An entertaining introductory look at capitalism, property rights, the redistribution of “wealth” and inequality within society. Private ownership of the means of production is the consistent application of property rights within society.
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| Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| This is going to be just a wee bit of an introduction to the challenges of understanding capitalism, you know, the place where monocled monopoly men feast on the babies of the poor, and other such stuff that you've probably heard about many times, particularly if you've gone to an arts degree. | |
| So... | |
| The essence of philosophy, and we sure as heck want to try and get away from ideology, which is just an echo chamber reinforcing prior prejudices usually based upon early experiences. | |
| Philosophy is not an ism, like a socialism or a fascism or a capitalism. | |
| Philosophy is really just about consistency, you know, in the way that science is about consistency, mathematics is about consistency, engineering is about consistency, medicine in its ideal form. | |
| is about consistency. | |
| If it's consistent, he's good. | |
| If it's not consistent, he's bad. | |
| That's really all you need to remember. | |
| Also, we'll get to singing vaginas in a few minutes. | |
| When it comes to philosophy, the question of property, and property is really where all political ideologies revolve. | |
| They revolve around property, questions of property. | |
| They're like the sun at the center of the solar system. | |
| It's all around questions of property and ownership and so on. | |
| So, with philosophy, the first thing that we have to understand is that when it comes to questions of property or control over resources, We must be consistent. | |
| We can't create different classifications of property that, well, you see, your toothbrush can be yours, and this was true even in a communist society like Stalinist Russia in the 1950s. | |
| Your toothbrush is yours because it's not a means of production. | |
| However, the means of production, a factory, and so on, they are owned by the workers, they're owned by the collective, they're owned by the state, and so on. | |
| So here you have two different definitions of property. | |
| That which you can own, and it's moral for you to own, and you can complain if somebody steals it from you. | |
| On the other hand, you have the means of production. | |
| Workers control means of production. | |
| And, I don't know, all Russians seem to have deep voices, at least in cliché length. | |
| And you have this means of production where you can't own it and it should be stolen from you and so on. | |
| So, this is one of the challenges of the collectivization of property or socialism or communism, that you have two different categories of property. | |
| So, In sort of the kind of mixed economy that we have now, a mix of socialist redistribution and some vestiges of private ownership, we sort of say, well, you see, if you have... | |
| Income, and it goes to $10,000. | |
| You keep it all, and anyone who takes it from you by force is immoral, is wrong, is bad. | |
| Ooh, $10,000 and one, we go, go backwards to the other upside-down world, and now suddenly people from the state, agents of the state, can take that money from you by force, and you can't complain. | |
| It's not theft, it's taxation. | |
| $10,000 to $20,000, you get taxed at X percentage point, and then it goes up. | |
| So we have radically different forms of property. | |
| It's the same dollar, it's just that when you accumulate them, morality reverses at a particular category, and now you should not keep it, you cannot keep it, it must be. | |
| Redistributed, which is the use of force. | |
| Taxation is force. | |
| It is the use of force on the part of the state to take money from some people, keep a large portion tragically for themselves, and then give that money to other people. | |
| Only for virtue. | |
| Never for vote buying. | |
| That's the beauty of it. | |
| So, with philosophy, we try to keep consistency going, which says that, okay, if I have control of a resource, how can it be That if I have control of 10,000 of those resources, it's moral to keep it. | |
| 10,001, suddenly it's immoral to keep it and I must give it up to the state or face some sort of prison sentence and whatever. | |
| I mean, it doesn't make any sense from a rational standpoint whatsoever. | |
| It's sort of like saying mass or the presence of some sort of physical object. | |
| Mass has gravity. | |
| And as you pile more mass on, yeah, the gravity gets stronger. | |
| But then, you know, if you have 10,000 ball bearings, then gravity attracts. | |
| But 10,001, the first one, gravity now repels. | |
| If you try and put that forward at a physics conference, they'd say, you're kind of failing the test of consistency, you arts major. | |
| I have an arts degree, so I'm making fun of my own beasts. | |
| So, consistency is the key, and wherever you see these sudden reversals in ethics, philosophically you have a giant problem, just as you would in math or science or whatever. | |
| So, the question around control of resources first and foremost comes to the question of control of your own self. | |
| Self-ownership. | |
| Do I have control over my dancing phalanges, as Bone says? | |
| Do I have control over my own body? | |
| Because that's the primary resource. | |
| And anything that you say about the body, you have to say about other forms of property, because the body... | |
| I mean, I know we've got this big mind-body dichotomy in Western philosophy. | |
| Blow that aside for a moment. | |
| My body is my resource. | |
| I shake my moneymaker, as one Jay Brown says. | |
| And... | |
| Whatever we say about the body as control of a resource, we can't magically reverse when it comes to something else. | |
| The body is part of matter, part of reality, really the essence of philosophy because within the body carries our capacity for moral choice and moral self-ownership, moral responsibility. | |
| So whatever we say about the body, we have to say about all property. | |
| So, do I own myself? | |
| Am I responsible for the effects of my actions? | |
| And this is a fundamental question around ownership, capitalism, property, social organization, politics, law, force, self-defense, the whole thing, rape, theft, assault, murder, all of it hinges on do I control The effects of my body. | |
| Am I in control of my body? | |
| And am I responsible, to put it that way, am I responsible for the effects of my actions? | |
| Now, if you say, well, Steph, you are not responsible for the effects of your actions, then you have A problem because you're putting forward an argument which you control, which you have defined, which you have thought of, which you have used your vocal cords or typing phalanges to put out into the world. | |
| So you have created an argument, put that argument out into the world. | |
| It's your argument. | |
| I respond to you, not to the guy next to you, not to the antler head on the wall or anything like that, not to the bug on your knee. | |
| I respond to you. | |
| So you're saying, well, I am responsible for the effects of my actions. | |
| One of the effects of my actions is putting forward an argument, Steph, that says you are not responsible for the effects of your actions, but we're both human beings, right? | |
| And so you can't put forward an argument that says someone else is not responsible for the effects of his or her actions, absent or unless there's some very specific phenomenon going on. | |
| Like if I have an epileptic attack, I'm clearly not, at that moment, in control of my extremities, and if I knock over a vase while having an epileptic attack, nobody's going to charge me with willful destruction of property. | |
| It's a bad, bad accident. | |
| That having been said, if I know that I have epileptic attacks, and I drive, and then I have one of these attacks, then I am responsible because I knew this was a possibility. | |
| Anyway, you get that and so on. | |
| So, if I am responsible for the effects of my actions, and you know that emotionally every time I annoy you, every time I say something that really bothers you, you generally get angry at me, right? | |
| I mean, you get angry at least at my pixels. | |
| So you get upset with me because I'm saying something that you perceive is making you upset. | |
| So I'm responsible for the arguments that I put forward. | |
| I'm responsible for what I put out into the public sphere. | |
| They're my arguments. | |
| You know, I source them when I remember and where relevant, or where possible to source them. | |
| Hey, this word was not invented by me. | |
| This word was invented by... | |
| I can never get anything across. | |
| So, I am responsible for what I put out into the public sphere, and when you get annoyed or angry at me, or let's say I say something that makes you laugh, then you are acknowledging because you're laughing at something I said, you're angry at something that I said, that I'm responsible for my arguments, and you're responding to those arguments. | |
| So, owning yourself means owning the effects of your actions. | |
| Now, owning the effects of your actions is how we have such a thing as morality, how we have such a thing as ethics. | |
| Because let's say I step on an ant. | |
| Not an atom, just an insect. | |
| So if I step on an ant willfully, not accidentally, but I see it, right? | |
| Step on the ant. | |
| The ant is dead because I decided to step on the ant. | |
| I own the death of the ant. | |
| Yeah, these are funny words to say in philosophy, but I think it makes sense. | |
| I own the death of the ant, because the ant is dead as the result of my choice. | |
| If I am a really mean guy and go strangle a hobo, then I am a murderer, because the hobo's death is the result of me choking his air off with my fingers. | |
| So, the reason we put people in jail, if they're not crazy, the reason we put people in jail or the reason that we apply social sanctions to them, again, through the law, is that they're responsible for their actions and they, quote, own the effects of their actions. | |
| If I go to a store and steal a candy bar, then the candy bar is not in the store as the result of my choice, my actions. | |
| I have control over my body and whatever I do with my body, I have control over or I have effected something through the use of Of my body. | |
| I go up and slap someone across the face. | |
| Hopefully someone shorter than me. | |
| Then I'm responsible for the imprint, right? | |
| The handprint on that person's face. | |
| I own it. | |
| I have created it through my self-ownership. | |
| So we own our own bodies and we own the effects of our actions and that's, you know, for good or bad. | |
| I mean, if somebody writes an essay that's really offensive and publishes it, then people can say, aha! | |
| That person wrote this essay and it's bad and they owned the essay. | |
| We're all processing self-ownership and owning the effects of actions. | |
| Anytime you get mad at someone for something they've done and tell them so or don't tell them so, you are affirming self-ownership and owning the effects of your actions. | |
| Can't get away from it. | |
| Can't escape it. | |
| And you can't argue against self-ownership without exercising self-ownership through the control of your body to produce the argument. | |
| You can't ever, ever... | |
| Find an argument against self-ownership which doesn't involve the exercise of self-ownership. | |
| In the same way, you can't find arguments against property wherein someone has not used property exclusively to make that argument. | |
| If you've ever tried typing out an internet rebuttal with somebody else typing at the same time... | |
| Actually, it would make more sense than most internet rebuttals, but that's perhaps a topic for another time. | |
| So... | |
| Through self-ownership, owning the effects of actions we get, ethics, morality, and so on. | |
| And so basically, through self-ownership, we own the effects of our actions. | |
| And some of the effects of our actions are morally good. | |
| Some of them are morally neutral. | |
| Some of them are morally evil. | |
| And some of them are the creation of property. | |
| So if I go out to a lake and I use my body to just say, let's make it as simple as possible. | |
| Reach in and grab a fish and pull that fish out. | |
| Well, the fish is out of the water as the result of my actions, and I own the accessibility of that fish, the fact that it's in my hand rather than in the water. | |
| I own the accessibility of that fish as surely as I own stepping on the ant and causing the death of the ant. | |
| And so, owning the effects of your actions means owning the property that you create. | |
| Now, the fish is not created, but the fish as property Is created. | |
| Some fish swimming around at the bottom of the ocean is not property because nobody can use it. | |
| It can't be seen even for, you know, spectator. | |
| It's pretty maybe. | |
| It's got glow fangs on its head or whatever the hell goes on in those Stygian depths. | |
| And so... | |
| A fish down at the bottom of the ocean, at the bottom of a lake, is not in a property state. | |
| It can't be used. | |
| It can't be accessed. | |
| It can't be used. | |
| It's there as part of the ecosystem goes, and it has an effect on the lake, but from a property standpoint, it might as well not be there. | |
| Now, if I go and get that fish out from the bottom of the lake and put it in my boat and clean it and gut it and fry it up or whatever, and suddenly it's been converted into food. | |
| When it was at the bottom of the lake, it couldn't be eaten. | |
| Now, through the effects of my body, through self-ownership and the effects of my actions, I have created food out of the fish. | |
| The fish formerly could not be eaten at the bottom of the lake. | |
| Now it's been cleaned and fried and now you can eat it. | |
| So property fundamentally is that which is converted into a usable form. | |
| Because if it's not usable, It's not really property. | |
| Like if I were to come up to you and say, hey, man, I've got a great deal for you. | |
| I'm going to sell you an acre of land for $10,000. | |
| And you say, oh, where is that acre of land? | |
| And I say, I'm not going to tell you. | |
| Trust me, it's great land. | |
| It's somewhere in the world. | |
| Above water, below water, can't tell you. | |
| Somewhere in the world, I got an acre of land for you, only $10,000. | |
| What do you say? | |
| Will I ever find out where this land is? | |
| No. | |
| It's a secret. | |
| Well, you wouldn't buy the land because you could never visit it. | |
| You could never build anything on it. | |
| You could never sell it. | |
| You could never use it because you don't know where it is. | |
| It's in an unusable state. | |
| So, property is owning the effects of your actions in creating something that was not there before. | |
| And again, in the fish, you don't create the fish, but you create it as a usable or consumable good. | |
| So, we own ourselves, we own the effects of our actions. | |
| Now, people have a tough time with land, and I've had a bunch of calls, so I'll just very briefly go over this land stuff. | |
| And then inheritance and singing vaginas. | |
| Oh yeah, they're coming. | |
| And so land, the way the common law has developed with regards to land is this. | |
| You get to a place that's unowned. | |
| It's not owned. | |
| It's a frontier land, wasteland. | |
| It's an asteroid. | |
| It's a field on Mars. | |
| Who knows? | |
| Or someplace where nobody's been before. | |
| Now the way the common law developed is if you enclose the land... | |
| Then you get the right to develop it. | |
| So you build a fence around it, right? | |
| It can't be just like you pee in a circle. | |
| It's got to be something that you, plus it's windy. | |
| You build a fence around the land, say build around five acres, then you get to develop that land knowing that you were going to have exclusive use of that land. | |
| One of the things about land, nobody uses it if they cannot be sure that they get to keep using it. | |
| That's just the way land works. | |
| This is why really violent societies don't develop agriculture, because agriculture, you know, you've got to gather your seed crops, you've got to clear the soil, you've got to clear the land, you've got to turn the soil, you've got to plant the seeds, you've got to water, you've got to chase off all the birds, you've got to harvest. | |
| I mean, it's a crazy amount of labor, which usually doesn't pay off for at least a year or two. | |
| And so, I guess in summer you get vegetables in a couple of months, but people will only develop land If they feel some security about being able to keep it. | |
| And so the way common law said is, you know, fence off the land. | |
| I used to do this. | |
| I was a... | |
| A gold panner and claim staker up in Northern Ontario after high school before college. | |
| Just make some money for college. | |
| And we used to go in kilometer squares and you hammer in these plaques, these sort of metal plaques with your name and the date and all that, on these trees. | |
| And that gives you the right for the minerals for that land for, I think it's a year or two. | |
| If you don't do anything with it, then it reverts back to unowned. | |
| And that's the key thing. | |
| So if you fence off, but don't do anything with the land, the land reverts to an unowned state. | |
| So obviously the goal is you sell it to someone who then will develop it quickly because when you sell it, the time frame, otherwise you just sell it back and forth and keep it forever. | |
| So it's a pretty elegant solution. | |
| You've got to invest some labor to mark the land off as yours, but the land doesn't really have any value. | |
| Unless and until you build something on it. | |
| Now, the house that you build on the land is an effect of your action, just like, you know, stepping on the ant or making the fish into a usable product so you could cut down a bunch of trees and you build a log cabin. | |
| Well, those trees were not formally shelter of any significant kind. | |
| You have converted them into shelter. | |
| You have created the cabin, and you own the effects of your action, so you own that which you create. | |
| I mean, if you're gonna say you don't own that which you create, then we can't ever have any negative sanctions to murderers, thieves, rapists, and assaulters because they don't own the effects of their actions, right? | |
| Property rights, ethics, and criminality are all one and the same thing. | |
| One and the same thing. | |
| So, that's the essence of land ownership. | |
| Nobody cares about land ownership. | |
| Land ownership, as we know, because if I sell you an acre, it won't tell you where it is. | |
| We don't want it. | |
| Nobody cares about land ownership. | |
| Land ownership is simply set up so that something can be done with the land. | |
| It doesn't mean build anything. | |
| You can fence it off. | |
| You can build a gate. | |
| You can preserve it. | |
| You can turn it into a park. | |
| You can whatever, right? | |
| So, it doesn't mean use it, like use it up and cut all the trees or anything. | |
| You can be keeping it for the pristine beauty of the lake where people can swim or whatever. | |
| Or just look at it. | |
| So that's really fundamental to understand when it comes to property. | |
| You own yourself. | |
| You own the effects of your actions. | |
| Now, some people say, aha, but it's not fair. | |
| Yes, that's true. | |
| It's not fair. | |
| Of course it's not fair. | |
| But, you know, don't blame the free market. | |
| Don't blame, quote, capitalism for that. | |
| I'm afraid your beef is with Mother Nature and she, not so good with the listening. | |
| Um... | |
| You know, it's funny because we've got these giant brains. | |
| I mean, these glories of nature. | |
| I mean, just amazing, fantastical, wonderful, wonderful brains. | |
| As Hamlet nobly expresses, what a piece of work is a man! | |
| How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable, in action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god! | |
| The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! | |
| And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? | |
| A wonderful speech about the beauty, and this is really the Renaissance view of man, this glorious rational being. | |
| We have developed this giant brain, our capacity to reason and communicate and create this amazing technology that links us all together. | |
| We have created all of this, or all of this has been created or developed as the result of inequality, as the result of some genetic mutations doing well and some genetic mutations doing badly. | |
| And so it seems strange to me that we would cry against inequality when inequality is the only reason we have the capacity to cry against inequality. | |
| But yeah, so some people will inherit a million dollars and other people will not. | |
| Other people will be tall and other people will not. | |
| Other people have blue eyes and other people don't. | |
| Other people have great hair, other people don't. | |
| Other people inherit good health genetically and some people don't. | |
| Some people are very pretty, some people are not. | |
| Some people have great singing voices and other people Do not. | |
| And so inequality, I mean, trying to erase that will be to erase life itself. | |
| The bell curve is everywhere. | |
| People are super smart. | |
| They're born smart. | |
| You can't keep it down. | |
| And it's like that creepy thing that Jessica Simpson's dad said about her breasts. | |
| You can't duct tape those things down. | |
| They're always going to get free. | |
| Same thing with intelligence. | |
| Oh, well, I guess we'll just keep going with that analogy. | |
| You put your head between it and make motorboat noises. | |
| So there is massive inequality all over the world, and some of it is genetic, some of it is environmental. | |
| I mean, if I had been born in some godforsaken backwater of the planet speaking some local clicking noise language, I would not be a podcaster or videographer with, you know, over 100 million downloads. | |
| It just wouldn't have happened. | |
| So, there is massive inequality. | |
| And I think those of us who are blessed with excess of gifts should use those gifts in the service of mankind. | |
| I think that's nice. | |
| I think that's helpful. | |
| It's not morally required. | |
| You can't just throw people in jail for not doing it. | |
| It's kind of like... | |
| If you're a doctor and somebody needs a tracheotomy because they're choking to death and you're like, oh no, I'm just in the middle of finishing my cheesecake. | |
| I don't think I'd really want to get up and bother with that plastic. | |
| Gross. | |
| All that spray. | |
| I mean, you can't be thrown in jail for that, but it's a fairly significant dick move. | |
| Like if you're walking past a pond and someone's drowning there and you're an excellent swimmer, It's like, oh, but I've got these Bruno Margulies shoes and I don't want to get them wet. | |
| Very, very hard to clean. | |
| Well, you can walk past and the guy drowns. | |
| You just, you know, not like you're evil. | |
| You're just not very nice, to put it as mildly as possible. | |
| So I think if you have excess of gifts, I think you should use it to help others. | |
| But that's just my particular perspective. | |
| That's not a sort of moral commandment. | |
| But yeah, there's inequality. | |
| Yes, some people inherit money and some people don't. | |
| Now, of course, the reality is the inheritance of money does not always provide happiness in any way, shape, or form. | |
| And anybody who aims to provide a permanent increase in happiness is most often selling a bunch of snake oil because our brains adapt to excess happiness and kind of return back to our normal state. | |
| I think there's some baselines that you can do to improve through integrity and virtue and so on, but nobody's going to give you the permagasm of ultimate happiness forever. | |
| That's just a... | |
| False. | |
| So, inequality, yeah, people get upset about it, but you can't erase inequality. | |
| And the thing is, too, is that if, let's say, that some guy has a million dollars and he wants to leave that million dollars to his son. | |
| Well, he, assuming it's his money, right, he lawfully, morally, righteously created the value that gave him the million dollars, so he can give that money to whoever he wants. | |
| He can give it to strangers, he can set fire to it in his backyard, he can give it to his son, and you can, I mean, how can you interfere with that? | |
| Because you can only interfere with that by claiming he does not have property rights to some or all of that money. | |
| But if it was a dollar he was giving to his son, you wouldn't intervene, right? | |
| So again, you have that problem. | |
| You can't have opposite rules when you multiply things. | |
| You simply can't. | |
| If you put enough ball bearings together, they don't become the opposite of ball bearings. | |
| They don't suddenly go from gravity which attracts to gravity which repels. | |
| I mean, this does not happen. | |
| You can't make rules like that because they're just silly. | |
| So the question is not, is it unfair? | |
| Because that's having a standard of fairness that in no way, shape, or form exists. | |
| In the world. | |
| The thing is, as well, there's something else about unfairness as well. | |
| I love to sing, and I have been blessed with a mediocre singing voice. | |
| And there are other people who are just fantastic singers. | |
| I mean, just ungodly good singers. | |
| Now, one of the reasons why it would be great to be a singer is they make a lot of money, they have a lot of fun. | |
| I mean, I know that, you know, grass is greener and all that kind of stuff, but, you know, Imagine! | |
| Just being able to, like I was just listening to, there's a Freddie Mercury just playing piano and singing his hits and all that, and I'm just like, I would love to be able to, just five minutes, give me five minutes to be able to sing like that. | |
| Love it! | |
| So, but the only reason why there's a music industry is it strenuously works to keep people like me out of it, and rightly so, because I would not be filling up any concert halls anytime soon. | |
| So the fact that there's a selection for the very best singers, and that doesn't mean always the people with the greatest voices, you know, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and so on, but it does mean that people whose songwriting and vocal capacities are appropriate to the songs and to the audience. | |
| And so because there's this inequality in people's singing ability, like Freddie Mercury never took a singing lesson his whole life, that bastard! | |
| So I love to listen to this guy sing, but the only reason there's a music industry that lets me hear this guy sing is because they keep people like me out of it. | |
| So me wanting to join it and saying, like if I said, well, let's lower the standards and I got to sing all of Queen's stuff, well, nobody would buy it, really. | |
| I mean, it would be a bit pitchy and strange. | |
| And so... | |
| So because there's this inequality that they only want the best and they will reject those who aren't very good, that's why I get to listen to these. | |
| That's why there's a music industry, right? | |
| So if I said, well, everybody, like all the bad singers have to be the front men of the band, then there would be no music industry. | |
| The whole thing would collapse. | |
| It would all go away. | |
| So the inequality is the whole reason why there's this thing that I wish there wasn't inequality for. | |
| And this is The reality of human life. | |
| So, you know, philosophically, you can't just go around getting rid of property rights in terms of inheritance or in terms of over a certain amount of money and so on. | |
| So we talked about singing, and now let's talk about vajayjays. | |
| So... | |
| Vagina is a form of property, right? | |
| My kidney is a form of property. | |
| My left nipple, well, my right nipple is often really wants to succeed, but my left nipple is a property. | |
| It's mine, right? | |
| I mean, I wash it, I feed it, you know, because the food that I eat helps sustain it. | |
| I exercise to keep it healthy. | |
| And so my kidney, my left knee, my right nutsack, my left nipple, you name it, they're all Property that I, you know, just as much as a garden, just as much as a house I built, I work to maintain, to build and to maintain. | |
| The same thing with a vagina. | |
| A vagina is a form of a property. | |
| Now, vaginas are unequally distributed in the population, much to the woe of my teenage self. | |
| And we would not think of... | |
| Redistributing vaginas. | |
| Like, we wouldn't say, look, some alpha players tend to get a lot of vaginas, you know, they walk around with bagfuls of them over the shoulder, whereas, you know, the 40-year-old virgin has a deficiency of vaginas, so what we need to do is redistribute the vaginas, right, and take women and make them have sex with guys who they wouldn't normally have sex with because vagina consumption is unequally distributed. | |
| Among the population. | |
| And that would be horrible totalitarian rape rooms, rape scenarios, and so on. | |
| We'd be forcing a woman to redistribute her property in a way that would be morally vile, hideous, offensive, and completely overriding her control over her own property. | |
| So that is property. | |
| And again, if you have one rule for a vagina, you can't have another rule for income. | |
| Because a woman's vagina is grown and watered and I don't know what the heck they do down there with jets and plumbing and singing and I don't know what. | |
| But they work to maintain, you know, they go to the gynecologist, they get the pap smears, they work to maintain the health of their vaginas. | |
| So it's their property. | |
| They grow it, they work it, they maintain it. | |
| They kegel it, apparently. | |
| So you can't redistribute the vaginas. | |
| It's immoral. | |
| And the reason I'm using vaginas is that a woman's fertility is a great deal of her sexual market value, whereas a man's money is a great deal of his sexual market value because the old, your daddy's rich, your mama's good-looking thing is that a man accumulates resources so that he can pay for a wife and children because historically, or at least evolutionarily, A woman was pretty disabled by having kids pretty much from the age of 15 to 35. | |
| You know, she's having kids, she's giving birth, she's breastfeeding, she's recuperating. | |
| I mean, it's... | |
| So redistributing vaginas is a horrible idea and redistributing money... | |
| Well, I mean, this only really came about when women got the vote and didn't really understand the degree to which a man's money is his sexual market value to a large degree. | |
| So, that's, you know, if you remember, things like singing capacity is very unequally distributed among the population. | |
| We can't fix it. | |
| You know, some kids are born blind. | |
| That doesn't mean that you get to take out the healthy eye of a kid who's not born blind and put it in. | |
| The blind kid's eye. | |
| I mean, that would be immoral, right? | |
| Some people need kidneys. | |
| You can't go around taking kidneys out of people and putting them into people who need kidneys. | |
| You can't redistribute kidneys or eyeballs or vaginas and so on. | |
| I mean, people who have great singing voices, you can't subject them to unnecessary surgery to destroy their singing voices, even though that would make singing ability more equally distributed among the population. | |
| I mean, it just would be immoral, and that which occurs for the body cannot fundamentally be different for... | |
| For income, for resources, and all of that. | |
| So with regards to capitalism, capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. | |
| So all that means is you have consistent property rights. | |
| You have consistent property rights. | |
| Self-ownership is consistent with the ownership of the products of the means of production, like a toothbrush. | |
| And it's also consistent with the ownership of the means of production, which is a toothbrush factory. | |
| All it is is consistency. | |
| And if you want to throw away consistency, then you've just ejected yourself from the realm of rational discourse. | |
| I mean, if you want to throw away consistency, you've got to go to the psychic fair, not to the science fair. | |
| So I hope this helps. | |
| Thank you so much for watching. | |
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