Sept. 6, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:14:05
3815 Marxism Versus Capitalism | Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux
Order "The Art of The Argument" Now: http://artoftheargument.com We Need Your Support: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donateThe fierce debate between free market capitalism and marxism has raged on for decades and escalated to war and near endless violence. Stefan Molyneux is joined by Lauren Southern's evil twin for a mock debate about the essential ideological conflict between freedom and central planning.Lauren Southern is an independent journalist and the author of "Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration and Islam Screwed My Generation." Order "Barbarians: How the Baby Boomers, Immigration and Islam Screwed My Generation" now: http://www.fdrurl.com/lauren-southernYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCla6APLHX6W3FeNLc8PYuvgTwitter: http://twitter.com/lauren_southernFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/lauren.southern.589Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi, everybody. Stefan Mullen, new from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
So in honor of my new book, The Art of the Argument, which you can get a hold of at theartoftheargument.com, I am having a series of debates.
And these are very intense, passionate, and powerful debates showing The Art of the Argument in action.
And it is a debate with a series of friends posing as, well, mortal enemies.
So I did one with Stephen Crowder regarding historical monuments.
And this one is with Lauren Southern's evil twin, I guess you could say somewhat Mano Amano, regarding...
The debate between communism and capitalism, between central planning and the free market.
And it was a spectacular performance by Lauren.
We really, really went head-to-head on this.
It was a very passionate and powerful debate.
I hope you enjoy it. Without further ado, here we go.
Lauren, how are you doing today?
I'm very well.
How are you doing over there, capitalist pig?
Oink, oink. Well, you know, I'm using the skulls of workers as the steps to my studio.
So this, of course, is wonderful for me.
So we're going to have a debate.
Now, I've released a book recently called The Art of the Argument, which you can get at artoftheargument.com.
And in it, I'm setting up a series of debates.
And this is going to be a mock debate.
But there may be people out there, Lauren, who have some suspicion about how well you can argue the communist side.
So let's get a little bit of your creds for the Reds.
Alright, so first of all, I'd like to start with, even within my own personal real life of supporting more libertarian policies, I think we vastly overestimate the ability of the free market to solve all our problems.
You know, we've got libertarians that come out and say, Just let the free market run amok.
It'll solve all our issues.
It'll solve everything, which is a complete lie, of course, if we just had the free market and no government and no borders.
Well, you'd, of course, have all of the issues that both you and I complain about often with people coming in the country and completely changing the culture and making it a caliphate, per se.
And a few farmers who can hardly organize a libertarian convention without disagreeing and stripping on a stage are not going to be able to put together an army to back that off.
Now, simply on the topic of capitalism, I do think we are too quick to dismiss the ideas and critiques of someone like Karl Marx, who saw a lot of issues with the idea of people just working eight hours a day and having no leisure, having no life, having no enjoyment.
iPhones are great and all.
It's great and all to be able to have a piece of technology covered in the tears of Chinese six-year-olds that's going to become obsolete in three months.
But we seem to have forgotten about the more meaningful things in life, our souls, our passion, our leisure time.
I thought one of the greatest arguments that Karl Marx actually had for feminism is he asked feminists why Instead of why would they beg to be in the workforce with men to have equality?
Why would they not want to bring men to the joy that they have?
One of the happiest roles in the world being the mother who can have leisure time, take care of her children, be with her family, learn hobbies, do arts.
Painting. All of these great, wonderful things.
Whereas men are stuck to be working in factories, where they're stuck to be working 8, 9, 10 hours a day.
Why not say men shouldn't be put into this suffering as well?
Join us in our leisure.
Us as humans have lost many of the great things that we had.
I think a lot of our spiritual side is gone.
I think a lot of the pleasures in the arts that we had before.
I mean, we've seen a massive decline in the arts.
And just the ability of the average human to do something like dancing.
People can't dance anymore.
They can't paint. They can't sing.
They can't do all of the things that humans should do.
They don't spend time with their family.
And it's because we have just succumbed fully to this entirely materialistic, capitalistic society where it's all about making that buck, whether it's $8 an hour.
And getting the next meaningless thing.
And it's been proven psychologically that choice does not make people more happy.
So just because we have more trinkets to go around, it doesn't make people more happy.
And capitalism is entirely based off the idea of people being miserable.
You don't go and participate in the free market unless you need something, unless you want something to fulfill you.
If you're perfectly happy at your house, gardening your plants, spending time with your family, fulfilling yourself or with your community, then you don't need the market.
The market is entirely about making people miserable, making them feel inadequate, making them feel like they need that next thing, that new iPhone, that new clothes, all of this.
I don't think capitalism makes people happy.
I think it's made them utterly miserable and taken away from the meaningful things in life, like the arts, time with family, and the spiritual.
Now, I guess I would respond with, can you give a brother a definition of capitalism that we can work with?
A definition of capitalism.
It is one of these big magical buckets wherein people project a lot of things, a lot of emotions, a lot of ideas, a lot of resentments.
So, as far as, you know, the pro-communist position goes, what is the definition of capitalism that you're working with?
Well, I think like communism and like Marxism, capitalism also has been given a bad rap by wrongful kind of perceptions of it.
We haven't really had real capitalism in the West in a long time, that's for sure, which is why I would consider capitalism just as utopian of an idea as perfect communism, because no matter what happens, the capitalists and the people who are The powerful, whether they be in government or in the markets, they will work together and coerce.
So the capitalism we have now obviously is crony capitalism, where you have people in the markets working with the government.
But even simply the idea of just the totally free market, completely unregulated, I am arguing against that.
Capitalism, just the free trade of goods between people.
Right. Now, you started off with a critique of culture.
Do you think that government schools have a fair amount to do with how people turn out?
I mean, the governments get children sometimes from, I don't know, eight minutes after they get out of the womb and so on, but they get from pre-K to kindergarten to primary school and junior high and high school and so on, and then sometimes off all the way to university.
So government schools are run on a socialistic principle.
From each according to their ability, those who pay taxes, particularly property taxes, go to fund schools, which then shape the heart's minds and perhaps, as you describe, soullessness of the children.
So it seems to me that if you're going to start critiquing people's spiritual malaises, would you not think that it is, say, the first 15 years of their fairly full-time government indoctrination that might have something to do with how they turn out and a little bit less an ad that they see somewhere on a website for an iPhone?
Well, actually, I think one of the biggest problems with schools is they are based and built off of the capitalist system, especially during the Industrial Revolution when schools came about.
They were entirely built off the idea of you go into your class and the bell rings, then you go and have your lunch, then you go into your next class, very menial things you do.
Everyone knows that modern schooling is based off the factory work setting.
I think most communists and Marxists would agree that we need a complete revitalization of our schooling to be a place of more arts and culture.
And that it is this capitalist-based system that we have schools teaching you to be a factory worker, teaching you to go Entirely into the capitalist system and not to be creative and think on your own.
One day you could be a poet, one day you could be a hunter, one day you could be all these different things.
We don't have that in school and now we just have this entire indoctrination.
And this is the thing as well.
I'm not saying, and I don't think many Marxists are saying that they 100% have the answer to the problem.
It's just these capitalists think that they have the answer and they think that capitalism is the answer when they don't realize that it deeply, deeply It needs to be critiqued and it has deep issues.
And it's a matter of finding out what the cure to that is and updating our schooling, updating our government, changing it for the better.
Because no matter what you guys want, anarchists, capitalists, whatever, no matter what you want, it's not going away.
The government is not going away anytime soon.
Neither are schools.
So we better find a way to make it more cultured and better so that we can have more meaningful lives.
Otherwise, we're just going to be sitting here having circle jerks in Facebook discussion groups all day like book club libertarians and anarchists tend to do.
You have really taken me on a journey here, my sister.
Oh man, okay. So you say that there's something culturally wrong, spiritually wrong, artistically wrong, that there's a malaise of the soul within the capitalist environment.
I point out that the primary influence on children, more so, more so than their parents.
Kids spend more time in government schools than their parents.
The government schools are not in any way, shape, or form organized along free market principles.
You're forced to pay in many places.
You're forced to go, and if you don't go, you're forced to pay even still.
There's no quality control.
People can't get fired.
There's no particular return on investment.
It's not part of the free market at all.
So if you're going to start to blame the free market situation, when the very center of culture, replace the church, replace the family, replace communities, the very center of that which shapes people in this supposed capitalist environment is a socialist slash communist indoctrination center called government schools, you're going to have to come up with a slightly better reply than, they have bells just like factories do.
That is not... A very good argument, I must say.
Right, and you think completely capitalist-based schools are going to work out just fine.
People are going to go into class and they're going to have their sponsored test TM by Apple and all the answers are going to be how great iPhones are and all their essays are going to have to be written about McDonald's.
Like, do you really think that corporate-sponsored schools are going to be A-OK? And what about the population that can't afford to send their children to schooling?
What are we going to do about that?
Oh, so do you care about people who can't educate their children?
Do you care about those people?
Yes, absolutely. And I think we as a society, I am so tired of this idea from the right wing and the anarchist types who believe that we just have no responsibility.
It's entirely individualism, entirely but ma freedom.
No, you have more you need to give to this world.
You have a responsibility to this world.
Just saying you're going to check out and everyone should just have their freedom is a lazy, irresponsible and entirely immoral viewpoint in my mind.
You have a moral responsibility to others and you have to contribute to this world.
Agreed.
So I have for many decades been talking to people about not having government run schools, because lo and behold, when you have government run schools, they end up being run not for the children, but for the government.
Boy, talk about exploitation.
You know, these are helpless children trapped into these indoctrination camps.
Their parents are forced to pay and they run for the benefits of governments.
They run for the benefits of teachers that run as big, giant vote getting machines for leftist policies.
And they're also run as big, giant conduits to get money from unionized teachers all the way through to leftist political parties.
They're not run for the benefit of the children at all.
Now, for years I've been making this case, and you know what the first thing is that people say, oh my communist friend, the first thing that people say is, What about the poor who can't afford to get their kids educated?
Two answers. Number one, they're not getting educated right now.
Number two, you care about them.
I care about them. Hundreds and hundreds of people I've talked about over the decades care about them.
Democracy says we care about them because everyone votes to put these schools in.
So we don't need the government and all of this indoctrination and all of this coercion at the center of children's education.
People care about other people's kids getting educated.
And so those kids will get educated.
Whether they get educated over the internet, whether they get educated in an airplane hangar, whether there are tutors, whether it's someone's garage, those kids will get educated because when we don't have the government to force us to do things, we have a great, wonderful field of voluntary flowers that grow up in order to fill the void.
And we know that's the case. I know that's the case because everybody has the same concern and I don't think that they're all just lying about it.
Right, and you really think they're going to be educated great on the internet, where you've got Google controlling what everyone sees, where they're going to be on the mainstream internet that has your viewpoint censored from it?
They're certainly not going to be seeing the arguments you want them to see.
I see what your concern is, Lauren.
If I understand this correctly, and please correct me where I've gone astray, your concern is this.
You're concerned that there may be one large, significant influencer of what children are exposed to.
Now, for you, that's Google.
For me, that's the government.
Let's just look at the two differences here.
Does anyone force you to use Google?
Absolutely not. Does people force you to pay for government schools?
Absolutely, they do.
Do you have free alternatives to Google that are both either anonymous or have different algorithms and so on?
Lots of options.
Can you create your own Google without Google throwing you in jail?
Absolutely you can.
Compare that to government schools where it's often a single curriculum, politically motivated, you're forced to pay, it's very hard to put out competition, and this idea that you're "Oh, I'm concerned Google's going to have a monopoly on information." That's government schools right there.
If your concern is monopoly, forget about Google.
It's infinitely more benevolent than your forced pay-to-play government education camps.
I think you're extremely naive to think that private schools would be any better at not serving just leftist doctrine than public schools.
In fact, I did go to a private school when I was younger and my parents switched me out of that school because it gave us entirely leftist doctrine and they figured Better not just pay for it.
Might as well get it for free.
They started giving out communist distribution of any candy that was won in games, any sports games.
Everything was distributed with participation trophies and everything, because that's where the culture went, Stefan.
It doesn't matter what you think the free market is going to teach your kids.
Where the culture is going matters, and capitalism has destroyed our culture.
It has made it entirely It has made it entirely based on materialism and making everyone feel good.
You may think that the whole feel-good doctrine is coming from the government, but where are you seeing it come from?
You're seeing private companies push it.
You're seeing private companies and magazines and papers and thinkers all push this idea.
I was pulled out of private schooling because the people that go into education tend to be left-wing.
So my parents figured, better not pay for it, might as well get it for free.
Well, okay, so hang on a second.
I'd like to cover only 12 points before I get to respond to them because otherwise I can't hold that much in my head.
All right, so first of all, look at that.
Your parents did not like what you were being taught in a private school, and look at that.
They didn't have to fund it.
They didn't have to pay for it.
They had the choice to opt out.
That's number one. So that's good.
They voted with their dollars, and if enough people found it unpleasant or negative or destructive, they would vote with their dollars, number one.
Number two, of course, these private schools generally have to conform to government educational standards, and therefore they're not really operating in the free market.
Number three is that a lot of these people who run these schools with themselves, educated in government schools, and I'm going to count higher education, you know, particularly in Canada, but in other places as well, as largely a government-run and government-controlled entity.
You do pay a little bit of your...
Of your tuition, but they run pretty much according to government regulations and government union contracts.
So this is not a free market situation, but what you're saying is your parents did not like the quality of what was being provided and therefore they could withdraw their financial support.
That is what I'm talking about.
Having that choice, having that option is so important because there's no single person who knows how education should be run.
Not you, not me, not some giant borg brain, Alan Parsons eye in the sky, phantasmagorical brain cloud of jellyfish neurons.
There's no way anyone knows.
There needs to be constant experimentation.
There needs to be constant innovation to find out the best way.
I don't know if school is the best way for kids to get it.
I know that 150 years ago when there was still somewhat of a free market in schools, you had a bunch of kids all sitting in a row and you had a teacher with a blackboard.
Now, massive upgrade.
It's a teacher with a whiteboard.
What's changed? Very little.
And why has it not changed?
Because the government has taken control of it and therefore it becomes immune from market forces.
No upgrades, no changes.
I don't know. I have no clue about the best way.
To educate people.
I have no clue about the best way to build a self-driving car.
I have no clue about the best way to build a cell phone.
But I know that there are people out there who working together in a voluntary environment can do all of that.
And so the idea that we have any clue how children should best be educated, there's a central plan, a central way that we can force everyone to conform to that and it's going to work.
That is truly magical thinking.
Nobody's that smart. So it seems I've recognized my mistake a little too late here, but I've let you take me on your little magical path of talking about private schooling because it's easy turf for you when Marxism isn't about private schooling and it's not even about having a large government.
It's about the workers' rights and the individuals' rights.
And in fact, at the end phase of Marxism, there is no government, just community.
So I think we need to go and take a few steps back here.
And for you, like I defined capitalism, I think you need to define Marxism for me.
Well, Marxism is in general government control of the means of production and the government control is supposed to be moderated by workers' collectives, workers' communities who may have the chance to run factories themselves or run their own means of production.
But it's the collectivization of profit, the redistribution of profit, and you only really have enforceable property rights in your toothbrush and your razor blade and your stockings if you can find them in a communist country.
The means of production, the really important stuff like the factories and maybe the banks and so on, these are all managed and controlled by the government through central planning.
And therefore, of course, there's supposed to be more money available to the workers because you don't have the greedy capitalists siphoning off all those tasty profits.
You can redistribute them back out.
To the workers who have more control over their own lives, who have more control over what's happening, who are not just cogs in a machine, but are intellects at work doing the best they can with their entire humanity, and that is the best way to have a functioning and functional society.
Right, for someone else's profit.
They're doing the best that they can, not for their own satisfaction or for their own profit, but so someone else can exploit them.
No, but in communism, they would all get to keep and share that profit.
That wouldn't be the capitalist siphoning.
Right, but they wouldn't be alienated from their work.
I want to ask you just entirely, aside from what we were just talking about, do you think that today people are happier?
And do you think that people feel somewhat alienated from the work that they do?
Do you think that they feel...
I mean, since the Industrial Revolution, the craftsman who created a beautiful chair and took it and sold it to his neighbor for corn or whatever food, that pure capitalist, I made something that I care about and I believe in, and I'm going to trade it for goods with someone else, that doesn't exist anymore since the Industrial Revolution.
People are simply cogs in a large machine and numbers on a checkboard.
They feel alienated and I'd like to hear you at least admit that.
First of all, I just wanted to point out, Lauren, this will make an excellent audition tape for CNN. I just wanted to point that out.
We'll stitch all this together and keep that going.
As far as alienation goes, I understand the argument that you used to make a chair from soup to nuts.
From the very beginning all the way to the end, you'd get the wood, you'd cut it down, you'd put it all together, you'd polish it, you'd deliver it, and so on.
Therefore, you had a full chair, and now you're bolting on one leg, bolting on one leg, bolting on one leg, and so on.
Now, as far as whether that's good or bad, I don't know.
Some people prefer to space out at work.
I mean, you've known them. I've known them.
We've both had boring jobs in our day.
Fortunately, today is not one of them.
But we both had boring jobs in our day.
And there are some people who is like, yeah, I go to work.
I completely space out.
I listen to my 10cc album on my headphones, and then I just go home.
I live to work.
I don't- No one enjoys that.
They tolerate that.
Pretending someone enjoys that is ridiculous.
That is a meaningless existence.
And people do that for eight hours a day for their whole life.
Just because you got lucky and got an amazing job where you got to do what you love doesn't mean that the other 90% of the population gets to do that.
They're exploited by the big guys who run all the places they can work, who control the money that they can have, who control the goods that they can have.
And they don't have a choice but to work some bullshit job that they're going to hate and is going to suck the life force out of them and then to participate in a system that is so overabundant with goods that nothing is meaningful anymore.
Nothing has value.
No one has a purpose.
They are simply a cog that a machine is going to replace one day.
No one has purpose in the goods they are buying and have no purpose anymore.
Yeah, listen, there's still room for the craftspeople.
You know, I go to country fairs and people make crap out of beeswax.
I don't even know what the hell it's all about.
Like they make bird shelters, they make mailboxes out of, I don't know, Bones of warthogs.
I mean, lots of really, they make their own jewelry, soup to nuts.
There's lots of room for individual craftspeople still within the society.
But, you know, here's the challenge.
And the challenge occurs to some degree with an ever-increasing population, which is if you go to build your own chair from the beginning to the end, you know, maybe you sell that chair for, I don't know, 50 bucks, and it takes you a whole day to do it.
Okay, so you've got some materials and so on.
Let's say you clear $30 out of your day.
Now, if you are willing to go and just screw the leg of the chair and over to go, and you rotate out, people don't just stay on the same job the whole time, then you can get $100 or $200 a day instead, because it's just more efficient to have one person work on one part of it, to have people...
Because they tried this back in the day.
Henry Ford originally had people swarming the Model T and just creating it back in the 20s, right?
The first mass-produced car, the first mass-produced vehicle.
He had people all swarm the car, and it was really inefficient.
And what he then found, he put it on the assembly line.
He put it on the conveyor belt, and people do their little bit.
And then they cycle around, they move along.
It's just a much more efficient way.
And see, I don't know whether people should give up extra money in order to have a more fulfilling job...
Or whether they are willing to do a job that's more boring in return for double the pay, which is kind of what happens when you have that kind of efficiency.
I can't make that decision for people.
That is everybody's individual conscience to do.
I can't tell people what's right or wrong.
If people want more money and less fulfillment at work, I'm not going to point a gun to them and say, nope, you can't do it.
Some people will make that choice and that's fine.
You know what's cheaper than one guy screwing in that leg in the chair and having an utterly meaningless existence?
Some child in the third world whose parents will sell them to a factory to work for two cents a day?
Or what's cheaper than that?
A freaking machine that'll replace all of us in our work.
We literally have no purpose.
Do you know what happens when people have no purpose in society's span?
That's when violence increases.
That's when war happens.
It is for the better of society that people have a place in this world.
And you know what's even better than just a machine doing people's jobs?
It's AI. AI is significantly better than us doing any jobs at all.
And you know what they say? People like Putin and Elon Musk are saying the person who creates AI first is going to be running the world.
And if that's a private company, God help us.
God help us.
We're not going to have any purpose at all anymore.
We're going to have nothing. We're going to be entirely under control of a corporation that has the smartest, most intelligent creature, basically a god on this earth.
We're going to be entirely under the control of a machine.
Is that the idea? The machine is going to be big and armed and controlled and is going to, what, make us stand in bread lines because it wants the bread for its own consumption?
I'm not quite sure how this plays out in anything other than a paranoid science fiction fantasy scenario.
All the people that are well versed in this, like Musk and such, are saying it's a much bigger threat than even North Korea is right now.
I mean, the only reason a lion that is more powerful than most of us is afraid of us is because of our intellect.
That's the only reason lions are more afraid of us.
And what's next? The only thing we should be afraid of is things that are more smart than us, and that's AI. And that's why all the people that are into this, that are intelligent, that know what they're talking about, are saying AI is one of the biggest threats, especially if it gets in the hand of people who only have profit as an interest and not the common goal of the people.
So your concern is there might be a central agency that would have direct control over the means of production.
In other words, you have a science fiction fantasy fear of something that continually manifests itself in actual real communist countries.
You know, I'll take the historical 94 million graves as a warning over the future Skynet death of humanity in Borg brain of infinite intelligence by computers.
Right, let's just pretend capitalism has no crimes.
Let's just pretend all of the slave labor, all of the dead people, all of the factory workers...
No, no, no. Slave labor.
No, no, no. Okay, slavery, not capitalist.
Oh, right. That wasn't real capitalism.
No, slavery was not capitalism.
Well, yeah, all of the dead people in a lot of these communist countries, that wasn't real communism.
Okay, hang on, hang on. It wasn't. The state is supposed to dissipate after that, and it's supposed to become a community.
Right. Let's do slavery, shall we?
Excellent. All right. So, slavery.
Would you say, for instance, that ancient Egypt was a capitalist economy based upon your standards of sort of free market and free trade and private ownership of the means of production?
No, I wouldn't, because I'm honest, unlike you, who won't admit that shooting people in a gulag has nothing to do with Marxism and everything to do with a crazy dictator.
We'll get back to me being on the defensive in a moment.
But right now, you would say that there are times when slavery existed when capitalism didn't, right?
Sure. Would you also say that I'm not proving causality here, but would you say that the rise and spread of the free market was at least to some degree coincidental with the fall and erasure of slavery across most of the world?
I don't know if I'd entirely agree with that.
In fact, I'd say the Civil War in America was mostly because the South didn't like the labor rights that were appearing in the North.
And they liked their free market because their workers were literally working for free.
So 2,500 years ago, slavery throughout most of the Western world, no capitalism really to speak of.
Now in the modern world, Well, slavery, there are still a few tens of millions of slaves, which is a terrible thing, and they generally are in third world countries.
There are no particular slaves in the West, except maybe perhaps in a few third world enclaves.
So we do have the rise of the free market, particularly serfdom fell away.
Serfdom fell away, which is a kind of localized slavery.
Serfdom fell away, slavery fell away, and there are very strong economic reasons for that, which is you...
There's no point automating your labor if you have slaves.
So when slavery began to fall away, there was an increased incentive to automate.
You know, it's the same thing like if you have massive amounts of third world immigration, you have less incentive to automate because wages stay particularly low.
And so we do have a situation where as capitalism tends to spread, slavery tends to decline, and there's lots of reasons for that.
It's impossible to efficiently allocate resources in a slave society.
Capitalism requires self-ownership in order to establish property rights.
Slaves don't have Self-ownership and therefore go against the very definition of the free market.
So the idea that you're going to try and conflate slavery with the free market when the free market requires self-ownership because you are the very first means of production that exists in your world, I think is a specious and kind of sophistic.
If I go to a store near me and I want to buy a hat or some sandals or some trinkets, a hairbrush, anything, where is that going to be made?
It's wherever you choose it to be made.
No, it's probably going to be made in China, like most of the things in America.
Consumers are not passive, though.
If you don't want to buy something made in China, you choose where it's made.
No, people choose what they can afford.
Now, people are pretending that America, there's no slavery, yada, yada, yada.
No, you're just buying from people who own slaves.
Because a capitalist is going to look at the first person where they can buy the cheapest stuff, even if They're not enslaving someone themselves.
They're sure as hell buying the cheap stuff from people who are enslaving others.
To pretend that capitalism has nothing to do with slavery, cheap labor, and workers' abuse is ridiculous.
Let's just pretend JCPenney didn't have a store collapse on a bunch of slave workers in the Third World.
We can just pretend that didn't happen.
We can just pretend there aren't the tiers of African kids on the diamonds you buy for your fiancés.
This is happening all over the First World.
Things are being bought from Third World slaves because capitalists are looking for the cheapest thing, not the most ethical thing, not the best thing for the community, not the things that are made with great craftsmanship and culture.
They don't care about their community.
They care about their freedom, of freedom, because there's no responsibility In the eyes of people that are purely capitalistic.
There's no responsibility to create a good society, a community, to have any other values, any leisure time, anything meaningful in life other than those charts.
And people are just numbers to them.
They're just statistics on their charts and just the numbers they can get, the lower the numbers can.
It doesn't matter who's enslaved.
It doesn't matter who is making two cents an hour to pay for it.
It's ridiculous to assume that capitalism has nothing to do with that.
It's so strange to me, Lauren, when people say people buy the cheapest stuff they can possibly find.
How much was your computer?
I work at a job where I have to edit stuff.
Don't act like my work is the exact same as someone else's.
Could you have bought a cheaper computer?
Is there a cheaper computer that could you have bought a 286 for 40 bucks on eBay?
Of course you could have. People buy stuff that is appropriate to their utility.
This is why there are malls that have cheap stores.
There are malls that have expensive stores.
There are cheap beater cars and there are Maseratis.
People buy a wide variety of quality It depends on personal taste.
It depends on personal knowledge of things.
It depends on your level of interest.
Some people buy a Chromebook and other people pay $3,000 for a gaming machine because it suits their particular needs.
And some people want stuff that lasts a long time and some people don't.
Like when I was a student, I bought a futon.
Now, it wasn't a terrible futon.
It wasn't like I bought it third-hand from Billy Idol's tour bus or something, but it was not a particularly great futon.
Why? Because I knew I was going to keep it for university and then I was going to sell it or junk it.
I didn't need it for a long time.
Now I have a nicer place, so I buy nicer stuff that's going to last for a longer time.
And now the idea that everyone looks for the cheapest thing too is also not the case because there are ethical funds and people accept lower returns on investment in order to pursue particular ethical goals.
People buy green products.
People buy products that are stamped fair trade and they pay more for those things.
And this is a matter of informing people and helping them understand where good things are.
And even these boycotts can be problematic.
As well because the boycotts tend to affect the workers out there in remote areas.
If you want workers to be able to compete better With other workers around there, then you need them to be more free.
You need them to be more free.
The workers in China, it's an ex-communist, still semi-communist country.
I'm not just talking about Berkeley.
I'm talking about even further to the West.
We're talking about China. It's terrible out there.
You've got people jumping off roofs.
This is not a free market.
They don't even have a free market in sex, for God's sakes.
You can't have more than one children without being able to put it in some wood chipper in the woods, Fargo style.
So they don't have a free market out there.
And It's still, even with all of that, even with all of that, they're infinitely better than they were off under, you know, 30, 40 million killed under Communist Mao's Great Revolution.
It's like, yes, they're not making a lot of money.
They should be more free. There should be more competition there to raise their wages.
But you know what they're not doing?
They're not trying to eat onion peels and they're not ripping open the pillows, uh, And eating the goose feathers because there's been this collectivization of the farm that results in a Holodomor-style mass starvation.
So it is bad.
And they've got enough freedom that it's better than it was before.
More freedom would make it even better.
I'm not going to pretend that bad things haven't happened under so-called communist regimes.
They have. Communism and how it's been practiced has not been perfect.
But I'm extremely annoyed with this idea that you cannot admit that there are problems with capitalism.
I just want to get this straight.
Are you going to pretend that there are no problems with capitalism, or can you name three of the biggest problems with capitalism for me right now?
Is there a problem with not using force to get your way?
Sure, sure there is.
There's problems with people who want to use force to get the right.
Capitalism means a respect for property rights and the non-initiation of force, the non-aggression principle.
Respect other people's property, keep your word.
And by property, I also include their sort of physical being, right?
Don't hit them, don't beat them, don't rape them, and so on.
Now, are there problems that come in a society with freedom?
Sure there are. There are tsunamis.
There are touchdown, horrible things, tornadoes and things like that.
There's hail. There's raining frogs.
And people make bad choices.
A woman marries the wrong man and she has three kids and he takes off with some cocktail waitress.
People make bad decisions they make.
But that's freedom! The search for perfection leads directly to hell.
There is freedom. People have the right to live free of coercion.
They have the right to live without any violence in their life unless there's an extremity of self-defense.
They have a right to not be pushed around by a big, giant, violent bureaucracy called the state.
They have a right to self-ownership.
They have a right to their property, to dispose of it through charity or through giving it to their kids or however they see fit.
Do problems arise in those societies?
Sure, of course, people get sick.
People get hit by buses. But that's not the issue.
The issue is they're not institutional problems.
They're the problems that naturally accrue from freedom.
You lock your kids in the basement, they're never going to get a sunburn.
That doesn't mean they're better off.
Should you be able to sell heroin to a five-year-old?
Let's go to that one.
Total free market.
Should I be allowed to sell heroin to a five-year-old?
I can't imagine a situation wherein a parent would allow a five-year-old to have the money to buy heroin or that a five-year-old would know what heroin is or how to get it or what to do with it.
So I can't imagine such a situation.
You may not be able to imagine it, but I sure as hell know when I was in high school, drug dealers came to our school and kids had money and jobs.
I had a job at 13. I could buy drugs when I was 13 if I wanted to.
And in the 19th century, you could buy cocaine when you were a six-year-old.
Do you know how? In Coca-Cola.
One of the first ingredients in Coca-Cola was cocaine.
And you could buy heroin even in the post-Second World War period.
You could get them like three for a quarter in London pharmacies and so on.
So there has been times in the past where this stuff is widely available and it's not particularly restricted.
And you know what there wasn't?
There wasn't a big giant opioid crisis.
There wasn't a big giant set of drug addictions.
There weren't ever escalating deaths from opioid addictions.
That comes from the government funding healthcare.
That comes from the government paying for all of these drugs.
That comes from all and general despair of people living in a dying society.
But yeah, there have been times in the past where kids could go into drugstores and buy stuff.
And do you know what? They didn't.
And that should be allowed. And there was not much of a problem at all.
Just yes or no. You should be allowed to sell heroin to five-year-olds.
Yes or no. Compared to what?
What do you mean compared to why?
Because there's no magic switch.
There's no magic switch that you can just pull and say, now a magic force field goes up for every conceivable interaction involving things.
If I ran a pharmacy, I would never sell heroin to a five-year-old.
And I would never, ever, ever go to any pharmacy that did that.
And I think that's how things would be dealt with.
But compared to what is important, Lauren, because if you say, well, should...
Five-year-olds be allowed to buy heroin?
And you say, well, no. Well, that's not magic.
What happens then is you have to create a big, giant government with a massive tax apparatus.
Usually, it ends up in fiat currency.
It ends up in foreign wars and so on.
It's like, I'll take the risk.
I'll take the risk.
I don't know.
Compared to what? There's no magic force field that just suddenly emerges when you want something to happen in society.
You have to create a tiny monopoly of people who have all the power in the known universe to impose their coercive will upon you, and then you have to cross your fingers and hope that for once in human history, power doesn't corrupt.
But guess what? It always does.
And that's what I mean when I say, compared to what?
Compared to a big, giant, imperialistic slave apparatus that sells children into intergenerational slavery?
It's like, compared to what? So your answer is yes to that.
Okay, so let's say we get your perfect free market capitalist state that has no borders, all just free trade.
What do you guys do when Russia, when China decides they want America to be part of Russia?
They want America to be part of China.
What do you guys do? You're going to free trade your way out of that one?
Hang on, hang on. Why would you imply no borders?
Isn't that a big disagreement?
Why aren't borders a violation of the non-aggression principle, free movement of people?
Good heavens now. Don't you have borders around your room right now?
We have borders around our screens.
I mean, you don't allow people into your house right now.
You have borders around your house.
When you have a car, you lock the car, you have borders around your car.
So private property is your borders.
I mean, imagine this.
Imagine this.
Imagine that you could buy up the land along the south of the United States and build a border.
I mean, they're American.
I guarantee you if that were possible legally.
Then you would have had this wall that Trump is talking about.
This wall would have been built decades ago.
Decades ago, if not half a century ago.
Because that's what people want to do.
They want to protect the stuff that they have.
Of course, in a free society, there's no welfare state, which means that there's not this massive incentive to go into that society.
But you can have complete borders when it comes to a country.
You can just have people buy the land and say you can't cross the land.
Or you can buy the land and build a wall.
I mean, compared to what?
Again, it's compared to what? Compared to the wonderful borders that are going on in Canada and America and France and Germany and Greece and Italy and Spain, these places have no borders and they have giant governments.
What are you going to have McDonald's buy up all of the borders on the coast and charge you, make you buy a Big Mac if you want to go past it and create the McWarlords to protect America?
Like, what is the plan here?
You seriously think that a corporation or someone buying up all of the borders on a coast is going to be great?
What if I decide to buy up all of the land around your house and don't let you leave your house, Stefan?
Like, how is that going to work?
I'll shoot you if you go on my property.
But see, all of these questions, you ask me like I'm the free market.
It's like, oh, yeah, Lauren, how do you build a cell phone?
Oh, you don't know how to build a cell phone.
I guess there's no such thing as a cell phone that is there because you don't know how to build one.
I don't know. I know that people should be free.
I also know that I would never buy a house unless it had guaranteed access to a road, right?
I mean, of course. I mean, I wouldn't bother buying that because I wouldn't want some.
I would buy the land that is between me and the road.
Right? And so the idea that someone's going to buy, I mean, these things can be easily solved in the free market through contracts.
What if I buy the road? What if I buy all the coasts around America and don't let you leave, as your suggestion was to keep out other powers?
Someone just buys up all the land around America and then creates the McWhorst to keep out the Russians.
I would never buy a house without guaranteed access to the road, which means that it would have to be transferred in any sale price.
I mean, there are ways that you can solve all of this stuff.
Whose road is it going to be?
Your road? Are you going to own all the roads so you can freely move on every single road everywhere?
Like, whose road are you buying access to?
You think one person's going to end up owning all the roads?
Maybe. Monopolies could happen.
Oh, so this is the idea that in the free market, you end up with a monopoly.
Because you see, you're so alarmed and scared and terrified of the possibility of a monopoly.
A monopoly with a lot of unchecked power.
But somehow you think the state, which is a monopoly with a massive amount of unchecked power, is the solution to a possible monopoly.
You will institute a giant Sauron-style monopoly in society in order to ward off the potential devil of a free market monopoly, which, by the way, has never once been shown in economic history to arise without the power of the state behind it.
When you get monopolies in the, quote, free market, it is always because the monopolies ally themselves with the power of the state.
And they create protectionist barriers.
They create licensing.
They create monopolies through the power of the state.
There is not one example.
In history of a monopoly being created and sustaining itself in the free market.
Because a monopoly, of course, what did they do?
They raised their prices.
That's what they want a monopoly for.
That invites in competition.
They can only raise their prices if they can collude to keep competition out.
And they can only do that through the power of the state.
So you're talking about using the state to control a boogeyman that has only ever arisen in history as the result of the state.
Regardless of whether or not it is a single person that owns everything, it is a very, every small group of people.
I'm sure you've heard of Pareto distribution.
Just like a game of Monopoly, one person, even if everyone is trying their hardest, one person will always have a majority of the wealth or all of it by the end of the game.
This is a well-tested theory that does show...
To continue in every single test, whether it be a trading game with all the participants starting with the same amount of capital, one person always ends up with the most.
This happens in real life, with or without government as a factor, which government is a factor, and it's not going away anytime soon.
So these large corporations are simply another problem with these large capitalist corporations working with our large, also pro-capitalist organizations that prop up certain people.
Is a big problem we have.
And that's not going away.
And we have to address that.
But it is going away. It continually goes away.
If you go back to 1900, the top 100 companies that existed, the biggest 100 companies that existed just over 100 years ago, of those top 100 companies, even with all the power of the state that they use, there are about five left.
It's rags to riches to rags.
Without the power of the state, rich people who are smart, they're entrepreneurial, they have very high IQs, very high ambition, just the right combination of personality traits and individual willpower to create a huge amount of wealth.
Now, you've also heard, of course, of the regression to the mean, which means that if you're smart or tall, you're going to have kids who are smart and tall.
But not really as smart as you are.
There's a regression to the mean.
And what this means is that there are some people who get a lot of money and they have a lot of ambition.
They create a lot of opportunities.
And then what happens is their kids just aren't as smart as they are.
It's just regression to the mean. It's natural.
The basketball player's kids are probably not going to be as good as he is.
And so on. And the short person has kids who are taller than he is.
It's a regression to the mean. It's why we don't end up with 20-foot people and 2-foot people on average.
It's a regression to the mean. So the market takes care of that.
Because what happens is people accumulate wealth.
Now, then what they do is they go straight to the government and they say to the government, I'm going to give you lots of money in return for preferential legislation so I can keep my wealth even if my kids are absolute idiots.
And, you know, the same thing happened.
The Eaton family was around for, what, 150, 200 years in Canada.
And then you had a bunch of four dunderhead sons who said, hey, you know, sales are overrated.
We're just going to have everyday low prices.
And next thing you know, they're out of business.
Sears going out of business because there are changes in In the marketplace, truck drivers, big truck companies may go out of business if trucks get automated.
There's a constant churn of wealth.
There are people becoming rich.
There are people becoming poor all the time in the free market.
And the more free it is, the more that churn plays.
Where it stops playing is when you have a big giant government with control of the economy, which is captured by all of the rich people in order to keep the poor out of competing with them.
Because the poor will always outcompete The rich.
Because the rich have a higher burn rate.
They have big mansions. They have yachts.
They have airplanes. They need to burn a lot of money.
Whereas poor people are lean and mean and will work for eight bucks an hour in order to build up their wealth and their dreams.
You know, when I was an entrepreneur, I worked for free for a while.
And that meant I could outcompete people who had, you know, three kids in private school.
So there is always this churn if the free market's allowed to operate.
I'm not talking about family lines here.
I understand that family lines come and go.
I'm talking about 1% of the population having all of the control and the money and the rest not having that.
Also, I think it's a very good question.
I think it's very good that you brought up IQ and distribution.
This idea that the free market will just take care of poor people is something that has been proven Completely false.
There is 15% of the population with an IQ below 80 that cannot function at normal jobs in this day and age.
They do not have a place in society.
They do not have a purpose in society.
This is not some myth.
And capitalists pretending that, oh, the free market will just take care of it is completely naive.
These people are not able to compete in modern workforces.
That is 15% of the population.
What do you guys do to them?
Just expect them to be homeless because they weren't given the same gifts as you, because they didn't try as hard?
No, this pull yourself up by your bootstraps is completely unrealistic when you consider things that you talk about a lot, like IQ. Oh, absolutely.
I mean, there is a bell curve.
Yeah, there's a bell curve of ability.
And there's even a bell curve not just in terms of IQ, but in terms of the right combination of the big five personality traits, which are significantly genetic.
This is a big problem.
It's not a problem of the free market.
That problem exists regardless of whether there's a free market.
That's a biological problem to a large degree.
Yes, but they have social safety nets within a communist Marxist society where people can be helped by the community, where the community feels a responsibility to others.
So the community wants to help them.
So why bother with having a big giant welfare apparatus if the community wants to help them?
You care about them. I care about them.
I mean, you know, they're but for the grace of God go you or I or, you know, just one lawn dart to the eyeball taking down our neofrontal cortex and we're in the same situation.
So for sure, I mean, people care about those who don't have the intellectual acuity to compete in a free market.
I care about them. You care about them.
Everyone... I've never spoken to anyone.
I don't even know. I can't even count how many people I've spoken to about this issue over the years.
I've never met one person who says, oh man, I hope they install a webcam so I can watch these people starve in the gutter because I don't care.
Everybody's like, well, what about these people?
We care. Now, the government doesn't care.
The government just wants to buy votes.
But we care as a community.
Only the community can help these people, not the state.
I agree, but people don't see...
I think that our state has been highly ineffective, both Republicans and Democrats, and we need a more socialist state that is focused on the worker, that is focused on the poor, and is not focused on crony capitalism and lying to get votes, which I think both the Democrats and the Republicans have been doing.
And we need a true Marxist leader, whether that be Bernie Sanders or someone else.
Which I do think Bernie has his problems as well.
But we do need a proper socialist to come up that does have the interest of the individuals.
Because if you have a lot of money, if you are in that 1% of control and power and you are a selfish person, as many people have to be, you have to be a little bit psychotic, you have to be a little selfish to get to these huge problems.
Points of power where you're controlling so many people.
And a lot of those people don't want to give up their money even in the system we have now.
They have offshore bank accounts.
They're trying not to be taxed.
Google pays almost nothing in taxes because they're putting their money through different countries offshore.
These people do not want to help others.
They don't. And plenty of people don't.
The idea that they do is ridiculous.
So I understand. So you have a grave concern that people who want power over others are psychotic and selfish.
Yes. So where the hell is your perfect socialist leadership going to come from, Lauren?
Why is it only the capitalists who are subject to the problem of corruption, but all the politicians that you want to give infinite coercive power over the general population, all of those people are somehow magically immune from the corruption of power.
Capitalists, while they're really easily corruptible and they're selfish and they're psychotic and they're sociopaths and they're mean and they're terrible, and they're the devils.
But in my pantheon on the other side are all of these wonderful...
People who can have more power than economic power.
Political power, the power that arises, as Mao said, out of the point of a gun, is infinitely more than monetary power.
Monetary power can't force anyone else to do anything.
Coercive government power.
Somehow, you have a cadre of people that you're willing to grant all of this power to because you're really afraid of corruption.
Do you understand how that doesn't make any sense?
I'm afraid of corruption too.
I'm afraid of corruption too, which is why I don't want any group to have that kind of power in society, the state.
There is a difference between people who want to use their power for selfish purposes and people who want to use their power to help others.
And I agree, power does corrupt.
So you have to have a very awoken populace.
You have to have a strong workers' liberation movement.
You have to have People that are ready to fight back and are socially aware because that's the only way that your power is going to stay in check.
Right now, the Republicans and the Democrats both want people to ignorantly walk on their way and not be aware of politics, to not be involved in their communities, to not be involved in the decisions being made because they are all working with these capitalists who just want to make a buck.
I think most of the people in government today are just capitalists.
That have used the power of the state to abuse others.
I think that we need a true movement from the ground up, from the workers up, that are keeping an eye on those they put in leadership positions.
And right now, we don't have that.
And it is not working. But to pretend getting rid of the state entirely would somehow get rid of people wanting power.
If you really think that Google one day...
No, you will never get rid of people's thirst for power.
It is innate. We know we receive dopamine as bald apes, me more so.
We receive dopamine from climbing the political ladder.
We see this in monkeys all the time.
So, we are biologically programmed to seek power over others.
And you can say, oh, that's good, that's bad.
It's like saying, well, you know, it'd be great if we had nine legs.
It's like, well, we have two, right? I mean, it'd be great if we hopped around on a giant tentacle, but we don't, right?
So, this is the nature of the beast.
This is who we have to deal with.
There is no way to reinvent...
The human being, right?
This sort of new Soviet man who's only going to work for the collective and is going to have no interest in his own personal gratification or profit.
This doesn't exist. We have a very finely tuned, very sophisticated, bald ape to work with that has survived and flourished and reached the very top of the food chain after billions of years of evolution.
So you will never, at least as far as I can tell, you will never be able to get rid of people's desire to have power over others for the most part.
And, knowing that we can have, forget about the elimination of the state completely.
Let's just talk about small government versus big government.
Small government would certainly be less of a temptation than big government.
But you cannot ever create a situation where people are above the law, basically, where they can do whatever they want, where they control the means of production, they control the life or death of millions of people, and not have them be corrupted.
This magical bubbling up from the bottom and everything's going to be fine, that's like so kumbaya, I don't even know where the bong is.
I think very soon you are going to find out, unfortunately soon, you are going to find out that government is not the only way to abuse power and to hurt people and to control people.
Soon you're going to find little agreements in the 267th page of your Facebook acceptance that says, hey, let us indoctrinate you.
Hey, let us Make you go through psychological programs on Facebook to do what we say.
And you're not going to read that. People aren't going to read that.
The corporations are going to abuse people.
They're going to control people.
They already have. To scoff at that is ridiculous because Facebook already is doing social experiments to say they can change how people vote.
They can change what political ideologies people support.
They can affect whether you are sad or you are happy.
And as people sign those Grossly long, disgusting documents and agreements to these capitalist empires.
They're gonna find that their freedom, their freedom of thought, their freedom of speech, their freedom to be unique individuals with a life outside of their stupid capitalist phones and machines and little trinkets that they have is going to disappear very quickly under the boot of a selfish 1%.
And I truly think that the only people who can stop that are individuals who are interested in helping the collective and not just themselves and making a buck.
But you don't, I mean, first of all, people don't have to use Facebook.
Second of all...
Don't pretend they won't.
Don't pretend they won't just because even you do.
You don't, I don't have to though.
If I close down my Facebook account, who comes to my house?
Now, if I say I don't feel like paying my property taxes, trust me, people will end up coming to my house.
That's not an optional relationship.
But if I close down my Facebook account tomorrow, nobody comes to my house.
Facebook sales on. I can go to other alternatives.
I can create my own alternatives if I want.
And that's number one. Number two, why are people so easily programmable?
Because our wonderful benevolent overlords in the state have been responsible for people's education for 12 years straight.
And more than that, even if they've gone to university.
So let's just give them around 15, 17 years of education from state apparatus.
So why are they so easily manipulated?
Why are they so unable to reason from first principles?
Why are they so intellectually undefended?
If the government is so great and we need the government to protect us from private corporations, why doesn't the government teach us more critical thinking skills?
Why doesn't it teach us how to reason?
Why doesn't it teach us how to think independently?
There's no courses in logic.
In most government schools, there's no courses on economics.
There's no courses on the law.
You can get a lot of crap on social justice warrior stuff and the need for diversity, but you're not taught how to think critically.
And so it's, again, this problem, while we've got these corporations that can manipulate people, why are they so easy to manipulate?
Because the government has utterly failed them in educating them on how to think.
When you tell people to march, they march.
When you tell people to bow, they bow.
When you tell people to ziegheil, they ziegheil.
When you tell people to buy a McDonald's hamburger, they buy a McDonald's hamburger.
And I sure as hell would rather spend my life in a meaningful society.
What's the quote? I'd rather spend the rest of my days in the Red Army than eating hamburgers in Brooklyn.
I'd rather have a society with a culture and something they're fighting for and a collective than a simply capitalistic, materialist society run by corporations.
And you have this naive view of people with time anymore to even critically think.
They're working 8, 9, 10 hours if they want to be able to buy a good house in their society because of how shot up the housing prices have been by capitalists.
And they don't have time for all this philosophizing.
They don't have time to sit in I'm trying to imagine what a society might look like if we didn't pay, as we do in Canada, 50...
To 60% of our income in taxes.
I wonder if massively high taxation has anything to do whatsoever with people's lack of leisure time.
Because, of course, if you're being taxed at 50%, and sometimes it's higher, but let's just go with 50%, if you're being taxed at 50%, guess what?
You have to work twice the hours for your take-home pay.
Do you think that might, that big giant state that you love so much, do you think that might have something to do with interfering with people's leisure time?
What percentage of people are taxed at 50% in Canada?
I have no idea. A very, very, very small percentage.
Let's say it's 30%.
People usually find a way to escape that tax.
People who make the most usually don't pay it.
Let's say it's 30%. That's not the essential.
The sliding scale is not the essential part of the argument.
Let's say that it's 30%.
What that means is you...
And I know that the Tax Freedom Day in Canada is somewhere in the middle of the summer.
And that's an average for the country as a whole.
And that doesn't even count the national debt, right?
And deficits and so on, right?
So let's say it's 30%.
Fine. So what that means is a third of your time is consumed in paying off the state.
Does that have any effect on interfering with your leisure time?
Of course it does. Look at what happened.
In the 1950s, one primary income owner, usually the man, one primary income owner, Could earn enough money to support a family with six children and a detached house and a car and all of that stuff.
And the taxes were lower. There was much more free market back then.
And the poor were being solved.
They were getting richer. Poverty rate was declining one percentage point every single year.
Everything was going fairly well.
And now, to get the same amount of money, you need two people working.
Why? Because taxes have more than doubled.
And so the idea that we'd have this wonderful leisure with a bigger government, well, we've got a big government and no leisure.
Sorry, go ahead. No, what happened is all of these Trotskyite neocons, which I do not agree with Trotsky.
I think Stalin, who wanted a more localized national socialist system, had a much better idea.
But Trotsky and these neocons, they just want to import the world into the system, which does not work.
You cannot export the revolution.
You have to have a nationalized socialism with a community if you want it to work.
But all of these neocons wanted to import the third world for their capitalist workers and pay them absolutely nothing.
And that's what's created a stagnating of wages.
Hang on, hang on.
So are you saying then that the Democrat Party is the pro-business party because they're the ones who opened up the floodgates to third world immigration into the states and they're the ones who have been maintaining it ever since fundamentally changing the demographics?
So you're saying that the Democrats are the pro- I think the Democrats and the Republicans are no different in a lot of ways.
I think that's true. The people who come into the United States from the Third World, they come in and, of course, a lot of them will be on welfare, a lot of them get subsidized housing, a lot of them get food stamps, and they get SNAP benefits, and they get, you know, I mean, the list, you can scroll past the acronyms in terms of the amount of money that they get.
Is that money provided to them by the state, or is that money provided to them by the free market?
It's provided to them by the state, but they're imported by these neocons, like the Koch brothers, to fund people like Reason TV, who argue for this kind of stuff, who want more of these low-wage workers to come in and cause the workers in the West to...
But they're only low-wage because the government gives them all this money.
Right, so the idea that this is some free market phenomenon when these households are getting $60,000, $70,000 a year in tax-free benefits from the state, the idea that this has something to do with the free market, you can't stretch the definition that far.
That's like trying to drop Susan Boyd into a leotard.
The state still keeps it somewhat under control.
If we got rid of all of the state, you would have Pajit taking every single job in California.
Not a single one of these people that would have been making a great wage for their family and kids in the 50s would have a house or a single damn job because everyone in India would be willing to work for less than every single person in America.
That's the reality of the situation here is, yeah, there are going to be cheaper workers and none of them are going to be the ones that are going to benefit from your ideology.
They're all going to be the ones in India and they're all going to be the ones in China and Mexico that are going to work for absolutely nothing.
And the capitalists are going to love it.
But all of the people that are living in the West and listening to your show are going to hate it.
Well, so they're cheaper for sure.
So why not just offshore those jobs?
They don't need to come to a particular country.
There's tons of coding that you can get done in India.
There's tons of manufacturing that you can get done in China.
Oh, because they want to live there. Why wouldn't they come over?
If they're going to work for nothing and they want to come over and live there, why wouldn't they?
They'll just move over because who needs borders?
Well, again, we did do the border thing sort of earlier.
And of course, if the population...
Here's the thing. And no one's going to have jobs to buy housing.
They're going to be the ones with the jobs, so...
If people don't want foreign workers, then they can boycott companies who hire them.
This happens all the time.
This happens all the time.
People boycott companies. I mean, this is one of the things the left does is they set up these boycotts, they set up these deplatformings and so on.
So there's ways to deal with people you disagree with when it comes to their economic decisions.
Just boycott companies. And they will then have to find some other solution.
Also, can you imagine if Americans like, and I know we're talking about America, but you know, it could be any sort of Western country.
If the kids were raised with proper education, they would be able to out-compete people from the third world to the point where there'd be no point bringing those people in because they just wouldn't be nearly as productive as really well-raised, intelligent, creative, critical thinkers, energized, motivated, and so on. People in positive free market schools, I mean, that would be no competition at all.
Because there's going to be so many jobs in creative feminist dance theory.
There's only so many jobs in these creative fields.
It's going to be all the people that are willing to do the call centers, all the people that are willing to work with the creative people that are going to be making money, because 1% of the people have the wealth.
I don't know if you remember that part of this conversation, but 1% of the people are going to be hiring the majority of people to work with them.
And I guarantee they're going to be able to find an Indian equivalent of A guy who has managing skills that will work for cheaper.
I guarantee it's a large country.
It is a very big country and I guarantee they're going to be able to import a foreign worker who will do it for cheaper and will be as smart.
That's possible. However, of course, there were cheaper workers in the 19th century, and that didn't all happen, right?
So there have been cheaper workers throughout the world, throughout history.
And of course, America had pretty much open borders in many ways, and there were cheaper workers all around the world, and the immigration worked relatively well.
So, I mean, this idea that it's just going to get swarmed with everyone from some backwater of Somalia...
Well, that's, of course, happening anyway.
So the idea that you're going to have a state to solve that problem, you have a bit of a false dichotomy saying, well, once I have a state, don't worry, we'll be able to control the guest worker program.
It's like, no, not according to all of the H-1B visas and all the other work visas and the DACA program, which went on for five years, I think, and they handed out all of these work permits and so on.
So the idea that, well, we've got a state and therefore we're going to deal with the problem of guest workers and so on, it's just not the case at all.
I do not understand libertarians, free market activists that always bring up 1700s, 1800s philosophers or even early 1900s immigration policy as an argument.
If you asked Adam Smith today or any kind of free trade guys about their thoughts on capitalism today in a world where you have trains, planes and automobiles, where you have local trinket makers competing with child slave labor across the world, And you have large government subsidies and these huge monopolies and technology.
You have Facebook, Google.
I guarantee Adam Smith would have a different answer than he had then.
And I guarantee that the early 1900s immigration...
And workers were very different than the ones today and their abilities to come over en masse with the transportation we have today and their ability to take jobs with most jobs being in technology today.
You cannot take immigration or work statistics from an age before ours.
I absolutely will concede that point.
I withdraw the argument.
It's a perfect point that you made.
Let's just close off with this 1% question because this has come up a bunch of times.
It sort of surfaced like a shark fin circling around us in the water.
Let us ask about this 1%.
This is the 1%, of course, of the wealthy who control, you know, depending on your metrics, what a quarter or a third or, you know, depends on how half the wealth in some places and so on.
And yeah, there is the Pareto principle, but the Pareto principle is not in perpetuity, right?
You give power to the state, it pretty much grows until it collapses.
The Pareto principle in the free market accumulates wealth in certain areas, and then next thing you know, you know, I have the biggest horse and buggy manufacturing in the whole of America.
Oh, wait, is that a car right here?
You know, your business model is toast, and you either change or you fail, and most of the companies will fail that particular transition.
But as far as the 1% goes, Do you think that as the size and power of the state has massively increased over the past century in the West, largely as a result of the turning of the currency system into a communist pit of corruption, because fiat currency, central banking, all of this is state control of the ultimate means of production, which is currency.
Forget everything else. If you don't have a free market in currency, you don't have a free market in anything, which is why Bitcoin is becoming so valuable.
As the size and power of the state has increased over the last couple of decades, do you feel or do you think that the income inequality has increased or decreased?
Hasn't it decreased?
No, it has, in fact, increased.
Now, this goes counter to the idea that the redistribution of state is going to deal with the problem of income inequality.
The state is much bigger now than it was.
It's like, what, 20 times bigger than it was 100 years ago.
The amount of money it redistributes is virtually infinitely bigger than it was 100 years ago, and certainly over the last few decades.
You know, workers' wages have stagnated, income inequality, and the rich have done pretty well.
Even since 2007, 2008, the rich have done actually pretty well, and the super-rich have done very well.
So we have this big, giant redistributionist state.
A large number of the Communist Manifesto platforms have actually been implemented in every single country throughout the West.
And here we see income inequality is growing.
The free market theory perfectly predicts this, because as you get more and more size and power of the state, what happens is you pay the poor to stay poor, so you keep them dependent on the state and you get their votes, which means the poor stay poor, which is not the case in the 19th century.
Poor wages doubled in the 19th century.
And the rich use the power of the state to maintain their own privileges and power.
It's called regulatory capture.
The pharmaceutical companies write the pharmaceutical regulations and the health insurance companies write the health insurance regulations to benefit themselves and keep competition from entering anywhere in the sphere.
And so the theory of public choice, free market theory, perfectly predicts that as the state gets bigger income inequality, It's going to increase, and this is exactly what we've seen.
So I guess my question is, do you feel that this is going to change if you make the size of the state double what it is now?
Somehow it's going to turn around and get better?
If you could cool it with the Zeke Hiles for a minute, that would be great.
I'm sawing sideways.
I'm sawing sideways.
I don't know if I have any Italian in me, but I feel like I do.
This is not allowed in England.
This is why I had to leave. I was far too gesticular with my floppy bits.
This has fried my brain.
I don't even know who I am anymore.
What am I supposed I hope you can downshift from the communist persona.
It would be a real shame if we lured you in there and we got you stuck there, you know, like visiting for dinner with the Hannibal Lecter, you know?
Am I answering as a communist or am I answering as Lauren?
I think I will let you be the judge of how best you want to bring this joyful intellectual fest in for a landing.
Oh my gosh, you killed me.
I don't even know who I am anymore.
Okay, can you put that into a simpler question without Zeke Hiles?
Sure, sure. Do you think that since, as the size and power of the state has grown, income inequality has grown, does that not run counter to your theory, that more state power will reduce inequality?
Right. Well, I think that more state collusion with corporations has increased inequality.
I think that it is both a problem with our corrupt state and our corrupt, selfish, capitalistic individuals that has caused a lot of this inequality.
People, both unfortunately within the government and within business, are just searching for more power and they're not searching to support a community.
They're not searching To create more meaning and value in people's lives.
And we've lost a lot of our purpose.
Whether it be as workers, we don't feel we have a purpose and we don't feel invested in our work.
We feel very alienated from it.
And even the products that we consume, more choice does not necessarily equal more happiness.
It's been proven that more choice does not equal more happiness.
More connected communities with more meaning and value, even if they are more socialistic, where we have shared resources and shared goods, shared education, I think that that could potentially be a solution.
But I think even if you do subscribe to the fully capitalistic free market ideology, that you have to at least take I think that there needs to be far more skepticism towards the free market and far more understanding that the critiques of Marx do have value even if they don't quite have the solution yet.
Yeah, it's funny how kids who are raised without choice end up finding choice stressful, you know, raised with any choice in their schools and all that kind of stuff.
And the last point I wanted to make, and this I think is for me the core of the issue.
Save the best for last, show a little egg.
But the core of the issue for me is this.
Whenever you want to grant people political power, you do it because you're afraid of some group, corporations, capitalists, whatever it is, right?
But what you have to think of is you have to think of the group that you most fear having control of that political power.
Because that's what will always happen.
There's no magical force field between the people you view as corrupt in business and the people who are going to end up running the government.
People gravitate who have a thirst for power.
They gravitate to where that power is.
And I guess one of the things that communists have done is just basically shoot the capitalists so that the capitalists don't get a hold of that power.
But that, of course, is fairly...
There are no Facebook death squads as yet.
I mean, they outsource that to Merkel, I suppose.
But when you are looking at giving people power, in order to save you from a demon, you have to recognize the demon always gets the power, and that's what you're surrendering.
So, thanks very much for a very, very enjoyable conversation.
I wanted to remind people, first, you can check out my book, The Art of the Argument, at artoftheargument.com.
Remember, remember, remember.
The 5th of November. And to follow Lauren on Twitter at twitter.com forward slash Lauren Underbar Southern.
Pick up a copy of her great book, Barbarians, How the Baby Boomers, Immigration and Islam Screwed My Generation.
And last but not least, I'm afraid she's on Facebook.
