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Jan. 9, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:47
50 Artists, Capitalism and Intolerance (Part 2)
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So I know that you're really curious.
You're really curious, how is Steph going to get all of this rambling about the free market and artists back into the topic of tolerance?
Well, I certainly appreciate your tolerance for my seeming tangents, but there is sort of a purpose behind this explanation of the perception of tolerance within the free market, so that we have a strong sense or a strong understanding of what it is that we are struggling against.
Now, If we sort of understand that artists have a particularly bad view of the free market because of their particular economic imbalances, And also because of the personality types of people who generally want to become artists, or who have a vanity about it, or who feel that they should.
I mean, somebody who's a really good and honest artist says, well, I'm not producing value, so why should I get money, right?
But somebody who feels entitled to people's money, time, and effort, regardless of the quality of what it is that they're producing, is going to have a negative or biased view of the market.
And those people tend to be, like, not the sort of genius filmmakers who obviously are in high demand, but they tend to be the people who, you know, work in sitcoms or TV at best.
So, I think it's important to understand people's emotional connection to the market and where they're getting that from.
So, why do I talk about that?
Well, because for these people, the market appears to be sort of very intolerant.
It appears to be something that is sort of dog-eat-dog and problematic and unbalanced, where all of the power is in the bosses and those who are providing the jobs and so on.
And that sort of mindset comes across to the general population in, I think, a pretty significant way.
And that is something that we really need to be aware of Sort of being people who are talking about the free market to understand where people's emotional perceptions are coming from.
So the free market is considered to be dog-eat-dog and hostile and cutthroat and all this kind of stuff because, you know, in the art world, to some degree, at least for some people, you know, it sort of is.
So, you know, let's understand that at least where people's perception comes from about the market so that hopefully we can Help to, you know, turn around people's perceptions without being hostile about those perceptions.
Because that's kind of important, right?
If we just think, well, everybody's stupid and they don't understand the market, then we're going to have a tough time trying to get them to change their minds about the market.
But if we have sympathy for them and realize that they've sort of inherited the bitter dreams of artists who haven't been very successful, then I think we can have a stronger way of counteracting that bias.
And, of course, this is only one of many, many things that occurs within the marketplace, right?
I mean, another way that people get a skewed view of the marketplace is through their educators, right?
So, people who are educators are definitely not in a high-demand situation, right?
The number of people going for professorships, you know, vastly outnumbers the number of people going for, you know, say, software programming jobs.
I simply know that because in my exploration of The job opportunities that were available for me in graduate school as a history student, there were, in the year that I was considering doing a PhD, there were 650 graduates in Canadian history at the same time that they were all competing for 23 positions.
Not all of those full-time and not all of those tenure-track.
So, the number of people who are in the academic world, you know, they also don't have any power.
You can't go out and found your own university.
You know, there's no entrepreneurial sense about that, because universities are so heavily subsidized, and you can't go out and start your own private school because of the regulations, and you're competing with the free resource.
So, you know, teachers, much more due to government intervention and control of the educational sphere, Teachers are much more likely to have this sort of biased view of the marketplace.
And that's also very important to understand when you are looking at why are teachers so concerned with downgrading the free market or why do they have that emotional perception.
Because they've been in a situation where they have very little control.
Where the people who are doing the hiring do have all the control.
You know, this is also true of unions, of course, but it's projected to bosses, right?
I mean, it's just sort of emotionally transferred from the union bosses, who are the real abusers, right?
I mean, of the current system where they can take your union dues without having to provide you value in return.
So, you know, people's perceptions of the free market are somewhat dependent on their own experiences, their personal experiences of the free market.
And that, to me, is a pretty important consideration when you're dealing with people, right?
So, if you're dealing with somebody who has had a bad perception of the free market, like an artist or whatever, right, then you want to say, well, you know, that's your perception of the free market and I fully respect that, but that's not necessarily the free market, right?
Your perception, while valid, is not a perception of the free market as a whole, right?
I mean, if you're an artist, you're definitely in the minority of people who are going into that field.
Most people don't face that unbalanced.
a sort of market supply and market demand scenario, right?
So if you want to be a model, there's like everybody and their dog wants to be a model.
And so you're going to face that problem.
If you want to be, you know, the next you too, you're going to face that.
Everybody wants to do that too because, you know, it's a pretty cool life to have.
I think being a rock star must be kind of fun.
So, you know, it's important to help people understand that their experiences of the market is not the market, right?
It's just their experiences.
And just because they haven't been in demand doesn't mean that the market as a whole is dog-eat-dog or cutthroat or you're never gonna have any power or whatever.
So, you know, why am I talking about this when I'm talking about tolerance?
Well, one of the things that is very true about the free market is that it is incredibly tolerant.
A mistake that I made when I first started getting into economics when I was in my teens, which maybe you feel the same way about or maybe you don't, is I thought that the purpose of the free market was to maximize efficiency.
To make more was always good.
To get ahead was always good.
That's what the market was for.
That was partly why I got suckered into the argument from economic efficiency.
You'll make more money, the free market is very efficient, and so on.
But of course, that's really not true at all.
Right?
The free market is all about choice and it's all about tolerance.
It's not about maximizing economic efficiency or, you know, automatically making people want to work harder or faster or smarter or more or whatever.
You know, the free market is perfectly voluntary.
It's perfectly optional whether you want to get involved in the free market at all.
I was talking with a young gentleman A little while back about the free market and he was saying, well, you know, we have to take care of the poor, the poor, like the poverty was a problem to be solved.
And I said, well, what's wrong with being poor?
And he said, what do you mean?
Like he just couldn't understand it.
And I said, well, I mean, I'm not being facetious.
It's a genuine question.
What on earth is wrong with being poor?
I mean, when I sold my company for the first time, and then it was sold by the new owners the second time, and I left for a variety of reasons, I took a year and a half off, or a year and three quarters off, and I worked on books, and reading, and writing, and so on.
And I was, you know, negative income, right?
I was broke.
I mean, I wasn't broke, but I was, you know, my income was non-existent.
But what was wrong with that?
Absolutely nothing.
The market is perfectly tolerant of choices like poverty.
Now, I know, of course, nobody thinks that poverty is a choice, but it is.
You know, for a lot of people it is.
So, for instance, if I'm a monk, then I'm going to be, well, guess what?
I'm not going to have a lot of assets.
I'm going to be poor.
But, you know, I'm going to be rich in spirit, right?
That's the story.
If I choose to do the entrepreneurial thing as an artist and to try and be a writer, then I am going to be poor while I'm pursuing That objective.
Because, you know, I have to spend all my time writing and learning how to write and, you know, I have to spend money on computers and printers and mail and email and internet providers and all that kind of stuff.
So it's a net negative.
But what's wrong with that?
Absolutely nothing.
If I choose, for a variety of reasons, that, you know, the best life for me is working some minimum wage job and, you know, watching sitcoms, the market is perfectly tolerant of that choice, right?
The purpose of the free market is not economic efficiency, right?
The purpose of the free market is that it has no purpose.
The purpose of the free market is that you are not forced into doing anything.
And you neither can force other people into doing things.
So, when I talk about tolerance, what I mean by that is that the free market tolerates everything except intolerance.
Now intolerance can take two forms, you know, and this could mean sort of bigotry or whatever, right?
The first form is sort of soft bigotry, right?
Let's just say you're some guy who doesn't like... You're sort of like some Napoleon guy.
Napoleon complex guy.
You don't like tall guys.
And so you just won't hire a tall guy.
So that's fine.
I mean, the market tolerates that.
But you're going to pay for it.
Right?
Because if you're only going to hire, you know, guys who are five foot five or less, then you're going to be cut out of a large section of The marketplace of talent, right?
So, maybe like 20% of guys, or 10% of guys, or 5'5", or lower.
So, if your competitor will hire anyone, and you'll only hire short guys, you're only getting 10% of the talent pool that your competitor has access to, and therefore, you know, you're gonna be less efficient, you're gonna have fewer high-quality employees, just all that kind of stuff.
So the market is perfectly tolerant of even something like bigotry, like from a legal standpoint, and I'm just talking about the free market, none of this positive discrimination nonsense.
The market is perfectly tolerant of all of that, but you have to pay the price.
And so that's part of the tolerance of the free market.
Now, the market is not tolerant of, and cannot survive in the long run, you know, compulsion, where you pass a law which says, you know, nobody over five foot five can get a job, right?
The market can't survive that.
Because that's just an economic catastrophe where the general talent pool just gets eradicated and, you know, the numbers of people who can't find their own work get increased and there's social dependence.
I mean, all of that stuff can't be survived.
But the market can survive soft intolerance, right?
Like bigotry and so on.
It just generally weeds it out, right?
I mean, if you only hire short guys and your business is that much less economic, then you're going to go out of business or get bought out by people who have access to a wider talent pool.
Now there are some people, and this is sort of women in particular, but I mean it's some men as well.
Who, you know, don't like the fact that they're less in demand, right?
So, a woman who gets married is, you know, going to have a couple of kids probably and that's going to take her out of the workforce for an uncertain number of years.
So, obviously, that's a net economic negative, right?
Which is sort of part of my argument as to why people don't make decisions based on economics.
They make decisions based on value, right?
And value is not always the same as economic value, personal value.
Like, I took time off to write books, which was not good for me from a pure economic standpoint, but was great for me from a life standpoint, and based on my values.
So, you know, the important thing, I think, is to recognize that some people aren't going to like... They aren't going to like it if you genuinely have a negative economic value.
They're going to want to make other people subsidize that, right?
So, women are going to want things... And again, not just women, but, you know, let's just talk about women for now.
Women are going to want things like They're going to want maternity leaves that are big and long and juicy and then they're going to want to make sure that their job is held for them.
You know, now there's this new thing in Canada where if your relative gets ill, you can take some time off work and your job has to be held for you.
And again, this generally falls to women, right, who often will take care of aging parents or relatives.
So, people who actually do have a net economic negative, where, you know, if you don't hire a woman who's, you know, 27, who just got married, because you're afraid she's going to have a bunch of babies and be sort of useless to you for an indeterminate amount of time, if she's even coming back to work at all, if you don't want to hire a woman based on that, that's not exactly bigotry, because, you know, it is an economic fact that a woman who has a bunch of kids is going to be less economically available.
It's not a certainty.
Well, no, it is a certainty that she's going to be economically unavailable for some period of time.
It's not a certainty that she's going to be less efficient than a guy who's around all the time but just isn't very good at his job, right?
So if you get some real hungry corporate shock, a woman who's going to have kids and sort of do emails from her recovery room, She is going to be more economically effective than some doofus guy who comes in and pushes paper around and doesn't really do that great a job.
But all other things being equal, women having kids is not an economic positive for an employer.
But, you know, people generally don't want that, right?
I mean, they want the benefits of being able to take time off and have kids and have mat leaves and so on, but they don't want the negatives that come with that.
So, they don't want to actually have a lower pay or less job advancement or whatever.
They're gonna want the other person to, you know, pay them the same amount, keep their job open, give them flex time, you know, not make them travel and all that kind of stuff.
Which is fine, you know, but for me, I don't have kids yet, so I'm available to travel in a moment's notice and my boss can call me up and say, listen, I can't make a meeting in Monday and, you know, Timbuktu, can you go?
And I can say, sure, because, you know, I don't have kids and so on.
So, you know, you get an enormous benefit from a personal level from having children or so I'm told.
So, it would sort of be unfair if I did not get that benefit or at least have not taken that benefit as yet in my life and also didn't get any economic benefits.
Then it would just sort of be unfair, right?
If somebody else gets all the benefits, financial benefits of not having kids and all the emotional benefits of having kids and I lose out because I don't have kids yet.
I mean, it's sort of not fair, right?
So, the market will punish.
Intolerance.
Intolerance of sort of the basic facts of reality.
So, I mean, if your projections are way off, the stock market's going to punish you.
If you think that, you know, skill in sort of phone sales, let's say, is based on someone's height, which obviously is not, then the market's going to punish you for your ignorance and You know, if you're a woman and you think that, you know, I can have three kids and also I'm going to get the same salary as a guy who's single or a woman who's single, then you're going to be punished for that ignorance as well because you're not going to get a job, right?
I'm not going to take a penny less than the guy who's single, but the thing is you're actually worth less than the guy who's single.
So, or the woman who's single.
So, you know, if you don't, then you're not going to get a job.
I mean, that's why you have to go to the government and get all these programs.
So, tolerance is a very sort of fascinating aspect.
of the market.
The market does not punish you by throwing you in jail if you're a bigot, but it will punish you by, you know, basically causing your company to falter at best and, you know, collapse at worst.
If you have bigotry like, you know, I only have high school education, but damn it, I'm worth as much as a guy with a master's degree, then if you have that bigotry, right, and bigotry sort of being my preference over reality, like instead of reality or replacing reality, if you have that bigotry, then you're going to face that problem, which like instead of reality or replacing reality, if you have that bigotry, then you're going to face that problem, which is I mean, unless it's manual labor, in which case you may be more valuable than the guy with the masters who's probably going to move on.
So, and I faced that actually, interestingly enough.
I had waitering jobs before I was in university, and then early on in my university, but then later on, I couldn't get jobs, even though I was a great waiter and went back to the people who had worked with me before, they wouldn't give me any jobs, because they knew, like I was out for like two months, then I was going away again, and what they wanted was people who would, you know, sort of stick around longer, i.e.
those who didn't have university education and weren't about to finish, because they knew I was going to finish my degree and come and work at a restaurant as a waiter.
So, sometimes it works the other way, right?
What's more valuable to the employer is not always associated with, you know, what is more valuable to the market as a whole.
Like, generally, education is better, but for lower skilled jobs, education is worse.
So, soft bigotry is punished by the market, but it's tolerated by the market, right?
And that seems to me entirely appropriate.
Because the problem is if you put a social agency in to punish soft bigotry, it's going to get it wrong and it's going to be subject to the political process and, you know, it's going to get hijacked by people who, you know, their own bigotry is going to take over that process.
So you get things like affirmative action and, you know, enforced mat leaves and all this stuff, which is just, you know, a brutalization of the economic facts of reality.
And, you know, a definite pillaging of those who are sort of, you know, childless by choice or childless by circumstance or childless by biology.
It's an absolute pillaging of the money from them.
Like, I'm not sure exactly why my money should go to people who have a bunch of kids when I don't.
I mean, that's their choice to have kids and it was my choice not to get married young because I couldn't find the right woman and so on.
So, you absolutely want soft bigotry to be punished by the market and not by any sort of social agency like the state.
Because if you try and punish soft bigotry with the state, it's going to get political, messed up, contradictory, hijacked, and it's going to end up being a far worse evil than the one you're supposed to combat, or trying to combat.
Now the other thing that's interesting about tolerance in the market is, you know, one of the arguments that I've had for a number of years with people who, this is back when sort of socialism or communism had a higher intellectual cachet than it did now, and you could actually sort of meet people on the street or in school who would have a button lapel pinhole, a pin of Karl Marx, which I just found astounding.
As a theorist, Karl Marx was just stone evil.
He advocated sheer dictatorships and his systems resulted in murder.
You wouldn't have Joseph Goebbels pin on your lapel and expect like not to get yelled at sort of by people who have used to at least I haven't seen it in a while they used to have this sort of stuff and I I would sort of say to them they say well the free market would you know whatever it's dog-eat-dog blah blah blah all the usual crap and I said well I'm said it helped me understand it right in in the in capitalism you can you don't have to exercise your property rights
But in communism, you are not allowed from exercising your property rights.
And that seems to me a pretty important distinction.
And so you get the normal, huh?
You know, because people just read emotional nonsense and never think about it.
That's generally the case with human thought.
So, you know, so what I said was, you know, I said, well, if I want to set up a capitalist town, In a communist country, I'm not allowed to, right?
Because the state owns everything, and I'm not allowed to own private property.
And they said, well, no, of course not, because private property is theft, blah, blah, blah.
You know, so then, of course, I'd mention to them that the state, like, property is simply the ability to control resources, right?
And I said, well, the state owns the resources, so the state owns the property, and does that mean that the state is theft, if property is theft, and blah, blah, blah.
What they mean by that is property that's owned by the individuals who actually have custody and have created the assets.
That's what they mean by property.
But property is a simple fact of life.
All resources are going to have to be controlled at some point.
A car has to be driven by someone.
And so you really do have to have... Somebody has to take custody of property and it's either the individual or the state.
And so they weren't against property, they just wanted the bureaucrats to have property and not people, right?
So it wasn't like communism is not a system without property.
It's just a system where property is run by bureaucrats and sort of party thugs and so on.
So, you know, we'd sort of go through that battle.
And then I would sort of say, well, so you can't set up a sort of free market private property town inside of a communist environment, right?
So communism is kind of intolerant in that sense.
Like it won't let you have these options.
You have to not exercise your property rights, so to speak.
We have to have no property.
But I said in capitalism, like in the free market, You can do that, right?
If you and I and a bunch of our, you know, a couple of thousand of our closest friends get together and we say, you know, we want to, you know, buy some land and set up a little communist town.
Well, the free market has no problems with that, because the free market is all about choice, right?
You don't have to exercise your property rights.
I mean, if you steal my car, I don't have to hunt you down.
I don't have to report it.
The free market doesn't care whether or not you exercise your property rights.
It simply says that you have the right to.
So it's very tolerant in that standpoint.
I worked with a guy who, believe it or not, was raised in a commune, which is not something you hear of these days.
But he's a little older, so I guess it was the 60s and so on.
So, he was raised in a commune, and in his commune, of course, you know, there was communal property, right?
Nobody owned everything.
I could take your pants, you could take my pants.
There were no sort of yours and mine.
We all just sort of agreed not to exercise our property rights and to sort of put everything in common.
And, of course, this is how it works in families as well, right?
I mean, children don't really have any property, but they get to consume because, you know, the breadwinner or breadwinners put it all in a pot and everybody gets to take it out as they see fit.
So from that standpoint, you know, you can have a commune, you can have a communistic society within the free market.
And so what I'm saying is that, you know, in the free market, any method of exercising or controlling property or property rights is available, right?
So I said, you know, in the free market, why not have communism as one of the possibilities of exercising property rights that people can choose?
Like, if communism is great, and people will voluntarily want to be part of a communistic system, then, you know, you set up your communistic town, or your cult, or your collective, and then people are going to see how wonderful it is, and they're just going to want to come and join it of their own accord.
Because it's a superior form of social organization, and everyone's happy, and everybody has a job, and everyone's loved, and everybody gets teddy bears, and so on.
And so, You know, in the free market, this communism could absolutely run within the confines of a free market.
I mean, without a doubt.
Absolutely fully supported, because property rights, the exercise of it, are optional and assignable.
Right?
So I can assign for you, you know, if I sort of sublease you my house, like I'm going on a business trip for, I'm going to work in another country for six months and you're coming here, we can swap houses.
So we absolutely can assign property rights to each other.
And make it purely controllable by the other person.
And you can do that in a commune, right?
So if you've got some genius who is, you know, your way of... He's so smart that you want him to run all your property, you can just sign over all your property to him, right?
Like you do with a hedge fund or whatever, or sort of institutional investment fund.
So, you know, I said capitalism completely supports all of the ethics of socialism and communism.
You know, like if you believe that a bunch of bureaucrats are the best way to help the poor, then you can send them a check.
You know, but the problem is, if you try and force everyone else to do it, then suddenly you're not such a good person, right?
Because you're acting in an immoral way.
Because you're saying, you know, one person has the right to take property from another, but not the other way around, and so you've got these contradictory morals, which is illogical and immoral and so on.
This issue of tolerance is very important.
Capitalism doesn't care if you want to be poor.
Capitalism doesn't care if you want to be a communist.
Go ahead, by all means.
Nobody's going to force you to exercise your property rights in some sort of majority-sanctioned way.
If I want to take my car and share it among my whole neighborhood, there's absolutely nothing in capitalism that's going to prevent me from doing that.
I mean, unless it's economically inefficient, in which case, in the long run, if people want economic efficiency to some degree, then it's probably not going to work out.
But, you know, that's not the problem with capitalism.
That's a problem with collective use of property that's sort of problematic.
It's something that my wife sort of mentioned to me when I'm, you know, I'm sort of constitutionally cheap by nature.
Economically efficient.
Yeah, that's it.
And so I said to my wife, you know, when we had to buy a lawnmower for the place, Oh, why don't we go in with a couple of neighbors and we'll all buy it together?
And she says, yeah, you know, it seems like a good idea, but you know, there's lots of problems with that.
If it gets broke, if it breaks and you know, if one guy's got a bigger lawn, he uses it more and he breaks, you're not all going to want to chip in.
Or some guy forgets to change the oil when it's his month and then he busts it up.
You get all these problems, right?
With collective ownership of property.
And so you really don't want to do that.
And, you know, I agree, grudgingly, she's wiser than me in so many areas.
But there would have been absolutely no problem in terms of what is supported within the free market with us doing that, with us buying a lawnmower, you know, collectively if everybody wanted to, and then, you know, fighting about repair bills and, you know, gas usage and whatever.
So that's what I mean when I talk about tolerance.
And, you know, wherever you have a system that is tolerant, that is portrayed as non-tolerant, it's important to know sort of why.
You know, so socialism is considered to be sort of politically correct and tolerant and nice and so on.
But, you know, socialism is all about waving guns around and threatening people.
And, you know, you have to do certain things from an economic standpoint.
You're not allowed to, you know, voluntarily exercise or not exercise your property rights as you see fit.
Socialism, which is portrayed as really nice, is actually horrible and violent and destructive, whereas capitalism, which is, you know, complete loosey-goosey, laissez-faire, is considered to be sort of cutthroat and mean.
And the reason that I talked about the artist to begin with is so that we can understand, to some degree, where that perception comes from.
Artists in aggregate because you know they're far more non-talented than talented artists in the world just by the laws of nature Artists in general want socialism because they want state money because they they can't sell their stuff, right?
So they have a sympathy towards socialism However That's not the case with capitalism.
You're going to have to produce value or, you know, sucks to be you, you get nothing.
And so that's also very important when it comes to understanding people's perceptions of the market and what it is that we're going to have to figure out and oppose as we talk to people about the market.
You know, sort of probe their understanding of it.
That would be my suggestion.
It's what I sort of find enjoyable.
Where did you get the idea that You know, that capitalism, this sort of cutthroat, mean, vicious world where it's like kill or be killed.
You know, we eat the poor for lunch and that kind of stuff.
You know, you really do want to sort of understand that kind of stuff in order to be able to really appreciate people's perceptions and where they're coming from.
So, let's cut it off here just because.
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