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Feb. 27, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:14:49

DEBATE BREAKDOWN! Free Market Stefan Molyneux vs Communist Vaush

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	So, yeah, debates are fascinating things.
	Vash and I had a debate, and I wanted to go over a couple of the points that were made and do some fact-checking on the claims that were made.
	It was a very interesting subject or topic of the debate.
	It was, what is a source of human wealth, and what is exploitation?
	Now, the point that I made, which, you know, I'll do this a little bit.
	This is being played a little bit faster because he's a bit of a slow talker, but the point that I was making was...
	If you want to explain the source of human wealth, you know, here's the basic thing that your theory must explain.
	Here's the basic thing. Okay, check this out.
	Okay, so this is trillions of inflation-adjusted international dollars.
	This is from 1 AD. Through to pretty much the present time.
	And you look at this graph completely flat.
	And it wasn't like it was high beforehand, right?
	So this is the, I assume anybody familiar with the source of wealth is familiar with this graph.
	You should be because this is really important.
	So you look at this graph.
	It's flat. And it begins to rise.
	1500, 1600, 1700, and then 1870, there's a kind of strategic inflection point and it just begins to go through the roof.
	So whatever, the source of wealth, we're talking about this upward graph that starts in the late 19th century and has gone, I mean, gosh, that's exponential, more than exponential ever since, right?
	So this is the basic graph that needs to be explained if you have a theory of human wealth.
	In other words, if what you're talking about as a source of human wealth is common throughout the earlier period, then it's wrong.
	It's an incorrect theory because you have to explain what changed.
	Now, my answer, of course, as to what changed was we got free markets, private property, a reduction in violence, and this allowed the productive scope of mankind to have full play, to increase its value when you get a bidding war for capital, for Land for labor, then those best able to maximize its increase end up in control of it.
	And this is where you get this incredible growth because none of that was present in the past.
	First in land in the 18th century and then in capital, in labor in the 19th century, you got free markets extending and expanding.
	And that's sort of my argument because they weren't present before.
	What was present before doesn't explain what this sudden growth is.
	And once you see this graph and you understand that it's been a huge benefit to mankind to have this kind of wealth, there had to have been something new.
	And theories of...
	Capital theories of free markets.
	There was a book I read many years ago called England's Treasure by Foreign Traffic that argued for a reduction in tariffs.
	There was, of course, the rise of property rights theorists like John Locke and so on, private property and limited theory.
	Laissez-faire capitalism comes, of course, out of the French cry of the merchants to their king when the king said, what can I do for you?
	And they said, laissez-nous faire, leave us be, leave us alone, let us trade, stop capitalism.
	So, getting the government out of the economy, separation of state and economy, like separation of church and state, was fundamental to the modern world.
	So this is the graph that I'm trying to explain, and Vosch, of course, had the challenge, and I put this challenge to him right at the beginning.
	Whatever theory he has, has to explain why this sudden increase in wealth, unprecedented in 150,000 years of human history, occurred right after private property and free markets and a meritocracy existed in the human realm of economics.
	So let's turn to his What explanation as to where this comes from, where this increase in 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.
	You know, incredibly complicated.
	God knows, depression, recession, or boom, what something might be worth.
	I think when I tend to think of human wealth, I tend to think of a more generalized, you know, accumulation of all of the industry, all the ingenuity, all of the material possessions, the labor-saving devices, the artwork that a...
	Okay, so he's talking about wealth as an accumulation of value.
	And you can see my face here on the left.
	I'm like, what? So this doesn't make any sense.
	I mean, right off the bat, we're talking about what is the source of wealth, and he's talking about the existence of wealth already.
	It's like if somebody says to me, let's say you go to some guy and you say, how did you make a million dollars?
	And he shows you his bank statement with a million dollars on it.
	That doesn't tell you how he got it.
	That just tells you that he has it.
	So talking about wealth as the already existing accumulation of value doesn't tell you where it comes from, which is why I'm making this face.
	Individual, company, country, civilization has accumulated.
	And through all of these different variants of wealth, there is one underlying cause, which is 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, those things are valuable on their own, of course.
	Now, that's interesting because...
	When he says that a diamond mine and an oil field are valuable in and of themselves, that's just not true.
	Oil was considered, like before the invention of the internal combustion engine, oil was considered a disaster.
	Like if you wanted to grow crops and you found oil there, it was bad.
	And diamonds? Well, diamonds weren't actually considered hugely valuable except for sort of some industrial applications.
	There was a big... I think it was De Beers after the Second World War to say, you know, diamonds are a girl's best friend.
	Diamonds, you've got to spend two months' salary on an engagement ring for your fiancé.
	It was a real push to make diamonds more valuable.
	Maybe you think gold has intrinsic value.
	Well, that's not true either because when the gold rush was occurring in Alaska, for instance, they sent people to find the source of gold and the local natives were like, oh, that yellow rock?
	Yeah, it's all over the streams.
	You can take it if you want.
	We don't care because they didn't have any value.
	So, things don't have intrinsic value.
	The value is based upon demand.
	And subjective theory of value is very important.
	If you've just drunk a big bottle of water, you don't want to pay a lot of money for a bottle of water.
	If you're dying of thirst in a desert, you'll pay a lot of money for a bottle of water.
	There is no objective, quote, value to a bottle of water.
	It depends upon subjective need and demand and desire.
	So, yeah, this is why I'm a little baffled at the beginning, because we're talking about the source, and he's talking about the existence.
	Uh... It's like me saying, where did the universe come from?
	And you show me a picture of a galaxy.
	It just tells me that it is not where it came from.
	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 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, so now we have a problem, right?
	I'm going to get into this, which is...
	If it is common labor that produces wealth, then people worked harder in the past than they do in the present.
	I mean, to have a seven-and-a-half-hour workday with a convenient washroom and lunch breaks in an air-conditioned office in a comfortable chair, that's kind of new.
	Like, that's less labor. That's less physical work.
	That's less hard work than was in the past.
	And so, like, to go back to that chart, right?
	Flatline and then all the way up.
	How on earth does a labor theory of value, and this is a Marxist idea, a label theory of value, which is discredited actually a couple of years after Marx wrote it, and he didn't reference it much after that.
	So how do you explain why we're so staggeringly wealthy now, given that human beings labored throughout history, what changed?
	So just saying people worked doesn't answer the question because people worked harder in the past and we were much poorer.
	Okay, and same question to you, Mustafa.
	Alright, so the source of human wealth, you've 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, okay.
	So there's two things here.
	Of course, the first I've talked about, this is how do you explain the graph rising?
	But the second is very interesting.
	But when you get more of a meritocracy, then you get wider disparities of income.
	Now, of course, you can say, well, but the aristocrats versus the peasants and so on.
	But, you know, would you rather be a king 300 years ago or a poor person in Canada?
	Well, you'd have much greater access to goods and services and healthcare and comfort and media and antibiotics and so on in the modern world, right?
	So everybody had it pretty crappy in the past.
	It's like that old Monty Python skit or scene from Holy Grail.
	Oh, that must be a king.
	Why?
	Well, he hasn't got crap all over him, to paraphrase it a little bit.
	So the income disparities that exist in a free market system are very large and And they do create this kind of envy and resentment.
	And it's important to explain.
	Like, if the source of wealth is labor...
	Then is it true that the CEO is working 300 times harder than the worker, right?
	Because he's making two, three hundred times the salary, right?
	So if it's a labor theory of value, you have to explain why people who are extraordinarily capable or considered to be valuable by the customers or the shareholders, which are representing the wills of the customers or the preferences of the customers at some point, You have to find some way to explain why some people make so much more.
	And I go into the Brad Pitt example here.
	So if it's the labor theory of value, you really can't say that the CEO is working 300 times more hours, 300 times harder than the worker on the factory floor, but he's getting paid 300 times more.
	So how does the labor theory of value account for that?
	Well, my approach of free market demand, supply demand, and the prices law which I get into that The square root of a group in a meritocracy produced half the value, right?
	So we'll get into that, but you have to sort of explain these two things.
	Why is there great disparities in income and what changed in the 18th, 19th centuries that allowed for the economy Incredible increase in wealth that we see.
	The answer to that is pretty easy to understand if you are familiar with Austrian economics, that kind of stuff.
	So the first thing is that 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...
	Yeah, so Henry Ford was able to double his workers' salaries by, instead of having all the workers swarm over one car, he had an assembly line where each worker did a little bit of work.
	They bolted on a wheel, they put on a steering wheel, they put on the hood of the car, and he was able to just massively increase production by just reorganizing the means of production.
	That's an incredible thing. It's something we take for granted now, but some people are just incredibly productive.
	This is well understood in economics, it's well known in economics, and Whatever theory of wealth you have has to be able to explain that.
	And just saying, well, people do labor, well, you know, okay.
	I mean, it's true that, you know, Jeff Bezos can't get his $100 billion plus fortune without workers in the factory, but...
	That still doesn't explain why there's the income difference.
	Now, I mean, the Marxist answer is that Jeff Bezos is kind of stealing from the workers and so on.
	But, you know, theft from the workers occurred all throughout human history.
	I mean, gosh, if stealing from workers creates modern wealth, then stealing from slaves is infinitely worse than stealing from workers.
	It's infinitely more exploitive because the slaves have no choice.
	I mean, the workers can choose to work at some different place.
	They can choose to upgrade or increase their skills.
	So if stealing from labor creates wealth, then human beings should have been fantastically wealthy 100,000 years ago when everyone had slaves or 2,000 years ago when everyone had slaves.
	And of course, we should have lost wealth as slavery was eliminated because you steal more from slaves than you do from workers, even under the Marxist model.
	So it doesn't explain why any of this has occurred.
	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.
	Now, I mean, it's funny, too.
	I use the word magic here, and I knew it was going to be a little bit of a trap for the low-brainers, right?
	But the reality is nobody knows exactly who these productive people are, how productive they're going to be.
	Nobody knows the cause of it in particular.
	Maybe one day we'll figure it out.
	Maybe it's just in the magic realm of free will or the I mean, if people knew exactly who these magically productive people were, then investors would never lose money because they'd be able to laser-like identify who was going to be the most productive and just invest in those people and not in anyone else.
	If people knew exactly what magic productivity was, there'd never be a box office bomb.
	Every movie would be like Avatar and Titanic and so on.
	So people don't know. We don't know.
	We know that it occurs.
	But we don't know why it occurs.
	And the why is less important than the what.
	Right? So we're talking about what is the source of wealth.
	Well, there are these people who have these amazing capacities to produce optimized things.
	I mean, you look at Tesla.
	You look at people like Elon Musk.
	You look at Steve Jobs.
	I mean, these are just titans of industry.
	And how are they able to do what they do?
	Nobody really knows.
	But the effects are very clear. It 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 exercising their productive genius in the free market throughout most of human history, we remain poor.
	You can see... Okay, so it's important, right?
	So think of a thousand people.
	Now, among those thousand people, there's probably one really fantastic singer.
	Now, let's say that there's a law that says everyone can only sing like this.
	They can only whisper, sing.
	Like they can't use their actual vocal cords, right?
	Ah. Upon the distance I see you, I feel you.
	Like you wouldn't actually be able to tell who was a good singer because they're just whisper singing, right?
	Now, let's say that you remove that restriction, then suddenly you're going to find really good singers and really bad singers, right?
	So that's an analogy for industrial production.
	If everybody's inhibited, the guild system in the Middle Ages was incredibly restrictive, incredibly compulsive, and incredibly controlling, and didn't allow for the free scope of human potential.
	So that's really, really important to understand.
	If you put a gun to people's heads, you can make a good singer sing well.
	He'll be a little nervous, I suppose, but you can't make a bad singer sing well even if you apply force to him.
	So you have to have a reduction in the amount of force, lower the barrier to entry, let the free play of talents work out in the free market, and then you'll find the really great singers.
	You'll sort out the bad singers.
	I mean, we all go to karaoke night if you've been, and it's like you know If you've been regular, who the good singers are and who the other singers are.
	It's pretty rough and pretty obvious.
	All right, let's move on. 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.
	Now that's really, really important because you don't get...
	Cities, really. You don't get an urban proletariat who are able to work for wages if you don't have excess food.
	So excess food is required for the Industrial Revolution.
	In other words, you would expect a free market in land to occur before a free market in capital, and that's exactly what did happen.
	Free market in land allowed the best farmers to accumulate the most land, produce the most wealth, which kicked a lot of people off the land.
	They went to the cities. The excess...
	Wealth that flowed into the cities from the farms was available to feed the people who ended up becoming the workers.
	And again, the theory just holds perfectly that way.
	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.
	Okay, I'm just going to speak forward to his response.
	So, Varsh starts his response.
	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.
	All right, so, the great man theory is the idea that, throughout human history, Great men willed things to happen and took history in a particular direction and so on.
	It's not primarily about economics, and I've rarely seen it used in a purely economic sense.
	And so, yeah, I mean, the fact that he's characterizing my argument, you know, like when he put forward his labor theory of value, I didn't say, oh, well, this is just another boring Marxist labor theory of value, widely discredited, blah, blah, blah.
	Like I actually engaged with the points of Rather than trying to characterize his argument in general, which is, you know, kind of a smarmy superior.
	Oh, this is just a standard ideologue.
	He's just a mouthpiece for Rand.
	And it's a way of diminishing the other person without actually having to engage with the content of the arguments to characterize it in some broader context.
	And he's applying this incorrectly because I'm not saying that the great man theory is responsible for modern wealth, right?
	Because we're talking about the source of...
	Of wealth. And in particular, of course, the real wealth that we're talking about allows us to have this conversation, which is modern wealth, because there were great men throughout all of human history.
	I mean, you can go back, I mean, Marx himself was a great man in terms of intellect and his impact on the world.
	So this guy being, like, this guy didn't make up, Vash did not make up the labor theory of value.
	He just got it from Marx and then says, well, there aren't any great men.
	men.
	It's like, well, you know, you only have the label theory of value because Mark was a towering influence in world historical thought.
	And there were great men all the way back through history.
	I mean, of course, you go back Napoleon, there was Augustine, there was Aristotle, there was Alexander.
	I mean, you just go through the list of Genghis Khan, there were great men, powerful men, world influencing men throughout human history.
	But that doesn't explain why over the last 200 years, we've become fantastically wealthy.
	So he's not addressing my argument.
	He's taking a separate argument that has to do with larger historical movements.
	He's not applying it to the specific economic conditions of private property rights, a reduction in value, in violence.
	He's not taking it and applying it to my theory.
	He's just saying there's this great theory of history, and this is what Steph's parenting, but we're talking about the source of wealth.
	The great theory of history does not confine itself to the last, 200 years, but goes back all through human history.
	Jesus himself would be considered a great man in this context.
	But I don't think anybody would say that Jesus was responsible for the Industrial Revolution, right?
	So this great man theory is not at all applicable to what I'm talking about, which are specific economic conditions.
	And of course, I haven't said, you know, this person or that person was responsible for these.
	I've just said these conditions came to be and this is the source of wealth.
	So him talking about the great...
	Man theory is nothing to do with what I'm talking about.
	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...
	Yeah.
	So I just wanted to take away this particular silly rhetorical tool that he had and just say, look, let's just deal with each other's arguments rather than trying to put them in this sort of big, wild historical context.
	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.
	Okay, so why on earth would you need to tie arguments to academic arguments that That people have made in the past.
	And you'll notice, of course, that when Vash is talking about the labor theory of value, he's not saying this is a standard Marxist argument, and he doesn't put his arguments in this historical context that he considers to be so essential.
	He only puts my arguments in this historical context that he considers to be so essential, which is how you know it's a rhetorical trick.
	If we reduce all discussion down to he said, she said, or he said, he said in our case...
	Okay, so I've made arguments about the source of wealth, free market, meritocracy, reduction in violence, respect for property rights and contract law.
	And so I don't understand why you can't actually just address those arguments, like why it has to be he said, she said.
	I mean, you address the arguments.
	You can prove how these things are incorrect.
	You can prove how this is not the source of wealth.
	You can find counterexamples.
	And he does some of that later, which we'll get to.
	But I don't know why it just becomes he said, she said, unless you are, quote, putting my arguments in historical context.
	Incorrectly, by the way. Then we can pull essentially anything out of our ass that we like.
	What this... So he's saying that he can't address my arguments.
	He can only, well, mischaracterize them as part of some larger argument.
	Otherwise, I can pull things out of my ass directly, like we can just make up anything we want, unless the arguments of academics are referenced.
	That is incomprehensible to me, of course, and it's incomprehensible to anyone.
	Because, I mean, obviously, if anyone can say anything unless you reference historical movements, then the people who created those historical thought movements themselves could reference anything.
	It's infinite regression.
	It's turtles all the way down. Essentially, it's 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.
	By the way, Übermensch, of course, is a reference to Nietzsche's overman theory, the sort of Aryan super race theory.
	And so, you know, throwing the German, like throwing German characterizations is, it's kind of bigoted, like throwing German words in that I have never used.
	And of course, I'm talking about the Industrial Revolution, which for 60, 70 years was almost completely contained to England.
	Which has been a traditional enemy of Germany, of course.
	So, yeah, just throwing in a German word here.
	It's just one of these poisoning the wells, silly little rhetorical tricks.
	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 productivity pretty much across the board.
	Okay, so he's saying that...
	The source of wealth is the Industrial Revolution.
	Okay, but that's not explaining anything, because the question, as I said at the beginning, which he completely ignores...
	Well, he does actually acknowledge, of course, that there has been increases in wealth throughout this time, but nonetheless, what he is doing is he is...
	Ignoring the cause of the Industrial Revolution.
	Why was there no Industrial Revolution 1,000 years ago?
	2,000 years ago?
	10,000 years ago? You understand human beings have been around for 150,000 years.
	150,000 years of barely subsistence existence for humanity.
	200 years, boom.
	We have 20, 30, 40, 50, sometimes 100 times increase in wealth.
	So, saying that the Industrial Revolution is the source of wealth doesn't explain why the Industrial Revolution only occurred 150 years ago, or 100 years ago, depending on sort of where you're looking and where you count, right?
	140 years ago. So that doesn't explain anything.
	That doesn't explain anything.
	So it's like saying that the source of my wealth is the big numbers in my bank account.
	What caused the Industrial Revolution?
	Sure, the Industrial Revolution generated wealth, but why did the Industrial Revolution occur particularly in the UK? Why did it not spread to France very much?
	Why did it not spread to...
	Russia very much.
	Why was it later in Germany and then much more effective in Germany?
	So you kind of have to explain all of these things.
	Just saying the Industrial Revolution is a source of wealth doesn't explain why the Industrial Revolution happened.
	Now, his argument is that...
	Let's just go back here for a sec because it's important to get his words again.
	Sorry, I just kind of blathered past them.
	...are more descriptive because we saw equivalent increases in productivity pretty much across the board.
	Now, it's been a while since I studied up on the Industrial Revolution, like in sort of its details, so I took this relatively at face value, although you can see by my face I didn't particularly believe it.
	But I try not to get tangled in facts unless I have them secure in my brain.
	So I did have a look upwards, because there's kind of a thing that you do in a debate where you have to rely to some degree on the honesty of the person you're debating.
	And so I looked at this, right?
	And I'll put the sources to all of this below.
	So in the period 1760 to 1830, the Industrial Revolution was largely confined to Britain.
	In fact, it was considered to be so powerful to Britain that the British government tried to keep the technology and the knowledge from leaving England.
	So, here's the full quote.
	In the period 1760 to 1830, the Industrial Revolution was largely confined to Britain.
	Aware of their head start, the British forbade the export of machinery, skilled workers, manufacturing techniques.
	The British monopoly could not last forever, especially since some Britons saw profitable industrial opportunities abroad.
	While continental European businessmen sought to lure British know-how to their countries.
	And so, two Englishmen, William and John Cockerill, brought the Industrial Revolution to Belgium by developing machine shops at Leige in 1807.
	And Belgium became the first country in continental Europe to be transformed economically like its British progenitor.
	The Belgian Industrial Revolution centered in iron, coal, and textiles.
	So look at this! 1760 to 1807 is almost a half-century.
	Almost a half century.
	So when Vosch says that the Industrial Revolution had its effects pretty much uniformly everywhere, it's absolutely, completely, and totally a lie.
	It's a complete...
	I mean, it's not even close. I mean, it's not like it was a couple of years.
	It's almost a half century, right?
	Here's another quote. France was more slowly and less thoroughly industrialized than either Britain or Belgium.
	While Britain was establishing its industrial leadership, France was emerged in its revolution, and the uncertain political situation discouraged large investments in industrial innovations.
	By 1848, France had become an industrial power, but despite great growth under the Second Empire, it remained behind Britain, right?
	So we're talking 1760, and then it was not until close to a century later, France became an industrial power, still remained behind Britain.
	England. And that's pretty important.
	And there is, of course, in the case of Russia, Russia lagged enormously behind.
	But just look at France here, right?
	So when he says that the Industrial Revolution occurred everywhere in equal measure, it's completely false.
	And it's not even, like, debatably false.
	It's like saying that Julius Caesar was the king of China.
	Like, I mean, it's just not even close to true.
	So, and this is not some Randian source.
	This is, I think, what does it come from?
	Britannica. History.com, Britannica.com.
	These are the standard sources for basic Facts.
	And of course, my argument is that where you don't have stable property rights and the rule of law and the rule of contract and a meritocracy and a free market, you're not going to get an industrial revolution.
	Well, by golly, that didn't happen in France because France was going through all of its political upheavals.
	And it didn't happen, of course, in Russia because Russia still had serfs.
	And when you have serfs, you don't really invest in labor-saving devices very much.
	So anyway, just...
	You can see my face here on the left.
	I'm like, you know, I'm not going to go and entangle on this unless I have the facts right in front of me.
	But yeah, this is, he's just, you know, this is, I mean, it's just a complete lie.
	So let's just hear it again.
	So you can hear the facts, then you can hear what he says.
	I think far more descriptive because we saw equivalent increases in productivity pretty much across the board.
	Right. France, after almost a century, was still lagging behind England because England had a 70-plus year head start on the Industrial Revolution, and of course it was the English theorists who first promoted free market, private property, and all that, and getting government out of business and all that stuff.
	France lagged behind, Germany lagged behind, Russia lagged enormously behind, so yeah, I'm sorry, this is just this complete lie.
	And I'm not even going to say he's mistaken, because this is a basic historical fact.
	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.
	Yeah, again, this is a complete lie, a total fabrication, a total falsification, which he's 100% responsible for, because this is like 101.
	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.
	Okay, so now he's got a challenge, right?
	Which he says that capitalism is vastly superior to feudalism.
	But why? The question is, why?
	Why is capitalism vastly superior to feudalism?
	Because if it's just human labor that produces wealth, well, are you saying that serfs don't work hard, that people who are feudal laborers don't work hard?
	I mean, they did work enormously hard.
	And I go into this a little bit.
	So if you're going to say that it's labor, it's the common labor that produces value, then you have to explain why capitalism is so vastly superior in its productivity to 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.
	Now, see, here's the interesting thing is that I never referenced great men.
	I never referenced individuals.
	I said that when you have a meritocracy, there are some people who are enormously valuable and the market tends to deliver the most capital resources like land and factories and so on to the people who are best able to increase.
	I mean, if you're looking to invest and there's one fund that has a historical return of 10% and there's another fund that has a historical return of 5%, you're probably going to invest with the 10% dude.
	Right? Because it makes you more money, which means that if they're more effective at choosing companies to invest in, which is why they can return double the investment, that you're going to give them their money.
	They're going to end up investing it more effectively in more productive companies and individuals.
	That's just the way the system works in a free market.
	There are exceptions and so on, but...
	I didn't just say, well, there are these magical people who stride out of history and drag the world into the Industrial Revolution.
	No, I said that you need private property, reduction of government interference, reduction in violence, contract law enforcement, and so on.
	And when you have a free market, then you get these productive individuals, right?
	So you need the conditions for the productive individuals to actually be able to work their, quote, magic, right?
	Yeah. But saying that it's just productive individuals is ignoring the complete causality.
	It's sort of like saying, well, you know, you need...
	If you put these seeds on a rock, they won't grow.
	But if you put them in earth...
	Then they'll grow.
	And then completely ignoring that I said, put them in earth, not rock, and saying, well, these seeds just magically grow.
	You need the conditions. I 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...
	Okay, so this is, again, first of all, all of this wonderful research he's done that completely lies about the Industrial Revolution.
	Because if he said the truth about the Industrial Revolution, that it started in the more free market countries and spread very slowly to the less free market countries, and once, like France, those countries became more stable and had the rule of law again and private property rights and they began to grow more, then he's accepting my argument.
	So he's got to pretend that it happened everywhere magically because of machinery and whatever.
	All of the supposed research that he's done, let's just go back and sort of see what he says.
	Okay, so I don't know what this means, right?
	So I said earlier, of course there's labor involved in factories.
	Of course people work in factories.
	It just doesn't explain much because people have worked hard throughout human history and they work less hard now and we make more money.
	So when he's saying, this is a complete straw man, like right here, let's hear it once more time.
	The entirety of productivity.
	In other words, Jeff Bezos answers the phones, programs the website, he drives the trucks, he manufactures the goods, he maintains the temperature of the warehouse, he does the taxes.
	The entirety of Amazon's production is done by one guy.
	This is a mad perspective.
	I mean, there's straw man and then there's like entire straw armies on straw battlefields with straw rain and straw bows and arrows.
	I'm sorry, this is funny. Oh, I just got to hear that again.
	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, you know, 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 create and those who simply operate machines, that certainly does exist.
	So the person who creates the machine, who creates the factory, is more valuable economically than the person who works economically.
	The machine. Let's just make sure we understand this, right?
	Now, see, again, I did never say that it's just the mere existence of a few highly privileged individuals, and I don't even know what the word privileged means here.
	He's saying that the person who creates the factory is more economically valuable than the person who works the machine.
	That's not necessarily true.
	In fact, the person who works the machine might end up much more economically valuable than the person who creates the The factory.
	Because the person who creates the factory is borrowing and going into debt, and if the factory doesn't work out, then the worker might lose a couple of weeks' pay, but the factory owner could end up millions of dollars in debt.
	I mean, I actually have some friends who went through this process, and it's really, really rough.
	Again, this is just someone who's never owned a business other than his own YouTube channel, which, you know, is a means of production, and it's a business.
	We'll get into that in a bit. But you might end up much less economically valuable by taking on these risks if they don't pay off.
	But at least he's saying that the owner of the means of production is more economically valuable if the business is successful than the worker.
	So he's agreeing with me that there are people who are more productive than others.
	But he's saying that it doesn't explain how much wealthier people are.
	But see, there's nothing to explain.
	I mean, if in a voluntary situation, if Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or whoever, in a voluntary situation, I know there's complexities with IP and all of that, but more or less, in a voluntary situation, if someone ends up wealthy, it's just because other people have chosen to give them that value.
	Like, if people want to buy Amazon stock, then that makes Jeff Bezos wealthier.
	Nobody's forcing anyone saying, it doesn't explain, or I don't like it, or it's like...
	It's sort of weird. Like, I don't know.
	It's just weird to me. Because in a voluntary situation, people become wealthier based on voluntary interactions.
	And I don't know what you need to explain.
	Your argument that these people are shooting stars that emerge quickly and then burn out quickly is an argument that these people were never that great to begin with.
	That instead... Oh, yeah.
	So I talk about how wealth, intergenerational wealth, diminishes, right?
	Now, again, my expression...
	In fact, your argument that these people are shooting stars that emerge quickly and then burn out quickly is an argument that these people were never that great to begin with.
	That instead... Okay, so I have that.
	And I'm very much confused by this, right?
	Because the one thing that happens in the Marxist analysis is that you get these overlords of bourgeois capital owners.
	And I was pointing out, and I did do this research before this debate, that 60% of people's wealth, like family wealth, is gone by the next generation and 90% by the third generation.
	So I'm pointing out that you have extraordinary people who generate extraordinary wealth.
	They leave that wealth to their kids, and their kids generally blow or fritter it away.
	And then by the time the grandkids show up, only 10% of the fortune still exists.
	I'm just sort of pointing out that there's this constant churn.
	It's a blow against class theory, because there's this constant churn of classes.
	Poor people become rich, then they fall down to the middle class.
	Middle class become rich, fall down to the lower class.
	Rich people fall to the lower class.
	There's this constant churn, as you would expect in a relatively free So he's saying, well, if their grandkids blow their wealth, then the grandparents weren't that great to begin with?
	I don't know. I don't understand what that means.
	It's like saying that if Scarlett Johansson's granddaughter isn't very pretty, that means that Scarlett Johansson was never very pretty.
	I mean, what on earth would what the grandkids do have anything to do with the productivity of the grandparents?
	You've got some, if Steve Jobs' grandkids blow his fortune, what does that have to do with the economic value that Steve Jobs provided in the past?
	Like, it just makes no sense to me.
	An incredibly complicated system of complexities and circumstances.
	Ah, you see, it's an incredibly complicated system of complexities and circumstances.
	Okay, I don't know what that means.
	We're inspired to bring them into 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 do feel as though your explanatory sense for this, the great man, it feels very disheartening.
	I laugh about this because he's talking about his feelings, and he's also, again, he's characterizing my argument as a great man argument, which is not the case at all.
	It's not the case at all.
	Like, if there's no Olympics, you can't win an Olympic gold medal.
	Right? So I'm talking about, like, where do Olympic gold medalists come from?
	Well, you have to have the Olympics first, right?
	In order to have Olympic gold medalists.
	And he's saying, I don't buy that at all.
	And so I'm saying, yeah, in order to have wealth, you have to have a free market, which then produces a meritocracy of productivity, which, you know, then raises all the boats.
	And he's just saying, well, I... I don't find that emotionally compelling or something like that.
	Your 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.
	We're not discussing freedom, we're discussing wealth, but maybe this is a foreshadow to the exploitation argument that's coming up.
	So that's interesting.
	Saying to people in a free market, lowering the barriers to entry and saying go for it and maximize your productivity is great, but he's not addressed the foundational prices law argument that I've made that the square root of a productive group produces half the value.
	That's just a fact.
	And Saying to everyone, well, you're just enormously and immensely talented, and you should just go be a billionaire.
	Okay, well, maybe that's true, and maybe people can.
	I think that's a wonderful thing to do, which is one of the reasons why I put out my philosophy show for free, so people who wouldn't normally afford or pay for or have access to rational philosophy can get access to it and benefit from it.
	But, I don't know, like, if you're the stagehand for Jon Bon Jovi...
	Is saying, well, man, you should just go be Jon Bon Jovi.
	It's like, well, maybe you can, maybe you can't.
	I mean, Barbra Streisand started out as an usher at a movie theater, so she became Barbra Streisand.
	Maybe you can, right? But, like, sorry, if you can't sing, you can't sing.
	And Jon Bon Jovi, a very handsome guy, and also a very skilled entrepreneur, a very intelligent guy, a great songwriter, a great performer.
	This is a conglomeration of talents that is actually really rare.
	It's really, really rare.
	And it is, you know, it is important to have a realistic view of your own capacities.
	I'm not out there looking for, like, I'm going to make a living as a hair shampoo model.
	Like, it's just not going to happen, right?
	I'm not going to go and join the Bolshoi Ballet and try and dance the lead in Swan Lake.
	Like, these things aren't going to happen.
	It's important to know what you're good at.
	It's important to know what you're not good at.
	And be satisfied with that.
	And not everyone can be a billionaire and And it is just the way things are.
	And that's partly talent. It's partly IQ, which is 80% genetic by late teens.
	It is partly willpower.
	It's partly also personal preference.
	Like, these zillionaires, their personal lives are usually just horrible.
	Just horrible. I mean, Jeff Bezos had to give away vast chunks of his fortune because of a horrible divorce.
	Steve Jobs abandoned his daughter and shacked up with some crazy hippie.
	Because you're working all the time.
	And a lot of people don't want to work all the time.
	I mean, I've worked in factories.
	I've worked in menial labor jobs.
	A lot of the people are like, they look with sorrow and pity at the boss who's sitting there doing paperwork and fielding calls from angry customers when everyone's heading home to have a beer and go play baseball.
	It's just different priorities.
	Having money is not the be-all and end-all.
	It comes with a lot of personal costs a lot of time.
	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. Yeah, so he just straw manned by argument by calling a great man argument, which it's not.
	He ignored the role of property rights.
	He ignored the role of privatization of public resources.
	He ignored the rule of law.
	He ignored the reduction of violence.
	He ignored the...
	The maintenance and respect for property rights.
	He ignored the entire intellectual theory that drove laissez-faire capitalism.
	All of that was completely ignored.
	He ignored the argument that people work harder in the past, so how does the labor theory – anyway, so he just ignored everything and told me that my argument was cucked.
	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, hang on, 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's going to be, sort of Brad Pitt or whatever, why do you think Brad Pitt gets paid more To clarify, I don't think everyone's equal. There are obviously individual differences between people.
	Some people are far more productive than others.
	Oh, man. And I referred to this point.
	So he said, obviously, some people are far more productive than others.
	I mean, that's conceding the entire argument that if you get a free market, some people will be enormously more productive, and they will gain wealth, but only as far as they satisfy other people's wants, needs, and preferences in a free market.
	So saying that some people are far more productive...
	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, you know, 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.
	Okay, so he can negotiate for more.
	Now, there's a full explanation here, but I needed to knock away this negotiation thing.
	In other words, Brad Pitt is just a better negotiator than the sound guy, which is why he gets paid a thousand times more.
	You know, he's a frontrunner star. People know him.
	His addition to a movie will bring in more customers.
	His relative market value... Okay, okay, okay.
	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...
	He makes like about $10 million a film or something like that.
	He makes... Okay, so we can skip over this stuff.
	You can look at it in more detail.
	But... Yeah, that's important.
	He is very popular with the audience.
	And that came out of, like, he started what I think is he got like, I don't know, a couple of thousand bucks for being in Thelma and Louise, which is like, oh, what's his, Hugh Grant got like 100,000 bucks for being in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
	So yeah, you start out, I think he was in Lair of the White Worm, which was pretty bad before that.
	So yeah, why are people being paid more?
	Because they're providing more value to the audience, right?
	More than the sound guy. Okay, so he starts off with negotiating ability, but negotiating ability is sort of a sham.
	And also, Brad Pitt, was it Soderbergh, who made Ocean's Eleven, wanted to make a movie with a bunch of movie stars, but they were all too expensive, so he got them to take much less money in order to do this project, which actually was 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's not even in the movie. Well, he's in the movie and the sound, right?
	If he wasn't there, the sound would be pretty bad.
	No, but why do you... I mean, past circumstances doesn't explain anything.
	So, of course, this is a silly argument as well, because an extra is in the movie, but is paid much less than the director, who's not in the movie.
	So this is just another arbitrary, silly distinction.
	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.
	Ah, 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 Brad Pitt does 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.
	Okay, so now he's saying that labor is not the determinant of value, but market demand is the determinant of value.
	I mean, it's very confusing.
	I mean, it's kind of a funny thing.
	Let me just do a tiny aside.
	I know this is long. I'm not going to do the whole debate.
	And plus the last hour is me just answering questions.
	But it's really interesting because when I contradict myself, it really...
	Bothers me. Like I sit there and I have to mull it over and go back and do the research and so on.
	Like when I had this memory of like, oh, no, the Industrial Revolution was different in different places.
	And so I went and checked the data and so on.
	But he said that it's labor that produces value.
	And he denies the great man argument.
	And then he says, well, some people are far more productive than others.
	And it's market demand, not labor that produces value, that produces income.
	I don't know what that means.
	Well, it's very difficult. You know, certainly for the sound guy, it's pretty heavy equipment they've 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, you know, services.
	I think an explanatory value for what it gets produced in society, for what is worthwhile in society.
	Well, wait, what?
	Okay. It's wage or the price of their, you know, services.
	I think an explanatory value for what it gets produced in society, for what is worthwhile in society.
	For what is worthwhile in society.
	Is he saying that Brad Pitt is not worthwhile in society?
	Brad Pitt movies are not worthwhile?
	I don't know what that means. It's just that, what, he maybe wouldn't pay for a Brad Pitt movie, but other people would, so his not wanting to pay for a Brad Pitt movie is more important than other people?
	I don't know. Anyway, 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.
	Okay, so I go more into detail.
	Circumstantial or circumstantial would be willing to pay in light of what the one thing is they want to pay Brad Pitt.
	Okay. So, 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.
	Okay, but the question is, what is the source of wealth?
	And he said that the source of wealth is labor.
	I mean, I'm not going to play it again because you heard it.
	I don't mean to laugh.
	Look, he's a smart guy. He's a very eloquent guy.
	And he's a good debater.
	I mean, I'll give him all of that.
	But again, sorry. I either look stoned or angry whenever you pause.
	It's an old habit of mine.
	Okay. Let's listen to that again.
	Okay, so it's not the customers who lead to his wage.
	Okay, so he's saying it's not the customers who determine his wage.
	It's the studio's evaluation of how many more customers they can get based on having Brad Pitt in the movie.
	Oh, it just gives intellectuals such a bad reputation when you take something so simple.
	Of course, you know, I mean, they've done all the research.
	You know, people have done economic analyses and pound for pound, dollar for dollar, Matt Damon is the most profitable movie star in human history as far as I understand it, right?
	So, of course, they do all of these analysis and they say, well, if we get Brad Pitt, we can expect to sell this many more movies.
	you get free publicity because all the e-news and all that they all want to interview brad pitt so you get free publicity and and people you get goosebumps because it's a new brad pitt movie and so of course it's customers who determine brad pitt's and he's saying well no but it's it's the agent who negotiates with the studio heads who are anticipating customer demand it's like it's the customers it's the customer 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
	so this i mean it's a complete straw man to say i mean I mean, of course I never said that Brad Pitt was the only reason there was any value in the movie.
	Because, you know, here's the hint.
	So when I say Brad Pitt gets paid a hundred times more...
	I'm saying that the sound guy adds value to the movie.
	When I say he gets paid a thousand times more than the extra, I'm saying that the extra adds value to the movie.
	So then when he says that my argument is that only Brad Pitt adds value to the movie, I mean, come on.
	I mean, there's legitimate...
	There's sophist moves in a debate.
	I get it. I mean, there's legitimate sophist moves.
	this kind of mischaracterization is, I mean, it's really pathetic.
	Could entirely well be that somebody else who was born in circumstances similar to Brad Pitt could have ended up being the Brad Pitt, you know, 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 the 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...
	Wait, so Brad Pitt doesn't earn his wages because what?
	He was born pretty.
	He was born with significant acting.
	So this is a deterministic, materialistic, anti-free will view of human history.
	That we're all just rocks tumbling down a hill and Brad Pitt happened to land in a swamp and somebody else happened to land on rocks and something else happened to land in a parking lot And he says he's a determinist, he's a materialist, which implies determinism, of course, right?
	I don't understand how this rebuts what I'm saying.
	So he's saying that Brad Pitt does provide enormous value.
	...or magical component of Brad Pitt, you know, 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... No, I've not said anything about genetics.
	I don't know what this means to say Brad Pitt gets paid more because...
	Determinism? Because he didn't earn it?
	Because he didn't choose it? Because I don't understand that.
	And of course, by this logic, then who he's debating with, like me, Stefan Molyneux...
	He would be debating with me, but then he could just be debating with someone else who, under my circumstances, ended up with exactly the same beliefs.
	Now, if he's a determinist this way and believes that, and this is a Marxist perspective, that your relation to the means of production, your class, it's called class consciousness, and then when they find exceptions, they say it's false consciousness.
	It's like, I mean, it's like Freudianism, right?
	Oh, if something's there, it proves the theory.
	If it's not there, it's being repressed.
	If the opposite is there, it's a reaction formation.
	It's all just gobbledygook nonsense.
	Yeah, that is...
	It's not a disprovable thesis.
	And of course, he'd have no reason to get angry at me for my beliefs because everything's conditioned and determined by environment.
	The 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... Okay, so the only reason that Brad Pitt is Brad Pitt is because he has a good PR team and a good agent.
	Oh, man. Now, this Vosh guy says that he's worked as a stagehand and so on.
	I spent a lot of time. I went to...
	The National Theatre School in Canada for almost two years studied acting and playwriting, and I was a good actor, man.
	They said, drop playwriting, just stay with the acting, you're that good.
	So I've directed plays, I've been the lead in a Shakespearean play, Macbeth.
	Like, I know a fair amount about this stuff, and if a good PR company can just make a $10 million movie actor out of anyone, then why don't they do it out of a whole bunch more people?
	Why? If they can just pick some guy off the street, you know, that sort of trading places idea, if they can just pick some guy off the street who's really good looking or whatever and turn him into Brad Pitt, why don't they?
	Well, because they can't.
	Because Brad Pitt is a singular talent.
	It's a singular talent.
	And, I mean, you can look at, gosh, I mean, look at Queen, where they lost Freddie Mercury, and now they tried a bunch of other singers, and, you know, they've toured, but they're not writing any new songs because Freddie Mercury had a unique creative talent and all of that.
	In Excess tried J.D. Fortune, I think his name was.
	They held this whole contest. In Excess, after Michael Hutchins died, took a hiatus and then tried to get some new guy, and then that all collapsed.
	Like, people are just not interchangeable.
	We're not like bots that you can just interchange with each other.
	As to why Brad Pitt became so successful, I mean, the guy is crazy cool.
	He's very relaxed on screen.
	He's a very good looking guy.
	And just, I mean, I was thinking about Ocean's Eleven.
	I think that there's a, like he says the word absolutely or something like that in Ocean's Eleven.
	And he does it in such a cool way.
	It's like in Wonder Woman.
	The Chris Pines, I think his name is, they're on a motorboat going to London, and London is sort of smoky and stenchy and all that, and she says, oh, this is terrible.
	How can people stand this? And he's like, eh, it's not for everyone.
	And that tells you so much about his character, his insouciance, his relaxed nature, his like, yeah, it's not for everyone.
	You find an actor who can deliver that throwaway line in a way so cool and so interesting and so packed with depth that it makes it into the preview for the entire movie.
	Come on. I mean, that's a very rare talent.
	And it's not just magic, of course, right?
	I mean, people work very hard.
	Brad Pitt goes to the gym a lot and...
	What can I tell you? It's a singular ability, and that's why he gets paid so much.
	The 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.
	Okay, yeah, so you get all of this, right?
	So people working very hard have done all of that.
	Massively, before I'm going to skip to, and that is really the source of wealth.
	It's not just the 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.
	Now that's why I'm laughing, right?
	Because this is not explaining anything.
	Because the question is, why did the Industrial Revolution occur in the 19th century and not in the previous 150,000 years?
	It's back to that graph, which apparently he's unfamiliar with, about all of human history, the complete poverty that we lived in as a species for 150,000 years, and then this tiny, tiny, tenth of a tenth of a percent sliver of human history, we've become fantastically wealthy.
	And where did the Industrial Revolution come from?
	If it's a great man theory, then we should have had this wealth as long as there have been great men.
	But we haven't.
	We've only had it in the last 200 years.
	Is he going to say that there's only great men in the last 200 years?
	Like, it makes no sense, right? Saying the Industrial Revolution is an effect of property rights, which I talk about later.
	And why did they build all these things, right?
	That's the question. Why? Why?
	Did people just suddenly become smarter?
	Well, that's a genetic explanation, and there's actually considerable evidence that intelligence in England has degraded considerably since the 19th century, yet England remains wealthy.
	This is why I'm laughing at this, right?
	Because saying, well, people just started building machinery, and they just started investing in capital, and they just started massively hiring people, and they just started producing all of it.
	That's not the source of human wealth.
	The source of human wealth are the conditions that allow for this.
	Like if you've got two farmers side by side and one is producing ten times the crops, Because he works harder, he puts irrigation in, he chases off the birds, he gets sprays to keep the bugs off, he puts up a scarecrow, whatever, right?
	He produces ten times.
	And you say, well, what's the source of wealth?
	Well, the source of wealth is that he's producing ten times!
	No, no, but what are the conditions?
	And let's say in a slave or feudal society, you don't get to keep any of your excess.
	Like you grow excess crops, the Lord just takes them.
	Or there's no market to sell them in because nobody else is building excess stuff, right?
	You have to have some legal and moral preconditions to allow for The soil to accept the robust plant of the Industrial Revolution, just saying, well, the Industrial Revolution is a source of wealth, doesn't answer anything.
	It doesn't answer why it didn't happen before.
	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...
	Wait, wait. Americans own slaves when the Industrial Revolution take place in America.
	You can simultaneously own slaves and develop an Industrial Revolution.
	They could... But the Industrial Revolution did not develop in America.
	It certainly didn't develop in the American South, and it never developed in any society that had slaves and or serfs.
	As I talked about, 70 years the British had an advantage in this, both because of theoretical reasons, rule of law, and because no slaves, no serfs, and no giant leftist revolution like in France, and no serfs like in Russia, and no burgermeisters and restrictive trade practices such as in Germany, and you name it, right? So...
	I'm sorry? Wait, Americans own slaves when the Industrial Revolution took place in America.
	You can simultaneously own slaves and develop an Industrial Revolution.
	They couldn't have... So, just to reiterate, of course now, I mean, what?
	America had slaves for a grand total of 84 years because they inherited the practice of slavery from the British Empire, and the British, of course, were working very hard to end slavery, but in the South, as I point out, and this is sort of a silly old argument, right?
	The In the South, there was much less industrialization because of slavery.
	They developed an industrial revolution back during the Roman times.
	The technology just wasn't there. No, no, that's not true.
	And the technology, the Romans were incredibly advanced when it came to technology.
	They just never put it into practice.
	Again, they knew the steam engine, which was one of the really founding principles or mechanisms of the Industrial Revolution.
	So, okay, we'll just do another couple of minutes.
	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.
	Okay, so here's sort of my argument, is that you had a moral crusade against slavery.
	That ended up diminishing slavery and reducing its impact.
	You had a moral crusade to some degree against serfdom.
	It really came out of Christianity.
	You can't have property rights if people are owned.
	Slavery is a direct violation of property rights.
	Self-ownership precludes you being owned by someone else.
	You can't say, I own this car.
	And somebody else owns this car, right?
	You can't. I mean, you can't say, I exclusively own this car and somebody else exclusively owns this car.
	And so you can't have self-ownership and be owned by it.
	You can't own yourself and have someone else own you at the same time.
	And self-ownership is foundational to philosophy, moral responsibility, and certainly to property rights.
	You own yourself. You own the effects of your actions.
	So there was a moral crusade against slavery, a moral crusade against serfdom, a liberation of serfs.
	And that had a lot to do with laying the foundations for property rights.
	And this is very much discussed.
	It was very much a discussion of the founding fathers, right?
	So the founding fathers, originally, they wanted to have life, liberty, and property as the foundational principles of America.
	Life, liberty, and property.
	Now, they had to remove property.
	Why? Because of slavery.
	Because you couldn't say life, liberty, and property and also own slaves.
	So they had to substitute life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness because they knew that you couldn't have property rights and slavery fully enforced in the same society.
	In order to get the property rights, which led to the foundation and the purpose of the Industrial Revolution, the soil in which the Industrial Revolution grew, you had to get rid of slavery.
	So that's sort of my causality there, the dominoes.
	Wealthier faster because they didn't have slaves.
	And it was in the slave-owned, the Industrial Revolution, which was largely serf and slave-free by the time they reinforced 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...
	Okay, so the printing press is interesting.
	The printing press was invented in a country where there was no direct and overt slavery.
	Also, when I say labor-saving devices are not, in general, pursued by people who own slaves because it lowers the value of their slaves, What do you say?
	It seems obvious to me.
	Maybe I've just thought about this for so long, but it seems obvious to me.
	Slaves didn't write the books that the printing press was displacing.
	Like monks wrote books, learned men wrote books, highly educated people wrote books, like transcribed the books, wrote out the books in calligraphy with pictures and so on.
	And so you didn't have, you know, like you have slaves rowing at the bottom of a Roman galley.
	Well, there's a reason they didn't come up with motorboats 'cause they already had the slaves, right?
	And what do you do with the slaves when you don't need them?
	Well, they will rebel, revolt, and kill you, right?
	If you can't pay them, you don't need them, right?
	What do you do? I guess you could sell them, but you would sell them to other places.
	They'd be like, why are you selling them? Oh, we have things that replace slaves.
	Well, why do I want your slaves then?
	I'll just take the thing that replaces the slaves.
	So when he says that the printing press was invented, and that denies my thesis, then he's basically, he would have to argue that the printing press was replacing giant farms of slaves Transcribing books in Latin with calligraphy.
	Can you imagine such a thing?
	Out there in the fields under the burning sun with the whipmaster, leaning over your medieval draft table with your parchment and ink, rewriting versions of the Old Testament in ancient Aramaic as a slave.
	I'm sorry, it's just so funny.
	...numerous inventions which were meant to make agriculture easier, a field that slaves almost exclusively presided over, of course, you know, back when agriculture was, you know, the industry of the day, you know, medieval Europe.
	There is certainly a...
	Wait, he's saying medieval Europe, slaves worked the fields.
	...almost exclusively presided over, of course, you know, back when agriculture was, you know, the industry of the day, you know, medieval Europe.
	There is certainly a relationship between the development of...
	Okay, so medieval, he's saying that medieval Europe...
	Agriculture was performed by slaves.
	Well, that is, as he would say, ahistorical.
	Okay, so we're talking about, this is from Encyclopædia Britannica.
	By the 6th century, the servi, or serfs, as the servile peasants came to be called, were treated as an inferior element in society.
	Serfs subsequently became a major class in the small decentralized polities...
	That characterized most of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the initial reconstitution of feudal monarchies, duchies, and counties in the 12th century.
	By the 14th century, economic conditions in Western Europe were favorable to the replacement of serfs by a free peasantry.
	Oh, look. They're not slaves.
	They were serfs and replaced in the 14th century 1300s by a free peasantry.
	The growth of the power of central and regional governments permitted the enforcement of peasant landlord contracts without the need for peasant servility.
	Right? So I talked about...
	Contract enforcement and property rights as the foundation for the agricultural revolution, which was the foundation for the industrial revolution.
	Without the need for peasant civility and the final abandonment of labor services on Des Mons removed the need for the direct exercise of labor discipline on the peasantry.
	And yeah, so...
	So, endemic peasant uprisings in Western Europe, 14th and 15th century, more favorable terms of peasant tenure.
	Although the new peasants were not necessarily better off economically than were their servile forebears, they had increased personal liberties and were no longer entirely subject to the will of the lords whose lands they worked.
	This favorable evolution was not shared by the peasants of Eastern Europe.
	And so, I'll put the link to all of this below, but yeah, the idea that medieval agriculture was slave-based, yeah, it's just not...
	That's just not true. So then he says...
	Okay, a relationship between the development of the Industrial Revolution and the existence of slaves.
	Now, boy, what do you even say?
	So slavery has been a constant feature of human society for 150,000 years, give or take, right?
	So if you're going to say that there's a relationship between the existence of slaves...
	And the Industrial Revolution, then you have to say, okay, why didn't it happen for 150,000 years?
	And why did it start where laborers had the most freedoms and thus cost the most of their employees?
	Why were labor-saving devices invented in a country where there were no slaves?
	Wait, sorry, the existence of the diminishment of slavery.
	Okay, so I thought he'd misspoken, which is fine.
	It happens. I don't want to catch people out for misspeaking.
	So if he's going to say there is a relationship between the Industrial Revolution and the diminishment of slavery, okay, well, that's sort of my argument, right?
	So he says that there was a relationship between the Industrial Revolution and the existence of slavery, and I just wanted to know if he meant diminishment and misspoken.
	There is certainly a relationship between the development of the Industrial Revolution and the existence of slaves.
	Wait, sorry, the existence of the diminishment of slavery?
	Wait, what?
	Okay, so he's saying that there's a relationship between both the existence of slavery and the end of slavery.
	So slaves existing is one cause of the Industrial Revolution, and yet another cause of the Industrial Revolution is getting rid of slavery.
	Okay, so now he's saying that...
	Reduction of slavery is an incentive for industrialization, or industrialization reduces the need for slavery.
	So industrialization and slavery are in economic opposition, which is kind of my point.
	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...
	No, 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.
	The diminishment of slavery was essential for the development of industrialization.
	So it's not just a decision arbitrarily.
	It's based upon the foundational morals and economics of the ancient world, which was slave-based.
	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.
	Okay, so, yeah, it gets kind of boring from here.
	And how far along did we get?
	Yeah, okay, so, I mean, I think it's a good debate, well worth looking over, but, you know, this kind of mischaracterization is very boring, that I just said, well, Rome just decided not to have an industrial revolution.
	I mean, it's so silly and kind of boring.
	I had a bit of trouble paying attention because I went to my happy place.
	But anyway, I hope that you enjoyed this, and I look forward to your feedback.
	I do appreciate the debate, and obviously he felt that he nailed it, and he effing nailed it, as he points out in the video.
	Obviously, I beg to differ.
	You know, it's funny because everybody looks for this kind of knockout blow, like this, you know, like the Kathy Newman thing.
	Those things are extraordinarily... I will sort of point out that, you know, later on when I talk to him about, you know, if he's into all of these markets, if he's into all this socialism and sharing the means of production and empowering the workers, why doesn't he hire more people?
	Because it's a fundamental thing.
	If labor is a source of value, Then hiring more people should make you richer.
	So I don't know why he doesn't want to become richer by having more people work on his channel.
	Instead, what he does is he pays contractors to work on his videos, which doesn't give them any job security, which doesn't give them any benefits, which doesn't give them any kind of stability of income because they come at his beck and call and he pays them intermittently.
	So this idea that he really, really cares about the workers when he won't share the means of production, he won't let other people guest host his podcast and give other people access to his means of production.
	He doesn't give benefits to his workers, the people who work for him.
	He doesn't give them any kind of steady source of income.
	But then, of course, he claims to really, really care about the workers and, well, facts, evidence and reality kind of beg to differ in that.
	All right, Stefan Molyneux, peace out.
	Have yourself a great day. Please help me out.
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