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July 4, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:54:08
DEBATE! Dr Andrew E. Mathis vs Stefan Molyneux: "Life Without Rulers: Socialism vs Capitalism"
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So I'm obviously really excited about this.
We're going to have a discussion between Dr.
Mathis here and Stefan Molyneux about, essentially, socialism and capitalism.
The title of this debate is No Rulers, Socialism vs.
Capitalism. As I recall, this started over a conversation about Antifa.
That was something between you two guys.
But without any further ado, we already discussed all the details.
And Stefan, would you like to explain a little bit about yourself to people who aren't familiar with you and give a short introduction to what your view is on the topic?
Sure. Well, my name is Stefan Molyneux.
I host the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world, 700 million plus views and downloads.
I guess I have the dubious distinction of being the second largest ban in YouTube history.
I was just kicked off this week with no warnings and no particular explanation.
So I guess I'm now a dissident.
I'm Samistat. I'm a radical.
I'm underground. And you can find me at freedomain.com.
I have 10 or so books, a whole bunch of podcasts and videos available.
Everything is... But I am, I guess, a classical Aristotelian objective reality, individualism and reason and evidence as the methodology for determining truth from falsehood.
I am committed to the non-aggression principle that you cannot initiate the use of force against others.
I am committed to owning yourself, owning the effects of your actions, whether it's Morality, an argument, a house you've built or a crime you've committed, you own yourself, you own the effects of your actions.
So the combination of the non-aggression principle and property rights gives us a free market society.
And I view the state, the state, the government, as a fundamentally immoral institution that we need to outgrow.
And the best way we outgrow that is to raise our children peacefully and reasonably.
But the state is an organ or an agency within society.
That has the legal right, in fact the legal obligation to initiate the use of force against citizens who are usually relatively disarmed and I view it on the same moral level that people in the past viewed slavery.
It's just kind of an ugly institution that we've inherited from the detritus and dustbin of history and we need to apply our rational standards to even the most ancient and venerated and habituated institutions like the state just as people in the past had to do with Slavery.
So my goal in the long run, of course, is called peaceful parenting.
You do not initiate the use of force against your children.
This includes spanking and timeouts and so on.
And through this process of peaceful parenting, we will eventually outgrow the need for a state to protect us from the criminals which generally come out of child abuse as a whole.
Like, you know, society used to be structured around smallpox and then we got an inoculation against smallpox.
We don't need to structure society around dealing with smallpox anymore.
It's the same thing with peaceful parenting and criminality.
The lust for power, the lust for taking without creating, for stealing and violence and so on, will be vastly diminished with peaceful parenting.
And through that process, we can achieve the goal of a universal moral standard called the non-initiation of the use of force.
And that is what I'm going to be arguing for tonight, free trade, property rights, and the non-aggression principle.
Alright, and Dr.
Mathis, would you mind telling people a little bit about yourself and your overall argument on this topic?
Sure. I just wanted to make sure that everybody here knew that currently right now on the Blue Politics YouTube, there's nothing live.
So if that's something that needs to be addressed on your end, I don't know if you want to handle that or not, but I'm fine either way.
I can go now or wait a little bit.
There's currently no live stream on your YouTube channel.
Okay, yeah, I'm not sure what's going on with that.
It's my first time trying to live stream for YouTube.
But we have the Twitch up, it's probably Timmy, and I didn't hear back from Lance from the surf, so I don't know what's going on there.
yeah yeah um it turns out Lance pooped out but um okay so uh who am i i am andrew mathis i am an adjunct professor of humanities at the university of the sciences of philadelphia uh and uh my background actually i have a doctorate in english literature But I have been far more involved through the last 20 years in studying history,
first informally as a member of the Holocaust History Project and as a co-founder of the Holocaust Controversies blog, and then for the last five years formally studying history at the university level, completed a bachelor's degree in 2017, certificate, graduate certificate from the University of Edinburgh, just finished, and I will be enrolling in the fall in a master's program at the University of Pennsylvania.
So my position essentially is that I am a socialist, and what that means is that I believe that the means of production should be controlled ideally by the workers, by the people who do the work.
So I think where Stefan and I fundamentally disagree basically has to do with this notion of what it means to be an anarchist.
So the conversation that Steph and I had on Twitter basically had boiled down to what does it mean to be an anarchist?
Can one be an anarchist?
Was my contention.
One cannot be an anarchist.
One does not oppose the creation and sustaining of hierarchies.
So here's essentially the argument that I would make in this regard.
Sorry, real quick, Doctor.
I can hear you fine, but some people in chat are saying that you're low volume for them.
Could you try moving a little bit closer to the microphone?
I know that Steph is fond of defining terms, and I am as well, so I think that that's a good place for us to start in this discussion.
So, capitalism, private ownership of the means of production.
Individuals, entrepreneurs, business owners, what have you, they own the means of production, they hire workers, they contract those workers for a wage or a salary to do that work.
But by and large, the profits accrue back to the capitalist, to the individual owner of the means of production.
My contention as a socialist is that, and it's based to a large extent, although not explicitly on the idea of the labor theory of value, that those people that actually do the work should be accruing most of the value to themselves.
But my contention is that the means of production are therefore better held by the workers than by individual capital owners.
I think where we get into a bit of a blind alley, intrusive and, you know, hegemonic and violent by its very nature.
I think, as Steph points out, I mean, that is what government is about.
Government, as Weber says, is, you know, the exclusive use of force within the geographic But I don't think that that's true.
I think that there are other forms of socialism that can work equally well, if not better than what we would normally consider to be socialism, which is state socialism, which is the idea that the state, in representing the workers, however poorly or well it might do that, that that controls the means of production on behalf of the workers.
Ideally, in sort of my ideal society, I would be more in favor of a syndicalist kind of model where workers were organized according to trade or according to type of work that they do.
Yeah, basically, I mean, the long and short of it is that there doesn't have to be a large intrusive government apparatus in order for workers to control the means of production, A. And B, and I think sort of the more important point to underscore here is that understanding that Stefan is an anarcho-capitalist and understanding that I am At least in theory, in our narco-syndicalist, also requires, I think, both of us conceding at the outset that neither of us is probably going to anytime soon get things exactly the way that we want them.
So we can talk about our ideal situations and or we can talk about how things are now and how they can be made better.
I'm open to both of those.
I'm open to one or the other.
But I think that it's an important concession, at least that I make at the outset, that it's not possible for us to have no government right now.
We have one. It has an enormous amount of power to itself.
Short of complete societal disintegration, which, frankly, looks more possible now than it has at any time in the recent past, but short of societal breakdown, I don't see government dissolving anytime soon in either my solution or Stefan's solution coming into play.
I can talk about the philosophy of anarcho-capitalism versus anarcho-cynicalism, but I'm more interested, really, personally, in talking about what we have now and how maybe it can be made better.
Sure. I just want to... I know we've got a bit of...
Stephan, I believe you're locally muted on your end.
Sure. Sorry about that. So, Dr.
Mathis, just a quick question so I know how to sort of frame what it is that I'm going to be responding to.
What has been, if any, your experience in starting a business, in running a business, in managing a business?
None. I have none. So I have a sole proprietorship.
About 30% of my income comes from my own small business that I run, of which I am the sole proprietor.
So yeah, what I was saying when I think I was cut off was that other than being a sole proprietor for about a third of my income and therefore paying twice as much taxes on that part of my income in the United States than I would if I were working on a regular salary position.
Other than that, I don't have any experience as an entrepreneur, no.
And listen, I mean, this doesn't completely obviously discredit, and maybe it doesn't discredit anything, but I just kind of want to point it out that I've been an entrepreneur for like 30 years now.
co-founded a number of companies and built them up to fairly decent revenue, sort of 30, 40 people working there and sold them.
And so as an entrepreneur, you just kind of have a different view from people who learn about the market from books and lectures.
And so I just, again, this doesn't invalidate anything you're saying.
I just really wanted to know if we were talking about experience or more theory.
No, no, we're talking about, I mean, from my standpoint, we're talking about theory.
I'm not an entrepreneur. My parents aren't entrepreneurs or anything like that.
I mean, I would say, I would stipulate that by saying I also am, therefore, you know, you could draw the conclusion perhaps because, but I am not a member of the cult of entrepreneurship, therefore.
You know, look, my father's a PhD in economics, okay, so I used to have arguments with...
When I was a kid about the role of entrepreneurship in a healthy economy.
And my father, bless his heart, as liberal as he is, he nevertheless holds a special place in his heart as a PhD economist for entrepreneurship.
He sees that as playing a decisive role in a healthy economy.
I'm not denying, by the way, that it plays a role.
I just don't fetishize it to the extent that I think that a lot of capitalists do.
I don't think we want to start off the debate, Dr.
Mathis, with things like the cult of entrepreneurship and fetishizing things, because, come on, that's not really a very fair perspective.
Let's try and keep things as neutral as possible so that we can have a more civilized discussion.
Well, look, I mean, I still have you on voice.
Okay, good, good. So I don't deny that there's risk involved in entrepreneurship, and I don't deny, therefore, that some reward should accrue with the risk that's undertaken.
Where I think I run into an issue with it is this idea that workers don't have...
Significant risk as well, if not perhaps more risk, because whereas the entrepreneur will often put up a significant amount of his or her capital in an active risk, there is more often than not significant amount of capital that remains on reserve for that entrepreneur that won't be lost because it hasn't been gabbled in that particular venture.
Whereas for the worker, that worker either has his or her worker doesn't.
And oftentimes, I mean, and, you know, It's fairly clearly been argued over the course of the last 150 years more often than not.
Without that salary, without that wage, things can go crooked pretty quickly.
Frankly, we've seen that over the course of the last three and a half months in this country.
Well, okay, so let's sort of deal with a couple of things that you've said, starting sort of from the end and working backwards.
I mean, for myself, I worked for probably close to 18 months without salary to start a business, and it wasn't like I had a lot of money to fall back on.
I had to sign promissory notes to get loans to cover payroll, and things were kind of brutal at times.
There's a lot of sleepless nights when you're trying to figure out how to get people paid, which those people don't Have to face the same challenges.
So there is a lot of risk and a lot of investment, particularly if you're not coming from a wealthy family, to entrepreneurship.
And when I started doing this philosophical work on the internet, I took like a 75% pay cut and things were quite exciting for quite an amount of time as they remain to me even now 15 years later.
So, I mean, but the level of risk to me is – that's a personal choice.
It's a personal taste. Some people take more.
Some people take less. But you said a couple of things about the free market that I wanted to get more clarity on because I'm not sure I quite understand them.
So you said private ownership of the means of production.
That is not at all a requirement of the free market.
I mean, if you want to start a factory and you want to hand out shares, you want to hand out slices and bits and parcels and pieces of – The company to your workers, you are certainly permitted to do that.
There's nothing that prevents this kind of experimentation.
When you say the profits accrue to those who have the capital or who owns the means of production, that's not true entirely.
Of course, the workers gain some share of the profits because if there aren't any profits, there's no money to pay the workers.
So some of the profits do go back out in terms of Wages.
And you referred to the workers.
I mean, I even hate this kind of differentiation.
The people, the laborers, is those who do the work.
Well, that's not the case.
Being an entrepreneur is a very, very large amount of work.
The bosses don't just sit there counting bags of gold in the executive suite while everyone else does all of the work.
There's a lot of work I think?
So it doesn't say, well, the workers can't own the means of production.
That's illegal, right? Because a truly free market may be, and there are examples of this in the economy, as you know, maybe having workers controlling the means of production is extremely efficient and positive, in which case you'll out-compete the hell out of people who have more top-heavy ownership structures.
And so there is nothing that compels What you call – by private ownership, given that the workers, so to speak, are also private citizens in a free market, there's nothing in the free market that says that the owners have to own the majority of it and they give next to nothing to the workers.
It's perfectly acceptable and, of course, when I was – as an entrepreneur, I was very keen – when I was on boards of directors, very keen to make sure that ownership was handed out to the people who worked for me and – That worked out really well.
The company founded 25 years ago is still running, still in operation, and some of the people I hired are running it now, which I couldn't be more thrilled with.
And part of that was because of handing out ownership of the means of production to workers.
So you can experiment with just about anything.
In the free market outside of direct theft and fraud and so on.
But you can organize the ownership of the means of production in any way, shape or form that you want.
You don't need a government to come in and forcibly seize the means of production and then the workers all cross their fingers and hope that the rich and powerful don't take control of the government, which they always do, and hope that the government treats them well.
What you want, of course, is as many conceivable experiments In the free market as possible to figure out the best way to allocate resources because you don't know and I don't know and no central planner knows and governments don't know because without the price mechanism there's no way to allocate resources.
So when you say, well, private ownership of the means of production, it's like, yeah, well, that's one possibility in terms of the bosses owning the means of production.
But there's just about every other configuration that you can think of.
When I first started the company, I owned a significant chunk of it and I gave it away to a bunch of the workers to motivate them.
And they did really, really well.
And we outcompeted and did really well and began to dominate the marketplace through that.
So, yeah, there's some selfish people that want to hoard the means of production.
There's other people who hand it out that may do better.
And so I just really wanted to point out that there's not this monolith of who owns what in a free market experience.
It really can be mixed and matched to provide an almost infinite number of experiments.
Okay, well, a lot, actually.
So let's try to go to some extent in the order that we've gone here.
I mean, so, well, actually, I'll go in reverse order.
So let me acknowledge one thing.
First of all, if you allowed your workers to share profits, that's fantastic.
I think that's great. I think, frankly, that that is the kind of situation that is far better than some revolutionary uprising where the worker sees the means of production.
It seems to me that on some level, the way out of a hard, you know, revolutionary socialist uprising, you know, with guillotines and the whole nine yards is some better understanding of allowing the workers to share in the profits that a business creates.
So, I mean, I applaud you for doing that.
At the same time, I would say that A few things.
First of all, so there's a distinction, I guess.
I had imagined when I was planning doing this with you, I was going to have to sort of yank this out of you like teeth out of your head.
But there is a distinction between free markets and capitalism.
So, because not all capitalism is free markets and not all free markets are capitalism.
Do I have you right on that?
Well, here, of course, we get back to the joyful definition of terms that hopefully can resolve these issues.
So you'll have to tell me what you mean by free markets versus capital.
Well, so I think you and I probably both agree on a particular point.
So let me kind of build out from this central point and we'll kind of go from there, okay?
So you and I probably agree that markets, when they are freest, allocate resources in the most efficient manner.
Which generally tends to raise the standard of living of the workers as quickly as possible, yes.
Right. But, I mean, at the same time, it will raise the standard of living of the workers.
It will also increase the wealth differential between the people at the highest level and the people at the lowest level.
Well, hang on, hang on. Sorry.
That's the point about capitalism.
That's the point about capitalism that's been acknowledged by everybody from Adam Smith all the way to Thomas Piketty.
I mean, it's not really disputable.
Well, okay. Don't tell me what isn't disputable.
Give me a chance to make my case.
I'm not going to tell you the black is white and we...
You can bookmark that.
You can bookmark that point.
Because, you know, I did give you a good five minutes there.
Okay, no problem. No problem at all.
Okay, so you and I probably agree that free markets will allocate resources as efficiently as possible, that the freer they are, the more efficiently those resources will be allocated.
Now, for every way that we regulate that market, it will render it less efficient.
So here's something that a lot of people, both economists and non-economists, forget about economics.
It's a social science, which means it studies the behavior of human beings.
So if we have a free market and something happens with supply and demand, that in order for equilibrium to be found again, it becomes necessary for me to make my factory less safe or lay off a bunch of workers or do something else that has human cost,
The free market will do that, and it will continue to allocate those resources efficiently, but it will do so at some cost to other human beings.
It's one of the reasons why people who believe in regulated markets believe in them.
They believe in them not because I would argue, not because they're socialists, which would mean that they would believe that the means of production were best held in the hands of the workers, rather because they see that a completely unfettered market has the tendency to do these things.
And to determine whether that's true or not, we really only need to look at history.
I mean, this is sort of 19th century history in the United Kingdom, you know, writ large, you know, and you talk about that it raised the The level of the workers to, you know, a better standard of living that they had before.
That's absolutely true.
But, you know, while I'm thanking you for curing my child of diphtheria, don't stick him up the chimney to clean it, is my argument, right?
I mean, if you are getting this wealth accruing across the society, according to Adam Smith's wonderful invisible hand, but the effect of it That includes the exploitation of workers, the increased differential between the people at the lowest level in that economy and the highest level of the economy.
That would argue that, yeah, it's a freer market, but it is really sort of not doing all it's really cracked up to be.
And that a solution to that problem is to regulate that market in such a way that, yeah, you render it efficient, but you render it more humane.
Okay, so hang on.
Let's try and pick a little of this apart.
Because this funny word, it's almost like magic.
I know that's not an argument.
I'll sort of explain what I mean with it. So people have this wand called regulation.
But you understand that your very concern for the capitalists who are going to exploit the workers also applies to the regulators who are going to control the industry.
Except the regulators have guns rather than economic incentives.
So whatever fears you have...
Of the capitalists being like mean monocle-wearing Dr.
Burns or Mr.
Burns kind of exploiters, it also applies equally, if not more so, to the people you're going to have regulate those markets.
In other words, if people are selfish and exploitive and drawn to control others for their own profit, exactly the same situation is going to occur for the regulator.
So coming up with the word regulator as if somehow you've got this...
A group of angels who have no selfishness, no meanness, they're not corrupted by power, who are going to be your regulators.
Like, the more you fear the capitalists, the more I fear the regulators, because the worse the capitalists are, a hundred times worse will the regulators be, because they will control and bully and sell favors and have regulatory captures, occurs all the case.
And the second thing is if you say, well, you know, the more free market, the more free a market becomes, the more there is a differentiation between rich and poor, like the rich get richer and the poor don't get proportionally richer.
I mean, you know that as the government has controlled more and more of the economy, especially since the 1950s, The split between CEO salary and worker salaries has only widened.
As governments have regulated more and more and more of the market, the rich have done progressively better, and the poor have had their wages stagnate, or the middle class have had their wages stagnate since the 80s or 90s, depending on how you're measuring it.
And that's just the kind of basic fact that I think would have you question the theory, because as more of this regulation is occurring, which is supposed to close this gap, the gap is in fact getting wider, which is kind of the opposite of what you claim.
So the single most common way that a market can be regulated is through taxation.
And one thing we know for sure about regulation in the U.S. economy since the 1950s is that it's gone down, not up.
I mean, it's just not disputable.
The marginal tax rate under Eisenhower, a Republican, I will remind you, was 90% the highest marginal tax rate.
By the way, during the 1950s, when the highest marginal income tax rate was in the 90s, Howard Hughes became a billionaire.
So it wasn't like it was just stopping entrepreneurship dead in its tracks to have a high Highly confiscatory, and I have no problem admitting that it is that, highest marginal tax rate.
On top of that, it was Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush 2 that did further deregulating.
I mean, this is what Reagan did.
Reagan grew government, that's true, but he deregulated markets.
So did Bush 1, so did Clinton very much so.
And so did Bush, too.
So I don't think that this argument that you have more regulation comparative to the 1950s rather than less is true, frankly.
A second point that I would make, and I think that this is actually maybe the point philosophically between me and you, is that whenever there is a talk about government and the gun in the room and all of that, the thought that comes to my head is that it is amazing to me That you don't apparently see that economic coercion is every bit as compelling as political coercion.
And that that gun, being figurative most of the time, by the way, is in some way more potent than the threat of me losing my home or my kids starving, something like that.
It's violence any way you cut it.
And so if you're asking whether the better solution is to deregulate or to regulate upward in the hands of government for the sake of argument in this particular example, I would say it's better to regulate in the hands of government unless I can vote for the people.
If I'm in a job where I have no say in what goes on with regard to the conditions in my workplace or if I'm in a right-to-work state where they can just fire me without cause for any reason, Then, frankly, I'm in a far more tyrannical situation than any government that holds a theoretical gun to my head if I theoretically don't pay taxes.
The idea that this coercion is more real because it's in the hands of government and more real because it's political rather than economic just doesn't ring true to me.
I don't think it rings true to most people.
People in this country, at least, I mean, I know you live in Canada, and frankly, Canada has better worker rights, but if you ask most people in the United States who they fear more, the government or their boss, I can tell you that the answer is going to be their boss.
Okay. So, I mean, I've heard this a bunch of times before that the taxes on the rich were very high in the 1950s.
I'll put a link to this at the end.
There is a common misconception that high-income Americans are not paying much in taxes compared to what they used to.
You say in the 1950s, the top federal income tax rate was 91% for most of the decade.
However, despite these high marginal tax rates, the top 1% of taxpayers in the 1950s only paid about 42% of their income in taxes.
As a result, the tax burden on high-income households today is only slightly lower than what these households faced in the 1950s.
So the 91% tax bracket only applied to households with an income over $200,000, about $2 million in, when is this article, $2017.
Only a small number of taxpayers would have had enough income to fall into that top bracket, fewer than 10,000 households.
So it is really not the case that there was almost nobody being taxed at 91%, and 91% was only on a very tiny slice of the income from 10,000 households in America.
So that's not very big.
As far as regulatory growth, yeah, the regulatory growth has been absolutely significant.
absolutely huge.
And I mean, for instance, I've seen pretty good studies that if the federal tax registry had remained as low as it was after the Second World War, which wasn't like a regulatory wasteland or the Wild West, Then Americans would be three to four times wealthier than they are now because there's been such a huge drag on this.
So the significant final rules published by presidential year, and so, yeah, it's gone very, very high and maintained itself as pretty high.
Total pages in the Code of Federal Regulations and the Federal Register is absolutely enormous.
So 1950... There were 10,000 or so, and then it just goes skyrocketing.
Total pages in the Code of Federal Regulations and the Federal Register, it absolutely skyrockets.
I don't know that I can share.
Can I? No, I don't want to share the whole screen.
But the total pages published in the Federal Register was 2,000 in 1930s.
It went up to 10,000 in the 1950s.
And it's come down a little bit under Trump, but it hit 100,000 pages, like 10 times what it was in the 50s.
So the idea that we don't have a hyper-regulatory burden, I mean, there's lots of ways to measure it, but a pretty solid one is total pages in the Code of Federal Regulations.
And it has been absolutely staggering how much it has grown.
I mean, this is just basic economic logic, right?
I mean, it's easier to add a rule than it is to take it away.
And so more and more rules get piled on without a concomitant reduction in the number of rules because whatever rules in there is usually there to benefit some corporations, some business, some political donor, some, you know, and we know that big corporations use these regulations to keep smaller corporations from competing with them.
And the last thing I wanted to mention was, so with regards to worker rights, it's very, very important that workers, you know, have a safe environment.
But man, it's complicated to get a hold of.
Like, it really is complicated because we can say, and I know this because I worked in environmental and health and safety regulations for over a decade.
So we can say, oh, we've got to have this regulation and that regulation for health and safety, health and safety.
And then the problem becomes that the business becomes so inefficient and impossible to run because it's almost impossible to comply with all the regulations that are out there.
There's 100,000 pages or whatever.
And so what happens is the businesses go overseas.
They go to some other place, and then what happens is people get depressed, and they start taking opioids, and then they die from an opioid crisis, right?
Like, you know, in America, and it's hitting a lot of lower-middle-class people who otherwise would have manufacturing jobs.
The opioid crisis is killing more Americans every year than died in Vietnam, for heaven's sakes, right?
right?
So this idea that we can find this magical, perfect mix of regulation and safety, and everyone's going to be hunky-dory, but you can't.
Because if you regulate too much, businesses go overseas, people lose their jobs, they get depressed, and they take drugs, or they drink too much, or they eat too much, and they die that way.
So we can't find some nirvana.
But I still do want to hear how the moral problems that are going to plague the business owners are not also going to plague the regulators.
Well, like I said, I mean, again, you've given me a lot to respond to, but to briefly answer your question first, I would say it isn't that they won't, it's that those people have to be responsible to me because I can vote for them.
That's the point. So, whereas I can't vote for my boss.
Sure you can't. You vote for your boss every time you show up.
Yeah, I vote for my boss every time I show up.
And if I don't show up and I don't get a paycheck, then I don't have clothes for my kids and I can't pay my rent or my mortgage.
Come on. Oh, come on, man.
It's not like there's one job in the economy.
I mean, when I was a waiter, I could go to five restaurants to figure out what job I could get.
Your personal experience is wonderful, Stefan, but it's not what's relevant.
Sorry? Your personal experience is wonderful, but it's not what's relevant.
We don't have a glut of jobs right now in the United States.
I don't know if you're aware of that or not.
Particularly for people that are not trained.
They can get a minimum wage job, but that certainly is not going to pay rent in most cities.
Oh, hang on. So what you mean is that...
Wait a minute.
You've given me a whole bunch of stuff to respond to, and I need to respond to it.
First of all, it is not a good measure of regulation to count numbers of pages, because I don't know if you've ever seen the way a law is written, but laws are written in such a way that unless it's a brand new law, in which case you can actually yes, the actual pages of laws, even when you get rid of laws, You have to write laws that get rid of those old laws, which means you add pages to the Federal Register of Laws.
Strike this clause.
Strike this page. Where this section appears, strike these words, add these words.
Anybody can go onto thomas.gov and look at any piece of legislation that is a landmark bill, and they'll see that that's the way that they're written.
Second thing is in terms of businesses going overseas, this is a direct result of free trade, by the way.
Which, again, I mean, in terms of deregulating, this happened to Clinton.
This is the North American Trade Agreement, which, you know, frankly, is a tremendous disaster for people that were working in manufacturing jobs.
And it was done to a very large extent to break the backs of the unions.
And it worked.
So, yeah, why should I, as a capitalist, why should I pay a union wage to UAW workers in Flint, Michigan, when I can send my production over to another country with no labor laws and pay everybody $2 a day with no bathroom breaks?
Well, I would argue that you need to regulate in such a way that prevents that from happening.
For one thing, the biggest thing that I would say, frankly, is that you You need to severely restrict, if not ban outright capital flight, A. B, you need to make it a rule of doing business in a That you're not going to move jobs overseas as a way of getting around workers' rights and labor unions.
I mean, and yeah, is that going to restrict trade?
It absolutely is going to restrict trade.
But to respond to the parade of horrors that you've given me about unemployment in manufacturing states, I mean, if it weren't for NAFTA, those jobs wouldn't have gone overseas.
And that is not regulation that did that.
That was free trade that did that.
Why do you think?
Why do you think after 12 years of government education, people don't even possess the skills to make more than minimum wage?
Well, it depends on where they go to school.
In the United States, their public schools are funded by property taxes.
So, I mean, where I grew up, you know, I mean, the property taxes were through the roof and the schools were excellent.
I mean, everybody that I went to high school with went to college.
I mean, it was a function of my socioeconomic status.
Now, you know, if you go, you know, 15 miles to the east of where I grew up into the low-income areas of the city of Philadelphia, you're going to find that the property values are nil and that, therefore, the schools are terrible.
I mean, there's a solution to that as well, which is not to fund schools on the basis of property tax, because that's a system that's absolutely designed to screw poor people.
Well, how long has that system been in place?
And you say that you can just vote people to get them to do what you want.
So why has that not been fixed in the past hundred years?
Why hasn't it been fixed?
Well, because for one thing, we have done things in such a way in the United States that we have devolved the political power for schools all the way down to the...
It makes school boards responsible to the smallest number of people, which in theory at least would be good, because then you would just have the people that live in the school district voting for school boards.
But at the same time, it limits the budgets that are available to those school boards.
And any time you go further up the ladder to try to change that, there's resistance, mainly by the wealthier constituencies who want to keep their school boards at the level, to prevent that being regulated up at the city level, county level, state level, and God forbid, federal level.
I mean, there's a lot of complaining about the Federal Department of Education, but frankly, the Federal Department of Education is the problem.
The problem with education in the United States is that it's funded by local property. - No, I get that, but you said voting could fix problems And this is a massive and catastrophic problem that voting hasn't fixed.
What about NAFTA? You say NAFTA was a direct assault on the unions.
Okay. So why is it that people didn't vote against NAFTA or vote to get NAFTA taken out if voting is the solution?
Sorry, I'll just repeat that question.
I think I kind of blurred in and out a second there.
Yeah, so if NAFTA... We're talking about NAFTA. Yeah, yeah.
So if NAFTA is so disastrous, and look, I mean, free trade is not 2,500 pages of regulation.
Free trade is free trade. You don't need a whole lot of regulations for it.
But if NAFTA is so disastrous for the middle class and the working class, the lower middle class, the manufacturing class, Then why would they vote in someone who gave them NAFTA or why wouldn't they vote out NAFTA by voting in someone different if voting is the solution?
Well, mainly because of corporate capture of our politics.
Exactly. Yeah.
You can't solve that.
I don't think, well, maybe you can, maybe you can't.
I mean, the situation frankly has gotten monumentally worse in the United States over the last 25 years because now there's unlimited campaign spending that can be done by corporations on political campaigns.
I mean, one thing that you can do, quite frankly, is not allow that.
One thing that you can do is restrict campaign donations.
And the reason why that hasn't been done, and look, it's a very long story, and it has to do with the judicial history of the United States over the course of the last 45 years.
But the long and short of it is that beginning in the next administration, but it's certainly not an issue just with the Republican Party, There has been a concerted effort to put dedicated corporatists on the Supreme Court that will allow corporate power to expand to the greatest extent possible.
And how do you undo that?
Well, you have to amend the Constitution.
So my point is, though, that you keep bringing up issues that are political.
And when I say, well, you actually have more control in the free market than you do on your entire political system, I mean, you know, I'm sure you and I both fairly loathe the Federal Reserve, because it actually is debt slavery that's intergenerational, that you pile up this national debt that children are born into to the tune of a million dollars or more.
I'm sure you and I find it utterly repulsive that bankster oligarchs can type whatever the fuck they want into their own bank accounts and enslave the next generation for their own predatory monetary bullshit.
Excuse my French. But we don't have any particular chance of overturning that with our rhetoric.
But if it's a bank that you don't want to do business with, you close down your account, you go to the bank across the street, assuming that the government allows one to open with its hyperregulation of the banking industry.
But you do have much more choice.
A capitalist cannot force you at the point of a gun to do anything.
But that's all the gun ever.
That's all the state ever does is pull out a gun at you.
So the idea that economic influence and incentives and disincentives that are voluntary in nature are somehow different.
It's like a smooth talker might get you might get a woman into bed voluntarily, but it's still very different from a rapist.
Well, again, it falls back on this issue of what to what extent this transaction in a quote unquote free market is really voluntary at all.
If I need to work in order to put a roof over my head, feed my children, clothe my family, and so on and so forth, then it isn't voluntary.
It isn't uncoerced.
But that's reality. That's not capitalism.
Hold on. Hold on. If I have nothing in the bank, And I have bills coming due at the end of the month and no way of making money other than going to work for somebody that might abuse me, then I would not call that a voluntary situation.
And I don't think any person really thinking about it would consider that to be voluntary either.
I think they see the inherent coercion in that situation.
Okay, so let me sort of understand this.
So this is the situation.
So someone has bills coming in, which meant that they had money at some point, right, because you can't get credit, you can't get this kind of stuff without having money.
They either haven't saved their money.
Or, you know, I mean, let's not invent true disaster scenarios, because they're so rare that we shouldn't say, okay, well, you know, once in a while, everyone gets hit by an asteroid, so we've all got to have giant suits of armor on at all times, right?
But we're in one right now.
No, hang on, hang on. No, no, let's deal with the theoretical, then we get to the practical, which I think is a great thing to do.
But someone had money, and how did they choose to spend that money?
That's a very, very important question, right?
So some people will say, I want to get a big flat-screen TV. Now, that's very nice, but unless you use it for educational videos, it's not going to add much to your human capital.
Other people say, you know, I'm going to buy a computer, I'm going to learn how to program a computer, or I'm going to go to night school and figure out some other language that might be helpful, or I'm going to go and learn accounting or business management or something like that, right?
And that's the way that you have job security is you encourage people.
First of all, you should start businesses.
If you care about workers, you should start businesses because that bids up the price of workers.
I mean, the fact that I hired over 100 people over the course of my career drove up wages incrementally to everyone else.
So I dare say I've done a little bit more for the workers than you have.
But the important thing is that you have to work on maintaining your skills and upgrading your skills.
And the fact that people need food and the fact that people need shelter, that is not a characteristic of capitalism.
That is a characteristic of reality in the fact that we need, as biological organisms, as you know, we need to consume calories in order to stay alive.
So blaming capitalism for reality seems kind of odd.
It's like yelling at gravity when you decide to jump off a cliff and say it's gravity's fault, but that's just reality.
And of course you can go and get another job.
You can start your own business.
You can move.
You can go and work for someone else.
There's so many things that you can do.
When you are resourceful and believe in yourself and all this Horatio Alger stuff, which sadly has kind of gone out of vogue, you know, when there was a recession, I weeded gardens, I took care of old people.
Like, there's so many things that you can do that you're never just dependent upon one person.
Now, with the government, you are.
So let me ask you a yes or no question.
I realize that that's kind of a loaded...
I'll do my best. Did people starve to death under feudalism?
Yes. They did?
Oh, God, yes. All the time.
Really? Peasants on estates starved during feudalism?
Oh, and in fact, one of the big problems with feudalism was because...
There was so little communications network, so few roads that were possible, especially in the rain.
You could literally have, I remember studying this in France, you could literally have a village in one area of the county that had too much food.
And you had another village that had a crop failure or some sort of locust storm or some sort of bug or whatever it was.
And they would actually be super hungry.
Some of them would starve to death during the Black Death and afterwards, the Black Plague and afterwards, there was massive waves of starvation.
So, oh yeah, it was a terrible problem.
You're talking about a specific group of people that are being affected in this particular, which are the urban trades people.
No, no, these are farms people.
Crops fail. Look, yes, crops fail.
But the bottom line about feudalism is that the system doesn't work if you don't feed the peasants.
And peasants work on farms, so they get fed.
I mean, look, I can recommend to you and any number of people listening to this, any number of books on feudalism, and talk about how it was basically at the very top of the things that needed to be done to make sure that the peasants had enough food to eat, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to do any work.
It was a system that was designed to make sure that the people at the lowest, while they had no political rights, certainly, and there could be beaten at will, and any number of other indignities that they could be subjected to, what they weren't subjected to was privation.
They weren't concerned about where their next meal was coming from, where they were going to live, and whether they were going to have clothes.
And that's a situation that was created largely by industrialization and capitalization.
Look, I hate to evoke the patron saint of socialism, Karl Marx, on this one, but I think he makes an excellent point about what industrial capitalism did in the 19th century, which is that it took away from the people on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder the ability to subsist.
Okay, look, dude, I mean, it's great to read Karl Marx, but you've got to read other things as well.
Here's something from...
Here's something. We can insult each other all that we like.
No, come on. The medieval world here.
Hold on a second here.
I don't think Dr.
Mathis was finished with what he was trying to drive at.
Okay, sorry about that. Go ahead. It's all fine and good that I read Marx or that you weeded gardens when you needed money.
But what we're not going to get anywhere is with the casting of aspersions.
There's a reason people read Marx.
People read Marx because for all of the places where he was wrong, there were observations about society that he made that were 100% right.
Marx was an important, maybe the most important, I would say, along with Weber and the religion guy.
...are the three most important sociologists of the 19th and early 20th century.
Marx recognized the conditions under which people in industrial capitalism were...
...to the extent that people did not before.
And I think that's something that you really sort of can't take away from him.
You can take away from him to the extent that you want to or need to the solutions that he suggests for that.
But I don't think that anybody really disputes the conditions that he's describing were real.
Yeah, okay. I mean, it's not an aspersion to say that you have a certainty about the food intake of the Middle Ages when you've not read anything other than Marx.
Here's an example. Hang on, no, I gave you your spot.
I'm just defending myself against the accusation of aspersion.
Let me continue. Okay, can I continue my point?
But you're not going to get away with saying that the only thing I've read about feudalism is Marx, because it's just not true.
Well, let me give you some other facts, right?
So, the medieval world was a very hungry one.
Even the biggest castles and the wealthiest lords could not afford to have enough grain to withstand a famine.
Malnutrition was always present.
It was during famines that people often resorted to killing their horses and farm animals for food, and in some towns, even cannibalism was recorded.
Such was the case in the famine of 1315 to 1315.
17. Due to Europe's growing population, enough food for everyone was only available with the best climate conditions.
A drop in temperature during the early 14th century led to a real lack of food.
Dozens of thousands died due to starvation, and some of the elderly refused to eat as a way to allow the younger population to survive.
The Great Famine extended from Scotland to the Pyrenees and from Russia to England.
In the latter, life expectancy was only 29 years, a drop of five years in the span of only two decades.
The Great Famine caused plenty of controversy, and the church was more affected than any other institution, mostly because no amount of prayer could reverse the deadly effects of the Great Famine.
Church attendance dropped during this period.
Overall, famines were relatively common during the Middle Ages, the average person being affected by three or four famines during their lifetime.
And there is a whole list here of famines of the 16th century, 14th century in France.
And this is the stuff that I studied in the following years.
This is the list of famines in the 14th century France.
1304, 1305, 1310, 1315 to 17, 1330 to 1333, 1349 to 1351, 1358 to 1360, 1371, 74 to 75, and 1390 to 91.
And so even after the Black Death famine was a constant threat.
So, you know, this is why I'm saying this is the stuff that I studied in my graduate degree.
So I'm just pointing to you to some counter information.
So I will concede to you automatically with no problem whatsoever that you can't feed people when there's no food.
But famines also occur today.
They occurred 100 years ago, they occurred 200 years ago, they've occurred before feudalism, and they occur after feudalism.
My point is that for a system like capitalism that claims to be one that provides for the overall Well, that's not my contention.
If you want to argue with Adam Smith, we're going to need a necromancer.
Let's argue with each other rather than Adam Smith.
Fine. My point is that what Marx understood was that that isn't true, that it still leaves many people behind, because it doesn't provide sufficiently for people to meet their needs beyond privation in most cases, and in some cases, not even for their privation needs.
The book, by the way, that I would recommend for anybody looking to understand Serfdom, Stephen Hook's book, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia.
It's an excellent look at the way that the economics of the feudal estate operated.
Again, I can see that when there's a famine, you can't feed people.
I mean, that's a given.
The question is that when the estates were operating on a regular basis, the peasants were always fed, they were always clothed, they always had a roof over their head.
Except for all the years that I mentioned.
But yeah, okay. When there were famines with no food.
Right. And when was the last famine in a modern capitalist economy?
In a modern capitalist economy?
I don't know. That's the point.
There was starvation in Appalachia until the 1960s on a regular basis.
Well, I wouldn't say that Appalachia is really integrated into a modern capitalist economy, and it's not because...
Oh, wait, wait, but I thought they were kind of on the land, so they had enough to eat enough themselves, right?
But come on, you've got to understand that you're not going to talk about famine occurring four to five times in someone's lifetime in a modern Western capitalist economy.
It just doesn't happen, okay?
Let's at least...
I'm there, I'm back.
Am I back? We never lost you.
Oh yeah. Yeah, I mean, let's at least, I mean, I know we've got our positions to hold and all of that, but let's at least acknowledge that we're not, oh, I'm gone, I'm back.
Knock on wood. Lordy, lordy, lordy, I gotta tell you, discord is not behaving too well.
Now he's back. Yeah, I mean, let's at least concede that there was pretty disastrous famines in the Middle Ages that do not occur in a modern capitalist economy, at least not on the average person's four or five times during their lifetime they're going to be subjected to life-threatening famines.
No, of course. I mean, we understand things like, you know, crop rotation and irrigation and, you know, ways of keeping food from rotting in silos that we didn't understand before.
There's any number of ways that we've been better able to prevent famine.
I mean, even in agricultural communities, you know, with a relatively tenuous relationship with capitalism, that's the case.
Anyway, I feel like we've gotten fairly far.
No, let me ask you this. And this is a question that I do really like to ask of socialists, right?
You know the sort of horrible flatline for 150,000 years, give or take, of human history.
You know, people surviving on...
1,200 to 15 calories a day, life expectancy.
I mean, it wasn't so bad if you got out of childhood, but, you know, half of children dying before the age of five and no capital accumulation, no modern economy, no real labor-saving devices and so on.
I guess my question is, I mean, 200 years, give or take, right?
I mean, things really did change.
And I completely understand that the aesthetics, so to speak, of the Industrial Revolution were ghastly.
I mean, you've got soot-stained kids going up chimneys and working 16 hours a day and all of that.
And that's brutal and so on.
Of course... The life expectancy of children did go up, and children did live longer because they weren't dying out in the countryside of various accidents, illnesses, ailments, famines, and so on.
But what do you think changed 200-odd years ago that birthed the modern world?
I mean, my answer is the free market, and there's lots to it, but where does the socialist, or I wouldn't say the socialist, I'm going to debate with you, not some abstract guy, But what's your answer as to what changed so much, so foundationally that we have so much wealth now?
Well, I mean, I think for one thing, there's an enormous influx of wealth that came as a result of colonialism.
I'm sorry, you just cut out there.
Could you just repeat that? Sure, sure.
Can you hear me now? Yeah. Yeah, there was an enormous influx of wealth that came into Europe as a direct result of colonialism.
That was a major contributor there.
If I had to identify a single factor that I thought was decisive, that would be up there.
Sorry to interrupt, but colonialism and predation on other countries had begun occurring all throughout human history.
You can't just say that there was none until 200 years ago or 300 years ago.
That can't be a causal factor because every country takes over every other country or every region all throughout human history.
What else? Well, but it isn't quite that simple.
I mean, we can't really compare Assyrian colonialism, or Hellenic colonialism, or even the Roman Empire for that matter, with the kind of imperialism that went on beginning in 1492, because you have essentially sides, for lack of a better term, that are so grossly mismatched in terms of technical ability, so that there really isn't a contest in terms of who's going to dominate.
That's point number one. Point number two, as you frequently point out in your I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry you have cut out again.
Could you just repeat that? Okay.
I was talking about disease being a decisive factor in eradicating the population.
So, you're still with me?
Sure, yeah, yeah. Okay, great.
And then, you know, direct compulsion to slavery and things, you know, becoming directly involved in those people.
To survive. It becomes a pure wealth extraction device rather than what colonialism was pursued for in antiquity.
And even to a certain extent the Romans, certainly there was colonialism done by the Romans for the extraction of wealth, but that was by and large a private enterprise.
A lot of people forget that Caesar, when he called, was a private citizen, a private army.
And, you know, didn't go into politics until after, basically, he had done his conquest.
For most of history, most of recent security rather than...
So I don't think that you can compare colonialism in antiquity...
Sorry.
I don't think you can compare...
Did we lose stuff again?
No, I'm still here. Okay.
I don't think you can compare colonialism and antiquity with colonialism beginning in 1492 because of the sheer amount of wealth extraction that took place, the sheer amount of expropriation and subjugation of the colonized population.
There was no Hellenistic ethos that went on in colonialism when the Spaniards The Dutch and the British and the French came into the Western Hemisphere.
We weren't going there to teach everybody Greek, and now we are going to subjugate these people to the absolute best of our ability.
Thank God that disease takes care of most of them.
The rest are going to put this silver mine here and work them, you know, 16, 18 hours a day, and whatever they put is back.
That's a new situation.
Well, but I mean, of course, the ancient Greeks and Romans, as just about every other culture did, when they conquered a territory, they took the women as concubines and the men as slaves.
That's not what happened, say, in India under the British, although I'm not a fan of colonialism at all.
And I fail to see how the transfer of gold or silver creates wealth.
Gold and silver are a mark of wealth.
And you were talking about silver mines and so on, but Spain was destroyed economically by the inflow of gold from the New World.
And 400-year depression because everybody fled the hyperinflation that came from the excess of gold.
So simply transferring gold doesn't create wealth.
Simply transferring gold will not create wealth, but having a body of slave labor that you are able to use to now grow cotton in a climate that is not available to people in Britain, or the Netherlands for that matter, to ship that back and forth by corporations that are protected by the governments of those countries can then now create Markets for textiles that didn't previously exist,
that provides opportunity for people to make money that just didn't exist.
Now, you know, it has all the bang-on effects that increased availability of companies creates.
Do you think that slavery is economically efficient?
I mean, we obviously recognize that it's immoral, but do you think that slavery is more efficient than, say, a modern combine harvester?
Real quick, before you go into that, just a heads up for you guys.
We've got 15 minutes left before we move to the 30-minute Q&A. But go ahead, Doctor.
Yeah, I honestly couldn't tell you.
I mean, is it more efficient?
I mean, I guess the combine harvester is more efficient.
What's the trade-off in terms of the money that's spent by the plantation owner?
It's difficult to say because you didn't have...
It didn't have a whole lot of overlap in those periods where you had combine harvesters and chattel slavery, right?
So it's a kind of, it's not exactly an apples to apples.
Well, but you do have modern ways of comparing these things.
I mean, there are tens of millions of slaves still in India that are producing crops and so on, and they don't seem to be very good at competing with sort of modern high-tech farming methods.
I mean, you and I, we're using this technology to have this conversation.
We didn't walk to each other's house through a swamp, so to speak, and then ride it down and then send it off in carrier pigeons and smoke signals in the Pony Express, right?
The question of the transfer of wealth It does not explain how we became so wealthy because it wasn't like there was 10 trillion dollars in India that was sitting there worth of everything and then the British or whoever just came over and transferred that 10 trillion dollars.
This kind of forcible transfer of wealth tends to be a net negative for the economy as a whole and certainly the average British person paid higher taxes, had fewer freedoms and lower wages because of colonialism.
And so again this saying well The West became wealthy through colonialism.
Again, it's one of these things.
I mean, the Indians were constantly pillaging each other and raiding each other, and the maps of the local countries were constantly shifting as people grab and stole resources from each other.
The gathering of slaves, I mean, as you know, the blacks in Africa were constantly enslaving each other, as were the indigenous populations of North America.
You know, if slavery and exploitation and theft and violence create wealth, why is it that when property rights and the general calming down rule of law began to occur that that's when we began to get wealthier?
Because that's not how things are really done in the present, at least in the West, to a large degree.
I mean, there's debt slavery and there's money printing and government control of currency and interest rates.
It's not really part of the free market.
But to me saying, well, I don't know, the British were like, what, especially savage and that's how they became wealthier?
Well, it's hard to think of groups more savage than some of the indigenous populations of various places around the world.
I get a whole speaking tour in Australia talking about this.
So if savagery is the mark of wealth...
I don't know. It's kind of tough.
And since the British Empire worked very hard to ban slavery, not just in the British Empire, but around the world, like Britain went into a multi 150 years worth of debt to buy out slaves.
And the end of slavery did to a large degree coincide with the birth of the wealth of the modern world.
And because, you know, if you have slaves, you don't have the same incentive to buy labor saving devices because it reduces the value of Well, I do think that you're underselling the extent to which the British Empire relied on the mailed fist in order to get what it wanted.
I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen countries that...
It has not invaded, but it's, you know, it's fewer than 10 countries.
You know, so if you get some idea of the extent to which the British imposed itself through sheer military might, I mean, let's face it, in the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the end of World War II, the British Navy is the single most powerful military force on the planet.
It had to be. The necessity is the mother of the nation.
need to control the season viable economy so on and so forth you know the British did that on steroids look I mean it's not like it's like yes I mean yeah they go in and they do some things that that hadn't been done in these countries before but but there's a whole sort of underlying more question about first of all I mean the underlying about right there hey but B I mean I you're so sorry can you go back
You cut out for me at least a little bit here.
Dr. Mathis, I'll go back about 5-10 seconds.
Yeah, I mean the main point that I'm making is that the British Empire relied on an enormous amount of force.
Allow me to briefly give you an anecdote just of a conversation I had with somebody, not Stefan, on Twitter, I don't know, a couple of years ago, about this guy defending British rule.
And talking about how the British came and they brought free trade and this, that, and the other.
How wonderful it is that the British had set up Hong Kong.
And I said, you know, they set up free trade using the single most powerful military force in history up until that point.
You can call that free trade if you want, but it seems like there's an awful amount of coercion setting that up.
I mean, that says nothing about the steps that the British underwent to get into China in the first place, you know, enslaving generations of I think you and I are going to have to disagree over the extent to which modern colonialism,
which is to say colonialism beginning around Transcontinental colonialism was really a game in terms of being a wealth extraction enterprise.
Why do you refer to colonialism as a British phenomenon?
I find that... Do you know what the most bloody...
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
What was the most bloody conquest in human history?
Do you know? You're going to say it was the Mughal conquest of India, but I would actually counter that and say it was probably the Mongol conquest of China.
Okay, so if brutal conquest and wealth extraction was the basis of modern wealth, then why were those two civilizations not enriched to the point of an industrial revolution?
Well, for a couple of reasons.
First of all, in both of our cases, in facing the Mughals or China facing the Mongols, what you don't have is essentially a population of sitting ducks who are poorly equipped to fight back, who don't have immunity to the diseases that were...
things like that.
The second point, I guess, is that because of the amount of...
And by the way, for the Mongols, they were largely not sedentary.
So the idea that they were going to set a business enterprise was kind of secondary to their thinking.
For the Mughals, it obviously was.
But it required a tremendous amount of expenditure to keep order.
I mean, it doesn't stop when the last Indian waves the white flag when the Mughals come into India.
That's a very different situation from when Native Americans are It's just a very different game that's being played.
I mean, China was... Well, it's not really a game, right?
We're talking about the Muslims in the invasion of India.
The Muslims killed between 60 and 80 million people.
I mean, that's not a game.
And if you're going to talk about brutality as a source of wealth, why are they not the wealthiest culture in the world?
Why is India not the wealthiest culture?
No, well, the Muslims who invaded, who slaughtered 60 to 80 million people in India.
At the time, they were.
Have you seen the Taj Mahal?
Oh, come on. The Taj Mahal is just one of the many palaces throughout history that did not...
It's like saying that you had an industrial revolution in ancient Egypt because they had the pyramids.
No, but what I'm saying is that you're not counting...
You're not considering, rather, the level of wealth that the locals actually had.
I mean, for most of recorded history, China was the wealthiest country in the world.
You know that, right? I mean, it was by far the wealthiest.
Because it produced goods that other countries didn't have.
And so it was able to charge large amounts of money for those goods.
Now, that wealth doesn't change the fact that China was the wealthiest country in the world for all those years, that the British Empire was far wealthier in the 19th century, does it?
Sorry, that what was far wealthier?
That the British Empire was far wealthier in the 19th century.
But the question is, why?
Why was the British Empire wealthier?
If you're going to say it's brutality, well, the Muslim conquest of India was far more brutal.
And again, you're talking about the invasion of China as well.
So if you're going to say that it was brutal colonialism that was the source of the wealth of the modern world, you have significant problems because there was massive amounts of invasions and conquerings and slaughterings and so on that did not generate the modern world.
Well, sure, but it...
Well, again, there are other factors to be considered.
I mean, just to go back several minutes in our conversation, I would say, by the way, the other decisive factor in how things change other than colonialism, although I will continue to say colonialism is the major factor.
The other one is the Renaissance.
I mean, just the influx of a massive amount of scientific knowledge that Europe can build, basically, that begins with...
To sort of cross over throughout the rest of the continent.
And then the Reformation gives that an enormous boost in terms of the ability to separate them from church power.
I'm sorry, that cut up for me.
Could you repeat the last couple sentences there?
Sure, sure. Just saying that beyond colonialism, which I will nevertheless continue to contend, was the decisive factor.
I would say that the Renaissance and the Reformation are also major contributors to what happens in terms of the creation of wealth in Europe.
I mean, I guess we would say that probably take concrete form in the 80s.
That that is a direct result of scientific knowledge via the Renaissance and the ability to separate from church power and to a lesser extent from state power as a result of the … And what are the other cultures that you would consider equal in brutality to European culture in history?
I didn't say that European cultures were brutal.
I said that European colonial Okay, so what other colonial events throughout history would you consider equal to or greater in terms of brutality?
I'm just wondering if it seems kind of Eurocentric, like every time you talk about colonialism, you're talking about the British Empire, which is just one of the hundreds of empires throughout human history.
I'm sorry, it looks like we got a weird reboot off here.
Oh, bugger. I'm back. It's all right.
I just, I'm getting this weird reboot off.
It just seems a bit Eurocentric, like every time you talk about colonialism, you're talking about the British Empire, and every time you talk about markets, you're talking about European.
It just seems kind of Eurocentric, and I'm just kind of curious what other predations or invasions would you consider would validate or invalidate the thesis you have, that it's brutal invasions that help generate wealth?
Well, it's not the invasions in and of themselves that create the wealth.
It's the brutality of the invasion creates the subjugation that makes the extraction of wealth possible.
Yeah, yeah, I get it. I get it.
No, it's not a minor point.
It's not that brutality creates wealth.
You can't oversimplify that.
If you do, it doesn't make any sense.
No, but you understand that the logic then would be that if, say, the Europeans, the Christians, the whites, or whatever, if, let's say, the British Empire created by far the most wealth, and if brutality is key to the creation of wealth, then the logic would be that the British Empire must have been by far the most brutal, right? Well, no, because again, you're hinging all that on this idea that the brutality creates the wealth.
I mean, you can create wealth without brutality.
I'm just saying that in this particular case, brutality was necessary to create the subjugation by which wealth extraction became possible.
No, no, I get all of that. You're not hearing what I'm saying.
Okay. So if brutality...
Let's just... We can do the shorthand.
I get that, you know, you go punch a tree, you don't get a watermelon.
I get all of that. I get it's around subjugation, the transfer of blah, blah, blah, right?
But if the modern world is staggeringly wealthy, like 20, 30 times wealthier at least than the Middle Ages, even if we just count raw GDP, right?
So if it is brutality that is the key for the creation of wealth, then...
But it isn't.
Okay. However you want to phrase it.
I mean, if it's key to the subjugation that allows you to blah, blah, blah.
But the brutality is the part that you're talking about, right?
Right. So if the modern world that comes out of the European tradition, if the modern world is 20 to 30 times more wealthy, Then it must have been 20 to 30 times more aggressive in its exploitation of others.
But some significant degree greater than all others.
Certainly it was more exploitative, absolutely.
More exploitative than say the 60 to 80 million people brutalized, subjugated and enslaved by the Muslim invasion.
No, that's why I also included enslaved, because you also can't enslave people without killing at least some of them usually, right?
I mean, because they subjugate themselves because of the threat of death.
So you understand I'm working with more than one dimension here, right?
Because this is my concern, right?
If the modern world's wealth is based upon exploitation, then...
The British, let's say, must have been by far the most brutal colonialists throughout all of human history because they created the most or got the most wealth, so to speak, right?
But there are other...
Not necessarily. Not necessarily.
No, no. You said the brutality and the subjugation was key to the wealth generation.
It was, but that doesn't make it worse than others.
You have to...
Then there's another factor.
There has to be another factor then.
There... Yeah.
I mean, another factor, for instance, like disease.
Like, it was not necessary to kill 60 million people because a large number...
Sorry.
I mean, I'm not sure what you're asking me to concede here.
I mean, the fact of the matter is that I pointed out that the British used brutality in the first place because you were kind of gilding the lily and that they hadn't.
Wait, I said the British didn't use brutality?
No, you just kind of said that they had, you implied that their touch was more gentle than I thought it was appropriate to suggest.
Wait, now I implied something?
Wait, I'm not sure what that means.
What did I say? I don't know that I can say it any more clearly than I already did.
Well, no, you're not quoting me.
You're just saying I implied something that you heard in your head.
Yeah, you did. What did I imply?
You implied that the British had established a certain standard of living for itself and for the world sort of at large and that it had done so in a, as I said before, in a less brutal way than I... A less brutal way than what?
than I thought was appropriate to state.
I felt that the way that you framed the way that Britain was taken.
Right.
Now, this is really illuminating for me, and I don't mean this sarcastically.
This is genuinely like mind-blowing to me, right?
Because I've always tried to figure out this unique hostility that socialists have towards the British, the Europeans, you know, happen to be my ancestors, neither here nor there, right?
But I've always been trying to sort of figure out, like, I don't talk colonialism, it's always...
The British in India or the British in North America or whatever.
It's never anybody else, right?
But now I get it.
Now it's crystal clear to me that it's because if wealth comes from exploitation and Europe became very wealthy, it's because Europe I know I'm oversimplifying, but that's the basic drive.
And I think that's where we fundamentally disagree.
That Europe became wealthy because it allowed for the free market and colonialism was...
I mean, colonialism was wrong.
It was destructive to the British population as a whole who got regularly dragged against their will onto ships to enforce the rulers' wishes.
It was bad for the free market because you had, as you know, the British East India Company, all these capital charters from the governments, there's no free trade and so on.
But all of these things occurred under a larger perspective, a larger movement, which was More free trade and more free markets domestically.
And every power throughout human history had had its colonialism.
If it could get away with it, it had its predations and its enforcements of particular trade routes on foreign countries.
That's a common all throughout history.
You can see this, of course, all throughout ancient Chinese history, Indian history, you name it, right?
And so to me, the difference is not the predation.
Not the exploitation, which occurred all throughout human history.
I mean, the serfs were unbelievably exploited.
They were bought and sold with the land like cattle, right?
I mean, and slaves were exploited, and the Incans were exploited.
I get all of that, right?
But all of that was occurring simultaneously to the growth of some pretty important aspects I remember doing research for a novel many years ago and reading a book published in the 18th century.
I think it was 1752 or something like that.
And it was one of these weird kind of half oldie time Shakespearean language.
England's treasure by foreign traffic.
You know, this idea that if you open up free trade, that England will become wealthier.
And yeah, they opened up free trade pretty brutally.
I mean, thank goodness that they did for Hong Kong, if not for the rest of China, because Hong Kong was a better place to be in the Second half of the 20th century than China was.
But to me, it is all of this stuff is going on, which is bad, and is a leftover of history of exploitation and colonialism and predation and enslavement and brutality that was all throughout human history.
But what did allow for the wealth to generate, which did not occur anywhere else in human history, was the growth of some aspects of the domestic free market.
And if those had been allowed to grow faster, I think that the wealth would have been generated faster.
And colonialism, by its definition, is a violation of the free market and of free trade because it's government coercion.
It's funded on debt.
It's funded on... Something even worse than slavery in general, which is the forced enlistment of military personnel and so on.
So I don't really have a question here.
I just like – I finally really get this exploitation creates wealth.
Well, the British were the wealthiest and therefore they must have exploited the most.
That to me is really illuminating and that's like a plug in my head that really does help me make sense of this position.
So, real quick, before you respond, Doctor, we're in our Q&A time here.
I was going to ask if you guys wanted to do closing statements.
If you're fine with it, Stefan, that sounded close to a closing statement.
If you're okay with it, can we have Doctor Mathis respond and then just go into questions?
Is that alright with you? Stefan?
I'm sorry, I've lost audio somehow.
Let me just see if I can get it back.
We got you, Ben. So I was just asking, is it right with you if Dr.
Mathis responds to what you said, and then we move into the Q&A? Oh, he can't hear us?
No. Hmm.
So I'm reaching towards his hip.
He's got some fancy gear.
Sorry about that. I got a plug in the back.
Somehow got disconnected. I do apologize for that.
I'm back. Okay, so yeah, I was just asking, are you alright if we have Dr.
Mathis respond and then we move on to the Q&A? I mean, the main thing that I would say about this notion that Stefan just put forward is that it feels very much like wanting to eat one's cake and have it too.
That, on the one hand, free trade is great as long as you disregard these other things that happen within the context of free trade, which, by the way, aren't free trade.
Right? I mean, so free trade, I guess, in theory is great, but we don't really have any way to tell because when was there free trade where there weren't all these other sort of exploitive things being undertaken by, I don't know, I don't care whether it's the British or the Dutch, or for that matter, you know, the Japanese did a lot of colonizing over the course of the late 19th and 20th century as well.
Of course, they weren't doing it for the sake of free markets.
They didn't even claim it, but certainly the British and the Dutch absolutely did.
And of course, America's been doing it since the end of World War II, making largely the same argument.
What I don't see is this kind of free trade argument being made where these excesses of exploitation and expropriation aren't also happening.
And I guess it sort of brings me back to the point I made An hour and a half ago, which is that we can talk about things in theory and we can talk about things in practice.
It seems more useful to me to talk about things in practice I know where my preferences lie in theory, but I also understand that reality is a different set of circumstances.
I'm sorry, I guess, that we didn't get into me getting to defend Antifa and get Stefan to bend to my will and admit that Antifa is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I was really hoping that we would be able to do that.
Maybe we'll get to it in the Q&A. Or next time.
But I will say that, obviously, I remain sort of convinced of my position.
And I think, ultimately, if I had to communicate a couple of core principles that I wanted to get across tonight, it is first and foremost that there is a significant amount of coercion and violence and force that goes It is every bit as insidious as when that force comes from government as it is when it comes from a boss or a factory owner or a capitalist or a banker or whomever.
And I think that the sooner that we recognize that, the better off everybody is going to be.
And that second of all, What socialism, at least in terms of how I understand it, which is the workers having greater control over the means of production, means is greater democracy, greater say over what happens in the workplace.
If the restraint of trade comes at the hands of government, then again, at least it's in a democracy that is not vulturized by corporations and corporate power.
I have the vote that can give me the ability to exercise some of that power, whereas in a workplace operating under capitalism, I don't have that right.
And I think that that's a situation that lends itself inherently to exploitation, and therefore it adds to the problem rather than subtracts from it.
And that's pretty much it.
All right, should we get to our Q&A? Yeah, so we've got another 20 minutes left here.
First, obviously, thanks for coming on.
I hope we can discuss this more again.
I really would like to hear something.
If you guys want to have a talk again just about Antifa, I think now would be a fantastic time with the protest to have that.
But jumping into questions, what you guys were talking about, for roughly the last 30 minutes, I have an odd way of looking at these things, and maybe I think it might be able to help clear things up here.
Obviously, there's multiple reasons for why the West was the first to industrialize.
Dr. Mathis, you mentioned the renaissance and the downstream effects of that.
I'm kind of curious, if we talk about colonization and hard imperialism, what percentage would you give it?
This is where both Stefan and Dr.
Mathis, would you say it's like 20, 50, 80% responsible for the wealth in the West?
Well, for me, it would be a minus.
I mean, that colonialism was a drag on the wealth of the West because forced reallocation of resources is – I mean, morality aside, we all get that it's wrong to initiate the use of force.
Well, maybe not Antifa, but it is a net negative to the economy in the same way that rape is a net negative to love and theft is a net negative to owning things.
It is – A brutal destruction of wealth to steal from people, to enslave people, to take things from them.
I mean, this is something that Churchill pointed out after the First World War with this sort of disastrous Versailles Treaty.
He said, okay, well, we can go and take a million shoes from Germany and dump them on British markets, but so what?
That just puts all these British shoemakers out of work, and then we don't have any shoemakers when we run out of German shoes.
You know, the transfer of wealth, particularly the forced transfer of wealth.
And I have to Have to, have to, have to.
Really draw the clear line between something that I don't think the good doctor would agree with me on, but I'm very, very clear on this, at least in my own mind, I want to be with the audience, that putting a gun to someone's head is not the same as offering them a job.
I mean, the fact that I need to say this kind of stuff is kind of odd.
Offering them a job, not offering them a job is different.
a woman out on a date is different from rape and asking someone to lend you five bucks is different from robbing them.
The initiation of the use of force is separate and distinct from offering a job or firing someone or not firing someone and so on.
These things have influence and they have a big effect on your life, but the only way that you can solve voluntary interactions like having a job or not having a job is by saying to people, "Well, you're not allowed to fire these people." Or if you try to pay them less than what we think they're worth, I'm going to put a gun to your head until you agree.
You can't solve economic inequality without massive political inequality, giving a small group of highly corrupt people the right to point guns at millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people and tell them what they have to do.
In order to stay out of jail, and what the state is, what do they do?
They ask, they tell, and then they make.
They ask you to do something, they tell you to do something, and then they make you do something, and if you resist them, they will shoot you down.
They will kill you, or they'll grab you, put you in a jail where you could get raped.
So the idea that somehow a voluntary economic interaction, which is kind of interesting because, you know, I mean, I assume that the good doctors have his place in academia, which is paid for by taxpayer dollars and has a nice union ring around it that's forced into compliance by the force of law and so on.
But no, voluntary economic transactions, however desirable or unpleasant they may be in the moment, are not at all In the same moral category as pointing a gun to someone's hand and demand that they bend the knee or you put a lead bullet through their head.
Well, so I didn't think that we were going to be returning to this topic.
So I'll answer the question first, which is that I think that you and I had put at a bare minimum of 50% in terms of how to what extent is colonialism decisive in creating, quote unquote, the modern world.
I wouldn't put it probably higher than 75, but it's in that range.
I would say 60, maybe.
I don't know. I mean, I'm an adjunct professor.
I get paid $3,500 a class.
I have to work a full-time job.
You know, when we began negotiating this whole debate, I pointed out to Stephan that my schedule is rather hectic because I work 60 hours a week, six days a week.
So, yeah, I'm not gaining anything from a union.
I'm pretty much at the beck and call.
Wait, but are you being forced?
Well, no, no, no, wait a minute.
Now, I've let you filibuster, so...
Oh, it's filibustering when I do a speech.
Okay. Yeah, it is.
No, but frankly, if I don't have that money, then my life is going to go a little bit sideways.
And that really kind of is the point that I've been trying to make before.
And again, I'll just repeat the point that I made before, which is you seem to have a big problem seeing that economic power can be as violent, if not more violent, than political power.
And I don't see any fundamental difference between allowing somebody to starve and shooting them in the head.
I think the end result, that the other person is dead, means that they're basically functionally equivalent.
Alright, well let's go on with Q&A. Alright, another question we had here from the user Braff.
They want to know, for both of you guys, what is a system, by this I assume they mean like a regime, empire, which was the most brutal in history?
Well, I would say just about all of them except the modern world.
You know, again, I did these speeches talking about the indigenous populations of Australia and New Zealand.
I mean, you've got cannibalism, you've got enslavement, you've got rape as a weapon of war.
This was common. Throughout almost all of human history, and it was limited only by feral imaginations and the technology of the time.
You have genocides occurring among the native tribes in North America as well.
They find mass graves.
You've got the mass slaughtering of children in Incan rituals.
You had brutalizations, of course, that occurred in all the wars of the ancient Greek and Roman world.
So, yeah, I mean, it's one bloody cavalcade of psychotic violence throughout most of human history.
And this began to diminish with – I certainly would agree with the Renaissance, with the Enlightenment, with the Age of Reason.
There was some tamping down of the more brutal aspects of our demonic natures.
And we began to see the first sort of buds of peace and reason coming through nowadays.
Now, whether this is because our philosophy certainly had some effect, whether it's because there was a brutal process in England and other places in the West where the most violent was simply hung and put to death, and we know that Almost every aspect of personality is dictated or has strong influences from genetics.
So whether that had something to do with that, whether it's because 300 years of religious warfare took out the most fundamentalist and literal-minded and brutal people in the West, it's a combination of lots of complicated things.
But we did finally get some sense of morality that extended beyond particular tribalism or in-group preferences to the point where people said owning other human beings are wrong, even if they're a different race, even if they're A different religion.
It's immoral to do that.
And some of the colonialism was, of course, brutal.
Some of it was driven by, I'm sure what Dr.
Mathis knows, the white man's burden, this idea that, you know, spreading market Christianity around the world was, you know, the wise course.
And it was a disastrous course, of course.
It didn't transfer, of course, particularly well.
And the brutalities were horrible.
So... I think that it's sort of like which was the worst of the worst throughout most of human history.
I really choose to focus on the steps forward over the past couple of centuries that we've managed to make to the point where, you know, Dr.
Mathis and I can have this great challenging conversation.
Neither of us are pistols at dawn kind of guys.
And, you know, we can have this nice conversation where we can really extract some interesting arguments.
I've had my mind expanded and really understand his position a lot better.
Man, that's some civilized stuff.
That is some civilized stuff.
And the more we can keep that going, the more chance we get to hang on to this crazy little gig called Civilization.
I would agree with a lot of what Stefan just said, actually.
It's hard to quantify one form of brutality as being better or worse than another.
I think that said, that point's stimulated.
You can find a couple of notable exceptions over the course of the 20th century.
I would have to say I would go with the old favorites, basically.
I mean, I would say that if you want to look at truly brutal regimes, I would have to go with the Nazis on the one hand, just because of their sort of dedication to eradicating entire groups of people on the basis of their non-voluntary membership groups.
And on the other side, I'd have to go with the camera.
I mean, when you have to be invaded by other communist countries to stop what you're doing, you're really kind of setting a real high mark for yourself in terms of just sheer brutality.
But thankfully, those are more, I think, informed by their ideology than by the extent of their brutality, unfortunately.
We have this tendency to want to rank brutality on the basis of sheer numbers, and I'm not sure if that's sensible, really, frankly, moral.
I think that We can look at current regimes.
We can look at the one that I live in, and I would say that, comparatively speaking, it's a far more regime than the one that Stefan lives in, which is, comparatively speaking, a more regime than, you know, Bhutan.
But in terms of, you know, if you were to chalk it up to sheer body counts, You would probably come to different conclusions.
To me, the ideology being a driver has some value and numbers obviously have some value, but those two examples I gave you are really kind of the standouts in terms of just regimes that are just fundamentally by brutality and operate on that basis more than anything else.
And it is kind of tricky with all the modern machinery of brutality that has been invented.
It's kind of tough to compare, you know, what people could have done in history if they'd had access to this kind of brutal technology that's around these days.
Sorry, go ahead. Did you want another question?
So there's a couple more...
I'm sorry, is there something else you want to say on this before we move on, Doctor?
No, I think we're good. Okay.
So the next question we've got here is from CableLock.
They had a question for Dr.
Mathis. They wanted to know if you could explain more about the anarcho-side of anarcho-socialism.
And they add, how do you theorize preventing harmful wealth and power differences from appearing if everyone is left to do the best they can?
So, it's a good question.
So, I mean, in terms, I wouldn't call it anarcho-socialism.
I would call it anarcho-syndicalism, which is probably more of a semantic thing than anything else.
I mean, means of production, and it's...
It's distinguished from state socialism, a situation like the Soviet Union, for instance.
The Soviet Union, the state, claims to be representing the workers, peasants, and soldiers, and therefore it centralizes the means of production to itself and claims to be then administering the means of production on behalf of the workers, peasants, and soldiers.
And obviously the extent to which that actually happens, your mileage may vary.
In a more anarchist environment, and here you would want to look at the ideas of people like Bakunin or Proudhon.
Noam Chomsky, for that matter, is probably the most important person talking about these ideas right now, and David Graver, the anthropologist as well.
In fact, I would really strongly recommend David Graver's work for pretty much anybody.
But they're talking about basically taking a trade union kind of format and having workers-controlled means of productions through those organizations.
To what extent That being the case, is it then possible to prevent corruption?
I think that the Sort of the safety valve there is that when you place the means of production in the hands of workers at the level of a union or syndicate, you are at least erring on the side of democracy being more possible as a way of providing a check on unchecked power,
on corruption and on other kinds of depredations that we, unfortunately, you know, we've seen them in unions as well as in corporations and every other kind of concentrated I mean, one of the reasons why anarchists are anarchists is because, you know, we don't think that it's a good idea that power be centralized.
So keeping it as diffused as possible is the best way to avoid the inherent problems that come along with centralizing power.
Yeah, just imagine that anarchists are Christians and power is Satan.
That's the closest I can probably get to it.
Yeah, agreed, basically.
Alright, so I'm a little bit confused where this is going.
Maybe you'll understand what they're trying to say better here, Stefan.
There's a question for you from Stargate Monkey.
Does Stefan know that the debt from ending slavery, the crippled economy, went to paying off the slave owners up until 2015?
Yeah, yeah.
So the British, this was a genuine moral crusade.
And I do think one of the greatest moral crusades, if not the greatest moral crusade in history, was the British focus, which came out of its Christian ethics and its Enlightenment ideals.
It was the first worldwide attempt to end the practice, the international practice of slavery.
And yes, the British went into enormous debt in the early 19th century to buy and free slaves.
The British poured a huge amount of blood and treasure into stopping slave ships and releasing slaves and freeing slaves.
I've got a whole, well, I guess you've got to find out in BitChute or Library at the moment because it used to be on YouTube.
But, you know, hey, the British have their faults.
I grew up there. I get all of that.
But as far as, like, one of the most incredible things that has ever been done to move humanity forward, however imperfect it may have been, however it was done by the state, and however corrupt aspects of it may have been, you've still got to give props where props is due, that one of the reasons why the modern world is largely, not, of course, exclusively, but largely free of slavery is the result of The British Empire.
And it's always something you sort of think about.
Okay, so like two million white Europeans were taken by the Muslims into slavery, which was like five times the amount of blacks that were taken to America.
And if you were a slave, this is kind of my way of thinking about it.
It's not much of an argument, but I think it's an interesting perspective.
You say, hey, well, if I was a slave, would I be happy about the British Empire?
And I got to think that the answer is yeah.
Because it's better to not be a slave in most circumstances than it is to be a slave.
And there was a huge amount of work done to end slavery.
It was a moral crusade, came out of Chesterton and other people.
A lot of Quakers, of course, the whole abolitionistic movement.
And it gives you a sense of just how long these things can take, right?
I mean, it started in the 18th century and...
Yeah, I think.
But nonetheless, it still has, I think it's one of the great achievements, one of the great moral achievements in history was the focus on ending slavery.
And I just, it just bothers me a little bit when people overstep that and just focus on colonialism, because I think you've got to have a view of both sides.
Alright, so we've got two minutes left here.
I know, Dr. Mathis, you said you've got to go at 10 sharp, so I'll just ask two more questions, one for each of you, and I'll ask Dr.
Mathis first. So when talking about capitalism and socialism...
The so-called third positionism always is lurking in the back of the mind because of historical context.
And Dr. Mathis, you wrote about the Turner Diaries.
Do you think that fascism is on the rise in the West?
And if so, what is fascism?
So that's a lot, and I'm going to try to give you as complete a picture of this as I can.
So a lot of different opinions about what fascism is, but there is this idea within the study of fascism that fascist minimum.
What do you have that makes something fascism that is lacking in other right-wing authoritarianism that isn't fascism?
And the answers are basically two things.
First of all, anti-Marxism And the other one is what Roger Griffin called palingenetic ultranationalism.
It's the idea that not only are we ultranationalists, and that is almost exclusively an ethnic nationalist rather than a civic nationalism, but that it's a nationalism that claims to be re...
Reclaiming an ancient glorious past.
So the Nazis called themselves the Third Reich.
That's recalling the First Reich of the Holy Roman Empire, the Second Reich of the German Empire.
Mussolini, he calls on the Romans as a way of calling up a great Italian past.
Never mind that Italy and the Roman Empire are obviously very different polities, very different forms of government, very different times and places, and so on.
If you have authoritarian, anti-communist, Ultranationalism, basically that's fascism.
Is it rising?
Yeah, it's definitely rising.
Now, there are very few cases that I would say you can identify That I would sort of unqualifiedly say is outright fascism.
But I mean, I'm beginning to feel in many of these cases, like if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck, right?
I mean, talk about Orban in Hungary, where there is sort of open attacks on minorities, whether Roma or Romanians for that matter, and Hungary or Jews, obviously, there's a perennial favorite, moving in an authoritarian direction by now closing down their parliament, and relying moving in an authoritarian direction by now closing down their parliament, and relying very heavily on anti-left-wing rhetoric as a way of mobilizing a right-wing, sort of more populist
You can see it to a lesser extent.
I mean, Hungary is probably right now the prime example of where it's happening in Europe.
It's, you know, look, I know I'm going to get in touch with Stefan for saying this, but, you know, when Trump says, make America great again, he is engaging in a form of pale and genetic ultra-nationalism.
When he is whipping up his base using attacks on communism, quote unquote, however, sort of poorly defined and And delineated.
He is, you know, and I don't, by the way, think that maybe he's personally fascist so much as he's sort of playing by the guidebook.
Because after all, you know, if it didn't, then wouldn't have had fascism for a solid 20 years in Europe in the previous century.
But, you know, it's difficult to look at the situations of growing authoritarianism in Brazil, in Hungary, to a lesser extent in the United States, but, you know, again we're Moving in an uncomfortable direction for me.
In India, in the Philippines, you see these regimes have some certain things in common.
Attacks on minorities, attacks on the left, moving away from democracy, and a very strong sort of call to national pride.
Those are all hallmarks of fascism.
Basically there. One of the things that I would say is most dangerous is this kind of tendency to paint with a broad brush the left, to say that there's functionally no difference between Social Democrats and Communists, for instance, is to really, not only to really sort of grossly miss the point, A, but B, and more importantly, is to play a very dangerous game.
Because what you are doing in characterizing the left in that way is you are pushing away the possibility of a compromise with people on the left who are willing to negotiate and are instead pushing the left into those positions that are radical ones.
This is what we saw in Europe in the 1920s and 30s.
And obviously the results weren't good.
One way of understanding World War II, particularly on the Eastern Front, is to see it as a showdown between the forces of socialism and the forces of nationalism.
And one of the reasons why that became possible was because democracy in the center was abandoned.
And it was abandoned at least in part because of this push to characterize all of the left as inherently Disloyal, untrue, not part of us, not among us.
The slogan of the Nazis against their primary political opponent during the last days of the Republic, the Social Democratic Party of Germany was, and it rhymes in German, was, who are the traitors, the Social Democrats?
I mean, the Social Democrats are the people who had basically put down the Communist Rebellion in 1919.
These were not communists by any stretch of the imagination, yet the idea that because they were socialists, they were disloyal, had to be eradicated from the nation.
This is a dangerous, dangerous game.
And calling people who are, you know, calling Democrats who are to the right of Eisenhower, quote-unquote, far left, plays directly into that same series of circumstances.
Anyway, I hope I answered the question, because that was kind of more than I meant to say when I started saying it.
No, I think it was a good answer.
And so last question, and then we'll close up here.
I'm going to get you over while you're doing that.
Okay. So if we don't, I don't know if he's had enough, but if you are had enough, thanks for coming on, Dr.
Mathis. Really appreciate it.
Good conversation.
And thank you, Stefan. Good night.
Right. So, last question, and we'll close up here.
This is for Stefan from Lil Bill.
So, obviously, with the wounds still fresh from Susan Wojcicki, what is next for you?
What are your plans moving forward?
Gymnastics! Hair modeling.
Bolivia. Well, I mean, what do you do?
I mean, you can't just fold up your tent and go home because I think that the world needs philosophy.
The world needs reasoned arguments and it needs challenging ideas and it needs a pushback against orthodoxy.
That's the spark which lights the tinderbox of the human mind.
So what it is for me is to continue to have great conversations like the one tonight, to continue to engage with my listeners.
I do this through my server.
You can check it out at subscribestar.com forward slash free domain.
And to continue to work on presentations.
Oh, I lost myself here.
Discord is one hinky and twitchy mofo this evening.
I just wanted to point that out.
I don't know what's been going on this evening, but we've had a perfect storm.
Yeah, so I do want to, I mean, I've got books in the works.
I've got documentaries in the works.
I love what I do.
I mean, look, the opportunity to have a great conversation like tonight is a real pleasure.
It's a real workout.
It stretches my mind.
It's a great challenge.
I really, really enjoy it.
And the opportunity to serve the world in this kind of way, yeah, okay, there's opposition and yeah, there's name-calling and there's all this nonsense about white supremacy and all this kind of garbage, which is nothing I even remotely believe in and something I would explicitly reject.
As an anarchist, of course, I don't want anyone to rule over anyone else, least of all racially.
But the goal is to continue...
To talk about reason and evidence, to pick up the topics that everyone else is too afraid to touch because those may be the most important topics.
You know, there are topics that were forbidden throughout all of human history and the people who stepped up and broke those taboos.
Are some of the greatest and most benevolent heroes that I've ever witnessed.
And, you know, maybe I can add to that number in my own little way.
Maybe not. But I'll be damned if I won't try.
And the people who stepped forward and said, you know, maybe owning other human beings is a bad thing.
I mean, this was blasphemy.
The people who came forward and said, you know, maybe we should question some of the stuff in the Bible and rely a little bit more on science.
Blasphemy! But because of that, we get the modern world.
Maybe people who said, you know, maybe human beings shouldn't be bought and sold with the land.
Like buildings or ditches.
You know, this was, of course, blasphemy.
You know, in 1930s or 1920s, Germany saying, you know, I don't think that blaming the Jews for all of our problems is going to lead out very well, is it?
And those people were considered to be blasphemers in some ways.
It certainly is true that there are ideas that are appalling and so on.
But there are also ideas which feel appalling that can be enormously beneficial to us.
And that is, as long as I'm working on my principles, self-ownership, property rights, non-aggression principle, universally preferable behavior, I will continue to navigate the debate landscape, the human intellectual landscape with that as my guide.
And If people get mad, well, it's really a reflection of their reaction rather than my arguments.
To get mad at a person for making an argument is as immature as breaking a hammer because you don't know how to use it, and it's really a very, very bad idea.
We don't want to go back to blasphemy laws.
We don't want to go back to things you just can't talk about, however challenging they may be, because If the ideas are good, they need to be heard.
And if they're bad, they need to be exposed.
So more of the same and hopefully even better.
All right. Well, thank you for coming out.
Jesus, words coming out too fast.
Thank you, Stefan, for coming out.
Thanks, everyone, for dropping by.
It's a real pleasure. Yeah, it was a good debate, and I hope we can get together again with Dr.
Mathis. I also would like to hear you two go at it just about Antifa.
I would like that very much.
All right. Well, thank you.
I'm going to close out here. You have a good night.
Take care, everyone. Bye. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain Show on Philosophy.
And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement and your resources.
Please like, subscribe and share and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
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