Sept. 19, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:53
4199 Defending Socialism
While the Merriam-Webster dictionary may define Socialism as "any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods" - the practical reality is much different. Stefan Molyneux responds to criticism to his recent arguments against socialism. The Hard Truth About Socialismhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RNZ2LjpEl4More Hard Truth About Socialismhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYY11Ro4h54Your 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
Hope you're doing well. Now, got some great responses to my recent series on socialism, which I'm gonna go through here.
Just before we begin, though, I'm going to nag you.
I apologize, but it is really necessary.
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Thank you very much. Now, here is the first question.
Stefan, if capitalism is so great, then why did it need a $787 billion bailout in 2008?
That privately owned fractional reserve banks turned into 29 trillion dollars via a recursion of deposits and loans to each other at near zero interest rate, i.e.
via legal counterfeiting.
And this is a very common error.
And I say error With all due respect to the fact that this is what people believe, this is what they've been told, and no disrespect or anything like that, but there's this belief that anything which makes money is part of capitalism.
Capitalism is just someone profited, someone made money, but if you go out and you pay 50 bucks for a Saturday night special for some, I don't know, untraceable gun or something, don't do it, but if you did, And you went and you mugged someone, and they had $100 on them.
Well, you've spent $50 and a little bit of time, and now you have $100 you've profited, and that's not part of the free market.
Why? Because it's a violation of property rights.
It's the initiation of the use of force.
It's a crime. And therefore, if you want to know what the free market is, what you want to do is you want to look, is there a gun in the equation Or not.
Now sometimes the gun is more obvious.
You know, somebody's got a gun to your ribs and they're mugging you or whatever.
And sometimes the gun is less obvious insofar as the government grants reserve banks a monopoly over the creation and production of currency.
Now the government then requires that you pay your taxes.
With said same currency, which means that you kind of have to get a hold of that currency in order to stay out of jail for non-payment of taxes.
So when the government grants a monopoly, what it's saying is that if you try to compete with this fractional reserve bank, we're going to throw you in jail.
If you do what the fractional reserve bank does, which is to create money out of thin air, you are a counterfeiter and you will go to jail, right?
So this is not part of the free market at all.
Currency has not been part of the free market.
In America for 105 years, since the creation of the Federal Reserve.
In 1913 because originally of course money was gold and What we call fiat currency paper currency was simply like a check You know like it was just a rather than carrying around gold you would carry around these pieces of paper that represented gold because They had you had to have ID and they couldn't be stolen is easily And cashed in as easily where if someone grabs your gold and runs off with it.
Well, they've they've got your gold so the Substitution of paper for the thing itself is not part of the free market.
It was never requested by the free market.
It was requested, of course, by bankers and by governments who love having this kind of power.
But if you really want to understand what fiat currency is, let me give you an example.
This is vivid and it's going to really, really stick with you.
Okay. Let's say you have some horrible infection and you go to the doctor and the doctor gives you a prescription.
Right, which actually is only required, I think Congress passed a law that only doctors could write prescriptions in the post-Second World War period, another monopoly, but anyway.
So you get this prescription, and you then go to the pharmacy, and you fill out the prescription, and you get the bottle of antibiotics, and you take the antibiotics, and make sure you take them to the end, so you don't end up helping to breed superbugs that are immune to antibiotics.
But anyway, that is the course of curing your infection.
If someone said to you, no, no, no, you've got it all wrong.
You've got it all wrong. What you want to do when you go to the doctor and he writes you a prescription is you want to eat the prescription.
You see, the prescription is the medicine.
So he says, antibiotic, eat it and it will cure.
And you'd say, well, no, the piece of paper is not the thing itself.
It gives me access to the thing itself, which is the actual antibiotic pills, but The prescription is not the medicine in the same way that fiat currency is not a gold or a basket of commodities or cryptocurrency or whatever it is, right?
It is not the thing itself.
A picture of something Is not the thing itself, right?
If you say, I want to buy an iPad on the internet, and someone says, here, this is a picture of the iPad, and you say, okay, 500 bucks, and then they mail you something, it comes in a suspiciously small envelope.
Turns out that what you bought was a picture of an iPad, you'd say, no, no, no, no, I wanted an iPad, not a picture of an iPad.
The image is not the thing itself.
Fiat currency is not money.
And a prescription is not medicine.
So that's not part of the free market at all.
Nobody would want that. Nobody would want a currency that could be inflated at will.
Nobody would want a system of rigid price controls over interest rates.
Interest rates basically are the price of borrowing money.
Money itself, we'd rather have stuff now rather than a year from now.
And so we should pay more to have something which is in higher demand, which is consumption in the present rather than in the future.
So interest rates are the price of consuming now and paying later.
And we know that price controls Lead to massive distortions in the marketplace, right?
So when OPEC jacked up the price of gasoline or oil, I guess, in the 1970s, there was a huge jump in the price of gasoline.
And then Nixon, Mr.
Free Market, right? Mr. Anti-communist.
He imposed price controls, which resulted in blocks going around the...
Like blocks of lineups for cars to try and get gas.
And then they just constantly ran out.
So we know that if you artificially set the price low of something, all you do is produce...
Shortages and if you set the price artificially high for something all you do is produce a black market and political pool allocation of that resource.
So when you have price controls you distort the heck out of the free market and when you have the government controlling the interest rates then you have price controls over one of the most essential signals that the free market gives which is Savings versus spending.
So if more people are saving, then the price of borrowing money goes down.
Why? Because there's more money. And fewer people who are borrowing it, because if you're saving, you're not spending, right?
And so when people put a lot of money in the bank, the price of interest goes down.
Now, the price of interest going down encourages people to borrow and to consume, and therefore they're going to start draining their savings, or more money is going to be lent out.
Now, as more money is lent out, the supply of money available to be lent goes down, which means that interest rates are going to rise, because supply is down, demand is high.
And this constant balance is very, very important in the maintenance and regulation of stability in the free market.
And so when people say, well, why did the free market need a government-controlled, not customer-serviced, at the point of a gun, $787 billion bailout?
Well, there's a gun involved in that, right?
It's not part of the free market.
It's not part of voluntary transactions.
It was the government creating, borrowing, begging, printing money out of thin air to hand to banks in order for banks to avoid a bankruptcy A said bankruptcy being caused, in many ways, or centrally by the government, forcing banks to lend to underqualified people in order to raise the rates of home ownership to make the economy look better.
So it's nothing to do with the free market.
And the key of that is that you say bailout, where did the bailout come from?
Bailout came from the government.
Government is not part of the free market.
Government is an agency of coercion.
It's not part of the free market. And if you say legal counterfeiting, I don't know about this 29 trillion, I mean, I've not looked that up, but If you say legal counterfeiting, well, if counterfeiting has become legal, that's not part of the free market.
So I just wanted to mention that.
Next question. If capitalism is so great, why did communism have the first man, first woman, first pet, and first satellite in space?
Why did the capitalist United States have to catch up many times over in the most technologically difficult endeavors of space technology?
Now, there's a lot to be said about this.
First of all, If you are a communist country, you can, because you basically own the economy, you can pour resources into crap like having Yuri Gagarin, well, I guess there was a dog, then a chimp, and then Yuri Gagarin fly into space.
What did that do to the average?
What did that do for the average person in Russia?
Who cares, right? We know that putting someone in space means that there are fewer bridges, worse roads, fewer buildings, there's just less stuff for the consumer.
And you can say, well, but they did invent Tang and other useful things came out of the space program.
But so what? It's still not customer-focused.
It's still not part of the free market.
So sure, communism can grab all the resources it wants and pour them into massive amounts of technological endeavors, and they can win that race.
But so what? I mean, first of all, it's kind of cheating, right?
I mean, it's like saying, well, if free competition in sports is so great, why do the people on massive steroids tend to win the race?
It's like, well, they're cheating, right? So if you can take things by force and pour hundreds of billions of dollars into a particular program, well, you get someone up in space and everyone else is kind of broke.
That's not part of the free market.
The other thing, too, you might want to read a book called East minus West equals zero.
Communism stole a lot of technology and ideas and innovations and so on from the West.
A lot of industrial espionage, a lot of just stealing left, right and center.
I mean, look at what China does with technology in the present.
And so, even if we say, well, communism got the first man into space, so what?
It's not moral, because they're using the power of the state to strip people of their resources in order to pursue a government program called getting one guy into space.
And the idea that we would judge an economic system by who gets the first guy in space, I mean, it's really sad.
And I don't mean for you, I just mean in general, think about it as really sad.
Like when I came to Canada, In the 70s, there was still talk about how Canada beat Russia in the World Hockey Tournament.
And it was like, yes!
You know, and it's like, if your entire moral system depends upon a puck going into the net in the right way and in the right place, that's pretty sad.
And if the morality or success or virtue or value of your system depends upon who gets someone into space, you don't understand the virtues and values of your system.
And so... What does it matter?
The question is, consumer goods were produced in the free market in America, which they weren't produced in Russia.
So yeah, if you have a lot of slaves, sometimes you can build some cool stuff.
Why is it that only Egypt built the pyramid?
Anyway, you understand, right? Okay, so next.
You're a smart man. Stefan, you mentioned early in the video, the workers have to negotiate for the value, so you're admitting that without help in this endeavor, the bottom workers will be taken advantage of by the more educated and greedy suits.
Who will employ every method they legally can to keep as much of the company money in their pockets as possible?
Socialism is not the answer, but what is?
I've been waiting and things are getting worse.
So yeah, you have to negotiate for your value.
If you're willing to work for very little money, then you will be paid very little money.
Now, other people may bid you up and so on, and it may happen if you're kind of passive, but you should negotiate for what you want.
You know, at the beginning of this video, it's partly why I did this exercise.
I asked for what I want, which is support for this show and for all of the ideas and arguments and evidence that I'm bringing to bear on these very complex problems.
So I asked for what I want.
Doesn't mean you're going to give it.
I hope you will find it in your heart to go to freedominradio.com and help it out, but it's up to you.
And so, yes, you have to negotiate.
Now, just think about this.
Let's say you go to a garage sale.
And let's say that you know something about stamp collecting or coin collecting.
And there's a stamp or a coin there that is more valuable than what is being asked for.
There's some coin there. They're asking for five bucks, but you know that it's worth 50 bucks or 500 bucks or whatever, right?
What are you going to do? Well, you're going to pay the $5, usually.
You're going to pay the $5, and then you're going to go off and you're going to sell over $500, and you're going to say, wow, $495, that's some pretty good antiquing, or that's some pretty good garage sale archaeology, right?
Now, are you going to go back and say to these people, well, you know, you really didn't understand the value of what you're selling.
I'm going to split the profits with you, right?
Here's $247.50 or whatever, right?
It's not likely that you will, right?
So they are undercharging, so to speak.
I mean, they're happy to get the five bucks because they don't know about the 500 bucks.
They find out about the 500 bucks and they kick themselves, right?
And we all hear this, you know, there's some painting in the basement of some aunt who died and the family move in and they find out that this painting is some Ruben sketch that's worth whatever, whatever, right?
It happens all the time.
It happens all the time.
What's the problem with it? Well, the people are happy with the five bucks, and the other people are happy selling the coin or the stamp for 500 bucks.
What's the problem? You may have regrets.
Oh, man, if I'd have known about it, this, that, and the other, right?
But if you're sensible, you say, okay, well, I made a bunch of money from my garage sale.
I can't possibly look at every single coin and every single stamp and every single thing that I'm selling to find out whether it's secretly valuable or not, right?
Because let's say you're selling 100 things.
And it's going to take you a half an hour per item to find out whether or not it's valuable or not, right?
Okay, well, that's 50 hours, right?
And the odds are it's not.
So you're going to waste more than an entire workweek trying to find out whether stuff is valuable or not.
And then, even if you find out it is valuable, well, I guess you could sell it online or whatever.
So rather than spend the 50 hours, you just sell a bunch of stuff which you're happy to sell, gets it out of the house, gets you some money and so on.
So, is it smart or sensible or wise to check the value of everything that you're selling in your garage sale just in case there's a hidden gem in there?
Well, the odds are there isn't.
And the time you're going to have to spend is quite high.
And the profit is so...
It's not really worth it. So...
Sometimes you undersell.
For sure. Sometimes you undersell.
Sometimes you ask out the second most attractive girl because you don't think the most attractive girl is going to go out with you.
Maybe she will, maybe she won't, but you aim a little lower.
That's up to you. Learning how to negotiate, learning how to ask for what you want is just a fundamental part of adulthood.
And schools don't like it, in particular, because schools don't like it if you negotiate, because you're there so that teachers can get summers off and nice pensions and retire at 55 and get healthcare benefits because they're obese or whatever, right?
So you're not taught how to negotiate in schools because...
Well, in general, you're taught by women, certainly up to high school, and women score very high on agreeableness.
They don't like to rock the boat and so on.
So the school isn't going to teach you how to negotiate because the school doesn't want a whole bunch of kids who know how to negotiate for fear that they might actually try to negotiate.
So there's a whole bunch of reasons as to why you probably, if you grow up with a single mom, you're probably not going to be great at negotiating because she wasn't able to negotiate the presence of a father in your life.
If your parents divorced, obviously you're going to see people who weren't very good at negotiating because they couldn't navigate or maintain the continuance of their marriage and so on.
So yeah, there's a bunch of things.
But the important thing to remember is that you're not negotiating with your boss.
You're basically leveraging your value to the customer.
You're leveraging your value to the customer.
So let's say that you're some great waiter.
And you're a waiter who's so great that people will actually come...
To the restaurant just to have you serve them.
And so everyone comes in and says, oh man, I want to, Bob, I want Bob to be my waiter.
He's great. He's so funny.
He's charming. He's warm. He's friendly.
He gets our food here, nice and hot.
He brings us a bill on time and so on.
Now, if you're that kind of waiter, can you ask for a bigger section?
Sure. Can you ask for more money?
Sure. If you're the cook and people just love your food, there's two cooks.
One food, people are like, eh, they send it back quite a bit.
Another cook, they're like, ah, that's the best food I've ever tasted.
Who's going to be able to successfully negotiate for a raise?
Well, the cook who... Makes the food that people really, really want to eat.
He's going to negotiate for the raise.
And get it. If the businessman is sensible, right?
Because he's negotiating based upon his value to the customers.
Because people think that your negotiation is with your boss.
Your negotiation is not with your boss.
The negotiation fundamentally is with the customers.
Now, if you are a salesman and you are selling twice what everyone else is selling, then you have twice the value, so to speak, to the company.
And so you're going to ask for a raise or...
Increase in commission or whatever it's going to be.
And that's usually baked in. Like, the more you sell, the more commission you get.
So, that is the negotiation.
So, if you want to make more money, provide more value.
It's not just a matter of willpower.
Now, the greedy suits who will employ every method they legally can to keep as much of the company money in their pockets as possible.
And there's this funny thing, like, only the bosses are greedy.
The workers are never greedy.
Well, Wanting more for less is a wonderful part of human nature.
We love that part of human nature.
It's why we're not living in caves.
It's why there are remote controls.
It's why we have phones.
We can call each other from an elevator rather than walk all the way across town.
We want something for nothing. We want to be able to talk to people without walking over.
We want to be able to eat food without growing it.
Yeah, of course we want something. We want more for less.
That's called civilization. That's called...
I mean... I'm not coming to your house.
You're not coming to my house for these conversations.
I'm broadcasting them, right? Get more listeners for less effort of walking around and speaking myself hoarse, right?
So everybody wants more for less.
Come on. I mean, the bosses want it and...
Also, so the idea that there's this big differentiation, that the workers are just hard-done-by, downtrodden, black-lunged victims of capitalism and the evil, monocled, thin-mustachioed capitalists are just laughing and giggling as they drug people and take their kidneys in a Mexican toilet or something.
I mean, this is all, it's all just cliché and nonsense and crap.
Yeah, they want to make, the bosses want to make money, and the workers want to make money, and that's the interesting negotiation.
That's the interesting negotiation.
And the customers want to make money, and everybody wants to make money, and everybody wants more for less.
It's wonderful. It's wonderful.
I mean, everybody wants the right amount of love.
Everybody wants the right amount of sex, and that's usually more than they're getting.
And everybody wants the right amount of money.
It's usually more than they're getting. And you have to negotiate with people peacefully and provide value in order to get it.
It's wonderful. It takes our desire for dominance and our desire for control and our desire for high status, it takes it out of the realm of war.
And pours it into the realm of economic productivity.
The free market sublimates and puts to massive social utility our desire to gain status, to gain resources, to control.
Right? I mean, it's beautiful.
It's harnessed male ambition in general, at least early on.
It's harnessed male ambition and turned it to the production of cell phones rather than the production of war.
Rather than going and hitting someone's head over, hitting someone over the head with a club and taking his woman by force, we now are in the free market in a competition to see who can gain the most resources to get access to the highest quality females.
You know, your daddy's rich and your mama's good looking, as the old song says.
Good! Good! I mean, would you rather it be war?
Would you rather it be violence?
Would you rather it be the mafia?
Would you rather it be what?
I mean, we're going to want to gain resources.
We're going to want to conquer the world.
We're going to want to raise in status.
The free market channels all of that to peace and productivity and cool stuff for consumers and so on.
You take that away, and what happens?
You get political cloying, you get people climbing up the dopamine hit drug tree of political power, or criminal power, or war power, and so on.
All sides of the same coin.
But you're going to have people who want more for less, and you're going to have people who want high status, and you're going to have people who want to dominate.
And if they can do that in the free market, it's better for everyone.
If they don't get access to the free market, do you think that people's desire to dominate is just going to vanish?
I mean, people in power want more money.
Okay, well, at least in the free market, they're limited by competition.
They're limited by what customers are willing to pay.
They're limited by shareholders, by stock prices, by worker revolts, by people quitting.
There's limited, right? You give these people political power, where's the limit?
Where's the end? Where is?
Well, the end is the end of civilization.
So let's just remember, whatever you say about the capitalists, you're saying about everyone.
And whatever you say about the free market is infinitely worse in the political sphere, which is really the only alternative to the free market for those who want high status, high power.
So here says someone from Europe.
He says, I'll keep my privileges, my 35 paid vacation days, my free medical care, my 8 salary compensation if I get laid off.
My benefits if I get in a bad situation.
I kind of like them.
So that is why I'm in Europe.
So just don't get any socialism.
I was so horrified when my friend in the U.S. told me that he'd been laid off and had to leave the same day.
No compensation. Here is mandatory two to four weeks.
Yeah, whatever. Enjoy capitalism.
Well, this is a well-tended piece of tax livestock.
So, first of all, my privileges.
They're not your privileges. They pay for by other people.
35 paid vacation days.
It's not paid for by the capitalists, it's paid for by the customers.
Capitalists doesn't have this magic pile of money that he can just drain to pay for your benefits.
35 paid vacation days, well, if everyone in your country, let's say this is Sweden, right?
If everyone in Sweden gets 35 paid vacation days, You haven't benefited because those vacation days have to be paid for by something and someone, and that's the customer in the end, right?
So let's say this raises the price 15% for goods.
Well, okay, the thing that used to cost $100 now costs $115.
And everything. Everything.
And it's going to accumulate, because the electricity is going to cost more, the raw materials are going to cost more, the gasoline, the transport is going to cost more, and it accumulates.
So the end consumer good is way more expensive, because every ingredient has to have this 15% addition to it.
So it's not paid. Oh, I get all this free money.
Yeah, and then you end up spending even more of it because the price of goods has gone up enormously.
If you didn't have these paid vacation goods a day, sorry, then the price of goods and services would collapse, might be cut by 50%, in which case you'd have more than enough money to take even more than 35 paid vacation days.
I mean, God! I hate to be so frustrated, but it's like, don't people think even a little bit where this money comes from?
And just look over the horizon of this endless flow of magic gold.
It's like people live in this fairy tale.
My free medical care.
No, it's not free.
My eighth salary compensation.
I don't know what that means, but I think eight weeks maybe he says.
My benefits if I get in a bad situation.
Well, again, all of this is paid for by something, by someone.
Your salary is cut, your purchasing power is cut enormously, so you just end up with less money to spend.
Now, if this wasn't given to you, and I'm not talking about the U.S. is not a free market economy that much anymore, and it's not even that high in the Economic Freedom Index.
You've got to look at places like Singapore and Hong Kong a little bit more for that, but...
So if you didn't have all this free stuff, you'd have a whole lot more money, and then you could use it to pay for vacation days, to pay for your health care, to pay for insurance against getting laid off, to pay for benefits.
You'd get more, like you're paying $2,000 a month for all of this crap, but in the free market, you'd pay like $250 or $500 a month for all of the same benefits in terms of actual purchasing power.
So, and none of these are part of capitalism, right?
It's all forced, right?
Okay, a guy says, there's no balance here.
Ah, the Hegelian guy.
There's thesis, there's antithesis, there is synthesis.
It's not an argument.
He says, there's no balance here.
You can't critique socialism without critiquing capitalism, which is why ideologues often can't often see that the market is rapidly undermining their own premises.
The morals and conservative value systems being extolled on this channel are becoming obsolete by the technology and production processes expedited by the market.
Economic progress is your enemy.
Well, that's just a word salad, right?
I mean, this is a bunch of adjectives and nouns all put together in a blender and spat out as if there's some kind of coherent story.
You can't critique socialism without critiquing capitalism.
And it's funny, you know, because this critique of capitalism, when you understand that capitalism is simply people voluntarily exchanging value for value in a free market, what's to critique?
I mean, you could say...
You could critique the people, right?
So you could say to people, Don't be so susceptible to manipulative advertising.
Okay, it's not really criticizing capitalism, criticizing human susceptibility to thinking that if you drink a lot of beer, you get a washboard stomach by a pool.
Not true. But you can't critique socialism without critiquing capitalism.
What does it mean to critique people's free choice?
It's like saying you can't critique rape without also critiquing lovemaking.
You can't critique theft without also critiquing charity.
I mean, it doesn't make any sense at all.
So, what does it mean to critique capitalism?
People are exchanging voluntary and value in the free market.
Now, you might critique the people, but criticizing the fact that it's voluntary is saying, well, not having a gun in the interaction, sure, you can critique that.
Sorry. Not having a gun in the interaction, you can critique that.
You can also equally critique having a gun in the interaction, right?
So, a guy by the road who asked you for five bucks, You can critique that.
But you should also critique the guy who's stealing from you.
He steals money from you by force.
They're both equal. You kind of got to critique the both.
You kind of don't. One is voluntary.
One is violent. One is free.
One is coercive. One is chosen.
One is violently imposed.
So, yeah.
I don't know about the rest of this stuff.
Economic progress is your enemy.
Says the guy who types on a smartphone, I assume from the typing, he types on a smartphone attached to a massive complicated data plan and using browsers and YouTube and so on, which was largely brought to the end consumer by the free market and so on.
So yeah, let me type on the most advanced economic progress stuff that economic progress is your enemy.
I don't know. It's not necessarily an instant rebuttal, but it just seems kind of silly.
All right. Guy says, I agree with this talk, of course, but I'm still having problems with people like Kylie Jenner.
She sold some lip kit and gathered wealth beyond imagination of any hard worker.
She had the privileges of being born into a wealthy family.
How is this equality of opportunity?
How is this meritocracy?
Do you really think she worked harder than all the people who are working hard and are still below the poverty line?
Let's think. That not everyone who makes a lip kit will be allowed to sell it.
I don't know about that. You might say anyone could just start a similar business, get rich, and then leave it to their kids, but that's not how it works.
The other companies have plenty of tools to destroy you early on.
Depends on type of industry, of course.
They can undercut your prices, and you can have better, more quality products who people want more, but once undercut, this might eventually destroy.
Oh, public schools, man.
Or they can sue you endlessly for some nonsense.
Even if you eventually win, it will financially destroy you.
Who will stop concurrency to destroy you?
Also, there's a fact that market gets saturated, so there's only space for so many concurrent businesses.
Not everyone can have their business.
Those are just few thoughts that occur.
Obviously, it doesn't mean I want socialism, but I'm unable to find good explanation.
The inheritance business seems inherently unfair.
Start advantage, ruining the equality of opportunity.
Yeah, so Kylie Jenner, I don't know much about her.
I think she's one of the Kardashian clan.
She's made like a billion bucks selling makeup and lipstick and so on.
And yeah, you can criticize that.
I think you can criticize that.
If you want to be more attractive, diet and exercise is the way to go.
I don't fundamentally have shows about this.
I think makeup is kind of ridiculous, which is why I don't really wear any.
So, yeah, this is who I am.
So, I don't know what that really means to say it's bad, but you can say to women, you know, why are you paying for this stupid lip kit?
Well, but again, you know, I saw it was in a mall.
It was a store over makeup.
They had a sign over makeup and it said, tools of the trade.
So maybe it's worthwhile.
Like maybe a girlfriend, a woman can spend, I don't know, what is it?
10 bucks or 20 bucks for this lip kit, whatever that is.
So she spends 10 or 20 bucks and it's enough to push a guy over the edge to invite her out.
And then he goes out and he spends a hundred bucks on her for an evening.
It takes her to dinner, dancing or whatever, right?
Okay, so she spent 10 or 20 bucks and she got $100 worth of value.
Are you going to tell her she's wrong?
You know, maybe Kylie Jenner has made a billion dollars because she's created $50 billion worth of value for women in terms of dates and retorts, transfers and so on, right?
Or maybe it's not even dates.
Maybe it's like, well, if I wear this lipstick, guys are more likely to help me with my homework so I don't have to work as much in school.
I don't know. I don't know.
Maybe guys are just more likely to buy me stuff or give me stuff.
Or maybe if I wear this lipstick, guys, I can use these beta orbiters around me to help me move.
And therefore I save 200 bucks on a moving company after spending only 20 bucks on a lip kit or something.
I don't know. I mean, I don't understand the finances of beauty because I'm a guy and so I was the one asking out and I was the one usually paying and so on.
But it's a real transfer.
Is that valuable?
Is that rich? Is that right? Is that good?
Talk to women. Talk to women and say, this is not wise, this is not right, this is not good, and see how you do.
Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but the idea that Kylie Jenner is the problem, yeah, she was born into a wealthy family.
Absolutely. And it's not equality of opportunity, but whoever said that?
Equality of opportunity is everyone can do anything, right?
That's equality of opportunity.
That doesn't mean that everyone starts at the same place.
And you can't ever have people start at the same place, you understand?
You can't ever have people start at the same place.
Inequality is foundational to life.
Inequality of singing voice, of looks, of hair distribution, of size of boobs, of intelligence, of negotiation skills, of personality traits.
There's no personality trait that doesn't have some kind of genetic basis, and the dice roll of genetics means that.
I'm sorry, but you are not gonna end up with some magic kind of equality.
Now, you may be tempted, as a lot of people are, to say, well, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a government power that allows for the massive redistribution of Saved money, you know, so you can't leave more than 50 bucks to your kids.
Okay. Well, first of all, that would just destroy people's ambition because a lot of people make money in order to provide well for their kids, to leave money to charity, and they just won't do it.
And so there's that.
Secondly, to reduce inequality in the starting position of kids, You have now created massive inequality insofar as some people have the power to strip other people of trillions of dollars.
Hmm, I wonder if that's going to corrupt anyone.
Thirdly, of course, there's this idea that Kylie Jenner or whoever are magically better off for what it is that they have.
I mean, have you never known any rich kids?
Do you know how many rich kids are miserable and depressed and anxious and drug addicted and on Adderall and You know, they're tortured by the fact that there's this regression to the means.
So people really, really good at making money are less likely to have children who are good at making or keeping money.
I just did this video that by the second generation, 70% of families' wealth is 70% of families, the money's gone.
And by the third generation, it's 90%.
Can you imagine inheriting Five million dollars and blowing it?
Can you imagine how horrible and terrible that's going to make you feel?
Can you imagine how tortuous your life is going to be?
Can you imagine growing up with all those kinds of privileges and not becoming narcissistic or grandiose?
I mean, look at these people's marriages.
Look at the dysfunction in the household.
Look at... You know, they become famous.
What was it? Kim Kardashian became famous because of a sex tape and she's on, what, her second or third marriage.
And I don't know.
It's this idea, well, they're rich and they're pretty and they're famous.
And therefore, if that was enough to make you happy, Marilyn Monroe might still be alive.
And it's just, it's not the answer you're looking for.
You know, they're so rich, they're so pretty, they have so much money, they must be so happy.
They post all these pictures of themselves on yachts and so on.
It's like, you don't know if they're happy.
And having the struggle might actually make you a lot happier.
Kylie Jenner did not earn her family's money.
She did not earn her own looks.
There have been some rumors that she's had plastic surgery.
I don't know, but she didn't earn her own looks.
They either bought for her by plastic surgeons or plastic surgery, or she was just born that way, in which case she didn't earn it.
So getting a whole bunch of money for things that you didn't earn, I guess it looks good from the outside, but I've kind of seen it from the inside.
It's not very pretty, so envy.
Envy is terrible. Now this idea that if you try and enter into some marketplace, they're going to lower their prices and drive you out of business and so on, it doesn't happen.
Like, people say this kind of stuff.
But it doesn't actually, there's not actually a record of it in the free market.
There's really not a record of it in the free market that you, someone's coming into your marketplace and so you lower your prices and you put them out of business and then you raise your prices like crazy.
Well, as soon as you raise your prices, other people are going to come in.
And there's just not evidence of it because there's so many people who can compete with you.
Do you know how many, like have you ever been to a drugstore, like a pharmacy?
Have you ever seen like these acres and acres of like weird crap you can put on your face to make yourself look prettier?
I mean, I'm sorry, it's like a crazy joker production chemical factory in there.
People basically, you know, you need this cream, this under-eye cream.
I remember some woman saying to me once that if you're going to, you get a little dab of the cream, you see, and you have to rub around your eyes with this, you know, I don't know what finger that is, the one next to the pinky.
And that way you don't, you know, push too hard.
And she was like 300 pounds, so I don't think that this particular thing was the most important.
But just, women love this stuff.
They love this stuff.
It's one of the delightfully incomprehensible things about women.
You know, their relationship to this stuff is like men's relationship to technology.
Kind of incomprehensible, kind of delightful.
So... Because there's so many people competing in the makeup space, the idea that you can ward off all competitors by lowering your prices.
If you lower your prices below production costs, all that happens is you go into debt.
And if you go into debt, then you have to pay the interest in principle on that debt overhead, which means that you've got to artificially raise or you've got to raise above your former market price.
So maybe you sell something for $10.
Someone comes into the marketplace, you lower it to $5.
How long does it take to wipe them out?
Maybe a year. So you're selling a year at half-priced products.
You're going to go millions and millions and millions of dollars into debt.
And then you won't be able to sell your stuff for $10 anymore afterwards because you have to pay off this debt.
Not just the interest, but the principal, which means you've got to charge $15 or $10 for something you used to be able to sell.
Oh, you've got to charge $15 for something you used to be able to sell for $5.
Now, if you charge $15, that opens up another option for someone to come into the marketplace and undersell you because they don't have your debt.
And then you say, well, we'll just drop it down to five bucks again.
It's like, well, no, you can't because you've already done that and you're already in debt.
So you just think these things through.
That's all. All right.
How many people died because of capitalism, a.k.a.
imperialism, in colonialism and wars after World War II? A lot.
And that's got nothing to do with the free market.
See, imperialism... Colonialism, these are all government programs.
They're not things that are voluntarily done by people.
You have to conscript the money, you have to conscript the people, you have to...
I mean, this paint the map your favorite color is a giant government program.
I get this a lot where people say, oh, you're just preaching to the choir, Steph.
I mean, people who already agree with you are watching this.
Like, dude, if you had this thought, I can't even tell you how lazy you are.
Oh, Steph, you're only preaching to the choir.
You can share it anywhere you want, man.
I make the videos, and if you say, well, I'm just talking to an echo chamber, go post these videos somewhere else.
Like, this idea that it's up to me.
You're part of the conversation of...
Philosophy. You're part of healing the world.
You're part of making the world a better place.
Go take these ideas and set up a Toastmasters introduction to your local socialist club.
Go have a debate somewhere. Go post it somewhere.
Go post it on some leftist thing.
Go engage with people.
Go do something! For God's sake, you're just preaching to the choir.
It's like you can invite anyone you want into the church.
I do. I speak with lots of people who I disagree with or who disagree with me.
It's great. So, I don't know.
You're just preaching to the choir.
It's a way of making, I guess, trying to make me feel impotent.
It's like, well, you're just telling me that you care about these ideas, but you're just too damn lazy to go and bring them to the attention of other people.
Well, you're the problem, not me.
So, someone has a very good point.
You got it wrong about Walmart.
People don't want to shop at Walmart, I was saying, that the customers decide.
The problem is central banks are printing trillions of dollars to pump stocks up to sometimes 100 times their true...
Value. Companies like Walmart come into your town with billions of dollars of stolen money, A.K.A. printed money from Wall Street.
They buy the land for cash.
They build the building with free cash.
They use fancy lawyers to churn their profits in a circle jerk to avoid most of the taxes, and our government allows them to import everything they sell from slave countries.
Also, when you have this massive overprinting of money, there is a lot of inflation.
You are forced to shop at Walmart. If Walmart had to compete to earn all the money they used to expand with, then they would go bankrupt because people hate them!
For example, if I wanted to open up a sandwich shop, I have to pay rent.
I get nothing free. I have to pay full taxes with no tax avoidance scamming.
And I have to pay everything from profits from my customers.
So how can I compete against Subway that has billions of dollars of free, stolen money and barely pays any taxes?
So this is what the guy said.
That's a great point. It's a great point.
I never want people to imagine that when I use these kinds of analogies, I'm defending every piece of regulation and monstrous Hammurabi on steroids style tax code that everybody labors under.
There's a lot of truth in this.
The government does print massive amounts of money and because Stock investments are usually taxed at less than income.
People have a massive incentive to pour all their money into the stock market.
It does drive up value. They do get free stuff, so to speak.
Absolutely true. Absolutely right.
And all of these interferences in the free market are absolutely wrong.
I'm talking about free market principles using contemporary examples because it's just easier when people think Walmart, they know what I'm talking about.
This doesn't mean that I want to justify everything that happens.
But of course, if you're a business owner and you can, Legally, like there's tax evasion, which is illegal.
There's tax avoidance, which is legal ways of minimizing your taxes.
You have to. I mean, that's what you have to do if you're the boss.
You don't just voluntarily pay a whole bunch of extra taxes.
You won't be the boss for very long, and you might, in fact, get sued for not fulfilling your legal responsibility or fiduciary duty to maximize the value.
So, you know, hate the game, not the player.
All right, so...
Someone said, I think this video should be part of a series so that you get to these...
Oh, sorry, he was a little bit earlier, yeah.
He says, this is good, but again, you don't address the points you initially said in your first video.
I think this video should be part of a series so that you get to those initial points.
Those initial points were emotionally driven, and that is what needs to be addressed.
These are good arguments, but the young socialists need to be addressed on their terms, terms that counter their feelings.
I think that perhaps you shouldn't stress the violence of the state.
Most young people won't appreciate that argument and think that you're delusional to carry on with that thinking.
Their idea of the state is that it provides services, roads, hospitals, etc.
Address the idea that state providing services doesn't mean it's socialist, and that taxation is needed to have those services, so that tax is not a total evil, and that capitalists are not against it in principle.
Many young people look to Europe for their model of socialism, so address that, which is quite a hard problem compared to Venezuela.
So, the state provides services, roads, hospitals, etc.
Yeah, the state does provide services.
So what? The question isn't, does the slave owner give dental care to his slaves?
The question is, is it moral?
Is the entire situation moral or not?
So yeah, if you get unjustly locked into a prison, and these are extreme examples, but just for the sake of principle, right?
If you get unjustly locked into some prison cell, guess what?
They're going to provide you food.
They're providing you shelter.
They're going to provide you at least rudimentary health care and so on.
Does that mean that it's right?
Well, they're providing you services, right?
They're giving you services. So, sure, the government provides hospitals.
And there's this fundamental fallacy which says that when the government provides something, if the government doesn't provide it, it won't be provided, right?
I mean, let's say there's a rock in the middle of a stream, and the water's all going around the rock.
And if you lift that rock, well, everything changes, right?
The water's going to rush into the hole even more so because there's a depression and so on.
It's not just going to continue to go around.
When you change things, things change, you know, I'd sort of put it that.
Basically, so yeah, the government provides roads for sure.
I very strongly doubt that roads are the very best way that things should be transported.
Roads were... Certainly the interstate highway was put in under...
Well, it was put in after the Second World War in order to allow for the free movement of the military around America, if there was a nuclear war or something.
And is that the best way that society should be organized?
I don't know. You get all these, quote, free roads and still paid for by debt.
You get all these free roads.
What happens is, well, people get a whole bunch of cars, and then they drive around a lot, and then they move around a lot, and then the whole society gets structured around these, quote, free roads that end up with a highly mobile society that's dependent upon Middle Eastern oil.
And the next thing you know, well, the Middle East is expanding ideologically and physically quite quickly because they stole all the Western technology and companies after the Second World War because Europe and North America were exhausted from the Second World War.
So who knows?
I don't know if roads are the best way that society should be organized.
I don't know. Maybe we'd have teleportation.
Maybe we'd have more 3D printing movement of stuff.
Maybe people would be more clustered together.
Maybe there'd be better communities.
Maybe there would certainly be far less environmental degradation if the roads weren't all, quote, free.
There'd still be some roads. Maybe there'd be jetpacks.
Maybe there'd be personal helicopters.
I don't know. I have no idea.
But once the government puts a structure in place, it's like digging a trench, right?
And it's guiding water.
You dig the trench and the water that's coming down that goes into the trench follows that way.
I don't know. I mean, is it right, Rhodes?
Is the way that the government provides healthcare at the moment optimal?
No. I mean, I had to flee from Canada to America for any reasonable kind of healthcare.
I don't know. When people are on Medicare and Medicaid, their prognosis, their outcomes are actually worse than if they're not.
So... It's sort of like saying, well, the slaves, you see, they pick all the cotton.
They pick all the fruit. They pick all the food.
And if the government isn't providing, you know, free labor in the form of enforcing slave laws, well, then this stuff's all just going to rot in the field.
It's like, no. What happens is you develop giant combine harvesters.
There are robots now that can pick raspberries and strawberries and grapes and all that.
I mean, things change.
And if you're going to look to Europe and say, wow, you see, Europe has all these wonderful welfare state socialist models and so on, it's like, yes.
And a lot of people from the Middle East and from Africa are coming to Europe to get all this free stuff.
Does that seem like a very good deal to everyone?
Does that seem like a sustainable thing?
Europe, Sweden is going to be 30% Muslim in just a couple decades.
And they're coming there for, a lot of them are coming there for the free stuff.
So you get this giant welfare state, oh, it's wonderful.
And then everyone comes in, and the government doesn't have a chance, really, or doesn't, the people don't really have a chance to say no, and they're not really asked about it.
Okay, the last one here says by, um...
By being a philosopher, you should know the limits of reason.
That it can't cure all bad thinking like some magic wand.
So you have to harness emotion to help with your reasons.
More broadly, you need to inspect emotion, which you did in this video, and specifically look at that, the heart and not the head.
I think it's part of the same question.
I don't know. It's annoying, of course, when people come up with these ridiculous false dichotomies when they straw man your position.
When did I ever say reason cures all bad thinking like some magic wand?
If I had access to magic, why do I have over 4,000 shows?
I'd just use magic, right?
So you have to harness emotion to help with your reasons?
I don't know. It's a funny thing, too.
And I mean, I'm torn about this.
Because, you know, let's say you sing a song and people say, you know, you hit a bad note.
The answer isn't always, well, yeah, you sing it better, right?
Because they can hear, they have ears.
So it's not like everyone who tells me how to improve what I'm doing, they don't have to do it better.
But they can. Because the capacity to think is not necessarily the same as having a good or bad singing voice, right?
Like Simon Cowell probably can't sing, but he can say he has ears and he's got judgment, got a good experience in the music industry and so on.
So he can judge these things.
If you say, I'm a great singer, you're singing badly, then I'd like to hear how you sing it better, right?
I mean, if you're Freddie Mercury, you can tell me you're not hitting that downscale note after the falsetto on somebody to love quite right.
And it's like, yeah, I think I've only done that once in my life.
And even George Michael didn't try it when he did the live version of that song.
If someone can do these wonderful...
So people are always like, well, Steph, you just need to do this.
You need to do that. It's like, you got a webcam?
Show me. Inspire me.
Because stuff like this, you got to harness emotion to help with your reason.
Inspect emotion. Look at that.
The heart. I don't know what to do with any of that.
Like people who just give me generalities, give me something specific.
You need to be healthier.
You need to do better.
You need to improve. I mean, you're not a coach if you just have some athlete and say, well, you need to just improve.
You need to get better at your sport.
It's like, well, yeah. Can you tell me anything specific I need to do?
No! Well, then you're a crap coach and I should not listen to you.
So, thanks very much.
I look forward to your feedback on these.
I can continue going with the series if you find it valuable.
