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June 13, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:42:57
"WAS THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION A BAD THING?" Stefan Molyneux vs Caleb Maupin
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Time Text
Can you guys hear me alright?
Yep.
Alright, so you guys won't need to hear me for long.
Let's just jump right into this.
So, alright everyone, welcome.
I'm really excited for this.
We've got Caleb Maupin here.
He is a journalist, a reporter for Russia Today.
Are those titles right?
Journalist, reporter?
Sure, yeah.
Okay.
And I think, yeah, we've got Stefan Molyneux, who is a narco-capitalist who runs Free Domain Radio, the largest philosophy channel in the world, I believe, right now.
So, without any further ado, our topic today is, was the fall of the Soviet Union a good thing?
So what we're going to do here is we're going to have a five-minute introduction to arguments and thoughts on this from each side.
And then it's going to be a back-and-forth dialogue between the two of them.
We're scheduled for 90 minutes on this.
And I was thinking that, Caleb, it would be best if you go first.
Does that sound good to you? Sure.
All right.
Well, I'm glad you put this debate together.
I want to thank the Blue Politics Channel for putting this together.
I want to say I've been debating a lot of people about these kind of topics lately, and it's refreshing because I expect that Mr.
Molyneux will take this seriously.
This won't de-escalate into some kind of insult comedy or something.
He's a professional, I'm a professional, and we both want to get to what the truth actually is.
So I'm glad to be here, and I just want to jump into it.
Was the fall of the Soviet Union a good thing?
That's the topic of this debate.
And it might not seem very relevant to what's going on in the world right now, but it's quite relevant because I believe that what's happened in the Soviet Union during the early 90s, which is widely understood to have been a humanitarian and economic disaster, is very similar to what's happening to the United States which is widely understood to have been a humanitarian and economic disaster, is very similar to what's happening to Extreme free market policies are leading to mass poverty and suffering and death.
So let's just go over the facts.
Now, everyone knows the Soviet Union needed reform during the 1980s.
They needed to update their system.
China was undergoing very successful reforms during that time.
The Soviet Union, however, because of the way their political system had developed, they weren't able to bend, so they broke.
They didn't get reform. Instead, what they got was collapse.
And what resulted was the overthrow of the Communist Party and the moving in of free marketeers.
With the help of George Soros, we saw Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, we saw the policies of the Chicago School of Economics, free market libertarianism imposed on the former Soviet Union.
And the results are widely understood to be a disaster.
70,000 factories shut their doors.
80% of the farms in Russia closed.
There was 20-30% unemployment.
There was a 900% increase in drug addiction and the suicide rate also dramatically increased.
From 1989 to 1994, the average Russian life expectancy decreased by three years.
At that point, 74 million Russians were living in poverty and 37 million were living in conditions described as desperately poor.
Between 1992 and 2006, the Russian population decreased by roughly 10%.
That's people either dying or leaving the country.
And in fact, U.S. economist who's a free marketeer, not a leftist, not a socialist, Anders Gunder Frank, He actually described it as, quote, economic genocide.
Basically, the country was being auctioned off to the highest bidder.
Free market libertarian policies were being put into effect, and it had disastrous results.
In 1994, we saw many cities in Ukraine, or a few cities in Ukraine to be fair, that had electricity and running water for only a few hours a day.
Studies showed that during that time, many parts of the USSR were living on par with parts of Africa that are deeply underdeveloped.
It was a nightmare.
Huge increase in organized crime.
Huge increase in sex trafficking.
It was a society collapsing and Western companies coming in and looting the place economically.
And it was a nightmare. And it was fixed.
Putin came in and fixed it.
And how did he fix it? He fixed it by reasserting government control.
If you look at Putin's economic policies, he wrote an academic dissertation about the strategic planning and the exploitation of natural resources in order to centralize the economy.
He utilized Gazprom and Rosneft, two giant state-controlled energy corporations, and re-centered the economy around the state, built up state-controlled enterprises, and Russia has been much better off since then.
The fall of the Soviet Union was essentially free marketeers turning Russia into a laboratory and putting into effect the policies that my opponent largely advocates.
Privatization, greed is good, get the government off our backs.
It was a disaster, but we really shouldn't be surprised by that, because everywhere we've seen British Empire economics put into practice, that has been the result.
In fact, communism, fascism, neither of those ideologies would have arisen if it weren't for the dramatic failure of Adam Smith free trade economics around the world.
If you can go all across the planet when countries are economically demolished, when they're basically Forced to surrender when big corporations like the Dutch East India Company back in the 1800s, or I guess more recently British Petroleum,
which was one of the corporations that was looting Russia, when they get control and economically demolish countries, when they strip the government and push the government out of the economy, when the state asserts no control and the market is allowed to run rampant, the result is a disaster.
I expect that we're going to hear all kinds of anti-Soviet, anti-communist cliches.
We're going to hear every Solzhenitsyn horror story, every allegation, true or false, about Soviet crimes.
And I believe one of the catchphrases Mr.
Molyneux has liked to popularize is, not an argument, because that is not an argument.
We're not here arguing the Soviet Union was heaven on earth.
We're not even necessarily arguing the Soviet Union was good.
I think the Soviet Union had its successes despite its flaws.
But that's really not an argument because, you know, I'm not a big fan of American capitalism.
I don't want the United States to be economically demolished.
I don't want millions of American women to be sold into sex trafficking.
I don't want there to be mass poverty and mass unemployment in the United States.
The fall of the Soviet Union is widely understood by economists to be a disaster.
And I'm actually quite curious to see I kind of pity Mr.
Molyneux to be in a position to argue that the events of the early 90s were somehow a good thing.
I'm really curious to hear what he has to say.
So please go ahead. Well, I appreciate the feisty introduction, and we are going to get out of our heads and into our hearts, I guess, as best we can, and go through the blood count murder factory that was the Soviet Union.
Estimates range extraordinarily wildly, but about 61, 62 million people, of which over 54 million were citizens, were murdered by the Communist Party, by the government of the Soviet Union.
Why were they killed? Does it really matter?
They were killed because they were bourgeoisie, or because they were landowners, or they were aristocrats, or they were called kulaks.
Some people were from the wrong nation, or they were the wrong race.
Black Sea Greeks, Kalmyks, Volker Germans, Ukrainians.
Some of them just happened to join the wrong political faction.
Trotskyites, Mensheviks, social revolutionaries.
Others were sons, daughters, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers.
Some were just those who came to the police to ask what had happened to their relatives who were dragged in, sent to gulags, and murdered.
Some of the victims were those who were occupied by the Red Army, Balts, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians.
Some were just in the way of what Marxists call social progress, the masses of peasants, people who were religious.
Some were just eliminated because they were potential opposition, the writers, intellectuals, teachers, churchmen, of course, the military high command prior to the Second World War, high and low Communist Party members themselves.
And this wholesale murder went on decade after decade from every Area, end, and reach of the Soviet Empire.
It was hundreds of thousands of darned Cossacks in 1919.
Of course, it was the Romanovs in 1917.
There was the intentional starving, as there was in China under Mao, of about 5 million Ukrainian peasants, 1932 to 1933.
The deportation and mass death of 50,000 to 60,000 Estonians in 1949.
About 6.5 million kulaks, the better off peasants, the more competent peasants, or those resisting collectivization during a seven-year period from 1930 to 1937.
1937 to 1938, when Stalin was eliminating all opposition of perhaps the million-party members of the Great Terror, the massacre of all Trotskyites in the forced labor camps, and why?
There were hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered because there were government quotas for the killings.
Vladimir Petrov, who in 1954 defected while a spy chief in Australia and whose credibility and subsequent revelations were verified by Royal Australian Commission on Espionage, About his work during the years 1936 to 1938 said, I handled hundreds of signals to all parts of the Soviet Union which were couched in the following terms.
Two, NKVD France, you are charged with the task of exterminating 10,000 enemies of the people.
Report results by signal.
And in due course, the reply would come back.
In reply to yours of such and such a date, the following enemies of the Soviet people have been shot.
Solzhenitsyn makes these quotas basic to the Great Terror of 36 to 38.
When he wrote the real law underlying the arrests of those years was the assignment of quotas.
The norms set the planned allocations.
Every city, every district, every military unit was assigned a specific quota of arrests to be carried out by a stipulated time.
From then on, everything else depended on the ingenuity of the security operations personnel.
Of course, you had to continually invent plots, invent counter-revolutionary measures, and it simply escalated in various ways to over 60 million people.
60 million, that's 10 holocausts, of course, right?
This is a prudent, most probable tally.
There's a low figure.
Of 28.3 million, which is 4.2 million followers, there's an unlikely high of 126 million.
This is a range of uncertainty of the murders within the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, committed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The error range is almost 98 million human beings.
That's larger than the population of 96% of the world's nations.
If France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Switzerland were all nuked and irradiated and blasted clean of all human life, the human toll would be less than just this range of the murders in the Soviet communist system.
The range, not even the total murdered.
The most probable estimate of almost 62 million murdered is over four times the battle dead 15 million for all nations in the Second World War.
62 million murders exceeds the total deaths, 35,700,000, from all the last century's international civil guerrilla and liberation wars, including the Russian Civil War itself.
The Soviet Union was not a country, it was a...
Murder prison. It was a slaughterhouse.
It was a place where sadists got to roam free and fulfill all of their unholy bloodletting lusts upon all of their real and imagined enemies.
It was a place with almost no rule of law.
It was a place of mass execution.
It was a place where the dead were buried in mountains.
It was worse than a prison.
It was a torture chamber that extended the length and breadth of almost an entire continent that swallowed up Eastern Europe after the Second World War.
It was a brutal factory where human beings were disassembled, not even for profit, but for fun.
In one instance, Where slave labor was used, and of course slave labor was used in many places throughout the Soviet Union.
In one instance, in one canal that was being built, 20% of the workforce died after being forced on low rations to build, in crippling temperatures, an entire canal largely by hand.
This was not productive.
This was not healthy.
This was not positive. It was simply a place where sadists could ply their unholy trade.
And the comment about afterwards things were a mess, well, for God's sakes, of course they were.
When you torture an entire continent from end to end, and you slaughter tens of millions of its inhabitants, and you terrorize hundreds of millions more, Of course it's a dysfunctional society that comes out of that.
That's like saying, well, this woman was kidnapped and tortured for ten years, and you know, afterwards she was a mess!
By God, she just wasn't that healthy.
And of course, at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union formally disintegrated, the...
The state assets, the assets really built on the blood of the people, was carved up and handed out by a bunch of oligarchs, most of whom had emerged out of the Communist Party itself.
So this was not a free market operation.
They were sold to robber barons, literal robber barons, not free market people, not through free market operations.
The state apparatus was carved, sliced up, and handed out to favorites and apparatchiks from the Communist Party, Far below cost, the profits did not go to the people, so even the disassembly of the murder machine was itself murderous, and the suffering of that terrible century lasts in Russia to this day.
But to blame the free market for the actions and the after effects and the hangovers and the post-traumatic stress disorder of communism is an injustice that truly staggers the imagination.
Okay, so shall we just jump into things then?
Okay.
Shall we go ahead? It's your debate.
Alrighty. Sounds like you agree with me.
You're telling me the fall of the Soviet Union was a bad thing.
You just disagree with me about the reasons why it was a bad thing, but you agree it was a bad thing.
That's what you got out of what I said?
The Soviet Union was a murder machine, but it ending was not a bad thing.
You said that the fall of the Soviet Union, the economic results of what went on in the 1990s were bad.
That's what I'm arguing. So we agree.
The fall of the Soviet Union was a bad thing.
It should have been a good thing, right?
It should have been a good thing if you believe free market logic.
They adopted your system.
They adopted profits in command.
They adopted markets.
And it should have been a glorious moment.
You're saying it wasn't because of the hangover and the post-traumatic stress.
So the fall of the Soviet Union was not a good thing.
I mean, it seems like we're on the same page about what went on in the early 90s.
Are we not? Are you saying that if a woman is kidnapped and tortured that she should not be freed because it's going to be very difficult for her afterwards?
Of course the Soviet Union, to end it, was to close down the largest murder factory the world has ever seen.
And the fact that there's a hangover and a problem and that the carving up of the body politic is handed out according to Soviet political or Russian political pressure points rather than the free market.
You can't blame the free market for the fact that Soviet resources...
We're handed out like candy to the highest bidders and the most politically connected and handed out at far below their market value.
We disagree about the reason, but we agree that the aftermath of the Soviet Union, when markets were imposed, created a disaster.
You're just saying it's communism's fault.
No, I'm saying that markets weren't imposed.
I would really like to ask a question because I've argued with libertarians a lot.
And one thing that has always shocked me.
You're a smart man, Stefan Molyneux.
You're very smart. You're very well educated.
Why do libertarians always lie and say that communism had no economic successes?
I've heard this my whole life from libertarians.
Never has communism ever...
Okay, dude, dude. Okay, first of all, stop, stop, stop.
Hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey, hey, shut up for a sec, okay?
Don't insult me. Don't call me a liar.
And don't put words in my mouth because I never said there were no economic successes under communism.
So if you want to deal with me as a human being face-to-face, fantastic.
But don't start calling me a liar.
Don't put me in the category of liars.
And don't strawman something I've never said.
Let's have a civilized discussion about the facts, okay?
I'm not going to hear who's going to step in.
So deal with my arguments.
I don't want to hear about libertarians and liars and things I've never said, okay?
Deal with my arguments if you can.
I did deal with your argument.
We're arguing about was the fall of the Soviet Union a good thing?
You've admitted it was a bad thing.
You put me in the camp of people who lie.
I've already won the debate.
I've already won. You went straight to ad hominem and straw man.
That is not winning a debate, my friend.
No. You conceded that the fall of the Soviet Union was a bad thing.
No, I did not. Yes, you did.
You said it's like a woman being traumatized.
You blamed it on post-communist traumatic stress or whatever.
But I would like to move on to another point.
I bet you do. Big disagreement between us, which is this claim that I frequently hear that is completely false, that the Soviet Union had no economic successes.
Is that your position or not?
Wait, are you saying that I've made the case that there was no economic successes under communism?
I'm asking you, is that your position?
I don't know what you mean by the phrase.
What do you mean by economic success?
Raising GDP, lifting people out of poverty, industrialization, transforming desperately poor countries into industrial superpowers, wiping out illiteracy, cultural achievements.
Did any of this happen, or is that all just communist propaganda?
What's your position? Well, we're going to have to take these one at a time, because you're just casting such a white net, I don't even know exactly what we're talking about.
Well, no, I mean, I frequently hear from libertarians...
Okay, don't talk to me about things you've heard from other people.
Just let you and I have a conversation without pulling in all of the ghosts of Mordor of people you've imagined in the past.
Okay, let's talk about GDP. Are you going to say that the Soviet Union raised GDP? You mean relative to, say, the serf era, the czarist era that came before?
Did it? Of course.
Okay. Did the Soviet Union not industrialize the entire country?
What do you mean by industrialized?
Did it build factories? Did it build canals?
Sure. Were they all economically valuable?
Were they worth the mountains of bodies and blood they were built on?
No. I mean, China is building cities in the middle of nowhere that nobody lives.
That raises the GDP. Is that an economically effective use of resources?
Of course not. So your argument is that because of the atrocities committed by the Soviet state, none of these economic achievements count.
Is that your argument? Are you going to strawman everything I'm saying?
I'm just curious because you just keep reinterpreting everything I'm saying, which is not what I'm saying.
No, I'm asking what your argument is.
So your argument is not that the Soviet Union's economic achievements didn't count.
That's not what you're saying. I don't even know what the phrase didn't count means.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
And I don't think you do either, but give it a shot.
Give what a shot? What does it mean to say doesn't count?
I don't even know what that means. No, I mean...
You said, as we were going over the fact that the Soviet Union's planned economy electrified parts of the country, most of the country, wiped out illiteracy.
No, no, no. Hang on.
We're going to do this one at a time because we're going to slice and dice this.
Okay. So let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this. No.
I mean, do you acknowledge the economic achievements or not?
I don't know what you mean by achievements.
Did they build things?
Sure, absolutely. Let me ask you this.
Was building concentration camps in Nazi Germany, did that add to Nazi Germany's GDP? Yes or no?
Did building concentration camps in Nazi Germany add to Nazi Germany's GDP? And so, do you equate the Soviet Union transforming a backward country into an industrialized country?
No, no. Don't pretend I didn't ask you a question.
That's really fucking rude, okay?
Did the building of concentration camps in Nazi Germany add to Germany's GDP? Of course.
Okay. Building the autobonds like the Nazi did.
Yeah, the Nazi state in many ways increased GDP. That's a fact as well.
Okay, and do you consider that to be morally legitimate and a good thing that they built a lot of concentration camps?
Socialism has never raised anyone out of poverty, has never had economic achievements.
I hear this all the time. I'm sorry?
Now you don't agree with that. That's what you're telling me, and I'm refreshed to hear that.
I'm refreshed to hear a libertarian who will admit things like Libya under Gaddafi had the highest life expectancy on the African continent and when it was forced to adopt your free trade system with NATO bombs, ever since then it's been a disaster and people have been fleeing in the Mediterranean trying to get out of the nightmare.
I'm glad you will admit that.
I'm glad you will admit that Cuba has a higher life expectancy and better living conditions than people in Haiti, where they're part of the free trade, global capitalist system, and people are starving and suffering.
I'm glad you'll admit that Cuba has better conditions than the Dominican Republic and some of the countries throughout Latin America that are part of your system.
I'm glad you will admit that socialism has had economic achievements.
I often don't hear libertarians make that acknowledgement, so thank you for that.
Okay, I'm waiting to be part of this debate.
You're debating with some imaginary staff in your head who somehow thinks that Haiti has a free market paradise system.
I don't even know what to say about that.
We will not acknowledge that socialism has had economic achievements.
What, do people actually deny that Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space and he was sent up there by the Soviets?
I don't understand what that means.
Of course he did. Okay, so now the argument is not that socialism didn't have economic achievements.
The argument is now that it was just a violator of human rights that resulted in mass death, like you spent your entire opening statement saying.
Is that what we're arguing about now?
Dude, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
You're all over the map here.
I don't know. It's so scattered.
...going over allegations about human rights violations, mass murder, etc., in the Soviet Union.
What do you mean allegations? These are very well documented, and these are even relying upon...
You can't say, well, the Soviet figures are totally valid for GDP, but they're not valid for the murder mills of the gulags.
So you can have your GDP. I think the GDP in the Soviet Union was largely bullshit.
Of course, right? I mean, because there's no market system with which you determine the value or price of what it is that you're building.
But okay, we can give you the GDP. Yeah, the GDP went up and they did electrify stuff and they did build canals and they did build factories.
Absolutely. But so what?
But, I mean, then you also get these death counts as well.
They didn't electrify Syria and build huge power plants there.
They didn't build all kinds of infrastructure, not just in their homeland, but all over the world.
None of that counts.
That's all fake.
Are you saying that's fake?
You said that the GDP was bullshit.
I mean, economic growth happened because of socialism.
That's an indisputable fact.
You've admitted it before.
Now you're trying to go back on it or say it's funny.
No, no, no. See, dude, you got to slow...
You calm your tits a little here, man, and go a little slower because you're just all over the map.
And what I'll tell you why. So, yes, hang on.
I listened to your sentences.
If you're not going to listen to mine, this is completely fucking pointless, all right?
Okay, you finish your points and then I'll make my points because the moment I start talking, you just talk in my ear, okay?
So you finish your points like a civilized human being, then I'll get to my points.
Okay. And I could speak.
So, I mean, are we going to take turns here?
You talk, I talk, I talk, you talk.
That's what I'm trying to do. That would be a civil debate.
Okay, so why don't you go, and then I'll go.
Okay? Or do you want to do it the other way around?
No, I don't care. So yes, there's no question that the Soviet Union built stuff.
There's no question that the ancient Egyptians built pyramids using slave labor.
So yes, I guess their GDP went up as well.
There's no doubt that the National Socialists in Germany controlled the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic and put a lot of people back to work by arming them for a massive world war.
There's no doubt that the murder factories of the Nazi concentration camps increased their GDP and gave people reliable income in horrible manners.
So the fact that people get paid, the fact that stuff gets built, It's not a measure of the virtue of a society.
The measure of a virtue of a society is whether or not the initiation of the use of force is used to build those things.
Sure, they sent a man into space and they built giant factories, happened to be horribly polluted and horribly polluting, and they built Chernobyl and they built a whole other load of massively dangerous and almost Europe-destroying Nuclear reactors without basic safety features.
So yeah, they built a whole lot of stuff.
There's no question. I mean, I'm not going to sit here and say the Soviet Union was exactly the same in 1991 as it was in 1917.
Yeah, they built a lot of stuff. They stole a lot of stuff.
There's a great book called East Minus West Equals Zero, which means like it goes into how much the Soviet Union stole from the West in order to build.
But yeah, they built a whole bunch of stuff.
They sure did. Slave labor can build you a whole bunch of stuff.
Labor that you point machine guns at and shoot people who don't do what you want, you can build a whole bunch of stuff.
What is the value of that in the long run?
Not that much.
And you can't even tell what the value is because there's no price system, there's no price mechanism, because there's no free market, there's no stock market to tell you.
What things are worth.
So if we're sitting here in the squalid, too great, too massive, did the Soviets build stuff?
Yeah, they built stuff. And so did the ancient Egyptians, and so did the Nazis.
So what? The question is the morality of how it was done.
May I respond?
Are you going to let me respond without interrupting now?
All right, I will proceed.
If the question... Is not whether or not they actually achieved anything economically, but whether or not they violated human rights in order to do it.
You're defending a system that is very, very guilty of mass death and killing far, far more than we can imagine.
I mean, where has free trade economics been implemented and not resulted in mass death, I would ask you.
Right? The British Empire imposed...
Imposed free markets at the point of a gun on China with the Opium Wars, right?
They forced Britain to join the British Empire free trade system.
That's why Hong Kong is now part of, you know, or was separate because of the British Empire and such, which you defend.
The result was mass- Wait, I defend the British Empire?
Stop interrupting me, please.
Okay, but don't tell me what I'm doing.
Make your arguments, but don't tell me what I've said.
I didn't interrupt you.
Now stop interrupting. All right?
You can talk about the mass famine of 1876 to 1879.
9 to 13 million people dead.
Because the British Empire wouldn't let them develop their own economy.
You could talk about the mass famine of 1928 to 1930.
Three to ten million people dead.
Why? Because they couldn't have a central government.
Because the fields that should have been growing food were growing opium poppies.
This is the disaster, right?
All over the world we've seen capitalism result in mass death.
In India, mass famines created by free trade.
Four to five million people dead in 1866 in the Orissa Famine.
The Indian famines of 1896 to 1879, 2 million dead at the hands of the British Empire, right?
You talk about the Great Famine in Ireland, 1845 to 1849, where the Whig Party imposed free market policies on the Irish people At the barrel of a gun, colonialism, and the result was millions of deaths, right?
Capitalism has killed millions of people.
You know, King Leopold of Belgium, he worked to death 10 to 15 million people in the Congo so he could make rubber profits from their labor.
You know, I mean, World War I, 20 million people sent to their deaths so the capitalists could carve up the developing world for themselves and colonial empires.
The whole reason that communism even emerged was in response to the fact that British free market Adam Smith capitalism was causing mass death and suffering around the world, holding back economic development, keeping the developing world poor.
And so countries around the world chose to break out of that system, organize and control their own economies, and they had great successes.
China, before the communists came to power, was deeply poor.
Now China, with a state-controlled, centrally planned economy, It's the second largest economy on earth.
The Soviet Union lifted itself up, as you have acknowledged.
So, you know, if we're going to play that game of who's violated human rights, I can point you to many capitalist governments, most of whom are in line with your free trade ideas.
So I'm not seeing the link.
No, I get that you're not seeing the link because you don't understand my argument.
So the idea that you can impose a free market At the point of a gun through imperialism is antithetical to market voluntarism, to market anarchy, to true free markets.
True free markets rely on two basic principles.
The first is the non-initiation of force and the second is a respect for property rights.
So I dislike the Soviet Union because it was a communist dictatorship.
And of course, it was an empire.
It was, you know, this union of Soviet Socialist Republic.
So it was a whole scattering of countries.
And of course, they tried to expand into other countries, into North Korea, into Korea.
North Vietnam and, of course, a wide variety of other places.
They funded the takeovers in Cuba and Cambodia and other places.
So, yeah, they were a terrible empire, and the British Empire was a terrible empire.
The British Empire was a violation of the free market and of the free trade because they forced people to become sailors.
And they forced people, the average British citizen, suffered enormously under the British Empire.
And it was, of course, highly profitable for the fascistic state corporations that had the union of state power so that they could outsource the protection of their invasions economically of other countries.
They could outsource that to the hapless and helpless British taxpayer who was dragged onto ships at the point of a sword and died of scurvy more often than he even died from war.
So the idea that somehow you get me into the corner where I'm defending the British Empire while opposing the Russian Soviet Communist Empire is ridiculous.
You and I are on the same side.
As you view the British Empire, so do I view the Russian Empire.
As you view British dictatorial policies where resources were stripped and markets were interrupted and people were enslaved both financially and at the point of a gun to be sailors and soldiers to defend the profits of the corporations united with the power of the state.
Yeah, we're on the same side.
I don't know what this straw man is that somehow you said I've defended the British Empire.
No, the British Empire is a monstrous violation of personal and political liberties.
Alright, now I will respond.
I've seen you defend the British Empire all over YouTube.
I watched a lot of your material, but I'm not going to quibble with you said this or that.
I'm not here to argue about you. I'm here to argue about facts.
You said earlier the Soviet Union stole a lot of stuff.
You referred to the Soviet Union as an empire.
The Soviet Union bankrupted itself, developing the countries that were aligned with it.
Huge amounts of money went into building infrastructure in places like Afghanistan, in places like Angola, in places like Libya.
I mean, the Soviet Union spent loads and loads of its money industrializing and developing the countries it was aligned with.
It wasn't plundering them.
When the British Empire went to India, it burned all the textile mills and forced them to import their cloth from Britain.
You know, I mean, you know, the United States goes around the world blowing up and destroying oil-producing countries and reducing them to chaos.
So the world market is forced to buy its oil from the four super major oil companies that are closely embedded with the puppet of Western capitalism, Saudi Arabia.
But that's all beside the point, because so now you're saying the British Empire wasn't capitalism.
You're saying the United States, I assume you're saying the United States, where force was used in order to create the country, force with the slaughter of the Native Americans, force with slavery was used to create it.
You're saying none of that counts because force was used.
But let me ask you this.
Where has real capitalism ever been tried?
This is like arguing with an anarcho-communist or something.
Show me one place where real capitalism, where no force was used, where everyone just did things voluntarily, was ever tried.
This is what is constantly said about communists.
That's not real socialism.
That's not real capitalism.
I pointed to you the ugly record of capitalism around the world, and you responded with the old cliche, not real capitalism.
So where has real capitalism ever worked?
Define capitalism for me, because we're obviously not using the same terms.
Clearly, I think capitalism has worked around the world in slaughtering millions of people.
I think capitalism is the system we live under in the United States right now.
I'm sorry, did you not hear what I said? Could you please define for me capitalism?
Under my understanding, capitalism is an economy where profits are in command.
As Frederick Engels said, it's preliminary transformation into capital.
Under capitalism, the means of production only function as preliminary transformation into capital.
Under other systems, we have houses because people need a place to live.
Under capitalism, we have houses so landlords and banks can make money, right?
Under capitalism, we don't have food because people need something to eat.
We have food so that capitalists can make profits from it.
Capitalism is a system where the means of production function according to profit.
That's my definition. What's yours?
Where the means of production function according to profit.
That's capitalism? Under my understanding.
So then all systems wherein people make more than they spend is capitalism.
Is that right? No.
Where there's profit? No, when profits are in command, when the state is not planning out the economy, when the market and the maximization of profit dictates production, when there's not state central planning, when society and the economy is not organized for the benefit of public good by central planners, but instead organized to make profits for private owners, that's capitalism.
Okay, so where the state is not dictating the economy, that's capitalism, right?
Yeah. So how on earth do you get, since you were talking about how The British Empire and America and so on imposed these systems at the point of a gun through the state.
How do you square that circle, my friend?
If it means that the government is not involved in the market, but you're saying that the government is commanding the market at the point of a gun and burning down textile mills and preventing people from doing X, Y or Z at the point of a gun...
You can't have it both ways.
You can't have capitalism as something imposed at the point of a gun by the state, and also that capitalism is where the state doesn't interfere in the economy.
The state interferes on behalf of capitalists.
That's what was going on in Britain.
That's why they burned down all the textile mills in India was to make profits for British factory owners.
Under capitalism, the government works for the corporations and for the capitalists.
Under socialism, the corporations and the means of production, the private capitalists or the state-controlled industries work for the people.
Okay, but you understand that when the government is using force to benefit particular state-enmeshed corporations, that's interfering with the free market, right?
Because all the other corporations and all the other individuals get kind of screwed for that, right?
It's the government working to help corporations make profits.
At the expense of everyone else, right?
Government facilitation of capitalism.
Well, no. See, capitalism is a free market, and so if the government is pointing its guns at people to benefit some corporations at the expense of everyone else, that's not a free market, right, by definition, because the government is violating and interfering with people's right of free trade, right?
Where has capitalism ever existed?
No, no, no. Forget this. Just help me with these definitions.
We're working with definitions, and as soon as I find a contradiction in one of your definitions, you jump onto another topic.
Let's stay on this one. Okay.
So do you understand that when a government is pointing guns at people to benefit a particular corporation, that's not free trade?
Because all the other corporations and the people on both other ends of the economic spectrum are being harmed by the force imposed by the state.
Well, under capitalism, the state frequently intervenes on behalf of corporations to facilitate their making of profits.
I don't see that as contradictory at all.
You know, the government helps capitalists make profits.
That's capitalism. Well, no.
No, no. See, capitalism is free trade, which means all transactions are voluntary, right?
So this is the basic argument for free trade, right, and why it's beneficial to the world as a whole, right?
This is not for you. I'm sure you understand this more for the listeners, right?
This is like, sorry, a little bit of econ 101 here, right?
So where is that? Hang on.
So let me finish. So if you and I... Exchange something voluntarily, right?
The sort of obvious example is I have a dollar and you have a pen, right?
And we decide to exchange these things voluntarily, right?
I have a dollar, you have a pen, and I want your pen, or I want a pen more than I want my dollar, and you want my dollar more than you want your pen.
So I give you the dollar and you give me the pen, right?
Praxeologically, which means by definition, but not tautologically, this is a net benefit to us both.
We are both better off because we have traded voluntarily.
Now, we may have buyer's regret and so on, but in the moment that we are not forced to do business together, in the moment that we are trading voluntarily, we are doing so because I'm happier having the pen rather than having the dollar, and you're happier having the dollar rather than having the pen, right? And so when you have free exchange, when you have voluntary exchange, that is a free market.
Now, if someone comes along and says, you have to sell your pen to staff for only 50 cents, otherwise I'm going to put a big bullet hole in your head.
Well, guess what, man?
That's no longer the free market.
That's a criminal enterprise.
That is a shakedown.
That is organized crime, or in the case of the government, generally disorganized crime.
So what I'm talking about is the free market.
So when you start to bring in the government pointing guns and corporations and corruption and violence and navies and armies and wars and bombs and destroying factories, that's no longer...
The free market. Now, you can call that capitalism if you want.
I mean, that's fine. I mean, I know a lot of people do.
It's corporate capitalism or crony capitalism or some people call it crapitalism.
It's actually really fascism.
Fascism is when the large corporations use government power in order to ensure unjust profits at the expense of free trade, of other people competing with them.
But we can call it free trade if you want, because I think that's more accurate and it's less of a loaded term than capitalism.
But it's not capitalism when the government is pointing guns at people.
It's certainly not the free market if you want to redefine capitalism as equaling fascism.
I think that's not particularly helpful.
But the reason we have the term capitalism is because the term fascism, which is what you're talking about, is already reserved.
And I think to conflate the two is not very honest.
Okay.
Well, Stefan, I hate to break this to you.
All capitalism is crony capitalism.
When a group of people has exponentially higher wealth than other people, they tend to try to influence government policy to keep it that way.
There has never been a system of capitalism in the history of the world where the government has just kept its hands off and allowed everyone to just live in this free market.
And it doesn't make any sense.
I mean, why would people with huge amounts of money, exponentially larger than other people's, sit back and say, all right, I'm not going to try to influence government policy to my benefit.
I mean, that's absurd.
I agree.
I agree, which is why I'm an anarchist.
We should not have a government of any kind, any way, any shape, any form.
A government in itself is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
And you're right. Of course, capitalists or corporations will use government power.
In fact, they're obligated to do so by the charges of their corporation.
I mean, I've been, I don't know if you've ever been...
I'm an executive on the board of a company.
I've been an entrepreneur and have sat on boards.
You have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits for your shareholders.
And you can't sit there and say, well, the government's got this great program or this great benefit.
Of course you will do it.
And it's been well documented that for corporations to invest in political representatives is just about the biggest investment and most profitable investment that they can make.
Yeah, human beings are corrupted by power, particularly The only way to limit the corruption that coercive power affords, whether it's of the communist variety or of the fascist variety, in other words, corporate capitalism, as you would call it, the only way to limit that is to remove temptation from corruption.
The table, right?
There's no state. You can't have a state because the state will be taken over by communists and then used to destroy their enemies.
The state will be taken over by corporations.
The state will be taken over by some race or some ideology in the same way that the state used to be taken over by religious fundamentalists and then they would try and impose their view of religious fundamentalism on everyone else.
And the only way we can survive that as a society is...
Western Europe, in particular, learned over 300 years of religious warfare.
The only way we can survive that is to separate church and state.
And the only way that we can end up with a relatively corruption-free economy, where you don't have corporations or ideologues using the power of the state to impose their vision of the good or of the profitable on everyone else, is to separate the state and the economy.
State should not have any influence over the economy, but once you have a state, it's always going to end up that way, which is why the state has to be viewed the same as slavery.
It is an institution that we cannot allow to continue in the long run because the corruption and the brutality is just so intense and so inescapable.
All right. Stefan, on the walls of the U.S. Department of Justice, you will find the words, when law stops, tyranny begins.
And the reason that we have law and morality is because without those things, it's the law of the jungle.
It's might is right. Law and morality are the only thing that protect the weak from the strong.
Without them, when law doesn't exist, when morality doesn't exist, the strong are able to ruthlessly rule over the weak.
That's the situation.
And let me add that that's why I view libertarianism – not yourself.
You can represent yourself, but libertarianism was such contempt.
Libertarians frequently tried to reduce laws.
They say corporations, oh, there shouldn't be environmental regulations restricting pollution.
There shouldn't be labor protections.
They shouldn't be forced to pay a minimum wage to their people.
They're trying to reduce laws.
But furthermore, Ayn Rand, one of the main thinkers of libertarian objectivist philosophy, a great influence on Alan Greenspan, She was his personal friend. Ayn Rand goes as far as trying to attack traditional morality itself.
She wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness, arguing that compassion and human empathy are mere weaknesses.
The character Howard Rourke, who is the protagonist in her novel, breaks into the apartment of a woman and violently rapes her.
And her narration portrays this as beautiful.
Why? Because this stronger man is asserting himself on this weakling.
She views people as the mob.
Her book Atlas Shrug talks about the billionaires and the great men of the world going on strike against the inferior rabble, the masses of people who would force them to pay taxes and treat their employees kindly and not pollute people.
Right? I mean, I view this idea that we're going to have a world where there is no government.
You're saying you want no government.
That has never existed anywhere in the world.
I don't think anyone would ever tolerate that, but I don't think it's desirable either.
But your failure of imagination should not be a limit on the progress of humankind.
So you're the kind of guy, clearly, logically, you would be arguing that slavery could never be abolished because no human society had ever existed without slavery.
You would argue that women should never be equal under the law to men because no society had ever granted women that kind of legitimacy under the law.
So your failure to comprehend or understand or imagine what a society could look like without a government simply shows the limits of your brain.
It doesn't show the limit of human potential.
Actually, the majority of human civilization did not involve slavery.
Slavery did not arise until the origin of private property.
Oh my gosh, you've got to be fucking kidding me.
Hunter-gatherer tribes did not have slavery.
That's simply not a fact.
Wait, who didn't have slavery? Hunter-gatherer tribes?
No, they were tribes. They were, you know, 20 to 30 people going around hunting and gathering.
Are you kidding me? Do you know anything about anthropological history at all?
No. Before the origin of agriculture, there was not slavery.
Humans were hunting and gathering.
Okay, I've done an entire presentation on this when I did my speaking tour on Australia, so you're just completely and totally wrong.
After the Civil War, the Comanches were the biggest slave owners in America.
Slave owning was fundamental to the tribes of North America.
Slave owning was fundamental to Africa.
Slave owning was fundamental to ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
The idea that there were no slaves before...
My god, I don't even know what to say.
Hold on, man. You gotta let him finish.
I'm sorry, I thought he was dead.
Go ahead, Caleb. I mean, the majority of human history...
Was hunter-gatherer civilization.
Before the origin of private property, before the domestication of animals and the growing of crops, humans were wandering around, hunting and gathering.
And they lived in tribes.
And there was some level of hierarchy in these tribes.
I think some authority certainly existed.
But there was no slavery.
There was no one owning anyone else.
And in fact, they didn't even really keep track of who was whose children.
So yeah, to say that no human society ever existed without slavery...
You know, Marxism is a concept of historical progress, right?
The hunter-gatherer civilization, eventually we human beings with our brilliance got too good at hunting and gathering.
We developed sticks and rocks and got so good at killing animals.
We paid close attention to the patterns and how plants grow and got very good at gathering.
We got so good at hunting and gathering, and it became necessary at that point.
To begin growing crops and having agriculture.
And that gave birth to a higher mode of production out of necessity.
And eventually, slavery gave way to feudalism, which was a higher mode of production.
And eventually, feudalism gave way to capitalism, which was a much higher mode of production.
And eventually, capitalism will give way to socialism and has given way to it around the world because it's the only way that countries around the world kept poor by capitalism in its monopoly stage.
Imperialism, the domination of the world by bankers in Wall Street and London, that's keeping the world poor.
So a few bankers and billionaires can stay rich, and they're embedded with the governments around the world, and they do it to make sure the profits flow into their hands.
And many countries around the world have broken out of that system with force.
Countries like China, countries like Venezuela, countries like Russia and the Soviet Union, countries like Cuba have broken out of that system with force and had great achievements in raising their people out of poverty and industrializing because they've broken out of that system.
Marxism is dialectical.
You accused me of saying that I would say that slavery had always existed.
That's something I don't contend.
Furthermore, and also on top of that, I maintain that we can get to a society eventually without a government, but that would be based on a huge level of material abundance.
The goal of communism is to be Sorry. Wait, hang on. Sorry. So we can't have a stateless society now.
At this point in human history?
No, no, no. At some point, I don't think it's imminent, don't get me wrong, but you and I, because you were so scornful of the idea of a stateless society, but now you're telling me we can have a stateless society one day.
No, she doesn't.
No. No, she doesn't.
No, she doesn't like the rule of the majority over the individual.
That's all she does. At the end of Atlas Shrugged, they don't sit there and say, let's create a fascist state and enslave everyone.
All they want is to be able to keep the proceeds of their own labor and to be charitable rather than to be enslaved.
That's all. They're talking about there, but...
So let me ask you this, because I'm genuinely curious about all of this, right?
So in preparing for this, you...
I watched a bunch of debates and conversations that you had.
Sell me on China.
Help me understand your positive view.
And, you know, I don't mean this to sound snarky or, like, really genuinely, like, help me understand...
Your positive view, because, you know, when I was in China, I mean, it was not very good and people weren't very happy and Tiananmen Square was halfway still being scrubbed.
But tell me, like, tell me on the pluses of China.
That's really interesting to me how you feel.
It's a very positive role model in many ways.
And what are the pluses that you see there?
I see 800 million people lifted out of poverty.
I see a country that was once the sick man of Asia with free trade imposed on it by the British Empire breaking out of that, having at this point half the steel in the world is made in China's state-controlled steel industry.
At this point, you know, before the pandemic, the tourism industry of the world was having a boom because millions of Chinese people whose grandparents were illiterate peasants were going on vacation.
For the first time, right, in generations.
I mean, huge achievements.
Electrification. This was a country that didn't have running water, that didn't have electricity.
Millions raised out of poverty.
I mean, it's astronomical.
I mean, China at this point, they're making better phones than Western capitalism is.
They have the world's fastest supercomputers.
I mean, the achievements are astronomical.
This is a whole society that has lifted itself up by its bootstraps.
It is an argument for the fact that growth can take place beyond capitalism.
And when the economy is controlled by the state and humans are mobilized to build and construct and unleash their creativity and brilliance, great things could be achieved.
And yes, the Cultural Revolution was a disaster, right?
I mean, that was a disaster.
And during the Cultural Revolution, they rejected the basic premise of Marxism, which is that growth is necessary.
Marxism is an ideology that is based on growth.
It argues that we need to get the economy out of the irrationality of profits and command, right?
Under societies of the past, people were homeless because there wasn't enough housing.
Only under capitalism are people homeless because there is too much housing.
That happened during the financial crisis.
The housing bubble burst.
People couldn't afford to buy all the houses that exist.
And we had tent cities set up in Nevada because people were homeless because there were too many houses.
That's not rational.
Under capitalism, right?
Under capitalism, people are hungry, not because there's not enough food, but because there's too much food.
This is irrational.
Profits, this magical, invisible hand, doesn't care.
And when societies are able to break out of that and rationally organize the economy, they can have big achievements.
I think China is proof of that.
Cuba is proof of that. Other societies around the world are proof of that.
Do they have big problems, as you endlessly pointed out in your opening statement?
Of course. I'm not going to deny human rights violations.
I'm Do you think that Hong Kong, which didn't go through the mass slaughters that China went through, Wouldn't it have been better if China had had some more free markets relative to what happened in China?
So China's the number one slaughterer of its own citizens in a much shorter timeframe.
Than Russia, right?
So Russia, 1917 to 1987, we had almost 62 million people.
China, about half the time, 1949 to 1987, killed almost 77 million people.
Almost 77 million people.
Now that is... I mean, we can't even comprehend, right?
So Hong Kong didn't go through that kind of slaughter, and they certainly did have a free market relative to China.
Do you think that the non-slaughterhouse—I mean, there were deaths, of course, and there was repression from the British and all that, but nothing compared to the democide that occurred or the slaughters that occurred in China.
Do you think that the Hong Kong model in any way is superior to the China model just in terms of, like, there not being 77 million people killed?
I have... I have two responses to that.
First of all, I believe the biggest trading partner with Hong Kong is mainland China and that Hong Kong's successes have a lot to do and walk hand in hand with China's successes on the mainland.
Second of all, are you contending that this big number you threw out there, all those people were persecuted?
They got death sentences from the Chinese government?
No, killed by their own governments in a variety of ways.
We're given death sentences.
They were shot. Is that what you're contending?
Do you not know these numbers?
I'm curious if you're playing dumb or what.
But they tend to be based on the fact that famines took place.
Well, no, but there's famines and then there's famines that result from specific state policies, such as the collectivization of the farmland, as I mentioned before, occurred in Ukraine and other places also occurred in China.
So, yeah, when you have state policies where food...
Can no longer be produced because the government has taken over and is not distributing the land to anybody effective, and also because they're withholding food as a form of punishment for class enemies such as the large landholders that were quite productive in farming.
Yeah, there is a lot of deaths that occur from that, for sure.
These are not just natural famines.
Right. So all those famines I listed earlier, like the British Empire in Iran, for example, blocking grain imports to Iran and starving 8 to 10 million people in 1917 to 1919, like the Bengal famine of 1943, which Winston Churchill joked about where 3 million Indian people died, does that all tarnish the reputation of capitalism?
But, oh, it's not real capitalism.
Right, I forgot. Yeah, you did forget.
But please try and remember, because it's kind of important.
It really wasn't that long ago that we talked about it.
So just try and hang on to that stuff in your head if you can.
I finished responding. I didn't interrupt you.
Now, I believe it was because of the Chinese Communist Party.
That the mass starvation and famines that had gone on in China for hundreds of years, most especially after the British took over, were ended.
It was China and the Communist Party that brought tractors to rural villages.
It was China and the Communist Party that created China's modern food production system.
So you're blaming them for problems in the food production system but not giving them credit for the fact that they built it.
I guess I'm just curious, so if you can just walk over 77 million bodies, is there a number of dead that would give you pause?
I'm just like, is it 80 million?
Is it 100 million? What if it was 150?
Is there some number of dead men, women, and children?
Hang on, didn't you ask me not to interrupt you?
Sorry, you asked me not to interrupt, right?
Can you let me finish my point?
Just out of curiosity.
Okay, thanks. Just what is the number of dead people that would give you some pause about this system?
Because clearly it's not 77 million people plus the 62 million from the USSR. So it's some number.
And it's not 130, 140 million or whatever.
whatever.
There's some number, and I'm just curious what that number is, wherein you would have some pause about your willingness to give a small number of people massive power over the economy and over other people's lives.
Is there a number?
Like, is it north of 130 million?
Would it be 150 million that might make you think something would be around?
Mm-hmm. At no point did I ever say that violations of human rights, the killing of innocent people, was justified.
At no point did I ever say that.
So by trying to put words in my mouth like that, you're being completely intellectually dishonest.
I said that China's economic achievements as the result of its central planned economy were good.
And I think 800 million people lifted out of poverty, the construction of a modern country, one of the poorest countries in the world, becoming the second largest economy in the world, is a good thing.
Whenever an innocent person is killed, whenever economic policies are problematic and have negative results, that's a bad thing.
Please don't try to paint me as an apologist for mass murder.
No, but it's worth it, right? To cover up the reality of what I'm saying.
I'm pointing toward economic successes.
I'm pointing toward real achievements, and you were pointing to human rights violations and atrocities to discredit that.
I just read you all these crimes of capitalism, and then you said that's not real capitalism.
No, I condemn those crimes.
I condemn those crimes as being perpetuated.
I don't agree with you about the Bengal one in the Second World War, but I condemn those crimes as being perpetuated by the state, and this is one of the reasons why a stateless society is the ideal.
But you, by talking—look, you've got to understand how you come across to anyone with any kind of moral center.
Is you saying, well, okay, yes, 77 million people were slaughtered by the Soviet government, but fuck, man, they built some really nice spaceships, and they built some tractors, and there were some canals and shit.
And I'm just telling you, like, from the outside, from outside your, like, ideological bubble— That looks completely sociopathic, which is like, okay, 77 million people killed here, 62 million people killed in the Soviet Union, but, you know, there was some good GDP numbers.
And, you know, this is the thing I find so kind of strange and surreal about these conversations, is that, like, every one of those 77 million people in China, every one of those 62 million people in the USSR... They wanted to live just as much as you and I do, right? And you don't kill yourself in order to raise the GDP. Now, you could, right?
You could, I don't know, I'm not saying you ever would or should or anything like that, but theoretically, right, you could strap a bunch of explosives on, you could blow up a building, and then they'd have to repair that building, and they'd spend a lot of money, and that would increase the GDP.
So you could kill yourself to increase the GDP.
You could set fire to yourself in front of a library and get more people interested in communism and socialism as a result of the resulting publicity.
But you don't do that because your life is extremely valuable to you.
And even though it might increase the GDP for your life to end, you don't want that to happen.
So the sociopathic element to me of this conversation is you saying, well, okay, 130, 140 million people killed, but GDP went up, and some people learned how to read, and there was some electricity that went to new places, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But you wouldn't want to be one of those 130 million people.
You value your own life, you care for your own life, and you're not willing to sacrifice your own life for a potential increase in communist GDP. But the degree to which you just don't seem to recognize that each one of those 120, 130 million people had just a strong A hunger for life.
We're not talking human rights violations.
We're talking about absolute multi-tens of millions of mass slaughter.
That's not like violations of human rights or hate speech laws or something.
Come on. We're talking about some incredible mountains of bodies, the likes of which have never been seen before.
And that's always the kind of surprising thing to me is that those people all wanted to live.
They all wanted to go home and kiss their children.
They all wanted to pursue their dreams and pick up painting in their old age.
And they were just slaughtered by communist governments.
And I don't know that, you know, a couple of percent increase in the GDP over a decade is something that's worth those bodies.
May I respond without interruption?
Okay, I guess that's a yes.
Would you pile the same kind of moral condemnation you did on me for recognizing that socialism has economic successes onto someone who waves the American flag Are they then celebrating the slaughter of people, the indigenous people, the slavery, the millions of deaths on the transatlantic slave trade?
Are they celebrating the Vietnam War and the Korean War?
I eat Thanksgiving dinner with my family.
I don't do that because I'm looking over and denying the humanity of Native Americans.
I do that because I can recognize that good things existed in this country despite the evil, horrible, racist things that went on.
Is every British person who's patriotic, are they ignoring it?
All those famines I just read.
Is every French person who sings La Marseillaise, are they celebrating the death of two million people who died when free trade economics was imposed on France after World War II in 1945, or on Vietnam, I mean, the Vietnamese colonialists?
I mean, if you're going to condemn me for saying that the Soviet Union had economic successes and say that I don't understand that the people who died have life, you can pour that condemnation onto every Western country.
Are people in Belgium who wave their own flag?
Are they morally atrocious because they don't recognize that King Leopold killed 10 to 15 million people and worked them to death in rubber plantations?
I'm sorry. I have said over and over again that I condemn any violation of human rights, I condemn any unnecessary death of innocent people, and you are sticking to this old anti-communist cliché.
Communism, you just throw out this body count, as if capitalism doesn't have a body count It's just as big.
And then your response, when I think to capitalism's crimes, is to say, well, that's not real capitalism.
Okay, so pour that condemnation on anyone who celebrates the achievement of the West, because the West is responsible for mass death, and mass killing, and mass torture, and mass enslavement, right?
This is the reality.
I mean, is someone who drives a Japanese car responsible for the crimes of Japan at Nanking or in the Philippines?
I mean, this is – we can learn from the good and the bad of economic systems.
I mean, this is unfair, and you only get away with it because you're appealing to a popular narrative.
You're supposed to be a revolutionary, Stefan.
You present yourself as this bold, brave revolutionary who's sticking it to the man and fighting the system.
You want a world without a government and all this.
This is all stuff I hear on CNN.
You know, the United States goes around the world liberating people from brutal regimes and spreading freedom.
China's an evil country violating human rights.
Saudi Arabia, we're not going to talk about.
Russia's an evil country violating human rights.
We're not going to talk about. It's about tearing down World War II monuments and repressing people.
You're just throwing out every old anti-communist cliché.
In my government school, you think government schools are communist propaganda.
In my government school, I learned all of this.
We watched movies about Hala Madur.
We heard nothing but...
You would have gotten the impression that the entire history of the Soviet Union was nothing but gulags and death camps.
That's what I learned in my government school.
There's nothing at all bold about any of this.
This is just standard regime change, demonization of some countries, glossing over the crimes of other countries' propaganda, right?
But there's a big difference.
Even I don't accept about 80% of what you're saying, but we can perhaps have that topic discussion another time about...
The endless famines and the genocide, as you claim, of the Native American population.
It was 90% smallpox.
But anyway, let's just say that you're right about everything that you're talking about.
I'm sorry, did you want to interrupt me or should I keep going?
I'm sorry? Go on.
I'm curious to hear more of this.
I want to hear about how the Native American genocide didn't happen.
I'm curious. Well, 90% of the natives were killed by smallpox because they didn't have an immunity because they hadn't been raised with smallpox in the same way that they gave syphilis to the Westerners, and the Westerners died like flies because they didn't have immunity to syphilis, which had been more built up in the native population.
Anyway, but even if we say everything that you say in this very sort of standard, cliche, Westeros evil and all of that, and you'll notice, of course, that outside of China, Every single country that you have talked about is a Western country, which makes you a horrible racist because you're only attacking white Western countries and you haven't brought any other countries into the fray, except for China, which you defend.
So here's the difference, man. And this is what I think you need to work on in your logic and communication skills, just my particular piece of coaching or whatever.
It's that all of the stuff that you're talking about has been raked over and disavowed by people as a whole, right?
So the Belgians don't sit there and say, yeah, it was great what King Leopold did in Africa.
And people don't sit there and say, oh yeah, no, it was great what happened to the Native American population.
It wasn't. It was horrible.
Absolutely horrible. And people have disavowed and rejected and been horrified.
There was not, you know, the transatlantic slave situation, you know, 400,000 slaves came to America from Africa, where, in fact, your big hunter gatherer society, the blacks went and caught the blacks and then brought them out to the Europeans to be sold.
And then 400,000 of them were taken to America, many millions more were taken to South and Central America.
And the American slave trade was about 5% the size of the Muslim slave trade.
But of course you don't talk about that because that would be to criticize a country that wasn't white exactly, right?
You don't want to do that because that's just the way communists roll is that they only ever attack Western countries.
But here's the difference. The difference is that all the things that you have brought up have been...
It's viewed in very critical ways by the West.
And people have disavowed slavery, of course, and rightly so.
And people have disavowed the treatment of the Native Americans, and rightly so in many situations.
And people have disavowed the famines, and people have disavowed some of the negative effects of colonialism.
And people have done all of that for a long, long, long, long, long, long time.
The difference is that you are defending China and you are defending the USSR.
That's the difference.
So all of the stuff that you're bringing up in the past is something that in the West, there's been a lot of navel gazing and a lot of examination and a lot of unearthing of regret and issues with regards to the past.
But you're not doing that because what you're doing is taking the current dictatorship model, such as is occurring in China, and you're defending it and you're promoting it.
And you like it. So that's the difference.
So if I was sitting there saying, I like what happened to the Native Americans, that would be completely appalling.
I don't like what happened to the Native Americans.
I think it was terrible. I don't like what happened with slavery.
I'm very glad that the British Empire ended slavery.
And in fact, the price or the cost of ending slavery, which started in the mid-19th century, was only finally paid off by the British government In the year 2015.
Okay, so that was a huge moral advancement in the world, and it's hard to say it probably would not have been possible in the absence of the British Navy, in the absence of the British Empire.
So, yeah, there was some negative stuff, but there was, of course, also, to a large degree, the ending of slavery worldwide, which was a moral crusade driven by white Christians in England and other places.
So the difference is all the stuff that you're bringing up, yeah, everybody recognizes that's a bad thing.
But you're the only person in this conversation or in any universe that I can think of who's sitting there justifying the union of Soviet socialist republics and dictatorial murderous China, which keeps more than a million Muslims in concentration camps and has live organ transplants from the Falun Gong.
Well, it's interesting.
So you kind of have it both ways.
On the one hand, you downplay the killing of Native Americans.
You say, well, they just died from diseases.
I mean, you quibble with the numbers, which if I had dared to do that with any of the socialist countries, you would have gone crazy.
But regardless, you said I only attack white countries.
Well, I risked my life to try and bring aid to the people of Yemen as they were dying at the hands of Saudi Arabia and Saudi bombs.
I went with the Red Crescent Society on a ship trying to reach Yemen.
The port was bombed eight times in a single day.
You know, medical university students were killed.
I have condemned the crimes of Saudi Arabia up and down, backwards and forwards.
Furthermore, I'm very proud of the fact that both of my grandfathers fought against Japanese imperialism.
I'm very willing to admit that Japan is guilty of huge crimes against humanity all over the world.
And I'm very proud of the fact that not only were my relatives involved, but the Soviet Union and China and the People's Liberation Army were involved in defeating Japanese imperialism.
So your attempt to appeal to white nationalist sentiments and say I hate whites or something like that is just dishonest.
Your claim that I am defending China's political model, I am not doing that at all.
I think that China's economic system has been largely successful, but I think that it's full of mistakes as well, right?
They have a big problem with corruption.
They're actively trying to adjust it.
There are big issues with human rights.
Even the staunchest supporter of the Chinese government will admit that there are many things that need to change.
So at no point did I deny that there were human rights problems or say that human rights violations were good, as you repeatedly, repeatedly have attempted to characterize me as saying, which is wildly dishonest.
Furthermore, in the socialist world, there is a recognition of these crimes.
The Gang of Four who carried out the Cultural Revolution were arrested.
Deng Xiaoping put the Gang of Four on trial for the fact that they conducted the Cultural Revolution.
They were sent to prison.
I mean, there was a huge effort to repudiate Stalin, some of which was a little bit weird, but whatever.
I mean, in the USSR, the socialist countries of the world have largely denounced crimes that took place within them.
And furthermore, again, I... You're quibbling with me about whether or not people died.
Native Americans were slaughtered.
you're quibbling with me about whether the transatlantic slave trade was bad.
You said one thing.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I will not let that stand.
I will not even let that pass.
I never, ever said or implied That it was not bad.
I never said that.
So please, for the love of all that's holy, do not have me in some pro-slavery camp.
That is unbelievably horrible.
Okay, okay. Regardless.
No, it's not regardless, man.
No, no. No, you made a mistake.
You owe me an apology.
No, you said that Blacks sold other Blacks into slavery.
Why does that matter? Does that make slavery okay?
You just said that I did not say that transatlantic slavery was bad.
Quibbled about the immorality of slavery.
I did not quibble about the morality of slavery.
No, look, you just fucked up and you owe me an apology.
You put me in, you characterized me as being pro-slavery or at least not anti-slavery.
Come on, man, that's not fair.
I wouldn't do that to you.
I have to know that you don't believe in slavery.
I don't either. Okay, so you retract what you just said about me as being wrong and incorrect.
I'll listen to the tape afterwards and see what you said.
Okay, if you don't remember what you said, I don't know how we're having a debate here.
You said that the British Empire ended slavery around the world.
I've got news for you.
The British Empire worked very hard to preserve slavery in the United States.
So much so that the Russians were forced to send their navy to New York harbors to protect it.
There was a real possibility that the British would intervene to keep the flow of cheap cotton from the plantations of the South coming in.
The British Empire with its textile mills was the primary partner And when was this?
What year? What time frame was this in?
We're talking about the 1800s.
Yeah, so I was talking about the mid-19th century.
So why on earth are you going 70 years off my timeline and thinking you're rebutting me?
...slavery in the United States, and the British were trying to intervene and keep slavery in effect.
And thank goodness Russia sent their navy to protect New York's harbor to enable Lincoln to defeat the slaveholders.
Karl Marx organized strikes among textile workers to refuse to work with cotton picked by slaves.
It was Marxists who led the struggle against slavery.
Read about August Willock.
He was a member of the Communist International, a German-born Marxist.
He was in the United States.
He rose up to the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. Army, defeating slavery.
Right?
Joseph Wiedemeyer, a leader of the Communist International, he led the Ohio 9th Regiment.
And they protected St. Louis.
Louis and were decorated for their heroic efforts to defeat slavery.
Meanwhile, the British very much wanted to keep intact the plantation system so they could get cheap cotton for their textile industry.
So that's just a complete misrepresentation.
Wait, what are you talking about here?
I mean, good Lord, you're confused.
Okay, so you were talking about the 18th century with regards to the British trying to preserve slavery in America, right?
Yes. Okay. So you know that's, what, 100 years before Marx became popular?
No. Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848.
I know, but when he became popular and had real influence and effect, right?
It didn't happen right away, right?
No, I think the International Working Men's Association was quite popular.
Like I said, there was a brigadier general in the Union Army during the Civil War who was one of them.
They were quite influential. No, I get all of that.
But you're taking the British from...
When in the 18th century are you talking about the British preserving...
I'm talking about the U.S. Civil War.
When we were trying to abolish slavery and the British worked against our efforts here in the United States.
No, no, no. Civil War. Okay.
18th century is the 1700s Civil War was in the 1800s.
So what are you talking about here? I'm talking about from 1860 to 1865.
No, I know. But the British didn't have dominion over America.
America was already a separate country by then.
So when you were talking about the 18th century, when the British were trying to preserve slavery in America, when in the 18th century?
That's the 1700s, right? No, I'm talking about the 1860s.
I'm talking about the US Civil War when they tried to intervene on behalf of the slaveholders and Russia sent its Navy to protect our harbors and keep the British out of the war, essentially.
Do you accept that the British Navy intercepted slave ships and freed slaves and that Britain spent a vast amount of treasure freeing, like buying up and freeing the slaves in the British Empire?
I'm sure things like that went on.
Wait, you don't know that? I'd have to look.
I'd have to do the research, but I believe you.
Hang on, hang on.
You claim to be talking all about the history of slavery, and I'm kind of curious if you ever read anything.
That disagrees with you.
If you ever read something that's not straight out of the Communist Manifesto, because this is pretty common knowledge in just about anyone.
Hang on.
Let me finish.
Okay.
There we go.
So it's pretty common knowledge for anyone who has studied anything to do with the history of labor, the history of slavery, and so on.
And this was posted recently by Rahim Kassam.
In 1833, Britain used 40% of its national budget to buy freedom for all slaves in the empire.
I'm going to read that again because, again, I guess you have never...
Read about any of this, which means I guess you're just reading, I guess, all the communist stuff.
But in 1833, Britain...
Hang on. Almost done. Almost done.
Almost done. Almost done.
There you go. In 1833, Britain used 40% of its national budget to buy freedom for all slaves in the empire.
Britain borrowed such a large sum of money for the Slavery Abolition Act that it wasn't paid off until 2015.
This means that living British citizens helped pay for the ending of the slave trade With their taxes.
Now that is really quite a powerful thing.
And I'm really kind of surprised, I suppose, that, I mean, I know about the communist stuff.
I actually just read through the communist manifesto with my daughter.
I've taken entire classes on communism and Marxism and so on.
But it seems like you've not read anything except all of this really anti-British or anti-British empire stuff.
It may be worth expanding your reading into stuff that is maybe a little surprising to you.
Real quick, I want you to have a chance to respond, Caleb, but just a heads up for you guys.
We've got about a little less than 10 minutes left from what we scheduled.
If you guys want to go over, that's up to you too, but I just wanted you guys a heads up.
Go ahead, Caleb. I don't want to go over. Do we want me to respond and then we do our closing?
No, let's just do our closing.
If you haven't studied this, it's kind of unfair to jump this basic knowledge on you if you don't have it.
I think it would be good. Caleb, like you know, respond to this and then we'll do closing points between the two of you.
Okay. Well, I'm sorry.
If you said you were familiar with the history of slavery and with the history of communism, and you were unsure of the fact that Marxists played a role in defeating slavery in the United States, I don't know how you can claim to be the authority there.
Karl Marx, maybe you're not aware of this, or maybe you are, he was actually the London correspondent for the Republican Party newspaper of New York City.
He wrote articles praising Lincoln.
His followers in the United States, the Workingmen's Party, were very, very key in organizing the struggle to defeat slavery.
And furthermore, during our Civil War, the British Empire worked very hard to help the Confederacy.
And that's a fact. So I think that flies in the face.
You're pointing to a lot of other things.
And you asked me, had I ever heard this about the British Empire?
I've heard it from you. In the lead up to this debate, I saw it all over the internet.
And I found a number of articles debunking your claim in detail and saying that, well, they did that, they did what you said, and then they went back on it and saying other things.
I'm not the expert. I'm not going to speak on that.
But I don't trust you. I'm not going to just take your word for things like this, especially since you went on a tirade telling me I'm anti-white.
So that's my response. Okay.
Alright, so I guess just closing points here.
Stefan, you want to go and then Caleb follow it up?
No, he can go first.
Okay. All right.
At the beginning of this debate, I pointed out that the fall of the Soviet Union and the implementation of free trade, free market economics was a disaster.
You agreed with me.
You just blamed the communists for it.
After that, I said that the USSR had economic successes, something that many libertarians frequently deny, and you agreed with me.
Yes, it did. Furthermore, you admitted that real capitalism, which you believe in, has never been implemented anywhere in the world.
Now, what you did is you rolled out a lot of human rights allegations against the USSR. And at no point did I quibble with you about any, any of those allegations.
I didn't try to downplay any atrocities.
At no point did I say these things were Western propaganda or Nazi propaganda.
There are others who made that claim and made those arguments.
Never did I make that argument.
Your sole argument seems to boil down to, communism killed lots of people.
I then responded with capitalism killed lots of people and communism raised lots of people out of poverty.
Communism had big achievements, and we in the United States can learn from that.
And you proceeded to then morally shame me about the fact that I pointed out that socialist countries have big achievements.
And from there, I said you wouldn't morally shame people who celebrate the West and its achievements because the West has a lot of blood on its hands.
And I don't condemn people for celebrating Thanksgiving and such.
I just want to let you know that our country, the United States, was founded in the struggle against Adam Smith free trade economics.
The Dutch East India Company was trying to keep the United States and the 13 colonies poor.
It was trying to prevent us from developing our own industries and our own economy.
And there was a revolution.
And we broke free from the British Empire, from free trade, from that system that's killed millions of people all over the world.
And what did we start doing?
Well, we had Alexander Hamilton, who created a national bank.
We had the government spend money on building lighthouses.
And the prosperity of the United States Despite the mass killing of Native Americans, despite the racism and the slavery, the prosperity of the United States largely came from a rejection of the ideas that you and Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan put forward.
These ideas are fundamentally un-American, and they've been imposed on our country, and we're seeing the disastrous results of these policies being implemented in the United States right now.
Prisons for profit.
Who thought of that, right?
Private prisons.
That's a nightmare. Corporations have an incentive for there to be more crime, for people to be locked in jail for victimless crimes like smoking marijuana.
That's a disaster. Well, that comes from the pages of Milton Friedman.
It's always better when a private company does it, right?
War for profit, right?
Military manufacturers, the military-industrial complex.
I mean, this is a disaster.
We're at the United States.
We are so free market in this country that municipalities around the country are unpaving the roads.
They are unpaving the roads because the local governments are so in debt to banks that they cannot afford to maintain paved roads.
They have a machine they call a reclaimer where they're ripping up the asphalt and pulverizing it.
This is a disaster.
The Constitution of the United States says that only the federal government can print money, but yet we've done what libertarians want.
We privatized it. We handed it over to a private corporation, a private corporation that for many years was run by an Ayn Rand objectivist named Alan Greenspan, and our government is in debt to bankers.
Some of your listeners may not want to read Marx.
They may think Marx is a crazy extremist.
Read the Bible. Read the Koran.
Read the Torah. Every major religion in human history has forbidden the practice of lending money at interest.
Why?
Because it leads to a creditor class that is greater and has more wealth and money than everybody else.
And the result of that is governments getting in debt to them, is all of society being centered around them.
Furthermore, it leads to the diminishment of physical economy, right?
When you lend money at interest, you are creating wealth without actually creating and building anything.
And I think what we need right now is we see such a disaster in this country, roads crumbling, water not being properly purified, all the things that the state should be doing are not being done.
Thank you.
I think what we need is a government of action that will fight for working families, that will defend the interests of average people against the billionaires and the bankers who are only concerned about their profits.
That's what we absolutely need.
You know, Roosevelt, he had the Works Progress Administration, built amazing things around this country.
He laid the basis for the economic boom that came after the Second World War because he constructed things.
And he was largely inspired in doing it.
He studied what Stalin had done in the Soviet Union with the five-year economic plans, and he learned from it.
Is Roosevelt just as guilty as I am of ignoring Stalin's atrocities because he studied it and learned from it and then was able to build the Great Hoover Dam, build Key West Highway, and give jobs to millions of Americans to save the economy from the irrationality of greed?
Of course not. We can learn from China's achievements.
We can learn from the Soviet Union's achievements.
We can learn from these countries.
There's no need to morally condemn I do not advocate the adoption of the Korean system or the Vietnamese or the Russian system in the United States.
That would be stupid.
America has its own culture, its own traditions, its own history, and when socialism comes to the United States, it will be an American socialism.
It'll be the Marxists who fought against slavery while the British Empire was trying to preserve it.
It'll be the tradition of the suffragists that fought for women's rights, women's right to vote, something that you're on record opposing.
It'll be the tradition of the labor movement that built industrial unions.
It'll be the progressive side of American history that has rejected racism, that has rejected bigotry.
It'll be that progressive side of American history taking power and remaking the country and unleashing the potential of every human being.
Yes, I think socialism in the United States will have a market sector.
The government shouldn't be running hotels.
The government shouldn't be running restaurants.
There's no need for the government to be running little tech startups.
But the banking system, our natural resources, the major industries, these things should be organized to serve public good and not profits.
And I have not heard a single thing throughout this debate that is in any way a logical argument about why the economy should not be organized to serve the people and not profits.
Well, I'll certainly agree with you one thing that you haven't really heard much.
So let's go through some of these points.
I'll do a closing statement, and I really do appreciate the conversation.
It's great to get these ideas out front and center.
We all know that the existing system is predatory.
The existing system cannot last.
The existing system survives by sucking the economic life juice out of the next generation to bribe the rich and the poor in the here and now.
It is a terrible, horrible predatory system.
I'm sure that Caleb and myself are both disgusted with the current system.
I know that we are, but he wants more government.
I want less government.
So with regards to the downplaying, yeah, you did.
I mean, he did. I'm sorry to talk to him directly.
Yeah, he did very much because he called them human rights violations.
130 fucking million people killed is not human rights violations.
That's genocide on a scale unprecedented in human history.
And so I'm sure that Caleb would never refer to the Holocaust as a human rights violation.
So yes, of course, he did downplay it consistently and repeatedly.
With regards to, it's so boring to have to rebut this kind of stuff, but I guess I'm older so I've done it so many times before when he talks about, oh, there's private prisons and that's really, really bad, and there's war and corporations make money from war.
These aren't free market institutions.
If it's paid for by the state...
And people aren't allowed to compete.
It's not part of the free market.
It's kind of a basic econ 101 thing there.
So I don't really know. That's the kind of thing that...
Here's the hint.
If there's a knife at the woman's throat, it's not sex.
Or at least it's not good sex, right?
If there's a knife at the woman's throat, it's rape, not sex.
If there's a gun in the room, if there's a gun in the economic interaction...
It's not the free market. And so with private prisons, well, yeah, I mean, I think it's terrible that people for nonviolent drug offenses go to jail.
I think it's absolutely horrible.
This is the kind of thing that happens when you have governments.
And so the idea that private prisons, wherein it's paid for by the state, the police are run by the state, the courts are run by the state, and the prisons are funded by state taxation, that suddenly this is part of the free market, It's delusory beyond words, and it takes a genuine ideologue to miss that really obvious point.
It's the same thing with war.
The idea that war is somehow the province of the free market, when war can only be engaged in by the state, and war is just about the worst form of slavery that exists in this world through the draft, and war is funded by coercive taxation and debt to the next generation.
The idea that somehow magically war is now part of the free market when it's an entirely state-driven and state-supported enterprise— Wow, you've really got to miss the point, all that kind of stuff.
As far as the Federal Reserve goes, oh, absolutely.
It's absolutely monstrous that the government gives a corporation the monopoly on money printing and money creation.
You go and try and create your own dollars, man.
The guy did that with the Liberty Dollar.
He ended up in jail. So whenever the government is forbidding competition...
Not part of the free market.
See, remember if there's a knife to the woman's throat, it's rape, not sex.
And if there's a gun in the room, it's the state, not the free market.
It's really not that hard to remember.
I don't think Caleb will because he's sitting in this squalid pit of ideology.
But I hope you out there will remember if there's a gun in the room, it's not part of the free market.
Now, with regards to slavery, yeah, absolutely horrifying.
Horrifying, horrible institution.
But you had a much greater chance of surviving as a slave than you had of surviving communism.
You know, communism in the Soviet Union was the single largest cause of death.
Democide, murder by your own government was by far the biggest, largest source of death for Russians.
I'm sure the same thing was true.
In China, so it beat out cancer, it beat out motor accidents, being killed by your own government was the largest single cause of death.
And just because there was some economic growth, there were some economic things that occurred, Under communism, in no way proves the case that only communism could provide that kind of economic growth.
There was economic growth under slavery, but when slavery was ended and wage markets began to emerge, For human beings, what happened was labor-saving devices became progressively more valuable, which they weren't valuable under slavery.
Why was there no industrial revolution in the ancient world?
Because they had slaves, and therefore labor-saving devices, which is the essence of economic growth, weren't developed.
They knew all about the steam engine in ancient Rome, but they just didn't have the same incentive because all of the richest people bought slaves and therefore didn't want to invent labor-saving devices, which lowered the value of their slaves.
So just because something gets created at the point of a gun doesn't mean it can't get created voluntarily.
This is really important.
If you kidnap a painter and you put a gun to his head and you tell him to paint a painting, that doesn't mean that if you hadn't kidnapped him, there's no way he ever would have painted anything.
You understand?
You're forcing him to do something doesn't mean that it wouldn't happen in a voluntary context.
So just because there was some kinds of economic growth, however, inconsistently reported by the communist dictatorships, Caleb's point is, well, there was economic growth, which is to imply that it couldn't have happened in a more peaceful manner, which again is like saying, well, this woman was raped.
And if she wasn't raped, she never would have had a dick in her vagina at all.
It's like, no, that's not the point.
The point is rape is wrong. And of course, she probably would have had sex if she wasn't raped.
She would have been voluntary and pleasurable rather than forced and terrifying.
So the idea that there was some economic progress in communist countries...
In no way proves the point that it wouldn't have been far better, far more peaceful, and without, say, a death toll of 130 million people or more.
That's just in two communist countries.
130 million people slaughtered just in two communist countries.
One 50-odd years, one 70-odd years.
I don't know how you overstep...
I genuinely don't know how you just say, well, yeah, but GDP. Well, yeah, but electrification.
I mean, that's 130 million people who desperately wanted to live.
And yeah, you know, there were crimes committed by Western governments.
There were crimes committed by the British government.
There were crimes committed by the American government.
I have no idea how that justifies the crimes committed by the Russian and Chinese governments.
It's like saying, well, you know, there are these two really giant mafias who go around killing people, and then people say, yeah, well, there are other gangs who kill people too.
It's like, how the fuck does that justify anything?
What the hell is the matter with people out there?
I don't know what the matter with this guy is, but I mean, just anyone out there pointing out that there's a criminal gang, you don't solve the problem of the criminal gang being evil by saying, well, yeah, there are other criminal gangs too.
Yes, I get it. Governments are criminal gangs.
I get it. I understand.
That's why I'm a voluntarist.
And of course, he accepts that that is all possible.
I guess he wants a couple of thousand more years of mass slaughter before we achieve a stateless society.
I want to do it, as you probably know, I want to achieve a stateless society.
By promoting peaceful parenting, right?
By don't hit, don't spank, don't yell at, don't brutalize, don't ignore, don't neglect your children.
I think that is the best way that we can get to a stateless society without having to wade through another couple of billion bodies of Marxist dictatorships in the hopes that after we climb over all of those bodies, it'll be the Garden of Eden all over again.
I really don't think that'll be the case.
I think as you kill more and more people, you traumatize more and more people.
So the last thing I wanted to mention...
Is that the one thing you'll see with people who are ideological, and ideological is when you put abstract principles above empirical experience and reason itself, right?
So, Caleb is very concerned, and I think he's right to be concerned.
I am as well. And I really saw this belly of the beast when I was in the business world and took a company public, and I just saw, yeah, it's really, it's really, greed kind of distorts people.
Access to power distorts people.
Anybody who doesn't recognize the basic principle that power corrupts is not really worthy of being part of an adult conversation about how society should be structured.
So, Caleb's point is that, well, you know, man, if the government can influence all of these economic decisions, then corporations and people who run corporations are going to use that power to serve their own benefits at the expense of other people.
It's like, well, yeah. Of course they will.
Because political power Corrupts human beings.
Institutional, coercive power rots out the soul and destroys the empathy.
I accept that.
As a universal principle, human beings are corrupted by power.
You've probably listened to my call in shows.
I never tell anyone to do anything, even though I may have a certain amount of authority in the situation.
I constantly reject any, even, influence over other human beings because I understand, I fully and deeply understand how power corrupts human beings.
Now, economic power Pretty rough, man.
That can give you a lot of vanity.
That can give you a lot of influence.
That can give you a lot of problems in terms of corrupting your soul.
I mean, just look at Bill Gates, right?
I mean, his corrupt responses to the coronavirus and vaccines and all of the terrible stuff he's done in Africa and other places is really wretched, wretched.
That's largely economic power.
Now, that economic power is used to buy government power.
I get all of that, which is why I want to take the government out of the equation.
But power corrupts.
Economic power is bad enough.
But boy, oh boy, you want to see real corruption?
You want to see real corruption?
You give a small group of people access to all the guns in the world against a usually disarmed population and having a million or two million pretty much outright sadists at their beck and call to brutalize whoever they dislike.
And that's totalitarianism.
That's communism. That's fascism.
That's National Socialism or Nazism.
Economic power is bad enough.
Political power is just about the most toxic power in the world.
It's really hard. Other than, say, abusive parental power, which is much more immediate and vivid, it's about the worst and most toxic power in the world.
So in general, I think what the communist ideal is, is they divide people into two groups.
There are the groups called the capitalists and the corporate leaders and the robber barons and all those people you see are totally corrupted by power and it's really bad because people are just so corrupted by power and we can't have a free market because corporations are deheaded by people who are just so corrupted by power.
But the problem is when you give people a monopoly of state power, By God, when you give people a monopoly of state power, they will be even more corrupted.
And we see that repeatedly in dictatorships.
You do not solve the problem of human corruption in the economic sphere by giving people monopoly violent power in the political sphere.
And that is the fundamental problem.
The more you dial up...
The corruptibility of human nature according to economics, the more you inevitably dial up the toxicity of human beings in contact with state power.
So thank you everyone so much.
Thank you so much for the Discord server, Blue Politics, for hosting this.
I really did find it invigorating and I appreciate my opponent.
Not necessarily his intellectual caliber, but his dedication to his position was tragically inspiring, I suppose, in a way.
But yeah, thanks everyone so much.
A great pleasure to chat, and I hope that we can do this again soon.
Please do let me know, of course, what you think.
In the comments below.
And I will sign off for now.
I'll go on to my Discord server.
We'll have a wee chit-chat about what went on.
But yeah, thanks everyone again so much.
A great pleasure. I look forward to these enormously.
I certainly look forward to doing another one.
But that's it for me tonight.
It's freedomain.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out the show.
I'd really, really appreciate it.
You can check out my free books on A Stateless Society, Everyday Anarchy and Practical Anarchy.
They're available. for free.
Stefan Molyneux signing off.
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