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April 17, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:00
193 Marx and the Labor Theory of Value

Darling Karl and the evil exploiters

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph. I hope you're doing well.
It is...
Well, I can tell you the time for sure.
It is 8.37.
It is Monday, April the 17th, 2006.
I hope you're well, and I thank you so much to those who joined in yesterday for the chat.
I'm sorry that I wasn't able to get Team Server working, but we did switch to Skype and had a rather enjoyable chat, a number of us, and I'll be posting that on the boards.
I'd like to get...
A little bit more of a professional recording style.
I've looked for some intro music before I start posting it as a podcast, but I'll certainly post it on the boards and you can let me know what you think.
Very enjoyable chat.
Again, very impressed with the quality of the conversations that we're having.
Not that you should care a whit about whether I'm impressed or not.
I just wanted to share with you that I am.
But, I mean, that's just great.
That's wonderful. And also, somebody posted on the board this morning that podcasts like 192, which was the one around curiosity and personal relationships...
Is helping them with a template of a free relationship which they haven't seen.
And I know what you mean, brother.
I have not seen it either. So it is a bit of inventing the wheel while trying to figure out how fire works at the same time.
So I understand that it's not the easiest thing in the world to get a template of.
And I'm certainly glad that what I can do...
To communicate about this is actually helpful.
And if it helps people get richer, deeper, more meaningful and freer relationships, well that is just a beautiful thing.
And I'm so happy that that is occurring for people.
Now, we're going to take a break this morning from relationships, although we will be getting to them again this afternoon, as I want to talk about the parenting issues that have been one of the most popular threads on the boards, and give you my two bits about parenting, and share with you my theory of how society can basically reproduce children through a kind of alien pod mechanism that I think will solve most of the issues around parenting.
So we'll get into that this afternoon.
But I thought we would take a little stroll through the life of Marx and out of sort of the labor theory of value.
Now, there's things that people don't know about Marx, which I think is interesting.
A book that I read that had a very strong impression on me was a book called Intellectuals by Paul Johnson.
Now, if you've at all dug into 20th century history, I'm sure you've come across his name.
...in a wonderful book called Modern Times, which is one of the first sort of public intellectual goings-over of the Austrian theory of the business cycle.
An excellent book.
He's a great reader, although he does use the word palimpsests, which had me running for the dictionary.
I don't know about you, but one of his chapters is called The Palimpsest of Friedman, something like that.
So he's a very good writer.
It's a very powerful and entertaining stroll, and his stuff on Einstein...
Which opens up the book, I think is just great.
So, I would definitely recommend reading Modern Times.
I would also recommend reading Intellectuals, his basic thesis in the book.
And, you know, be warned that he is religious, but this doesn't really come across in his writing.
It's just interesting to know as a piece of background material.
But one of the things that he talks about in Intellectuals as a basic idea for the book is to say, look...
In the mid to late 19th century, all of these secular thinkers put themselves across as the moralizers of mankind, as those who could give mankind the best moral instruction possible.
And the reason that they put themselves forward was that they said, well, you know, these priests, they talk a good talk, but they don't really act it out.
So much like Luther railed against the wealth of the popes in Rome...
the intellectuals in the mid to late 19th century put themselves forward as the moral educators of mankind by railing against the hypocrisy of the religious people, of the priests and so on.
And he said, well, I think there's something to be said for that.
There definitely was a fair amount of hypocrisy going on in the church.
He loves it at the time.
That's how you know he's religious, because he says at the time.
It's different now.
But back then, boy, you know, there really was.
And now we fixed it, just like government programs.
Yes, abuses have occurred in the past.
But now we have an oversight committee and everything will be wonderful.
So, I mean, you might as well just put one speech in front of people apologizing for the abuses and excesses of government programs and then just recycle that speech every five to seven years because...
Well, the cycle is about at least here five to seven years.
Some terrible, terrible thing is revealed, and then the Apollo, oh, mistakes were made, but now everything's better, and we can move forward together as one for the good of everyone.
And then everybody calms down for a while, and then reporters just don't want to poke at that wound, right?
They let it heal, and they deal with other wounds, and then they come back, and it's like...
Wow, abuses are going on.
Well, yes, mistakes were made, but now we can go...
They might as well just have the same speech, and it's usually the same looking guy, too.
Actually, now, these days, it's a woman, because nobody wants to yell at a woman in a press conference.
So anyway, so he said that the intellectuals had valid critiques of the clergy, the corruption of the clergy, and put themselves forward as the moral instructors of mankind.
And so he said, well, let's have a look at their lives.
Since everybody who makes a criticism must themselves, like they cannot themselves complain about being subjected to that criticism.
So if I critique a podcaster for sounding vaguely gay when he's tired, for speaking too quickly, for having an odd accent, for taking too many pauses and for having too many vocal tics, I'm not sure that I would have a good deal of luck resisting that criticism I'm not sure that I would have a good deal of luck resisting that criticism were it hurled my way as well, which is why I simply criticize absolutely everything else.
So, hey, everybody has what gives them pleasure.
That's the meat that I feast on.
The errors of the world is my mead.
And so, he wanted to take that same...
approach of hypocrisy, the charge of hypocrisy, the charge of moral corruption and moral degradation, and apply it to the intellectuals who had turned it upon the church.
So he has a book which is full of chapters on a wide variety of people.
It really is quite fascinating because, of course, we are very distracted by the idea of genius.
We are very distracted by the idea of genius and that talent equals quality of any kind other than of the work it's producing.
So, the idea, like, he takes on Hemingway, and Hemingway was a...
You know, well, we'll have a...
I mean, I'm mulling over a podcast series on art.
I'm obviously very fascinated by art, and I've spent many years as an actor and a playwright and a novelist, so I do have some really...
Strong opinions about art, and let me know if this would be of interest to you or not.
But I find Hemingway to be completely emotionally dead as a writer, and that has always been something that has troubled me.
I really like writing that is alive.
You know, I've got to tell you, I also like writing with just a little bit of humor, which is why Ayn Rand is a little bit of a plod from Oasis to Oasis, at times.
But... Hemingway, the people are all emotionally dead.
The writing is emotionally flat.
He does have a certain kind of compact power to it.
And the writing itself is completely amoral.
If you ever want to sort of see just how amoral the writing in Hemingway is, just to have a flip through a short story called The Short and Happy Life of Francis McCorbrick.
And... Basically, it's about a woman who doesn't respect her husband and what she does.
And there's absolutely no...
I mean, there's a moral agent in the story who has absolutely no criticism for a horrendously immoral act that a woman does.
And this, of course, is a gentleman who absolutely loathed his mother's hypocrisy without ever Without ever ingesting fully the ideals that call it hypocrisy, right?
So if I call everyone hypocrisy and get really angry at them, sort of blurb it out as I was talking about in podcast 192, then I'm not actually ingesting the values which are giving rise to my criticism of hypocrisy.
I'm just getting angry, which is going to make me a real hypocrite over time as well, because without just acting out the values rather than ingesting them and applying them to myself and universally and peacefully and with understanding and wisdom, I'm just...
I mean, this is why the cycle of abuse tends to continue.
And his relationships with women were just horrendous.
His level of physical injury, there's one point at which Paul Johnson lists Hemingway's physical injuries, which just go on for like a page and a half.
I mean, he shot up a toilet with a, I think it was a machine gun or some sort of automatic repeat gun.
He shot up a toilet, broke his leg like three times, broke his jaw, broke his, and all of these, of course, is the result of heavy drinking and heavy machismo.
And I also have never, I've tried listening to, I mean, I read when I was very young, The Old Man and the Sea, which was like, oh my lord, was it ever like sensory deprivation to read that book.
Ugh. And And this is a basic totemistic idea of masculinity as a trial against nature or a trial against women.
I mean, how pathetic, puffed up, and insecure could masculinity be to think that it is very important that you conquer women?
I mean, come on!
I'm sorry, I just think that's the funniest thing in the world.
I mean, most men are two to three times as strong as any woman.
I believe that men and women are equally intelligent.
I think that women may be said to have some additional verbal skills when it comes to discussion or argument, but only in terms of emotional argument.
That's just because they are weaker, so they have to develop other methodologies.
If you, as a chest-thumping Neanderthal-type man, have not quite figured out that sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you, and feel that it's very important to conquer the physically weak and to conquer nature.
I just think that's funny.
It's very important that you land a big fish, because that says something about the size of your manhood.
I just think that's very funny.
Ha! I mean, if you really want the fish so much, go buy some tuna from the store or rent a Russian trawler and you can have all the fish you want.
But the idea that it's muscles against nature, I just think that's too funny.
Anyway, so I mean, I don't want to get into a discussion of Hemingway or his philosophy, although I guess I have.
But it's okay, you know, I've been so concentrated for the last couple of podcasts.
I need some room to move.
Give me some space, man. I need to roam.
It's Gypsy Thought Day.
So, the way that he talks about Marx in this book is interesting.
This is not the only biographical source.
I've read good chunks of Das Kapital.
I've read certainly the Communist Manifesto, which is a complete entertaining ravings of a lunatic, where he actually does accuse capitalist workers with having sex.
With their employees as a right of ownership.
I mean, just crazy things like that.
Like they'll have sex with all the proletariat because their own wives aren't enough.
You know, that kind of stuff. We just make up these amazingly complicated things.
And boy, if you ever want to read about sexual exploitation, some parts of the Gulag Apicalago talk about it quite astonishingly.
I'm going to talk about that in another section, though, on the reverse effective government programs.
But Marx was a Jewish, of course, and he got married, had children, and he also had an affair with his maid.
I mean, this is sort of when you...
This has nothing to do with his ideas.
It's just if you want to look at the source of people's ideas, people who don't have self-knowledge, right?
People who spit out false things into the public arena without a methodology for correction, right?
I mean, I'm sure I've spat out a few false things over these past 200-odd podcasts, but I have a methodology for correction, But people who throw out certainties into the public arena without a methodology for correction are acting out emotional problems, in my humble opinion. And we can talk about this more another time.
Marx basically banged his maid.
And while she was still working there, I think he had a child by her.
And so when he talks about the exploitation of the employer...
It's not just about capitalism, you know?
It's not. And of course, the conditions of the working class, which is something he wrote, I think, in the 1860s with Engels.
Engels was an industrialist who had a lot of money and was very keen on Marx and gave him lots of money to write.
Well... They wrote a book together on the conditions of the working class in England, which was actually a complete fabrication.
You can look this up on the web.
You know, it's like the global warming thing, which we can also get into another time, but the mathematics behind it, global warming, a complete fabrication.
And the social conditions that are described by Marx and Engels in one of their seminal works, complete fabrication.
I mean, this is the kind of thing that's important to understand.
You know, one of the things that Christina has taught me that I'm going to spend some time on in another podcast, I know this all sounds like intros to other podcasts, but hey, that's okay, is that when people do something that's immoral, and it may not be a very large thing, but when they do something that's immoral, it's a very clear indication of their character, a very clear indication.
It doesn't have to be a very big thing.
If I fabricated the evidence for an entire podcast series on this, that, or the other, If I lied about this, that, or the other, and I mean, I'm not talking about, I mean, if biographers were ever to be interested in my past, I'm sure they would come up with some contradictions about my memories of my teenage years, like it was this year and not that year that his mother did this or that, but...
That's fine. I mean, that's not me trying to lie.
That's me just trying to repiece things as much as I can without having access to any other family members who went through it.
So I'm not going to sit down and go, hey, my brother, I'm doing a podcast on our family.
Would you like to sit down and compare notes?
So the same thing is true with my...
Methodology for correction. So, if I put something out there and somebody says, here's the evidence against it, then of course I'll repeat that, I'll refine the arguments, I'll try and put it out on air.
So, that's not the same thing.
Mistakes and errors and so on, that's fine.
You take the wrong piece of evidence and so on.
But if you fabricate an entire book and then never admit it and cover it, I mean, this is a whole different type of personality structure.
And basically, I personally, when I find that out about somebody, with very rare exceptions, with very rare exceptions, I simply stop reading them.
I simply stop thinking that they have anything of value to offer.
So, for instance, Sartre and...
Was it Simone de Beauvoir?
They were existential philosophers, came out of France in the 1950s.
She wrote The Second Sex. He wrote a whole bunch of books on existentialism.
And I found out that they enjoyed threesomes together with his grad students.
He was a professor. Now, that kind of interaction...
Hey, don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against threesomes on video.
No, I mean, I have...
For me, sex is monogamistic.
If they did threesomes, that would be a problem for me.
I just think that that's pretty depressed behavior, right?
I mean, if you love someone, why would you want to have somebody else in bed with you?
I mean, isn't it about you and that person?
I mean, that's sort of my feeling.
But even if they did that, that would be one thing, but they did it with grad students who were susceptible and exploitable and obviously dependent upon...
Sartre for his marks and getting them their masters or PhDs or whatever.
So it's an innately non-equal relationship, which is one reason why bosses shouldn't have affairs with employees, because it's kind of an innately exploitive relationship.
So when you sort of read stuff like that, or when you read about somebody like...
Brecht, Bertolt Brecht, he wrote the Three Penny Opera, which was an update of a 17th century play.
You know that Mack the Knife song that came from that?
Well, you know, you realize that he collaborated with the Eastern European communists.
He had people, he sort of ratted people out and got them thrown into the gulags and took all the state subsidies and, you know, just lived this completely ghastly collaborative existence.
Well... The great thing is that releases me from having to bother reading any of his kind of stuff.
I mean, even if there's a deathbed confession of remorse, that really isn't the way to go.
And when you read about...
And this is why it was very touch-and-go with me for a while with Ayn Rand, once I read about some of the stuff that occurred later in her life, with those sort of kangaroo courts, and everybody must love rationality, I'm the most rational, therefore everybody has to have sex with me.
I mean, that was just blatantly culty stuff.
And I think that the fault, of course, lies that she never made it to anarcho-capitalism, and therefore...
Defended the centrally moral authority, which he then became, and there's lots of reasons why that went haywire, so I was fine.
I just read her earlier stuff and don't worry so much about her later justifications for how she is the ultimate goddess of love, which never quite took with me particularly well, because one of the things that I do value is a rational kind of humility, which I'm not sure I would find particularly in Ayn Rand, should I meet her today.
So Marx had affairs with his maid and produced a child and his wife stayed married to him, right?
So this is another clue about what kind of person he is.
So he has an affair with his maid.
Now that's pretty...
Pretty gruesome to begin with.
I mean, this is a woman completely dependent upon him economically.
And the maids, of course, need a reference.
If you're a maid of any years, you need a reference from your past employer to get a new job, generally.
Because there's the problem of theft and there's the problem of affairs.
So people don't hire maids who aren't your first mating job without references from prior employers because of this sort of very issue.
And so I'm sure he withheld that from her.
And then he had a baby with her and his wife stayed married to him.
Now, I know that divorce wasn't the easiest thing in the world back then, but it could be done under that kind of circumstance.
And this is not a woman who, we don't have much record, I don't believe, of what she said, but she did stay with him.
Now, he also applied to get jobs, pretty simple jobs, like clerking jobs and so on, because he did go through a time of pretty severe poverty, where he was writing and he spent all of his days in the reading room at the British Museum, writing and, I guess, quote, researching, which seemed to mean reading all these other socialists.
And... He also applied for jobs as a clerk at a railway station, if I remember right, or something like that, and he was rejected because his penmanship was too bad.
I mean, that's sort of another clue about the guy, right?
He's desperately trying to get a job, and he won't even, during the time where you're supposed to write down your list of, I guess you write down a paragraph so they can check your penmanship, which was very important back before typewriters, Well, he couldn't even be bothered to write down that well.
Now, he also played around on the stock market and lost a good deal of money.
And there's sort of lots of reasons as to why he had problems with capitalism.
And we know for a simple fact that when this guy accuses an entire group of people he's never met of sexually exploiting those who work for them, When he has actually done it himself, you know for sure that the world he's creating is simply a projection from his own unconscious.
It's not that hard to analyze somebody from that standpoint.
All you need to do is find one wild, exaggerated and unjust accusation about the world that he has actually performed himself and denied.
And, you know, you don't have to be an innovator in psychological circles to figure out that this person is acting out emotions, acting out guilt and rage and so on, and the fact that their intellectual theories are sort of a transmutation, transmogrification, to use my first extra polysyllabic word of the day, of their own inner guilt and rage and corruption and so on.
And then Marx did get a huge bequest.
I can't remember from who. I don't think it was Engels, but he got an enormous amount of money, lived his life in pretty wealthy circumstances, and spent a good chunk of the last 30 years of his life dodging critiques of the labor theory of value.
So having done a slight axe job on Marx, Let's talk about the labor theory of value.
I don't have a lot of time, but it's not that hard to explain or refute, so I'll sort of say what the theory is and then what the refutation is.
Well, the labor theory of value is that if I produce goods that are worth $10 and...
I am paid $5 for them, then the entire profit of the capitalist comes from the $5 differentiation between what the goods are sold for that I'm producing and what I myself am paid.
So the labor theory of value says that the value, the entire value of producing a widget that sells for $10, the only value that's there...
It's the labor that creates it.
Because the person will say, well, without that labor, there is no widget.
And therefore, the entire value of the widget comes from the physical labor of the person who has created it.
And therefore, any time a worker gets paid less than the value of the good is sold for, that is exploitation.
And that the capitalist class...
It skims off the profit by taking the $5 when they're selling something for $10 and only paying the worker $5.
It's really that simple. I'm sure it's explained in many more words, and I'm sure that I could spend many more words talking about it, but it really does become that simple.
Now, there's a grain of truth in all of this insofar as where mercantilism is involved.
In other words, where the capitalists have paid the government thugs to keep other capitalists from entering the market.
and we talked about this in the podcast on competition, so I won't go into any of it here, where that is occurring, then there absolutely is exploitation of the worker, and there's exploitation of the consumer, because the worker is underpaid, of course, and because there's a monopoly on the jobs, because there aren't other people competing for those workers, because there's been a state-sanctioned and because there's a monopoly on the jobs, because there aren't But the consumer is also fleeced, because the price is higher, because the monopoly has been kept at bay through the power of the state.
That is sort of what happens, and it is exploitive, but it's not the labor theory of value.
But there always has been that going on in the market.
Because there's always been a government, there's always been exploitation of the workers and of the consumers through both taxation and the regulation of competition or the elimination or reduction of competition.
So he's right, but he was wrong about it being an aid to the marketer, and of course he was wrong completely about the solution.
I mean, it really is sort of like someone saying, oh, you have a cracked forearm, let's shoot you, rather than let's bind you up.
So he partly identified the problem, but of course the solution is more freedom.
The solution is not a complete totalitarian dictatorship where those in the state own everything, because Lord, that's not going to lead to exploitation, is it?
So he spent the next 30 years of his life not writing a whole lot except, you know, vague and nonsensical justifications for the labor theory of value, which was patently proven false.
Patently, patently, patently proven false.
His prediction was that exploitation of workers was going to increase over time because Marx claimed that his theories were scientific.
And he claimed that the exploitation of workers, their condition was going to get worse over time, the labor theory of value, and so on.
Because these capitalists have all this power, right?
I mean, according to his theory, the capitalists have all this power, so they can pay somebody five years, sorry, five dollars when they're selling it for ten dollars.
And that's the phrase, you know, workers control of the means of production.
The capitalists control the means of production, and therefore they can...
In the same way that a landlord owns an apartment building, just rents it out to someone, the capitalists own the means of production, and therefore they can shortchange the workers.
But he was saying, well, the workers should own the means of production, which is what Noam Chomsky says as well.
The workers should own the factories and so on.
And I'm sure that's no problem at all.
I'm sure that the capitalists would be more than happy to sell the factory to the workers if he got the right price.
It's just that the workers don't usually tend to have the capital.
And, of course, Marx would blame the capitalists for that.
I would not, but that's something we could talk about another time.
Now, the disproof for the labor theory of value is that you want to find a situation where mercantilism is not going on, and there are certainly indicators that that is the case.
Oh, and sorry, just briefly, Marx did say that capitalism was an improvement over feudalism, but just that socialism or communism would be an improvement over capitalism.
It is a natural and inevitable step.
So he predicted that the plight of workers would get worse and worse.
He predicted that in an industrialized country, it would be inevitable that socialism would occur and that there was a bunch of other things that he predicted.
That's why it's called scientific socialism, because it makes predictions and it's supposed to be empirical and so on.
And what happened, of course, was that none of these predictions came true.
In fact, quite the opposite occurred.
It was the least industrialized countries that went for communism.
Communism did not occur inevitably, but was the result of violent revolutions.
And the plight of workers got better, not worse, under capitalism.
So all of his theory proved incorrect, which is sort of important to understand, right?
I mean, if you predict something and the complete opposite happens every time, it may be valid, I think.
To say that there's a problem with your theory.
It's just possible that that would be a scientific approach, really, if you wanted to use the word for your theory.
Now, the reason that the labor theory of value is disprovable is because in a free market situation, there's absolutely no reason why workers would sell their labor.
If they could get $10 for it by owning their own factories, lickety-split and nice and easy, then...
They would do that. I mean, if you could get paid twice your current wage just by snapping your fingers and creating something, well, wouldn't you do it?
Of course you would. I mean, people don't want to get underpaid.
The same greed, I guess you could say, that causes the capitalists to want to pay the workers less makes the workers want to work more.
So, if the means of production are forcibly withheld from the workers through state power, in other words, the idea that the workers controlled the means of production never quite occurred under socialism or communism, of course, because the Politburo and the bureaucrats ended up and the politicians ended up owning the means of production.
And the workers were not allowed.
You could not go and build a factory in a communist country.
So the workers simply were not allowed.
Now, in that situation, sure, It's exploitation, because you're not allowed to compete with the capitalists.
But any situation where you are allowed to compete with the capitalists, which was occurring quite a lot in the 19th century, there were ups and downs due to government control of the money supply, but there was a lot of competition, and people did have the rags to riches and the riches to rags stories.
There was a cycle. People did have the capacity to create their own factories.
So the question is, of course, well, why didn't they?
If you could simply sort of snap your fingers and make double your wages, then why would you not do that?
And Marx could never answer that.
He could never answer also why people were getting better off rather than worse off.
He always said, oh, it's temporary.
Oh, it's this. Oh, it's that. Oh, it's a blip.
He just made up anything to keep the theory.
And so, of course, the answer to the riddle, of course, is pretty simple.
I'm sure you understand it already, so I'll just be very brief with it.
The answer to the riddle, of course, is that it takes money to make money, right?
So a capitalist has to invest $10 million into building a factory.
And then you, as a worker, get to rent that factory.
So if you're a lathe operator, you can either build your own lathe from scratch, which is going to cost you a lot of time where you otherwise could be working, Or you can buy a lathe, which is going to put you in debt for a million dollars, let's just say, and then you've got to pay that debt off.
So, of course, you're going to make $10 with it, but half of that money is going to pay off the cost of buying the lathe, and so you're still going to be making only half.
Now, in the end of it...
You're going to end up with an asset, but of course it's going to wear out over time and you might need to buy another one.
It might break down. And if it breaks down and you're the owner of it, like if your lathe explodes or something, then you're kind of out of luck because if it happens to the capitalist you're working for, then he's got to replace the lathe and it may have some long-term effect on your salary, but right then you still get paid and so on.
But you can buy your own lathe, which means you've got to pay off, and then eventually you'll end up with the lathe yourself, and you'll get $10 an hour and so on, but then your lathe will be old and it will need more maintenance.
There's just always problems with capital equipment, the same way there is with sort of computer networks and so on.
And so if somebody spends $10 million to build a factory with a bunch of lathes, then you may not have the credit, want to invest, want the risk or anything like that of buying your own lathe.
So what you're going to do is you're going to go and rent the lathe from someone.
And how do you do that? Well, you pay them five bucks.
And you keep five bucks for yourself.
So the capitalist is happy.
He's paying off his $10 million investment.
You're happy because you're making five bucks.
And if you were not using a lathe, you would be making like three bucks.
I mean, let's just say that you had some foot-operated lathe thing that you built yourself and you had a little awl or something that you used to carve, whatever it is that you're doing with the lathe.
It's been a while since I took shop, so I don't want to get too technical here.
Well, we know for a fact that the workers prefer renting the capital equipment from the capitalist because they do it.
I mean, so they're going to make $5 by doing that as opposed to making $3 by not doing that, or $5 plus risk, or it would probably be even less.
It would be like $4 plus risk to buy their own lathe with 20 years from now I get to run my own lathe at $10 an hour if it's still working and so on.
So it's the optimum thing for them.
They get to walk straight into a factory.
They don't have to spend the weeks or months or years building up the factory, doing the market research, figuring out how to make it most efficient, where the location should be, getting the suppliers to take your goods, all of the massive infrastructure that it takes for any kind of business to operate.
They don't have to do anything like that, right?
They sign on the dotted line.
They put on their overalls and they go and start lathing and they're, boom, getting five bucks an hour just off the street.
And so it is beneficial for them to do that.
It's not exploitation because it's voluntary.
Where it is coercively manipulative and exploitative, it is so because of the power of the state, and the solution is not to create an infinite state.
So this theory is very easy to debunk, of course, and the thing we'll talk about this afternoon, actually I think we will, because I think it's important to talk about, Why on earth did socialism become so popular?
And why on earth is communism still an intellectual force?
I mean, I'll tell you, I watched a few minutes, probably about 20 minutes, of Good Night and Good Luck, just because I usually like snappy dialogue and acting, and so I watched it knowing that it was about the HUAC trials, and it was about the McCarthyism, And the sympathy towards communism still exists.
It's really, really, really astounding and unbelievably offensive to the millions of people, hundreds of millions of people who died under communism in the 20th century.
But there is a reason, and I think it's a pretty significant one, why it's still so popular and why it became so popular when it came out, which is important if you're going to argue against it, I think, to understand why people still have this connection with communism.
So we'll talk about this afternoon.
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