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March 9, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:01:07

"You Want Me Put Into the GROUND!" Stefan Molyneux Confronts Communist!

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	What we're going to do as we are going here is start by reading off some I'm going to tweet this to you first.
	Thank you. Yeah, but we're going to start off by reading a list of fallacies.
	And the idea here is...
	We have a book that came out a while back called Give Them an Argument, Logic for the Left.
	And that is kind of my guide for how to deal with argumentation and especially when dealing with people of the opposite political perspective.
	And I just sent you the link to the YouTube channel.
	Thanks.
	I want to try to present arguments here.
	I'm not Ben Burgess.
	Ben Burgess is the author of the book Give Them An Argument Logic for the Left, and he is a philosophy professor and teaches logic.
	So if there were ever to be a third debate, that would be probably the last person that you would...
	He'd be the final boss, maybe.
	But why don't we go through this list of...
	So, the first one that we won't be using today is the ad hominem fallacy.
	I think that's self-explanatory.
	It's where you insult someone and use that as an argument instead of an argument.
	So, for instance, something like Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, therefore all vegetarians are Nazis, would be an ad hominem argument.
	A straw man argument is where you present...
	A different version, a weaker version of your opponent's argument and attack that instead of dealing with the person's argument head on.
	Appeal to ignorance is when you use the lack of evidence as evidence.
	For instance, no one has ever seen a flying saucer, therefore there are no extraterrestrials on other planets would be an appeal to ignorance.
	That doesn't follow.
	A false dilemma is when you say you can either do one thing or another, or this is the outcome, or that is the outcome, when there are middle categories that might apply.
	So, for instance, she either loves me or she hates me.
	That's a false dilemma.
	She might be indifferent to you.
	A slippery slope fallacy is where you set up a chain of causes and then get to an absurd conclusion by skipping several steps in the causal sequence.
	A circular argument is where You argue you're, you know, in a circle.
	You know, you might say something like, I know that it's wrong to eat pork because the Bible says so.
	And then you would say, well, why does the Bible say so?
	Well, because it's wrong.
	A hasty generalization is when you appeal to anecdotal evidence that doesn't necessarily apply across the board to generalize.
	A red herring fallacy is where you just try to divert away from the argument.
	An appeal to hypocrisy.
	This is one that you engaged in when you were on the channel last time with Matt McManus, where you talk about the hypocrisy of the person that you're arguing with rather than their arguments.
	I don't agree that that's a fallacy, but let's let that go for now.
	Okay. I don't want to let it go, actually.
	Why wouldn't that be a fallacy?
	No, that's good. Let's debate about debating.
	So the reason that it wouldn't be a fallacy is...
	Because we have a limited amount of time in which to evaluate people's claims and what they put forward.
	And if a fat guy tries to sell you a diet book and says that dieting is really, really important, you have to ask yourself, okay, well, if you're fat and dieting is important, then you should have followed your own diet.
	Now, if you have followed your own diet, And you're still fat, then your diet book is not good.
	If you think that dieting is important and your diet book is good, but you yourself have not followed your diet, then clearly dieting isn't that important to you.
	So it is a way of evaluating a claim based upon whether the person is willing to put their own ideals into practice.
	So if I say that telling the truth is the ultimate virtue and you catch me lying a lot, then it doesn't disprove necessarily.
	Whether or not lying is a virtue or not, but it proves that I don't believe that it is.
	I just want to stop you there.
	So it doesn't mean that the guy's diet book is necessarily wrong, but it means that it's kind of a waste of time to investigate it because he's not following his diet himself.
	Okay, well, I understood you.
	If you're looking for rules of thumb for making decisions without rational argumentation, perhaps pointing to hypocrisy would be a good one.
	I don't disagree. Like if someone were trying to sell me, like for one, as I've gone to YouTube, sometimes I look around for people to give me advice on how to grow my channel on YouTube.
	And if their channel is smaller than mine, I generally don't waste a lot of time watching what they do.
	But that doesn't mean that I've actually considered their arguments.
	And the things that they actually might say might be really good or bad.
	I can't necessarily know the truth of their arguments, but I've chosen to forego rational engagement.
	And this is a rule of thumb.
	It's not a bad bit of reasoning, but it is when you're arguing or evaluating an argument, you can't appeal to hypocrisy.
	So the next one would be causal fallacy, which is where you come up with a cause that doesn't really apply and use a bit of magical thinking.
	You know, like, I clap my hands and then it started to rain on Would be that kind of argument.
	The fallacy of sunk costs, which might be an argument where we have to continue on doing something because we've wasted so much time or we've invested so much time or energy into something, therefore we have to continue.
	Appeal to authority, that's pretty simple.
	People know that one. Equivocation is when you use the same word or similar phrases to mean different things and switch back and forth without making it clear.
	What you're saying. Appeal to pity is when you try to say, oh, you know, I must be right because look how sad my life is.
	And you must believe me because something like that.
	The bandwagon fallacy is the last one.
	It's when you say, everyone believes this, therefore it must be true.
	Sorry, can you just go back to the first one?
	I didn't quite get how that was an ad hominem.
	It was Hitler and the vegetarian thing.
	Yeah, an ad hominem is something like, if you say, Hitler was a vegetarian, therefore all vegetarians are Nazis or evil.
	I think that's a genetic fallacy.
	That's not insulting the person.
	That's just a generalization fallacy.
	Ad hominem is you're dumb, and therefore your argument is wrong.
	You're ugly, therefore your argument is wrong.
	And so that's not quite in the same category.
	But, I mean, look, we're not going to engage in these kinds of fallacies.
	According to Google, the genetic fallacy can converge with the ad hominem fallacy.
	According to Google, the genetic fallacy can converge with the ad hominem.
	Circumstantial and abusive fallacies.
	They're not identical. I was giving a rough sketch.
	Alright, so we're going to be debating basically, I guess, the nature of freedom.
	I think along the way, from my side, I want to debate what it means to be a conservative or right-wing.
	Today? I'm not either of those, but...
	Right. This is something that you say that I think that I want to demonstrate that maybe you are along the way by determining what it would mean to be left-wing or progressive.
	Sure. Okay. And then also, if you wanted to bring up the difference between capitalism and communism, and I guess you're going to argue from empiricism...
	What their success rates have been.
	But I want to... I'll try to...
	You can just wait for my argument.
	Okay. So go ahead.
	Do you want to start or shall I? Well, let's...
	I think let's start with the juiciest one first.
	And I come at this from a genuine state of curiosity.
	And I really do want to understand this.
	So... You know, everybody knows these numbers, right?
	They know the numbers that are ascribed to communism in terms of communists' body count.
	Now, of course, there may be some people who aren't massively aware of this.
	Let me just run through a couple here.
	And this is not an argument to disprove communism at all.
	I mean, I understand that, but I just want to get your thoughts on how you deal with this particular issue, right?
	So, I mean, estimates up to 100 million, 150 million.
	I've got a very specific one here, 149,469,610.
	People's Republic of China, body count over 73 million, just under 60 million for the USSR, Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, that is 3.3 million.
	The Democratic People's Republic of Korea, 3.1 million.
	Cambodia, 2.6 million.
	If you've seen the killing fields, you know all about that.
	I mean, everybody knows, of course, that what happened in Vietnam.
	The USSR was a human disaster of the first order.
	What happened in China under communism was a human disaster of the first order.
	You've got the Holodomor. You've got the forced evacuation of cities under Cambodia, driving everybody into the countryside where they starved to death.
	You have Cuba, North Korea, and so on.
	And it sounds like I'm trying to be provocative, but I'm genuinely not.
	How, as somebody who's on the left, do you approach...
	Well, okay, the way I deal with it and the way I generally think about it is to consider it as the failures of the 20th century, the failures of attempted revolutions in the past.
	And when I think about it, I have to ask myself, do these examples, and there are many of them, should that lead me to abandon the entire project?
	Let's call it human emancipation.
	No, I'm sorry to be in.
	Human emancipation is too broad.
	I mean, I think you and I are both interested in human emancipation, but this is socialism and communism.
	Hear me out, because the thing is, I have an argument for why a socialist project is a project for human emancipation.
	And I can make that argument.
	And you can't equivocate. When I'm talking about communism and you start talking about human emancipation, you're immediately substituting terms, which we kind of agreed not to do at the beginning.
	So let's deal with the topic of communism.
	All right, all right, all right. So communism, so I have a definition or an understanding of communism that is probably different than most people's because it's Marxist.
	Rather than coming out of like a distorted view based on loose understandings of what happened in the Soviet Union.
	It's based on my readings of Marx, which I started doing after the economic crisis of 2008.
	So the first thing that drew me to Marx was trying to understand that economic crisis and And I interviewed a lot of different economists, and I came to believe that Marx's understanding of how capitalism functions is fundamentally correct.
	So, the first thing I'll say, just really briefly, is that I don't think that you can separate out these things.
	I don't think you can separate out the project of what I'll call modernity, the project of liberalism, and The project for socialism.
	They all emerged historically around the same time.
	They're all aiming in different ways at the same thing.
	And so because you can't separate those things out, it's very difficult to determine, especially if you don't have a good definition or understanding of what capitalism is, what's responsible for what.
	So, for example, in the Soviet Union, One of the big debates amongst the Stalinists was whether or not the law of value could apply during socialism or in a socialist country.
	Now, any thoroughgoing and straightforward and kind of honest reading of Marx would show that he couldn't.
	But everyone in the Soviet Union, all the economists, including Stalin, tried to argue after a certain point that it did still apply, or it could apply under socialism.
	What do you mean, the law of value?
	Tell me what you mean. Well, the law of value comes out of Marx's capital, and also it comes out of Adam Smith.
	They're connected thinkers.
	And it basically works like this in Ruff.
	The work that you do in the realm of production determines the value of the commodity that's produced.
	That's the labor theory of value, right?
	Yeah. But it's called the law of value rather than the labor theory of value because there are different labor theories of value.
	There's Ricardo's, there's Adam Smith's, there's Marx's, and Marx talked about a law of value.
	But I don't want to debate the law of value with you today because it's...
	No, I'm still waiting for an answer on how you deal with the hundred billion plus debt.
	So the answer is that I think of that alongside of all the different similar atrocities that have been done by capitalist countries or regions that are in historical moments where there were bourgeois revolutions and...
	And I think of this as part of a continuing crisis of modernity, whether it's calling itself socialism, capitalism, or something else.
	I don't distinguish between The failures of, you know, basically state capitalism in the Soviet Union and The failures of, let's say, the United States or the failures of the French Republic or the various atrocities that have gone on and massacres.
	So, sorry, in this formulation then, communism doesn't solve this problem.
	It just continues to add to the body count, so I'm not sure why it would be a solution.
	Well, we now have to talk about what communism is.
	But I do have an argument. No, no, that's a sort of rebuttal.
	Like if you're saying, well, people get killed all the time and communism is just one of the murderers, I'm not sure how that's a shining city on a hill that you want to mount your flag over, if that makes sense.
	Well, again, so I started out my answer by saying, when I think about the question of these communist atrocities, I ask myself, to what extent do I want to continue to push for...
	The struggle for human emancipation, which I think starts in probably the 17th century, but certainly would be attached to the revolutions of 1789 and revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the American Revolution.
	So do we want to continue to try to strive for human freedom or not?
	Is it worth it? And then the other question you have to ask is, okay, if it's not worth it, do we have an alternative?
	Is it possible, under this system, to stop struggling for human emancipation?
	Or can we retreat into an earlier form of life?
	Where we would no longer have to try to struggle to basically take hold of ourselves and set the terms of our own existence.
	So if we think we can retreat into some other form of life, then perhaps, you know, what we'll do is become what's called a reactionary.
	We try to retreat from modernity, democracy, liberal values, rationality, and move into some sort of I don't know.
	Well, okay, so I was...
	Yeah, you're right. There's a whole continuum in between, and then you start to break it down into, you know, different political ideologies.
	You know, all right, so let's say that I don't want to become a reactionary.
	Well, what are my other options? Well, I could become a conservative Republican, as an example.
	That's actually probably still...
	In line with liberal modernity.
	It's not rejecting the whole thing outright.
	And it, too, has its own history of atrocities.
	But, you know, I could try to...
	I mean, I'm certainly not going to be able to find a tradition, a modern tradition, political tradition, that doesn't have a body count.
	So – but if I – so then I guess we could start – Hang on, hang on.
	Go ahead. Hang on. Free markets.
	I mean you talk about state capitalism.
	That's an oxymoron because capitalism is voluntary peaceful trade.
	The state is the initiation of the use of force, usually against a legally disarmed population.
	And so if you're going to try and make equivalent peaceful trade and coercive oligarchical state power, I think we need to get into those reeds and separate the wheat from the shaft.
	Okay. So now we've stopped in our first round.
	I've answered your question.
	I'm sorry to be annoying.
	At least I don't understand your answer.
	Oh, well, that's okay. I don't expect you to understand my answer before I presented an entire argument.
	But the first question was, how do I think about the history of communism?
	And I've answered it.
	So now what we're... We're debating is, is my understanding of communism and capitalism good enough?
	And do I have a thoroughgoing understanding of the free market?
	If you can define free market, we can use free market and capitalism, I guess, interchangeably.
	Maybe free markets better. I don't think we can.
	And here's why. Because the free market is only one aspect of capitalism.
	It's not the entirety of it.
	So capitalism relies on both a mode of production and the market.
	Hang on, let's define what it is first before what it relies on.
	Well, I'm beginning to.
	You start to talk about how it functions and you're then beginning to describe what it is.
	So it has both a realm of production and a realm of exchange.
	The market is the realm of exchange.
	The workplace, the factory, this is a realm of production.
	You can't separate those two things out.
	But there were factories and places of exchange and money and buying and selling in the Soviet Union, but nobody would say that the Soviet Union was equivalent to a Western, more free market economy.
	I would say that it was influenced by the market.
	Hang on. We need to find out what's different, right?
	So my argument is that the free market is when you do not initiate the use of force, particularly centralized coercive force like the state.
	You don't initiate the use of force to override peaceful and voluntary transactions, that you have the rights of property and the rights of trade.
	You don't have to exercise them.
	You can give away all of your property and you can grow all your own food and refuse to trade, or you can You do whatever you want.
	You can set up a commune and not exercise property rights, but you have the option to exercise property rights, and there's no coercive interference in the freedom of people to either own property or to trade the products of their labor.
	Okay, so now you're talking about this idea of everyone being their own producer and then also going into the market to exchange.
	No, no, I didn't say anything about everyone being – you've got to deal with the words that I'm actually giving you because if you go off into your own, you know, we weren't going to straw man, right?
	I didn't say that phrase at all.
	I didn't imply that phrase at all.
	And so, you know, let's just pretend we're both three years old and just deal with the words that each other are using, and we'll get a lot further, I promise.
	So what's your objection to the words that I did use?
	Why isn't that a good match for what you're saying?
	Your words were that everybody is their own producer?
	Yeah, because if everyone's going to have equal access to the market and no one's going to be oppressing anyone else, then everyone will be their own producer and then they would all trade.
	That's the idea. But not everyone is their own producer.
	That's right. That's true.
	Of course, right? I mean, there are old people who don't produce, there are children, there are people who are disabled, there are people who are mentally challenged, there are people who are ill.
	I mean, this idea that everyone has to be, this is why, I mean, we have to just deal.
	You have the right of property, you have the right of free trade, no coercive interference with free trade.
	But then if you suddenly shift that to everyone's a producer, I don't even know what that means.
	I mean, babies aren't producing anything other than farts and farts.
	Before we were in this period of time that we are now, it used to be the case that that was, it was certainly closer to being true, that a lot of what went on was subsistence farming based on, with the aim of personal consumption and not so much for the aim of exchange.
	It was only as, you know, the ability to use technology to mass produce things, bring people together on collective projects and develop projects Basically, to accumulate capital.
	But that changed, and the market became where people had to turn to for substance.
	Well, they didn't have to.
	They could continue to do subsistence farming if that's what they preferred.
	Right. Well, what happened was, as subsistence farming was phased out, and by the way, through the use of the state, then...
	Okay, so not the free market.
	Well... Okay, but the market, see, yeah, that's right.
	It was not the free market alone that created these conditions, but the market itself emerged through the sweeping away of subsistence farming and the bringing together of people to create capital.
	Well, I'm sorry.
	I will certainly say that there were economic drivers outside of the enclosure movement and the power of the aristocrats, the power of the state to kick people off their land.
	Which is that a farmer who's really good at producing food is more likely to outbid a subsistence farmer because he's going to produce four or five or six times the crops through whatever mechanism or skill or hard work or whatever that he is going to put into the equation.
	So I mentioned this in the debate we had last time.
	Outbid to whom?
	You're talking about subsistence farmers.
	They're not competing in the market.
	Well, in a sense, they are for their land, right?
	No, they're not. They own their land and they're using their land to grow the crops that they need, right?
	That's a subsistence farmer.
	So they're not in competition yet.
	I understand what the term subsistence farmer means.
	I understand what that means.
	But somebody's going to come along and offer them a huge amount of money for their land.
	And so a subsistence farmer, if someone's going to come along and say, I'll give you $100,000 for your 10 acres or 5 acres or whatever it is, right?
	And that's because a subsistence farmer isn't going to be able to grow more and sell anything, whereas somebody who's going to come along and use that to produce 5 or 10 times the amount of crops, and sometimes it's up to 20 times the amount of crops they got out of the agricultural revolution, So in general, there certainly are state actors that kick the serfs off the land, and that was reprehensible.
	But there is also a general movement that the ownership of the means of production, in this case land, tends to accumulate to those best able to maximize resource production.
	That's absolutely true. I don't disagree with that at all, that capital accumulates and tends to accumulate to those who can out-compete everybody else and produce more faster.
	That monopolization and accumulation also tends to move towards crisis.
	So then you'll have kind of a cycle where, you know, the people are very successful, they produce a lot of mass goods, their companies grow and grow and grow, and then the profitability tends to sink and then they go into a crisis and someone else comes along, buys that up or pieces of it up and can start to be profitable again.
	That's Marx's theory of crisis.
	But it's not really a crisis, is it?
	Well, I mean, so, like, I mentioned these...
	It's not a crisis for...
	It's a churn. Yeah, it's a crisis for the people involved.
	Sure. And the way that I... Let me just very briefly...
	Every once in a while.
	So you get things like World War II coming out of it.
	Sorry, coming out of what? Out of economic crisis.
	No, that came out of state crisis.
	That was a state-engineered crisis.
	Okay, so this is where you and I disagree.
	I think we're going to have to table that disagreement.
	No, no, no. Let's do this disagreement.
	World War II is a pretty important event in human history.
	Let's do it. So what is your theory of the economy?
	Well, it's not my theory.
	I mean, this is well admitted by the former chairman of the Fed who just did a whole thing about this recently.
	Dude, can we just one of us talk at a time?
	You don't get to say it's a fact.
	You have to tell me what your arguments are for your economic theory because no one in any university or anywhere would claim to say, oh, yeah, economics, we've got that down to understanding of facts without theory.
	So what is your theory of your economics?
	What school do you belong to?
	Are you a marginal utility theorist?
	How do you think the economy functions?
	All right.
	Can I make my point now?
	Yeah. Okay, good. You have to answer the question.
	Well, I'm trying to answer the damn question.
	You keep interrupting and trying to frame my discussion.
	Yeah, that's the point. There are a bunch of rich people who don't want to become poor again, and there is a natural churn in the cycle of the economy.
	In the second generation, you get some super wealthy family.
	By the time the second generation has gone through the wealth, 60% of the time, it's gone.
	Like, gone. Like, middle class or below, right?
	By the third generation, 90% of family fortunes are gone.
	And you can think of it in terms of singing.
	Like, Freddie Mercury's...
	If Freddie Mercury had a son or whatever...
	The Sun, it might be kind of musical, but it's nowhere likely to be nearly as musical or have the great voice that Freddie Mercury had.
	And it just kind of decays that way.
	And occasionally you do get these kind of the Barry Moores and so on.
	There's a lot of talent that kind of hangs in there from an acting standpoint.
	But this is constant insurance.
	So what happens is rich people want to go to the state to protect them from absolutely rejoining the middle class or, heaven forbid, even lower than the middle class.
	So they run to the government and they try and get protection.
	Now, one of the fundamental ways they do this, and governments love to get involved in this, is central banking.
	So, in the free market, money is something that, you know, needs to be transferable, it needs to be fungible, divisible, recombinable, and so on.
	And generally, there's a bimetallic standard that has emerged prior to cryptocurrencies or whatever you might have going on now.
	And so you get a gold and silver currency.
	And people don't like carrying around gold and silver.
	They can lose it. It gets stolen. So they end up with these notes that represent gold and silver, the bank notes.
	And they were all in the 19th century competing with each other.
	Banks would compete with each other.
	And if a bank printed too many pieces of paper that represented its gold reserves, then you could get a run on the bank.
	The bank could go out of business.
	And back then, you didn't have this big corporate shield for bank executives to keep all of their personal property that they'd usually pillaged from the bank.
	And they ended up going to jail or being completely broken.
	That's why they wanted to invent corporations as a legal shield against people, creditors reaching through the business to take their personal property.
	So what happened then was the governments decided to take over the control of money.
	And this really was central banking.
	It's the Federal Reserve and lots of other places around the West went into this.
	And then the government could create money at will and could.
	And this was nothing to do with the free market.
	In fact, it's the very opposite of the free market.
	Now, what happened then was, in the First World War, the Allies could not possibly pay the war bills because there was a gold standard.
	They were running out of gold. So they decoupled gold from currency.
	And then you could just print as much money.
	You know, you can run the printing presses, but gold is pretty hard to find.
	I mean, I've actually done this for years.
	It's a hard thing to dig out of the ground.
	And then after the end of the First World War, when Germany had all of these reparations to pay, they just printed money like crazy.
	You got the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic, where one of my ancestors took his entire life savings out of the bank, went across to a cafe, and paid it all to buy one cup of coffee, and that was it for his entire life savings.
	And then you got this, of course, financial crisis, because they were printing so much money.
	The entire Western system was awash with money to pay off war debts, to pay off the war brides and pensions and health care for veterans and so on.
	And so you got this massive stock market boom.
	And then you got a restriction in the money supply.
	And Ben Bernanke, I think, a former chairman of the Fed, has admitted all of this, that this is all a fact.
	It's not a theory.
	This is – and again, you can take his word for it, not mine.
	And then what happened was when there was a stock market crash in 1929, there was actually a worse stock market crash and a worse economic crash in 1920.
	But within 18 months, it had resolved itself because you kind of had a do-nothing bunch of politicians or the vestiges of the former free market politicians in the West.
	But what happened was after the stock market crash in 1929, they put massive controls into the economy, they controlled wages, they controlled prices, they restricted the money supply, they did not allow interest rates to fluctuate according to market demand, and you got a 14-year massive Great Depression with 25%,
	30%, 40% unemployment, which generally ended up culminating in Well, one of the things that drove Hitler to power then ended up culminating in World War II. So, I mean, this is just one aspect of how things went, but it was kind of a central driver.
	Can I respond now? Yeah, yeah, please.
	Okay, so I have two things to say to all of that.
	The first one is, that's not an argument.
	And the second thing is, it's not...
	Wait, what I said is not an argument?
	Yeah, none of that is an argument.
	That is a just-so story.
	You just told me a little story.
	Some of it actually was coherent.
	Some of it... Okay, just deal with the argument.
	Stop characterizing the damn argument like a 12-year-old.
	Just tell your argument.
	Don't add harm to the argument.
	Just respond to it like an adult, for God's sakes.
	Okay, could you repeat, in two minutes or less, an argument that explains how banking works, how you think banking works?
	Sorry, you want me to explain how banking works in a free market?
	That's right. That's because in order for...
	Yeah, in a free market. Sure, in a free market.
	That'd be great. Because the problem is, in order to understand whether or not it's true that an economic crisis brought on the Great Depression rather than a conspiracy of bankers, which is what I kind of heard you saying.
	Tell me if I'm wrong on that.
	Was it a conspiracy of bankers with state support that brought on the Great Depression?
	No. Well, do you want me to just go through it again?
	I'm not sure what you mean. No, no, I just want a yes or no on that one.
	I don't know what you mean by a conspiracy of bankers.
	Were the bankers conspiring with the state to create the conditions which then, inadvertently or on purpose, created a crisis, an economic crisis?
	How am I possibly supposed to know what backroom deals were cut in 1926 in New York Or London or Paris or Rome.
	I have no idea. But I do know that when governments have the power to print their own money, they would rather print money than raise taxes.
	And this is generally where an inflation of the money supply results in higher prices in general.
	And we can see this occurring, of course.
	And then when higher prices, when prices start to increase, then the governments have to tamp down on interest rates, which causes a misallocation of capital.
	I mean, there's a whole Austrian theory of the business cycle, which I won't I don't know what conspiracy means, but yeah, for sure, governments would rather print money than raise taxes.
	So you're saying, there's the argument, thank you.
	So what you're saying is that the economic crisis, which was experienced as a fiscal crisis for the nations in Europe, came about because rather than tax their citizens, they printed money.
	That's what you're saying. Okay.
	So my question would be, what was it that made it the conditions so that taxation of their citizens was politically unfeasible?
	Do you think that politicians prefer to raise taxes or borrow money?
	I think it depends on the circumstances.
	For instance, after the Great Depression, around the late 30s and 40s and 50s, the tax rate was much higher, and it was actually considered to be a public good.
	The public was very accepting of the tax rate being higher, and FDR was very successful as a politician with a high tax rate because the economy was booming and people had homes.
	Wait, the economy was booming in the 30s?
	No, after, I said.
	You said 30s, 40s, and 50s.
	Starting in the 30s, late 30s, and then going into the 40s and 50s and 60s, the economy was booming.
	The tax rate was much higher, and it was perfectly acceptable to tax the public.
	No one was concerned, or at least not as concerned, about taxation then as they are now.
	And the reason why... The taxation becomes a major concern politically is because of lack of profitability, stagnation of wages, and basically the way that it immiserates or is seen to cut into the lifestyle of the public.
	When people can afford taxation, it's not a big problem.
	When they can't, it becomes a political nightmare.
	So you can't point to them...
	You know, not refusing to tax their subjects during an economic crisis as the cause of the economic crisis.
	And you can't say that, you know, it just is self-explanatory that for all time the state doesn't like to tax its subjects.
	It's not true. There are times when taxation and spending is very, very popular.
	There are times when it isn't.
	It depends on the underlying economic conditions.
	Okay. Well, I'll bring some data to bear on the question because I've heard this Misconception that taxes were very high in the 1950s.
	So this is an article, I'll send you the link, from Scott Greenberg.
	There is a common misconception that high-income Americans are not paying much in taxes compared to what they used to.
	Proponents of this view often point to the 1950s, where the top federal income tax rate was 91% for most of the decade.
	So, yeah, it's not... It's not true that there was this massively high tax rate in the 1950s.
	There was a couple of points higher in general, but of course there was a huge amount of tax avoidance and so on, but yeah, it's not really true.
	Okay, so that's one source.
	I'll look for mine.
	How about we just compare taxation in Europe?
	Because I don't have to demonstrate that the taxes in America in the 1950s were higher, although I believe that they were higher than they are now, and that the resentment of taxes was not as near as high as it was, say, in the 20s and 30s, or as it would be later on after the economic crisis of the 70s.
	Right. I'm sorry, I'm not sure what we're arguing here.
	Hang on, let me just ask my question.
	Let me tell you, what I'm refuting is your claim that governments always don't want to tax their subjects and spend and would always prefer to print money and...
	I didn't say the word always.
	You're completely strawmanning my position, which you promised not to do at the beginning, and you gave me a long lecture about not strawmanning.
	Explain to me when that wouldn't apply.
	Hang on.
	I never used the word always.
	Okay, I didn't say you did.
	I just said... You just said that my position was...
	That's what I'm arguing against. I said that's what I was arguing against.
	But that's not my position, so why are you arguing against something I never said?
	No, if I'm wrong, tell me when the tax rate was higher and the government was happy to tax its subjects and it wasn't the case that the government always or...
	You know, universally or any other word you want to use.
	No, but I didn't use any of those words.
	Okay, fine. So, that's great.
	Then, boom, I scored a point.
	Because your whole point, your argument was, governments would always prefer or would prefer...
	No, no, you see, you're not hearing what I'm saying.
	I never said the word always.
	Do you concede that?
	That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what words I use.
	We're not going to straw man, but it just doesn't matter what words I use because you got your own thing.
	Okay, fine. If you didn't mean, if I'm misinterpreting you and what you meant, then explain to me when governments do want to tax people.
	Well, governments have to tax.
	See, listen. Look, the way that it works is governments have to tax.
	You can't have it both ways. You can't say it's never popular and I never said it's never popular.
	Which one is it? What?
	I have no idea what you're talking about now.
	You'll have to try and join the debate that we're actually having and try and get rid of the guy in your head who represents me.
	Unfortunately, the only way I can do it is through my own brain interpreting you.
	So if I'm misinterpreting you, explain to me when...
	Governments do enjoy or feel that it's the best option to tax their subjects and spend rather than printing money.
	Sure, no problem. I mean, this is how I can tell you've just never really spent much time in the business world.
	And I don't mean that as a dick. It's just kind of a fact, right?
	So the reality is that you can't borrow unless you have it.
	I'm in the business world. I run zero books publishing.
	Our profit rates have been going up.
	Also, that is an ad hominem.
	That's an ad hominem. And it is, what else would it be?
	No, it's not an hypocrisy.
	That is an ad hominem.
	You're not addressing my argument.
	You're addressing me.
	So try again. Okay.
	I'll ask you this question then.
	Is it easier to borrow money if you have collateral or don't have collateral?
	It's easier to borrow money when you have collateral.
	Okay. So governments can't borrow money if they don't tax, right?
	Because future tax receipts are the collateral through which they're going to repay the interest on the money that they borrow.
	So of course governments have to tax in order to borrow money.
	Why can't they just print the money?
	I'm sorry? Why can't they just print the money?
	You mean without taxing at all?
	Yeah. Why can't they use their own money that they printed, fiat money, as their collateral?
	Because fiat money without future tax receipts is not collateral because it's just pieces of paper.
	Well, what is money?
	Where does it come from?
	What's your theory of the economy, Stephan?
	Wait, are you asking me where money comes from, or what's my theory of the economy?
	Those two aren't the same question.
	That's a piece of it. The point way back was I said, okay, before we can debate...
	No, no, which question are you asking me? I'm happy to answer it.
	All right, all right. Let me put that other question aside.
	Let me ask you again, why is taxed money, money you get from someone else, collateral, and money you print...
	What makes it different?
	Because money that you tax is taken from genuine productivity.
	Money that you print is just counterfeited.
	What do you mean by genuine productivity?
	Well, because money that you tax is taken from, generally, more or less free exchange in a free market that represents actual value, actual productivity, actual trade and transfer of value, whereas money you print is just counterfeiting.
	You're just taking away the value of money by adding more units.
	Now, when I give you money for a commodity and you give me the commodity, And I give you $100, and the commodity is worth $100.
	So now I have $100 worth of commodity, and you have $100.
	Is that fundamentally different than me exchanging $100 for $100?
	I mean, in terms of the value of the things?
	Well, dollars are fiat currency.
	So there's a certain amount of money that...
	And you, and I trade you gold for silver, and I gave you 100 pounds of gold or whatever the, you know, 100 gold coins, and you give me the equivalent of that in silver.
	Do we have the same values on both sides?
	I'm not sure what you mean by values here.
	I mean, like, I mean, is the silver that you've given me in exchange for gold of equivalent value as my gold?
	Right. Well, value is subjective.
	So there's no objective value that you can appeal to.
	Dude, you can't ask me a question then immediately interrupt my answer, okay?
	I've been trying not to do that to you unless I'm completely lost.
	So let's say, I don't know, 10 ounces of gold is worth an ounce of silver or something like that, in our voluntary estimation, right?
	So, if you offer me an ounce of gold and I will trade you 10 ounces of silver for it, then if we voluntarily go through that trade, we obviously do it.
	The only reason we would do it is I want your gold more than I want my silver and you want my silver more than you want your gold.
	So, there's a free exchange. We're both better off from that situation.
	We clearly find...
	I find more value in your gold and you find more value in my silver.
	But the ratio at which we exchange them is the value we're willing to assign to it.
	It's not embedded in the gold.
	It's not embedded in the silver.
	But it is based upon our subjective preference and evaluation of the value of these things.
	Why is it that the money that the state would print wouldn't be subjectively valued by, let's say, the bank as collateral?
	Why would that exchange not work?
	If the value is subjective, what is to stop the state, especially considering that they have the force of guns, from creating a subjective experience in the bankers that this is good money that they should be willing to – from creating a subjective experience in the bankers that this Lend on or exchange for?
	Well, to take a sort of very trimmed down example, I'm sure you get up as more for the listeners, which is if you have an economy that consists of 10 oranges and you have 10 coins, then generally an orange will be worth a coin.
	Now, if you suddenly introduce 10 more coins into the equation, you don't have any more oranges.
	You just have more coins. And what that means then is each orange is probably going to be worth two coins rather than one coin because now you just have twice the units of value compared to the actual value, which is the orange.
	So if you add more currency, more fiat money into an economic situation, it doesn't actually magically create, of course, more goods or more services or doesn't drag more gold out of the ground or more oil out of the ground.
	It doesn't produce more goods and services.
	So all that happens is the goods and services in circulation end up with more monetary units attached to the value that they have because the monetary units have been created arbitrarily.
	And so the price of oranges is no longer one coin.
	And it's two coins, but you haven't actually added any value to the situation.
	You've just created inflation.
	So how does the amount of money or the value in a – well, no, I'm going to step back because I have a question that's coming to mind, but I should clarify here first.
	Okay, so I understand what you're saying, but I still don't understand why this relationship between oranges and coins makes a lot of sense.
	The coins and oranges seem very different to me.
	I'm not sure if what you're talking about is that...
	Okay, I'm not sure, based on your explanation that you've given me so far, why it should be that the price of oranges will go up if you introduce more coins, if five coins are worth one orange.
	If you introduce more coins and you don't introduce more oranges...
	And it's all a matter of subjective value.
	Why can't you just convince the person that you're trying to sell or buy an orange from that, yeah, you have 10 coins now, you've minted some more, but still they should give you the orange for five.
	I don't understand what the basis of the exchange is.
	I don't understand why the coins are exchanging for oranges other than You know, a subjective experience and maybe some haggling.
	What sets up that exchange?
	I really can't figure out how to...
	I'm not sure what the question is.
	Well, okay. So, coins and oranges aren't really usefully the same kinds of things, right?
	And according to your theory, what determines the ratio, like how many coins an orange is worth, is whatever I decide as the holder of the coins to spend.
	Right? It's subjectively determined.
	So it's subjectively determined by the person spending the coins for the oranges.
	Or if you want to put it the other way around and say that it's a subjective experience of the person with the oranges that determines the price or the value of the orange, then it's whatever they're willing to part with their orange for.
	That determines the value of the orange, rather than there being any kind of necessary relationship between the amount of coins on one side and the amount of oranges on the other.
	All I'm trying to point out is that magically creating more coins does not magically create more oranges, and therefore you simply make the price of each orange more by whatever ratio of coins.
	Now, here's what's so horribly unfair, and I think we can find common ground on this.
	I know that that's actually the case, in fact, that that is how the economy works, but given how you've explained pricing, I don't understand the argument.
	I don't see why, if it's subjectively determined, that means that the people decide, yeah, it's what they agree to, why that relationship should alter based on how many coins I produce, necessarily.
	Shouldn't that be determined subjectively by the participants in a free market?
	Well, the ratio of currency to goods and services is important.
	So, for instance, in general, you get about 3% more gold in the world every year.
	And, you know, some gold vanishes, you know, people put it, they melt it down, they put it into a lockbox or they, you know, put it under Fort Knox and so on.
	But generally, you get about 3% more.
	Now, coincidentally, actually, economic growth for a long time was about sort of 3%.
	And so the amount of gold goes up relative to the economy in kind of a useful way, which is one of the reasons why gold has been used.
	And if you look throughout human history, there's something really interesting about gold and about silver.
	So throughout human history, as far back as can be recorded, it cost one silver piece for a good steak dinner.
	And it cost one...
	Sorry, one ounce of silver got you a good steak dinner all the way back through history.
	Roman Empire, Greek Empire, back as far as...
	Why was it that amount? Hang on, hang on.
	Let me finish. Why? And then one ounce of gold got you a nice outfit.
	Not what I'm wearing now, which is kind of like homespun stuff.
	But one ounce of gold got you like a nice suit or a nice outfit.
	That's just kind of cool how that works.
	And nobody knows exactly why.
	I mean, you could... We'll probably put everyone to sleep theorizing about it.
	But there is a kind of stability to the value of things.
	And of course, you'll notice that when the value of fiat currency goes down, the demand for gold tends to go up.
	Why? Because the government can always print more money and now it doesn't even have to print it.
	It can just type whatever it wants into its own bank account.
	And what happens, which is really horrible, is that the people – like, let's say the government creates an extra billion dollars, right?
	They just type a billion dollars more into their own Fed bank account, right?
	And then they start lending that money out.
	Now, here's what's so unjust, and here's why this mechanism works so horribly to the advantage of the privileged classes, which I think you and I would both have equal amounts of contempt and anger towards at the moment, which is the people who get that money first – We're good to go.
	I mean, geez, I remember when I first came to Canada, 1977, stepped off the...
	We couldn't afford to fly from England to Toronto, so we flew from England to New York and then we took a bus up to Toronto when we moved to Canada, my family.
	And I remember back in the day...
	You could buy a candy bar.
	This makes me sound like the youngest guy on the planet, right?
	Obviously, right? But you could buy a candy bar for 10 cents.
	10 cents! Now, it didn't take very long for the price of a candy bar to go to 20 cents, to 30 cents, to 50 cents, and now it's like $1.25 or $1.50, right?
	So what's happened?
	Have candy bars become like computers, just smaller and so much, like 15 times cheaper to produce?
	Well, no. All that's happened, and you can see this when Canada was decoupled from the gold standard.
	I think that happened under Pierre Trudeau in the late 60s, early 70s.
	And you can see this under Nixon as well with stagflation in the 70s.
	Originally, you had to have a gold backing to your dollar.
	Like you could take your dollar and you could exchange it for gold and therefore the government couldn't print too much money because you could get a run on the dollar.
	The government couldn't pay it. And progressively, first under FDR and then finally under Nixon, the gold standard, like the fiat currency was decoupled from gold and you could just print as much as you wanted.
	And that's when inflation really began to hit the skids, right?
	I mean, went through the roof, so to speak.
	And the reason why this mechanism is so powerful is the elites get the money at full value and then the poorest and those in the underprivileged, the marginalized communities end up getting that when it's basically turned into toilet paper and they can't buy anything of value with it, really.
	And so this is one mechanism by which the poor is kept...
	Do you remember what you're answering?
	Do you remember what the original question was that I asked that you're answering?
	Can you repeat that question?
	Yeah, the relationship of currency to goods and services.
	What the basis of the equivalence was and why it would be the case that there could be a regular rate of exchange if it was always subjectively...
	That was my question.
	But the ratio was not subjective. You were a theater major at one point, right?
	One of your things since you were a theater major?
	Yes. Because I want to compliment you that you managed to be very entertaining as you tell the story.
	Oh, are you going to add hominem now after making sure that we don't do add hominems at the beginning of the discussion?
	You tell a story that doesn't answer that question.
	Well, no, I'm just pointing out you didn't answer the question.
	You instead told a story.
	But I tell you what, in all honesty, and this is an aside, I think you're very good as someone who can tell a story.
	I don't think I could have maintained that as long as you did and be entertaining without answering the question.
	So the point here is that I didn't hear anything in your explanation.
	And I do have to admit, you're not great because I did kind of fade on you.
	But But I didn't hear anything in your explanation that, one, amounted to an answer to my question, and two, that I could refute because it was a story and not an argument.
	You weren't working claims that I could really go after, certainly not arguments.
	Well, hang on, hang on.
	That's – again, you're just insulting my argument and insulting me by calling me a storyteller rather than somebody who's making an argument.
	But the fact that you can't rebut the argument does not mean that the argument – I don't even know what your argument – there was no argument.
	Okay, but you're not following what I'm saying.
	I don't understand where you're – how this relationship is created given that the way that the relationship is created is objectively – And you don't have an argument or even an understanding of my question.
	Doug, the fact that you can't understand what I'm saying is not my fault.
	I can't teach you Econ 101 in the course of a debate.
	Like if I'm sitting there trying to sort of understand quantum physics and I say, well, I don't understand anything that you're saying.
	You're just an actor.
	You're just making stuff up.
	I mean, do you understand this? That's fair.
	That's fair. But the problem is, If you were teaching me Econ 101, you would say, okay, let's go over this concept.
	This is how this concept works.
	This is what this concept is.
	You'd start like that. You wouldn't say, let me tell you a meandering story that doesn't really all connect together.
	I mean, you might, but then you'd be a particularly poor teacher and argument.
	But I'm not trying to teach you.
	We're having a debate, which means you should have come prepared.
	No, no, no. In order for us to have a debate, you have to state your arguments clearly.
	So I actually have a side that I could argue, but before I get there, I have to kind of get you up to speed, which is why I'm asking you these Socratic questions.
	So, for instance, I don't think that in marketing utility theory, there is a good explanation for why Things exchange at a regular rate.
	I think that the labor theory of value does a much better job of explaining that.
	When you say that everything is just subjectively determined, then it doesn't seem to me that you can claim that there would be anything like a fair price.
	Fair would be whatever people decided on in that moment.
	There wouldn't be a regular rate of exchange.
	Of course a fair price is whatever people decide on in the moment.
	So if I take something that's Let's say it's made of gold.
	If I overcharge you, could you overcharge someone?
	Can you get in a free market?
	I don't know what you mean.
	Okay, so given that that's the case, that there is no way to overcharge for something, let's go back a step and ask the question again about why it would be the case that you couldn't just print money.
	Because if you printed money and you could subjectively convince the other person to use that money as collateral on a loan...
	Then that should function.
	There's no reason why, if everything's simply subjectively determined through a fair process of debate and agreement, that couldn't be the case.
	There would be no reason for someone not to accept that money as collateral if it's all just subjective.
	So, yeah, there has to be a material basis, some sort of consequential basis for why that isn't Okay, I understand.
	I'm sorry if I didn't get it.
	I think I've got it through my head what the issue is.
	Okay. So, to go back to the oranges and the coins, right?
	So, the subjective value of an orange is subjective.
	I mean, I know that's a tautology and all, but, you know, if I've just had five oranges and I've stuffed to the gill for oranges, I don't really want to pay much for an orange.
	I probably would pay to not have an orange.
	Whereas if I'm dying of scurvy, I'm some horrible sailor, you know, press ganged into the British Navy and I'm dying of scurvy, I would give my kidney for an orange because it's going to have me live.
	Right.
	So there's no objective value in the orange.
	However, there is an objective ratio between the money and the oranges.
	Right.
	So we go back to 10 coins, 10 oranges.
	Now, if you have 20 coins and 10 oranges, then each orange is now worth two coins rather than one in general over time because it is an objective doubling of the money supply, in this case the coins.
	It's an objective doubling of the money supply relative to the fixed number So while a preference for an orange may be subjective, it is not subjective, the ratio of the coins or the money to oranges.
	So simply printing more money devalues each particular unit of money unless you have an equivalent increase in the goods and services produced, which is not, I mean, government printing of money vastly outstrips the growth of the economy.
	But what I don't understand there, so what you said is, okay, the ratio is objective.
	The fact that there is 10 oranges and now there's 20 coins, and that's an objective fact.
	But our subjective appraisal of what the consequence of that might be is still subjective.
	And the value of the coins in relationship to the oranges is still subjective because all we have to do at that point is convince one another that, yeah, I still have these coins and I'll have more coins than you have oranges, but the coins and oranges are subjectively worth the equivalence still.
	I mean, I don't see an objective reason why the increase in the number of coins...
	Would suggest that there should be an increase in the price of the oranges.
	I just still don't see that.
	Yeah, it is an effective fact.
	You have 10 oranges and 20 coins.
	So when you have 10 oranges and 10 coins in general, it'll shake out.
	You know, this could be exceptions.
	You could convince someone. But in general, over time, it will shake out.
	If you have 10 oranges and 10 coins, each orange will be a coin.
	If you have 20 coins and 10 oranges, it will eventually be the case that the oranges in general will be worth two because you still have the same actual...
	which is 10 oranges, and you have much more money chasing the economic interactions.
	And so if everybody gets, you know, I mean, you know what's going to happen, right?
	So when you, when, let's say, let's say the way that it works out is this.
	Let's stop.
	I'll explain it really, really quickly in a way that will be perfectly clear to you.
	I'll be really brief, right?
	So let's say what happens is, let's just play this out, right?
	So there's a little village, right?
	And there are 10 coins and 10 oranges, right?
	Now, someone, maybe from the government, maybe from the Federal Reserve, comes along and gives me 10 extra coins.
	Well, what do I do? Well, I start buying up a bunch of oranges, right?
	But what happens is people end up with more coins, but there's no more oranges.
	Why do you do that? Why would you buy more oranges if you got those extra coins?
	Well, I mean, I have increased capacity to demand things now because I have more money.
	You know, when people get more money, they generally buy more.
	That's why people want more money, right?
	Well, I mean, are you going to eat those oranges?
	Well, I mean, this is a theoretical example, okay?
	We don't have to get down to an economy of 10 oranges in reality, right?
	Well, I mean, are you buying them to exchange with someone else?
	No, it doesn't matter. It just means that if you have extra money, you will generally buy more.
	And that drives up demand.
	But there's no actual increase in the amount of production.
	I just think you're making an assertion. I don't see the logic of it.
	But listen, here's the thing.
	If you won a million dollars, would you spend more, do you think?
	Not on oranges. No, no.
	Forget the oranges. Would you spend more if you won a million dollars?
	Maybe not. Actually, I think I would put a lot of it into savings.
	Okay, so if you put the money into savings, that means the bank can lend out more so people will go and buy a bunch more to start the businesses because the money now that you put in the bank is used to lend out to entrepreneurs.
	So they'll end up buying more.
	Like, unless you just stuff it under your couch in $1 bills in general, in which case you're taking money out of circulation and raising the value of everyone else's money, that money is going to be spent.
	You go and invest it, it's going to get spent.
	You put it in the bank, it's going to get spent.
	So if you get extra money, it's going to end up being spent.
	Nothing you said, everything you said is absolutely true.
	It has no bearing on the question of the relationship between the oranges and coins to start with.
	That doesn't explain that relationship.
	I do agree that, you know, as an assertion, what you asserted was fact.
	But it doesn't relate.
	Okay, so hang on. So if you get the million dollars, and let's just say you go and spend it, or you put it in the bank, someone spends it, right?
	That increases demand for goods and services, right?
	Right. Okay, if I put money in the bank, that increases demand for goods and services?
	Yeah, because the money doesn't sit in the bank.
	They lend it out. I know because I took out loans from a bank to start a business.
	I don't think it necessarily does. So the bank will lend it out to people.
	They will go and buy stuff, right?
	No, not necessarily.
	That didn't happen, say, in 2009 when the banks did get huge amounts of money, but it didn't get reinvested and certainly it didn't increase consumer spending.
	And the reason why was because people thought, you know what, investing in production right now is a losing proposition.
	It's better to play around in the financial markets because it's really hard to make a profit.
	I mean, we haven't even talked about profit.
	No, but the bailouts have nothing to do with the free market, right?
	I'm talking about a free market situation here.
	Yeah, it doesn't matter whether it has anything to do with the free market.
	You asked me the question of whether or not if I put money in the bank that would necessarily increase consumption.
	My answer is no. You didn't ask me is the bailout free market thing?
	No, you didn't ask that. No, hang on.
	We went from you putting money into a bank, which is a not bailout situation, and you suddenly dragged in a bailout situation, and you say, well, that's perfectly legitimate.
	Well, it's not. I'm talking about a private economic transaction of you putting money into a bank, and you're now going to a multi-hundred billion dollar government bailout.
	Now you're arguing the morality of the players or some shit?
	I mean, look, that is not what we're debating.
	We're debating whether or not when you invest money, you put money into the bank, whoever it is, that automatically produces more consumption in society.
	The answer is no, it doesn't.
	And I gave you an example.
	There are thousands of others.
	No, but that's not you putting money into a bank.
	That's a government bailout.
	That's a very, very different situation.
	I put money into the bank.
	Whether or not there will be capitalists out there who want to borrow money from the bank and invest in production and also consumers who are getting paid enough to want to spend more because I put money into the bank isn't determined by whether I put money in the bank or not.
	Well, how do you think the bank pays interest on its deposits?
	How do I think?
	The bank pays interest on its deposits based on lending and collecting interest from others.
	Lending! There we go!
	That's exactly what I'm talking about.
	They lend money out. I'm not saying they're not motivated.
	Okay, then what the hell are we wasting time on this for?
	I'm saying that it's not necessarily the case.
	Because I put money in the bank, the consumption will go up.
	That's not a natural consequence.
	Now, if you want to... Fill in the details and explain why that tends to lead towards that.
	You know, I'd be glad to hear it.
	But the other thing about this is it still doesn't explain the relationship between coins and useful things.
	You still have this subjective theory.
	You've got to let me get you there, man.
	I'm trying to pack a whole lot of learning into a short conversation, so I'm trying to get you there.
	We haven't even started talking about what freedom is, which was the whole point of this conversation.
	All right, we'll get there. So let's not get there.
	Let's bracket this.
	No, no, no. I need to finish this.
	There's no point. There's no point.
	Oh, Doug's a word salad idiot, and Stefan is an idiot.
	No one will have gotten anything out of this exchange, and I'm willing to write it off.
	So let's move on to the...
	Just because you're willing to write it off, don't be a dictator, man.
	This is a conversation. Okay, I'm going to give your audience a happy ending here just very briefly, right?
	So this is kind of the supply and demand thing, right?
	So in general, all other things being equal, if there's an increase in demand, it tends to raise the prices.
	Now, they call this kind of price gouging and so on or whatever you want to call it.
	But in general, if there's an increase in demand and the supply remains static, there is an increase in the price.
	That's a supply and demand thing, right?
	So if you put money in the bank and the bank lends the money out, then there is an increase in the- Of the oranges to be about two.
	So that's just all I wanted to say from the very beginning.
	And I'll say in response to that is when we started with our isolated, you know, very simplified explanation of oranges and coins, there was a whole lot of stuff that wasn't filled in in the background of that.
	And that was, I will say, was historically developed.
	And then I'll leave it at that.
	But here's the, in other words, in reality, The mechanisms and institutions and all of that, the mode of life that brought that question of the oranges and coins to become such a dominant question, that developed historically.
	But here's what I want to go to now with this conversation, which is on the nature of freedom.
	And I have two arguments, and they're rather abstract.
	And there may be nothing in here that you even want to argue against, but I will say it to go back to the answer to the question of why I still believe in socialism itself.
	I don't mean to interrupt you when you start here.
	I'm just going to mute so if I'm taking notes, it doesn't clickety-clack everyone into obscurity.
	Okay, that's fine. So here's my argument.
	Human societies set up the terms of human social relationships, including whether or not freedom of thought and expression is possible.
	The primary way human societies determine what is possible is by creating systems to meet human needs and imposing norms on people in order to meet the needs of that system.
	And if we want to maximize freedom of thought and expression, we must create a system to meet human needs that encourages these sorts of freedoms, the freedoms of thought and freedom of expression.
	Then I also have this as a kind of follow-up on the socialist side of this.
	A society that creates conditions wherein the majority of people must ingratiate themselves to and work for a minority of people in order to meet their needs incentivizes servility and self-censorship.
	Under capitalism, the majority of people must ingratiate themselves to and work for a minority in order to meet their needs.
	Therefore, capitalism incentivizes servility and self-censorship.
	Those are my two kind of conjoining arguments.
	Okay. So freedom of thought, freedom of expression is key, right?
	right now unless you have private property you don't have freedom of expression in other words unless you can go and buy a canvas and buy a paintbrush or buy a typewriter or buy a computer or you know have money and and rent a blog or buy a blog or create a website that's yours you don't have you can't have freedom of expression without property rights in other words if the government owns property if there's no private property the government can terminate your access to what you
	The government could come and confiscate my webcam and my microphone and so on.
	So unless I actually have absolute property rights, I really don't have any right to freedom of expression.
	Okay, so I gave you two arguments.
	And what you've done is you've asserted...
	Oh my gosh, you're just describing my arguments.
	Can you just respond to them?
	No, you haven't given me an argument.
	You've responded with an assertion.
	No, I just did. I gave you an argument.
	The fact that you don't see it as an argument is not my issue.
	Very simple syllogisms.
	And you haven't responded by taking on my arguments and arguing against it.
	Instead, you said you must have private property in order to live, basically, in order to have computers.
	No, no, that's not what I said.
	You said you work in a strongman, that's not what I said.
	Or in order to live freely, I guess.
	No, that's not what I said. No, that's not what I said.
	No, you didn't say that exactly.
	Okay, can you just deal with what I said as you promised at the beginning?
	Sure. What did you say?
	Tell me what I missed. Wait, I just said it.
	Were you not listening? I was listening, but I can't use every single word that you use precisely the same way back.
	This is why we're not having any luck here.
	Just give me the gist of the argument that I just made about 20 seconds ago.
	The gist of the argument was, without private property, there could be no access to the things of life and the things that we need in order to have free expression, in order to create our expression.
	Okay, good. Yeah, so that's fairly close, right?
	So yeah, without private property, we don't have the right of freedom of expression because we can't own what we would use to produce our goods, services, art, whatever.
	I disagree that with your assertion, not your argument, that private property is necessary to provide people with the things that they need to have that creative expression.
	Well, private property doesn't provide you with anything.
	But if you earn it and create it, it should be yours.
	Well, why should it be?
	Because you keep referring to my argument.
	I haven't referred to your argument.
	You haven't made one. Dude, you've got to let me finish my thought, okay?
	Let's give each other a little space here.
	This is a good conversation. Okay, just let me finish my thought.
	So you keep referring, Doug, to my staff's argument, your argument, your words, your perspective, right?
	So you clearly understand that I own the effects of my body, in this case, me vocalizing this particular argument.
	Now, you may disagree with the argument.
	You obviously do. You may not think it's an argument.
	You may just refer to me as an actor or whatever it is, right?
	But the reality is you don't think you're arguing with someone else and you hold me responsible for what it is that I say.
	So clearly I'm exercising self-ownership to produce an argument which you identify as my staff's argument, right?
	So I own my argument and that's one example of property rights.
	So here's what I think you're doing.
	I think there's an interesting question here as to whether or not there can be freedom and autonomy without the concept of property.
	What you're talking about is I recognize you as a human subject and as a free and autonomous one, right?
	And I'm not trying to stop you from being free and autonomous.
	But the question of property goes beyond that, especially when we stop talking about simple property of your body, yeah, and your expression, right? And the property to own, let's say, things that are collectively used.
	If I own things that other people need, because I don't necessarily need your expression.
	Wait, somebody else needs your microphone, don't they?
	No. Nobody else in the world could use your microphone.
	Someone else could use it.
	Wouldn't they say they need it?
	No. What do you mean?
	I'm just going to say that no one said to me that they need it.
	No, no, but if you offered up your microphone for free to people, would someone take it?
	Perhaps. No, they would.
	It's a nice microphone. I mean, you've got a nice voice, but it's a nice microphone too, right?
	Your setup is nice. So if people...
	So now, okay, so I get where you're getting to.
	I got a little nervous there, but I get where you're getting at.
	No, I'm not going to take your mic. No, no, no.
	Okay, so here's the...
	What you're getting at is that everyone needs each other and the things that we produce together...
	To survive. In other words, there is no you on your own.
	You don't need the microphone to survive.
	Well, I do actually now.
	Why? Because it's how I make a living.
	No, there's tons of ways you could make a living without using the microphone.
	Well, okay, if I'm willing to, yeah, but you know, look, you don't need to eat that sandwich.
	You could eat something else.
	Sure, I understand. You're agreeing.
	Right, okay. But you're exercising exclusive monopoly control over the private property of your microphone in order to have freedom of expression.
	But, right, I need to be able to use or consume things in order to have freedom, right?
	Right, and if you didn't have exclusive right to use your microphone, you wouldn't have the freedom of expression, at least, that we are engaging in today.
	Why do I need the right?
	Why don't I just need the simple material ability?
	I'm not sure what you mean. Well, what is a right exactly?
	Isn't that a social agreement?
	Well, now we're going into a whole other question, which is what are rights?
	Do you want to go that way?
	That's fine with me. No, but I mean, yeah, that's part of it.
	I think that's an important question.
	What is a right? How is it backed?
	And why is it necessary for material things to be distributed so people can consume them and use them?
	Why are rights so important?
	Well, what is a right?
	Well, rights don't exist in reality.
	I have a theory, but I don't have an argument.
	I did have an argument that you haven't really addressed.
	You've asserted a counter-argument.
	You didn't take up any of the parts of my argument.
	You haven't referred to it.
	We're trying to get through the do-you-need-property-to-have-freedom-of-expression part.
	I started the thing with two syllogisms, all neatly constructed, and part of it was...
	That, you know, with the conclusion that under capitalism, the majority of people must ingratiate themselves to and work for minority people in order to meet their needs.
	Therefore, capitalism incentivizes servility and self-censorship.
	So I made an argument there.
	It was three parts. I didn't give you the first part again.
	You didn't refer to it.
	We were working through the first one.
	I'm happy to deal with the other ones if you want to now.
	Okay, okay, okay. No, go ahead.
	But let's talk about rights instead.
	I just wanted to point that out.
	And I think in about a half an hour, we should wrap this up.
	But go ahead. Well, it's kind of annoying that you take up time complaining that I'm not addressing an argument and then you tell me not to address the argument.
	Go ahead and address it.
	Go ahead and address it. All right.
	So I don't know what ingratiation means as far as this goes.
	I mean, I got my first job when I was 10.
	I was very, very happy to get it because I kind of needed the money.
	I've been paying my own bills since I was 15.
	I was very happy to get work and I worked hard and I was happy to get the experience.
	Yeah, I mean, I had some mean bosses, but so what?
	I mean, I've been a boss. I've had some mean employees.
	There are just mean people around.
	But the best way, of course, to not be in a subservient position is to continually add to the value that you can bring, to read, to think, to debate, to all of these kinds of good things.
	You and I are adding to our human capital, so to speak, just by having this debate.
	I'm learning an interesting perspective and interesting arguments and People who are listening to this now learn the price of an orange in a theoretical universe, all stuff that's really, really important when it comes to getting a job.
	Actually, it is actually really important.
	So if you want to have a greater leverage when it comes to negotiating with your boss, then keep adding value to the point where other people will be competing.
	You know, if you want a raise, then go produce more value.
	And if your boss won't give you a raise, get another job.
	I don't see where this... What subservience is.
	Somebody's worked hard to create a business, they're offering you a job, and you're voluntarily taking it, and you could go out and start your own business, as I did, as you have done, if you don't like working for someone else.
	And some people do like working for others.
	You know, when I worked in a restaurant, the waiters got to go home and the manager was there until 1 a.m.
	in the morning doing orders and taxes and payroll, and then everybody walked out like, oh man, I wouldn't want that guy's job.
	They looked upon him with pity as a tragic life form.
	And so everybody just makes their choices.
	Where, of course, the boss looked at the waiters and probably thought, well, they're not really going anywhere.
	I'm glad to be doing what I'm doing.
	Everybody was happy in the situation that they had.
	And if they weren't happy, they could change it.
	Right.
	Okay.
	So now what you're saying there is that anyone who is working any job has the capacity to become their own boss.
	I never said that at all.
	I was talking about myself.
	Yourself. So, now, the way I understand the society that I live in is this way, which is that most of the things that we have...
	Are produced through the work of people who aren't their own boss.
	And that if you try to create a society where everyone was their own boss and everybody was their own producer, maybe, as I said a little while back, and also the seller...
	The system would break down.
	And certainly you wouldn't have the massive wealth that we have now, right?
	I don't want a system. I just want freedom.
	I want people to have property rights and not be subjected to the arbitrary and invasive use of force.
	Okay, well that brings me to the first argument I made and I'll repeat it to you.
	Human societies set up the terms of human social relationships including whether or not freedom of thought and expression is possible.
	The primary way human societies determine what is possible is by creating systems to meet human needs and imposing norms on people in order to meet those needs.
	If we want to maximize freedom of thought and expression, we must create a system to meet human needs that encourages these sorts of freedoms.
	Now, you don't want a system, but you want the freedoms.
	I think that's unrealistic.
	By my argument that the way in a human society that those freedoms are achieved is through the creation of systems by human beings.
	Okay, so give me your system.
	What does your system look like?
	Well, no. We're not done arguing this.
	We're not done with this argument yet.
	I mean, if you want to say to me, oh, you know what?
	I'm wrong. I do want a system.
	And my understanding that rights is everything and private property is the foundation of everything without any kind of understanding of the system, then yeah, I'd be glad to start describing socialism to you.
	But we're not done arguing this point unless you're willing to concede that these arguments are sound.
	You mean the argument that?
	Human societies set up the terms of human social relationships, including whether or not freedom of thought and expression is possible.
	The primary way human societies determine what is possible is by creating systems to meet human needs and imposing norms on people in order to meet those needs.
	If we want to maximize freedom of thought and expression, we must create a system to meet human needs that encourages these sorts of freedoms.
	And then the second part of the argument is a society that creates conditions wherein the majority of people must ingratiate themselves to and work for a minority of people in order to meet their needs incentivizes servility and self-censorship.
	Under capitalism, the majority of people must ingratiate themselves to and work for a minority of people in order to meet their needs.
	Therefore, capitalism incentivizes servility and self-censorship.
	Okay, so this is great.
	Now we can really get some traction here.
	Okay, so is it fair to say, Doug, I'm not trying to catch you out here, I just genuinely want to understand that your microphone, your camera, your setup, is it a means of production?
	Yeah. Okay.
	Now, in a free market society, you have a perfect right to own that and to use force to defend it and to give it away if you want or whatever it is.
	Will it to anybody or hand it to Obama on the street if you want, whatever you want, right?
	Yeah. Now, under socialism, would not the government control the means of production or someone other than you?
	There would be no state under socialism.
	No. So, who controls the means of production under socialism?
	Well, the workers do.
	And they don't do it through a state apparatus.
	The state apparatus is there in order to manage contradictions between classes.
	So if you don't have a minority owning all of the means of production, then you don't need a state.
	The state is a tool of the bourgeois class.
	No, no, no, but to get there, right?
	I mean, the...
	The socialism that I've always seen is a bigger and bigger government transferring the means of production from one group to another from, you can say, individuals to – usually it ends up being other individuals, although theoretically I know it's to the proletariat.
	But in the transitional phase, wouldn't it not be the case that – I mean, you know, there are socialists who openly talk about nationalizing or taking over the means of production.
	Do you disagree with that methodology?
	Well, taking over the means of production and nationalizing them are not the same thing.
	When we talk about workers taking over the means of production, in fact, by Marx's account, that's not enough.
	Oh, man, I must have been yelling at you.
	I'm sorry, my throat is sore.
	No, hold on.
	I hope I don't have the coronavirus.
	I got a tickly throat now.
	Okay. Yeah, no.
	The idea of Marx is that you take the means of production and you transform it.
	It's not that you... Wait, who takes the means of production?
	The workers. And how do they take it?
	Well, maybe through an occupation.
	This is a tricky thing, but maybe through an occupation factory.
	Not really. How do they take it? Are they legitimately permitted to use violence to take the means of production?
	Well, okay, so this is where we have an ethical quandary, right?
	At what point is it worth it to act against a minority of people and change a system when they don't want you to?
	If you have a majority of people who want something, but a small minority don't, you know, how do you handle that?
	What I would hope you could do is maybe social pressure.
	Simply make it impossible for people to oppose you because there's such a will to take hold of the factories that they will submit.
	Maybe it's not immediately conceived of as being in their self-interest, but they can't go up against the will of the 90% of the population.
	You just have the popular people behind you.
	Sorry, go ahead. I mean, that's one way to conceive of it.
	Unfortunately, in this world, what tends to happen is that you have small pockets of communities where this idea rises up, but it doesn't spread everywhere, and so it rises up somewhere, and then it's just smashed by the majorities.
	You can think of the commune, the Paris Commune, and just the rows of coffins of the communards as an example of when you don't really have the popular support that you need in order to Yeah, I would condemn the use of violence in this movement.
	Oh, good. Well, that's great.
	Because to me, proletariat's seizure of the beans of production generally takes place with great violence.
	Violence is the midwife of the revolution.
	You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
	And the way in which communist dictatorships have been established in the world, almost without exception, is through force.
	So you may be a bit of a lone voice crying in the wilderness when it comes to no violence as the transfer mechanism.
	We'd have to talk about specific examples, you know, like battles and situations within the uprising of the Soviet Union.
	But I don't, you know, look, they killed the anarchists.
	I'm not a big fan of the Bolsheviks.
	I'm not a Bolshevik. I'm a Marxist, okay?
	Wait, did Marx reject violence in the pursuit of the revolution?
	Well, he didn't reject it when it was a form of self-defense.
	Well, he advocated or certainly accepted violence as the midwife of the revolution.
	And so if you say you're a Marxist, but you reject violence, which Marx himself supported and encouraged, in fact, I'm not sure how you get the label Marxist, because that seems like a pretty big difference.
	At that time, that was during a time of the bourgeois revolutions in 1848 and 1847.
	So when he was advocating for violence at that time and later, he was doing it in the context of bourgeois revolutions against monarchical power and authoritarian power.
	And he was sort of part of a larger revolution.
	And it was only as that revolution unfolded and failed that he started to see that there was this distinction that needed to be really underscored between the elements of the Republican or bourgeois revolution and the elements of it that were not really the same.
	They were workers and that there were different interests there.
	But, you know, what is Just so people know, like, sorry to interrupt, but so people who know what Marx is talking about, Marx wrote, there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.
	And he also wrote...
	Where did he write that?
	I'll give you links. He said, Far from opposing the so-called excesses,
	instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated, the Workers' Party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction, right?
	Terroristic direction. And he was very, very keen and bloodthirsty on revolutionary terror and violence and all of this.
	If you say you're a Marxist, it seems like you'd be down with that, right?
	I'm a Marxist, but I'm not.
	You have to read that again, because one of the things that's interesting about that quote is at the very beginning, he calls the bourgeoisie murderous, right?
	Every violent person calls their enemies violent.
	That's how you justify violence.
	Well, right. And you would justify it the same way.
	I mean, you believe in the right to self-defense, in defense of, say, property.
	Right. But the workers don't own the factory, right?
	So you are taking somebody else's property.
	Well, if you have the majority on your side, and you're going in...
	But come on, man. I mean, that's not...
	The majority is not morality.
	Okay, well...
	I mean, that's like saying two guys corner a woman in an alley and they have a vote on raping the woman.
	I mean, the woman's going to be outvoted.
	That doesn't make it right. Well, okay, that's true.
	I'm not saying that the majority itself makes it right, but then we have to ask ourselves, you know, what is the actual aim, you know, what the aim is, and also, at what point do we think that there can be such a thing as, you know, a free and open and voluntary contract?
	I mean, it seems to me that there's always somebody who feels like they're getting screwed.
	But if you have the mass majority behind you, I mean, sometimes just social pressure alone will do the work.
	But if you're facing bourgeois forces, and at the time also, you know, they were teaming up with the old monarchs to come in and slaughter the workers with their armies, then trying to fight in that war against them with terror makes a certain amount then trying to fight in that war against them with terror makes
	And their justification for it was that it was self-defense, the defense of their revolution as well, which to them had as much moral weight as your concept of property.
	I don't know about that.
	Or some partial occupation of factories or an attempt by working small, like a workers' party to take control of the mode of production would lead to anything but what we saw in the 20th century?
	I don't think so.
	No, I don't think it would. But we're not talking about...
	You know, these particular battles, we're talking about kind of big, broad ideas about property rights, and I gave you a very kind of concrete argument here.
	The human society is set up in terms of human social relationships, including whether or not freedom of thought or expression is possible, all that stuff.
	I'm arguing that if people are facing violence, you know, I never felt particularly subjugated by having a job as a waiter.
	But I tell you what would make me feel subjugated, and this is why I hope you can understand this.
	Your feelings are not an argument. Hang on, hang on.
	Let me finish. So this is Engels, right, in 1849.
	And again, so the first quote is from...
	The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna.
	That's from Nui Reischinke Zeitung, number 136, November 1848.
	I've got it on my screen.
	I haven't read this before.
	I've read Marx's capital on German ideology.
	I haven't read this by Engels.
	Hang on. So this is Engels in 1849.
	He says, the next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth, not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples.
	And that, too, is a step forward.
	The disappearance from the face of the earth, entire reactionary peoples.
	Now, this is exactly what happened in the communist revolution.
	I'm just telling you, you and I are staring across a great fiery chasm, because the people that you follow, the people that you like, the people who shake your ideology, they want me dead.
	They want to put a bullet in the back of my head because I would be considered one of these reactionary people.
	This is Lenin in 1917, and Marxist-Leninism is a big thing.
	He says, the state is an instrument for coercion.
	We want to organize violence in the name of the workers.
	And that's not good.
	This is the checker chief in 1918.
	The public and the press misunderstand the character and tasks of our commission.
	We stand for organized terror, this should be frankly stated, being absolutely indispensable in current revolutionary conditions.
	Trotsky on Stalin in 1940.
	Under all conditions, well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.
	So the theory is of killing people, organized political terror, against me, against my family, against my child.
	Excuse me for taking it a little fucking personally, because history has said and has proven that the rivers of blood that follow the institution of the ideology that you like gets me and people like me, by the millions, absolutely fucking killed.
	So I know that's not you, but you can at least understand why I'm a little nervous about it, right?
	Well, you know, I want to point out...
	I don't know the... Again, this is one piece I haven't read, but overall, one of the things that you have to understand when you read this stuff is that when they're talking about the destruction of reactionary forces, they don't necessarily mean...
	Certainly, it doesn't have to be the case, or Marx wouldn't think it was the case, that the destruction of reactionary forces wouldn't necessarily just mean the destruction of reactionary people.
	In fact... It wouldn't work to just kill reactionary people.
	No, they talk reactionary people.
	They want to wipe entire reactionary peoples off the face of the earth.
	I have two points. The first one was that it wouldn't work to just kill the reactionary people if you didn't transform society, right?
	So I would argue that you don't want to kill anybody.
	No, they do want to kill people.
	Did you not hear what I read?
	They really, really, really want to kill people like me.
	Well, Engels is dead, so you don't have to worry about him.
	He's not coming for you. And the second thing is...
	The fuck are you talking about? This guy inspired mass murder of people like me throughout human history in the 20th century.
	I mean, I'm not worried about Engels himself, obviously.
	That's like saying Hitler's dead, so we've got nothing to worry about from neo-Nazis.
	Let me get through my first point.
	I think I'll make the second point first.
	The second point was that this was a massive, very effective...
	Appeal to pity.
	It's a fallacy, and it is not a great one in terms of making your argument.
	You following an ideology where they say they want to kill me is not, what, up to scratch for you from a debate standpoint?
	Let's talk about what an ideology is, because the thing about an ideology that makes it dangerous is when it's irrational, when it's an article of faith, when it's not a theoretical understanding of the world, but is instead sort of a doctrine or religious faith.
	And I, you know, am very open to debate and not having my Marxist understanding be in ideology in that sense.
	But doesn't listen.
	You hadn't heard these quotes of an ideology that you follow.
	They don't seem to slow you down at all.
	Does it not trouble you to hear these quotes from people that you claim to be virtuous and good and you are a Marxist?
	Does it not trouble you to hear that they want to kill and murder entire reactionary peoples?
	This is genocide. Does it not even slow you down a little bit?
	A little bit to hear these quotes.
	Let's put this into...
	No, just emotionally. If I followed an ideology and it said, we want to kill people like Doug, that would slow me the fuck down.
	It doesn't seem to slow you down at all.
	You're looking at the face of someone they want to kill.
	Would you identify as a reactionary?
	They would identify me as a reactionary.
	Why would they identify you as a reactionary?
	Because I'm anti-communist.
	Oh, well, I mean, I guess.
	So you understand. Like, you're looking into the eyes of someone that the ideology that you worship, they want to kill me.
	And if you win, I will be dead.
	I don't worship any ideology.
	No, but do you feel anything about that?
	Like, human being to human being.
	Does it trouble you at all that you're looking into the face of someone your ideology wants to kill?
	If I felt that there were forces in the world that wanted to come in in the name of communism and kill you, I would be outraged and I would stand up and oppose those forces.
	But this is what they say.
	That's not the same thing as somebody, okay, in the context of this document, during a revolutionary moment where there was actual fighting going on.
	But this is what they did for 100 years.
	They said they wanted to kill their enemies.
	It never ended. It never ended.
	You can talk about this was particular to a moment in time, but it lasted the entire fucking 20th century.
	They put 100 million plus people into the fucking ground, like me.
	Does that not slow you down at all?
	I know this is a strong argument, but statistically, from my perspective, I'm a Jew and you support Nazism.
	In terms of who ends up in the ground, it won't be you.
	Maybe it'll be you, but it certainly would be me and my family and my friends and all the people who support.
	We're going into the ground if your ideology gets its way.
	My ideology, which, by the way, you're responding To two arguments I gave you, right?
	This is your response to those arguments I gave you.
	You said you're a Marxist.
	I'm telling you what Marxism is.
	You don't even seem to know. But we can't build on...
	I do know what Marxism is.
	You didn't know about this call to violence and murder.
	Okay, I hadn't read this particular document, but I did know that Marx was not at all adverse to defensive violence from bourgeois forces or from the monarchies.
	Do you consider the violence that they enacted in the Soviet Union or in China, do you consider that to be defensive 40, 50 years, 60 years after the revolution?
	Yeah, but I don't consider Marx responsible for Stalin's failures.
	So the fact that Stalin enacted the exact violence that Marx called for, you don't think Marx has any ownership of that whatsoever?
	Stalin didn't enact the exact violence that Engels was talking about in this document from, when was this?
	1848, 1848.
	Yeah, in 1848, you're talking about the freaking European revolutions against the monarchy.
	No, but Engels is talking about the next world war.
	You're not talking about going after some free market marginal utility theorists in the United States or wherever you are today.
	You're talking about a defense.
	Look, are you going to condemn the French Revolution?
	Yes. You don't think that we should have escaped from monarchical rule?
	I think that the French Revolution would have been much better recast with the Enlightenment values of individualism and the free market so that it could have been a little bit more like the American Revolution and resulted in...
	That was violent. That was violent.
	Look at the atrocities of the American Revolutionary War.
	Are you willing to stand there and defend that?
	They would kill people like me because some of my people were British and would have wanted to...
	They didn't go around killing all the British? They did.
	They shot them. Wait, you said the revolutionaries in America went around killing everyone who was British?
	I'm saying that they shot British soldiers, yes.
	And are you going to make the case that the American Revolution is morally equivalent to the revolutions in Russia and the revolutions in China?
	Of 1848 in Europe, when that document was written.
	No, no, but Engels was talking about the future.
	No, he was talking about the future of the revolution he was in, which was a bourgeois revolution against the monarchical powers in Europe.
	That happened in Germany and France.
	It was not Mao's China or the Soviet Union.
	It was very much in line with the American Revolution and the French Revolution.
	So you want to condemn modernity and liberalism and the breaking away from monarchy because it was violent.
	Go right ahead. Why did the Americans revolt?
	Why did the Americans revolt?
	Because for a variety of reasons, one of which was they didn't like taxation without representation.
	I remember that from the schoolhouse. They were fighting against taxation.
	Why did the Soviets, why did the Bolsheviks take over in Russia in 1917?
	Was it to eliminate taxation?
	Wait, so we're leaving the 1848 document that you brought and tried to...
	Well, no, because the 1848 document stretches forward.
	Engels wrote, the next world war, that's in the future.
	There was no hint of a world war in 1849.
	Certainly not. I mean, it actually took, though he wouldn't have been able to know...
	63 years or whatever it was to get to the next world war.
	He said the next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties but also of entire reactionary peoples and that too is a step forward.
	So he was talking about way in the future or significantly in the future.
	It wasn't an immediate. The next world war.
	That is way in the future and that's exactly what they did.
	No more kings. That's what he's talking about.
	You want to go back to kings?
	No, entire reactionary peoples.
	That is not individual.
	That is not a tiny slice of society.
	Reactionary classes and dynasties, entire reactionary peoples.
	The aristocracy and the kings, the monarchical powers, the authoritarians who were, you know, letting peasants, wiping peasants out and trying to squash the development of free enterprise, you moron.
	I mean, come on. Why would you?
	Now you morrowing me because you feel that ad hominems are a bad idea, as you said at the beginning.
	You've left the realm of responding to arguments aside.
	But I'll tell you what. Oh, so now ad hominems are fine if you decide that I'm not responding in the way that you want me to.
	See, this is the Marxist thing, right?
	You just react with aggression when you don't get what you want.
	I got upset. I'm sorry.
	I apologize. I shouldn't have called you a moron.
	Fair enough. But it's not fair to condemn Angles for wanting to get rid of the reactionary forces in 1848, which were these monarchical powers, which you yourself would not want to stay under, because you yourself are a free market absolutist, and then act as though he's coming after you today?
	That's crazy talk.
	So no, that's not...
	Do you know what the revolution in Russia did to people like me?
	The revolution in Russia.
	Okay, so now we've left Marx and Engels behind.
	No, because it was a Marxist.
	And the Bolsheviks. It was a Marxist revolution.
	Which I've already told you, but I wasn't, right?
	I said I'm not a Bolshevik.
	I don't align with that approach to taking power.
	I already said that.
	I said I was arguing for Marx's critique of capitalism, and I was arguing for Marx and Engels, who, by the way, were aligned with the bourgeois revolutions in 1848.
	So now you're talking about Marx and Lenin and maybe Mao.
	Would you say that Lenin was not a Marxist then?
	I would say that Lenin conceived of himself as a Marxist.
	Absolutely. But I would say...
	He did follow the revolutionary terror and the disappearance of reactionary peoples.
	It just turned out that they brought the description of reactionary, maybe beyond what Engels intended.
	I don't know exactly. But there was nothing in Marxism that would condemn the use of violence against those who oppose Marxism.
	He was getting rid of the czar, right?
	But you know what happened to people like me, right, in the communist revolutions throughout the world?
	You know that we were dragged out and shot, right?
	So were people like me, right?
	So why on earth would you want to have anything to do with this fucked up ideology that countenances revolutionary terror and has enacted it on hundreds of million people plus in one century alone?
	Like, what the hell are you doing in this vicinity of this murderous doctrine?
	Because reading Marx and agreeing with his critique of capitalism, and more importantly, like coming out of Marx, these two little arguments I gave you about the necessity to change society does not...
	You would accept that in no way, in no way, shape or form would you accept that from a Nazi to say, well, you know, Hitler had his critiques of communism, and I'm just there for that, and I don't care about this other stuff.
	Come on, man, you would never accept that.
	From a Nazi. Okay.
	All right. So let me say that whether or not I would accept it is kind of irrelevant because that is an argument to hypocrisy.
	The second thing is that what you're talking about, I think, is there's another fallacy that's been going on for a while here that I let slip.
	But I'm just going to go on.
	But no, look.
	If someone said to me, I've read Hitler's program on literacy, to go to make a Bernie Sanders reference.
	I've read the documents in the Nazi Party, which were about teaching kids to read.
	And they're good!
	And we should use them.
	I would be suspicious, but I would not say, oh, you hate Jews.
	I wouldn't, because that would be irrational.
	But you are not interested in Marxist literacy program.
	You are interested in revolutionary socialism and seizing controls of the means of production and allying yourself with an ideology that both advocates for and has enacted the murders of tens of millions of people.
	I'm interested in these two arguments.
	Let me repeat them to you. Human societies set up the terms of human social relationship, including whether or not freedom of thought and expression is possible.
	The primary way human societies determine what is possible is by creating systems to meet human needs and imposing norms on people in order to meet those needs.
	If we want to maximize freedom of thought and expression we must create a system to meet human needs that encourages these sorts of freedoms.
	A society that creates conditions wherein the majority of people must ingratiate themselves to and work for a minority of people in order to meet their needs incentivizes servility and self-censorship.
	Under capitalism, the majority of people must ingratiate themselves to and work for a minority of people in order to meet their needs.
	Therefore, capitalism incentivizes servility and self-censorship.
	And I don't think that you've talked about that all.
	Instead, you've gone back again and again to the very first thing you said, which is, oh, the hundreds of millions of dead bodies, which I have answered with, you know what?
	There is this long process of modernity and liberal questing after freedom.
	And if you look to Marx's history, you'll see he was right in the thick of it.
	He was right in the thick of the same bourgeois revolutions that you would, I think, admire.
	But he wanted to go one step beyond them and also liberate workers.
	Now, that didn't work out very well.
	What happened instead in the 20th century, by and large, was that you had...
	The development of states, bourgeois states, and sometimes not very liberal ones, come out of that rather than authoritarian states, rather than any liberation at all for working people.
	So, okay, is that the fault of Marx, the old revolutionary from the 19th century who wrote the Communist Manifesto with demands in it like everyone should get the right to vote?
	I don't think so. Is it the fault of Engels, who in the middle of a revolution said, we need to strike terror into their heart and kill all our enemies and make sure that these forces of reactions are wiped out forever?
	In other words, let's not have any more kings.
	Let's not have any more domination.
	So I don't think it's his fault either.
	I do think that it's very difficult, the process of arguing for and then to Creating socialism, which is in fact only the arrival at actual human emancipation as conceived of by liberals.
	I think that is very difficult and that you have to hold on to some principles of basic decency along the way or else you're all will be lost.
	But no, I'm not going to sit here and say because Marx critiqued, you know, Monarchal power or, you know, exploitation of workers.
	That means he wanted to kill your family.
	And that's crazy. Well, except that he called for violence, and violence is exactly what happened.
	Now, you can say, well, Marx was only talking about the kings, but it turns out, funny story, apparently there were about 100 million kings in the world under communism because they all got killed.
	Once you unleash the demon of violence...
	You're just moving, again, from the context of Marx's time...
	Hey, I gave you a long speech, man.
	I did not interrupt. All right?
	Okay, go ahead. Thank you.
	I'll give you your speech. I think that it's worth...
	Examining the call to violence, because this is not a theoretical construct in the world.
	Communism's call for violence is not a theoretical construct.
	I will tell you this as well, Doug, and I appreciate you having me on to have this conversation.
	It is not a theoretical thing for me as well.
	Being anti-communist, when I go out to try and give speeches, I get bomb threats, I get death threats, I get my listeners attacked, they get tip over buses, they use violence against people who want to come and hear a talk on philosophy.
	Why?
	Because I'm very specifically and vociferously anti-communist.
	In other words, where the fuck is my freedom of expression?
	Where the fuck is my capacity to go out there and speak and talk?
	Because it is the communists who are coming out and attacking using the very violence that Marx calls for, because they call me a reactionary.
	Because you can call anyone a reactionary and that unleashes the hounds of hell at their very doorstep.
	And so for me, this is not a theoretical discussion about the enactment of violence by communists in the world.
	world.
	So when you're talking to me about the communist system giving people this wonderful access to free speech, I can't do it.
	I can't go out there.
	I can't get there.
	Now, listen, I'm not saying you support that in particular, but I would say, given that you hadn't heard these explicit calls for revolutionary terror and violence and genocide against reactionary classes of people, I think that you should take a pause and look at the line, which is not a very long It's a very straight line between these calls for violence and this acceptance of violence and the mass genocidal violence that was unleashed under these dictatorships in the 20th century.
	The result is in the recipe.
	It's right there.
	And it was enacted in this way.
	And I know that you're not a violent guy.
	And I know that you don't like violence and you want it achieved peacefully.
	But the ideology that you subscribe to does command violence.
	That violence was enacted and it continues to be enacted to this day, obviously against me and against many, many other people.
	So I hope that you can find it in your heart to at least understand why.
	I would view this as a very negative and destructive thing in the world, but I certainly do appreciate the chance for having the conversation.
	I appreciate it, too.
	We'll wrap it up.
	But I just want to say one thing in response to that, and then you can say one thing back and we'll wrap it up.
	You know, that argument you just gave me is that sounds very familiar, and it's because I do talk to people on the left, not Marxists, mind you, but people on the left who will say, you know, when I hear these ideas expressed, when I hear these ideas expressed, I feel physically threatened sometimes.
	And I know you didn't argue exactly the same way that some of these people do, which is therefore we shouldn't...
	Who are these people? I'm not sure what you mean.
	There are people who would say to me, don't platform that guy, he's a fascist.
	Don't argue with him.
	He's a fascist. And I don't know that you're a fascist.
	I haven't watched everything, but I do think you're absolutely...
	And I think we both would agree that, at least from my perspective, you're on the right.
	But I would just say that these people will argue that just the mere ideas are a threat to their life.
	But you don't agree with that, right?
	I do not. But I think that when you say the ideas of Marx are not, if this isn't a theoretical discussion, they're a threat to my life.
	I think that that's very much the same argument.
	In fact, almost identical.
	No, no, because I'm not calling for revolutionary terror.
	I'm not calling for the initiation of the use of force, and I'm not calling for entire classes of people to be wiped from the face of the fucking earth.
	I'm opposed to all initiations of the use of force.
	So for people to feel threatened in some analogous way to Marxist ravings about destroying entire classes of people, which actually happened, the idea that this is equivalent is not.
	The people who say don't talk to him, as far as I know, he's a fascist.
	Don't talk to him. Don't ever debate him.
	They're not arguing, oh, go kill him or anything.
	They're just saying don't talk to him because for them it's not theoretical.
	It's not academic. But I'm not a fascist and I've opposed fascism.
	I've debated against fascists.
	I'm for a non-aggression principle.
	I mean, this fascist label, this is what happens, right?
	As soon as you say violence is permitted against our enemies, we know, you know, historically, no human being can handle that kind of power of the legitimized use of violence.
	So what happens is they say, well, we're only going to enact violence against Nazis and fascists and reactionaries.
	And the next thing you know, 100 million people have been labeled that way and they're gone from the face of the earth.
	That's the problem with this kind of unleashing the genie of violence.
	Well, I'll just say, look, I don't think you can save, You can make this extension from somebody having ideas you strongly disagree with and then to all the way to therefore they are identical to and there's a slippery slope towards some sort of fascist violent movement that someone might say about you.
	And I also would say, you know, they'd say they have about you, express ideas, people really strongly in disagreement.
	But that doesn't mean that you're actually a threat to their life and limb.
	The fact that I think Marx is right doesn't make me or people like me a threat to you.
	And I would encourage people to check out Marx for themselves.
	Read Communist Manifesto and read the Capital, Volume 1, 2, and 3, or read the German Ideology.
	German Ideology is a great book.
	And figure out, does it make sense or is it a violent reaction or a violent communist call to kill all the bad people?
	I don't think it is. Well, there are people actually in your chat who want me thrown in jail.
	There are people who are calling me a CIA violent goon.
	Yeah, this is a very real thing.
	It's a very real thing that as soon as you start to say that violence in the pursuit of utopia is great, suddenly everyone is an enemy who opposes you and it's...
	Here's what I found right away in the chat, so I'm not sure if that's one of my people or yours, saying I have an IQ of 68.
	But listen, I'm going to end the broadcast here, but hang around.
	We'll say goodbye to each other, and thank you for having the debate.
	Thank you. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
	And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
	Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
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