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June 19, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:01
The Communist Manifesto for Kids - Part 2!
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All right, this is part two of the Communist Manifesto.
Yes, it is. And we are, something very interesting, just in the very first paragraph here, we are 7% of the way through the book.
No, no, 5%, sorry.
5%, okay. And so it's something kind of interesting that happens.
History is really, really interesting because for most of human history, everybody was starving.
If you look at the production of stuff, it was like boom, boom, boom.
It would go up and down a little bit, up and down a little bit.
And then literally in the last two, 250 years, it's gone like, whoa, like crazy high.
Crazy high. Now, one of the reasons for that was because there was slavery.
Now, slavery is like, okay, when you feel ordered around...
I hate it. You hate it, right?
Like you might do it. Not that you get a lot of orders, but you might do it, but you're not going to be like, yay.
I'm going to literally be like, if I can avoid this in any possible way and also like get some payback in there, that would be perfect.
Yeah, yeah. So there's sabotage, there's laziness, there's deliberately working slowly.
People resent. I do that a lot.
So many years ago, I went to a conference, not really by choice.
I'll talk about that another time.
And somebody said to the audience, you're the kind of people who will do Almost anything that people ask you to and almost nothing that people tell you to.
Yeah. And it's kind of like human nature.
We don't like being ordered. So you're like making your dragon pictures.
But if I said, Izzy, you must do a dragon picture or you get locked in the storage room.
I mean, if you can conceive a...
Like, you might do a dragon picture.
I'm like, oh my god. You might do a dragon picture, but you wouldn't be putting your best into it, right?
I'd be like, scribble, scribble, done.
Now, the other thing, too, is that when people buy a lot of slaves, like let's say they buy a lot of slaves to get their crops, like to pick their crops, right?
Yeah. Then they don't, at the same time, they put all their money into a slave.
Now, a slave used to cost about $30,000, like $25,000, $30,000, so like the price of a good car, right?
Yeah. So, if you buy all these slaves and they're all out there picking your cotton or your crops or whatever, you don't really want to invest in some big giant machine that does it for you.
Yeah. Because you already have the, quote, machine, which is human slavery, right?
Yeah. So, it's not only morally wrong, of course, to own human beings, but it's like crazy inefficient.
And everybody knows that kind of...
Deep down. Like there was all this really, really cool stuff in the ancient Greek and Roman Empire.
It's like in the Roman Empire, they knew about the steam engine, they knew about like lots of really, really cool things.
They just never bothered to make machines that made things more efficient because most of the population in the cities were slaves.
Yeah. There's a famous story about a guy who said he was like really smug and snobby.
Oh, I hate people like that.
Oh, I can't believe it.
I actually talked to a slave yesterday.
I didn't even know he was a slave.
You know what we should do? We should make the slaves wear little circles on their chests so we know who's a slave and who we don't have to talk to.
And do you know what the other guy said? What?
Are you crazy? If they all have little circles on their chest, they'll realize how many of them there are and how few of us there are.
And then? That would be very bad.
Things would be bad for the rulers, right?
So a lot of people try to explain why we got so wealthy now.
Like, never happened before in human history.
Incredibly, insanely, madly wealthy.
Like, the poorest person now is way better off than the richest person 100 years ago.
Oh, wow. Oh, yes.
Crazy, right? Because the richest person 100 years ago, he didn't have antibiotics, he didn't have air conditioning, he didn't have the internet, he didn't have a car, he didn't have like any of these...
He didn't get free healthcare in Canada.
Which is free or not free?
Not free. Not free. But it's free for them.
It's not free for rich people who have to pay taxes.
Yeah, that's right. So I would much rather be like a really, really poor person in a rich country than a really, really rich person in a poor country because it's a big, big mess.
So people always try and explain like how on earth did we suddenly become so wealthy?
Now the answer, I think, and I think is a good reason for this, is that Well, first of all, slavery was made illegal, which is a good thing.
And secondly, people were just allowed to trade and trade and trade.
So you know something about this.
Give me your trading and entrepreneur and business experience.
Chocolate making. That's right.
Did we mention that in the last show?
We did not. I think we did. Oh yeah, we did.
That's right. It's a chocolate pizza.
I may be kind enough to actually post that on Twitter.
Have we already done that already?
No. Okay. You know what?
We can put it on this show. Yes.
We'll put a link to it on the show. Yes.
So you, you buy the ingredients...
You mix your labor in, because, you know, if you just had a candy shop that was like a bag of chocolate chips...
Yeah. That would be really...
You're just a grocery store then, right? Yeah.
So you have to transform it.
You have to change it, right? So what I do really fast is I buy the chocolates.
I mean, some chocolates, same brand, at one store can be $3.50.
The other store could be $4.50.
I mean, it's different for each store, but...
Last time, I did not exactly have time to go to the store that was better, so I spent the $4.50.
But let's just make it $4 to be simple.
But that's interesting, too, because we happened to be at the store, so we didn't need to make a separate trip that might take half an hour or an hour.
Yeah. So you saved time rather than money, but time is important, too, right?
Yes. Okay. Yeah, with time, I can make more chocolates and hopefully get him to buy more.
Right. Yeah, but...
Yeah, so I bought the, let's just make it $4 to be easy.
So I bought the $4 chocolate and then I took out a bunch of pieces from that.
It was white chocolate, but I took out a lot of white chocolate.
I melted it and then I made nine little of my chocolate blobs, I call them.
I call them cookies, but you don't agree, right?
Yeah, because they're not dough or anything.
It's just chocolate, basically.
And then sometimes they'll put on sprinkles, sometimes they'll put on other chocolates on top.
So you have milk, white and dark chocolate is your basic ingredients, right?
Yeah, typically I will be doing the milk chocolate and the white chocolate from now on because he likes white chocolate and milk chocolate better than dark chocolate.
And who's your big sucker customer?
You. Yeah, that's right. So if I don't particularly like dark chocolate, I'll eat it like in an emergency of sugarness.
Oh my goodness. So you'll melt the chocolate, right?
Yeah. And then you flatten it.
I take a spoon and I pour it onto some wax paper.
Right. And then I kind of dab it around until it ends up in a circle of shape.
And you might make patterns if it's like a mixture of light and dark.
Well, yeah. If I melt, say, some dark chocolate and some white chocolate or something like that, I will make the white chocolate.
It can either be, let's just make the examples, the white chocolate is the base.
And then I might take a toothpick and I might swirl in some dark chocolate to make it look pretty.
It really does. And then you might put some stuff on top, right?
I typically, I like M&Ms right in the middle.
If it's a small chocolate, I'll put an M&M right in the middle.
And I have different ones. One's for 75 cents and one for $1.25.
And the $1.25 are very big.
So how did you figure out or determine the price that you should charge?
Well, I wanted to make money.
Of course, yeah. And since I use a lot of chocolate in each one, and also I take a lot of time and all that.
So I actually, I started it, I think the original price for all of them was $1.50.
And then you said the price is too high, so I lowered it.
But you could still make money if you lowered it, right?
You just didn't quite as much money, right?
Yeah, so I lowered it. I lowered it to $1.50.
Nice.
Even though it's only five cents less, but still it's five cents.
No, but that can make a big difference in how people think.
Like we remember we talked about this years ago when we were in one of the stores, like one of the everything stores that they don't like to say two bucks.
What do they say?
A dollar ninety nine.
They do.
They also people when people started learning this trick, they did a dollar ninety eight.
I swear.
No, seriously.
I remember like I don't know when I was young, it was a dollar ninety nine.
And then when people, I saw there were less, there were only buys like $1.30 and $1.50 and stuff, but there were fewer of those items.
Yeah. I saw they actually made $1.98.
And I'm like, what the heck?
It's like one cent less.
Now, partly that's because $1.99 seems less than $2.
But also, before people all used credit cards, they used to use cash.
And if it was $2, you wouldn't have to open the cash register if someone gave you $2.
But if it was $1.99, you'd have to give them a penny back.
So you'd have to register the sale.
They didn't want the cashiers basically taking the money without registering the sale, pocketing the money.
Oh, that's smart. Yeah, so they had to try and make it.
So it's kind of two reasons for that.
So you have your raw ingredients, which is what you pay for.
You have your labor. Wow.
And then you have your products and you have your price and you make money, right?
Yeah. One last thing. Sorry.
Also, the reason I split them off into two groups, actually probably like three or four days ago, mainly just because I'm like, okay, that chocolate is tiny.
Why is it still being charged for the one that's like the biggest one I have?
Or like I had a quadruple layer, which one, bottom chocolate, some fillings, some white chocolate, then some more dark chocolate.
Right, because you have different sizes, right?
So some of them are like the size of a thumb.
Yeah. Some of them are like the size of, like if you put your thumb and forefinger, like the OK symbol, then it's about that size.
There's some that's in between? Yeah.
Right, okay. And, well, the ones that are the size of a thumb are a chocolate, a little one of those.
It's called mini Hershey's Kisses, basically.
You cut the top off, you put some melted chocolate, and then you put a white chocolate or an NM or a candy cane or something on top.
Right. They're like 15 cents.
They're actually less than 15 cents.
They're like 10 cents. So you were charging more than the people wanted to pay.
And also what happened was there were times where you wanted to sell more.
Maybe they'd been getting a little old or something like that.
So then you would, when you wanted to sell more, what did you do?
I made fresh chocolates. And I also...
No, but when you wanted to sell a clump of the existing ones...
Oh, I'd put a sale. You put a sale on, right?
Yeah. Because you wanted to... It's called move product.
You wanted to sell stuff, right?
Well, yeah. I have these sales.
So for the month of December, because there are a lot of holidays in December.
Yep. So just the entire month to make it simpler.
I do Valentine's Day and I also do St.
Patrick's Day and I'm going to do Easter and stuff like that.
Halloween too. And that gets you a lot more sales, right?
Yeah, it does. And also the thing is too, when people, I think that what happens is when I, like you put a sale on, I'll buy more.
And then I'm like, oh, these are really good.
I'm going to have more even when the sale is off.
So it doesn't just raise your sales in the moment, but for a little while longer.
Yeah. There's more sales.
Yeah. Okay, so you are in a situation, you don't have to sit there and say, oh, what do you mean I have to study under someone else for 200 hours just to make chocolate cookies?
Yeah. Right? You can just go and make them, and you can make your own decisions, and you can make your money, right?
Yeah. Now, if you were running a really big business, you'd have a spreadsheet or a database, right?
And you would say, okay, here's what I spend, here's how much time, here's the profit, and you would track...
Well, I actually do that a bit.
So, I bought some chocolates and so far I'd spent $16 and I'd made $14.
So, I'm like, ooh, I need to make some more stuff.
I lost $2.
And then, I mean, to be fair, I bought one like a couple days before, but still.
I was down $2.
So, I decided, oh, I need to make some more stuff.
So, I split them off into two groups.
75 cents and $1.25.
And now I'm getting more buys on the 75 cents.
Because if you have stuff that's priced the same, but one is twice as big, no one's going to buy the smaller one, right?
So you have to change the price.
And also it's good because sometimes I'll get him to buy a small one in the morning and then a small one at night, which is actually more money for me.
So there's this big question, and this is a question that Marx was asking like 150 years ago, how did we suddenly become so rich?
So here's his answer.
We're getting into the book now.
He says, modern industry has established the world market.
Right. What does that mean?
So the world market just yesterday, we were in a grocery store and what did we buy?
Some freaky fruits.
I don't call them freaky. Oh yeah, like that's what you posted.
Did you post that? I did post a picture of that, right?
That was that lychee something?
Lychee, yeah. Lychee. It reminds me of leeches.
So where did they come from? China.
Yeah, so the store was like half in the Philippines and Chinese.
And I actually checked with the woman, the cashier, it's the stuff from China, right?
And so that's a world market.
So imagine they're grown literally almost completely on the other side of the world and they end up as relatively fresh fruit.
It's a world market, right?
It was actually pretty fresh. I mean, I haven't had a lot of them, actually, my first time eating them, but they seem pretty fresh.
So, at World Market, he's saying the big question is how to become rich.
Now, people like me, we say, well, we became rich because property rights were enforced.
Like, if someone could just come and take your candies whenever they wanted, like your chocolates that you make...
I wouldn't make them. You wouldn't make them, right?
Because you'd be like, well, what's the point?
And also, if people would say, oh, I'll pay you later, and they never did, you also wouldn't bother making them because you'd just be costing you money.
Well, sometimes, I mean, I trust you, of course, but I mean, sometimes it'd be like, I cannot talk.
A little credit is okay, right?
What do you mean? Like credit meaning you will lend me the money, so to speak, to buy the chocolates if I pay you later.
Well, yeah, sometimes I do that, but also, I mean, a lot of the times, I just want to keep it strict or anything, but sometimes I'd be like, oh, I'm busy right now, so I'll pay you, I don't know, like 10 minutes or maybe later today, and I'm like, I'm actually just going to go take the money from the cupboard really fast, and I mean, just, I mean, I want it to be safe. I mean, I can't do that in a store, like, hey, I'm just going to...
No, but we want to forget, but you might forget, that's the problem.
Yeah, we both might forget, and then it might be like, hey, what happened to that chocolate I made?
I don't remember getting money for that.
So... We talked about, so you have no barriers to entry.
You can just go make the chocolates, right?
You have the money to buy the chocolates and you get to keep the chocolates.
You get to sell them at the price that you want and you get to charge people.
And so all of that is called the free market.
You can just make stuff and you can sell stuff and all of that.
You don't have to pay a lot of taxes.
You don't like or any.
Right.
Yeah.
So it's tax free.
Yeah.
So that's called that's called the free market.
Right.
Yeah.
And we say, look, in the 18th, 19th century, first in in land and then in manufacturing, like in making stuff, because you've got to make food before you make stuff, because people got to eat before they make stuff.
Right.
Yeah.
And like I cannot make chocolates on an empty stomach because I will gobble up all my chocolates.
Yeah, let me ask you this.
Here's an interesting question, right?
So let's say there's you and some kid.
We'll call him Bob, right? Yeah.
So let's say that you and Bob are both deciding to buy chocolates.
Now, if everything's equal and you're selling the chocolates, but Bob is only eating them himself, who do you think can buy more chocolate?
Well, me. Because?
I'm sorry. Because I'm not eating them.
Because you make money from them.
Yeah, I mean, he's just eating them all.
So if you're profiting from the chocolate, you can afford to buy more and more chocolates.
Because every chocolate you buy, it doesn't cost you money, it makes you money.
Whereas he's just spending money and he's going to run out of money.
But for you buying the chocolates gets you more money.
Yeah. It wouldn't be if I was making them.
Why? Why? Because you would eat them all.
No, I remember just eating them.
I'm like, so he had a special order.
He wanted a chocolate, what's it called?
Volcano. And I said I couldn't actually do that because it would be impossible to carve and it would take so long and I don't have that experience yet.
So I said, why don't I give you some cool patterns?
And then I realized that that didn't work because wax paper is being difficult.
Right, right. So I decided, hey, I'm going to give you a surprise, and if you don't like it, I can just put it up on my candy shop, maybe the display area.
If you don't sell it to me, you can sell it to someone else, right?
Yeah, so what I did, I put in a bunch of little chocolate blobs, white chocolate and dark chocolate, and I put on milk chocolate chips on top of each one, and there were, I don't know, there were...
Stop drooling me. I'm drooling.
I'm so sorry. I hope this doesn't get on the microphone.
Oh my god, no. I need one of those little dental things that suck out the saliva.
I'm poking it, okay? Alright, go ahead.
And, I mean, so, I don't know, it was, I don't know, I had like 20 little tiny pieces, but they were very small, so I charged $5.50.
We came to an agreement on that.
Yep. And I don't even know why I went.
Oh yeah, I remember when I was making it.
You just said, hmm, I just might need to take a closer look.
And I'm like, nope. Right, right.
I always lean in to try and snuffle them.
So let me ask you this. Let's say there's a chocolate bar in a store and you and Bob both go in.
And let's say the chocolate bar is a dollar, right?
Now Bob is just going to buy that chocolate bar as he's going to eat it himself, right?
Yeah. But you are going to make something and you might make two bucks out of that chocolate bar, right?
Yeah. So let's say there's a bidding war, like you both trying to figure out how much you want to spend.
Who do you think can bid more or pay more for that chocolate, you or Bob?
Me. Because you're going to make money from it, right?
Yes. So that's important, right?
I mean, the better the chocolate, the more money I make.
Right. So here's the thing.
Think of land, right? Now, if you are just buying land, you're going to grow your own stuff, right?
That's like Bob just eating the chocolate himself.
But if you're going to buy land and you're really, really good at growing crops, so you grow more than you need for yourself and you can sell the rest, who do you think can bid more or pay more for the land?
You or Bob? I'm sorry, say that again?
So Bob, he just goes and plants the crops.
Yes. And he just eats it all himself.
Oh yeah, okay, then I can borrow more land.
You can pay more.
Yes. So he might pay $1,000 for the land, but you might pay $1,200 or $1,300 because you can make money from the land, whereas he's just consuming stuff, right?
Yeah. So the people who are better at farming...
They end up being able to buy more land.
Yeah. Now that's fantastic. Like if he just eats it all, he can buy like one kilometer and he can live on that.
But if I sell it, I eat some and sell it, then I can buy two kilometers.
Well, no, because whoever's selling the land, right?
Let's say two square kilometers, right?
Whoever's selling the land, they're going to want to sell to you.
Yeah, because I'll be paying more. Because you'll pay more.
Right, so that means that Bob eventually gets kicked off the land because he's not a good farmer or he's lazy or whatever, right?
He's not smart or he doesn't like to farm.
So you'll end up owning a whole bunch of land.
Do you know why that's fantastic? Because let's say you can produce twice as many crops as Bob.
Yeah. So instead of there being, Bob might produce a thousand apples, right?
Yeah. But you, for the same land, can produce 2,000 apples.
Because of my green thumb.
Yeah, because of your green thumb or whatever.
You work really hard, whatever it is, right?
Yes. It's the same soil.
So you end up being able to bid a lot more for land.
So you end up owning more land, but because you're such a good farmer...
You can produce so much more food.
Now, Bob has kicked off his land.
He goes live in the city, but there's all this excess food that can support people in the city so he can just get a job there.
Now, letting the people who are best at growing stuff have the most land is one of the reasons why we don't have to be farmers because there are all these great farmers out there who work really crazy hours and very hard and take a lot of risks and they're really, really good at farming.
Of course, in the winter, there are also people who grow like carrots and turnips and stuff.
Right, right. So people who...
Like, I do a show and I ask for donations for the show.
So when I buy things, I'm not just consuming them, right?
Right. So someone might buy a microphone just for online gaming so he can coordinate with his friends or his teammates or whatever, right?
Yeah. But I use it and I can hopefully make money from doing that so I can afford better equipment and more stuff because it's like an investment, right?
Yeah. So Marx's big question is, okay, how on earth have we become so rich?
Now, the answer which we're talking about here is, you know, free markets and property rights, keeping your contracts.
Like if people say they'll pay you in a week, you can actually have them pay you in a week and they will.
But his answer is different.
He says, So he's saying, look, one of the reasons we're so rich is that we discovered America.
Now, I don't particularly agree with that.
I'll tell you why. First of all, America, which was discovered in like the 16th century or 1500s or whatever, right?
By the Europeans. So first of all, it had been discovered in the past because there were already people living here.
So there were the natives or the indigenous population here.
Before that, there's reports there were Europeans in North America.
So it's been discovered a whole bunch of times.
It didn't make everyone super rich.
So just discovering America can't be enough because it's been discovered before.
Also, there's tons of new countries that got discovered all throughout human history.
Yeah. And, I mean, the Romans went and took over a bunch of countries.
I mean, I won't go through the whole list of all these different empires, right?
So the fact that there's some new land that's opened up, or people have found some new land, even if there are people living there, well, that's happened all the time throughout human history.
It didn't make everyone super rich, so it's not enough of an answer to me.
Yeah. So he says...
I think it's probably that people stopped having slavery, so they started investing in time-saving devices, like washing machines and stuff.
Like, I know... My mom still spends a lot of time at the washing machine.
I gotta say like maybe two hours, I don't know, two hours and five days.
I actually really mess that up. Half an hour every day maybe?
Every couple days? Every day or two?
It kind of hits, like it comes and goes sometimes.
Yeah, let's just say in the day that she has to do some laundry.
Not has to, does some laundry.
It's half an hour, 45 minutes or something.
Yeah, yeah. Now, if you had a slave to do your laundry, you probably wouldn't bother buying a washing machine.
Probably wouldn't even bother trying to make one or anything.
There wouldn't be a washing machine.
No. Because people would say, well, everyone has slaves to do their laundry, so why on earth would I make a machine that did laundry for free when people already have slaves, right?
So, yeah.
So he's saying, look, when they discovered America, there were all of these great improvements in trade, in communication.
So there was this thing called the Pony Express.
Mm-hmm. Which was, if you needed to send a message to, I don't know, someone in Toronto, then there was no email, there was no phone, there was a telegraph, which is like a whole series of clicks that translates into a language.
So you would hire some guy who would get on a very fast horse and write the message for you.
Oh, that's cool. Which was kind of new.
And if it was a long message, they'd have, like, because you can't ride a horse from, like, one end of the country to the other.
So there'd be, like, these stations where you'd trade in your horses.
Oh, that's so cool. And this horse would get 20 miles.
The horse would be tired. You'd get a fresh horse and you'd just go like crazy.
But it was very expensive, right? But the only reason that existed was because there were important messages.
There was already trade.
So he's saying, well, you discover America and you get these amazing improvements in trade and communications.
He's like, no, because that didn't happen the last time.
The last few times America was discovered.
He says, And in proportion, as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion, the bourgeoisie, right, the people who own the means of production, developed increases...
It's the people who are, like, example, like, not the slaves as an example.
Yeah, well, yeah, there's the old farming, right?
There's the slaves, and then there's the foreman, like the guy who's in charge of the slaves.
He's not a slave himself.
And then there's the people who own the farm.
And so it's the people who own the farm.
That's who he's talking about. The bourgeoisie.
I pronounced that correctly-ish, whatever.
And so increased its capital.
So capital is the money that you save that you generally will use to invest in something new, to create something new.
Yep. And pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
So what he's saying is that because America was discovered, there were new railways.
But again, America had been discovered a whole bunch of times before or invaded or conquered.
You know, I'm starting to dislike this guy as we speak.
Oh, we'll get there.
This is just the beginning, right?
Well, you said you weren't going to tell me about him at the beginning because you didn't want to start me off in an odd way, so I was feeling he's actually pretty bad.
So he's saying, well, because we had railways, trade got better.
And my argument basically is, well, no, because there was trade, people built railways to deliver goods.
Like, if you, let's say you end up being a chocolatier, which would be a good way to make sure that I end up with a very, very large coffin.
Yeah, like, I don't know, the size of Mount Everest or something like that, yeah.
So if you're a chocolatier, let's say that every time you send your chocolate to the next town, they just get stolen and nobody...
Pays you for them, right? Yeah.
Would you send chocolates to the next town?
No. No, I could just sell them here, right?
Like I could sell them in my shop.
No one steals them.
There would also be other people in the shop who would maybe, I don't know, someone tried to steal a chocolate.
Me and the other people who were actually good people who were trying to steal my chocolate would maybe stop them or something.
Or imagine this. Imagine there's a town to your east and a town to your west, right?
Yeah. Now imagine when you send your chocolates, they charge you $50 in taxes just to go and sell in that town.
Whereas if you send them to the west, they don't charge you anything.
Where are you going to send your chocolates?
West. Right. So the more free you are, the less taxes, less control, less theft that's going on.
So if you're going to build a railway to deliver your chocolates, where are you going to build it?
To the east or to the west? To the west.
To the west, right? Right. Why would you bother building a big railroad, which is very expensive, to just deliver where it's high taxes and your stuff gets stolen all the time, right?
You wouldn't do it. You wouldn't. So it's property rights, the fact that people could be sure that they could trade and keep their money, that's what built the railroads, not just the discovery of America.
Yeah. Silly. Anyway, so you know what?
I'm just going to do this, too, because I want to make sure that we get the technical blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Definition of bourgeoisie, right?
Because it's a word that has a very complex series of...
Oh gosh, that is a very...
Ah, you see? It's a polysemous French term.
No. What?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, here we go.
It's a French term, bourgeoisie, that can mean a social class, people with a certain upper middle class, upper middle and petty bourgeoisie.
So petty bourgeoisie are like the shop owners, whereas the really rich bourgeoisie would own the entire factories and all that kind of stuff.
Oh, yeah. So, yeah.
Okay. They do have to do a lot of work to run a factory.
Okay. They do, yeah. Even with my chocolate, I'm like, hey, I'm losing money.
I've got to find ways to make more money and stuff.
Well, here's the other thing, too. So, at some point, if you keep track of this, which actually is going to be a cool thing to do, you should keep track of how many hours you work so you can figure out how much you're getting paid per hour to make it.
Well, I think I'm going to do something like for the...
Chocolate, I mean, for like the special order sometimes, like the chocolate pizza is an example, it's gonna be maybe my time is worth 50 cents an hour.
Let's just say like right now.
That's a start, yeah. That's a start, and then I can time it from, sorry, you're on my microphone, start to finish, and maybe it takes an hour, two and a half hours.
Yep. That would be, that would be $1.25.
Right, right, that makes sense. And that would add to the actual price.
Wait, 50 cents an hour?
Yes. Two and a half hours?
Two and a half hours. A dollar, 25 cents.
Yeah, yeah, quite right. Quite right.
Okay, sorry. That's me too.
I was just like, wait, am I getting this right?
Is that correct? No, what? I swear I'm not actually that bad at math.
Anyway, so he says, we see therefore how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
So again, to me, there's an old saying which says, putting the cart...
In front of the horse.
That would not make a lot of sense right there.
Yeah, so normally you get, you know, we go on those hayrides, right?
We don't really anymore, but we used to, right?
Yeah. And so there'd be a bunch of horses in the front and they'd be pulling the cart, right?
Yeah. So they're saying, if you get things backwards, you remember we used to do these logical puzzles?
Yeah. Oh yeah. And I would say, when you were younger.
Do the umbrella one. So I would say something like, oh man, I can't believe that everyone's making it rain by putting up their umbrellas.
And say, no, it's raining, and then people put up their umbrellas.
Right, so we used to do a lot of these kind of games.
When I was like seven and eight and stuff, but maybe six.
Like we would say, I can't believe that all these people gathered around the grave are putting that person in the ground.
Right. And you'd say?
No! That's right.
It doesn't work that way!
Yeah, he's in the ground.
He's going in the ground. That's why they're there.
They don't put him in the ground just because they've gathered.
So putting the cart before the horse is when you get what's called causality, like dominoes, right?
Can you imagine? So we used to watch these dominoes.
We built the dominoes stuff too, right?
So imagine you started, you know.
Now imagine if you tried to do it the other way.
They were all down and you tried to push them back up from the end.
Can you imagine? That would be impossible.
Imagine if we did like an hour-long video of like, there's something wrong with our dominoes.
And we'd like, they'd all go down.
And we'd say, okay, now we need to get them back up.
We'd try and push them back up or whatever.
They'd fly everywhere.
Now, you could fake that, though.
You could play the video backwards.
That's right. You could play the video backwards.
That's right. So he's saying, well, you know, they just started making all these factories, and they started building all these railroads, and they started having the Pony Express, and that's why we became rich.
And it's like, no, no, no, no. Because people had the expectation of making money, they built all of these things.
But first you had to have free trade and property rights and all that kind of stuff, right?
Each step, he said, in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class.
So what he's saying is, and this is kind of true, right?
So if you're a trader, you want to trade, you want to sell your wheat to France, right?
But let's say there's all these laws, like we talked about when we ordered the glow dust and the walkie-talkies, all these crazy tariffs, right?
$63 to order the glow dust to come in like two days, but still.
So let's say that you want to sell your wheat into France, but the French government puts a big tax on everything, right?
Yeah. So what you would do is you'd get together with all the other people who wanted to sell wheat into France.
And you'd go to your government, to maybe your king or your parliament, and what do you think you would say?
Because you want to be able to sell to France, but the French government isn't letting you.
Now you could go to the French government and say, hey man, can you really lower your taxes?
But they don't want to. They probably wouldn't do that.
No, because they like collecting the taxes.
You would ask the king to sell their taxes.
Well, you would say to the king, maybe, and I don't know, something like this, right?
So the French government doesn't want to lower the taxes for two reasons.
Number one, they like getting those taxes.
Yeah. And number two, the French farmers are going to get mad at them because maybe other people can sell wheat cheaper and then the French farmers have to lower their prices.
Right. Or maybe they can't compete at all.
They have to change their whole way that they grow to be more efficient.
And they don't like that. They don't want to do that, right?
They're like, hey, it's here.
It's working. We like the high taxes.
There's an old saying which says, if it ain't broke, if it's not broke, don't fix it.
Yeah. Right? Which is kind of true.
You know, somebody asked me the other day, what's your big weakness?
And I said, for me, it's trying to get perfect video and audio to the point where I just fiddle with everything until something goes wrong and I have to start all over.
Oh! Oh no, it's true.
You say, I'd be like, hey dad, can we example, again, a game we mentioned yesterday, Rocket League.
And, um, uh, oh yeah, with the game, with yesterday, with the Rocket League.
He's like, hey dad, can we do some Rocket League?
And you're like, yeah, let me just get this audio right.
And I'm like, so, in an hour or two?
So never, never.
Like, in an hour or two until you realize that it's not going to work and you're like, um, I'll get it to work.
I did a live stream just the other day and the audio was too high because I adapted a bit because before it was too quiet.
Anyway, so. Oh my goodness. Okay.
So you can't go to the French government and say, hey man, let us sell our wheat into your country.
But what you can do is go to your own government and say, you know what you should do?
You should put a lot of taxes on the French wheat coming into our country unless they agree to lower theirs.
Right. And then you can try that.
Or you can say, go talk to the French king and offer him some benefit in return for lowering taxes because then we can sell.
See, the government likes when you can sell into other countries because you go and sell and then you bring money into your country, especially if you do it in gold, right?
My gosh, even with China, I remember me and my friends once, we went around a store.
We were... We, three of us, we went to five, three, we each got a different section.
So one was, it was at some dollar store.
One was like the candy section.
I got the candy section.
My friend just got like the little stuff, you know, the little gadget section and stuff.
And I don't remember what my other friend got.
But mine, there wasn't really too much in my section.
But my friend's section, like the whole little gadget stuff, it was like literally, I think like out of five things, four of them were made in China.
Out of the five things that she looked at.
Right, right.
So yeah, they like it.
So you would put pressure on the government to try and get the taxes lowered.
Yeah. And this actually did kind of work.
This actually did kind of work.
So what he's saying, so when the bourgeoisie, when they get stronger, a corresponding political advance, it means they work harder to try and influence the government and politics and taxes and laws and all of that to benefit trade, right?
I think that's good. Makes sense?
Yeah. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility.
The kings and... The feudal?
The feudal is...
Remember we talked about how...
After the fall of the Roman Empire, there was this age where the warlords roamed all over the place.
And then people would say, okay, to the local, whoever was best at fighting, we'll give you some of our crops.
In return, you protect us from all of these crazy guys who want to come and steal everything from us, right?
So that's called a feudal relationship.
You're kind of tied to the land.
You've got to give a whole bunch of your crops to the king.
You might have to work on his land as well for, quote, free.
But in return, you get protection from all of this violence.
So that's called feudal. Yeah.
An armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune.
What the heck is that about? Okay.
An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility.
An armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune.
What does that have to do with anything?
Okay, so it's a complicated way of just talking about what I was talking about, that you say, okay, I will give up some of my crops, but in return you protect me from having all of them stolen.
Okay. Oh, well, it's...
I mean, he wants to make it he or she or whatever.
I don't know. Was this one person who did it or a bunch of people?
Oh, it happened all over.
Yeah, all over. Oh, okay.
Well, whatever. They just wanted to...
I don't know, make it look like they were really smart and use all these complicated phrases so that they would seem, oh, they're really smart.
It's also not specifically designed for like 11-year-olds, but you can figure it out.
Yeah, but I mean, it still took you a second to figure it out.
Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Here, independent urban republic, as in Italy and Germany, their taxable third estate of the monarchy, as in France, afterwards in the period of manufacture proper, serving either...
The semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility.
Yeah, see, that makes perfect sense. And in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last...
This is all one sentence, by the way.
I'm sorry, what? Do you remember the book that we've been reading for a while?
Oh my gosh, I remember that.
Oh man. James Joyce, the portrait of the artist as a young man.
Oh my god. That was really something.
It was so bad.
So we'll finish this paragraph and then we'll stop.
Okay, I think this is too confusing for me.
Hang on, let's do it. This is one sentence.
We can do it. Can I do it? Do you think I can do it in one breath?
No. Okay, I'm going to try. Do it, do it.
Try. Wait.
Oh my God.
I get to go up like a puffer fish here.
Okay.
An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune, here independent urban republicas in Italy and Germany, their taxable third estate of the monarchy as in France, afterwards in the period of manufactured property, but serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility and in fact cornerstone of the great monarchies in general.
The bourgeoisie has at last since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market conquered for itself in the modern representative state exclusive political sway.
Oh man.
But he clears it up here. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
Yeah, okay. So, I mean, we don't need to look that at all, right?
So, basically what he's saying is that as...
As the manufacturers, as the bourgeoisie get more economic power, in other words, as they become richer, they involve themselves in politics and they try and get the government to help them expand their markets, to guarantee their property rights, to lower taxes and trade barriers between them and other countries and all of that.
Right. That was hilarious.
I know that part when you start...
I was like, if there was one more sentence, I wouldn't be able to do that.
Yeah, when you run out of breath and you start having to go really loud and your chest just tightens and tries to push out any air that's left.
Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. It's always funny to think, you're always three minutes away from dying, right?
If you run out of air. Anyway, so he's basically saying that now the manufacturers have become so powerful that the government just exists to serve their needs.
And that's the question we'll get to next time, but we'll stop here.
We are now 8%.
We went up 3%!
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we'll go faster from here on in, because a lot of this is kind of intro stuff.
Yes. Good stuff. Thank you, everyone.
I promise it will not take us 400 episodes, or at least versions, to finish this.
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Make more egg memes. Make more egg memes.
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Yeah, I think you just started a whole trail of memes.
I really did. I really did.
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I mean, this could be my biggest accomplishment after 15 years.
It's just egg jokes.
Egg jokes. Sad but true. You should do it.
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