Nov. 21, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:43
4250 The Horrible Terrible No Good Carlson/Shapiro Debate
Tucker Carlson squares off against Ben Shapiro about economics, freedom and the destructive side of capitalism. The level of ignorance was shocking, the debate reached levels of sophistry and manipulation that shouldn't even be possible, and Tucker Carlson needs to start shipping physical copies of his show to help truckers!Stefan Molyneux, Host of Freedomain Radio, breaks down the entire mess for you.▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour 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▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
The challenge that I have undertaken as a public intellectual is to not disappoint you while at the same time remaining in close adherence to the truth and reason and evidence.
And it's a tough act.
It's a tough balance. I embrace it with enthusiasm and appreciate all of your support.
Thus, I hope you can understand why, to me, it was a little shocking and somewhat disappointing to see the debate between Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro that aired recently.
So, I'm just going to zoom in on one particular part about driverless trucks, which I think has within it embedded a huge amount of information and arguments and morality regarding freedom and independence.
Tucker Carlson, who I generally like, did discharge a B-52's worth of emotional bombast on Ben Shapiro.
And it is tough when you are faced with somebody who is absolutely kneeling at the feet of their own populist emotional rhetoric to counter it, because it looks kind of mean.
And basically, the argument went something like this.
So... Ben Shapiro asked Tucker Carlson if he, Tucker, would ban, if he was the president, would ban driverless trucks, or if he was in charge of that agency of the government, would he ban driverless trucks?
Now, that's a complex question for sure, and there's lots of nuance in it, none of which was addressed by Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson basically jimmied up his sophistry and said, Are you kidding?
Absolutely! I would ban driverless trucks.
Because driving for a living is the single most common job for high school educated men in all 50 years.
And this, he said, is the same group whose wages have declined by 11% over the past 30 years.
Family will be destroyed.
It will be a horror show.
And we're going to end up as pure communism if we don't ban driverless trucks.
Now, there was a lot of like, well, the greater good is protecting your citizens.
And I just want a country where people can have safe and happy and prosperous lives.
And... It's like calling yourself an expert doctor or surgeon because you say, I just want people to be healthy.
Saying it is a whole lot different from being able to achieve it.
And he did also pull the rhetorical device to say, well, the free market, I love capitalism, but it shouldn't be a religion where we sacrifice everyone on the altar of abstract ideals like free trade and so on.
And he did say, Tucker did say, well, this is why half of young people or more like socialism.
Because, you know, they can't get ahead, they can't dig themselves out from under student loans, they can't afford to buy houses, let alone cars, and so on.
And so he said, yeah, this is why people like socialism, and we've got to fix it by banning new industries.
And he also made the case that communism, he said, happened.
This is Tucker Carlson. Communism happened because of a lack of management of the transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy.
And that is...
It's patently false. Communism happened because a small, dedicated group of revolutionaries seized power.
Communism happened, at least in, you could argue around the world, but in general, communism happened in Russia because America entered the First World War.
This is the horrible, demonic dominoes you set in motion when you use violent government power in the pursuit of political or geopolitical ends.
So the United States ended the First World War, and Germany, otherwise everybody would have fought towards standstill, and everybody would have gone back home, and hopefully the brutal lesson of Western European war in a post-industrial society would have been learned, and there would not have been a Second World War.
But instead, America jumped in to the First World War, which caused Germany to panic and knew that it needed to get Russia off its...
It's eastern borders, and therefore the German government funded a group of revolutionaries to foment a communist revolution in Russia.
So, of course, Wilson entered into the war in order to make the world safe for democracy and then sunk massive amounts of, well, basically the entire population of Russia and then Eastern Europe after the Second World War.
Shortly thereafter, China, and then of course Korea, North Korea, North Vietnam, and Cambodia, and Cuba, and you name it, all because originally America decided to enter into the First World War, because you don't know what happens when you unleash the dogs of war.
So communism happened because of government intervention.
Communism happened because the fascism of the draft was imposed upon American men.
They were sent to Europe, and Germany then took Russia out of the war by fomenting revolution rather than fighting on the front.
So the idea that, well, you see, it was just a lack of management of the transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy, it's just a shocking lack of knowledge of history.
And, of course, all societies had challenges moving from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy.
America and France and Holland and the United Kingdom and Canada.
It was all tough.
So why didn't they all go, "Communists?" Well, that doesn't really explain anything.
But it is basically a weird kind of abstract threat that people sometimes make when they're in debates.
You see, if we allow for driverless trucks in America, we're going to end up grinding and being ground into human waste and paste under the boots, heels, and gun butts of a totalitarian communist dictatorship.
So do you want your driverless trucks or do you want your basic freedoms?
And of course, this is not a good argument.
It's not an argument at all. And Tucker Carlson was reduced to mealy-mouthed, whore-marked-card platitudes like, I just want decent people to live happy lives.
Yeah, I don't even know.
So he says that the driverless trucks would put 10 million men out of work, it would destroy families, it would be a horrible thing for society, and again, would propel America towards a communist-style dictatorship.
So... That's kind of hysterical.
It's not an argument, of course.
The appeal to disastrous consequences is never an argument.
It's like saying, well, you see, we can't end slavery because, you see, nobody will pick the food, nobody will pick the cotton, so we'll all starve to death.
And surely, even the slaves would starve to death, and surely the slaves would rather live than die, and surely the slaves would rather remain slaves than starve to death, and you can invent dire consequences.
For every proposition. And this race for disaster scenario panic mongering is not how civilized men and women resolve disputes about the use of force in society.
You appeal to principle. Slavery is wrong.
I don't care what happens after slavery.
Slavery is wrong. And giving the government the massive power to throw people in jail who are trying to generate a new industry is wrong and immoral.
It's like, well, you see, we don't want a giant authoritarian government controlling the economy, so the way we save ourselves from that is give the giant government the massive power to completely destroy a new industry.
You see, we have to save capitalism by giving government power to control massive sectors of the economy through central planning.
You see, that's how we save capitalism.
A wonderful operation.
The cancer was cured. Unfortunately, the patient was beheaded.
So... Now, this idea...
That new technology is going to throw huge numbers of people out of work, and it's a disaster, therefore we have to prevent that new technology, is a terrible and immoral argument.
I mean, let me give you an example.
So, at the turn of the last century in America, 90% or so of people were involved in farming.
Why? Because farming was largely manual labor, and therefore 90% of the entire economy was It was composed of people working in the agricultural sector.
Now, in America, that's about 2%.
Now, that's less than a century.
That's about a century and a bit.
So that's a huge shift.
90% down to less than 2%.
Now, you could say, of course, oh my gosh.
If we're going to get rid of 88% of the entire economy...
Not just a sector.
The entire economy.
We're going to get rid of 88% of people's jobs in the entire economy.
I mean, if you look at...
What a disaster! What a mess!
What a butt, right? Now, of course, there were paroxysms and booms and busts and cycles and all of that in the 20th century, but they didn't really have much to do with the free market.
They had to do with Federal Reserve control of interest rates and money supply and the odd war and the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt put in massive government programs and huge government controls and massive union-reinforcing restrictions on labor mobility...
During the 13-year Great Depression that culminated in the god-awful 50 million man and woman slaughter of the Second World War.
So the idea that, well, you see, all of these problems are to do with the free market is false.
It's not true at all.
So you could say, wow, you know, if you invent farm machinery, you get combine harvesters and so on.
By gosh, you are going to put 88% of the men in this country out of work.
So we can't...
Allow for farm machinery.
See, it's far more.
It's far more than what's going to happen with driverless cars.
And nobody sits there and says, well, you know, what we need to do is ban farm machinery so everyone has a job, because we understand, those of us who are reasonably well-educated in morality, private property, free market principles, volunteerism, we understand that you...
That would be terrible. It would make everyone poor to ban farm machinery, everybody going back.
You can mow your grass, if you've got a big lawn, you can mow it with an electric mower, a gas mower, or you can mow it by hand, with a hand mower, which I have done, and it's really not very pretty.
Or, you see, what you can do is you can get a pair of pinking shears, or children's scissors, or a nail file to cut.
Wow, you're going to be really busy all day.
Is it going to be productive?
No. So this idea, well, I like machinery, I like the free market, but...
We have to ban all these driverless cars because people have jobs already.
Come on. And it's so...
It's so sad.
It's so ridiculous.
Like, if people want to understand how the free market works, fear-mongering is pathetic.
And fear-mongering is anti-intellectual.
It's a way to attempt to use scary syllables to tickle the fight-or-flight mechanism so people run away from freedom.
That's all it is. Cattle prod straight into the...
Fight or flight, straight into the hypothalamus, and boom!
You just run and recoil! It's horrible, it's tragic.
See, I notice, you just look in the mirror.
If you want to understand what freedom is, just look in the mirror, look at what you want, and look at what you do.
So Tucker Carlson, interestingly enough, distributes his show on YouTube, distributes his show on television, and I assume a bunch of other online outlets, maybe even the podcast, I don't know.
See, Tucker Carlson doesn't record a show And then rely on DVDs or CDs or VHS tapes, for that matter, in order to distribute his show.
See, if he did... If he didn't use YouTube, if he didn't use television, I forget the television, let's just say YouTube, because people want to see his show, they can't figure it out, how to get it, or they can't get it, they're not by the TV when it happens, so he could sell DVDs, let's say. Now, if he sold a lot of DVDs rather than putting his show on YouTube, what would happen, you see, is a lot of truckers would be required to deliver those DVDs to people's houses.
Ooh, that's interesting.
So by putting his show on YouTube, Tucker Carlson is denying truckers' income, is denying truckers their value.
He's driving down the wages of truckers by lowering the demand for their services by putting his stuff out online.
But you see, the fact that he is willing to shaft truckers by making his stuff available online...
Doesn't have anything to do with anything.
We should ban driverless trucks because we really care about the truckers.
But how much does Tucker Carlson care about the truckers?
Well, he will distribute his show online rather than hire truckers.
Now, Ben Shapiro, not great.
Not great. And when you get that level of emotional bombast from someone, you have to meet it with moral outrage.
You can't just back off and say, well, you know, but...
We've got a free market principle and slippery slope.
You've got to say, no, that's terrible what you're talking about.
We're talking about giving the government the power to put guns against the head of people who want to start an industry and throw them in jail if they try to start that industry.
That's evil. That's immoral what you're talking about, Tucker.
That's the initiation of the use of force against peaceful people who simply want to provide a service in the free market.
What you're talking about, you see, Tucker...
This is the trick that the communists do, is they will try and trick you into fascism as a response to communism.
You see, so public control but private ownership of the means of production, that's fascism.
Public control and public ownership of the means of production, that's communism.
But you see, public control but private ownership of the means of production, that's fascism.
So if you want the government to control which industries last and which industries don't last and what's allowed and what's not allowed, that's central planning.
So they've tricked you into fascism as a response to communism and therefore both squeeze and destroy the free market.
And Tucker should know that by now.
Good heavens. He's, uh...
So, Tucker Carlson says, sorry, Ben Shapiro says, well, people can move.
If there's no jobs where they are, people can move.
And, I mean, Tucker Carlson, like, leaving no emotionally manipulative stone unturned, says, so they must pick up and leave the graves of their fathers and their mothers, and it's like...
So, you know, just out of curiosity, see, if moving for economic opportunity...
It's so terrible. Well, then, of course, Tucker Carlson should want completely closed borders because, you see, the people who come to America are certainly leaving the graves of their fathers and mothers, not even in the same country, but for India and Pakistan and Somalia and Libya and you name it.
They're leaving the graves of their fathers.
That's terrible. People shouldn't move for economic reasons, so close the borders.
No immigration. I don't know.
Maybe he is, but I doubt it.
Leave the graves of their fathers.
So, just out of curiosity, I looked up Tucker Carlson.
See, he thinks it's just horrifying, you see, that people might want to move for the sake of economic opportunity, because they will leave the aforementioned graves of their fathers and their mothers.
So, Tucker Carlson, interestingly enough, has constantly moved to pursue job opportunities as a broadcaster and as a columnist and so on.
So... I don't even know.
Like, how do you explain these things?
Look in the mirror. See what you're doing.
And that probably has a lot to do With what other people wouldn't mind doing either.
So you see, it's fine for Tucker Carlson to move to pursue economic opportunities, but for other people, it's uprooting them from their deeply held and foundational communities, and their spitting and shitting on the graves of their mothers and their fathers, and it's like, come on, man, look in the mirror! You moved to pursue economic opportunities!
Nothing wrong with other people doing it.
So, this idea that...
If you have a bunch of people who are all suddenly, quote, out of work, what are you going to do with them?
How could this possibly be handled?
But it has been handled in the past.
So let's look at the end of the Second World War.
So at the end of the Second World War, the United States had more than 12 million men and, brackets, women, in the armed forces.
So 12 million men...
And of course, think of all of the other men and bracket women who were involved in supplying the armed forces and this, that, and the other, right?
So there are millions of millions, tens of millions of people either directly in the armed forces or in industries working to supply the armed forces in the Second World War.
Tens of millions of people. 7.6 million of the men were stationed abroad.
So a funny thing happened.
At the end of the Second World War, you had tens of millions of people whose jobs evaporated, either directly as soldiers or indirectly in supplying the military-industrial complex.
Tens of millions of men and a couple of women.
All their jobs evaporated.
Now, there was all of these plans.
All of these plans say, oh, we've got to have this big, giant government agency to match up people returning home from the war to their job opportunities and make sure that everyone...
Chaos, panic, nastiness, right?
People got jobs like that.
The prosperity of the 50s came out of the relative free market that occurred in the 40s, mid to late 40s, after the end of the Second World War.
By the time they had even thought about getting some plans going with the government job resettlement program, or whatever the hell it was called, everyone had come home and found jobs already.
Tens of millions of people whose jobs completely vanished, and there was virtually no transitional difficulty.
So that's kind of important.
There is a mess in the American economy, as there is in the West.
And the mess has to do with a whole bunch of things, which I'll just touch on very briefly here.
And one more government program called Banning Driverless Trucks is not going to solve these problems.
It's not going to make it worse. It's a band-aid over a sucking chest wound.
So first of all, 10 million men, after 12 years of government education, are only fit to turn wheels and look at lines on a road.
I know, there's more to it than that.
But, you know...
So the fact that there are all these terrible government schools out there means that these people come out and they're really only fit to sit and drive.
So that's pretty terrible.
If you improve government schools then people will be able to think and reason and they'll be better and then they won't want jobs as truckers and it really won't matter.
So that's one thing that could be done.
The welfare state and unemployment insurance has people frozen in time, right?
So you know what happens. You lose your job in a small town And you just sit around until your unemployment insurance runs out, and then you try and figure out something else to do.
Maybe you go on welfare if you're a woman.
Maybe you get knocked up and raise your kids without a father to make sure you get child benefits and so on.
But everyone's got kind of stuck.
It is kind of funny to me as well that Tucker Carlson says, Ah, you leave the grave of your fathers, right?
America, of course, was founded by people who left the grave of their fathers and traveled across an entirely, exquisitely dangerous and disease-infected crossing across the Atlantic to get to America.
But you see now... People can't move from Idaho to Kansas because, I don't know, the ghosts of their parents, I don't know.
So there is that mess.
Of course, we have paid a lot of irresponsible people to have children through the welfare state, and irresponsibility, lack of conscientiousness, is a genetically transmitted characteristic.
So we have created, it's not entirely, but there's no aspect of personality that doesn't have a significant genetic impact.
Component, like IQ itself.
80% of your IQ when you're in your late teens is genetic, and nobody knows how to really alter or change it from there.
So that's sort of basic reality.
So it's a giant mess.
It's a giant mess. And the entire interstate road system, I know I'm going back, but this is the root of these kinds of problems.
Like if you want to look at the root of Of the problem of healthcare insurance, you have to go back to the fact that in the Second World War, companies weren't allowed by the government to give raises to their employees, so they decided to pay their health insurance instead.
That's the only reason why your health insurance is bound to your job, which creates a lot of power for the employers now, because if they fire you, you lose your health insurance, and if you've got pre-existing conditions, that makes you very easy to control and very easy to dominate and very easy to bully from an economic standpoint.
But it's the result of a government program.
It's not the result of the free market.
So if you go back, the entire interstate highway system was built largely by Eisenhower as a way of allowing the army to move around America in the event of a nuclear war.
It's still being paid for, by the way.
I did a speech on this some years ago in Philadelphia, I think.
So the entire interstate highway system was not economically driven by free market requirements.
It was just a giant government program that made America very spread out, very reliant on cars, and made trucking a big industry that it otherwise would not have been as much of.
Driverless trucks will be safer.
Well, we know that because the only way that insurance companies will insure driverless trucks is if they're safer than human beings.
So how many people do you think should die at the hands of truck drivers falling asleep or being inattentive or checking Twitter while they rocket along at 60 miles an hour or 55 miles an hour?
Who knows, right? So that's an important principle.
And the principle as well.
Putting a robot truck on the road is not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
The non-aggression principle, also known as the porcupine principle of self-defense, says you're only allowed to use force in self-defense.
You can't initiate the use of force against someone else.
Putting a robot truck on the road is not an act of criminal aggression against someone else.
So... So then, of course, what people say is, okay, well, let's say we allow these driverless trucks out on the road.
Well, you see, there's all these people that are going to be thrown out of work, so now we need a big, giant government program to retrain them for other industries, which is a terrible idea.
First of all, the government doesn't have any clue.
What job requirements are out there?
Doesn't have any clue what new industries are emerging.
Anybody who knows for sure which new industries are emerging are not in a million years working for the government.
You know what they're doing? They're investing their own money to make themselves multi-zillionaires.
Because if you are the kind of person who can figure out which of the new industries and which are going to grow and which are going to be economically valuable, then you shouldn't be an investor.
You're not going to be a bureaucrat in some government program.
So they're going to take billions and billions of dollars out of the economy to train people for jobs that will never materialize, and those jobs, even more jobs would have materialized if they hadn't taken billions of dollars out of the economy to train people for jobs that aren't there.
So, I'm sorry, like, I wish there was a magic, bloody violent laser Glock wand that we could wave to make the world a paradise by pointing guns at people, but we can't.
It just doesn't work.
So, here's the basic fact.
Once the technology is invented, people are going to use it.
They're going to use it around the world.
They're going to use it in China. They're going to use it in India.
They're going to use it in Hong Kong. They're going to use it all over the place.
So how are you going to ban driverless trucks in your own economic environment without...
and also ban it overseas so that nobody compete with you?
So let's just take a little quick example, and this is all just made-up numbers, but I hope you get the principle.
So let's say that there's a $1,000 computer, and let's say that 10%...
Of the cost of that $1,000 computer is driving.
It's the truck that has to drive it all over the place, right?
So let's say that driverless trucks save 50% off that 10%.
So now you're saving $50 on your $1,000 computer.
So if you use driverless trucks, your $1,000 computer is now only $950.
That's pretty good, right?
And so then what else is a 5% saving?
Could be higher, could be lower than ring matter, right?
So, you've got $1,000 in your pocket, you're going to go and buy the computer, you get to the store, and it's $950.
So you pay your $950, you've got your $50 left over in your pocket, right?
What are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with it?
Well, you're going to go spend it somewhere else, probably, right?
Or, you're going to go and put it in the bank, in which case the bank may lend it out to other entrepreneurs to build businesses or whatever, right?
Even if you stick it under a mattress, you're incrementally raising the value of everyone else's money by taking yours out of circulation.
A tiny, tiny bit, but it's still there.
There's nothing you can do, really, with that money that isn't going to make something more valuable somewhere else in the economy.
So, the $50, like everyone sees, oh, the truck drivers lose their jobs.
They say, oh, well, the price of computers goes down a little bit.
But then what happens is you take that money, you spend it on other things.
So let's say you go and buy a sound card for your new computer.
Okay, well now there's jobs in the sound card factory.
Let's say that you go out for lunch.
Well, now there's restaurant jobs.
Let's say whatever. It could be any number of things, right?
So that $50 extra, that's called economic growth, which means you're producing the same good, a computer, for $50 less.
That's how the economy grows.
That's why we have any kind of wealth And the only way to achieve those gains in any kind of consistent way is to allow for the free market to operate.
So if you ban the driverless trucks in your country, what happens is Japan or China or other places will allow the driverless trucks, and therefore their computers will be able to underbid the Your computers, right? So, because if you go to the store, there's an American driven by human beings computer for $1,000 and then there's a Japanese robot truck computer, that's a phrase, for $950 people are going to pay the $950 one.
And what that means is that the American computer companies are going to go out of business, which means more people get thrown out of work.
What that means then is the American computer companies don't need truckers because they're out of business, so there's fewer jobs for truckers.
It's like, it doesn't matter! Once the technology's there, I don't mean to sound helpless, but there's no economic dictator around the world, although I'm sure the EU's trying.
It's just the reality of how things play out in the free market.
Because this is the basic intelligence test.
That the free market requires.
Like, there's no accident that all these people from the third world are voting for socialism.
All the people from Mexico are voting for socialism because they come from low IQ groups.
And low IQ groups want stuff in the here and now.
It's an intelligence test to say, are you pro-socialism?
To the average person. The elites, they're all about management and control.
It's another matter. But the average person, if they say, wow, I really want free university, right?
What's an intelligence test?
Do you believe there's such a thing as free?
Well, if you do, it's hard to make the case you should be free to vote, but no, there's no such thing as free.
If people say, I want to tax the rich more, for the most part, they're not rich.
Or if they are rich, they're just trying to buy a populace by pretending that they don't have tax breaks elsewhere.
So, it's just like an intelligence test.
Do you want the government to ban driverless trucks and keep 10 million American workers in their jobs?
Well, now, you've just given the government the power to ban entire industries.
And you're now crippling industries that can't compete with foreign economies that use driverless trucks.
Everybody goes out of business, everybody collapses, but the government power remains forever.
And now, every industry that's threatened by growth, by progress, by competition, is going to run to the government and say, hey, you did it with the truck drivers, now you've got to do it with us.
I'm telling you, it's personal to me, because, again, this is an IQ test.
How is this power going to be wielded against others?
Well, it's quite simple. The mainstream media is dying.
Yay! Mainstream media is dying.
And they're going to run to the government, and they do already in some places.
Canadian mainstream media wants money from the government and get it directly sometimes.
The mainstream media is going to run to the government, and they're going to say, we're essential for democracy, like all this kind of crap, right?
And they're going to say, well, you see, we're running out of money, and that's terrible.
And so we need you, the government, to...
Either give us money directly, which taxes people in the alternative media and others, of course, to pay for all of this, or they're going to say, we want you to ban our competition.
Because this whole ban driverless truck thing is just about banning competition.
That's all it is. Banning competition for trucks.
And if the horse and buggy manufacturers had had their way, there'd be no such thing as the car.
And Tucker Carlson would be able to weep about imaginary people leaving imaginary graves for very real, tangible, economic benefits.
But they're going to say, well, you've got to ban alternative media because they're destroying our profits in the same way that you have to ban driverless trucks because they're destroying the profits of existing truckers.
You understand? That's just how it's going to play.
And people who can't see that, I'm not saying Tucker Carlson is low IQ, he's smart.
But he's just not thinking things through.
Or he has bad advisors.
Or he's just a guy who wants to keep his television show by appealing to populism and vaguely positive phrases like, I want nice people to have nice things in a nice environment.
Pretty much Aristotelian levels of political analysis right there.
Because it comes down to this.
In the free trade...
And this is what Bastiat referred to as the seen versus the unseen.
The seen versus the unseen.
If lots of truckers lose their jobs, they make a big fuss because they know that their jobs are being lost and they know that it's the driverless trucks that are doing it.
So they get mad and they get upset.
And I understand that.
That's natural.
I understand that. But just because people get upset doesn't mean that you should give in to them.
I mean... Tantrums should not drive public policy any more than they should drive which kid gets candy in a convenience store.
So the truckers who lose their jobs can point at the driverless trucks and say, Aha!
Those Terminator robot transformer bastards have stolen my job.
So that's the scene.
And it's tangible, it's visceral, and it's...
But if you allow the driverless trucks to take over and you release...
Tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy to create new jobs.
Some new guy sees, walking down the street a week later, and he sees a sign in a pizza hut.
I worked there right now. He sees a sign in a pizza hut saying, Waiters Wanted.
He's like, oh, all right.
I can go do that. Actually, it's a pretty good job.
I love that pizza. And their fettuccine was great.
And the hot chocolate was good.
And it was kind of crazy, though.
They had these... For a while when I was working there, they had a little clock.
You had to get the drinks and the pizza out within 10 minutes of people coming in for lunch or they got a pizza for free.
Kind of crazy, but good tips for the most part, which was pretty essential.
And this is back in the days of change when nobody really used a lot of credit cards, so you'd end up walking around like a knight in chain mail, like kaching, kaching, because you don't have so much change in your pockets from people's tips.
Anyway, so the guys are going down the street.
He sees a sign in the pizza window that says, waiter wanted.
He goes in, he gets a job as a waiter, and he starts his whole career, as I did.
Started working in a bookstore, and then got a paper route, and cleaned offices, and worked in a hardware store, and worked in a shelving store, and worked in a couple of restaurants.
It's just how you get started in your economic journey to hopefully some decent solvency in middle age.
So he sees that sign, he goes in, he gets a job.
Now he doesn't sit there and say, aha, I know that job only exists because those driverless trucks have given people more liquidity of income, which they're now spending to some degree on Pizza Hut meals, which means that there's a greater demand for waiters in Pizza Hut.
He can't, right? Nobody can trace that.
So the truckers can see those driverless trucks taking my job.
The guy who gets the job. In the Pizza Hut, he can't make that.
You can't follow those threads through.
It's like if you spend a bunch of money to create a bunch of government jobs, the people who get those government job paychecks are like, yay, this is fantastic.
And the other people who didn't get jobs, who didn't get raises, they can't look at that and say, oh, well, that's because of those government jobs, right?
So if the truckers and the populace, like...
Tucker the trucker lover.
I think that's kind of a tongue-tie, a tongue twister, I think.
So if they get their way and the government is allowed in a truly fascistic way to ban, to destroy, to undercut and disallow a fledgling industry like driverless trucks, then the guy's going to be walking down the street.
You know what he's going to see? Nothing.
He's going to walk past the pizza hut.
There's going to be nothing in the window.
No sign that says, waiter wanted.
Waiters wanted. In fact, the sign may be going out of business.
And he won't be able to trace that to the trucks.
Okay, so I think you understand that.
It's the seen versus the unseen.
And anybody who talks about economics as if it's just one-sided, as if you just get these benefits, like, hey, 10 million people get to keep their jobs and there's no downside.
It's dumb.
It's terrible. It's wrong.
It's wretched. It's profoundly uneducated.
And profoundly disappointing.
And this is all the stuff that Ben Shapiro should have been talking about.
But again, when you get hit with that populist wave of sophistic passion, you have to really push back pretty hard.
Otherwise... You get washed over, or you look kind of like, well, I have these principles, and they don't really apply to people, and yes, people should suffer from my principles, and it's like, no, the point is to reduce suffering as a whole.
The point is to reduce suffering as a whole.
There's a case to be made, it's abstract, could very much be real, but this is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
It could be that disallowing driverless trucks, banning driverless trucks, results in No cure for cancer.
Because all that money that's saved from driverless trucks, all that money that's saved, some of that's going to go into cancer research, which otherwise won't.
So maybe we don't get a cure for cancer because we want to keep people in their jobs, which won't last anyway.
You say, okay, well, the solution you see to overseas countries or overseas economies using driverless trucks is to put a big giant tariff on goods coming in from those countries, right?
Big giant tariff.
Well, you're still not getting economic efficiencies.
All you're doing is you're handing more money to the government.
The government is going to use that money as collateral, with which to borrow 10 or 20 times more of that money, thus adding to the future debt down the road.
So it really doesn't help your economy at all.
At all. And all you do is create a black market, and all you do then is you say, Oh, okay, so let's say Japan allows driverless trucks...
But Canada doesn't.
So you say, OK, well, we're going to put a tariff on Japanese products because they're using these driverless trucks.
That's cheating! OK, well, it's so ridiculous.
I mean, why do people think these things...
All you have to do is say, well, what would you do if you were a Japanese executive, right?
Other than work 18 hours a day and spend three hours a day extra doing karaoke before falling asleep on the subway and thus convincing your sons to grow up and never have children.
But anyway... What would you do if you're a Japanese executive?
You say, oh, well, you know, they put a tariff on the American imports because we have driverless trucks, so I guess we'll just give up on that entire market.
Of course you won't. All you'll do is you'll open up a branch office in Canada and then just import your stuff from Canada.
And then you end up playing whack-a-mole with all this stuff.
The government has no incentive to really do it.
All they want is the money. They don't care.
They don't care about the business. They don't want the money.
So the idea that we just give government more and more power over the economy in order to somehow prevent a system that gives the government power over the economy, it really is tragic.
It's like buying a male prostitute for your wife because you're afraid she might cheat on you.
Let's get it over with! Let's get it over with!
You don't defend freedom, Tucker.
You don't defend liberty. By giving enormous central power, fascistic powers, to the state.
You're falling into a trap.
It's a well-laid trap.
It's pretty bloody obvious when you see it.
And you have too big a platform to be that irresponsible regarding the realm of ideas.
You have too big a platform to be that irresponsible regarding the realm of ideas.
And, yeah, Ben Shapiro...
You should shape up those arguments, man.
You've got to be able to handle this kind of stuff if you want to play in those leagues.
It's Van Molyneux for Free Domain Radio.
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