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Jan. 19, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:41
60 Loving the Lefties

Returning Marx's 'come hither' stare

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Good evening, everybody!
Hope you're doing well.
It is Steph.
It is 5 to 6 on Thursday, January the 18th, 2006.
And I hope you're doing well.
I've been off-air due to technical difficulties for the last day or two.
I was in a meeting and I was futzing around with my computer because I was only, like, 40 minutes of a two-hour meeting.
And I decided to do the clever thing and defragment my registry, because I hadn't done it in a while.
And as a sort of developer, off and on, I install and uninstall a whack load of stuff, and lo and behold, very, very ugly things happen to my computer for some reason.
And it took two of my network guys two days to resurrect it, so it's back!
And I did try using other computers, but it's only this one that has the juice to do a A podcast for, I guess, 45 minutes to an hour on my commute, so the others sort of... I got sort of slightly into a podcast, and they gave up the ghost, as only lithium-ion batteries can do.
So, I hope you're doing well.
I guess I had an interesting couple of days, I'll get into in a little bit.
I know that I'm teasing all of those out there who are avidly following all the minutiae of my business career, but I'm really not in a position as yet to talk about what's going on, but it's all very interesting.
And I also spent, I think it was last night, I spent two hours chatting with a fine gentleman named Reggie on a radio show called The Infidel Guy, which is at infidelguy.com, and I think that it was enjoyable.
I started off with the argument for morality, which I think drew a fair amount of blank stares, which is fine.
I mean, it takes a little while.
And then we had some people call up and chat, which was also enjoyable.
And, you know, one of the questions that sort of came up in that I mean, lots of questions came up in that show, and of course it's something that I get occasional email queries about.
I got one from a fine young libertarian gentleman who has, I guess, recently switched over from republicanism to libertarianism, in the same way that you might go from, I guess, crack to orange juice.
And, you know, his question is, well, gosh, how am I going to deal with all these teachers and all these socialists and all these people?
And, oh, heavens, I certainly understand the problem.
I mean, especially in school and in academia where, you know, those who enjoy suckling at the infinite bosom of state funds seem to, you know, flourish and multiply like Mildew on my old bachelor carpet.
So I certainly do understand it.
And the only thing that I can really suggest, and I want to spend a few minutes talking about this, I know that I've done some podcasts on how to deal with non-libertarians, but when I was getting ready for my stint on the Infidel Guy show, I was, he sent, his producer sent me a bunch he sent, his producer sent me a bunch of MP3s of their so I could sort of get an idea of the format.
And this happened.
They only got around to sending it to me about 40 minutes before the show, so I only could listen to one of them.
And what it was was a Marxist, and I think he was an objectivist, talking about their different approaches to the problem of truth and political power and so on.
And it really struck me that, boy oh boy, do I have a heck of a lot more in common with the Marxists than I guess I thought way back in my libertarian-slash-objectivist days, now that I'm more Anarchistic in my approach to social organization.
I listen to the Marxist and to some degree, don't get me wrong, I think communism is a fetid and revolting moral and intellectual system.
And of course, communism is just a human slaughterhouse.
But, you know, in terms of his critique of American foreign policy, it's like, yo bro, right on!
You know, I can't help but want to applaud.
Because, you know, one of the things that I think could be said about, you know, socialists and Marxists is that Yeah, they're nutty and they don't understand the free market to save their lives and so on, but there's a reason why people are drawn to that philosophy.
Marxists in particular, and socialists, are very, very keen on looking at things from the vantage point of the helpless, right?
I mean, this is sort of my take on psychological Marxism, so, you know, please feel free to take it with a grain of salt the size of a Utah salt lick.
You know, when you have sympathy with the downtrodden, right, and you have sympathy with sort of the surface image of things, then you are really going to have a pretty strong sympathy for Marxism.
I've been reading a book by V.S.
Naipaul called Among the Believers, An Islamic Journey, and it's his tales of sort of going through Muslim countries, and it's quite fascinating, of course, because one of the things I was going to mention, and I may read a chunk of it in another podcast, was Just how, you know, I've sort of mentioned before that religion, religious instruction is something that's taught, right?
I mean, religion is taught.
It's never innate.
So that's one reason we know that there's no God.
And so he runs into a gentleman who is, you know, not at all religious.
And why?
Because he was raised by a communist.
And that's really the two options that are available to most Muslims, right?
I mean, sort of radical foaming-at-the-mouth communism or radical foaming-at-the-mouth Islam.
So what I find when you look at the sort of surface of things...
And you have a sort of, I guess, emotional bent to viewing images, which is very common and, you know, not necessarily a bad thing.
And you see sort of those standard pictures which you'll sometimes see, you know, in ads for charities or whatever, right?
Where there's basically, it's usually the same type of image and what it is is some ragged guy living in a cardboard box on the waterfront and behind him sort of towering above him are these, you know, huge edifices of modern capitalism like the skyscrapers and the big cranes and so on.
And of course there is this implicit sense of injustice in the picture, right?
Like with so much wealth you think that we would be able to get rid of or help people living in boxes and so on.
And I mean there's lots of reasons as to why that's really not the case, which we don't have to get into just now.
But one of the things that I think is interesting is that when you take this sort of emotional approach to understanding social phenomenon, you really don't understand very much at all.
And, you know, I would say that Marxists kind of get a small part of the way there, and then their imagination sort of takes over their logic, and they don't make it much further.
And the reason why it's important to talk about this is because Marxists can be real allies to the libertarians.
I'm not saying that we'll be able to swing them over to, you know, International Friends of Capitalism Brotherhood, but I am saying that no matter who you talk to, no matter who you talk to, there's always something that you have in common that you dislike about the government or state programs or whatever.
And what I'm suggesting is It's important to find those areas that you have in common with people.
Before you start bludgeoning them with a big sack full of books about libertarianism and the free market, it's important to find about things that you have in common.
So, for instance, one of the gentlemen who called in on the show last night, you know, he didn't like the government so much or whatever, right?
But he liked certain programs and, you know, there's like, well, what about the poor?
And I went into my spiel about how You know, the government traps people in poverty and so on, and he was like, ah, yeah, that's true, you know, and he was talking about some government program that's called, sort of, by people who get into it, The Pit, right?
It's like the Roach Motel.
It's the poor motel.
You can check in, but you can never check out.
And so, I mean, you're not going to convert people into a big sweeping statement of philosophical viewpoints, but if you want to find sort of common cause and common humanity with those who aren't libertarians, or even with those who are libertarians but who don't share your ideas,
You know, all the way, then what you want to do to sort of get by in school and high school and university, and this is, you know, I'm not saying this in any way to suggest that you compromise your values, but you simply cannot argue with everybody all the time.
It's exhausting, it's alienating, it's no fun, and you know, kind of life's too short.
But what you can do is to find the areas that you agree with based on sort of, and then try and extrapolate those into universal moral principles.
So when I was listening to this show from Infidel Guy about the Marxist versus the Objectivist, You know, the Marxist was talking about things like, you know, this incredible foreign policy that America and the Western countries have.
And yeah, he's got a blind spot to the predations of the sort of third world countries, but that's fine.
I mean, nobody knows everything all at once.
But he's talking about how, you know, the Americans do this overseas and that overseas, and the American companies pay the government to do this and to do that and to get rid of competition.
It's predations on the working class and blah blah blah, right?
And, you know, to a large degree, I gotta tell you, I would get right up on that horse and ride it as hard as he did.
Because, yes, it is absolutely horrible the degree to which corporations can influence government policies, both domestic and overseas.
You know, I wouldn't necessarily say to him that it's equally horrible the degree to which unions can do this as well.
But, you know, it's very important that we not mistake people's critique of capitalism as if they really understand and are using the same terms that we do.
Because it's really not the case.
For this Marxist, capitalism is a process where the corporations run the government for their own ends.
Right?
So, Noam Chomsky would say something like that the corporations will get the governments to take taxpayers' money to fund things like, you know, defense research and medical research and the Internet and so on, and then they will profit from those things through the public purse, right?
So they get the government to do all this stuff on the public purse and then they profit in the private purse.
And, you know, Noam Chomsky has, I'm sure, a lot of ideas I don't agree with, but right there it's like, hey man, brother, you testify!
Like I'm up in the front pew shouting and pumping my head up and down because, you know, you really can't help but agree with those analyses.
So it's very important that we not look at those who have critiques of the way that the mixed economy operates.
And the critique that people have about how corporations profit from wars, and corporations profit from the exploitation overseas, and the corporations profit from manipulations of the stock market, and... I mean, as far as I'm concerned, it's like, absolutely they do!
Of course they do!
But the problem, of course, is not the corporations.
The problem is the government.
And I'm not saying that you're going to get them to swing that way at first glance.
But if you have a socialist who wants the poor not to be subject to arbitrary power, not to be subject to the power and whim of their, quote, masters, Well, if you're kind of like a sort of softy and a sentimental and you don't really have the intellectual rigor to go deep, then you're going to look at sweatshops in Indonesia and you're going to sort of go, oh my lord, that's just terrible!
Oh, those poor little children with their aching fingers putting together the microchips when they could be out playing in the picnic fields.
You know, that isn't entirely understandable.
Emotional reaction.
And what you see is, you know, the sort of scowling-faced, possibly mustachioed, nicely-dressed capitalist foreman walking up and down the rows of these underage, you know, children who are slaving away for eight, ten, or twelve hours a day.
And you're going to have an emotional reaction, right?
And you're going to say, oh, that damn capitalist!
Oh, that damn business owner!
It's such exploitation!
I hate that guy!
And, you know, that's an emotional reaction.
It's absolutely and perfectly understandable, right?
In the same way that we have a sort of instinctive belief that the world is flat until people tell us otherwise.
It's perfectly understandable to look at that situation at an emotional level and say, that company of Nike or whoever, that company is exploiting those and they get paid what?
Two dollars an hour?
Two dollars a day?
Oh my god, that's terrible!
And You know, I personally agree.
I think it is absolutely terrible that these kids get paid this amount.
In fact, I think it's so terrible that the kids get paid this amount that I want to make sure that so much investment and opportunity is going to come to that country that those kids are going to either get ten dollars an hour or, as their parents desperately want, for them not to work And to be able to go to school.
That's what I want.
I care about those kids so much that I want as much competition for their time and their labor as humanly possible.
And the only way to do that is to get the government out of the business world, to lower taxes, to lower barriers to investment, to lower monopoly contracts that are often signed between these corporations and the third world governments, to stop foreign aid that props up these wretched dictatorships, so that they're not limited by the lack of productivity that their horrible policies put in place.
You know, as I've mentioned earlier, right?
I mean, the growth of government regulation and so on, you know, starts to cripple the economy, right?
And so generally there's a sort of fuse that's built in wherein the economy is faltering and therefore, you know, you have to sort of either pillage it and it collapses even further or you sort of retrench your regulations and your taxation.
The problem with the third world is that they're so heavily supported by corporate bribes to the government, by foreign aid, by all of this sort of stuff, that they can keep going despite the predations that they have on their population.
So it's actually profitable to them, right?
I mean, the more miserable their country is, the more they're going to get foreign aid and so on.
So I care about the poor people in these poor countries so much that I want them to be subjected to as little violence as humanly possible.
Which means getting the state out of their faces.
You can certainly agree with them that corporations do bad things when they have access to government power.
And yes, you can say that those individuals within the corporations who make those decisions are bad people and you can wag your finger at them.
But, you know, the truth of human society is that unless you change the incentives in some fundamental way, you will never achieve any kind of permanent change.
So yes, we can wag our fingers at these people, right?
The same way that we can wag our fingers at a starving man, you know, stealing some bread.
But it doesn't really matter, because the starving man's gonna steal the bread anyway.
You know, the same way that we can sort of wag our fingers at, you know, women who've had five kids who get mad when welfare looks like it might be cut.
It's like, yeah, we can whack her fingers, but can you really blame her?
I mean, yes, you can blame her in a sort of abstract moral sense, but who's going to say, yes, for the sake of principle, I now will let my children go hungry?
I mean, what you need to do is aim at the belly of the beast and change the fundamental.
Motivations, the fundamental incentives and punishments that are, you know, more in tune with reality.
And that's, you know, that's a lot more conceptual, right?
So, you look at the sweatshop as a Marxist, right?
You look at the kid in the sweatshop and you see that smoking capitalist guy, foreman guy, going up and down the rows of machines, or even worse, you know, sitting in his limo outside, maybe passing out a quarter to some urchin.
You look at this and you get angry, right?
And you get angry because all you see is these urchins and the capitalists.
What you don't see is the delicate and brutal web that makes these things possible and worthwhile.
So I've said in previous podcasts that war is only possible Because the government pays for the military, and the profits accumulate to private interests.
So that's the only way that war becomes something which anybody would get behind.
I mean, if you're running Halliburton, then you're making a fortune right now, but you wouldn't be making a fortune if you actually had to pay for the troops in Iraq that were, you know, the pretext for you getting the money.
So there's simply no way that war is profitable in the absence of the state.
And I would widen that whole definition to include the premise that exploitation in the absence of state power is always punished by the free market.
And that's a very important consideration to begin talking to socialists about.
The first thing you want to do is absolutely agree with them.
That, you know, U.S.
foreign policy, yes, it's brutal and it's murderous and it causes the deaths of many, many people.
And, you know, the foreign policy, for want of a better word, of Stalin was brutal and caused the deaths of millions of people.
And the foreign policies of England were brutal and caused the foreign policies of Tibet.
You know, if Tibet had power, it would be terrible and brutal.
The problem aren't individual countries or just the West, but, you know, power in general.
And I'm sure they would agree with you, for the most part, right?
So then you both have common cause and you have common humanity and sympathy for those whose faces are being ground into mush under the brute heel of state power and corporate interests.
And yes, we all agree with that, that that's a terrible thing.
But then you say, you know, but the one thing I can't really understand too well is why doesn't somebody realize in these countries, like in these Indonesian sweatshops, Why don't they realize that paying people more, you know, they'll get better work out of them.
They won't be so tired.
They won't... whatever, right?
And also, you know, why is there no other competitor coming along who's going to get better work out of people?
Because those people are going to be paid a little better, even if it's just a penny or two, right?
Or somebody's going to come up with a big investment, right?
They're going to come and invest in some machinery that's going to cut down on the labor.
And therefore they're going to make much more profit and they're going to start bidding up the prices for the labor that remains and expanding factories so that they can hire more labor than was originally required, even with the inefficient old system.
Why is it that no one comes along to improve upon, not the sort of conditions of the workers or whatever, because that's just a side effect, but why is there so little demand?
for these people's services, that that's the best they can get.
Why are these people's wages not going up over time, as happened in the 19th century throughout the sort of industrializing nations of the West?
And of course, the Marxist is going to say, well, it's a system and blah blah blah, but it's an important thing to dig into and really start to ask that question.
You know, why is there so little demand for these people's labor?
I mean, if they're so cheap, Then everybody should be going over there and bidding them up, right?
I mean, they should, within a generation at most, have some kind of equilibrium.
You know, and I can absolutely guarantee you what the answer is, and I haven't done a lot of research in this area, but the great thing about having studied this stuff for 20 years is you can predict.
You know, like a physicist doesn't have to measure the falling of every rock to know what speed it's going to fall at.
And I can absolutely guarantee you that the reason that these people are poor is because of government corruption.
So, there's some monopoly that's being handed out by the Indonesian government, or there's some insane tax on foreign nationals coming in and setting up factories, or there's some labyrinthine and arcane licensing system where you just have to spend five years in the country Figuring it out and bribing everyone you can get your hands on and then paying more bribes to those who found out that you've bribed.
There's going to be so much corruption that the barriers to entry for other foreign nationals or even internal competitors are so high that it just can't be done.
For instance, in India it can take you like five years to get a license to start a business.
And you have to spend like thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to make it work.
And so what does this mean?
Well, it means unless you're a multinational who can bribe their way to the top, right?
A very rich, right?
And the whole thing is a large artificial barrier which you have to pay money to get over, right?
All bad laws are traps for money, as somebody wrote.
And the barriers to entry is the one thing that you want to start looking at when you're dealing with a socialist who's talking about the predations of capitalists in other countries.
You have to say, well, boy, if these people are so cheap, why isn't everyone over there getting as much labor as they can and bidding these prices?
I mean, it would make sense, right?
Capitalists are greedy.
They want to go to where the workers are cheapest.
So why aren't they?
And, you know, this is where the Marxists, if they have any intellectual integrity, or the socialists, are going to kind of, like, go, you know, that is an interesting question.
Why aren't there, like, 50 companies all vying to get these kids' labor because it's so cheap?
And what you'll find out when you dig into it is that it's really quite simple, right?
Because there's some arrangement with the government wherein the barriers to entry are kept so artificially high, or the taxes are so high, or the unions are this, or the regulations are that, or there are import tariffs, or export duties, or whatever.
I mean, there's just a whole load of that the government can pour onto any productive endeavor to make it sort of sickly profitable for the government and unbelievably exploitive to the workers.
So much of this crap can be floating around, and every country has its own configuration, right?
But when you start to look into this, you and the socialists will absolutely find common cause.
And it's going to be fundamentally a lack of competition that is enforced by the state that makes it profitable.
And then, depending on the intellectual rigor and integrity of the Marxist, you are going to be able, maybe, to have the following little scrap of conversation as well.
Which is to say, That if it is the barrier to entry that is the major problem in keeping these people's wages down, then surely the problem is absolutely the capitalists doing something wrong, blah blah blah, right?
But if the barrier to entry is what is keeping other people out, and thus keeping these people's wages low, keeping the demand for them low, and thus leaving them ripe for exploitation, Then how is it possible that the barrier to entry is profitable at the price?
Sorry, that's a confusing way of putting it, so let me try it again.
The capitalists almost never hire their own armies to enforce this high barrier to competition.
So let's say I'm some Indonesian sweatshop.
I'm like Joe Evil and I run an Indonesian sweatshop.
Well, how on earth am I conceivably going to stop 10 other factories opening up all over Indonesia?
I mean, it's a significant and fundamentally crucial question to talk about with your Marxist friends and your socialist friends.
And believe me, there are common points of interest that we can all get behind.
How is it possible for a private company to prevent another private company from opening up somewhere across town or across the country?
Well, of course the answer is, and we're not talking about the state.
Take the state out of the equation.
Just talk about the private company.
Well, what they would have to do is they would have to hire a lot of armed people.
And they would have to comb the countryside and they would have to... I mean, how would you even know, right?
You could build something and sort of from the outside it looks like an airplane hangar and you could build it at the end of an airport and inside you're secretly putting this sweatshop together where you're making, you know, baby Gap sneakers or something.
So how would you conceivably be able to make it profitable to prevent anybody else from opening up another factory?
Well, the answer is, of course, that you simply can't.
You simply can't.
So how on earth is it profitable for these companies to keep the barrier to entry raised so high and so that it remains a profitable venture?
And that's a very essential question.
And the answer, of course, as you, you know, I'm sure have guessed 20 minutes ago as I've continued to labor the point beyond all endurance, for which I apologize, but at least I haven't said, you know, more than 40 times in this podcast.
The answer to the question of how is it profitable to keep the barriers to entry high for other companies is that you offload, you offload the cost of exploitation to those who are exploited.
So there's this kind of unholy trinity, right?
Well, unholy duo... I say unholy trinity, right?
So there are the poor kids who are making the sneakers, and they are the exploited.
And then there are the corporations who employ them at low wages, and there is the state that pays for the army And the licenses, and the business bureaus, and the bureaucracy, and the civil servants, and the paperwork, and all of that crap, all the guns and bombs and everything, and there's the state which pays for all of that, and how do they do it?
Well, they steal some money, a small amount of money from the corporations, and they steal a very large amount of money from everybody else.
So you're some kid making two bucks a day, and a certain amount of that is going to be taxed by the government.
And what does the government do?
Well, the government pays the soldiers and the bureaucrats and the civil servants to ensure that nobody comes along to bid up your wages.
So, anytime you want to open a factory, you have to, well, guess what?
You have to go to the government, and you have to get a license, and you have to get export permits, and you have to get import permits, and you have to buy the land, which is a complicated and convoluted process, and you have a huge and complicated tax system, and you have to do this, and you have to bribe that, and you have to... And it's just like, oh, forget it!
It's way too complicated!
And, by the way, a lot of the people in the government have already been bought out by Joe Evil with his first set of sweatshops.
So they're not going to approve you at any price.
They're going to string you along for quite some time, and they're never going to approve your application because, you know, they're already in the pocket of Joe Evil.
So the amazing thing about this, and the thing that the Marxists and the Libertarians can completely get behind, is just how awful and evil and corrupt and immoral is this That the government taxes the citizens of a country in order to pay the army to keep competition out for the citizens' wages so that the citizens stay poor forever!
That's something, you sort of go over that with a Marxist and he'll be clapping you on the shoulder and he'll be, you know, he'll be offering to sell you his little red book and he'll be, you know, jumping up and down with, you know, rapturous love of the proletariat and you'll all be, you know, brothers in class.
And this is the kind of analysis that, you know, we really can get into with socialists and we really can get into with Marxists.
Now, they're going to say that the corporations are the ones who are funding the state.
And that, you know, it's the corporations that have created the state, and so on.
And that's fine, you know.
I mean, I'm willing to grant them that there is an unholy union between the two.
I think that they're going to have a tough time saying that the corporations preceded the state.
Because as far as I remember it, in ancient Rome, quite a lot of state, not so much with the corporations.
You know, corporations is a legal fiction that was sort of invented in the 19th century to protect capitalists from, you know, being personally exposed to losses.
I don't have a particularly strong opinion about it, but it smells kind of bad because it's a government legal fiction that is treated like a person but doesn't really exist.
And so I certainly know that, you know, from an epistemological standpoint, Creating this legal fiction and giving it rights and obligations is definitely wrong, logically, because there's no such thing as a corporation.
It's just a bunch of people and a bunch of buildings.
To create this fictional entity and then say it can do this or that...
That you can accumulate the profits from a corporation personally, but the losses can't touch you personally.
That just seems like something that was rigged by capitalists and the state.
I mean, it really does seem like something that's just a bad idea for the general population, but a great idea for capitalists who want to limit their exposure to risk.
And again, no problem with capitalism.
Love the free market.
Dig the free market.
But, you know, these people are going to get pretty good at using state power to exploit That's the system.
And you know, once you get something like a corporation with legal, state-enforced rights and obligations, you're no longer in a free market, right?
And you're in some sort of weird state alternate universe where up is down, black is white, and a piece of paper can pay taxes.
So, I think that the Marxists are going to have a tough time saying that the corporations create and invent the government.
For a number of reasons, right?
One is that, well, governments have predated corporations by sort of thousands and thousands of years.
And, you know, another reason that we know that that's not the case is that, you know, you just look at who the people are paid by.
Like, who is the military paid by?
Right?
The military is not paid by the corporations.
The military is paid by the government.
And, of course, the corporations do contribute in bribes and taxes, money to the bureaucrats and to the politicians and thus to the military.
But, you know, the primary source of income is the taxation on the general citizenry for most of these sort of rapacious countries.
And, you know, of course corporations will contribute to the Democrats and the Republicans in hopes of getting all this preferential legislation, but the amount of money that they have to give to the government relative to the amount of money the government spends on enforcing Its whims, I mean, is just such an imbalance.
I don't know how many hundreds of billions of dollars the US military consumes annually, but it far dwarfs even the sum aggregate of corporate donations by many hundreds of times.
And so, one of the problems is, you know, to sort of sum this up, you know, if you're going to deal with socialists and Marxists and people like that, you know, one of the main things to understand is that, you know, we really have a lot in common.
You know, we don't like corporations cozying up to the government and, you know, raising the barriers to entry and limiting competition and thus being allowed to exploit their being, given the position by the state of exploiting their workers.
We don't like that any more than the Marxists do.
We have that in common.
I think that our analysis is like Marxism 12 steps deeper, right?
So we're disturbed by things like exploitation and people who don't have any power.
and are sort of terrorized and beaten down.
It's just that we say, okay, well, the nominal guy walking up and down the aisle of the sweatshop is the foreman or the capitalist or whatever.
But, you know, a more strict and stringent and detailed economic analysis is the recognition of the fact that the corporation only finds it profitable to exclude competition.
If it can offload the costs of excluding competition to the general taxpayers through the power of the state.
And so if you want to get rid of exploitation, the first thing you need to do is to lower the barriers to entry for all competitors for labor, for the price of labor.
Because any time you lower the barrier to competition, competition is going to increase and thus the price of labor is going to be bidded up enormously.
And so you want to make sure that you get rid of things like licenses and tariffs and exports and import duties and weird union powers.
And you want to get rid of bizarre and labyrinthine tax and regulatory structures.
And you want to just throw the market wide open to as many entrances as humanly possible so that you can bid up the price of labor as quickly as possible.
And if you get rid of the state, Then it is going to be far more profitable for a corporation to invest in upgrading its technology, in hiring new workers, in upgrading its machinery, in expanding its markets, in advertising.
That's where corporate profits will suddenly make a lot more sense and be a lot more applied, rather than corporations going out and raising private armies.
You know, like Microsoft's going to raise a private army to go beat up on Apple.
It's not going to happen.
Because the fundamental economic equation, when you get rid of the state, changes.
So it's no longer profitable at all to pay the state and bribe the state and get preferential legislation from the state.
Because guess what?
Now the entire cost of enforcing it, if that's the stuff you want, is entirely yours.
And guess what?
If you are Microsoft and you want to start hiring an army to go beat up on Apple, guess what as well?
Apple can hire an army and come beat up on you.
So it's never going to happen.
Capitalists are only going to find it profitable to limit competition and to keep other people out of their market and raise the barriers to entry.
If the taxpayers pay for the enforcement, they will never find it profitable if they themselves have to pay for their enforcement.
Because it's much, much better for them to simply invest in improvements peacefully.
And also because corporations aren't very big on confronting other legally armed entities like other corporations who have their own private armies, right?
They really like it when the state disarms every possible opponent so that they never have to worry about that kind of stuff.
So this is just sort of one example of how, when you're talking to a socialist, you really don't have to take an oppositional standpoint.
I mean, you can if they're really obnoxious.
By all means, go ahead and have fun!
But I think it doesn't do the cause any good to say, well, the socialists are way over there, the Marxists are way over there, and we're way over here, the complete opposite.
It's just not true.
You know, they recognize a lot of the problems in the sort of mixed economy, and they call it capitalism because they just, you know, that's the term that they use.
But they recognize a lot of the problems in the mixed economy and a lot of the problems in the foreign policies of governments.
And we should really try and build bridges to them and find common cause with them.
Because, you know, they're not just necessarily evil trolls who are out to destroy all the vestiges of human freedom.
The things that they see going on in the market, especially overseas, where we don't get a lot of visibility for these things.
The same way that we don't get a lot of visibility for, you know, American foreign policy or British foreign policy and so on.
What they see is horrifying, and we would be horrified too.
And we really can find common cause and invite them into a new way of looking at these problems, where they don't necessarily waste their lives fighting the wrong enemy, which is not the capitalist, but the state that makes violent predation profitable by passing on the cost of violence to the taxpayers that they are using that violence against.
And I think if that's explained, We can all get behind that kind of predation, which is a really terrible and vicious social evil.
So I hope this has been helpful, and I hope it's given you the chance or the choice or the possibility of opening up new types of conversations with those who we think are just natural opponents, because they've got some great stuff to say.
It's just that they don't go far enough in their analysis, and thus When they try and solve a problem, they make it worse.
So, let me know if this has any sort of help with you when you're talking to people, because I think it's a very interesting idea, and I think it really could help us build bridges to those who we think of as enemies at the moment, but who we may have a lot more in common with than we imagine.
So, I'm signing off now.
Thanks so much for listening, as always.
All the best.
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