it worked for everything else.
All right. Here's another part.
The most common comment I got was, what part of do not infringe do you not understand?
Because the Constitution says, do not infringe.
And if the government makes you buy insurance, well, you're infringed.
No doubt about it, right?
And that's clearly not intended, right?
Well, here's the problem with that.
People who say that are basically repeating a bumper sticker.
They are not on the Supreme Court.
You need a Supreme Court to tell us what this gun thing means, what a lot of this stuff means in the Constitution.
That's why it exists. If your take is that your non-lawyer reading of the Constitution and the phrase do not infringe is all you need to know, well, you don't understand what the Constitution is.
You don't understand that the system was developed because, the Supreme Court part of it, because the Constitution could never be clear and we would never agree and maybe situations would change in which reinterpreting would make sense.
So the dumbest opinion is that the Constitution clearly says That you should not infringe and that any form of infringement whatsoever is a violation of the Constitution.
The first problem with that is that we infringe all over the place.
How many infringements are there already on getting a gun?
For example, they're not free.
You can't get a free gun.
There's no free gun.
Of course it's infringement.
Do we tax gun ownership?
Of course we do. Do we put you in jail if you use it illegally?
Can you get a gun if you're under the age of gun buying?
Can you get a gun if you're incarcerated and you're in jail?
We infringe all kinds of gun rights.
And we're still here.
And we still have enough guns.
Do we or do we not have enough guns to protect against, let's say, the government tries to do something bad to the citizens?
Probably. We have more guns than people.
So a little bit of difference isn't going to change that too much.
Can the average person who is not a criminal and not crazy and old enough, can they get a gun?
Yeah, pretty much every time.
So there's not a lot of infringing going on, but treating infringement as an absolute when only the Supreme Court can even decide when it's being infringed and what that means is not a good argument.
It's a bumper sticker.
Let's see. Somebody said, I'm adding cost, meaning the idea of adding insurance, because I'm ignoring the, quote, real issue.
So here's somebody saying that the real issue is culture, mental illness, and bad parenting.
So that's not an argument.
That's not an argument.
Because the real issue...
Could be the real issue, at the same time that the solution is unrelated.
So, what is the real issue with people trying to rob my house?
The real issue is those people.
It's not me. It's not my fault that bad people might try to burglarize my house.
But the solution is not for me to go fix those people.
The solution is for me to, you know, have locks on my doors and alarms and firearms.
So my solution has nothing to do with their defects.
So you can separate the solution, what you do, from what the source of the problem is.
It would be great to work on the source of the problem, and we should, but you can still have solutions that are separate.
So whoever said, You know, the idea doesn't work because it's not working on the core problem, doesn't know how solutions work.
Here's my point. When somebody says, it's not fair and it's unconstitutional for you to make me pay more in insurance to own my gun because you're infringing on my rights there, here's what I say.
Where in the Constitution does it say that I need to subsidize your gun?
Why do I have to subsidize the guns of other people?
You didn't see that coming, did you?
This is the secret part of the thought experiment that I was hoping people would sort of stumble onto.
And this is the part that will open your mind a little bit.
The other parts are just sort of on the argument.
Did you realize that if you are a legal gun owner, You are subsidizing the illegal gun owners' ownership of guns.
You're paying for it. Because the total cost of owning a gun is not just the price of the gun, it's the damage that you do with it or you could potentially do with it.
It's the people you kill, it's the police action, it's the health care, it's the social services, etc.
Ah, Danette, thank you for noticing how good this is.
There is no constitutional right for you to make me pay for your fucking gun.
I will fight to the death for you to keep your fucking gun.
I'm pro-Second Amendment.
I want you to have your gun, for all the reasons you want a gun.
But you can't make me pay for your fucking gun and call it a constitutional right.
I will not subsidize your gun.
Do you know how you make me not subsidize your fucking gun?
You do it by putting an insurance penalty on there.
If you're in a high-risk group, you can pay for your own fucking gun by paying more insurance.
Don't make me pay for your fucking gun.
And don't lump me with the anti-gun people because I want you to pay for your own fucking gun.
Pay for your fucking gun.
Don't make me pay for it.
And if you're in a high-risk category, too bad.
Not my fucking problem.
I was once in a high-risk category.
I was once young.
I paid more.
I didn't like it.
It wasn't your problem. Why should you pay for my high-risk category?
That's the reason they do it.
Now, because all of us go through certain ages, the one thing that we all agree on where obvious discrimination is acceptable is by age, right?
Everybody agrees that age...
is an acceptable discrimination variable.
You don't want kids doing certain stuff.
But young adults are also plenty risky.
Somebody says, black people, dude, this is racist.
What would be the racist part of treating everybody the same?
Is your point that if everyone's treated exactly the same, it's racist?
Is that your point?
Because you know what else is racist if you treat everybody exactly the same?
Every fucking law!
Every fucking law is racist if you treat everybody the same.
There might be some exceptions.
But the fact is, anything that has any impact on cost is discriminatory against certain ethnic groups accidentally.
So here's where I'm shaking the box.
Here's where I'm shaking the box.
The part that should have changed how you're thinking about it is when I said, I don't want to pay for your gun and your gun risk.
As soon as you heard that, it felt different, didn't it?
Didn't it feel different? So...
And then let me explain again what thought experiments are.
A number of people said to me on Twitter, you lefties are trying to take away our guns, you know, just shut up.
To which I said, uh, it's a thought experiment.
All right. Somebody was saying, Scott advocates disarming all black people.
I will delete this racist.
Goodbye, racist. Um...
Anyway, I lost my train of thought there.
Let me see where else we get.
Somebody else said, criminals will always get illegal guns.
So, how is that smart?
If you can stop or reduce some part of the problem, but it doesn't solve 100% of the related problems, you shouldn't do it.
What about, do you think kids should legally be allowed to have cigarettes?
Do you think that should be legal?
Some people do, probably.
But doesn't friction on kids smoking reduce the amount of smoking, don't you think?
Don't you think that collectively all the things that are done, you know, education-wise and making it harder to get cigarettes, don't you think it makes some difference?
You know, clearly someone who wants to smoke can get cigarettes.
My stepson could get them pretty easily.
But he was also willing to take maybe more chances than the average person, which ultimately got him killed.
And I think friction works for kids and cigarettes.
I feel that's safe.
All right, so here's the bottom line.
So I do not advocate.
I do not advocate putting insurance costs on guns.
Are we clear on that?
It was a thought experiment to allow you to get out of your locked bumper sticker opinions on guns and to change from focusing on, if you remember my beginning example about the drug dealer and separating the drugs, it's to make you take your focus away from the outcome and up to a process.
And is it a good process and is it constitutional to have the cost of a product reflect the actual cost to society?
Is it unreasonable that products cost what their actual impact is?
Now, in thinking through why insurance is a good idea or a bad idea, the hope is that it would clarify how you're thinking about everything.
So the whole point is simply to clarify thinking, I'm not suggesting insurance on your gun.
I mean, I don't know if it's a terrible idea.
But here's maybe the biggest reason you don't want insurance on your gun.
I was waiting for somebody to say this.
There's one really, really good reason.
You don't want insurance on your gun.
And it's this.
You don't want the insurance companies deciding what the law is.
Because, in effect, the insurance companies would take over some of the role of Congress.
They would effectively be managing the gun situation for their own profit, and that may not be where you want to give your authority.
And if somebody had mentioned that, I don't think somebody did.
I would have said, yeah, that's a pretty good point.
All right. Somebody said, you don't want to insure guns because it would create a gun list like the NRA. The NRA is a list of gun owners.
If an insurance company also has your name, I understand that would be more people on a list, but it seems to me that when you buy a gun, don't you put your name on a list anyway?
If you were to buy a gun today, is there any scenario in which you wouldn't put your name on a list?
That's a question. I don't know.
If it were not a private sale, let's say you bought it at a gun show, and a gun show, don't you have...
Yeah, I know NRA is optional, but...
If you buy it at a gun show, don't you have to give your name?
I would think so. So I don't know that there's any such thing as not having a list of gun buyers, but this would be an inaccurate criticism.
If you made everybody insure their guns after they have them, you know, the grandfathered-in guns, then that would create more of a list.
So I will agree that that's a valid criticism.
Unless... The way you do it is the way I explained, which is the only place you apply it is that the point of purchase is once, it's only once, so that grandfather guns just wouldn't need insurance.
So one way to deal with that is that the grandfather guns, they've been around long enough, they probably are less danger than someone who buys a gun this month.
All right. That is about all I have to say on this.
Somebody says the dealer retains the records.
NRA has no knowledge of which guns I own.
Yeah, that does make a difference.
You know, people who say that the NRA is voluntary and it doesn't tell you specifically what guns anybody owns, or even if they have guns.
There are members of the NRA who do not own guns, but not many, percentage-wise.
So, anyway, please accept the thought experiment as just that, as a way to shake the box.
I'm not promoting that idea.
I'm pro-gun. And let's talk about something else tomorrow, and I'll talk to you later.
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