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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

13:07

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward | A Reply to Peter Joseph

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	I hope you're doing very well.
	This is a response to some of the responses to my Zeitgeist Moving Forward review, along with why I think it's really, really important to have this discussion.
	And I also really wanted to thank everybody who took the time to respond to my video.
	And also thank Peter, who laid down some pretty heavy stuff in his response to some of my questions and criticisms.
	So thank you so much for that time.
	Unfortunately, and I did, I read every single YouTube comment, read every email that was sent to me, and looked at Peter's video.
	Unfortunately, there were no responses to my core criticisms.
	It's a shame, and people who aren't used to this kind of stuff, I can understand that it's easy to miss.
	But some of my criticisms were that in the movie, it was kind of a one-sided academic fest.
	There were no dissenting opinions.
	A way to respond to that is, you know, show me some dissenting opinions that I may have missed.
	This wasn't done.
	I argue that central planning, economically speaking, as opposed to prices in a free market, not what we have now, but a real free market, central planning has never worked.
	And the way that you can respond to that is show me examples of successful central planning in the past.
	And when I say it doesn't work, I mean it descends into mass starvation and generally has to be abandoned.
	I said that there's an economic calculation problem, which is that the desires and preferences of billions of people can't be calculated, and the answer of, we have a supercomputer, won't solve it.
	If the problem can't be solved, in other words, if it's a 2 plus 2 equals 5 problem, a faster computer won't help.
	A faster computer won't help you find the reproducing sequences in pi.
	A faster computer won't break out of an infinite loop.
	So having a faster computer won't solve the problem.
	And of course the Everything held in common and no currency has been tried in very small environments and hasn't been successful where the computer calculation isn't necessary.
	So, I said that this was a flavor of Marxism, and Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, the theory of communism may be summed up in one sentence, abolish all private property.
	A way to respond to that is to teach me how the Zeitgeist approach respects private property.
	If it doesn't, though, it's a flavor of Marxism.
	It's not my personal opinion, these are just some facts.
	I also argued that forced currency, the current existing system of violent and predatory state counterfeiting of currency, is not the same as a voluntary medium of exchange.
	This was not addressed.
	I agree with a lot of the points you make about the hideous deprivations and exploitations of the existing system and it's certainly my hope that we can reach common ground.
	But I went through with great interest looking for What I said was the absolute central purpose and highest value of what it is that I was discussing, which is, and I'll reproduce it here, I said, look, if people want to not use money in a free society, that's perfectly acceptable.
	Nobody should aggress against them and force them to use money.
	If other people, such as me, do want to use money, then I expect the same civility in return.
	A commitment to the non-initiation of force is essential to a civilized society.
	Now, Peter spent, I guess, close to an hour, or certainly almost 50 minutes, responding to My PowerPoints, but he didn't show these slides to his audience and he didn't address these arguments.
	That's pretty telling, in my opinion, and I hope that it's not and I hope that there can be a commitment to the non-aggression principle from people interested in this kind of solution, but so far it doesn't look good.
	So, when I say it's the most important thing in my presentation and you skip over it, Don't even address it?
	That's not good.
	Look, Peter is great.
	You are a fantastic communicator.
	I mean, I thoroughly admire your passion.
	I thoroughly admire your intelligence, your verbal skills.
	I mean, I think they're just fantastic.
	And the problem is that I view the resource-based economy, which is kind of redundant.
	All economies are resource-based.
	Money just reflects resources.
	But a society without money of any kind ruled by a small elite with everything held in common is not a new idea.
	I don't think we can solve 21st century problems with minus 5th century thinking.
	So if you go to Plato's Republic you can see this is the very basis of Plato's Republic.
	This is not a new idea.
	I mean it may seem new and you can update it with supercomputers but it's not a new idea.
	And it has been tried, this common ownership and no money has been tried countless times throughout human history.
	I and my listeners who help me out with finding some of this information, we've not found one example where it doesn't end in totalitarianism, starvation, depopulation of cities, a war of all against all.
	It is catastrophic and has cost the deaths of over 100 million people throughout history, central planning.
	So it's serious stuff.
	I mean, when people talk about structuring the economy, what they're talking about is who gets food.
	The problem, of course, in Plato's Republic as well, is that if you give a small elite, and they will have to be a small elite, power to control the resources for every human being in the world, it has been my experience, and not just my experience, I think the experience of history, that human beings can never be trusted with that kind of power.
	There's no solution to the problem of oligarchical domination except for commitment to the non-aggression principle and a decentralization of power.
	So here are some examples.
	In Russia, after the successful Bolshevik revolution of 1917, until the early 20s when Lenin introduced what was called the NEP or the New Economic Plan, there was no currency or private property in Russia and mass economic collapse and starvation followed as a result.
	You can see this occurring in the Ukraine as well.
	There were mass starvations with the central planning.
	Of Russia, about 10 million people died in the 1930s because of starvation.
	This is when they had Ukraine, which was called the breadbasket of Europe because of its extraordinarily fertile soil.
	So, central economic planning was a disaster.
	And certainly in this particular period, they had to reintroduce currency.
	And even Stalin, who was a committed Marxist, and morally insane of course, which I'm not attributing any of this to the Zeitgeisters, But even an ideologue like Stalin never tried to reintroduce a moneyless society.
	Now, in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, anarcho-communists, and these are people who believe in the abolition of money, everything held in common, and no state, which is really the end ideal of Marxism, where the state withers away.
	In the 1930s, anarcho-communists took over large sections of Spain, and they abolished and burned all money, and they imposed the death penalty on anyone found using money of any kind.
	This is, historically, this is what happens when people get control of a neighborhood who don't like money.
	And this is what I'm asking for, a commitment to the rejection of violence which has not yet been received from the leaders of the movement.
	That's my request.
	And the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, of course, they got rid of currency, they owned everything in common, there was a centrally planned economy, mass starvation and genocide, depopulation of cities.
	And I hope you understand, I'm not ascribing any negative or malevolent motives to anybody who's interested in solving the existing disasters of the current... I mean, you can't even call it an economic system, the current system of predation by the powerful upon the weak.
	I'm not ascribing any negative motives.
	I'm simply pointing out that these are the inevitable results of even the best or most well-intentioned approach which involves common ownership and central planning.
	So the utopian city of New Harmony, Indiana was a very small group of people who got together and decided to hold everything in common and have a centrally planned economy and it devolved into starvation and death and everybody abandoned it.
	So, again, you can go through examples and I post the links in the box below, in the description box, but if you can find examples of successful non-ownership, no property rights, no private property, and collective or common planning, central planning of the economy, please let me know.
	And this, you know, I assume people don't know this, but centrally planned economies, along with the rejection of private property, are responsible for more deaths than any other political ideal or movement, including Nazism.
	And here are some of the numbers.
	65 million in the People's Republic of China.
	20 million in the Soviet Union.
	These are conservative.
	2 million in Cambodia, 2 million in North Korea, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in the communist states of Eastern Europe, 1 million in Vietnam, 150,000 in Latin America, this goes on and on.
	There is a significant death toll.
	to centrally planned economies.
	No matter how well-intentioned people are, there is the calculation problem, the resource allocation problem.
	Without price, without private property, you simply can't allocate resources effectively and provide a link to the actual.
	There's a great talk by Dr. Salerno about this, which you can look at, which we'll go into this in more detail.
	But let's look at this approach in context.
	It's not new.
	Anarcho-communism, you can trace it all the way back to some of the higher realm thinking, the platonic history of Western philosophy, but modern anarcho-communism arises from the writings of Kropotkin and Bakunin, but now it's aimed at a post-scarcity utopia.
	And the anarcho-communists oppose the state because they believe that the state is the protector of private property.
	But the reality, of course, is that the state only exists through its attack upon private property, through taxation and coercion and regulation.
	It is an attacker upon private property, and a true system of freedom rejects the initiation of force and respects private property.
	There is no state in a truly free society, but private property is accepted and respected.
	So here's an article from great Austrian economist Murray Rothbard from 1970.
	He writes, the anarcho-communist seeks to abolish money, prices, and employment and proposes to conduct a modern economy purely by the automatic registry of needs in some central data bank.
	No one who has the slightest understanding of economics can trifle with this theory for a single second.
	Now, I'm not quoting this to prove anything, I mean there's no proof in this, it's merely statements, but simply to point out that economists have been talking about the impossibility of this theory, I guess this would be 40 years ago now, a little over 40 years ago, and he's talking about stuff that was put up in the past.
	It may seem like a new idea.
	It's not a new idea.
	It's been thoroughly examined by this.
	You can read Mises' critiques of socialism, which are almost a hundred years old and have not been refuted by a socialist economist to my knowledge.
	And if they have been, please let me know.
	But this is not new stuff.
	And it's been tried before.
	It's a catastrophic failure, whatever it's tried.
	So it's serious.
	I mean, we're talking about the lives of hundreds of millions or possibly billions of people.
	Either flourishing or ending.
	So it is very important that we get this stuff right.
	This is also a quote from Murray Rothbard.
	Again, this is not proof, but just to point out that these ideas have been critically examined before and it's worth looking at the criticisms.
	Fifty years ago, Ludwig von Mises exposed the total inability of a planned moneyless economy to operate above the most primitive level.
	For he showed that money prices are indispensable for the rational allocation of all of our scarce resources, labor land and capital goods, to the fields and the areas where they are the most desired by the consumers and where they could operate with greatest efficiency.
	The socialists conceded the correctness of Mises' challenge and set about in vain to find a way to have a rational market price system within the context of a socialist planned economy.
	This is an exact description of the central computer and fill out your needs on your iPod approach of the resource-based economy.
	Look, I'm going to keep this short.
	I wish that there was more to rebut in the rebuttal, but my points weren't addressed, which is a shame.
	I hope, I hope that you will check out, I've got free audiobooks and PDFs about a truly rational state of society, which is described in, I think, great detail.
	and conforms to the non-aggression principle, which I think is the most fundamental aspect of any form of social change.
	You can find these at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
	I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciate the time and energy that people interested in these solutions are putting into this discussion.
	I, I really, really, really appreciate that a lot of people's lives are entire piles of economic caca at the moment.
	That the system, this predatory, disgusting, vile, aggressive, violent, indebted system is nearing the end of its collapse.
	We really need to learn from the lessons of history.
	We really need to focus on what has worked in the past and what has not worked in the past.
	To work from first principles.

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