Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Feb. 24, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:05:04

Freedomain Livestream!

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	We are, of course, doing a debate on the free market versus communism, although I think it is fair to say that it will probably go, well, into other directions and other places and other processes and you name it.
	So if you're just joining me here, if you could just let me know What the audio sound is like.
	Am I too loud? Am I too quiet?
	I was buzzing a little bit last time because I'm just a big one for fussing and fixing the audio until it breaks again.
	It's starting all over again. How are you guys doing?
	Nice to meet you. Nice to chat with you tonight.
	I hope you will enjoy the debate.
	Sound is alright? Just let me know with a thumbs up if you can and then I will go in and join.
	Sounds good?
	All right, all right.
	Good.
	All right.
	I do not have permission to speak in this channel.
	Hello, can you hear me? Stefan's online.
	Hey, how's it going? Alright.
	Hey, Stefan, can you hear me?
	Yes, I can hear you fine. Can you guys hear me alright?
	Sorry.
	Let's get a minute.
	And can you guys...
	Somebody just demanded that I rub my head real quick.
	So I'm going to go non-traditional and rub my forehead.
	And you guys can hear the moderator talking, is that right?
	The Molly army is here.
	That sounds both vaguely tough and vaguely not tough, but at the same time.
	And is the video coming through smooth all right?
	What do you make of the Chinese flu issue?
	Well, just while we wait for all of this, the Chinese flu issue is going to have its primary issues.
	What is it? 80% of American antibiotics are made from China.
	And the last antibiotics plant in America closed down in 2004 because, of course, just hyperregulation makes everyone so safe.
	So massive problems with supply chains.
	It's kind of weird how... My business experience kind of prepared me to understand this because I worked in the B2B sector for many years as a software guy helping big corporations control and reduce pollution and the B2B sector much, much bigger than what you see as a consumer and that's the big issue is they're shut down.
	What do you got, 700 million people on lockdown?
	Yeah, it's going to be a bit of a drag for the old economics of the situation.
	All right.
	Do we have Vosh here?
	I can't hear.
	It says voice connected, but I can't hear the moderator.
	Thank you.
	All right. Oh, there we go.
	Stefan, shave. Yeah, you and my wife both.
	I'm so sorry. Go ahead. All right.
	Well, while we're waiting, just for everyone joining in, this is a scheduled debate between Stefan Molyneux and Vosch.
	We're discussing the source of human wealth and what exploitation is.
	We'll be discussing this for roughly two hours, a little bit less.
	And I just also want to let you guys know we've got some stuff coming up.
	We've got John McAfee and...
	Well, in March we've got John McAfee, we've got a Libertarian Roundtable, and...
	Vermin Supreme at the end of the month.
	Hey, my man!
	Also for our users here joining in, after this is over, Vosh is going to be hosting on his server a debate with Destiny.
	Would you like us to post a link to that afterwards, Vosh?
	Well, we'll be streaming it on DLive.
	I probably will just have a private call with him.
	But yeah, if you'd like to, go for it.
	Sure. Or that I could only stream this on YouTube.
	I heard about that. I heard that you were discussing on D-Live about that whole thing.
	Do you mind if I ask while we're waiting here what went on there?
	Yeah, it was the stupidest thing.
	So I was doing a video game stream.
	I was playing Hollow Knight.
	It was a great time. And I wanted to make a point about the depiction of sexualization in anime.
	I love me some anime, you know.
	So I bring up a clip from Kill La Kill, which has lots of boobies in it.
	You know, just ripe, resplendent fields of boobs.
	And we watched, like, a 20-second clip, which is being used to illustrate a broader argument.
	I'm speaking over the clip.
	You know, this is clearly fair use protection against, you know, copyright, what have you.
	But anyhow, you know, it gets copyright striked by Sony, presumably automatically.
	I doubt anyone sought out my, like...
	30k view YouTube stream, which was unlisted.
	It's still really annoying, though.
	I've sent them the email and the counterclaim, so hopefully that gets addressed soon.
	Yeah, I've heard about that. Don't they have a really weird...
	if you challenge each strike and win on each strike, they can hold it against you?
	I'm afraid you cut out with that last bit.
	If you win on each strike...
	Yeah, I'm sorry about that.
	Don't they have a really weird system where even if you challenge each strike and you win each strike, they can still hold it against you?
	Yeah, you have to. I think that the strike gets cleared from your list, which if you have three concurrent strikes, you get your channel deleted.
	I think that the strike gets cleared from your list once it's resolved, but there are several stages in the process of it being resolved that can mean very often that you have these bunk claims where you're waiting on a 30-day maximum response period from the claimant, and that strike remains on your profile the entire time, which can make it really nerve-wracking Once you have one strike, it's like, oh God, I'm going to resolve this as quick as I can, but if I get another bunk strike at the same time, there go uploading privileges, and a third one, there goes the channel.
	Oh, geez. It's pretty annoying, but it's a simple fix.
	I'll just never look at copyrighted material on the channel again, even if it's useful for an argument.
	Varsha, I just had a request, if you could turn down your audio a bit.
	Yeah, that's really rough.
	Just a little loud. So how's your day going?
	It's pretty good. Hey, hold on.
	Hold on. Yeah. Steph, we're still not getting your audio.
	Oh, no audio from me?
	You're muted on your end.
	Oh, sorry about that. I'm unmuted now.
	All right. Yeah. Excellent.
	So my day is not as important here.
	Let's get right into it.
	If you guys are all right with that.
	Another time then. Yes, of course.
	So, Stefan, my general idea for this was, you know, one general topic about capitalism, but we've got to bifurcate into the source of human wealth and what exploitation is.
	My thinking was that we'll kind of tackle those separately.
	And for the most part, you know, like the only things we really have here is, you know, you know, No insulting.
	Keep it like, you know, civil and whatnot.
	I've seen both of you guys before. I don't think it's going to be an issue.
	And then just, you know, basically, you know, kind of, you know, don't interrupt each other.
	Be kind of fair on time.
	So, you know, if you got a lot of long points, you know, let the other person make a lot of stuff.
	But, you know, for the most part, I think you two are going to be fine with that.
	So my plan is to largely stay back, guide this very loosely, and I'll only really step in if things get heated.
	Does that work for you? Yeah, fine with me.
	Works for me. All right.
	So the first topic here that we have is the source of human wealth.
	Vosh, would you like to tell us where you think human wealth comes from?
	Sure. So it's a really vague question, which I like.
	There's a lot of openness to be found there.
	What do we mean by wealth? Are we talking like material price?
	In which case there are myriad market factors that play into it.
	Incredibly complicated, God knows, depression, recession, or boom, what something might be worth.
	When I tend to think of human wealth, I tend to think of a more generalized accumulation of all of the industry, all the ingenuity, all of the material possessions, the labor-saving devices, the artwork that an individual, company, country, civilization has accumulated.
	And through all of these different...
	You know, variance of wealth.
	There is one underlying cause, which is, you know, inescapable and inextricable.
	And it is labor.
	Human labor is what drives wealth.
	Even if you...
	Stumble into a diamond mine or find oil bubbling to the surface of a field.
	You know, those things are valuable on their own, of course, but the process of mining, the process of refining, of advertising and selling the product, of consuming, of building machines to use these things, of deriving a use value, From these objects, all of this stems from labor.
	And it is for that reason, I believe, that when we credit the wealth of a civilization, of a country, of a firm, of a person, we should elevate those whose labor has brought that to pass.
	In some civilizations, you know, this has been slaves, more so than any other group.
	And in, you know, our civilization today, that is the common worker for the most part.
	The people who labor and toil to provide services or to produce goods, to mine, to work, to strive to produce art.
	These are the people who I believe build wealth.
	Okay, and the same question to you.
	All right, so the source of human wealth, you kind of got to answer two questions.
	And you can say, well, sure, human beings are necessary for the creation of wealth.
	Yeah, okay. I mean, that sort of doesn't add a huge amount to the equation in my humble opinion.
	But what I would say is we actually have a very good explanation as to where wealth comes from.
	So the first thing that you need to do is you need to explain why there was so little wealth throughout almost all of human history.
	And then why you sort of look at that line of wealth, right?
	Almost all of human history, people were surviving on virtually nothing.
	Starvation was rampant, even in civilized areas like the Roman Empire.
	You could have feast or famine within, you know, five miles of each other.
	So why were we so poor throughout almost all of human history?
	And then you get this massive, I mean, to call it exponential is an insult to exponentiality, massive increase in wealth since the...
	18th century, first in agriculture and then in industrial production.
	So what changed? What was the difference?
	That's the first thing that needs to be sort of explained and understood.
	And the second thing is that we also need to explain that when you get more free markets, when you get the allocation of or the earning of goods and services and the control of goods and services by those who are best able to maximize their use, Why is it that we get this pretty wild income disparity?
	And it's true in general that the rising tide lifts all boats, but boy, it seems to shoot up some pretty high and some much slower.
	So the answer to that is pretty easy to understand if you are familiar with Austrian economics, that kind of stuff, right?
	So the first thing is that there are some people, and I sort of hate to put it in this way, but they're magic.
	They are magicians of productivity, and nobody knows exactly why.
	It's like saying, why is a particular singer or a particular baseball player?
	I mean, why are they so good?
	Why are they so popular?
	It's a mix of skill and charisma and hard work and all of that and resisting temptation.
	But some people are just magic when it comes to the creation of wealth.
	Now, if you want a wealthy society and you have free markets, which is the only way to get a wealthy society, then what happens is those people tend to end up accumulating more and more resources.
	So if you can get twice the crops out of a particular piece of land, you're able to bid a lot more to own that land.
	And because of that, you get massive increases in agricultural productivity.
	And there's a very well-known, somewhat well-known equation for this.
	It's called Price's Law, and it's common throughout human beings.
	It's common throughout the animal kingdom.
	It's common in just about every meritocracy that you will look at.
	And it goes a little something like this.
	In a meritocracy, like where you can earn and profit and compete, The square root of the number of people involved in an endeavor produced half the value.
	So if you have a company of 10,000 people, 100 people of those 10,000 people produce half the value, and of those 100 people, 10 produce half the value.
	So in other words, you have 10,000 people, and 10 of those 10,000 people produce fully one quarter of the entire value.
	Now, why is this the case?
	I don't know. Nobody knows, but it doesn't really matter, because it's a reality we have to deal with.
	So in a free market, Those who have this magic ability to just create, you know, Steve Jobs-like, the opposite of Elizabeth Holmes-like, they have this incredible ability to create wealth through passion, through creativity, through organizational genius, through converting to a Model T assembly line as Henry Ford did for all of his other considerable faults.
	So there's these magic productivity people and in a free market they tend to accumulate the most resources And they massively increase the wealth in society and that creates a lot of resentment and then people say, aha, those people only have money because they've stolen from you and then they run to the government to steal it back and everything kind of collapses Venezuelan style.
	And that explains why when these people were inhibited from...
	From exercising their productive genius in the free market throughout most of human history, we've remained poor.
	You can see when the free market began to occur in the 18th century, particularly in England and the Netherlands, you can see when the free market began to operate in the realm of land that you had more and more productive landowners taking over land, the bourgeoisie of the landowners, so to speak. They elbowed aside a lot of the aristocrats and you got a massive increase in food, like sometimes 10 to 20 times the food productivity.
	As occurred in the early Middle Ages was occurring...
	In the 18th century, we're talking winter crops, crop rotation, turnips, like you name it.
	It was just incredible what people were able to do with the productivity of the land because they were able to compete and land was sorted according to who was the most productive in a market mechanism.
	So that is a source of human wealth, is letting the free market determine who gets generally to bid the most on the resources, and that's the people who can make the most use out of those resources, the most productive use out of those resources.
	I think we're good to go.
	Monopoly. But the reality is that the people who tend to be very wealthy, it really, really doesn't last at all.
	So if you have a family wealth, about 60% of the time that wealth is gone within one generation.
	It's been blown. It's been frittered.
	You know, this rags to riches to rags story that's very common.
	Or they say shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.
	By the second generation, fully 90%.
	Of the money is gone.
	So these geniuses, they appear like comets or I guess more like meteors in the night sky.
	They flash, they burn bright, they burn out, and other people come along to take their place.
	And there's this constant churn of classes and wealth.
	But in general, it's a rather bumpy but significantly linear upward bump of wealth.
	And that's the genius of the free market.
	And that's how it serves humanity so beautifully.
	If left to operate with the enforcement of property rights and in opposition to the initiation of force.
	All right. So, just a quick note here on the chat.
	I forgot to mention the text, so if you guys are...
	You won't be able to talk, of course, but you can type, you know, discuss this as it's going on in the debate chat.
	If you want to invite your friends, invite code is just Blue Politics.
	We've got another 100 minutes, and I'm going to mostly step back now.
	Vosh, if you want to just go ahead and start with your response.
	Yeah, I'm going to need some time for this.
	So this is a pretty standard, like, Randian great man explanation, which, and the great man theory, I should say, is widely discredited in sociological people.
	Okay, listen, I hate to interrupt right at the beginning here.
	Let's do each other a favor.
	Hang on, go for it. I'll just be a sec.
	Let's just do each other a favor.
	Let's not characterize each other's arguments.
	That's such a waste of time, and it's so boring.
	Well, this is a reductionist and blah, blah, blah, and it's a Randy and this.
	Let's just both go back and forth with the actual content of the debate rather than wasting everyone's time characterizing what we think about and how standard it is and where it comes from.
	Let's just deal with the points, okay?
	Because life is short.
	The point of being able to identify what type of argument a person is making is so you can tie their arguments to academic arguments that have taken place in the past.
	If we reduce all discussion down to he said, she said, or he said, he said in our case, then we can pull essentially anything out of our ass that we like.
	What this is, essentially, is great man theory.
	And I don't find this to be a particularly effective descriptor of Well, frankly, anything.
	So we begin with your description of why wealth suddenly ballooned upwards during the 18th century and since then our wealth has increased tremendously since that point.
	And I would argue that the reason for this is not because the government suddenly took their hands off the reins and allowed these Ubermensch to walk society and do as they would, which drags the entire productivity of the nation upwards.
	I would argue it's because of the Industrial Revolution, which is, I think, far more descriptive because we saw equivalent increases in In productivity, pretty much across the board.
	In countries that had high levels of economic freedom, in countries that are despotic and totalitarian, the effects of the Industrial Revolution seem to near ubiquitously increase the wealth and productivity of society, no matter what policies they have concerning individual property rights.
	Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that I believe that capitalism hasn't had an impact on the development of wealth in our societies.
	I think it has. I think it's just absolutely a head and shoulders improvement above feudalism or above mercantile capitalism.
	But the idea that...
	Capitalism's effectiveness for whatever percentage it is responsible for the increase of human wealth is because of these great men, these people who stride head and shoulders above the peasants who contribute more.
	I just don't see that.
	In none of the research I've engaged in, none of the analysis I have seen done of firms or of countries, nothing I have seen has shown me that the entirety of the productivity we see from any level of society is done by a small elite core of do-gooders who preside above it.
	It is, in fact, the tireless work of everyone who participates in that system It is through that that we are able to reap the benefits of an industrialized society.
	After all, the process of invention to create, say, for example, a new factory machine, this is work.
	It is labor. The person who has done this is a worker.
	To operate that machine is likewise work.
	Whether you believe there is some differential in the relative levels of productivity between those who That certainly does exist, but I don't believe there is so great a difference between these people that you can find strong explanatory variables as to why our general level of civilizational wealth has increased just because of the existence of a few highly privileged individuals.
	In fact, your argument that these people are shooting stars that emerge quickly and then burn out quickly is Is an argument that these people were never that great to begin with.
	That instead an incredibly complicated system of complexities and circumstances conspired to bring them to a position of relevance.
	And then, you know, eventually history does to them what it does to everyone.
	Which is it brings them down.
	Altogether, I just...
	I do feel as though this...
	Your... My explanatory sense for this, the great man, it feels very disheartening or like cucked to me, I guess would be the best word I have for it.
	Because what it is essentially telling most people is that in spite of their incredible level of individual talent, productivity, whatever, if you're not at the top of society, you just weren't cut out to make it.
	It's a system that justifies the placement of one man above the other.
	And that, to me, is the absolute opposite of freedom.
	That's why I stick to a more materialist analysis of civilizational wealth.
	Wow, I would really like it if we could get a debate going, but it looks like I'm going to bring facts, reason, and evidence to the table, and you're going to say you don't like the outcome, and you've never heard that argument before.
	So, okay, well, then what I guess I'll ask you, if we can get a bit more back and forth going, why do you think, let's say, Brad Pitt, and by the way, it's not a great man theory, because that's a very, very sexist of you.
	I mean, there are lots of women who've contributed enormously to the economy as well, and of course, you pointed out Ayn Rand, a great novelist.
	And philosopher. But why do you think, if everyone's equal and it's just the amount of labor, I mean, I've made a movie, I've made a number of movies, a number of documentaries by now.
	May I make a brief correction?
	Hang on. I don't think everyone is equal.
	I've made a bunch of movies by now. And why do you think that the leading man, like the star or the leading woman, whoever it's going to be, let's sort of Brad Pitt or whatever, why do you think Brad Pitt gets paid more than...
	Than the sound guy on a movie set.
	So to clarify, I don't think everyone's equal.
	There are obviously individual differences between people.
	Some people are far more productive than others.
	I just don't think that the reason why our society experiences such high levels of income and social inequality is because those on top are these, you describe them as magical people.
	I think magic is as bad an explanatory gesture we're going to get for any social phenomena.
	But the reason why Brad Pitt is paid more is because he can negotiate for more in a free market.
	You know, he's a front-runner star.
	People know him. His addition to a movie will bring in more customers.
	His relative market value allows him to- Okay, okay, okay.
	So sorry to interrupt.
	So that's interesting. So you've given me two explanations there which seem somewhat contradictory.
	And it's really, really interesting. This is kind of, I think, at the core of the issue.
	So you're saying that Brad Pitt makes more, like he makes like, what, $10 million a film or something like that.
	He makes more than the sound guy.
	Simply because he negotiates better.
	In other words, if the sound guy had Brad Pitt's agents, the sound guy would also be making $10 million a movie?
	Or is it because the audience prefers Brad Pitt, he's more singular, he has more of a monopoly on Brad Pittness, so to speak, than the sound guy who's kind of interchangeable?
	I will agree that Brad Pitt does have a monopoly on Brad Pitt, but I don't think it's because he negotiates better.
	It's not the skill of negotiation that matters here.
	No, but you did say negotiation is why he's paid more, right?
	Yes, he's in a better position to negotiate, or his agent is in a better position to negotiate, because past circumstances have led Brad Pitt to be more marketable than some random sound guy.
	I mean, the sound guy is not even in the movie.
	Well, he's in the movie and the sound, right?
	Well, yes, he works for the production, but he's not in the film.
	No, but why do you, I mean, past circumstances doesn't explain anything.
	Past circumstances explains everything.
	So why do you think that Brad Pitt gets paid, I don't know, like a hundred times more than the sound guy?
	The same reason any popular person can be paid money to speak at a university, because more people are interested in seeing them.
	Okay, good. So it's not the labor that determines his income.
	I mean, there's many, many people who work harder, so to speak, and invest more labor in the film than Brad Pitt does, right?
	He kind of bungees in for the shoot.
	And a lot of times movies have been in preparation for a year or two before Brad Pitt might come in for a month or two.
	So there's people who put out far more work into the movie but paid far less.
	And so this idea that labor is what's driving value is falsified by the movie star example because many people work much harder who get paid a small fraction of what bread hits us for less work.
	You said that Brad Pitt is being paid more because his labor is worth more.
	And then you just switched to saying that was my argument.
	I don't think his labor determines how much he's paid.
	I think his market value determines what he's paid.
	I agree. Brad Pitt probably works as hard, probably quite a bit less hard than your average stagehand.
	I mean, that's tough work. I've been on sets before.
	It looks very difficult.
	You know, certainly for the sound guy, it's pretty heavy equipment they got to carry.
	Brad Pitt has a lot of lively comforts I'm sure they don't get to enjoy.
	I don't think that labor is an explanatory value for one's wage or the price of their services.
	I think an explanatory value for what it gets produced in society, for what is worthwhile in society.
	Well, it's because people like to watch Brad Pitt.
	And so it's the customers themselves who determine the value of the contributions.
	In other words, if you and I, let's say we're just hanging out and we say, hey, let's go see a movie, right?
	And let's say we're just complete manic sound aficionados.
	We're just crazy about the sound guy, right?
	And there are people who will like this.
	There are people who will go and see a movie just because some guy wrote the score.
	And he's like, oh, that guy is amazing.
	But most people are like, Brad Pitt is really cool.
	He's a good actor.
	He's handsome.
	He's got abs for days and all that.
	So they'll go and see the movie because Brad Pitt's in it.
	And so Brad Pitt is a good investment.
	It's not that he costs $10 million.
	He makes the movie like $50 million because he sells $50 million worth of tickets that wouldn't be sold if he wasn't in the movie.
	So Brad Pitt...
	Is paid a hundred or a thousand times more than the sound guy because people will go and see the movie for Brad Pitt, but they don't really care about the sound guy.
	Now, if there was no sound guy, the sound would be bad and the movie wouldn't work.
	But it's a lot easier to get another sound guy than another Brad Pitt because there's only one.
	So it is the end customers who determine the value.
	And I don't know how you end up with, well, there's no such thing as disproportionate or wildly disproportionate economic value.
	When Brad Pitt is paid a thousand or ten thousand times more than, say, an extra, well, that seems like quite a spike in income, and that's all determined by the customer.
	It's not determined by the negotiation.
	It's not determined by the bosses.
	It's not determined by the director or the studio.
	It's fundamentally determined by the customers and how much they want to pay Brad Pitt.
	A few things. For one, I never said that a person's price or wealth or income or earning is determined by the labor that they produce.
	That's determined by a wide variety of market factors, which you have just explained.
	I do want to correct you on one thing, though.
	It's not actually the customers that lead to his wage.
	It is the fact that he and his agent are willing to negotiate for a wage that they believe that the studio would be willing to pay in light of what the customers would bring for additional revenue to the movie.
	There are a wide variety of complicated economic factors that go into this, but none of them are that Brad Pitt is a magical Superman who strides atop all the other production staff in the movie set and is singly responsible for all of the value in that movie.
	It could entirely well be that somebody else who was born in circumstances similar to Brad Pitt could have ended up being...
	The Brad Pitt, with some different name, of course, but a similar level of popularity.
	And it has nothing to do with any genetic or circumstantial or magical component of their birth.
	It's just a product of circumstances that has placed Brad Pitt in a position of prominence that allows him to negotiate for his wages.
	But when it comes to what builds civilizational wealth, what truly builds society and drives it forward, it's not popular people who get popular because they have a good agent or because they have a good PR team or because they got lucky.
	It's the hard work of millions or billions of human beings.
	Well, yeah, but I mean, I don't even know what to say.
	People have been working hard.
	For about 150,000 years since we first hived off from the apes.
	So people have been working very hard, gruelingly hard, gruesomely hard.
	I mean, if you look at ancient skeletons, a lot of them are like bowed down by the amount of work.
	Their joints are shot because they had to run all.
	I mean, people work like crazy throughout most of human history.
	But something changed. Like 200, give or take, 200 years ago, give or take.
	Something changed to the point where we got this 20, 30, 40, 50 times increase in human wealth.
	And it's not just because people decided to work 50 times harder.
	Human beings were working about as hard as they humanly could throughout most of human history and something changed.
	Now, I would argue what changed.
	Was morality. What changed was there was a move for a variety of both intellectual and economic and political and historical reasons.
	There was a move towards a lowering of barriers for trade.
	A respect for property rights and contract and a general diminishment in the random violence in society, whether you put that down to the fact that there were executions of sociopathic prisoners for hundreds of years or whether you put that down to the Black Death or whether you put that down to, as some people do, and I think it's a very good theory, that parenting improved.
	And when you stopped brutalizing your children as much, they grew up to be more empathetic and less prone to aggression and violence.
	But something changed I think?
	To begin to harness nature's scarce resources and energies and become massively productive.
	And that is really the source of wealth.
	It's not just fact that people move their arms.
	They've been doing that throughout all of human history.
	The reason wealth productivity went up during the 18th century was because of the Industrial Revolution.
	Because people invented machines, built factories, built conveyor lines, automated and processed the labor refinement, built steam engines and coal plants and revitalized global trade.
	There are a number of factors.
	But why did they do all of that?
	I mean, the ancient Romans knew about the steam engine.
	The ancient Romans knew about really cool stuff that they could have used to create the Industrial Revolution.
	But they didn't. Why? Because they all owned slaves.
	It took the shattering of serfdom.
	It took the shattering of the ancient practice of human slavery in order to...
	We had the Industrial Revolution in America when they owned slaves.
	I'm sorry? Wait a minute. Wait, Americans own slaves when the Industrial Revolution take place in America.
	You can simultaneously own slaves and develop an Industrial Revolution.
	They couldn't have developed an Industrial Revolution back during the Roman times.
	The technology just wasn't there.
	I agree there are ideological components.
	No, no, that's not true. No, this looks like, I mean, I don't mean to pull credentials here because it's all nonsense.
	I got a whole history of Rome presentation, graduate degree in history.
	Oh, no, no, there was a lot of...
	I'm well aware of what you speak on in Rome.
	But they didn't want to invent labor-saving devices because they had invested all of their capital into slaves.
	So when you invest your capital into slaves, you don't want to create labor-saving devices because it diminishes the value of your slave.
	Each slave cost about the equivalent of a medium-expensive car in the modern West.
	And so there were very strong political and economic reasons to do with the immorality of slave ownership that had to do with why.
	Now, there were slaves, of course, in America.
	And the North industrialized faster, got wealthier faster because they didn't have slaves.
	And it was the British, and in particular the British Empire, that worked feverishly in the late 18th, 19th century century.
	To end slavery, not just in England, not just in the British Empire, but around the world, worked very, very hard and would grab the slave ships and free the slaves and lock up the slave owners and worked very, very hard.
	It was largely a Christian mission, of course, but they worked very, very hard to end slavery.
	So the fact that America had slavery, while America inherited the Industrial Revolution to a large degree from England, which was largely surf and slave-free by the time it started, and the industrialized North had a far greater economic progress than the slave-owning South, so I don't see how the example of America does anything but reinforce the thesis.
	Okay, so a number of points here.
	For one, there have been plenty of labor-saving devices that were invented over the time when slavery was commonplace in civilizations across the world.
	The printing press, the cotton gin, numerous inventions which were meant to make agriculture easier.
	a field that slaves almost exclusively um were presided over of course you know um back when agriculture was you know the industry of the day you know medieval europe there is there is there is certainly a relationship between the development of the industrial revolution and the existence of slaves but the idea that that wait so the diminishment of slavery um Well, both, I suppose, the diminishment of.
	Because I agree, there is a proportional relationship between the industrialization of society and the reduction of reliance on slave labor.
	But the idea that Rome could have just decided to do one, and then it took us 2,000 years to decide, actually, what if machines are better for...
	But that's not what I said, Vash. I didn't say Rome just could have decided to do it.
	I said that they had slaves, which you just admitted.
	They had slaves and they had labor-saving devices.
	The diminishment of slavery was essential for the development of Civilizations have had slaves and they've had labor-saving devices for as long as both have existed.
	When the Industrial Revolution took place, the material wealth and the productivity of our societies increased massively.
	But it wasn't because everyone just decided that it was moral to start doing so.
	It was because of the incredible ingenuity of inventors and the hard work of the people who manned those factories that civilizations pulled themselves into the industrial era.
	I reject this assertion that it was a moral, you know, zeitgeist or a moral paradigm shift that led to the overwhelming increase in the productivity of human beings.
	Alright, so let it just be noticed that Vash has said that he just rejects it.
	Okay, good. Well, I reject your rejection and we've completely solved the problem.
	You just have to say, I reject, I reject.
	Okay, so... Well, I provided a counter-argument.
	No, you didn't. You just said that there were machines in the ancient world.
	Well, of course there were. I mean, you could have carried water or you could have had an aqueduct.
	You could have dragged things along through a forest or you could have built a road.
	Of course there was labor-saving devices in the ancient world.
	So what? I mean the fact is there still was not this massive lift-off and take-off of human wealth.
	And for that you require efficiency.
	The Industrial Revolution.
	The idea that it was the laborers within the factory that produced the wealth when laborers in the fields before, the slave laborers in the fields were working even harder than the factory workers were in the Industrial Revolution and for, of course, less pay because they virtually got no pay.
	They got room and board and some rudimentary health care and that's about it.
	So the idea that it was human labor that somehow drove it is to say, well, I guess they just worked 10 times harder than the slaves did and they didn't.
	No, no, no.
	It's not to do with that.
	The fact is that when labor starts – hang on.
	I'll finish in a sec.
	I'll finish in a sec.
	When labor starts to cost money rather than you just buy a slave and then you buy and burn that slave until they – I guess you don't even want a pension.
	You just burn them out until they die.
	But when labor starts to cost money, then the first thing you want to do is start investing in labor-saving devices.
	And that harnesses and extends and expands the power of the laborer.
	The economic efficiency of the laborer is vastly enhanced by being attached to a factory machine that does a huge amount more work for him.
	And so when labor costs money, you start saving money by introducing labor-saving devices.
	That frees up labor to do other work that is more productive and adds to the value of society as a whole.
	So again, to clarify, labor-saving devices have been invented as quickly as the people of their time could for as long as humans have been around, including the time when we owned slaves.
	While there is undeniably a relationship between the economic value of a labor-saving device relative to the availability of free labor, that doesn't negate the fact that humans have tried to increase the efficiency of their society for as long as has been possible.
	And I take issue with this spurious straw man you keep assigning, Where you describe the Industrial Revolution as simply workers choosing to work harder.
	It was workers... I never said workers...
	Wait, you're accusing me of a small man.
	Hold on, Stefan. I never said workers choosing to work harder.
	Let me finish my argument. It's not a phrase I even used at all.
	You just said that my argument was that workers must have started to work 10 times harder to account for the increase in wealth production during the industrial revolution.
	No, that was a mocking of your argument.
	That wasn't my argument. You'll need to try and keep up.
	Okay, well then to clarify, it has nothing to do with workers suddenly choosing to work harder and everything to do with workers.
	I never said workers suddenly choosing to work harder.
	What are you talking about? I am addressing my own argument and clarifying my position.
	Well, then why are you saying it's what I said then?
	I think you mischaracterized my position.
	Well, okay. Here's what we should do.
	I would like to finish the point before we gallivant and complain about it.
	Here's my suggestion. Here's how we use our economically productive tools, right?
	I don't know if you can see me or not.
	You got a pen. You got a piece of paper, right?
	So what you do here, what you do is if I use a phrase that you want to take issue with, which is obviously perfectly fine.
	That's the point of a debate. You can jot down the phrase because I'm telling you, man, relying on your memory is not working because you keep...
	I trust the people who are watching to remember you as you said it.
	And if my chat would like to rise up and say that he did indeed characterize my argument in that way, you are all free to.
	But until that point, I would like to say that it has nothing to do with workers just deciding to work harder.
	And everything to do with some workers who are inventors or politicians, which is in itself a form of work, who developed the labor saving devices of the Industrial Revolution, which then allowed the workers, working as always, to increase the productivity of our society.
	It has nothing to do with people choosing to work harder.
	It has nothing to do with a moral paradigm shift.
	It has everything to do with a change in the material circumstances of our society and how it allows our workers to increase their productive efficiency.
	We continue to see this today.
	The existence of the internet has revolutionized the material efficiency of our society.
	This has nothing to do with a moral paradigm shift.
	It's simply new technology allowing for us to create and distribute in new and inventive ways.
	Always, of course, this is being done by people who work.
	And it is for that reason I credit them for the bountiful society we now find ourselves within.
	Okay, so you've accepted that the end of slavery helped make workers more productive, but you don't consider it a moral paradigm shift for slavery to have ended, so I guess you don't view it as an improvement in human morality for slavery to have ended?
	it?
	I'm not quite sure I follow.
	I don't think people abandon slavery for machinery as a more efficient form of economic production for moral reasons.
	I think they did it for material reasons, because you can make more money from a factory than you ever could from a plantation.
	Of course, this is somewhat simplified.
	You know, the actual particularities of economics are incredibly complicated.
	But generally speaking, the Industrial Revolution de-emphasized the necessity of slavery.
	I don't think that slavery is a good thing.
	I'm glad it's gone.
	But I don't think we made that transition for moral reasons.
	Why don't you think the transition was made for moral reasons?
	Because Sorry to ask a question and just interrupt.
	I get that there's pecuniary advantage in getting rid of slavery.
	I get that it's more efficient and all of that.
	But are you saying there were no moral considerations in the abolitionistic movement?
	Oh, and the abolitionist movement, certainly.
	But they weren't doing it for economic reasons.
	The people who built the factories weren't doing it because they knew they would be replacing slaves and that would be freeing the slaves.
	The people who built factories wanted to make money.
	The abolitionists weren't doing abolitionist work for the benefit of their economy.
	They were doing it for moral reasons.
	They, of course, had a moral incentive.
	But factory workers, or sorry, factory owners, the inventors who built these machines and And industry lines?
	I don't think they did it because they knew their machines would allow for the emancipation of slaves.
	Okay. Now I'm really confused because you said there was no moral considerations in the ending of slavery.
	And now you're saying that the abolitionists who largely drove the ending of slavery had significant foundational moral goals and moral concerns.
	So I'm really lost now in Voschland, I'm afraid.
	You'll have to give me a compass to lead me out of my...
	Plenty of moral reasons to the end of slavery.
	I don't think the development of the machines necessary to create the Industrial Revolution were done for moral reasons.
	I thought they were done for material reasons.
	Well, that's exactly what I said.
	Yeah, that's exactly what I said.
	I mean, you're completely agreeing with my point.
	I think I'm going to go.
	I don't want to accept and understand, but there was, of course, a lot of the enclosure movement kicking people off ancestral lands for both good and bad and indifferent reasons and so on.
	There was some negative stuff in it for sure.
	But I think that we can say, and I think we both agree, that there were moral considerations that had to exist prior to the excess labor that drove, and the costly excess labor that drove the Industrial Revolution.
	You had to get rid of slavery in order to build wealth.
	And that, to me, is one of the foundational moral aspects of the market and the foundation of wealth.
	And this dichotomy between, well, the factory owners didn't build their factories in order to end slavery.
	Well, yeah, of course, you'd have to end slavery before there's even an incentive to build a factory.
	But the reality is, of course, that you don't require – this is the wonderful thing about the free market.
	You don't require moral considerations in order for the actions of everyone involved in the free market to benefit mankind.
	I mean it's a beautiful thing.
	I mean, it would be great if everyone woke up, as you do, as I do, as a lot of these listeners do, they woke up in the morning and thought, gosh, how can I best serve the world today?
	How can I best make the world a better place for people in harm and people in suffering and all of that?
	It would be great if people woke up every day and thought that way.
	Some do. A lot don't.
	And the good news, of course, is that in a We're good to go.
	on the Industrial Revolution.
	So to be perfectly clear, the Industrial Revolution took place because material, not moral circumstances, allowed for a massive increase in the productivity of civilization.
	This change in our productivity did change the economics of slavery, which upended many of the slave-oriented businesses that existed alongside and even after the Industrial Revolution, because, of course, the Industrial Revolution revolution took place before the abolition of slavery in many places. the Industrial Revolution revolution took place before the abolition of What's more, slavery continues to exist to this day across the world.
	We saw other forms of exploitative labor come alongside the Industrial Revolution, such as child labor, such as workers being stacked in tenements, spotting out eight or nine babies, because they knew that at 12 they would have to send them off to the factories because it was the only way to afford their company-owned tenancy.
	company-owned tenancy.
	The idea that the Industrial Revolution was part of some moral surge towards the free market and individualism and proprietarianism is ridiculous, because the Industrial Revolution had comparable effects in societies that hadn't seen the free market touch them for a century afterwards.
	The Industrial Revolution had the exact same effect on Soviet Russia, as few and far between the rights for workers were there at the time.
	They They nonetheless saw a comparable increase in the productivity of our society because it has nothing to do, and I need to make this perfectly clear, nothing to do with the free market, with a moral decision to evolve into, you know, laissez-faire economics, and everything to do with material circumstances of society changing.
	Labor-saving devices have been produced for as long as humans have been ingenious enough to produce them.
	Slaves have existed since the beginning of humanity up until now.
	These are parallel but not intersecting courses of material and moral considerations, and merging the two of them carelessly only serves to dilute an understanding of the actual driving forces of history.
	All right. Well, that's a long description without any particular causality.
	Now, of course, the effects of the Industrial Revolution had impacts on non-free market or less laissez-faire societies, of course.
	Of course, because things that get invented in the free market, shockingly, can be transferred.
	There's not this magical force field between borders that all the things that are invented and created, the knowledge of better farming and winter crops like turnips, the steam engine, can magically pass from one country to another, even if the second country...
	I mean, believe it or not, you can get internet in North Korea, even though North Korea is a post-communist society and the largest open-air slave pen in human history.
	So yes, of course, you get wonderful things invented in the free market economies and they can themselves transfer.
	The idea that all labor-saving productions have been produced in free-market societies that other non-free-market societies have just...
	I'd be happy to. The idea that all labor-saving devices and all economic productivity is produced by free market societies and then aped and copied by non-free market societies...
	I'm sorry, when did I say all? When did I say all? I'm sorry, most.
	All without exception, no matter what.
	I mean, come on, don't be a... There's always complexity to these.
	Sometimes it goes both ways.
	But when I say free markets generate goods, which then cross into non-free market societies, I didn't say all goods and you find one exception and the whole thesis falls to the ground.
	ground.
	Come on.
	I mean, let's...
	No, actually, I was trying to address the central kind of your argument, which is the spurious and ahistorical idea that all of the developments in wealth production in non-free market societies, which invalidate your argument that these are fundamentally a derivative of the free market, came from osmosis between which invalidate your argument that these are fundamentally a derivative of the free market, came The truth of the matter is, it's entirely possible for the wealth of a society to be built up tremendously by a totalitarian society.
	society to be built up tremendously by a totalitarian society.
	China right now, which is by no means communist, but I also wouldn't fairly describe as a free market, is ballooning in economic and social productivity in spite of the fact that much of the ability to trade as a firm within China is limited by the CCP's sort of central is ballooning in economic and social productivity in spite of the fact that much In spite of that, they grow tremendously.
	The truth of the matter is, and sometimes this hurts for folks to learn, but freedom and productivity aren't necessarily one-one ratios with each other.
	We have to fight tirelessly to ensure both of them.
	But to assume that they're both intricately tied is to assume all productive societies are free and all unproductive societies are unfree.
	And that is not true.
	There are many free societies throughout history that have at the same time been materially deprived, and there are many ludicrously productive societies that have been tyrannical.
	So if I just jump in real quick, just to try to pull this together, I'm going to try to I'll summarize your guys' arguments as best I can in a single sentence, and just tell me first if I'm wrong, but I think this might help us move closer to the topic here.
	Vos, you believe that the source of human wealth is primarily labor, and Stefan, you believe it's primarily innovation.
	Is that correct? No, I believe that the source of human wealth is property rights, self-ownership, and a freedom from violence.
	That the moral imperatives to not use force to get what you want, to respect self-ownership, to respect personhood, to respect property and contracts, a universal validity to promises and property and the sanctity of the human body, That is the foundation of wealth, and it results from a moral commitment to universal moral values, to ethical values that are universal, and to opposing the initiation of the use of force.
	And I think Bosch's argument is something like, a mysterious, ahistorical asteroid hit the earth and we got wealth.
	I may be paraphrasing a little bit.
	Something like that. Very slightly, Stefan.
	Clean your ears out, my friend.
	I've said pretty clearly, wealth is created by labor.
	Whether that labor be the factory worker or the inventor that produces the machine the worker is on, this has been the case in every society throughout human history.
	After all, inventors are themselves laborers.
	No, there's absolutely no deterministic social or historical force that means that property rights and a prevention of violence leads to the material wealth of our society.
	Singapore, South Korea under its fascist regime, the Soviet Union back when it was around, China today, Saudi Arabia, These are societies that have enjoyed massive economic and productive booms with, let's say, tenuous relationships to the principles of free markets and human rights.
	Okay, that's great. Let's deal with those countries.
	I agree. It is great. Nuance is very special to me.
	Now we have something we can discuss.
	Okay. So, South Korea.
	If you compare and contrast South Korea, which is a relatively free market system, at least compared to North Korea, and you see that South Korea's wealth is 20 to 30 times per capita North Korea's wealth, well, we can see the effects of relative free markets to a communist system.
	Of course, remember, North Korea, not referred to these days, of course, was founded specifically as a communist system.
	And so if you look at the difference between South and North Korea, you have here a twin study, a twins study, the most robust form of comparing situations and environments known to mankind because you have a genetically virtually identical population.
	You have one system that's relative free market, relative property rights, relative rule of law, relative contract enforcement.
	You have another system that's communist.
	And you can see the outcome with regards to Saudi Arabia.
	Saudi Arabia is wealthy as an effect of the wealth of the West because Saudi Arabia stole the oil-producing companies, the oil-producing machinery, and the oil-producing technology from the West.
	And this is why Saudi Arabia's wealth followed its theft after the Second World War of Western technology, Western companies, and Western expertise.
	After the West had been tragically weakened by the horrors of the Second World War, a lot of the Arab states jumped in and nationalized and stole basically all of the Western stuff.
	And so, boy, yeah, you know, it's like calling a thief wealthy because he's stealing from people.
	That's not really the same as actually having a free market yourself.
	And the wealth That Saudi Arabia is able to gather.
	It gathers because the wealth of the West is enough to purchase stuff that the Arabs, to a large degree, not completely stole from the West.
	So I don't think that this really goes against the arguments.
	Which examples of yours would you like demolished first?
	Would you prefer North and South Korea or Saudi Arabia?
	I feel that that's a bit of a rhetorical question.
	It is. I'll do both.
	So, South Korea had heavily protectionist policies up until the 1980s.
	The idea that the free market was what led to their sudden economic boom following the Korean War is ludicrous.
	What's more, they had a fascist government for a large portion of that time.
	You know, US backed and stalled as an alternative to what happened to North Korea.
	The circumstances that have befallen North Korea are incredibly complicated, but the idea that the differential between North and South Korea's relative levels of success is that one of them has had free markets and one of them hasn't is ridiculous.
	There is such an enormous multiplexity of issues, historical, social, economic, that divide these two countries and have continued to divide these two countries for the past 70 years, which makes comparisons between the two of them on such a singular...
	Do you have any actual arguments or do you just say ridiculous and it's complex?
	I mean, come on. So responding to an argument with, is that an argument rhetorically, is not the same as rebutting my argument.
	I'll ask you, let me finish.
	That's with the case of North and South Korea.
	With Saudi Arabia, I don't know what you mean by they stole their wealth.
	I mean, they traded for it in the free market.
	What are you talking about?
	No, no, no. They nationalized Western technology and Western companies and Western capital equipment after the Second World War.
	So they were able to, not using the free market, develop a tremendous amount of civilizational wealth that currently places them You know, in relative levels of like per capita income, enormously above what you would expect of a society of their, you know, development level.
	And they did it not using the free market policies that you claim are the central basis for all social and material development.
	So there are a lot of ways that a country can become super duper wealthy and very, very material.
	A man can get wealthy by kidnapping your children.
	That doesn't mean that he's using free market, it's a moral thing to do, or they're using, and his wealth relies upon you having the money to ransom your children.
	So yeah, I think I'm going to say this.
	I never said it was moral.
	We're just talking about what builds wealth.
	You're the one who's making the claim that wealth is built fundamentally, or at least the huge spike in wealth since the Industrial Revolution has been built by the existence of liberal economics in the free market, and I'm saying that's just ahistorical.
	It doesn't correlate to the developments of dozens of countries across the world.
	It's Okay, so when I say, so let's say, just for instance, so when I say that free markets require a respect for property rights, you somehow bring in Saudi Arabia with its massive theft of Western technology and expertise.
	Which got really wealthy, yes!
	You somehow bring that into the free market and its respect for property rights.
	No, I said they don't have a free market, and in spite of that, they have grown very civilizationally wealthy.
	They're a counterargument to your point.
	No, they're not. Welcome back to Google,
	I'm Michael. At the behest of a totalitarian theocracy, but they are nonetheless workers, and they are the ones that produce the wealth.
	I'm not saying that's good or bad.
	I'm just saying that's where the wealth comes from.
	Alright, let's see here.
	Sorry, we've gone far afield from my original, which is good.
	This is a rambling kind of thing.
	And yeah, here we go.
	They depend on oil as the country has the second largest proven petroleum reserves, the largest exporter of petroleum in the world.
	Did they develop all of that technology and knowledge and expertise themselves, do you think, Vosch, or did they get it from somewhere else?
	I don't see If you don't invent something yourself,
	But you're dependent upon the free market to invent it for you, then you kind of are dependent on the free market for the source of your wealth.
	In other words, that would only be the case of only the free market could build more.
	I'll be quiet.
	Let me finish my point.
	So if Saudi Arabia didn't develop all of this oil extraction technology, the petroleum engineering, all of the wonderful machinery and complexity and all of that, if they instead stole it from free market developed economies, then they kind of are dependent on the free market for the source of their then they kind of are dependent on the free market for So let me clarify two things.
	For one, I addressed this argument earlier, where you cannot simply hand-wave the enormous material success of societies that do not have free markets by saying that they just got what they had from other countries.
	For two, stealing is a valid way for, not moral, mind you, but a valid way for civilizations to accrue wealth.
	The British Empire did this for like a millennia.
	Many of the civilizations that we, you know, laud today, yours, maybe, I don't...
	Canada did some stuff, I'm pretty sure.
	America, certainly. We stole enormous amounts of wealth from all over the world and that contributed to our civilizational wealth.
	Again, I'm not making moral claims here, only factual ones.
	And finally, the fact that Saudi Arabia nationalized the industries within its borders And that is how they seized control of, so to speak, the means of production, albeit for the royal family, is not an argument that they couldn't have developed those facilities themselves.
	In every case, this is a legitimate example of, without the impetus of the free market, a society managing to develop enormous material wealth.
	Also, the idea that just because they nationalized a few oil fields 45 years ago, therefore means that all the wealth they've enjoyed since then is exclusively because of the refineries that they only would have been able to steal and couldn't have just built themselves, I think is fairly ridiculous.
	I don't think it's a good explanatory variable for why they're so wealthy.
	So if I might just ask a question here, again, I don't want to be mostly out of this, but It seems like a better way to phrase this would be whether or not a free market is better at this kind of innovation.
	Fosh, do you think it's just as good?
	Hang on.
	Sorry, just before we put a bookmark on that, because I do want to get back to this communist argument that, you know, we all know this one, like there's a fixed pie in the world.
	And if one country ends up with more slices of pie, it's because it stole slices of pie from other countries.
	And of course, there is theft.
	And I am a voluntarist.
	I'm an anarchist.
	I despise and dislike the existence of the state in any way, shape or form as a predatory mechanism, which violates property and personhood on a regular basis.
	Both domestically and overseas in horrifying complex and multimillennial manners.
	But come on, the wealth of the West was not primarily stolen.
	And we know this, because the wealth in the West is far more than the entire GDP... What on earth is that background noise?
	The wealth of the West is far greater than the entire GDP of the world...
	200 years ago. So there's no conceivable way that the West could have stolen all of that wealth.
	And of course, the reality is that as far as roaming bands of gangs, stealing things from each other, that's been a constant for 150,000 years of human history.
	So the idea, again, we go back to this thing at the beginning where human income was flat, human wealth was flat for almost all human history, and then you get this incredible spike over the last 200 years.
	That's not the result of people just being better at stealing.
	That is the result. Of the free market because theft has been a constant factor in human society throughout all of human history.
	Okay, so for one...
	Who saw that background noise? Just by the way, I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's kind of distracting.
	Oh, I apologize. I was typing down a few of the points to make sure I didn't forget it.
	I'm taking your advice.
	I'm a millennial. I can't write with my hand.
	Okay, so there are a couple things here.
	I have no idea what communism has to do with believing there's one pie and different civilizations have different slices of the pie.
	It's pretty well known, economically and politically, that it is not a zero-sum game.
	Different parties can benefit.
	I don't know why you're arguing as though I said that stealing is an explanatory factor for civilizational wealth.
	I'm only saying it is a way that civilizations have built upon their wealth.
	And your idea that the great civilizations of the West today didn't build a tremendous amount of their wealth off of theft is frankly ridiculous.
	Colonialism fueled the American, the English, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, and the Spanish empires For an incredibly long length of time.
	I mean, if we could go over, I don't have these stats in front of me right now, but if we could go over them, the amount of wealth that they were able to pull in, raw materials, labor exploitation from their colonies was unbelievable.
	And critiquing colonialism is by no means a communist exclusive venture.
	But yeah, no, just stealing is a thing civilizations do.
	Again, it's a counterargument to your point that the free market and the magic of individual success is the explanatory factor for the huge increase in civilizational wealth.
	Also, I can't help but notice, it seems like every time I get you on something, you jump to a different topic.
	Before, we were on Saudi Arabia, North and South Korea, and now you jump to the idea that communists are saying the wealth only got their money from stealing, which I never said.
	No, no, no. This is not me jumping around, brother.
	Come on. Don't be ridiculous. It's not me jumping around at all.
	You brought up this argument that the West, in part, gained its wealth through colonialism, and I'm just pushing back.
	This is not true. That is a factually correct statement.
	Colonialism, like most government programs, it was a government program, colonialism was brutal on the working classes of Europe.
	I mean, you probably know these stories as well as I do, that there used to be these...
	My brother actually had one of these...
	When we were kids, it was a stein with a glass bottom.
	And say, well, why on earth would you want a beer stein with a glass bottom?
	Well, the reason being, of course, that the British government was so hungry for sailors to go around praying on the planet and attacking other countries that they would drop a coin into a guy's Beer at the bar, and if he took a drink from it, he was considered to have accepted the king's coin, and he could then be kidnapped, impressed they called it, and sold, well not sold, but kidnapped and put into the navy against his will for an indefinite period of time.
	Of course the same thing occurred with just about every empire from the Roman Empire backwards and forwards.
	So colonialism was a map coloring exercise for the ruling classes.
	It did not make the countries wealthier at all.
	It benefited certain particular individuals who were very high up.
	It's like the Federal Reserve of its time, you know, like this money printing machine of monstrosity benefits a few people at the top at the expense of the working class.
	But the idea that the society as a whole became wealthier during colonial times is, well, you can see particular people became richer, those who got the kind of anti-free trade monopolies and charters from the government.
	Yeah, they got kind of rich and that was a violation of free trade and property and all of that.
	But the average person, taxpayers lost money on colonialism.
	The taxes would have been far lower without colonialism, and they lost their lives, their freedoms, their futures, everything with colonialism.
	It was a monstrous behavior on the part of the state.
	And so the idea that this suddenly generated a massive amount of wealth.
	And the argument against that, of course, is that if colonialism was so profitable, then why on earth did all the European powers, after they had exhausted themselves to near decreptitude after the First and Second World War, why was the first thing they did was give up all their colonies?
	I mean, if it's so wonderfully productive and profitable to have colonies, why didn't they just use that to replenish their coffers as gold?
	Because they lost money on those things in aggregate.
	So I would expect somebody who wrote a book called The Art of the Argument to understand what an unsound argument is.
	So first of all, that colonialism was hard on European people has literally nothing to do with any point that I was making.
	I'm sure colonialism was difficult for European people in a number of ways.
	It went on for centuries. I'm sure it introduced a lot of strange economic pressures that were quite hard in the peasantry of the countries that were doing the colonializing.
	Second of all, it was by no means just a state's endeavor.
	Most colonialism took place under a system called mercantile capitalism, which means trade firms would work alongside the crown to colonize different countries.
	This is where we get stuff like the East India Trading Company, This is where we get stuff like the, you know, all of the trade.
	I talked about all that, just what I just said.
	I talked about all that. Right, exactly. So this wasn't a state project.
	This was in large part pre-capitalism corporations working alongside state mandates towards a specific collective economic end.
	Oh, so it was written by the state, but it wasn't a government program.
	No, it wasn't run by the state.
	Whoa, whoa, whoa. My friend, your ears.
	Get the eggs out of them.
	I said that they worked alongside the state, not that it was a state project.
	Nobody works alongside the state. Come on.
	I mean, the state is a monopoly of force.
	It's the one with all the guns and cannons and bullets.
	I mean, nobody works alongside the state.
	The state is the one that grants these monopoly charges to these countries.
	What's more, your argument that colonialism didn't benefit society at large, it just benefited the wealthy, that's the case for all societies.
	Every civilization that has ever existed, with the possible exception of some incredibly small anarchist communes, has had a wildly disproportionate amount of wealth and wealth We're good to go.
	Wait, are you saying that the guy who was involuntarily kidnapped and thrown on a ship and then not given any oranges or lemons, who developed scurvy, had his teeth fall out, his eyesight go, and then got blinded before he even got a chance to go into combat was somehow benefiting from colonialism?
	No, that isn't an argument that I made.
	My friend, the eggs, you have to listen, okay?
	I'm not saying that every individual peasant benefited from colonialism.
	I am saying the civilization at large did.
	This is factually correct if you take a look at all of the spices, material wealth, and labor that these colonizers were able to extract from the colonized civilizations.
	Why wouldn't they? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, please, my friend, you made four points, I give you four points back.
	So this idea that it's disproportionate in how it's distributed, irrelevant to the broader argument, and last but not least, the idea that, like, well, if colonialism was so profitable, why didn't they just keep doing it?
	There are a number of historical and social arguments as to why individual colonies, most of them fought or revolted against their colonial oppressors.
	Nowadays we have an international environment that discourages colonialism, thank goodness, but in large part the reason why England didn't just, you know, stay in charge of India is because they were growing so feisty that it wouldn't have been worth the effort.
	So, there you go.
	So, real quick.
	You're taking the side of the ruling class to own the free market guy.
	By saying colonialism was effective?
	Are you that weak for a gotcha?
	Come on, guys. I guess I'm going to have to be the one who stands up for the working class here.
	Because the fact that a couple of people really well connected to the guys with all the guns, the state, the fact that the oligarchs in the mercantilist, crapitalist model...
	The fact that they were able to bribe the state, to socialize the cost of their monopoly enforcement, of the extraction of resources from foreign countries, which is what mercantilism is.
	The fact that they were able to socialize the cost of that by having the government steal people's lives, steal people's labor, and enforce people into the navy and into the army and so on.
	The fact that they were able to do that is not beneficial to society as a whole.
	There is no such thing, of course, as society as a whole.
	I mean, this is just a concept, right?
	So the fact that the vast majority of people in the colonial powers paid more taxes, were subject to more arbitrary kidnappings and being forced to be the army and navy slaves of the mercantilist powers that be, the idea that this is somehow beneficial to society as a whole is monstrous.
	The fact that oligarchs can use the power of the state to enslave the working classes is not beneficial to society as a whole.
	I've got to tell you, I was a little surprised hearing this defensive, oligarchical, mercantilist violence.
	I want to clarify this really quickly.
	So I've said this several times.
	I'm not making any moral statements, only factual statements.
	And the argument is what builds civilizational wealth, over which colonialism objectively did.
	That's why they did it. So this weird virtue-signally two-minute rant about how I dare I speak over the poor, plighted European commoner, I'm not saying any of this was moral.
	It's colonialism.
	Do you think I'm defending colonialism?
	Are you listening to this discussion?
	No. I'm saying it contributed to the accumulation of material wealth.
	This is what Marx would have called, by the way, primitive accumulation.
	You can Google that next time you'd like to come more prepared to a discussion of this caliber.
	But yeah, in the future, please listen to my arguments before responding to them.
	Maude, you've been interrupted so many times.
	I apologize for the indignities that have been forced upon you.
	What would you like to move to next?
	No, so I do want you guys each to have...
	Thank you for that. I do want you guys to have a...
	We've got 40 more minutes, and I do want to get in exploitation.
	So if you guys could just put in closing thoughts before we move on.
	Stefan, if you want to go ahead.
	Do you mean closing thoughts on the past discussion, or...
	Yeah, human wealth.
	Oh, yeah. So, yeah, human wealth can be transferred at the point of a gun, for sure.
	I mean, I was talking about this.
	I'm doing a series for my subscribers, which is the Communist Manifesto for Children.
	She and I are going through the Communist Manifesto and talking about this.
	And without a doubt, the farmer who grows the crops, you know, warlords can ride over the hill and can grab his stuff and, you know, hit him with the hilt of their sword and steal his bread and his food and his beer and maybe his wife and all that.
	For sure, but that does not generate wealth.
	What that does is it encourages everyone to exist at a bare subsistence level because all the excess that you have to put a huge amount of work into creating and holding on to, all of that excess can be snatched away from you at any time.
	Now, this, of course, occurs in more primitive societies or more warlord-based societies with just, you know, some guy coming over the hill and hitting you on the head and taking your stuff.
	So the transfer of wealth Wealth, so to speak, does not add, like the forced transfer of wealth does not add to the wealth of society, but this is why societies remain so poor, is there was no point.
	If you could not hold on to your property, if you could not have property rights enforced, if you could not have contracts enforced, if you could not have future reliability for maintaining your control over the excess goods that you'd produce, you just don't produce any excess goods.
	It just doesn't work. I mean, this is why communist economies and socialist economies are so unproductive because your stuff just gets taken fairly arbitrarily by the state or by the local whoever, right?
	And so you have to have property rights in order to put in the labor to have some at least reasonable confidence that you can hold on to the excess value that you have produced, whatever it is.
	And so this argument that somehow using force to transfer wealth adds to the wealth of society.
	Oh, yeah. I mean, the guy who knocks you over the head and takes your bread, he's got a loaf of bread and he didn't have to even grow the food or he didn't have to grow the crops.
	He didn't have to cook it. He didn't have to do anything to store it.
	And so, yeah, there has been a transfer of wealth, but that is a net reduction because...
	Not only has no wealth been created when you transfer a loaf of bread from a farmer to a warlord, but the effort that the warlord has put into pursuing and getting that bread is not something that is being used to produce any other goods and service, and so you have a net reduction.
	Plus, in the long term, what happens is people, as I said, don't want to produce any excess goods unless they have some reasonable assurance that they can hold on to them.
	So the idea that the initiation of force and theft and so on adds to the wealth in society Either at an individual level or at some large, mercantilist, colonialist level, is just false.
	It's just false. So that's, yeah, that's my last thought.
	I guess we can turn this over to Vash.
	Yeah, go ahead, Vash. Yeah, I'm a market socialist.
	I actually defend the efficacy of not necessarily free markets, but at the very least of market economies.
	And the reason why I'm a market socialist is because I recognize the driving force of history from a material perspective is Is and always has been the tireless efforts of the nameless millions and billions of human beings who have lived and died on the fields or in the factories.
	These are the people who bring us forward and to them we should always be grateful.
	We are them, after all.
	I'm working right now, and so is Stefan, of course, albeit our jobs are different than most folks.
	But this is nonetheless labor.
	Labor builds, labor produces, labor provides.
	And while I do agree, and I want to be clear about this, you know, in the interest of fairness, that there are elements of liberal capitalism that have facilitated an increase in our general level of economic efficiency.
	Even Marx contended this, that capitalism was superior materially and morally even to feudalism.
	I do not believe that is in and of itself a great enough explanatory variable to account for the entirety of human history.
	So, yeah, in conclusion, I suppose, while it is undeniable that market economies and property rights have facilitated the developments of further economic efficiencies, even those exist only through the tireless labor of the worker. even those exist only through the tireless labor of the as it has been since the beginning of time.
	And it is for that reason that I credit them.
	And I am proud to say that every economic and political position that I advocate for and support, all of them are derived from the advocacy for this group of people, who I believe we owe everything to.
	Can I just mention one thing here?
	I know we've got this whole exploitation thing.
	I think it's been somewhat embedded into what it is that we have been talking about.
	And I put a request in, of course.
	We can obviously negotiate all of this, though I will be using Brad Pitt's agent to negotiate this next part.
	So I think the exploitation part has largely been dealt with, although we can certainly do it again or in a different direction.
	But I am curious about...
	What I've seen from Vosh about this idea that I think it's companies with over 500 employees should have the government take the companies and distribute the ownership of the company to the employees and so on.
	Like the ideal economic situation, to me, is very simple, like non-aggression, non-initiation of the use of force, respect for property rights, and everything else is fine.
	But I would like to know more about this approach to dealing with I'll start with you.
	I think that a lot of users here aren't familiar with you guys' views.
	I think it would be good if we started with just how both you guys view exploitation and we can jump right into that.
	I'd be happy to lead from exploitation into that because the two concepts are pretty inextricably linked.
	Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, sure.
	So, exploitation can mean a million different things.
	God, I mean, you can exploit your friends for pizza and free car rides.
	But in a broad, you know, civilizational sense, in a broader social sense, I think exploitation exists entirely.
	Any time there is a power differential between one agent and another, and the more powerful agent uses that differential to extract favorable circumstances, conditions, or interactions from that person.
	The most obvious example of this would of course be the exploitation of the common worker.
	Because a worker has much less bargaining power than a firm does, or a boss, or a business owner, or whatever, A worker, while they can nominally negotiate for their wages, most of the time just has to accept what companies are providing, whereas companies have all of the bargaining power because they don't have the same level of individual vulnerability that a regular, average, everyday middle class or poor person has.
	I would consider that to be a very severe form of exploitation.
	There's also a tremendous amount of labor theft that goes on in this country, more, in fact, than every other type of theft combined, including Burglaries, robberies.
	This is stuff like unpaid overtime.
	These are very serious and very pernicious elements of overt and illegal exploitation that we have sort of normalized in our society through our deferential, almost cuck-like reverence of the autocratic business owner.
	Vos, have you ever been a business owner?
	Unless you would consider what I am presently doing, owning a business, because I pay a few folks?
	No, not really. So you do have employees, right?
	I mean, not in a legal sense, because I just pay them for editing work, for example.
	They would be more contractors. But apart from that, no.
	The real rigors of business owning, I am not familiar with, personally.
	And do you feel like you have massive power and control over the people who are contractors for you?
	Some of them, yes. I make a surprising amount of money from doing what I do.
	I know some of the people who work for me, who edit for me, aren't in positions of privilege as I am.
	And I know that the terms in which I negotiate how much I pay somebody to edit my videos are ones over which I have complete control.
	I can save 50 bucks to edit a video that's two hours.
	I can save 500 bucks.
	But that's, I mean, that's me to say.
	I'm in a much stronger position to bargain than they are.
	And why is that, do you think? Well, because I have much more money, power, and they're the ones coming to me to fulfill a subsistence need of theirs, which is wealth.
	And do you believe that that power, while it may not corrupt you because you have an admirable knowledge of these power relations, do you believe that many people are corrupted by that power?
	Do you think that's kind of innate to the mechanics of the system?
	Yes, I think it's innate to the mechanics of the system.
	I don't know if it reflects necessarily on the moral character of the people who do the exploitation.
	I think it's a necessary component of a capitalist economy.
	Okay, so a difference in power tends to corrupt the person who has the most power, right?
	I believe so. Generally speaking, yeah.
	And that's why we can't have a state.
	I mean, I'm an anarchist.
	There can be corruption that occurs, but of course there is no possibility of a greater power differential than that between the state and the citizen.
	The state and the citizen is the greatest power differential that there is.
	And the monopoly on the use of force that characterizes the state...
	This is not for you. This is just for the audience as a whole who may not be...
	Oh, no, sure. Because I completely agree.
	Go off, King. I completely agree.
	I'm very anti-state, though I believe there are transitory systems between ours and a stateless society that should be implemented.
	But I'm, in principle, agreeing with everything you say.
	Okay. So...
	You have power with regards to how much you pay people, but to some degree you are, of course, also at their mercy, whether they do a good job, whether they're reliable, whether they do it on time, or whether they end up trying to charge you more and withhold your materials and so on.
	I have gone from, you know, growing up the dirt poor to...
	I co-founded a software company, grew it to 30 or 40 people, and most of them worked for me because it was a software company and I was the chief technology officer.
	And you certainly do have some authority.
	And, you know, it's funny because I remember being very sensitive to this, having been an employee myself for so many years.
	It's a funny thing. I'll just tell you this by the by.
	I was very aware that when I asked an employee to come into my office, that the employee would be nervous.
	And I actually remember sitting there brainstorming with a friend of mine, how can I invite an employee into my office so that the employee doesn't feel nervous that they're in trouble or they're fired or something like that.
	And I actually just came up with, just for those who ever want to use it, this was the residual product of my brainstorming.
	My answer was, the solution was...
	Hey, so-and-so, can I just borrow you for a second?
	And that gave them some sense of ease.
	I don't know why, but it kind of worked that way.
	But I was, of course, also very much at the mercy of my employees because if they decided to quit, if they got better jobs, they walked out with a huge amount of knowledge.
	You know, we had a code base that ran into the massive amounts of lines of code and interoperability with various database systems and other systems and so on.
	And it took at least six months to train someone to be effective and efficient within that code base.
	And so there was authority, in a sense, on both sides.
	And they were always being poached for better jobs.
	And I always had to sort of make sure they were happy and so on.
	And so there is a kind of equality on both sides in terms of the vulnerability to each person's uncoupling from the economic relationship, so to speak.
	There are undeniably workers who are in a privileged position to negotiate their salaries in the relative terms of employment.
	But I think for most workers, the reality is much grimmer.
	For most people, they know they are utterly dispensable cogs in a machine that is not of their design or control.
	And that if they choose to leave...
	I do applaud any efforts made to ameliorate the inherent power differential between the worker and the owner, but it is ultimately, I think, an inevitability That this interaction produces exploitation.
	And I know, by the way, that you agree with this, at least principally, because you share my belief that the relationship between parent and child, a very socially normalized hierarchical relationship, can also very often be toxic or exploitative or abusive.
	I mean, it's very normalized.
	Everyone's got a parent, or at least I suppose most people do.
	But we can agree with some reflection like, hey, It is a little bit weird that two people get absolute, utter authoritarian control over how a baby is raised for 18 years.
	And that's kind of how I feel about businesses, too.
	It's gotten very normalized, but you take a step back and it's like, wow, 98 or whatever percent of Americans work for authoritarian firms over which they have no control and they are utterly dependent on these systems for survival.
	Is that really true? I mean, I'm not saying this because I don't think it's true, and maybe I just move in more entrepreneurial circles.
	Is it really 98%?
	Oh, I was being, I think, a little hyperbolic.
	I don't know. I would imagine the vast majority of American workers are in that position.
	I would imagine it's more than 90%, but I don't have that exact statistic.
	Okay. I think it's lower than that as a whole, but that's sort of neither here nor there.
	I suppose, yeah, so the point...
	I think to make here is why are the workers so replaceable?
	Because you said, as you said, and I'm not going to catch you out here, but as you said, there are the workers who are in a stronger position.
	You said privileged. I wouldn't necessarily agree with that terminology.
	But there are workers who are in a stronger position to negotiate, and there are workers who are in a less strong position to negotiate.
	And what do you think the difference is between the two workers?
	Is it genetics?
	Is it environment?
	Is it choice? What is it that makes that difference?
	Mostly the material conditions of the worker and the firm they work for.
	Obviously, there's degrees of individual exceptionalism.
	Some people are truly phenomenal at their work.
	But I think for a lot of them, it's just like, you know, tech jobs have a tendency.
	You said you worked for a tech startup, or you were, I'm sorry, you owned a tech startup.
	That in those cases, you know, usually people have very highly individualized, specialized knowledge that eventually becomes core to the development of whatever product or service it is that firm is providing.
	In those cases, I think the workers tend to have a Fairly high level of control over their employment.
	But most people, whether they're intelligent or unintelligent, good or bad, black or white, male or female, most people's labor, and I think this is natural, is replaceable, just by way of how an industrialized economy functions.
	I don't think these people should be relegated to the back pale of society, you know, where they have no power over their own lives.
	I think that these people are the backbone of our society.
	And that's why, and I'll end on this point, that's why I find the Atlas-shrugged title of the book itself so funny.
	Because in the context of the book, it's about these great leaders, you know, unchained by state regulation.
	They rise and take society with them.
	But I mean, in a much more immediate sense, all the workers need to do is stand up.
	You're right. As powerful as firms are, they are utterly powerless.
	The entire capital class is reduced to tears the moment the workers decide to stand up, to strike, or to do any kind of unionization work.
	And I think we need to move in that direction.
	That power differential needs to be addressed.
	It needs to be corrected. Well, listen, I have no moral objections.
	In fact, I quite support unions as long as they're voluntary and as long as they don't use force to get their way.
	I mean, if 100 workers want to walk out of a factory, the boss is in a huge amount of trouble and might bring him to the table that he wouldn't get to.
	And of course, people can ask for too much.
	The bosses can ask for too much profit, and that's at the expense of the workers.
	The workers can ask for too much pay, and that's at the expense of their survivability as a firm because they can't If you give workers double their salaries, you have to probably increase the price of your goods by 40% to 50%, and that means you can't compete.
	So it's a complex negotiation.
	But here's the thing, I think, where you and I are going to differ, and I think this will be a very productive conversation, because when I look at the difference between workers who are interchangeable and workers who are really, really valuable— You can look at that.
	I don't want to put words in your mouth, Vash, but I think you would look at that and say, that's a systemic problem that we need to deal with in some external way.
	Whereas what I would say, this is what I said to my employees, I said, listen, I would love to pay you more.
	I would love to pay you more, but it's not up to me.
	It's up to the customer.
	If you can provide value to the customer over and above what you're providing now...
	I would love to pay you.
	I am the flow-through mechanism by which you get paid by the customer.
	And if it's any consolation, I said I'm also the flow-through mechanism by which I get paid by the customer.
	And I also work for you because I would deal with a lot of the shit that they didn't want to deal with with bad customers or problems with the specs and all.
	I would have to go in and negotiate all of that.
	So if you have a worker, let's say, who doesn't feel that he or she has much negotiating room, this is what I would say to that person.
	I would say, look, You have a choice.
	You can wait for some magic leftist horse rider to come in and save you, or what you can do is you can really work to improve the value that you add to the company.
	I don't know what that means because it could be different for everyone.
	Like, why was I able to start a software company even though my graduate work was in the history of philosophy?
	Well, because from the age of 11 or 12, I took a tiny inheritance and bought a I learned how to program.
	I would go in on Saturdays all day to the computer lab in school when the computers had a grand total of 2k between them, I think, of memory.
	And I learned how to program.
	And that just turned out to be super valuable for founding the software company and coding in that professional environment.
	And so I would say, and I know it sounds kind of ridiculous, like this learn to code thing has become kind of a ridiculous thing.
	But if you take the time and effort to educate yourself, to gain skills, and this doesn't have to be night school.
	It can be just looking at stuff on the Internet.
	It can be listening to, don't listen to music in the car, maybe listen to how business works or something like that.
	So there's a lot that you can do to add value and be in a stronger negotiating position without complaining about the system.
	And that's the first thing.
	And the second thing that I would say, and again, we probably agree on this, although that may not be the case.
	But dear God, government schools are terrible because they put out people after 12 years of education with almost no economically valuable skills at all.
	And it's even worse in universities sometimes because you come out with negative economic value.
	Not only have you not learned anything, but you've grown to hate the market system that you kind of need to survive in to pay off your stupid, overhyped, predatory student loans.
	Boy, there's an example of exploitation is student loans for crappy education that harms your brain.
	So just to finish up, and I'll let you, of course, have your chew on this, but I think if we had a system or we had a free market educational system, it would actually instill people with – Really valuable skills so they could get out there and they could negotiate hard for what it is that they want.
	We don't even teach negotiation in government schools.
	We don't teach how to read a balance sheet.
	We don't teach about the value of cash flow.
	We don't teach about how to serve customers.
	We don't teach about how to start a company.
	We don't teach any of the things.
	And I don't think it's an accident because I think a lot of the powers that be, these high-level corporate capitalists, I think that they're kind of happy that the schools are dumbing down people who could out-compete them.
	Like, why is it that my company...
	I was up competing with Microsoft.
	I was out there competing with IBM, these big, giant companies.
	Why is it I was able to compete with them?
	I was willing to work harder.
	I was hopefully willing to work smarter and willing to take risks that the other bigger companies weren't.
	I didn't learn any of that in school.
	I learned that from economics.
	I learned that from business books.
	And so if we had a system where young people were taught actual business skills and they were taught how to negotiate and how to provide value...
	That would be fantastic because we're back to the statement of where does wealth come from?
	Wealth comes from efficiency. It comes from knowledge.
	It comes from finding faster and better ways to serve the infinite well of human needs.
	Right now we have a system that dumbs people down, that throws them out into the marketplace, crippled intellectually from terrible anti-educational practices in the state.
	And I really, really would focus on people.
	Maybe we'll get the magic classless and stateless society 100 or 200 years down the road.
	But in the meantime, please, please up your skills, up your capacity or willingness to take risk, learn extra stuff, go that extra mile.
	And you'll find that when you go into that negotiating table, you'll have a lot more weight behind you and a much better chance of getting what you deserve.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So, I mean, I agree with the sentiment of a lot of this.
	One of the issues, I mean, American education is crap.
	Actually, I think that's a bit of a meme.
	I think that education is crap almost everywhere in the world.
	And the reason for that, I think, I would blame capitalism for this.
	At least here, using America as an example, so I'm familiar.
	Textbooks are manufactured by private companies that engage in rent-seeking behavior by petitioning to local school boards to, you know, get them their products on the table as opposed to other textbooks that might cover a subject more comprehensively.
	We have, I mean, Betsy Davos right now, like, is our education secretary.
	There is an attitude for those who preside over our education system, which are in many case state actors, but also in many case private actors, or sometimes the line between them gets blurred.
	Who are conspiring to turn school into a machine for stupid workers.
	To just turn them into drone cucks that will just...
	It comes up the Prussian model, right?
	Good factory workers, dumb soldiers, and...
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, no, I mean...
	I agree. I think, so this is why I depart from you in that.
	I think the opposite approach should be taken.
	While I do agree that marketable skills should be taught in schools, I mean, this is a sense, like, we need this for our society to continue.
	We need marketable skills.
	I also think that we shouldn't, you know, shame or discourage people who decide to pursue less marketable skills.
	I think the fact that university is accessible to a lot of people is a beautiful thing.
	If you want to learn about underwater basket weaving, I mean, maybe it doesn't make someone somewhere out there, you know, a ton of money.
	But I'm sure that somewhere out there, the world is being enriched artistically through the existence of baskets that were, you know, woven underwater.
	You could probably make a good YouTube channel about that.
	I think they're actually pronounced...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	No, in all likelihood, yes.
	Who knows what underwater speaking techs will have when this gets run out.
	But I think this is where I would push back, I guess, on your overall sentiment, is that I agree...
	That people should strive to be individually exceptional.
	Some people do believe this.
	Most of the leftists that I know don't.
	I'm happy to say that. Most of the leftists and myself agree that while it's very important to organize collectively and fight for people on a social front rather than doing this hyper-atomized individualistic rhetoric, at the same time, individual exceptionalism is very valuable.
	I mean, God, you know? We don't want to live in a world where everyone's just meeting the moderate, the bar, you know, where everyone's just trying to cross the foot-high, you know, jumping bar.
	We want people to try to be exceptional.
	And this is my argument to you.
	It's that I think the environment...
	that best facilitates the production of exceptional individuals, whether they want to get into underwater basket weaving or corporate finance, I don't know, is a worker cooperative model, is one in which everyone collectively owns is one in which everyone collectively owns whatever firm it is they work for.
	And the reason for that is because I am, to borrow a quote, perhaps haphazardly, less concerned with the intricacies of Einstein's brain than I am with the near guaranteed knowledge that hundreds of people as intelligent as him have lived and died in fields and factories.
	That's what concerns me more than anything.
	It's the knowledge that there are incredible people out there who, if they had just been given more of a shot, maybe, for example, more equitable living circumstances, better education, or collective control of the means of production, a little bit of democratic control over where they work, they could have become magical.
	But they can't because there are so many systems of governance, of free market in our society that conspire, to borrow the phrase, to keep them and many people like them in the dirt.
	That is my argument to you, that such a society would actually produce these tremendous people in greater quantities than what we see now.
	Well, I don't want to play Mr.
	Gotcha game, but I guess I do in a little way because you did use the phrase, some people are phenomenally productive, which actually goes back to my very first point that you seem to not like too much, but I guess we kind of close the circle on that.
	But here's what I would say about this.
	And you have, let's say your channel, right?
	Your channel is a means of production, right?
	I mean, you have... I think?
	And, you know, just out of curiosity, because I'm always like, I want to see theories in practice.
	I want to see theories in practice.
	And so I had a look through your channel.
	Again, it's not a gotcha thing.
	I'm genuinely curious. And you seem to be the host of every show.
	And so I'm kind of curious why the people who work with you don't get to host your show.
	In other words, why don't you take your channel and do what you suggest is the best thing to do, have other people host your channel, share your profits with them, get them involved, rather than paying them in this cold Marxist wage laborer, dry calculations of mutual utility stuff.
	Why don't you put your theories...
	I'm curious why you don't put your theories into practice and create a worker-run, worker-owned, worker-controlled factory called the Bosch Channel because you seem to hold a monopoly on the microphone and you're not sharing it with the workers.
	And I'm just wondering why.
	Yeah, I do think there are reasonable thresholds of worker participation behind which it's not reasonably expected that you should adopt a cooperative model.
	For my case, for example, I probably do about 95% of the work to keep the channel afloat.
	But you wouldn't if you let other people host, right?
	Well, that is true. I could spread the work around more, but the main reason why I think the co-op model is essential, broadly speaking, is because it is a solution to this very particular type of wage exploitation that we see in the traditionally run firm.
	And that's not a model. That's what you were talking about with the people you pay.
	Why don't you invite them in to collectively own your channel rather than pay them?
	If the wage paying is exploitive, why don't you?
	I mean, this is what you think is the good, and nobody's going to stop you from doing it, and that's why, because I'm curious why you're not doing it.
	Because I do not think that the exploitation model is descriptive when we're talking about people who aren't expected to supply consistent wage labor to whatever firm it is they participate in.
	So just because a person, for example, like I might shoot them a message on Discord, like once or twice a month or something, and be like, hey, can you cut down this video from the DNC debates?
	I'll give you $200 or $300.
	Just because they have that level of engagement, while I do agree there is a fundamental level of inequality in the relationship between us in that bargaining system, I don't believe that type of exploitation is one which should be ameliorated with a worker-owned collective.
	Now, I will say, and that is just a product...
	Wait, so it's for other people, not for you, right?
	Well, no. I mean, I hardly think the way I run my channel is in any way comparable to, like, a business.
	But I will say this.
	Sorry, why is it not a business?
	Well, I mean, for one, I don't, like, I literally don't have a business.
	I don't have an LLC. Like, I just, I make contract money from YouTube and from direct donations, and then I redirect some of that.
	You produce a product, and you gain profits from that product, and it's, I assume, you pay taxes and you file, and I mean, just because you don't have an LLC doesn't mean that it's not a business, is it?
	Well, I mean, it's legally not a business.
	I'm a contractor of YouTube.
	No, I get that. But it's a business.
	Come on. I mean, you're putting out a product and you're making money.
	And I guess if this collective way to go is the way to go, I would expect...
	Like, I was really... I went to your channel and I'm like, wow.
	Because there's a lot of up-and-coming YouTubers that would really like to get access to your, like, 60,000-odd subscribers.
	And I'm just curious why you don't share your means of production with...
	Because an equivalent example would be like saying that a delivery boy should be in the part of a worker co-op of a legal firm because twice a week he brings them orange chicken.
	just because there is money exchange between those two agents and just because they provide a service to the legal firm doesn't mean that they have a relationship on a level that necessitates a worker cooperative.
	I will say this though, I'm not trying to skip on out of this.
	I do think there are people who run YouTube channels large enough that you could argue that a worker cooperative would be a viable enterprise for them.
	The Young Turks, for example.
	I know recently there have been attempts for the unions to organize.
	There's been some drama on that specifically. - You've rejected the union organization, right?
	I heard that, but then I heard they had just like, they want like a private meeting before they agree to certain.
	I'm not sure. It's very complicated.
	I don't like have a set opinion on it, but whatever the case may be, if I agree that there are some levels of business relation that should be cooperatized, but there are some levels that are abstracted enough that they probably shouldn't.
	If you believe I'm being hypocritical in this case, that I don't like my editor, for example, they I don't become part of a worker cooperative, even though I don't even have an LLC, then that would extend the reach of worker cooperatives to a point where you would have to include delivery people and the guy who waters the plants every Tuesday as part of the cooperative.
	But that results from your decision to create a monopoly over your channel, to have you as the monopolistic host over your channel.
	And that also does create, of course, you would probably be getting 95% of the profits of your business, right?
	Presently, I'm probably getting in the ballpark of 80, but yeah.
	Okay, so you get 80% of the profits of your business, and so you make far more than the people you pay, and it is, I assume, a full-time gig, given the number of videos you put out.
	I assume this is your thing, right?
	Yeah, I don't have much other, not much free time these days.
	Okay, so this is your thing, and you have a monopoly over the means of production of your channel.
	You take 80% of the profits and you don't have any ownership share with anyone who works for you.
	I mean, when I work with people, I generally will pay them a percentage of whatever comes in from the channel.
	I'm actually much more of a worker cooperative guy than you are.
	If it's an efficient business model, you can say, well, I'm not big enough, but if it's an efficient business model and the Young Turks should do it and you shouldn't, isn't that the best way to get to be the size of the Young Turks?
	And if you haven't done it, I guess, but you're recommending it to other people, you say, well, I'm too small, but isn't that how you get bigger?
	I do not believe that privately, that individual YouTube channels where 90% of the work is done by one individual, who could be doing 100% of the work if they just wanted to spend less time playing video games and actually knuckle down and do the editing themselves, are the appropriate business model to apply a worker cooperative standard.
	I've never heard anyone argue in favor of that.
	It should be noted, though, that while the intricacies of applying worker cooperative business models Are incredibly complicated, and there's a whole range of nuanced discussion there.
	Whether or not that fuzzy line would include where I am presently, which I've never heard anyone say- No, but wouldn't it be cool to take your theory for a spin?
	Listen, you could put a message out here saying, listen, if you're— I'm happy to turn over my means of production to you and you can take the microphone once a week and I'll pay you a percentage of the donations because you've got 80% of the money goes to you, you, right?
	So you've got some stuff to spread around, and it would be a great way for you to open up your channel to a multiplicity of voices and to not have this monopoly production of the means, monopoly control over the means of production.
	And it would mean, of course, you'd have less work to do and so on.
	And it just, it would be a very cool thing for you to do, because I'll tell you this, I mean, I've One of the reasons I'm so keen on the free market is I got my first job when I was 10.
	Everyone's like, ooh, child labor is bad.
	It's like, no, no, no. Child labor was essential for me to survive.
	I've been paying my own bills since I was 15 years old for a variety of reasons that are both comical and tragic.
	So I've sort of been in the free market from the very beginning.
	beginning, I'm not saying you haven't been or anything like that.
	But having been an entrepreneur, having, you know, built a company, gone through all of that, you know, from from like two guys in a room to to being going public and all it's a big deal, right.
	And then having been an entrepreneur in this space for like 15 years now, and all that excitement, I've really I really feel like I've kind of lived it.
	And when you've lived it, you get a kind of oomph or bedrock to your perspective, because it's sort of like if you're looking at a tree, and someone tells you it's not a tree.
	It's, you know, okay, well, I don't even know what to say other than it's a tree.
	As I'm looking at it, it's a tree.
	And the reason I'm suggesting this, just being an annoying older guy, you know, I know it's annoying and it may be pure nonsense, but what I would say, Vash, is you want to take your theories out of the books, out of the library, and put them into practice, right? So if you think that, you know, worker...
	Sharing is better. Find a way to implement that in your business.
	I absolutely guarantee you can, and we can talk offline if you want help on that.
	If you say, well, we should help the less fortunate, then open up your channel to other people to do shows there and give them a voice there.
	Not just through debating, because debating you have to usually have a certain size and all that kind of stuff.
	And really open up your control over the means of production to the less fortunate, and then you'll see how it plays out.
	Maybe it'll be absolutely fantastic.
	If I make it really well, maybe there'll be things that are challenges.
	But if it does work out, you'll end up with a really powerful oomph saying, hey, you know, this isn't just theory, man.
	I've lived it and I've done it.
	And here's what I got.
	A few things. To clarify, and I'll have to conclude on this because I have to go because I'm also debating destiny immediately after this.
	And I'm great at scheduling.
	So to clarify, first of all, while it would be great for me to open my heart up and just let every person with...
	With a need to participate in my channel.
	That has nothing to do with the fundamental principles of worker cooperatives.
	Worker cooperatives mean that everyone who is an employee of a given firm collectively owns that.
	I do not have employees, and there is a big difference between an employer and a contractor.
	I have never heard a person advocate that an individual YouTube channel should be subjected to an economic model, which is clearly intended for traditional firms with traditional employee relationships.
	But I am happy to say There's nothing theoretical about what I'm advocating here.
	Literally millions of people across the world are employed in worker cooperatives.
	There is a great deal of... Actually, I'm going to be honest, there could be more research done on them.
	But the limited research that exists on them seems to speak very positively of their general level of productivity, Worker satisfaction and a bunch of other factors like ability to withstand price shocks and economic downturns that exceeds traditionally owned, you know, authoritarian firms.
	So whatever I choose to do with my channel in the new future, I sincerely appreciate your offer of advice and counsel.
	But it is, in fact, the traditional firm I am most interested in seeing be made a worker co-op.
	I have to head in in like two minutes.
	So, moderator, would you like to impose some sort of ending state on this discussion?
	Yeah, before we do, I just want to make sure, Vosh, you said that's going to be on DLive, right?
	Yeah, I'll stay where I am currently.
	I'm just DLive slash TheRealVosh, because someone took Vosh before I got Vosh.
	Okay, so I'll post that after this, and Stefan, I'll post your YouTube channel again.
	But I guess just before I wrap up, Stefan, you want to have the final word here?
	No, not really. I mean, if Vash has to go, I know he's got more hair to wash than I do.
	So if Vash has to go, that's fine.
	I do appreciate the conversation.
	I know he's got to go, but listen, I'm real happy to...
	I booked a little bit more time, and I had my granola bar before we started.
	So I'm ready to go, baby.
	But if we have people in the audience who want to...
	Ask questions or make comments.
	I would be happy to stay for a little bit longer and deal with any of those if people are interested.
	And again, I really do thank you, the mod, and Varsh for taking the time.
	This is my life, man.
	I used to go to clubs. I used to dance all night.
	And now there's nothing more fun than a debate on a Sunday.
	Is it Sunday night? I've lost actually.
	I don't know. When you work online, who even?
	Yeah, Sunday night. I guess not that many clubs open on a Sunday night.
	But yeah, I used to get ringing in my ears all day from listening to Depeche Mode all night.
	Now I love debating exploitation and colonialism.
	So I just want to thank everyone who dropped by and Vosh and the moderator for setting it up.
	Yeah, likewise, if I may.
	Just, sorry. Probably Tim, Blue Politics, thank you so much for hosting.
	Stefan, thank you for taking the time to speak with me.
	I really appreciate it. Yeah, I really appreciate it.
	Please have a phenomenal day.
	And I know, I don't know the specifics.
	I don't know if there's some drama about it, but you should debate Destiny sometime.
	I know he's super unprofessional in emails or whatever, but he's a feisty lad, and he's usually a good time to talk to.
	Up to you, of course. I appreciate the recommendation.
	Alright, have a good one.
	Alright, so thanks both of you guys.
	This has been fantastic. I really appreciate both of you guys coming out.
	And I also appreciate both of you guys keeping it pretty tame.
	I know there's a few points I could tell you guys were holding back.
	And I appreciate it.
	Honestly, I think it was quite productive.
	And it was good. This was a great discussion.
	We've got a little bit of extra time here.
	Peace out. Have a good one, Vash.
	If you want to throw people up or take text chats, I'd be happy for that.
	If that's the way you want to do it or if there's something else.
	Sure. So if anyone wants to ask some questions, I opened up the AMA questions chat just above this VC and throw in there.
	If you want to ask a question yourself in voice chat, I assume you're okay with that, Stefan.
	Yeah, let me just, while you gather those together, I just, listen, I want to mention, because look, there's a little bit of team mechanics going on here.
	Like there's Team Vosch and there's Team Eggman and there's probably Team Walrus out there somewhere for those who love the Beatles.
	But listen, You can't lose in a debate.
	Oh, he destroyed and smashed it.
	No, no, no. Listen, you can't lose in a debate because if you're disproven, you get the truth, which is a great plus and a great positive.
	Some of what Vos and I We're debating was sort of factual based and, you know, was colonialism beneficial for the society as a whole or did it just benefit particular class individuals at the top near state power and so on?
	Some of that was empirical and some of that was sort of moral and foundational.
	And I liked his debates.
	I thought he did a very, very good job.
	I don't think he did quite enough of a good job to prevail, but that's obviously not my fundamental idea.
	Place to decide. But let's try and stay away from the he destroyed, he smashed, he this, he that, you know, I mean, he, he put some really good arguments in, I put some good arguments in back.
	And the purpose, of course, is to show the back and forth to show that people, even from relatively oppositional sides of the political aisle can have a productive discussion.
	And I was the only one who dropped an F bomb.
	So I guess that means I lose.
	But anyway, so I just wanted to mention that while we just wait for the questions to come in.
	Okay, so yeah, guys, in the chat above this VC AMA question, so go ahead and write your questions there.
	If you want to ask it in voice, write in all caps VC before it.
	I guess while they're coming in, I'll just go ahead and ask a question myself.
	I know you probably feel like you may have answered this.
	I didn't feel like it was really fully fleshed out, so I was wondering if you could touch on this.
	In the debate, you were saying...
	I know there's three things. You put it in a trilogy.
	I'm not going to remember all of them, but it was property rights, essentially, is the source of human wealth.
	Can you explain how you think, mechanistically, it all derives from property rights?
	Well, sure. Okay, so...
	Morality is often portrayed as something that you have to learn Kantian-style German or ancient Aramaic to understand, and you've got these massively thick books on morality that makes everybody's head turn to dust.
	My moral foundation was working as a daycare teacher for years when I was a teenager where I had a class full with another teacher.
	I was a teacher's assistant, not a formal teacher, but it was like 25 to 30 kids aged 5 to 10 for a couple of hours every day after school.
	I had actually made arrangements to leave school early to get the job because I needed money for rent.
	And then I would work all summer full-time.
	And, you know, when you work with kids, which was great fun, and I really loved those kids, and I think we all had good relationships.
	But when you work with kids, you constantly, what are the two things that you say all day with kids who have been brought up pretty rough sometimes?
	It was a pretty rough neighborhood in many ways.
	Well, what do you say? You say, don't hit and don't grab, right?
	Don't hit and don't grab. Don't push, don't shove, don't use force.
	And don't take people's stuff.
	Don't take other kids' stuff.
	Hey, if the kid's got gum and wants to share it, fantastic, but you don't just get to go into his backpack and take his gum, right?
	That's wrong. So...
	Morality is really not that complicated.
	If you expect a four-year-old or a five-year-old or even a three-year-old to kind of understand morality, it can't really be that complicated and it's really not.
	So that's the property rights.
	Don't steal and don't initiate the use of force.
	Listen, there were times where I would see because the kids are always hoping that you don't see and then they can both come to you and say, he started, he started.
	But you'd see, sometimes you'd see one kid would push another kid, and then the other kid would jump up and push him back, right?
	And I wouldn't ever say to the kid who pushed back that was bad, right?
	Because that's self-defense, so to speak, particularly if it was more immediate, right?
	I mean, if it was five minutes later, maybe not so much.
	You do need to have the foundation of non-aggression and property rights.
	There's not this weird flip that happens in morality where it's like, well, it's great for five-year-olds to not initiate force and to respect property rights, but boy, by the time you get to 20 or 30, it's this postmodern relativistic hellscape of subjectivism and exploitation.
	So I just wanted to make that sort of basic point.
	But the way that property rights produce wealth ties into what I said near the end of the last debate before we got into the final debate about Vosch wanting everyone else to adopt socialism except him.
	The point of that was to say if you don't have a reasonable expectation that the excess value that you produce You have to have it to trade.
	If you only ever grow enough food to feed yourself and your family, there's no economy.
	There's no trade. It's just subsistence farming which characterized a good deal of human history.
	So you have to have a reasonable expectation that you will get to keep and trade Why would you grow extra food if it's just going to get stolen from you?
	Aside from what Bloomberg says, I guess he didn't ask all his farmer friends, farming is hard work.
	If you want to produce excess food, it's bloody hard work.
	You've got to get up early. Your back is going to hurt.
	You've got to mend fences. You've got to milk cows.
	Anyone who's not done manual labor in their life should never talk about farming because it's bloody hard work.
	You have to be really, really smart and plan for a lot of this stuff as well.
	So if you don't have property rights and the right of contract, property rights being I can hold on to the excess that I produce and contract mean I can trade and get paid for it and whatever because sometimes there's delays in payment and all that.
	So if you don't have property rights and contract, nobody produces any excess and you don't have any wealth.
	That's number one. Number two is that, as I mentioned, if you are a farmer and you can produce twice the crops out of one acre, So, the guy...
	Who can make $200 a year out of an acre of land is going to be able to bid more for that land than the guy who can only make $100 a year, right?
	Because he can get more profits, right?
	So he can bid more for the land.
	And so the most productive tend to end up with the most land.
	And that works for a little while until their lazy-ass Eaton-style kids end up just, you know, not grasshoppering but anting all summer and then they end up blowing.
	Like, my family was rich aristocracy in Ireland for a thousand years until my grandfather, the drunken wastrel, blew up all of the land and sold it all off to fund his epic debaucheries and used his last couple of bucks to send my aunts and my father to...
	To university and it's all gone.
	It's all gone. And it's kind of true, right?
	I mean, as I said, 90% of the wealth the family accumulates is usually gone by the third generation.
	And so because there's this constant shuffling, so, you know, let's say I'm the great farmer.
	I end up with 10,000 acres and I'm just producing food like crazy.
	My son is not a very good farmer.
	And Maybe he'll borrow.
	Maybe he'll go into debt. Maybe because he doesn't like farming and he's not good at it, he'll go do something else and then he hires someone who's not that invested in it and so on.
	Eventually, the land is going to be up for sale and some new guy who's a fantastically great farmer will snap it up because, again, he can bid the highest and he ends up producing maybe even more crops.
	You have to have this constant shuffling of...
	Resources into the hands of the people best able to maximize and create amazing things out of them.
	And that process is what generates wealth.
	If you interrupt that process, if you stop that process, wealth begins to decline and decay almost immediately.
	All right. So let's just get right into the next...
	Real quick here.
	If anyone... To have a kind of, I guess, mini voice debate.
	Are you open to that? No, yeah, yeah.
	Bring him in. Hey, let's socialize this mofo.
	So if you guys want to have a mini debate with Stefan, write an AMA questions VC there.
	And last time I'll say this, if you want to invite your friends here, it's bluepolitics.gg.
	I'm sorry, discord.gg slash bluepolitics.
	So... Spacebeard has a question he'd like to ask you.
	Let's see. Spacebeard, you there?
	Yeah, I'm here. Go ahead.
	So my question is, before when you were talking about property rights, it seems to me that you were conflating simple possession and property rights.
	And it's my understanding of both most modern legal code and both, you know, Just historical common law, those two things are not the same.
	It seems to be a common trend that these things are associated as if they're synonymous.
	What are your thoughts on that? Which things are synonymous?
	I'm sorry if I missed it. It seems to me that you were synonymizing simple possessions and property rights.
	I'm sorry, you're going to have to tell me what you mean by simple possessions.
	You mean a toothbrush? What do you mean?
	Before, you were talking about the foundations of morality in children and how they have possessions.
	When you were talking about that, you were conflating that with property rights, where property rights are a legal system that really governs interactions between people with relations to a specific natural resource or means of production.
	A simple possession is a simple possession.
	They're totally distinct...
	Oh, okay. Sorry. I think I understand now.
	So what you're saying, and it's a bit of a Marxist distinction, which doesn't mean that it's false.
	I just sort of want to point out the historical origin of it.
	So the Marxist distinction is to say that the ownership of the means of production determines class consciousness, and owning a toothbrush is not going to determine your class consciousness, but owning the factory that produces the toothbrush...
	So there's a distinction, and Vash was talking about this as well, where he was saying, look, my channel is not the same as a big company, so there's totally opposite economic rules to apply, and I should wage exploit my workers or contractors rather than invite them in to participate in a worker-owned and I should wage exploit my workers or contractors rather than invite them in to But morality doesn't work that way.
	Morality doesn't say, well, there's one set of property rights for goods over a million dollars.
	Thank you. Sounds like somebody's flushing a toilet.
	Oh, well, it's good having the water background for a fishing story.
	So if I go fishing in a lake and I catch a fish and I bring it and I sell it to you for a buck for your dinner, right?
	Well, I didn't create the fish, but I converted the fish into a usable good by taking it from the bottom of the lake where you can't eat it and putting it in your pan and then into your belly, right?
	So the property right is converting something that has...
	Non-value, like the fish at the bottom of the lake, it only has potential value.
	It converts it into something that has real value.
	In the same way, if I buy a piece of land to grow food, I'm not buying the land.
	I'm buying the right to keep the food that I grow.
	In other words, if somebody were to sell me the land but not any right to grow food, well, I wouldn't buy it because I only want the land as a mechanism by which I can be guaranteed to own the products of what I buy.
	Create, right? So understanding that property rights are foundationally about what you create.
	I mean, nobody would build their house on land that somebody else owned because the person could just kick them off at any time, right?
	So you have to establish ownership of the land to build your house on, otherwise the house isn't going to get built.
	And so property rights fundamentally are required for the creation of goods because I'm not going to bid on land if I want to grow food.
	I'm not going to bid on land unless I can keep the food that I grow there.
	I'd harvest it and keep it. Property rights regarding means of production.
	If you borrow money and you hire people and you create a factory, well, that's the same as you and your brother creating a log cabin in the woods.
	It's just the difference of scale.
	Morality doesn't suddenly reverse after a certain scale.
	Well, I guess in the communist world, if you're an individual murderer, you're a bad guy.
	But if you kill 100 million people, well, you're just idealists who need one more chance, right?
	But in the genuine world of morality, size doesn't matter, you know?
	It always sounds bad when a man has to say, size doesn't matter!
	It's not the wand. It's the magician, baby.
	So the idea that there would be separate property rights for the means of production versus individual property, you own the effects of your actions.
	Whether it's a toothbrush or your genius in creating a factory that builds toothbrushes, you are still responsible.
	You own the effects of your actions.
	I own the product of my debate.
	People say to me, well, your tweet said this and that's bad.
	It's like, well, you're just affirming property rights.
	I created the tweet. I am responsible for The tweet, if you go strangle a guy, you're responsible for the resulting murder.
	So we are responsible for the effects of our actions.
	That doesn't matter how big or how small our actions are.
	It may matter from a legal context insofar as stealing a candy bar isn't as bad as stealing, I don't know, some Aztec kid's living heart on a ritual, stone rock or something.
	But the morality doesn't care about scale.
	It's more binary than that, if that makes sense.
	Okay, well, again, you keep saying there's no distinction, but there's a very concrete legal distinction between a possession and private property.
	It's like, okay, I own the farm and everything that comes out of it, even if I hire somebody to come and produce the thing.
	I mean, again, and your assertions about Like morality somehow, caring like morality is this separate thing.
	I find that a little bit like nonsense.
	Sorry, I don't understand the farm example.
	I'm sorry to interrupt you. I just want to make sure we...
	I always get accused of interrupting, but it's because I don't want people to keep building arguments when I don't understand the beginning, if that makes sense.
	You know, like if someone tells you how to get somewhere and you don't understand where you've turned left or right at the beginning, you kind of got to stop them there, right?
	So what do you mean about...
	Let's say I own 10 acres and I hire some guy to...
	You started it off a little bit like rambly and off topic anyways.
	But the thing is that...
	What I asked you was why you keep conflating simple possessions and private property when there is neither a historical connection between the two nor a current legal connection between the two, but you're speaking about them as if there is.
	Private property rights is your right to own a natural resource or a corporation or something like this from which you have the right of capital increase.
	Whereas simple possession is like I have a banana in my hand and I'm eating it.
	That's a simple possession. It's different than me saying I own this land and these natural resources and anything that comes out of it and I can control all of the economic activity in this as a kind of microstate.
	One is a very new legal construct within the construct of liberalism.
	Are you saying that large land ownership is a new construct?
	Okay, so one is a very ancient human relationship between an object and the person, and the other is a rather new legal distinction that came out of the Enlightenment era, like within France and the aristocracy and the establishment of capitalism.
	But sorry, you know that there were landowners in ancient Greece and ancient Rome that owned thousands or tens of thousands of acres, right?
	I mean, yeah, I mean, this is true, but again, like within the modern context, of course, we've had private property rights in the past, but again, even there, it's different than a simple...
	Okay, but so what's the difference?
	So just help me understand.
	I mean, you still have control over your farm and you have control over your banana.
	Right, well, one requires a state to enforce that control, right?
	And one is within your direct control, right?
	So if I own a state...
	If I own this estate over here, that is a right that is granted to me by a state.
	No, no, no. The state doesn't guarantee property rights.
	No, no, hang on, hang on. The state doesn't guarantee property rights.
	The state exists only through its violation of property rights.
	You can't rely on the state to guarantee your property because they will take your property by force.
	And there is actually, I mean, you know, in America, there's no legal right.
	To protect you. There's no legal right to protect your property.
	And so, no, the state is not at all a guarantor of property.
	The state exists through its violation of property rights in the form of taxation.
	Okay, well, the state is literally the arbiter of property.
	Property rights. They grant deeds to property.
	They maintain a military and police force.
	They maintain a military and police force that is absolutely necessary to maintain the social relationships between individuals so that these property rights are not violated.
	Hang on. Why is it absolutely necessary, boy?
	That's like somebody saying, well, you know, we have to have slaves, otherwise there's no possible way that the crops will be picked.
	You want cotton, you got to have slaves.
	It's like, no, you get rid of slavery, you get a whole new way of picking cotton, which is eventually giant machines and all of that.
	So I don't, you know, just because something has existed and has claimed dominance over a particular modality of human interaction, like property rights, doesn't mean that that's the way it has to be forever, no matter what.
	You're very conservative, I'm telling you that.
	Very right-wing. This is the way it's always been, so it's the way it's always got to be.
	I'm not saying it's the way it's always been, it's the way it's always got to be.
	What I'm saying is that private property rights are a system of civil rights.
	They're civil liberties. This is fundamental to the ideas of liberalism.
	The idea of private property rights is a legal contract between the members of that society mediated by the state.
	It's not a simple possession.
	It is actually a legal system that is under the protection of a state.
	Without a state, Without a state institution, if you have private property, you then are the de facto state.
	If you are the person maintaining the monopoly of force over the given territory to control your resources, you have now become the state in the absence of a state.
	This is what monarchy was.
	Now we have a state that mediates private property rights to the individual.
	I don't understand this at all, and I think we're going to have to move on because here's the thing, man.
	If you want to have discussions about this stuff, you've got to define your terms ahead of time.
	You've got to tell me what is a state.
	I even asked you for the difference between your personal property and the larger property category, and I couldn't get anything out of that.
	Let's move on to another one.
	So you don't have the monopoly to initiate the use of force, like if, you know, in your own property.
	The moral rules don't change on your property versus something else.
	So let's move on to another question.
	I would say just get your definitions.
	Definitions is so important when it comes to debating these kinds of ideas.
	And I just feel like I've spent 10 minutes chasing definitions, and that gets kind of boring after a while.
	So, you know, just work on the definitions.
	Shoot me an email. It's on the website at freedomain.com, and we'll pick it up.
	I hate playing catch-up on definitions all the time.
	So if we have another question, that'd be great.
	Yeah. Next one is also a VC question from Exilla.
	I think it's related to the debate.
	Exilla, are you there? Yes.
	I need to look at my question.
	I think it was about Vosh.
	Actually, can you hear me?
	Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so I worked for a small construction business, and it's in the United States, and we had to closely look at the IRS guidelines for subcontractors versus employees.
	It just so happens that in new construction, like building cookie cutter homes, that the majority of the business for just the market Happens to be dealt with subcontractors.
	And you have some six-figure to multi-million dollar companies where they have very, very few employees.
	It might be like one, two, maybe ten.
	You know everybody by name.
	You know their birthdays. But the subcontractors, you might have 50 to hundreds of them.
	And I was asking you, where do you think the continuum is?
	Between those two lie where you're going to say, I don't have a business now because I have only subcontractors, because I don't have employees.
	Do you get what I'm coming from?
	Yeah, the distinction is going to lie when someone tells you that you should put your own economic theories into practice and you don't want to.
	That's when you're going to start creating this kind of distinction, just to be perfectly clear, you know?
	It would be like me saying, well, peaceful parenting is the way to go, which is something I've been saying since long before I even became a father.
	My daughter's now 11. And I hit my child, right?
	And somebody said, well, you know, you've been talking about this peaceful parenting.
	You might want to do it in your own home.
	And I said, no, no, no. But you see, peaceful parenting is only when you have more than one child.
	It doesn't count when you only have one child.
	It's like, well, isn't right...
	Isn't this way of organizing yourself economically the right thing to do no matter how many employees or contractors or this or that you have?
	It's a little unfair here because Vosch isn't here to snark in my ear about this kind of stuff.
	But yeah, I think that's pretty clear.
	If somebody told me there was a way to put my theories into practice in my daily life, I'd be thrilled about it.
	I wouldn't create this arbitrary distinction and say, well, it's for other companies.
	Do we have another question?
	Yeah, our next one comes from Firstamender.
	Let's see. Go ahead.
	Yes! Yes!
	Okay. So, like, one thing that I noticed about, like, your debate there, where you were talking about...
	Vosh, he made a really, really big, like, mistake.
	And I feel like... Wait, only one?
	Oh! Just trash talking to the guy who went here.
	Anyway, go on. No, it's a very big mistake.
	So, like, he basically...
	Labor basically creates wealth.
	But as we know, as being libertarian capitalists, you and I, both capitalists, we know just because you have somebody labor does not necessarily mean that you create wealth.
	Just to reinforce that point.
	So first of all, in the really boring to most people but fascinating to me history of economics, the labor theory of value was disproven within a couple of years of the publication of Das Kapital.
	It was like no economist takes it seriously.
	Well, there's no economist that actually… Over 100 years since it's been taken seriously.
	So the idea that somebody still adheres to the labor theory of value is, I mean, I hate to say it's ahistorical because that's not an argument, but it is kind of, it has been disproven so many times.
	And of course, if you think like it's, sorry, it's a lot of work to dig a hole in the ground and fill it back in again.
	Particularly if you want to put the grass on top really nicely.
	So you could spend an hour or two digging a hole five feet down into the ground, filling it back in again, brushing all the soil away and making it look just like it did before, and you haven't added anything of value, although you've worked very, very hard.
	So yeah, labor alone doesn't produce value.
	That's like saying that screaming produces songs.
	Well, I guess if you're into heavy metal, maybe.
	Now the question for you, okay?
	Because I just...
	That was the introduction.
	Now for the question. But you responded with saying, well, wealth is created through morality.
	Wouldn't you agree that it requires individual liberties as a prerequisite, but ultimately only result in just one piece of the puzzle?
	Having individual liberties doesn't necessarily create wealth.
	Well, okay, I think you're simplifying my answer just a smidge there, because I did put a lot of examples in there of saying slaves worked harder than workers, but workers got paid more, so there must be some other magic source that is being introduced into the equation.
	And I didn't say that morality alone...
	I said that morality – so, for instance, the moral crusade to get rid of slavery produced the conditions for the Industrial Revolution.
	And so morality is necessary but not sufficient.
	It's necessary but not sufficient for there to be wealth.
	In other words, it creates the condition where in the pursuit of wealth – But listen, this is something that people don't hugely understand.
	And I remember reading about this.
	I think the book was called The Undercover Economist, which is like, I don't know, like 20 years ago or something like that.
	There's a really, really great piece in the book, and it had a really important part in my life, which is this guy said, oh, everybody talks about maximizing profit, maximizing GDP, and so on.
	But no economist says that you have to do that.
	And I'll give you an example. So...
	I took time off from my business career, about 18 months, maybe closer to two years.
	And I left the company that I'd co-founded.
	And listen, I don't want to sound all kind of braggy or whatever.
	This isn't even a humble brag, right?
	But the new owners of the company were begging for me to stay because I built the software to begin with.
	I'd been involved in the business for a long time and I knew all the customers.
	I had a lot of value. And they offered me like $150,000 a year.
	This is like close to 20 years ago now.
	$150,000 a year to work three days a week.
	And I'm like, no, I won't.
	Because I'd much rather rely on donations and be slandered on Wikipedia.
	Or at least lied about on Wikipedia.
	So that is...
	That was sort of my approach at the time.
	And I took that time off.
	I had some savings and I took that time off and I ended up writing two novels.
	And, you know, I went from making fairly good coin to being below the poverty line in terms of my income.
	Now, is that... Bad for the economy?
	Well, no, because the economy doesn't mean that you have to work.
	The economy doesn't mean that you have to maximize GDP. You can if you want, and you can go and work all the time if you want, and you can save like crazy, or you can go make a lot of money and blow it like Nick Cage and Johnny Depp or whoever blew their money or whatever happened, right?
	So this aspect of the economy is really important.
	No economist is going to say, well, it's bad for you to quit your job and write novels.
	Okay, did that lower the GDP? Well, I guess it did, but so what?
	What the hell is the point of maximizing the GDP or maximizing your income or maximizing profitability?
	It's all about having choices. I had the choice to continue working because of the free market.
	I had the choice to quit because I made some money from the free market.
	And so just as, to tie it back into your question, you need a moral universe.
	Where there are property rights and a reduction in violence in order to even have the potential to generate wealth as a society.
	I think it ends up kind of like it's one domino that hits the next one.
	And I agree with that. I mean, I discovered that a long time ago, sitting there reading Milton Friedman and Rothbard and a whole bunch of other dang textbooks that...
	And a lot of it is like very heavy...
	So it's like, yeah, you're barking up just the same exact tree.
	Yeah, there's no logic. People say, like, the logic of capitalism is to do this, that.
	It's like, no, no, no, no, come on. The logic of capitalism doesn't exist.
	It's free will. It's free choice.
	This mechanistic, deterministic view of the universe exists.
	That the only reason we have a modern society is the planets of weird coincidences aligned and magically produced all of this new stuff.
	It's like, no, there were particular choices that people made about the morals they argued for, the virtues they stood for, they pushed back against mercantilist power, against the tyranny of the medieval unions, which were completely crippling to the economy to the point where You couldn't even be like a blacksmith without apprenticing under a blacksmith for like seven years to learn probably about six months worth of material.
	And you had to do the job that your father did.
	You were just locked in.
	You were a serf, half enslaved to the land.
	You were bought and sold with the land.
	I mean, it was not a free market situation.
	By increasing the amount of choices...
	It outputs to a greater society by creating more choices for people.
	And so I guess you went straight towards the morality thing, which I get it.
	I do. I understand.
	But don't you think that it would have been better to be like, well, I think that it's choices, not necessarily that morality.
	Now, does morality increase the amount of choices?
	Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
	But then wouldn't you just say, well, it's choices that make it, not morality.
	Well, but choices is such a subjective term.
	If I start talking about property rights and the non-aggression principle, that's more specific.
	Because, look, you know what choices mean to a leftist.
	I don't know if he's a leftist.
	I don't know what the hell he is anymore.
	No choices to the left.
	No, you got a point there. No, choices mean something very, very different, which is to say, hey man, I don't have the choice to go to Harvard if I don't get free money from the government.
	So choice is one of these unfortunately subjectivist terms that I'd like to be a bit more precise.
	I guess it's like you want to give people more choices, but then at the same time, without trying to revoke other people's choices.
	And so I think that's where a lot of capitalists and a lot of socialists, they tend to differ.
	But choices and morality are not the same thing.
	Obviously, you know that, right? I mean, you can choose to kill someone, to rape someone.
	No, no, no. I don't want those choices around too much.
	But being that like, let's say if you murder somebody, you steal something from somebody, you lie, you cheat, you know, things like this.
	You can say that, okay, yeah, that's the individual choice, but that is at the revoking of the autonomy of another individual.
	And so you can come to a conclusion that somebody who had their goods stolen is not going to be able to make choices regarding those goods.
	You revoked that person's ability of those choices for your ability to ownership.
	So you can come to a conclusion just without even discussing morals that it's effectively wrong.
	Okay. Well, I've got a whole book on ethics called Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, which goes into this in more detail.
	But let's move on to another question or two, if we have some.
	I really, really appreciate the conversation.
	Thank you. Thank you.
	Yeah. All right. So, Firebird would like to know, how do you feel about reliefs if they do jobs at the time and age?
	Oh, I hate it. This is like stutter madness.
	Can you just try that question again?
	You'll need to speak up a bit so it doesn't keep cutting you out.
	Oh! Sorry about that.
	Firebird asks, how do you feel about religion and beliefs and deities?
	Are they obsolete for our time and age?
	That's a complicated question.
	So there's two aspects to this.
	So the first aspect is from an irrational, objectivist, empirical, or objective philosophical standpoint, the existence of deities cannot be supported.
	And I even go further than that to say that the non-existence of deities is proven.
	I've got a book called Against the Gods, available for free at freedomain.com forward slash books.
	So from a philosophical standpoint, the existence of deities can't be supported.
	Now, that having been said...
	The fact-value dichotomy is really, really important in the modern world.
	And what I mean by that is, and this goes back to an argument that Dennis Prager and others have made, it goes all the way back to pre-Augustinians, which is, where are you going to get your morals from?
	So, if you say to a Christian or...
	A Jew or a Muslim, you say, well, why is murder wrong?
	You say, well, it's right there in the Ten Commandments.
	Thou shalt not kill.
	Actually, thou shalt not murder.
	It's a little bit different. So it's like God said it, and God is the moral law, and that's it, right?
	I mean, there's lots of complicated stuff around it, but it's kind of beginning at the end of the discussion.
	That's the Alpha and the Omega of where the moral law comes from.
	Now, if you take...
	Universal consciousness out of the equation, if you take God out of the equation, where the hell are you?
	Sorry, where the heck, for the Christian listeners, where the heck are the morals going to come from?
	They don't exist in nature.
	You cannot get an ought from an is, according to Hume.
	In other words, the fact that you strangle a guy and he dies, well, you say to the Christian, why is that wrong?
	Well, God says don't murder.
	You say to the Darwinists, the secularists, and so on, why is that wrong?
	You know, he might say, well, it's inefficient to stability of society, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	But, you know, what do you say about the people who disagree?
	Well, the Christian says you're going to hell or you're certainly not going to heaven.
	And what do you say to the guy who can get away with stealing?
	What do you say to him? What do you say to the guy who can get away with stealing?
	If you say to the guy who wants to get away with stealing, if you're a Christian, you say, well, you can't because God's always watching and God sees it and God records it and it's going into the book and St.
	Peter's going to wave his quill at you at the pearly gates and you're not going to get into heaven.
	So that's why you don't do it. But if you can, get away with it.
	And you remember with Vash, he was talking about it's economically productive and, you know, it builds wealth, colonialism.
	me say, like, I'm not applying any moral standards to this conversation.
	Now, for a Christian, a religious person, the idea of not applying any moral standards to a conversation about theft would be kind of incomprehensible.
	But if you're anti-theistic and a pure secularist, you generally tend towards Nietzschean-style moral nihilism or the will to power.
	And this, of course, is a lot of what the left does is this will to power.
	And I can't get to the existence of a deity philosophically, but I find a universe of no ethics to be revolting, which is, again, I know it's not an But we can't be mammals.
	We can only be inhuman, right?
	We're human or we're inhuman.
	We're human or we're anti-human.
	We're good or we're evil.
	We can't be amoral because amoral leads you directly to evil.
	And the reason why good and evil exists for us is that we have the capacity to universalize our choices into a particular ethos.
	The lion doesn't say that the zebra owes the lion its life because of some collective good of lioness or something like that, or mammalian life.
	So we do have this unique capacity to abstract our rules into ethical concepts that are universal and binding, and we're either going to use that for good or we're going to use that for evil.
	The problem, of course, is that if there isn't a God, then the universals are not founded in philosophy but in theology, which can be very dangerous.
	There's 300 years of religious warfare and over 1,000 years of religious warfare in the Muslim world and in the Jewish world and so on.
	it's a big problem so to me the big challenge was okay if i can't get to ethics through god and i can't stand and find it repulsive and wrong and evil to have an amoral darwinian nietzschean style will to power universe how on earth can i get ethics so i did write this book and you can get a short version of this it's at essentialphilosophy.com the book is free on youtube and mp3 you can read it online uh you can buy a copy too if you want um
	I came up with a theory of ethics that doesn't require a guard, doesn't require a government for enforcement, and it's now been going on close to 15 years, and it's holding strong.
	So you should check that out.
	All right. User Capra wants to ask, how was your day?
	My day? Oh gosh, what can I talk about?
	You know, I didn't sleep too well.
	I was a little tired today.
	And I don't normally have more than two cups of coffee, but I had a third for this debate just to get my gears up and going.
	So it was an okay day.
	I would give it a six.
	And usually I'm like an eight to a nine in terms of like good days.
	So thank you. How was your day?
	Oh, mine was good.
	Good. I had some interesting debates.
	All right.
	Let's see. Do you have a question? Is there a question out there?
	For me. Let me see.
	So we've seen a couple of these.
	Might as well just ask, what are your thoughts on Nick Fuentes?
	Well, I would sort of...
	Is that how you pronounce it?
	I don't know. I've never heard it pronounced.
	Is it groper? Groper?
	Groper? I'm not sure.
	Grouperfish? I don't know what it is.
	Listen, there are legitimate and strong points to be made against what's referred to as Conservative Inc.
	with regards to its lack of criticism of mass immigration, its lack of criticism of the fact that mass...
	Immigration into the US, I sort of dug up these statistics for a part of the debate with Vosch that never materialized, so I might as well jump in and milk them now.
	But it's really bad.
	Because I grew up poor, I really do have a lot of sympathy for the poor and recognize how much help they do generally need to sort of get out of...
	It's a very, very big deal.
	So here's a quote.
	The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually.
	That's from a couple of years ago.
	According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25%.
	As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.
	Now, when you're making $2,500, that's 7%, 6%, 7%, 8% of your income annually.
	And that's not even counting the additional taxes of the immigrants who are very high on taxes.
	Consumption of government services, government goods, food stamps, welfare, subsidized housing, and so on, and not to mention, of course, education.
	So I think that there's a lot of criticisms to be made.
	And Nick, of course, is a young man.
	People forget that he's only a couple of years older or a year or two older than Nick.
	David Hogg, who himself has some maturing and some seasoning to do, I think that he's gone for shock value too much, you know, and just sort of professional advice.
	I think he said some outrageous and offensive things.
	Now, I know that people have said the same thing about me, so I'm willing to accept that, but I've always tried to ground what I say in expert interviews and science and sources and all of that.
	And there's some things that he said that I just I can't countenance.
	I don't really want to get into the details.
	It doesn't really particularly matter.
	But that's so those are my those are my particular thoughts.
	And let's move on to the next question.
	All right, Yukimaru.
	To organize to stop the rise of Internet censorship.
	I just missed the beginning of that.
	If you could do that again, please.
	Oh, sorry. What is the most effective way for people who love freedom of speech to organize to stop internet censorship?
	Well, you know, this is the big challenge of the age, right?
	I mean, because finally we have free speech.
	Finally we have free speech where you don't have to own a newspaper or a television station to have an impact on the world stage.
	Finally we have no gatekeepers.
	We can all talk with each other. And that, of course, is enormously alarming to the powers that be.
	It's like it's one thing to have your rights on paper.
	It's like, oh, wait, they have an internet?
	They can talk to each other now?
	Oh, that's no good. So...
	The strategy of the left—and this started all the way back with Andrew Anglin and so on— I don't mean they are that way, although maybe they are sometimes in terms of like intellectual respectability or whatever.
	But toxic, of course, is not an argument.
	But to make people so unsavory that what happens is when they get threatened with deplatforming that people say, oh, well, you know, I don't want to be seen to be defending that person's viewpoint.
	Therefore, I will not defend that person's right to free speech.
	And, you know, I went out there with Alex Jones and with other people to really defend people's right To speak as a whole.
	Have I always been perfect at it?
	No. Some stuff escapes my attention, some stuff slips past the radar, and sometimes I'm just really, really busy, but I'll usually put out a tweet for this kind of stuff at least.
	We just need to be able to stand for people who are Very much against our sensibilities and say they have the right to speak.
	Communists have the right to speak.
	Fascists have the right to speak.
	Even Nazis, they have the right to make their case.
	However repellent and abhorrent we find it, it's got to be out there because if these ideas are out there and we censor them, they're just going to go underground.
	It gives legitimacy to this sense of persecution and it's really a terrible, terrible idea to To censor all but the most extreme forms of immediate incitements to violence, right?
	So I'm down with, you know, you really shouldn't be out there on the back of a truck screaming to burn this mofo down in the middle of a race riot because that's not particularly good.
	You shouldn't be encouraging violence against others.
	You shouldn't be encouraging the destruction of property.
	You shouldn't be out there using your rhetorical gifts to add to the violations of persons and property so endemic in the world.
	So But yeah, outside of that, I am very much a free speech absolutist, and all should be permitted, all should be debated, and the marketplace of ideas should be the way to go.
	But of course, because we've been raised in government schools, we don't know how to debate, so unfortunately we're just falling back on knee-jerk censorship.
	All right.
	Let's see here.
	That's not good.
	That's not good. Oh, now I want to know, but that's fine.
	It's your show. You sure you want to know?
	No, if it's not good, I will trust your judgment on the things I cannot see.
	Or if I did see there, it might turn my eyes bloodshot.
	All right, the next one.
	This is a good one. It's from Mr.
	Superguy. He wants to ask in voice, are you here?
	I'm here. Is he there?
	Superguy? Hello.
	Hey. Cool. Be a little quiet.
	Am I? Yeah.
	Alright, give me one second.
	Alright, is that better?
	It was fine to begin with, so let's just jump in.
	Alright, perfect. So, how do you feel about guaranteeing a flaw for the standard of living through government policy?
	Well, that's pretty easy. Does it violate property rights?
	Does it require the initiation of the use of force?
	I mean, certainly it would require taxes.
	Well, that would be the initiation of the use of force, so no, I'm against it morally.
	Okay. So what's your, like, political ideology?
	Are you kind of an ANCAP? Yeah.
	Well, I mean, the word ideology is a smidge prejudicial.
	The consistent and universal application of the non-aggression principle demands a stateless society.
	And it looks very weird to people.
	I'm not saying to you necessarily, but it does look very weird to people.
	But so what? You know, the universal application of the principles of gravity results in a sun-centered solar system, which makes people feel dizzy if they believe that the Earth was fixed in its center of the universe.
	universe so what the fixed application of the constancy of the speed of light produces weird relativistic time travel slowdowns at the very fastest speeds of existence and energy being converted into mass when you approach 186 000 miles per second so what freaky things shouldn't scare us with the universality of principles and the fact that society looks very different
	when you look through the lens of the non-aggression principle it should be pushed back against because you know radical news and social ideas have killed a lot of people throughout human history but i really can't picture after many many years of thinking about it and puzzling about it interviewing about it reading about it writing about it talking about it debating about it, I really can't see how a universal application of the non-aggression principle is going to produce anything other than the best and freest human society possible.
	Okay. All right, that's fine.
	All right, thanks. Okay, we'll just move on to the next question then.
	So Fred asks, do you think that functional post-scarcity will ever emerge through the free market, aka goods are so cheap, They cost pennies while retaining high quality.
	Oh boy, we'd already be there if it wasn't for regulation.
	Hyper-regulation, right?
	I mean, like the crazy kind of regulation where you can't open a factory in America and so now everyone's dependent on Chinese prescription drugs that may not come relatively soon.
	I'll give you a tiny example of this, right?
	So post-scarcity, we'd already be there.
	This is what's so frustrating is seeing the road less traveled.
	So here's a tiny example.
	So, in the post-Second World War period, there were significant numbers of regulations and controls in the American market system.
	Now, it's been estimated that the escalation, the increase in regulations and controls in the market system in America has cost two to three percentage points of GDP growth every single year.
	Now, because this is cumulative and compound...
	Right now, right now, we would have incomes well over $150,000, $175,000 a year if everything else had remained the same, but we just hadn't had all of this massive increase in regulation.
	And maybe some of the regulations would have shifted, like we don't have to regulate the radio any more, maybe we regulate something else.
	But if the amount of regulation had remained constant, and that's not...
	Utopia, right? That's just not dystopia, right?
	That's not utopia to say, can we just keep the amount of regulation in the post-war period roughly about the same?
	We'd already been in a post-scarcity society.
	We would already be making $150,000, $175,000, $200,000 a year.
	This is what's so frustrating about the world is we're kind of dragging ourselves along, wounded by massive debt and deficits and inflation and QE dumping of fiat currency toilet paper onto an increasingly fragile and scattered marketplace and the creation of, you know, you say, well, unemployment is low.
	It's like, well, yeah, and some of that is good and some of that is just debt.
	Some of that is just government borrowing.
	Some of that is increased government employment and so on.
	So we would already be there.
	Even if just one tiny factor in the American economy and other economies had remained constant, we'd already be in a post-gastity society.
	We're dragging ourselves along, barely able to keep wages at a steady level, while debt opens up a chasm underneath us because of all of this crazy regulation and control and all of that.
	It's just horrendous.
	So, yeah, absolutely.
	All right. And Road Trip, I'd like you to talk about They say that that alone is eye-opening.
	Sorry, just lean a little.
	You're going to need to deep throat this mic, my friend, and just give it another try if you could.
	Thanks. I'm so sorry.
	Roadtrip asks, if you could talk about the Pareto distribution, they say that that alone is eye-opening to how big companies actually work, and that not everyone provides the same value in any work.
	Yeah, now, so the Pareto distribution is more of an 80-20 rule.
	The one I was talking about earlier, which I have had countless emails telling me to get right, and I appreciate that.
	It's good to be corrected, of course. But the Pareto distribution, and it's funny too, not to, again, I don't want to sort of bag on Vosch because he's not here to defend himself, but he did sort of say, well, there's no magic source.
	There's no, you know, and I used magic as an analogy at the beginning.
	Like, it is kind of like magic.
	Like, how do you, how does someone sit down and write the song yesterday, right?
	Like the Beatles, one of the most famous recorded songs in 6,000 different versions.
	And I'm not even kidding. There are 6,000 different versions of that song.
	It's kind of magic. Freddie Mercury is sitting in a bath in Munich and the song Crazy Little Thing Called Love pops into his head and he jots it down and it goes on to sell a bazillion records or whatever, right?
	And David Bowie and Queen are jamming one night and they end up coming up with...
	A great song under pressure.
	And so it is kind of like magic.
	And the reason we say magic is not because it's incomprehensible or it's genuinely magical.
	We just don't know how it happens.
	So how are some people so amazingly productive?
	And Vash did seem to, in fact he did, very much decry this idea.
	He said, oh, it's the grand person of the economy and...
	You know, that there are these individuals who are stupendously productive.
	And then later on, and he did, you know, as I mentioned in the debate, he did actually say there are some people who are phenomenally productive.
	And so, again, I always have a problem with people who seem to win the point and then switch to another point when it wins that point, and they don't seem to notice.
	Like, if I'd made a big contradiction by that, like that in the debate, I would have stopped and said, well, wait a minute, you're right.
	I did say that earlier. I said there wasn't any big phenomenally productive people.
	Now I'm saying that there are. I do need to resolve this.
	But, you know, he just... Just keep on moving, man.
	Did you hit something on the road?
	I heard a thump. No, just keep driving.
	Just drive. So the Pareto Principle, as I mentioned, is an amazing thing, and it explains why free markets are so productive and why socialist economies, centrally planned economies, are so destructive.
	Well, there's two things. So the important thing to remember, and this goes back to an old von Mises argument, That price is a giant free supercomputer available to everyone on where to allocate their resources.
	So if there's some community that they want to build 5,000 new houses, they're going to bid up the price of labor.
	They're going to bid up the price of lumber and drywall and piping and electricity cords and all that.
	And so people are going to want to sell there.
	It just allocates goods based upon demand.
	And if you don't have the free market mechanism of price, you never, ever know.
	Where to allocate resources?
	It becomes political, it becomes corrupt, not just because people are political and corrupt, although they are, but because there's no other way to do it.
	If the market mechanism of supply and demand, this incredible information called price, which doesn't just exist in the present, but exists, people bet on the price of pork bellies two years from now, based upon whatever they think is going to happen to the weather or the political situation in China or whatever it is, right? So price is this incredible mechanism.
	That is not just the price of goods, but the price of, you know, the value of future productivity of a company in terms of stock prices and the future value of money, right?
	Because interest rates are the price of money, and when interest rates go up and down, it tells you how much people are saving, which is deferred spending.
	I mean, it's really, really complicated.
	Without price, there's absolutely no way.
	No way whatsoever. Peter Joseph, nonwithstanding, there's no way.
	To allocate resources in any remotely efficient way.
	The price mechanism in its constantly changing, non-centrally managed supply and demand, past, present and future, is even a price for the past based upon how valuable an antique is.
	So without price you can't do it and without the Pareto principle wherein the square root of people produce half the value.
	I mean it's just wild. The square root of all the people in a productive enterprise produce half the value.
	And so, you know, this example I use, 10,000 people, 100 of them producing half the value, but they only produce half the value if they have an incentive to do so.
	If everyone gets paid the same, then you lose close to half the value of the company just by not incentivizing those people to use their weird magic sauce to produce just so much more value.
	I sort of used an example, so when I was in the software field, I wrote a program that adjusted every aspect of our software based upon client specifications, from the tables, to the queries, to the forms, to the query by forms, to the reports, even to the web interface.
	It would change everything.
	You create one script, it would go through and change everything in the database, which normally would take weeks or months to do and to check, and it produced a whole report.
	So I loved programming, and I loved doing programs that affect programs themselves, like this metaprogramming is, to me, the trippiest stuff and the most fun stuff to do.
	So that was just enormously productive.
	It was an enormously productive thing for me to do.
	I have a very good capacity or ability to negotiate programs With hostile people.
	And so when people got mad at our company, as they inevitably did from time to time, I was just really good at going in there, calming things.
	It's just a magic sauce weird thing that I've always had.
	You know, like that guy in Stand By Me who got killed because he was really good at resolving disputes.
	Well, hopefully I don't end up like that.
	But it's just this weird magic sauce that I was able to...
	To put out. If there's no incentive, then you just don't do it.
	It just doesn't come into being.
	If there's no way for musicians to make money, you'll get hobbyists and there'll still be music around.
	There just won't be big live shows.
	There just won't be the kind of cool stuff that goes on.
	Freedom and incentive and meritocracy and property and contract is all required for this magic source of the Pareto principle to create this staggering amount of value that there's no other way.
	Oh yeah, he was blaming capitalism for bad government schools, right?
	So I pointed out how the government was producing bad, like people with no economic value.
	And he was immediately like, well, it's the textbook companies who sell to the government.
	It's like, no, no, no, come on. It's the government.
	It's the government. All right.
	Another question? Let's do one or two more.
	Yes. So during the debate that you had, I thought it was really interesting.
	So I'm actually, I guess this is two things.
	A user has a question here, then I would like you myself to comment on something because I found it really interesting.
	You talked about South Korea.
	And you were saying that South Korea's success compared to North Korea, that's because of the free market there.
	And he seemed to basically say, no, that's because of fascism.
	First, I wonder if you could comment on that.
	I thought that was really interesting.
	But also, the user wants to know, how do you define fascism?
	Yeah, so, okay. I mean, I can do this one real briefly.
	So, communism is government control of the means of production.
	Fascism is private control, nominal control of the means of production, but government's control of economic policy and government controlling the currency and government directing the capitalists to do.
	So a sort of typical example is in the Soviet Union, when there was a war, the government controlled the munitions factories directly.
	Under Nazism, when there was a war, there was nominal private ownership of the corporations, but the government directed the war policy and paid the corporations from the public purse.
	So where there's nominal private ownership but government control, that's fascism.
	When there is direct government control of the means of production, that's communism.
	Now, with regards to South Korea, okay, let's have a look at this.
	So South Korea.
	Oh, let's see here.
	Yeah, see, this is the idea that South Korea is some giant...
	It's the 29th freest economy in the world.
	And within its region, it's the seventh freest economy in the world, right?
	So let's see here.
	South Korea's economic freedom score is 72.3 making its economy the 29th freest in the 2019 index.
	Its overall score has decreased by 1.5 points because of sharply lower scores for judicial effectiveness and the tax burden and declines in monetary freedom and labor freedom.
	South Korea is ranked seventh among 43 countries in the Asia-Pacific region and its overall score is above the regional and world Averages.
	Okay, so, you know, that's pretty good, right?
	I mean, it's got almost $40,000 per capita.
	And its public debt is less than 40% of GDP, which is not great.
	But of course, compared to something like Japan, it's pretty fantastic.
	So South Korea, when he's saying it's like not part of the free market, it's like, you know, there are, what, 300 plus countries and it's in the top 10%.
	That's not... That's not too bad.
	Now, let's look at North Korea, right?
	So, North Korea Economic Freedom Index.
	Let's see here. Is it even ranked?
	Is it even...
	Let's see here.
	Yeah, I don't...
	Oh, yeah, here we go.
	Oh, God. Oh, it's so sad.
	Okay. It really is.
	It's god-awful, right? So, North Korea's economic freedom score is, what was the other one, 73?
	It's 5.9, making it the least free, least free of the 180 economies measured in the 2019 index.
	So, I mean, come on.
	I mean, we've got 180 countries, South Korea's 29th, And North Korea is dead last, and he's trying to make some bloody equation between these two?
	I mean, come on. This is...
	I mean, I get, you know, people get ego invested.
	He's a young man. He wants to win.
	His testosterone, for whatever it is, denied by his haircut, is still free-flowing through his body.
	But come on. I mean, trying to equate these two is...
	I mean, it's ridiculous.
	So, yeah. That's...
	Does that help with the answer?
	Yeah, I think so.
	So... I try to keep my own thoughts out of this, but one thing I will say is just that I find these kinds of things are really interesting.
	There's a difference. People look at a snapshot, like what it is now, look at the correlation.
	I think it's more beneficial to look at where policies were in the past.
	So I think that if you look at South Korea's policies back in the 1990s, the freedom index went around since 1995, I'm sure they would have been ranked much higher.
	I'm sorry. I'm totally rude of me.
	I just got distracted by a chat message.
	Could you just repeat that point again?
	Yeah, I was just saying that I find with this kind of stuff, it's normally more indicative of policy effects if you look at what the policies were over the long term rather than where they are now.
	And I'm sure if you look at South Korea back in the 90s, they were ranked higher than they are now.
	Yes, that certainly is true.
	That is the case.
	And you're right. This process of philosophy is very important.
	You know, I mean, a smoker is not...
	Of ill health until he is of ill health, but it's the trajectory that really counts.
	And this is what I was trying to get with the debate with Bosch.
	I was trying to get a sense of this flow-through, right?
	Because I did personally find it really frustrating because the Industrial Revolution created a lot of wealth.
	And so the question is, well, what's the source of human wealth?
	So I tried to talk about the factors that led to the Industrial Revolution, right?
	Free markets in In land, free markets, in contracts, and private property enforcement in contracts and all of that, and reduction in violence, end of slavery.
	Like, I put all of these things in as the sort of preconditions, a lot of the moral arguments, and then you get the creation of wealth that's characterized by the Industrial Revolution.
	And then he said, and I'm not paraphrasing him here, he said that the cause of wealth was the Industrial Revolution.
	It's like, no. No, no.
	That's when the wealth was being created.
	We're looking at the cause of the wealth being created, not the process of the effect.
	And so trying to sort of push it back to beforehand is – I just – I couldn't get there.
	And it was really frustrating because maybe there would be a different argument.
	But it's really tautological to say the source of the increase of wealth is the increase of wealth.
	That really doesn't answer anything.
	So did you have another question about that or – Uh, nope, that's, uh, um, that's all I got.
	So, um, I just want to let you know, uh, we did pin down the Libertarian Roundtable for March 27th at 7pm Eastern.
	Does that work for you? I would have to check my schedule, but I'd be very surprised if I was scheduled that far out.
	So, uh, just shoot me an email and we'll sort it out.
	All right. Uh, so, last question here.
	Um, we've, well, actually, you got time for two more?
	It depends how long they are, but let's give it a shot.
	Wesley asks, is it ever okay to defend yourself from the cops?
	Well, no. I would generally, you know, they call it street litigation.
	You know, they have the legal right, they have the weaponry, and they have the sympathy, of course, of the general population.
	And so I would suggest go with them.
	I was strongly advised, in fact, I would make it a very emphatic case.
	Go with the police peacefully and litigate people.
	In the courtroom where it belongs and try and secure your freedom.
	I think there's very good arguments to not talk to the cops because they're allowed to lie to you.
	You're not allowed to lie to them in most jurisdictions.
	So, you know, go quietly, get yourself a lawyer and take it from there.
	But it is...
	And listen, remember that the cops, you know, they're not...
	I mean, I've had some calls with some very tortured people in the government who are voluntarists or became voluntarists and have trouble with their career choices now.
	But, you know, cops do a lot of good in the world.
	They do keep a lot of criminals off the street.
	And given that recidivism is very high and nobody knows how to fix criminals, so to speak, that is an important job.
	They do believe, of course, that they're doing...
	Good in society, and again, they're right about it in a lot of ways.
	The fact that, and I wrote about this like 15 years ago, so this is not a new argument of mine.
	People are heavily propagandized, and you need to be aware of that.
	It's not their fault that they've been lied to so consistently and so universally by their culture.
	It is, you know, extracting people from the matrix is a tricky business.
	Getting people out of, you should When it's back on, I think next month, the movie Hoaxed is going to be back, hoaxedmovie.com.
	I have a whole thing in there about Plato's Cave.
	Getting people out of the land of delusions, out of the state-constructed shadow land that they live in, is a very delicate process, and it is a challenging process, and it's really, really important to have sympathy.
	You know, there's an old phrase, I grew up Christian, and there was an old phrase, there but for the grace of God, go I. And When you are dealing with somebody like a cop who you may have significant disagreements with, you're dealing with somebody like Vosch who I obviously have significant disagreements with.
	And I don't mean this to sound condescending because Lord knows there's things that I have illusions about and still need to be peeled back from time to time.
	So this is a sort of commonistic human process.
	But you just think of your own life.
	And if you just had not happened to run into particular arguments, or particular perspectives, or a particular book, or had a particular crazy friend who started dragging you out of the matrix, if you had just slipped through the cracks, as most people do, you'd be on the other side of that table.
	And you'd be arguing that the Russia hoax was real, and Trump made fun of disabled people.
	I mean, you just would be for the most part.
	They're there, but for the grace of God, go you and I and please, please try and be as patient as possible.
	It doesn't mean beat your head against the wall for the rest of your life, but be as patient as possible when dealing with people who've been I've been propagandized.
	So, and I will say this, like, I mean, so with Vosh, it's a little different because, you know, he's been out there debating with people.
	He's been exposed to contrary ideas, so I could be a bit tougher with that.
	But most people, divorcing them from their illusions is a very, very tricky and difficult business.
	So please, please, as much as you can, be patient with them and go with the cops.
	Don't fight with the cops and get yourself a good lawyer and hold your tongue.
	All right. Let's do one more.
	Oh, two more. One more? One more.
	All right. Last question then is from Fred.
	How can a free society manage the responsibility that comes with legalized vices such as drugs and gambling?
	Well, that's a great question. So, first of all, I refer you to fdrurl.com forward slash bomb in the brain.
	And the reason I do that is that I've done a whole series of presentations, including an interview with Dr.
	Vincent Felitti, who ran the Kaiser Permanente Health Study, that if you look at dysfunctions, like drug addiction and gambling in particular, they arise fairly directly out of childhood abuse.
	I mean, take an example of one of the most famous gambling addicts in history was Fyodor Dostoevsky, And his father was so abusive and so brutal that he was murdered by his own serfs for his alcoholism, by they poured alcohol down his throat until he drowned in his own alcohol.
	And so I would say that once we fix parenting, once we fix childhood, which is why I brought this aspect in of childhood, and to his great credit, Vash brought that back in again with regards to power disparities, and I really appreciated that.
	It was great. But If we can raise children peacefully and rationally, we don't hit them, we don't circumcise them, we don't abuse them, we don't neglect them.
	When we raise children in a peaceful and rational way, these addictions will largely dry up and blow away.
	I mean, you know, they may still happen.
	There'll be people who have brain tumors or, you know, whatever.
	They're just some really susceptible that way or whatever.
	But if you have peacefully raised children...
	It's sort of like, you know, when smallpox was really common and like a quarter or a third of the population would sometimes succumb and some would survive from smallpox.
	And you'd say, my gosh, how would a free society deal with smallpox?
	It's like, well, funnily enough, now that we've become a more free society, we have, I still have the scar.
	Do I still have the scar on my arm there from my smallpox inoculation when I was a kid?
	And now we don't have to worry about smallpox.
	And in the same way, peaceful parenting is an inoculation against most social dysfunctions.
	Promiscuity, alcoholism, cigarette smoking, drug addiction, hyper-stress, and ill health.
	You know, I mean, child abuse can take up to 20 years off your lifespan if you don't deal with it, which is why I strongly suggest people deal with it, talk therapy or self-work or whatever it is that can help you to deal with the effects of that abuse.
	But once we start raising children peacefully and lovingly and productively and positively, We will end up with a world that is as strange to us and beautiful as today's world would be strange and beautiful to those from the Middle Ages, which was when parenting was much harsher and much, much worse. Alright, well thanks so much for sticking around.
	Oh, my pleasure. Listen, thanks for great, great questions from your wonderful audience, and I'm sure I had nothing but love and respect in the chat, as always, as usual.
	But I hope, you know, I hope the thing, too, like, so people hear about me from unsavory sources like Sycopedia, And, you know, hopefully they then come by and say, okay, you know, he's got some interesting points.
	I may not agree. But, you know, he's not, you know, he's not sucking the soul out of your children's belly buttons or something.
	So, yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with everyone.
	Before you head off, I am assuming I know what Wikipedia says because I've seen other sources.
	Would you like to respond briefly to that just to, like, dispel it?
	I know you've said it before on videos.
	I mean, just very, very briefly, I'm not a white nationalist.
	I don't believe, I mean, different ethnicities is not violating the non-aggression principle and property rights and the rule of law should extend to and protect everyone.
	I'm not a fan of the welfare state.
	I am much more a fan of open borders and the absence of the welfare state, which is an old argument that goes back to Milton Friedman.
	I encourage people to have honest conversations with their family, but I support people's right to disengage from abusive relationships where they can't be recovered or they can't be reformed.
	You should not spend the rest of your life being abused by anyone, whether it's a parent, an aunt, an uncle, or whoever.
	You should work your very best to connect with people and to try and minimize abuse, but if the abuse is relentless, And you can't change it.
	You have the right to leave.
	And it may in fact be a very good idea.
	I don't tell people what to do.
	I don't go around breaking up families and so on.
	I just support the right of people and remind them of their right in their short life to not have abusive lives, abusive households.
	This whole far right thing is nonsense.
	I've consistently opposed far-right fascism.
	I've had debates with fascists that are highly oppositional to the fascist ideology.
	Oh, gosh, what else?
	I've done entire shows on the evils of Nazi Germany.
	I've done a show with a Jewish professor on the evils of the German economy and the German socialist model.
	And so, yeah, I mean, that's just that's a typical it's a communist tactic.
	I'm not including Bosch in this, of course, but it's a communist tactic to just call people you disagree with racist and Nazis.
	And I mean, this is just it's a tragic, tragically effective thing, although I think it's losing its power now.
	But I guess I appreciate the capacity or the chance to response.
	For those who are interested, I have put together some of the rebuttals to some of the more silly things that have said have been said about me.
	I should do more, and I will get around to it.
	But fdrurl.com forward slash untruths.
	That's fdrurl.com forward slash untruths.
	Let me just make sure it's got the plural there.
	I can type. I really can.
	Untruths, is it plural? Yes, untruths.
	So I hope that you will check those out, and I appreciate the chance to talk about that stuff.
	All right. Thanks again. Really appreciate it.
	Thanks, guys. So we'll see you in March.
	Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful, well, I won't say rest of the weekend because it's 57 minutes here until the weekend is over.
	But thanks for the opportunity.
	A great pleasure. And I will talk to you guys again.
	If you like the show, freedomain.com forward slash donate is the place to go.

▲