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June 29, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:59
306 The Dollar Democracy
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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is the 29th.
There we go. We have now processed the date correctly.
It's the 29th of June 2006, 1722 in the afternoon.
It's so important for a pacifist to use military time.
And we are not going to talk anymore about anger.
Instead, I'm just going to get angry.
Greek.
No, I'm kidding.
We're not going to talk anymore about anger, because I think I did kind of deal with the topic this morning about where anger is appropriate, where compassion is appropriate, and it has to do with people's experience of doubt, blah, blah, blah.
You've already heard it.
Don't need to say it again.
So why don't we take another topic this afternoon I'm slightly drawn to the relationship and economic topics these days, although I will be getting back to philosophy.
Most quickly and most imminently, because I know that's also a popular topic, we're having some very interesting discussions about ethics on the boards, which I will try to synthesize in another podcast or two.
But I would like to talk about the voting of the dollar.
Dollar voting. Very interesting concept, I think.
The basic idea of economic success is that people are voluntarily willing or desirous or, in effect, bestow you with dollars based on...
The fact that what you're doing is a value to them, right?
So if you produce a 50-gig MP3 player with a full 17-inch color screen that folds down into a half an inch for 50 bucks, then you are going to get...
Your product is going to receive a huge amount of money.
You're going to sell Move lots of product.
And in a sense, in a very real sense...
The success of that product is being voted on and is being voted on in a positive way.
And every other MP3 products that can't do that is going to have a negative vote against it or an absentia vote against it from an economic standpoint because people aren't going to be giving those vendors money.
So one of the fascinating things about the free market is the extraordinary deep and dynamic Democracy that is occurring within the market system.
It's really quite a wonder when you think about it, that every time everybody buys something, they are voting for the success of that particular something or someone, and they're not voting for everyone else.
So when you're chatting with people who are all big with democracy, since democracy, majority voting, ruling, the individual, blah, blah, blah, because of that, People think that democracy is a good way of making decisions, and obviously if you could have something be more democratic, then that would be better.
Well, there is nothing in the world, in human concepts, nothing whatsoever that is more democratic than the free market.
Not a single, solitary thing.
So, for instance, if we look at something like the welfare state, and people say, well, the welfare state is valid because people vote on it.
They voted for politicians who put in the welfare state.
They vote for politicians who continue to fund the welfare state and to expand it.
And because politicians are such vote sluts, we know for a fact that society doesn't want the welfare state to end because if politicians could get into power...
By saying, I'm going to end welfare as we know it.
Oh wait, someone already did that.
If a politician could get in by saying, we're going to get rid of the welfare state, and people would vote for him or her, then for sure politicians would do that because they love power.
And so we know that people want the welfare state because they don't vote for politicians that dismantle it.
They instead vote for politicians that vow to dismantle it and then don't.
So that's...
I guess that's very different, right?
So, one of the ways in which you can approach debating something like the welfare state with people is to say that wouldn't it be great if the welfare state could be voted on by everyone all day long and all night long?
And wouldn't government be a whole lot more responsive in the way that, say, Kmart or Walmart are Wouldn't the government be so much more responsive and wouldn't it be a better situation if we could have everyone vote on everything all the time?
And people are going to say, well, that's not possible, it's too complicated, too much overhead, you'd never get anything done, and blah, blah, blah.
Well, but just as an ideal, right?
As an ideal, wouldn't that be a good thing?
If we could have everyone vote on everything all the time, wouldn't that be...
A good thing, just from an ideal standpoint, an idealistic standpoint.
Now, of course, people can't say no, right?
Because they've already said that voting and democracy is a good thing.
So they can't turn around and then say, well, it's a good thing, but only if it's once every four years, right?
If it's a good thing, then why would it only be once every four years?
And wouldn't it be better if everyone got to vote rather than just, I don't know, 40% of the population mostly composed of old people and special interest groups?
wouldn't it be better if everyone got to vote all the time, continuously on everything?
And that it cost them no effort.
I mean, wouldn't that be an ideal and utopian situation?
Now, of course, Democrats are going to get kind of, to people who are into democracy, they might get a little bit irritated because they won't know where you're going.
They'll think you're just looking at some sort of fantasy land where this kind of stuff can occur.
But, you know, stick with it.
You're going to have a chat with them about this.
And at some point, they have to say, yes, if we could get everyone to vote on everything all the time, then it would be better than once every four years with a minority of people voting.
And even those.
And also, wouldn't it be great if when people voted for something, you knew they meant it?
You knew they meant it.
Because it cost them something.
They had to give up on everything.
If they voted for something, it cost them something.
It would have to be something that they really meant it.
Because, you know, like, if you're in a farming community, are you voting because you agree with the idealistic platform of the guy in charge, of the party that you like?
Or are you voting because you're going to get your farm subsidies extended?
I mean, this is sort of one of the big problems with a mixed economy, right?
It's a sort of half-socialistic, half-capitalistic, or parasitical socialist and the host free market situation.
Do we really know why people are voting?
Are they voting because that's what their family...
We've always voted Republican.
We're always going to vote Republican.
Are they voting because they've got someone in the military?
Are they voting because they're getting subsidies?
Are they voting because they think the guy's got nice hair and is good looking?
Are they voting because...
Like, why? Why are they voting?
Are they voting because that's the way this minority group has always voted or...
We have no idea, really, why people vote for politicians.
We just know that it's probably not...
I remember talking to one guy up here in Canada.
We had a guy named Pierre Trudeau who did an extraordinarily good imitation of a ferret for most of his adult life.
And he had a wife named Margaret Trudeau whose claim to fame was A, that she was very pretty, and B, that she slept around with the Rolling Stones or some portion thereof.
And so... One guy said, oh, I voted for Trudeau in the 70s because I thought his wife was cool, with a straight face, like I drove a car blindfolded off a cliff while I was drunk and landed on an orphanage.
People just say this stuff, right?
So we don't really know why people vote, but we do know that there's lots of bad reasons for voting and that some not insignificant proportion, if not the vast majority of voters, vote for those bad reasons.
There are very few people who vote are economists or political science majors or philosophy majors who have any clue what they're voting for.
They just sort of go along with the trend, right?
In Florida, with the hanging chads, you can't even figure out who people are voting for, let alone why they're voting.
Or what the motivation is. So wouldn't it be better if you had some methodology of ensuring within a democracy that people actually meant what they were doing?
Who they voted for actually had a cost-benefit to them.
Now, you can go further, but I think you sort of get the idea.
And once you have these things in place, these understandings in place with your oh-so-patient pro-democracy debating partner, then, of course, you can say that, well, that's what the free market does in terms of products.
That's what the free market does in terms of products.
You don't vote once every four years what your supermarket should stock.
You don't vote once every four years on what movies your theater should stock, and with a whole bunch of people who will profit from the movie voting as well.
You don't vote for all of these, so you don't get together and vote once every four years who your kids are going to marry.
So, getting together once every four years with a whole bunch of pre-bought politicians fronting for special interest groups and a whole bunch of people who are fairly ignorant in what it is that they're voting for and who are bought off with special interest bribes, this obviously is not a good way of making decisions.
Nobody would say, I'm going to take the political model.
And I'm going to apply it at work.
You don't see this situation occurring where people say, in order to make a decision about a product, we're going to get everyone in the building that my company works in to vote after I've given them a couple of TV spots and a few pamphlets to vote on which product we should build.
That's not how people make decisions.
You don't make decisions on raises by getting everyone together and voting for them.
It's optional to come, and you do it by department.
Of course, the only department that's going to show up is the department whose raises are in question, and all they're going to do is vote for huge raises.
So nobody takes that government matrix of decision-making.
And reproduces it within their own life, right?
So that's just simply not an option.
And so if this was a really optimal way of making decisions, then we would put it into our own life, right?
I mean, this is how we would do things at a personal level.
So, for instance, when it comes to sales projections, which are, of course, the bane of most companies' existence when it comes to projecting cash flow and so on, when it comes to all of that...
Sales projections are notoriously unreliable, but certain companies, HP being one of them, have developed a system wherein people are simulating a stock market where they get to bet on future sales.
And they found that the accuracy has shot up enormously because now what they're doing is they're reproducing a market, in this case the stock market, where people can buy and sell based on their expectation of future sales, sort of quote stocks in an internal website.
And they get rewards based on accuracy.
And so if people are overbidding, other people will start underbidding.
And very quickly they get to a very accurate cost of what...
Because, you know, people are profiting from it.
They're trading with detailed knowledge.
There's lots of collective...
I mean, so a market is the best way to make decisions, right?
In a collective sense. I mean, there's no better way of making decisions than the free market.
For a number of reasons, right?
Obviously, in the free market, if I buy an MP3 player, I'm not taking an MP3 player away from you.
I'm stimulating demand, which is going to bring the price of MP3 players down, and so on.
But in politics, which is a zero-sum or negative-sum game, if I give you $100 million for your subsidy, I'm directly taking it away from someone else.
And if it's not the existing taxpayers, then it's the future generations through the national debt.
So in politics, it's a zero-sum game.
In the free market, it's not.
In the free market, the more people want something, the more there is to go around.
That's the magic of the invisible hand.
So if everybody wants MP3 players, then lots of resources are going to be diverted into...
Producing MP3 players, so the initial price surges up, and then it goes back down as more resources get applied.
And so when a lot of people want something, its supply increases, right?
In the government, quite the opposite is true.
If everybody wants a piece of the tax dollar pile, then it all goes away from the society as a whole, and whatever people grab is just that much less available for everyone else, right?
So no... No company does that.
No company says, in order to figure out what I'm going to bring, I'm going to get a whole bunch of uneducated people to vote once every four years, and I'm also going to allow my competitors to bribe them, and my own salespeople can bribe them, and my shareholders can bribe them, and the shareholders of my opposing companies can bribe them.
Nobody would say that's a great way.
I mean, if I walked into a business meeting tomorrow and said, I've got a great way of determining what our product direction should be.
We're going to open it to a heavily bribed situation once every four years among people who have no clue what we're doing.
I mean, people would laugh at me, right?
And yet this is how we're supposed to run the whole country, which is much more complicated than our little product suite?
Good heavens. I mean, it's funny, right?
I mean, this is funny. You just try bringing it up in a business meeting and see how far you get.
People will say, well, you're a complete lunatic.
Well... Why would it be any better for the government then, right?
I mean, they're not serious about this whole democracy thing, right?
I mean, and if they are, if people are these sort of theorists, then surely we can expect them to live their own life that way too, but of course, they never do.
And so to get back to the welfare state, when people say, well, I think the welfare state's the best thing ever, then fantastic.
We can vote on it, right?
So if they say, because you get this, right?
Oh, if you want to change the system, you can change your vote or you can run for office and this and that and the other.
It's like, well, yeah, I could.
And that seems like a rather high degree of effort, right?
Is that... Is that what you do?
If you dislike the company that you work at, like you find it's involved in criminal or abusive activities, or they keep planting drugs on you and calling the cops, or whatever horrors we can equate with the activities of the state, do you say, well, all I have to do is become CEO and change it?
Would that be wise career advice?
So you're some, I don't know, like the...
Some lowly employee in a big corporation, a huge corporation, right?
So you're a clerk at Walmart, let's just say, and you find that Walmart is doing horrible, abusive, screaming at you, they're docking your pay, they're cheating you on your time card, they're just doing terrible things.
And you sort of sit down with a good friend of yours to bitch about it, and your friend says, well, see, what you've got to do is you've got to get off your ass, stop complaining, and go become CEO of Walmart, and then you can make all the changes that you want.
Would you think that would be excellent advice?
That that would be very productive advice?
That that would work out well?
No, of course not.
The person would look at you like, don't be a dickhead.
What a ridiculous solution that is.
I'm a clerk, right?
I'm a cashier.
I'm not going to stroll around and be CEO. And of course, also, I mean, the reason that this is put out as an idea is because, of course, it's completely impossible.
But also, the fact of the matter is that if Walmart is that corrupt, and of course, I'm not saying it is, right?
Don't sue me. If Walmart is that corrupt, then you're never going to get to be CEO if you're an honest person, right?
I mean, the system is going to be self-sealing, right?
The system is going to be self-defining, so you're not going to have to worry about this issue at all because you're going to end up getting kicked out the first time you bring up an honest idea in a staff meeting.
Let's say you make it to junior manager, right?
Then you are going to immediately get shafted out of the organization.
You're going to get demoted.
You're going to get run out of town because you're coming up with some honest thing and it's a dishonest organization.
So if you're going to try and bring integrity to the government, it's going to be even worse.
And of course then the idea is that you work for 20 years to get all the way to the top of the government and you fool everyone all the way.
You take all this money. You pretend...
That you take these bribes, you pretend that you're, you know, and yet you somehow manage to completely change your soul without losing it, right?
So you end up agreeing that, yes, we should rip off the taxpayers.
Yes, I should run up the national debt.
Yes, I should fund the military and I should invade these countries.
And yes, because you're going to get to, you want to get to be finally, you want to get to be the president.
And then you're going to change and turn the whole society into libertopia, right?
Well, and how?
Well, you're not going to be able to, right?
I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen.
I know Harry Brown had these ideas about what he would do if he was president.
I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen.
You'll just get impeached. If you did finally manage to work your way up after 20 or 30 years to be CEO of Walmart, and it's a corrupt organization, and you then try and turn it around to be honest, the shareholders and the board, they'll just fire you.
You just get fired. And the same thing would happen, of course, if you work your way up to the top by pretending that you're a dishonest guy in politics and then you end up saying, hey, ooh, by the way, I'm an honest guy underneath the, I'm a sheep in wolves' clothing, I'm an honest guy, then you just get impeached, right? Because you stop signing appropriations bills and you stop passing, you stop approving legislation and, of course, everybody's up in arms because you're holding up billions of dollars.
They're not going to stop for you.
Are you crazy? People kill for 20 bucks sometimes.
People will become soldiers for two grand a month.
So you think that people are going to stop you?
Are they going to assassinate you or are they just going to impeach you?
Are they going to poison you so that you're incapacitated?
I mean, people aren't going to stand there.
People in politics are going to stand around and say, Oh, well, I guess he really wasn't.
I guess, haha, didn't we get caught by our own system?
You've got hundreds of billions of dollars holding up that people want to get their filthy little hands on.
Man, they won't even notice you as they run right over you.
They won't even notice the squidge mark on the bottom of their combine harvester or their sort of big street roller.
You won't even show up as a minor speed bump as power rolls right over you.
You're a figurehead, right? You have no power as a president, right?
You're just doing everyone else's bidding.
You are not the decider, despite what certain people say.
So, if somebody says to you that the solution to dissatisfaction with the government is to go and join politics and turn the system around or whatever, right?
Then you simply have to say, oh, well, obviously you're perfectly happy with everything the government does because you haven't run for office.
And if they say, yes, I'm perfectly happy with everything that the government does, then you say, okay, well, if you feel that the way to deal with a bad relationship is to gain more power...
Then, have you ever quit a job in your life?
Like, have you ever quit a job?
Yes, I've quit a job.
Well, why? Well, they didn't pay me enough.
I wasn't respected. It wasn't what I wanted to do.
I was a waiter or whatever.
Well, that doesn't make any sense.
Why would you change a relationship?
Like, if you say that the best way to deal with problems in a relationship is to gain more power and then change them, then why would you ever quit a job?
Because surely you should just become the boss and then change the organization.
Well, there was this... Have you ever broken up with someone?
No. Well, then, you know, what you really should do is marry them and then try and change them, right?
Because that's having slightly more power than just being a boyfriend and girlfriend, although it's mutual.
So, help me understand, you can sort of say, right?
Help me understand, if you feel that the best way to deal with politics is to become a politician, change the system and so on, help me understand how you've come to this conclusion, right?
Have you put this into practice in any area whatsoever, right?
Start with the basics.
Start with the simple stuff. Start with the obvious stuff.
Say, am I your guinea pig and you're telling me this is an absolute?
Do you have any clue what you're talking about?
Or is this something that you're just kind of making up as something that you think is true because somebody told you or it's a way of getting me to shut up?
You know, just find out if you're really debating with the person.
So, that's, you know, generally if people tell me to do something, I ask them, you know, oh, you should do this, right?
You should do that. You should forgive everyone or whatever.
I just say, okay, well, is that something you do in your life?
Like, can you tell me examples of how this has worked out for you?
And also, if you should accept what everyone does, then why are you not accepting the fact that I'm not accepting people, right?
That seems to be kind of... It's contradictory.
Help me understand that conundrum.
You know, all of this. Just ask people, how does this work out for you, right?
So if somebody says that if you want to fix the government, you should become a politician or change the system from the inside or something, that's great.
You know, hey, you could be right. You know, well, what proof do you have of this, right?
What have you done in your own life that supports this theory, right?
If you've quit a job, well...
That's not a good sign for your theory.
If every job you've come to, you've become CEO to fix everything, then that's sort of a plus to your theory.
At least it's something that can be done.
Of course, I mean...
It can't be the case for everyone else.
If you say to everyone, if you have any problems with your company, you should try and become CEO.
Well, only one person gets to be CEO.
So everyone else is then going to have all the problems.
They're not all going to have the same problems.
If you have dissatisfaction with the government, and you should then become the president to change it or run for office or something...
Well, then you're just going to solve your problems and create everyone else's problems who disagrees with it.
So, you know, it's just how people explain to you how this works, right?
And how they've proven it in their own life.
It's a reasonable thing, I think, to say to someone who is saying that I know the right way and the right thing to do and all this, that, and the other.
I think it's a reasonable thing to say that, you know, what's the evidence in your own life, right?
Somebody prescribed something that sounds really weird.
It's like, well, do you have any evidence that this cures this ailment?
Or are you just sort of saying stuff and getting me to take poison?
So that would be, I think, an interesting and valid approach to that particular topic.
Now, we are still circling and nibbling at this issue of the welfare state, and this, of course, can occur with any number of things in your debates with people.
But if somebody says to you, the welfare state is great, then you can sort of say, well, why is it great?
Well, you know, we want people to help the poor.
Well, helping the poor is a complicated thing.
It needs to be continually optimized.
So wouldn't it be great? Wouldn't it make bureaucrats more responsive if you got to vote for them every day with no extra effort on your part?
Well, you're sure, right? I mean, because the whole thing that democracy is supposed to be justified because it's responsive, right?
It responds to the voters.
It's productive from that standpoint.
And... So if it's responsive to the voters, then the more responsive it is to voters, the better, right?
It's not like responsiveness is good every four years, but bad every two years, right?
The reason it's bad every six months or every month is because the overhead is considerable.
But what if the overhead could be completely eliminated, right?
What if there was no...
you didn't need anybody to...
voting was like, you know, you just snapped your fingers and it occurred.
Well, wouldn't that sort of be better, more democratic than what we have right now, more responsive to what the people want, more reflective of what the people really need, whereas at the moment they're just bribed in special interest groups and shiny-haired politicians striding around, mouthing platitudes and making stirring speeches.
They're Robert C. Birds of the oratorical world, just nonsense and nonsense and nonsense.
Wouldn't it be more valid if you got to really figure out what people wanted and how valuable the services were for them from the government provided and all that?
And so at some point, people got to say yes, right?
At some point, people got to say yes.
If you could vote all the time, every day, without any additional overhead, that would be more democratic than what we have right now.
Yes. Well, of course, that is something that we free market philosophers like to call a charity, right?
It's called a charity.
Say it after me. Chastity.
Anyway. So, this is something that's important to understand.
If you think that helping the poor is important and it's complicated and you should vote on it and blah, blah, blah.
Well, or if the welfare state is justified because people vote for it, then the more voting, the better.
The more continual the voting, the better.
And also, when you're not voting with just in abstractions that don't cost you anything, but you're voting with your own money...
Then that's best of all because you know people really mean it.
They're not just bribed to do it.
It's their money. So if you want to help the poor and voting is good, charities are ideal.
Charities are much more moral and effective than the welfare state.
If the welfare state is justified in some manner by the fact that ignorant people vote for it when they're bribed to, then obviously people's authentic beliefs with their own money, which they vote for, is even more authentic, right?
So if it's a value in democracy that people choose something, Then the more choice they get and the more honest their choice is, the better.
Obviously, it's not that great a choice if you're bribed.
The farmers voting for farm bills is not really that great and valid a proposition.
So more voting is better and votes where you've got a personal stake in it are better.
And so clearly... The free market charity model is far superior.
Far superior to the state model when it comes to democracy.
Far superior. It's not even in the same league.
And it's not just on the side of the person who's, quote, voting for the charity by donating it money, but also on the side of the charity, right?
When was the last time you got a progress report from the government that wasn't just full of nonsensical propaganda, but actually was sort of independently verified by a third party, was audited, and yes, in independently verified tests, the scores for these students are going up and up and up, and isn't that great, and so on.
Well, yeah, of course, never, right?
Never. The government just jiggles numbers to make itself look better in a temporary manner, and then jiggles the numbers to be a lot worse, maybe even than they really are, in order to get additional funding after the election, right?
So, I mean, this is just a continual thing that occurs.
So, in a charity, of course, the charities...
We get independently audited finances.
Independent auditors will come in and say, well, here's the overhead.
Here's how much money is actually going to the poor.
Here's our success rate.
Here's our approach. Here's how we've optimized.
Here's how we're cutting to the bone.
You get all of this independently audited stuff, which gives you some degree of comfort about the value that the charity is providing.
Of course, you never get that with government at all, right?
You have no idea. You just know that it's lies, and you know that it's theft.
But you don't know to what degree, or where, or how, or what.
So... From that standpoint, charities are far superior, because they're dealing with real information.
So the charities have a desire, a natural desire, to optimize their way of doing things, right?
And of course, if somebody is very keen on voting, the other thing you can say, democracy is a great thing, it's like, well, shouldn't you be fighting to get this put in place in your grocery store then, if voting is so good that...
The people should be bribed by the food manufacturers to vote on what they feel is the best food, and this should occur once every four years, and then it gets fixed, but nobody actually has to listen to you because there's no consequences if the products change after you vote for them.
Like, shouldn't you be fighting to get this instituted in your grocery store and everywhere else that you can think of as the best model?
And if you don't feel comfortable with it in your grocery store, why would you feel comfortable with it, say, with lots of weapons and educating our children?
Now, of course, the great objection that people have to this issue of voting is that in a democracy, it's one person, one vote, right?
One adult, one vote. Whereas in the free market, people have lots of different levels of income.
People have lots of money.
Some people have lots of money and so can buy lots of goods and thus over-influence the production of goods relative to blah, blah, blah.
And lots of people have less money and therefore it's not one person, one vote.
It's dependent on how much money you have available to spend and so it's not equal.
It's not equal, right? Well, that's certainly true.
But, of course, human beings aren't equal either.
I mean, yes, we should all be equal before the law, blah, blah, blah, but we're not equal in terms of abilities and capacities.
Otherwise, I still haven't been asked for that GQ cover yet, which is odd to me because we are, of course, all equal.
And so that would be...
I'm still checking the mail for that.
So, people say, well, it's not equal.
Well, the interesting thing about capitalism and its relationship to democracy in the free market sense is that, yes...
Some people come to the table with more votes than others.
But, this is important, but that's only because other people have voted for them.
It is a continuation of democracy for some people to have more money and other people to have less money.
So if you come to the grocery store and you are going to spend $50 because that's all you can afford, and I'm going to come and spend $500 because I can afford that, well, the only difference between the two of us is that people have voted, assuming it's not based on force, people have voted to give me more money.
That's... What democracy means, right?
If I have more money, then people have obviously voted to give me more money.
They voted for me with their dollars in one form or another, and it could be inheritance, in which case it's my parents voting, but they only got to vote because other people with all that money, because other people voted for them with more money and so on.
So it's purely democratic for some people to have more money than others as a result of prior voting.
It's not a violation of the principle at all.
And of course, people aren't equal.
People say, well, everyone has to be equal.
To me, that's fine. It's like, okay, well, when you want to get your teeth looked at and the cavity filled, do you just randomly pick someone on the subway and hand them a knife and say, go for it?
Or do you look for somebody who's trained, right?
Are you discriminating or prejudiced in who you want to work around the nerves of your teeth, say?
When you marry your spouse or you go out with a woman or a man, is it the case that you just randomly picked someone from a phone book and went out with them?
Or do you have discriminating tastes about the kinds of people that you're going to go out with so that you're not going to go out with some, I don't know, heroin, crack addict, prostitute or whatever, but you're actually going to look for someone with virtue and intelligence and whatever, self-respect.
Is everyone equal or is the one person you're going to go out with to get married?
Are they special or extra?
This whole idea of equality is nonsense.
We don't have to go into this in particular detail.
Certainly, everybody's right to property and right to life and the non-aggression principle is universal and constant and not shaded on degrees of intelligence.
But we're talking about economics here.
And in economics, for sure, people are by no means equal whatsoever.
And of course in the free market, people with different amounts of money don't compete with each other very much.
It's not like the millionaire is competing with the poor person for a seat on the bus.
It's not like the poor person is competing with the millionaire for the million dollar house.
They can't afford it.
So there's not a huge amount of overlap.
It's not like the rich guy can't get reservations at the ritziest restaurant in town because all these poor people are lining up ahead of him.
There's lots of different strata of economic provisos or goods that are provided in the free market.
That are all specifically tailored to and aimed at, or a lot of them are, at income brackets, right?
So you don't have to jostle through five people deep of poor people to get to the BMW salesman, right?
There's no particular competition.
And the rich guy isn't out there buying a used ladder, right?
So there's not a huge amount of competition from that standpoint.
So it's not like there's a lot of displacing that goes on in the votes of the free market analogy in the marketplace.
And of course, when it comes to voting, we know people mean it.
When it comes to voting with their dollars, we know that somebody means it.
So assume it's not taken by force and it's not being bribed in its decision matrix.
When I go out and buy a Volvo, as opposed to buying every other kind of car that I could have afforded, then we know that I really want the Volvo.
We really, really know that I really, really want the Volvo.
Why? Because I took a fixed amount of money and put it into buying a Volvo rather than buying everything else that I could have bought with it.
And it's not just between a Volvo and all the other cars.
It's between a Volvo and absolutely everything else that I could conceivably have bought with that money, including not spending it at all, which is retirement or peace of mind or deferred spending or interest or whatever, right?
So... We know for a simple and objective fact that when I go out and buy a Volvo, that I really mean it, that a Volvo is the highest value for me with that money.
And how do we know it? Because I actually went out and bought it.
So this is how you know that dollar voting is real and meaningful because people are actually giving up a value in order to achieve what it is that they want.
Ownership of a Volvo in return, I'm giving up the value of everything else that I could buy with my money every month that goes into the car.
So, this is, I think, an important thing to understand and to recognize that when you're spending money, you actually have some skin in the game, right?
You actually have some possibility of loss if you vote wrong, so that's why people are very careful about expensive purchases and so on, and So you know that people mean it in a way that you just don't know when they vote with a dollar that's not worth anything, that's probably bribed, or that they don't have a clue what's going on.
I mean, people, when they go out and buy a car, they'll do a lot of research, right?
Is it a lemon? And what kind of mileage does it get?
Is it comfortable? They'll take it for a test drive.
I mean, very few people just go out and say, hey, that looks cool in the window.
I'm going to buy it. I don't even care about the price.
When people are spending their own money, they're very careful.
They do a lot of research. I mean, I'm not a poor guy.
I do ridiculous amounts of research for the simplest little piece of hardware that I buy, partly because I'm geeky and I enjoy it, but I also want to make sure that I'm getting the best.
So, when people are sort of spending their votes in a democratic standpoint, they don't invest anything in it.
They don't do a, oh, I've got to pass these political science courses and I've got to read 1,600 essays on the internet to figure out what I should vote for.
They just, oh, I like that guy.
He seems kind of cool. Oh, that ad made me angry.
I'll go vote for that. But when they're voting with their dollars, you know that they mean it.
You know that they've done some research.
You know that they're evaluating what's best.
What's the best use of their money?
In which case, you absolutely should steer people if they want to help the poor, if anybody wants to help the poor.
You've got to steer them towards charities and not towards the government, right?
It wouldn't make any sense at all because you don't care when it comes to voting.
You don't really, there's no reason to believe that anybody really means it relative to spending your own money, deferring all the gratification you could have got with the other spends of the money.
There's lots of different ways to approach this.
I think the most important thing to understand is that you do actually have a much more functional democracy in the free market than you do in any kind of democracy that is occurring in a political context.
There's simply no comparison whatsoever.
And so if you really do want to understand the role of free choice and free democracy within human life, where you need to look is to the marketplace, to the free market, not to any of these artificial and ridiculous political setups.
So I hope that's been helpful.
I'm actually still driving, but I'm done with the topic, or I guess you could say...
The topic is done with me, since this is an unconscious process as much as it is a conscious one, as I'm sure you're aware.
So, thank you so much for listening.
I really, really appreciate the time and energy that it goes into listening to these podcasts.
And I appreciate 151 board members now coming along.
And I haven't checked down those lately, but I'm sure they're doing just swimmingly.
And I did have a question that came from a board member about what am I going to do to...
To get the word out about Free Domain Radio a little bit more quickly than I'm doing right now, perfectly valid question.
And I'm actually, this week, getting the contact of a very good marketing firm, PR firm, that is going to help me get my name out there.
The story that we have to tell is I've got to think that I'm about the most prolific podcaster in the world, and I think we've had about the fastest growth of just about any podcast that doesn't have a sort of celebrity already endorsing it or a part of it.
And so that's sort of the angle that I think we're going to take, and that it is a rather deep podcast relative to most people's podcasts, which seem to be a lot about jokes and media and technology.
So I think there's a story to tell about the volume and speed of growth of this podcast, and I think it will be an interesting story to tell.
I think also the depth and challenge of the topics that we deal with There's a story there to tell as well.
This isn't just sort of a guy making silly jokes.
Okay, well, it is a guy making silly jokes, but with occasionally deep topics thrown in.
So I'm going to try and put that together.
I also have two contacts for what is called viral marketing, which is around celebrity and placement and controversy and so on.
And so I'm going to look into that and use some of the donation money that I've received to try and get the word out because the money is...
I've always felt that if you have a going concern, you should reinvest in it to prove your faith in it.
And so I'm definitely going to roll that remaining money back into free domain radio that hasn't already been spent on server bandwidth issues, hosting and software and a little bit of hardware and also on ads which I've bought.
So that's what I'm going to do.
So, of course, donations will be absolutely hugely appreciated.
I look forward to that every evening that I check my email.
My motivation rises and dips depending on the donations that a receiver don't receive.
So please do what you can.
It's hugely appreciated and you're doing your bit to prove that voluntary association is optimal as well, which I think is a good thing.
So thank you so much for listening.
I appreciate it, and I will talk to you soon.
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