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Oct. 17, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:28:03

Stefan Molyneux vs 2 Communists! Freedomain Debate

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	Hey everybody, tonight we're debating communism versus anti-communism, and we're starting right now.
	With the communist side's opening statement, thanks so much for being with us.
	Brenton and Swoletariat, the floor is all yours.
	Hey folks, name is Brenton Lengel.
	I am a poet, playwright, author, Ringo-nominated comic creator, author of Snow White Zombie Apocalypse, and most recently, Darudi's Shadow of the People, which was just successfully funded on Kickstarter, but you can still pre-order it.
	Go check that out. And Swole, do you want to introduce yourself and then I'll go into my opening?
	Okay. I'm not getting that from Swole, so I'm going to go straight into my...
	I'm good. Sorry, guys, I was muted.
	I am Swole Terriot.
	I have a... Oh, one sec.
	Pardon my interrupt. It's just a little bit...
	There's a bit of static if you're able to...
	I think your mic might be giving off a little bit of feedback.
	Okay, I'll try this again.
	I am the Swoletariat.
	I have a small YouTube channel, about 3,000 subscribers, where I do Marxist content.
	I am an Orthodox Marxist, aka Trotskyist, and I also have a fitness channel as well.
	Great. So to start off tonight, I think what I might do is acknowledge my esteemed opponents.
	I genuinely hope things have been going well for JF with his fruit trees on his wilderness homestead, which is no doubt a bit difficult to keep running, what with the weather and soil conditions, and oh yeah, the lack of an additional $25,000 from the late Jeffrey E. Epstein.
	Yes, that one, the one you're all thinking of.
	He's why JF has a career as a YouTube influencer.
	I'd like to acknowledge Mr.
	Molyneux, who it seems is here after being banned from nearly every mainstream social media company under the sun, from YouTube to PayPal to MailChimp.
	Congrats on that last one, by the way.
	I'm sure that took some doing.
	And if anyone's wondering why, please feel free to consult the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League.
	But I'm compassionate.
	So in deference to those obstacles, might I offer you an egg in this trying time?
	Like I know you're really, really into eggs, like unbelievably so.
	I can assure you they're fresh, laid by my chickens just the other day.
	And don't worry, the chicken that laid them was white.
	I made sure I know that's really important to you.
	And by the way, you know, kidding aside, that's not a joke.
	I will send you the eggs.
	Just give me a P.O. box or something.
	But in the meantime, what in the world have I gotten myself into?
	Well, it's a debate where I will be discussing communism with a couple of intensely weird people on the internet.
	I wish I could say this was a rare occurrence, but apparently I hate myself and or love ulcers, so here we are.
	I anticipate a lively debate.
	I'm sure at some point Stephbot will get triggered and accuse me or my partner of wanting to literally murder him, and I expect we'll hear a number of accusations and atrocities thrown around with all the grace, poison, nuance of a confused bear rolling its way through a campsite.
	Why? Because conversations about communism scare the absolute bejesus out of a very specific type of person, exemplified by my two interlocutors.
	So what is communism and why is everyone in the West so frightened of it that they will often jump right into the arms of fascist dillweeds?
	Well, for the answer, we can look to two places, etymology and history.
	Communism is a society based upon the common ownership of property.
	That's where the com comes from.
	What is common ownership of property, you ask?
	Well, to answer that question, we must first define property, and that brings us to Roman law and one of the founders of political anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Perdon, who examined the concept in a series of essays titled, What is Property?
	And what is property? According to Broudhon and every socialist who came after him, including Marx, property is defined as the ability to use, abuse, or destroy that which is owned for any reason or no reason.
	In short, property is a social relationship between a person and an object, between the owner and that which is owned, whose reality is rooted in law, human judgment, and social custom.
	From this, Proudhon came to three conclusions.
	The first and most famous being property is theft, which is to say that objectively speaking, when human judgment and human custom are removed from the equation, there is zero material difference between justly acquiring property and stealing property.
	It may be counterintuitive, but to quote Shakespeare, nothing is good or ill, but thinking makes it so.
	And who has a title to what is a matter of opinion, precedent, and power?
	Nothing more. Second, Proudhon observed that property is liberty, which is to say man's liberty, which is the ability to act within and upon the world in accordance with one's desires, is tied directly to one's access to property.
	In other words, if I want to run a marathon, I must have food and shelter and medicine and somewhere to actually do it.
	If I am denied these things, I cannot.
	Therefore, my liberty is limited or expanded by my material circumstances.
	Finally, Proudhon concluded that property is impossible, which is to say that this legal relationship is entirely imaginary.
	It exists as a mental tool, as a projection of human minds within human culture to aid our interaction with physical reality and each other.
	When we know who has a right to what and who does not, we are less likely to be in conflict, at least in theory.
	In actual material reality, property is the stuff of wars and murders and genocides, at least when it is improperly managed.
	Now, socialists break property down into four subtypes.
	Capitalists only recognize two.
	The first being public property and the second being private property.
	Why won't they think beyond this?
	Because they are afraid.
	They are afraid that if people think beyond the false dichotomy of government and non-government ownership that we will descend into chaos and conflict.
	But let us not be cowardly and let's think a little further.
	Don't accept it. Just try it out.
	And so we come to two more types of property, namely personal and common.
	And hey, there it is again, communism.
	Personal property is the property that an individual uses and possesses in actual reality.
	This is what Proudhon was referring to when he said property is freedom, because all of our ability to act and live and love comes from this relationship.
	It is our access to the means of existence.
	This is what society at its most positive exists for, to provide us with these things, So that we may have liberty.
	And when we contribute back to society, our task is to provide for others with access to these things.
	This is the great human project.
	It is, in a word, emancipation.
	This is distinct in socialist philosophy from private property, which has a specialized definition in anti-capitalist critique.
	Private property from a socialist standpoint is theft.
	Because private property is not access to the means of existence.
	Rather, it is property secured by the state, which is to say the military and the police, on behalf of the elite, i.e.
	capitalists, as in those individuals who, through historical circumstances, owing to the bugs in our financial, political, and cultural systems, have come to own property which they neither use nor possess, but rather through force of arms, are given the ability to use, abuse, or destroy that which is both used and possessed and often needed by others.
	Without the state, a man cannot own another's home.
	A man cannot control more property than he can physically possess and defend.
	Jeff Bezos cannot own Amazon against the wishes of those who work at Amazon without an army of police and soldiers to beat, jail, and kill those who disagree.
	Communists object to this relationship for obvious reasons.
	When we play this game, there are just a few winners and many, many losers.
	Those who find themselves in a position to command the state and direct its violence where they want it to go naturally use it to secure their own interests.
	So essentially, those at the height of power within society are a big club, and you and I, we are not in it.
	And the game of capitalism, the game of properties, is one they created for their own benefit, with rules they control.
	In other words, it's a rigged game designed to extract maximum labor and value from the bulk of society while paying back as little as possible in return.
	This is why you can have record profits in the richest nation on earth and you can send Jeff Bezos on a pleasure trip to space while simultaneously the majority of that same nation's population cannot handle an unforeseen $500 expense, where millions of Americans teeter on the edge of eviction and one in six children do not know where their next meal is coming from.
	And so we come to the final type of property and the beating heart of communism, common property.
	What communism is and how it has been understood in practice since before Marx and Engels, likely since before recorded history, is an attempt to return to our ancestral way of life before the rise of the state, a way to regain the freedom that we had in the state of nature, before war, before armies, before governments and private property, while simultaneously preserving the benefits of modern civilization.
	The product of communism is to move as much property as possible from the public and private spheres into the common spheres.
	It's literally in the name.
	And what is common property?
	Well, you already know.
	You just never realized it.
	It's all around us.
	It's the air, it's language, it's knowledge, it's international waters, it's space, and before the state, it was also land.
	It is our inheritance, our real inheritance, our birthright, which has been stolen from us.
	Before kings and armies and rulers, common property dominated the globe, and communists are simply those who would see its return.
	So to understand, you understand now where this fear comes from, and why try as they might, I don't think our opponents can reckon with this idea, because it shakes the very foundations of power, and those at the heights of our society feel the tremors and know how precarious their position is.
	And for reactionaries who are existentially devoted to preserving this very specific, and let's be honest, very stupid form of social hierarchy, This regiment of command and obedience, communism, for that communism is the stuff of nightmares.
	Because if you take away the power from the elites, what are they?
	I'll tell you what they are.
	They're us. And they never were anything else.
	And any pretensions towards the contrary is pure vanity.
	Which brings us to the failures of the Soviet Union, and why everyone associates communism not with common property, but with one very specific, highly authoritarian failed attempt at reaching it.
	For the purposes of this debate, I will call it Stalinism.
	The fact is, the reason this model dominates in the minds of so many, despite actual reality and real material history, is because the two greatest empires the world has ever seen agreed that it should.
	The capitalist West agreed that the USSR should be considered the truest example of communism because they wanted to associate Stalin's brutality and totalitarianism with the idea and forever frighten their citizenry away from taking real power within their own society.
	And the communist East wanted the prestige of being the vessel by which the dream of communism could at last be achieved.
	But they were, all of them, deceived.
	Because communism is not government control, it is not totalitarianism, and ultimately it is not statist.
	Communism is a stateless, classless, moneyless society in which the means of production, which is to say vital industry and resources, are commonly owned, like the air around us, and are operated by the workers who use them for the benefit not of a privileged few, but of everyone, where resources are distributed along the general principle of, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
	In short, it is a society that works for everyone.
	And in the 21st century, it is exactly what we need to avoid human extinction and encourage human flourishing.
	Thank you. Do we wait for the mod?
	Do we go straight?
	Is it anarchy or are we modding?
	I'm going next. Maybe anarchism, not anarchy.
	Yeah, it's anarchy right here.
	All right, I'll go here.
	All right, so tonight we are debating communism.
	But since unlike our opponents, we are materialists, to really understand what communism is, we have to analyze it scientifically and by extension dialectically.
	That is, how and why it emerges out of the present society, which happens to be capitalism.
	But in doing so, for the purposes of this debate, we also have to consider the libertarian formulation of markets and property.
	And how it relates to the material reality.
	For all the right libertarian talk of non-aggression principles and voluntary contracts...
	Your mic is... I'm sorry, but your mic is giving that feedback again.
	It arises from a lack of capital investment, I think.
	True, true.
	It's still there.
	I don't know what to tell you.
	I'm stuck with it.
	Well, it's pretty bad, and I'm usually pretty easygoing about mics.
	Is there any way in which you have a second mic where you might be able to click in Zoom to connect to that mic instead?
	I do not have...
	See, when you speak slowly like this, when you speak lower than a certain level, I think you're fine.
	Yeah, it is. So just don't go too excited.
	I think you'll be good.
	Just, yeah, pull in Elizabeth Holmes and crank that voice down to Barry White levels.
	You'll be fine. All right.
	Let's try talking like this.
	Works. Okay. That's hot.
	All right. For all the right libertarian talk of NAP and voluntary contract, the greatest irony is that the very markets and property relations they champion are themselves predicated on the most extreme forms of coercion, dispossession,
	and violence. Capitalism, which I'll define here as the era of generalized commodity production based on private property, And the exploitation of wage labor could not exist but for the mass expropriation of common lands for private profit on a global scale.
	To quote Christopher Hitchens, the history of capitalism is the history of expropriation.
	Marx observing this process remarked on the tremendous advances in technology, technique, and innovation that were thereby enabled.
	Brutal as it was, this process of dispossession and collectivization of Europe's peasantry into the cities and factories ultimately created the modern proletariat, a brand new class overtaking the bourgeoisie as history's most progressive force.
	But exploitation at home was actually not enough to fuel capitalist development.
	It needed to be paired with expropriation and imperialism abroad.
	The majority of the world in the 19th century was not very amenable to capital.
	So the imperialist states set about opening the rest of the world at gunpoint.
	Colonizers tended to find it immensely difficult to get people to work in their mines and plantations.
	Echoing today, wages were not high enough to induce people to abandon their subsistence farming.
	So coercion was required to move peasants into the labour market, imposing taxes and closing commons, constraining access to food, evictions, and often outright violence.
	You know, voluntary contracts.
	Some 55 million dead later in India, China, and Congo alone, markets suddenly and miraculously found themselves open.
	The Industrial Revolution and success of Europe more broadly, therefore, had nothing to do with culture, values, or race, as my slippery opponents have argued before.
	Quite the opposite.
	It was achieved by the robbery of wealth and productivity of dozens of other countries.
	There's never been a more collectivist mode of production than capitalism.
	Its ability to conscript, expropriate, and dispossess are historically unmatched.
	99% of human history bore witness to the same percentage of people living off the land in small, disparate, atomized farms, communes, and villages only to have all that flipped on its head in two centuries.
	As Marx and Engels pointed out, this collectivization was an immense leap forward in the progression of human society because not only did it increase human freedom and productivity by orders of magnitude, but it crucially set the stage for the democratic takeover of society by the working class, thereby enabling the abolition of class and the state altogether.
	And I think we all agree here that we want to get rid of the state.
	Communism is the classless, stateless, moneyless society, and it necessarily emerges out of its lower phase of socialism, a state of material abundance, which in turn emerges out of the transitional phase of a worker state, which, under the right conditions, emerges out of the contradictions of capitalism itself.
	What Stalinists and right-wingers share in common is the belief that the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc., are socialist societies.
	Thanks for stealing my point there, Brenton, by the way.
	They are not and were not.
	These are worker states in varying degrees of deformation and degeneration, excluding China, which is now a simply capitalist state by any measure.
	The common report from rightists is to proudly declare the no true Scotsman fallacy.
	But it is not a logical fallacy because neither Marx nor Lenin ever believed that socialism could be achieved in backwards, semi-feudal peasant societies like Russia, Cuba, or China.
	They said it openly. Marx explained that socialism could only be achieved in the most advanced industrial nations because that's where the productive forces were the most advanced.
	The Russian Revolution, the greatest event in human history, was a gamble, one meant to inspire workers in Germany, England, France, and America to follow suit.
	That gamble ultimately failed due to the murderous betrayal of the leadership of the German Social Democrats.
	Leaving the Bolsheviks isolated to defend the revolution from a civil war and 14 imperialist powers.
	They succeeded in defeating their external enemies, but the revolutionary backbone of workers' councils, aka Soviets, were devastated by years of war, and they were powerless to stop the rise of Stalin and the emerging bureaucracy he represented.
	Stalin went on to achieve many successes, but at the high cost of liberty, democracy, and millions of lives.
	The unprecedented economic and military success of the USSR ensured that every subsequent revolutions took a Stalinist character, highly bureaucratic, top-down, and illiberal.
	What I just described is a scientific and materialist analysis of society and how it changes through time.
	My opponents, on the other hand, are at a disadvantage.
	Trapped in the mind prison of philosophical idealism, they have no idea what to make of the state, why it exists, who it serves, and how to overcome it.
	Ironically, it is they who are the utopians in this debate.
	Almost as if to mock themselves, they simultaneously reject the state as coercive on the one hand, while defending the very economic system it was built to reproduce on the other.
	If human emancipation is the goal, then the abolition of private property and commodity production are the necessary prerequisites.
	Personal property is not private property.
	Until all of us are free from these forms of domination, no one is free.
	Commodities are objects produced for the purpose of exchange rather than use, thus enabling markets.
	Markets have existed for most of human history, and they are not inherently bad or good, but they do not exist in the abstract.
	In a system of generalized commodity production, unequal distribution of wealth, and private property, the kind advocated by our opponents, the competition in irrational anarchy of markets necessarily pushes wages down, descales labor, and trends towards monopoly, state oppression, and imperialism.
	Of course, as we've seen historically, early capitalism did pass through a short phase of relatively free markets alongside incredible worker exploitation.
	However, dialectics teaches us that society is never static and that it has a direction.
	The laws and contradictions of capitalist productions necessarily start evolving to monopolies and cartels, then mature into imperialism and finance capital, dripping with blood at every step of the way.
	But as capitalism continues to decay far beyond its best-before date and the class struggle intensifies, the democratic control of the economy becomes the instinctive demand put forward by the ever-increasing forces of the proletariat, ultimately transforming...
	We're coming to that close for the opening statement.
	I'm like two sentences away.
	Ultimately transforming from a class in itself to a class for itself and taking the reins of society once and for all.
	Only then can work be transformed from alienating misery to the creative expression of free individuals.
	All in there.
	You got it. I want to say thank you very much to our guests for being here, who, by the way, are linked in the description.
	And I want to also let you know, folks, if it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate, we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion, and politics.
	We hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you are from.
	And with that, we are going to kick it over to the anti-communism team.
	Stefan and JF, thanks so much for being with us.
	The floor is all yours.
	Thank you. What's our policy on swearing here?
	That's okay. Jesus.
	I'm telling you. Worst fucking communists I've ever seen in my life.
	And let me tell you why. So first of all, we start off with a guy saying, hey, I just crowdfunded my comic, raising enough capital so that I can make profits from my property and Going out there across the world, but by God, am I ever against the free market and the accumulation of capital to gain access over the means of production.
	And then, of course, they're talking about Marxist writings and Prudhomme's writing and so on.
	In other words, these guys wrote books and they are responsible for the effects of their actions.
	They own the effects of their actions, whether it's an argument or a book or a comic.
	And then, and then I get treated to the edifying spectacle of communists who claim to fucking defend the working classes against the exploitation of predatory corporations.
	I am, and you can tell from a little bit of the salty language, I am working class to the core.
	I grew up in a single mother household, dirt broke.
	I got my first job at 11.
	I've been paying all my own bills since I was 16 years old.
	Came from a rough section of town and fought and bit and clawed my way up to the very top.
	Of intellectual achievement when it came to having the world's largest philosophy show with a billion views and downloads, millions of books read.
	Working class guy arguing against the power of the state.
	My very, very first article was a stateless society, an examination of alternatives I loathe the state have always from the very beginning.
	So as a dedicated anarchist from the working class, I claw my way up.
	To the very pinnacle of intellectual achievement, and then what happens?
	In conjunction with the state, massive globalist international corporations smash me down.
	Now, you'd think if there's one fucking person the communists could get behind, it's a working class guy who had the means of production smashed and taken away from him by massive globalist corporations.
	But no. That's not how they roll, my friends.
	That's not how they play.
	What they do is they cheer and applaud and approve giant multinational corporations smashing, exploiting and taking away the means of production hard-won, hard-built, hard-fought-for by a proletariat anti-statist.
	So that's how seriously...
	I mean, it's almost like a parody.
	I thought for a second they were kidding.
	And then what did they bring up? The ADL and the SPLC. Also, massive, international, incredibly well-funded, hand-in-glove-with-the-state organizations that regularly get in trouble with the things that they say about people.
	Do they check the alternatives?
	Do they listen to the working-class guy?
	Do they have any sympathy for the plight of a working-class guy who's been smashed and exploited by giant multinational corporations?
	No! They absolutely applaud it and love it.
	So we have a kind of parody.
	I really can't put it any other way.
	It's a kind of parody.
	Because we've got, hey, I crowdfunded and raised enough capital so that I can profit from my comic.
	Oh, Boy, isn't it great that those multinational corporations smashed that working class guy and stripped him of the means of production in an election year for specifically political reasons.
	So yeah, exploitation, predation, and so on, they're totally behind it.
	That's sort of the thing that I wanted to mention.
	The worst communists I've ever seen in my life.
	It's literally a complete and total parody.
	All right. So moving past that, let's have a quick look at the basic arguments.
	I don't know where we disagree.
	You guys hate these.
	I mean, theoretically, like when it actually comes to practical multinational corporations smashing up the working class, you're totally behind it and applaud it.
	I understand that theoretically you don't like that kind of stuff.
	Yeah, I'm with you, brothers.
	I'm 100% with you.
	I hate the state.
	I hate corporations.
	Corporations is a legal fiction.
	That allows the rich and the powerful hand in glove with the armed might of the state to create a legal fiction that allows them to profit with no risk, right?
	They can take all the profits they want out of this legal fiction called the corporation, and when the corporation goes bankrupt, nobody can ever pierce the corporate veil and touch their own personal assets.
	So it is a foggy ghost by which they get the proletariat to bend over and take it up the you-know-where, right?
	So yeah, hate the state, hate corporations.
	My fundamental argument is that the initiation The initiation of the use of force is immoral.
	The initiation of the use of force is immoral.
	Force in an extremity of self-defense is a regrettable necessity is morally fine.
	Initiating the use of force is absolutely immoral.
	Whether it takes the form of the state through control, regulation, taxation, the exploitation of children by putting them into these Pink Floyd brain deadening veal fattening pens of disinformation and lack of concentration camps known as government schools.
	Whether it's creating money out of thin air and raping and pillaging the savings and economic productivity of the working classes in particular and those on fixed incomes.
	It is absolutely brutal.
	Whether it is starting wars and generally taking that lower tonka toy scoop through the lower classes to send them off to be cannon fodder on the battlefield.
	Whether it is foreign policy, whether it's sticking their armed might into every hornet's nest around the world and then inviting everyone in to commit acts of heinous terror in the homeland.
	All of these are unbelievably evil and an absolute predation upon the body politic and upon the very poor who generally bear the brunt of these kinds of horrendous policies.
	We are... As flies are to wanton boys, are we to the state.
	They kill us for their sport.
	So I don't know where our fundamental disagreement is other than the fact that as somebody from the working class who got completely smashed up by multinational corporations, I think I'm a much better Marxist than you guys are because I think that's horrible.
	And I've argued against people being deplatformed for perfectly legal speech on repeated occasions.
	I guess you like that sort of shit because you're the worst communist known to man.
	If you focus on fighting back against the initiation of the use of force, it takes place in many spheres.
	We've talked about it with regards to the state.
	We've talked about it with regards to foreign policy, war.
	We've talked about it with regards to monetary policy or the creation of money in order to fatten the purses of the ruling classes and steal from the poor and those on fixed incomes.
	We also need to talk about it, as I have continuously over the course of my show, in the home.
	The most exploited underclass on the planet are children.
	And Marxists never talk about this stuff.
	Because if you want to talk about where the initiation of force lands with its greatest fist and boot to the neck, it is on...
	The backs and necks of children.
	Children have no legal rights in our current society.
	They have no economic independence.
	They are legally allowed to be hit in most countries around the world.
	The mass rape of children is endemic within society.
	One out of three girls, one out of five boys at a bare minimum.
	The industrial rape of children occurs on a fairly horrible and wide scale around the world in Western countries.
	And so I've always focused on the non-aggression principle must first and foremost be applied in the home.
	That children, and I've been a stay-at-home dad for 13 years now, so I have some experience in this matter, children must be reasoned with, they must not be punished, you must not raise your voice, you must not call them names because they're in a trapped and subjugated relationship.
	I mean, that's mostly by nature.
	They're trapped. Babies can't exactly go out and earn their keep.
	So the positive and healthy and peaceful treating of children, I'm currently working on a book called Peaceful Parenting, so I'm hoping to get that out more, but I've been talking about this from the very beginning.
	No spanking, no punishment, no raised voices, no yelling, and try and keep them away from government schools where they're indoctrinated by the ruling classes to becoming, as the Prussian model always demanded, good little foot soldiers and good little capitalist workers.
	So I'm not sure where our disagreement is.
	Now, when you get rid of the state, when you have a voluntary and relatively peaceful society, I don't have in any sense the foundational narcissistic arrogance to say how that society should be.
	Should it have money? I don't know.
	If the money is peacefully established and not coercively put into people's lives...
	Who am I to say people can't have money?
	If you say people can't have money, then you've got to throw in jail people who are voluntarily trading using bits of paper or cryptos or tattoos or whatever the hell people are going to end up using.
	That's the initiation of force.
	So I think we work to reduce the initiation of force as much as possible within society.
	We can't do much about the state and monetary policy, at least as individuals, but we can certainly talk about the peaceful parenting of children, which will end up with children being raised to the point where they won't become criminals or want to go We're good to go.
	Then what does society look like after we end slavery?
	It's really hard to know ahead of time.
	And you can't enforce one particular outcome or solution within society without violating the non-aggression principle.
	So when you say, well, the state is, it pillages people and it's really bad.
	And of course, because the foundational, this is my last point, the foundational reality of human life.
	Is that people can't handle power.
	You know, it's so funny.
	Like we have Lord Acton's famous dictum, power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.
	We all accept that.
	And then we say, yes, but we need this big powerful state to organize how the means of production are distributed among societies.
	Like, no, no, no, no. People can't handle power.
	Power is addictive. Power dehumanizes.
	Power creates an inhuman need for...
	Us versus them. Selfing versus othering.
	And it requires the dehumanizing of those you are going to subjugate and exploit.
	Human beings can't handle power.
	We take away the power from parents to abuse their children.
	We take away the power of the ruling classes to use the state.
	And you're right, they then become like us.
	They have to compete with us on an even playing field, which I'm more than happy to work with and to accept.
	Human beings cannot handle power.
	So if you say, well, the state is really bad because it corrupts people, hey, I'm with you 150%.
	But then if you say, well, after we get rid of the state, society has to be this way.
	It's got to be classless. It's got to be moneyless.
	Who the hell – who put you in charge?
	Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
	The point is to take down oligarchical, coercive, violent hierarchies like the state – And then let a thousand flowers bloom.
	If people want to live with the collective ownership of the means of production and they don't violate the non-aggression principle to do so, fantastic.
	Have your hippie ways with the means of production.
	Have a factory where everybody votes and there's no bosses and nobody is having their excess labor exploited.
	Fantastic. If other people, peacefully and voluntarily, don't want to do it that way, fantastic.
	I'm not going to sit there with a gun and tell people how to live after they become free.
	Human beings can't handle power.
	I can't. You can't.
	I think the moderator can, but that's probably just about it.
	Human beings can't handle power, so how dare you say how a free society should be organized?
	How dare you say what the slaves should do after we free them from slavery?
	The whole purpose is to oppose the initiation of the use of force.
	What happens after that is how history is going to play out in the first peaceful scenario known to man.
	And that's my closing statement.
	All right. Well, Stéphane has went very hard, and I agree with everything I'm hearing, so I will only have some complimentary notes.
	Stéphane talked about children, and it's weird how we have this anti-Natalist attitude with Brunton's intro.
	Attacking Stéphane for liking eggs, absolutely ridiculous.
	Each egg can potentially become a viable baby, and they should be cherished and respected, and it's one of the most important things you can do in life to reproduce and find an egg to inseminate.
	I find this absolutely ridiculous as an opening attack.
	On the point of the state, I think that our opponents here are attributing the actions of the state to capitalism, when in fact you can have such a broad definition of capitalism so as to include the actions of the state During capitalism in the economy, and so ultimately because people have paid taxes, it's capitalism that feeds the actions of the state.
	But neither Stéphane nor I are standing for a strong state.
	In fact, we are combating this state.
	And so it's a little weird to hear a critique of the state when these people know that we're not supporters of the state.
	And then, in fact, the most ideal capitalistic society would be one with a very reduced state that, I agree with Stéphane, wouldn't make any use of force if possible.
	So as far as communism, as Stefan pointed out, these guys can start their commune and they can live as much as nonviolence will allow them to live in their conceptions of property.
	And if they want among themselves to decide that property doesn't exist or that it's called common property, so be it.
	But there are reasons why societies didn't converge to this, and I believe there are reasons why Such societies remain very small, inefficient, and eventually disappear.
	It is that communism, as our opponents define it with a lack of conception of private property, causes a number of issues, which I will summarize in two points.
	One, there's a lack of economic incentives for development.
	If there's no such thing as the accumulation of private property, there's no incentive for someone to contribute his best to society.
	The reason Jeff Bezos could do what he did is that he knew that if he was successful at starting a network of distribution that would be more efficient than Walmart, more efficient than anything else, That eventually it would be rewarded with private property.
	If you cannot give that guarantee in society, then you have people racing for the bottom.
	You have people not willing to engage in creative or risky endeavors.
	The fact that someone like Jeff Bezos ends up getting rewarded also displays to the future innovators of our world.
	It says if you can do like Jeff, if you can improve the efficiency of society so much that people are throwing money at you through the Internet, You will be rewarded for it.
	The absence of such a motivation economically is what plagues communistic society, and that's why they remain small, they remain familial, and they remain essentially local communes.
	And when they grow into big systems, these systems will tend to be less productive than their private equivalent.
	That's why each of us go to a private grocery store to buy private goods at the price that is set by the free market.
	Now, my bet would be that if Brenton and Swadithariot would have the society they desire with a stateless entity or a very small state, That this society would converge toward the free market and it would essentially be a form of capitalism desirable to Stéphane and I. So I don't take issue with their fight of the state.
	I just think they're deluded about whether they can maintain a highly productive society without the proper set of incentives that come from capitalism.
	Because there's a reason why Jeff Bezos must be a billionaire.
	It's because he's done something that has improved enough lives that he deserves that reward.
	And we want him to hold to these billion dollars and invest them in the most productive endeavors into the future.
	Because the community is unable to get together and determine what is best for their own future.
	We just have to look at our democracies and see where they're headed to see how the power of the mob doesn't work to direct society.
	We need individual innovators that are better and more intelligent and more careful than the rest of the average of the population.
	My second point and the second flaw of socialism and communism is that it has a poor eugenic structure.
	Capitalism, by limiting the amount of private property that one can obtain to whatever you can sell, whatever you can obtain on the free market, it essentially puts a leash on people.
	It says, if you have only $30,000 a year, that's what you deserve because that's the value of your labor.
	And if you want more than that, you need to contribute more to society by inventing something, by starting a company, or by somehow finding something that other people want to buy for more than $30,000 a year.
	Because of the absence of such a leash in communism and because, as our opponents have presented it, we distribute according to people's needs, the needs become infinite.
	The needs become infinite because people who get paid by whatever central structure they drain from, whether it's a state or whether it's a commune or hippie-style farmland, They will eventually drain the energy of this farmland to make more babies.
	Socialism has no way to limit the growth of these needs.
	And as long as you fund people who bring nothing to society just because they have needs, you are creating more people with needs and more needs into the next generation.
	This system is unsustainable, and I've never heard in all of my career of debates, on modern-day debate, not a single socialist or communist came to solve this issue.
	So I'd like to hear Swati Tariyat and Brenton today.
	How do you deal with the fact that you are creating an infinite chain of need because you're letting anyone with needs benefit from the products of society?
	And that is it for my introduction.
	You got it. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for those introductions.
	And I want to let you know, folks, we are very excited.
	Next week, a debate on race and crime.
	As you can see at the bottom right of your screen, it is going to be a controversial one.
	You don't want to miss it. Hit that subscribe button as we have many more debates to come.
	And with that, thank you very much, all four of you gentlemen.
	We will jump into open dialogue.
	The floor is all yours. Yeah, so I have a couple of quick answers for Steph.
	The first thing was, you did not get banned from social media over your anarcho-capitalist stuff.
	Like, I was on this channel not too long ago arguing with Dr.
	David Friedman about anarcho-capitalism.
	Dr. David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman, is not banned.
	You got banned for the ethno-nationalist stuff.
	No, that's not true.
	First of all, you have no idea why I got banned.
	You have no idea why I got banned.
	The point is, there's nothing that I said that was any sort of incitement to violence.
	I had 17 experts talking about intelligence and IQ and so on.
	I'm not an ethno-nationalist.
	I've always opposed ethnic supremacy.
	Just right there. That is an incitement to violence, Stephen.
	Before we go too far down this line of discussion, I do want to mention, we are here to debate communism.
	I do want to redirect us.
	I'm just answering a direct question.
	I'm sorry, what was my insight into violence?
	Sorry, you accused me of inciting violence.
	What was that? I'm saying that when you push forth that particular type of rhetoric, it is dehumanizing and it causes people to...
	Not you. Sorry, what type of rhetoric?
	I'm not sure what you're talking about.
	But people who are...
	So this is outside the...
	Hey, you brought it up, man.
	If you're going to accuse me of inciting violence, you better put some shit behind those words.
	Yeah. So what I'm saying is...
	Is that when humans have a natural block in our mind, when it comes towards doing violence towards other humans, essentially, you don't eat your own kind.
	It's built into us probably by evolution.
	We can see this evidenced by the fact that in World War II, for instance, a lot of soldiers did not actually shoot to kill their enemies, and armies had to put in specific I don't know what you're talking about, man.
	Do you not know that a quarter of a billion people were murdered by their own governments, often leftist, socialist or fascist governments, communist governments in the 20th century?
	Okay, but that doesn't have anything to do with what we're talking about.
	You say people have an inbuilt desire not to kill each other.
	These large, unsubstantiated statements about IQ dehumanizes people.
	Yes, I know.
	We're off.
	So we were off of that.
	I do want to, but given that you did bring this up, I do want to give Stefan the last word before you go back to communism.
	Sure, because I do want to answer his other question.
	So apparently talking about, I mean, I thought it was scientific socialism or scientific communism, talking about the science of IQ differences.
	We're off. Is exactly designed to reduce social conflict and violence within society.
	It is the very opposite of what you're claiming.
	You may think that, but that's not how it is. Oh, you may think that, but that's not how it is.
	That's your brilliant rebuttal.
	And if you're going to talk about, well, we don't have a big desire to kill, how about the 100 million people that communists killed in the 20th century?
	Do you think that that falls under the category of not wanting to kill others?
	I think that there's a lot of people who don't want to kill others.
	They just happen to be not communists.
	So I'm gonna let Swole answer that, but hear what I wanted to say also.
	On this point, because I wanted to answer these specific charges, so you accused essentially Swole and I of being hypocrites.
	Now, here's the thing.
	Let's say that we were hypocrites.
	Like, we're not. Because you've got an imaginary version of anarchists and communists in your head, where the idea, like, communists can't be effective, like, within a market thing.
	Just try making an argument rather than reading my mind.
	It's so childish. I'm making an argument here, Stevan.
	Let me finish. Just start.
	That's all I'm asking. Even if we were hypocrites, that wouldn't mean we're wrong.
	If a doctor who smokes tells you smoking is bad for your health, is that doctor wrong?
	You start off by calling me a racist or whatever the hell it is, and then you say, well, ad hominems don't prove anything.
	Do you even listen to yourself, man?
	What is the matter with you?
	So first off, that's not an ad hominem.
	That would be an insult.
	At worst, it would be poisoning the well.
	I did not say you're wrong because you're a racist.
	I said you're a racist and you are wrong.
	Let's move on to the other guy. This is ridiculous.
	Just to close this parenthesis, though, I will say to Brenton, if you think that stating a fact is inciting violence, how about...
	Enforcing a deception over that fact.
	We have a choice in society.
	Either we're going to talk about the truth or we won't.
	And you make a fetish dichotomy here by suggesting that talking about the truth would be incitement to violence.
	It's not simply about the facts.
	If it were truth, that might be true. Yeah, if it were truth, it would be true, but it's not.
	See, communists are very concerned about free speech because communists killed 100 million people in just 100 years.
	So they're very concerned about violence, you see, the violence of science.
	Again, you're trying to paint us with the freaking excesses of the USSR, the exact thing that I said you would do.
	Excesses. Excesses.
	So you're saying they killed too many people.
	Well, what number of people would be okay to kill?
	You're saying 70 million was too many.
	Let me answer this question. Is 50 million too many?
	That's like saying the excesses of the Holocaust, like there's some reasonable number.
	What is the matter with you?
	I've heard you argue this.
	Soletariat, Soletariat. I'm looking at the meter.
	It is off the charts.
	I need you to turn your game down.
	It's still fuzzy.
	Be your best, Swole, if you can answer this.
	Now, okay. It's still fuzzy.
	I've got to tell you, man, even if you can go out and find a mic right now, it's so bad.
	It's not the mic.
	It's literally the computer.
	This happens when it's the drivers or something.
	It's giving the audience a wonderful chance to listen to a communist saying there was just excessive deaths.
	In the Soviet Union, it was just too many.
	You know, some number would be great, but they just went a little...
	It was like maximum was too high.
	They just went into the red, so to speak.
	When people talk about excesses in this instance, that's not at all what we're actually referring to.
	It's a figure of speech, Stephen.
	You should know that. No, it's not a figure of speech.
	You're saying they just killed too many people.
	I would like to say... So Swole, answer.
	You're doing good. If I keep my voice low again and go for this one, let's see if it works.
	Okay. So yeah, the 100 million dead figure.
	I've seen you mention this a few times before, Stephan.
	And, you know, Google is very easy.
	It's very, very easy to...
	It's called The Big Black Book of Communism.
	It's a very well-researched book.
	Yeah, it certainly is something.
	Famously, that book was trashed by its own key contributors who denounced the book as sloppy and biased scholarship.
	Its own key contributors, where he got the data from, by an author, quote, obsessed with arriving at a total of 100 million kills.
	Do you want to cut that figure in half for accuracy?
	Do you want to cut it in half, say it's only 50 million?
	I'm going to give you five seconds to make each point.
	It is that bad. I've never had anybody with such a bad mic.
	I'm sorry for being so bad. Oh, you have had people with a worse mic, James.
	You absolutely have had to name him, Brendan.
	Wait, he's telling a true fact.
	That's a hate speech.
	That's seriously a liar.
	That Gavin guy from the early debate who didn't even get his – Can we not debate the mic quality?
	Can we just get on with the debate?
	All right.
	The real number is a fraction of that.
	A quick Google search is enough to make that abundantly clear, but given this fact, Oh, Google.
	You think Stephen might ask himself, why do exactly zero historians take this book seriously?
	Does it have anything to do with why exactly zero serious philosophers take Ayn Rand or write libertarianism seriously?
	Well, these texts are written for 14-year-old edgelords.
	That's because the non-aggressive principle...
	No, this is not an argument. Just insulting everyone is so retarded.
	It's so dumb. Hold on. Make some actual arguments rather than, oh, nobody respects this and it's for 14-year-old edgelords.
	Make a case!
	Do you not know how to debate?
	So, alright, if you want examples of how they came up with that number, they included basically literally everyone who died in the USSR during Stalin's years, including the World War II deaths.
	All the famines, which necessarily weren't necessarily It's Stalin's fault, although he did exacerbate them at the same time.
	The famines weren't Stalin's fault?
	Have you not heard of the liberalization of the farmlands?
	Have you not heard of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge and the Pol Pot expelling everyone from the cities?
	The famine was happening anyway, but Stalin made it worse because he's an idiot and so did Lysenko.
	He's an idiot! Yeah, he caused the deaths of millions of people.
	He's not evil, he's just an idiot, right?
	So causing the deaths, being a mass murder of millions of people, are you saying Hitler was just an idiot and not evil?
	Yeah, evil or an idiot, it doesn't matter.
	They're just as dead. It doesn't matter?
	It doesn't matter whether he's evil or just foolish?
	So, if you want to talk about, like, the famines for instance...
	Swole?
	If you want to talk about the famines, for instance, those can be dropped directly at the feet of Trofim Lysenko.
	He was a scientist who rejected evolution and said some things that were, shall we say, politically convenient for Stalin's power, and thus got raised to the highest levels of power within Soviet society.
	His ideas about planting, like, for instance, planting seeds too close together because, in his mind, plants were comrades and would not compete with each other, If they were the same species, led to absolute disastrous results.
	And then the propaganda machine lied about it.
	So your argument is that if you just had different people with this unbelievable level of power over other human beings...
	I give you a chance to speak, right?
	So if you just had different individuals inhabiting this incredible power structure of centralized coercive control over property, everything would have been fine.
	And my argument is it doesn't matter who's in power.
	When you have that much power, it's always going to go badly.
	You can't take some people out, put other people in, and have it work well.
	Human beings can't handle power.
	And so it's not about this individual and his bad ideas.
	It's about the entire power structure.
	If you're going to try to drop something at the feet of socialism, as in like socialist philosophy and ideology, it is important to understand where there are personal failings and where there are structural failings.
	The personal failing was on the part of Trofim Lysenko.
	The structural failing was on the part of the USSR itself and its paranoid system of propaganda.
	No, no. Propaganda didn't cause the famine.
	Individuals didn't cause the famine.
	You know what caused the famine?
	Collectivization of the farmland, violation of property rights, and the stripping of property for the soldiers.
	No, because we know that's not true, because they collectivized the land in Spain, and that didn't happen.
	And in fact, when they collectivized the land in Spain, it was a giant boom of food.
	Like, that was the one thing the anarchists, the Spanish anarchists, were amazing at, was feeding absolutely everyone.
	So we know for a fact it was not the collectivization, it was specifically Lysenko.
	So socialism is not anarchism.
	You understand? Anarchism means without rulers.
	Socialism means centralized control over the means of production.
	Anarchism has always been the left wing of the socialist movement in the sense that we have always been the direct action oriented anti-state libertarian.
	Like the very first person to ever call themselves a libertarian was Joseph de Jacques, who was an anarcho-communist.
	Does it mean, does anarchism mean without rulers?
	Anarchism means without rulers.
	Okay, fantastic. Then you and I are the same.
	And then when you talk about one government under Starling having massive control over the allocation of resources and land and crops and fertilizer, is that being without a ruler?
	No, that's being with a centralized, coercive, oligarchical, powerful ruler.
	So it's the opposite of anarchism.
	That's why I'm saying it's the power, not the individuals that causes the problems.
	Okay, so first off, we may agree on something like that, but the fact is that we don't agree, for instance, on ethno-nationalism, which you have gone on record.
	If you denounce that now, fine.
	But you definitely do not agree on that.
	Okay, define ethno-nationalism for me.
	I don't even know what you're talking about. As in a country where the state keeps out people that you find undesirable.
	You said, let's see, back in October 4th, 2015, you cannot run a high IQ society where I mean,
	it's not a fact. Freedom, free speech, democratic structures, market structures tend to collapse.
	And Helmuth Nyberg is the scientist.
	So if you want to go and argue with him, and I had him on the show and I cross-examined him, it's not my data.
	Don't shoot the messenger.
	Be a mature, big person and go and talk to the person who actually did the research.
	That does not say ethno-nationalism.
	That is simply a scientific fact.
	Stephen, could you give me an example of...
	Stephan, could you give me an example of a society that had a high IQ and then lost the high IQ and then became Warsaw because of it?
	A society that had a high IQ, lost the high IQ. Well, we can see this.
	So I also, Edward Dutton, I had on my show as well.
	He's written a really powerful book called At Our Wits End.
	And again, you get mad at him if you want to shoot in the messenger, but you've got to be mature and not just roll your eyes when facts come along.
	And IQ across the West is dropping.
	IQ, sadly, in sperm counts.
	I think my sperm count is dropping just being in contact with you.
	There could be other reasons for that.
	Hold on. The interruptions.
	Brenton, I do want to hear the rest from Stefan.
	And then eventually you want to...
	JF has... This guy runs a think tank.
	All right.
	I hate to do this, but Brenton, I'm ready to mute you.
	So I got to give him an actual chance to respond.
	IQ is falling. Now, would we say that the West is doing better now than it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago?
	I would look at this and I would say that the West, in terms of unfunded liabilities and $180 trillion just in the West, we have a lot of deferred poverty in national debts.
	And after the Second World War, poverty, particularly among the black community, which is where we should really focus our efforts on alleviating poverty, poverty was declining one percentage point every single year after the Second World War until… LBJ's Great Society and Welfare State Programs, the welfare-warfare state of the social planning for the underclass as well as, of course, the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, of course, to some degree as well.
	So we had a situation wherein for the first time in human history, The poor people had a very real shot of getting out of poverty, and particularly the black families and the black communities.
	That, tragically, was destroyed by the welfare welfare state, and now we've created a permanent underclass.
	I think that's actually pretty bad.
	So we do have an example where things, I think, have gotten worse.
	IQ has tended to decline in America and other places.
	And IQ is a pretty objective test.
	It's been around for 100 years.
	It's been well-validated.
	By just about every scientific metric known to me.
	IQ has been raising. I'm sorry?
	IQ has been raising up to the 70s.
	And then what they call the Flynn effect has reversed since the 70s, stabilized then, and then we're getting lower.
	So much lower, in fact, that in many leftist places of America right now, there is a movement to stop testing people, to stop imposing standards for success in universities.
	And so definitely what you say is true before the 70s.
	After the 70s, we're going...
	This is just To the opposite direction.
	No, that's not true, actually. That's not true. It's still going up.
	That is true. Well, tell me about the data.
	From which scientists do you claim...
	Guys, this is off topic.
	We're completely off topic. Yeah, listen, just for those of you who don't know, and we won't debate this now, so there's a measure of the sort of most concentrated intelligence.
	It's called the G-factor, and they called it the G-factor because they couldn't really think of a good word.
	IQ is a good measure of how to take tests, but there's a raw processing power called G, and the G tends to be declining, although you're right, in some metrics IQ is increasing, but the sort of most common underlying processing power tends to be going down.
	And of course we can see it's very well correlated, and this has been talked about in Newsweek and other places, that GDP tends to be correlated to average IQ within a country.
	Again, these are just basic facts.
	Now, the fact that you would then go, oh, this means you're an ethno-nationalist, It's such a ridiculous leap from a scientific discussion of the literature to a horrendous...
	So let me get this just straight.
	You are not an ethno-nationalist and you do not think the government should keep out people who have low IQs.
	I think that the government should not exist at all.
	So you're asking me to deploy an institution I think is morally invalid.
	So I don't even know how—I've denounced the state, and then you're saying, well, do you want the state to do something?
	Did you not follow the earlier argument?
	Was it too complicated? I mean, again, I don't believe the words you say half the time.
	Because this is—first off, a lot of times ANCAPs define the state completely different than traditional anarchists do.
	We normally define the state as the military and the police.
	ANCAPs and libertarians tend to define the state as the government.
	Specifically as like the body that exists for the creation and mediation of policy.
	So if you tell me you're anti-state, but then you make statements that seem to say that you're okay, or at least We'll entertain the idea of keeping certain people out because you feel they are incompatible with the society.
	I'm sorry, I'm going to have a hard time believing you.
	What are you talking about? When have I ever said people should be kept out who are incompatible?
	Like, you're just arguing with some bizarre straw man in your head?
	Like, what are you talking about?
	Again, you are on record of having said this.
	Oh, I have said what?
	You did not mean that.
	We should keep people out who can't participate in society.
	What are you talking about? On record.
	Okay, give me the quote. Give me the quote, big guy.
	Give me the quote. You are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free market economy.
	If you are bringing in groups with average lower IQs, it's going to be a problem.
	Now, I don't believe that the state should keep them out at all.
	I don't believe in the state as a whole.
	How do we stop that? Yeah.
	Well, I mean, the big idea, of course, would be to rely on private charity rather than the welfare state because the welfare state – and this is a common – Private is charity to keep people out and to halt the free movement of peaceful people.
	Again, just to stop the interruptions.
	All right. Yeah, so this is an old argument.
	You can go back to Milton Friedman.
	It's not even my argument.
	So, again, you're just shooting the messenger.
	And the argument is you can have open borders or you can have a welfare state, but you cannot have both.
	And, again, you can get mad at me, but this is not even my argument.
	So – I mean, that's a terrible argument.
	You absolutely can't. And I'll point to Brent.
	I'm very disappointed here because Suoletariata asked for scientific evidence.
	He says it's outside the subject.
	So somehow data cannot be brought in this subject, according to Brent.
	Wait, wait, wait. When did I say that? Well, I asked, what is the evidence that the Flynn effect is not reversing and that it's continuing in the last 10 years?
	And you said, we're not going to talk about that.
	It's outside of the subject.
	No, I said literally Google it.
	Google it and tell me which scientist has published a study in the last 10 years claiming the Flynn effect is continuing in America.
	I'd like to see this. We can continue that after this debate.
	Now, Brent, on your point...
	There is a way through private property that you can have a reduction of the free movements of people.
	Private property is guaranteed by the state.
	It doesn't exist without the state.
	Well, private property is not just guaranteed by the state.
	People are willing to protect it themselves through their own actions and security forces.
	Private property has emerged naturally in societies of monkeys that were protecting their bananas from the other monkeys.
	You can't even have a debate without private property.
	You can't have a debate without using...
	Personal property. I don't care about how you label it.
	In the end, if people own lands in a libertarian society, there may be people who try to enter that society but are incapable of acquiring lands because they're incapable to survive on the free market, incapable to sell their labor or sell products.
	This argument is ridiculous because there's plenty of land for everyone.
	We're nowhere near a point where we don't have enough land and there you will not find enough people who agree with you and will want to keep that many people out.
	Well, but of course, it's the government.
	People can only control the land that they can physically defend by themselves and use.
	It's not possible.
	The borders are too large.
	It's the government that prevents people.
	The world is too big.
	It's the government that prevents people from gaining access to lands.
	And I'm sure we're on the same page as far as this goes, which is when the government prevents you from going out and homesteading, when the government prevents you from freely building roads, when the government reserves massive areas of land for its own use or whatever it is, they're preventing people from going out and using the land.
	One of the greatest barriers to the productive and enjoyable use of land is the state.
	And I'm absolutely completely and positively certain that people can figure out property rights in the absence of a state.
	I'll give you a tiny example. It sounds kind of silly, but it's actually very real.
	If you go to a sort of country fair, then there's booths that people can set up to sell their wares.
	And what people do is they just go out and they put a little chalk outline about where they want their booth, and everybody just leaves that alone.
	Now, nobody's going to call the police or go to the courts.
	It's a spontaneous recognition that good fences make good neighbors.
	There is a hierarchy in those.
	Looking at the Berlin Wall, right, where when people tried to escape from East Berlin, they were gunned down, gunned down, trying to forcefully, trying to peacefully leave a society that was intolerable to them because of its lack of freedom and the concentration camps.
	And so when you guys defend communism, which is well known for shooting people trying to cross barriers and then say, oh, it's really bad to have boundaries to free movement of people.
	It's madness. Yeah, so again, you are equating communism, which is much bigger than even just Marx and Engels, let alone, you know, with one specific variant of communism, which, you know, never reached communism, never really reached socialism, got about to state capitalism and imploded.
	So, yeah, that's a bad model.
	We probably shouldn't do that.
	There's no disagreement on that.
	You know, the issue here, like, when we're talking about the free movement of peaceful people and the fact that I don't think you can make any ethical case whatsoever to halt that.
	And secondly, I don't think you can possibly stop people from moving where they want to go and where they are welcome.
	Without a state to do it.
	Now, if you oppose the state, you have to necessarily support open borders.
	And I will also say that you can absolutely have open borders with welfare.
	And the sole reason is, we have open borders in the United States between states.
	I can leave New York and go into Kentucky.
	And let's say there's welfare.
	Can I claim the welfare in Kentucky?
	No, because I don't live there.
	So obviously we can have different levels for what you are allowed to take essentially from the community stores based upon who you are, how long you've been there, what you do.
	That's perfectly fine.
	But yeah, it is absolutely compatible with a quote-unquote welfare society.
	So you're against the state, but you're for the welfare state.
	I mean, I'm okay with in the- So you're not against the state.
	First of all, I'm giving you an example as to why that line of logic doesn't work.
	No, we get rid of borders and the welfare state.
	I don't want borders.
	I don't want any initiation of the use of force.
	If it's used to keep people out, that's bad.
	If it's used to forcibly take people's property and transfer it for political power, which it almost always is, that's bad too.
	We're on the same page.
	All initiation of the use of force is immoral.
	We've got to talk about the NAP because the NAP is a garbage moral system.
	Oh my God. Can you start off by making a fucking argument rather than just trash talking stuff like a fucking two-year-old?
	Here's the issue with the NAP. The NAP prevents no violence whatsoever.
	All it does is seek to, when it's actually put into practice in reality, it excuses violence committed by the more powerful entity.
	So for instance, with regard to the NAP, when there is a argument, let's take for instance, oh, I don't know, Israel.
	You have the Palestinians in Gaza and you have the Israelis.
	Both sides claim that the other is aggressing against them and both sides are correct.
	So what happens? They fight and the IDF kicks the crap out of them and essentially forces them into an open air prison.
	Because again, the NAP can't actually, it's basing everything on the subjective act of aggression.
	And it just says, don't be aggressive.
	aggressive.
	Rather than the real material conditions.
	I don't know what the hell.
	I feel like I'm in some alternate universe here where we're not even speaking the same language.
	Okay.
	How is the, how are the Israeli military funded?
	Are they funded voluntarily?
	Are they funded coercively?
	How are they staffed?
	Are they staffed voluntarily?
	Hang on.
	Let me finish.
	Let me finish.
	Are they funded voluntarily or are they funded coercively?
	So when you're talking about, when you're talking about, hang on, when you're, I'll explain it to you because you guys don't seem to have grasped the NAP at all.
	So when you have a state actor called the IDF that is funded and staffed by putting guns to people's heads, taking their money and taking years of their life by forcing them to enlist.
	That is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	Thank you.
	And so when you're saying, well, the IDF somehow justifies the non-aggression principle, a state army is funded and staffed through violence, through violations of the non-aggression principle.
	That's where you need to stop, not what happens afterwards.
	Sure, but again, the same problem happens with two people, two normal people who are not funded.
	Oftentimes in a fight, both people will say that they've been aggressed against.
	So you don't need the IDF. It's just one obvious example.
	No, it's not an obvious example.
	The IDF only exists because of violations of the non-aggression principle, so it's not at all an obvious example.
	Okay, but again, it's the same problem as this with two people.
	The IDF exists purely because of capitalism and the state.
	Capitalism requires a state.
	That's why it exists. It exists to protect the capitalist interests in Israel.
	It doesn't exist to have anything to do with some idealist notion.
	Hang on, you're just throwing words in here which you haven't defined.
	What is your definition? You can't just use these words like some monkey shooting a gun.
	What do you want to find?
	What do you need help with?
	What is the definition of capitalism?
	A mode of production based on private property and the exploitation of labor.
	Okay, so exploitation of labor is somewhat subjective, but let's talk about private property.
	No, it's a scientific term. It doesn't mean it's not a moral good or bad.
	It's just exploitation. No, exploitation is not a scientific term.
	Just adding the word science doesn't make something scientific.
	No, no, my argument is scientific, so I'm right.
	No, so you're saying it's private property.
	Okay, so if you're saying that the IDF only exists because of capitalism, and capitalism is defined as private property, but the IDF only exists because private property is violated, then you have your head so far up your ass you get to see out of your eyes twice.
	Stephen, you are disagreeing with Adam Smith and John Locke.
	So what? Who cares?
	The point is, this is a basic idea about the state and how it functions.
	I just made an argument. Replying with the word basic doesn't alter my argument.
	I'll run through it again because you obviously missed it.
	Okay. If you say that capitalism is based upon private property, But government, armies, and police only exist because of violations of private property, then you can't say that capitalism is responsible for those things.
	That's not what I said. Yes, it is.
	You said that government... Armies and police exist because of capitalism, but then you define capitalism as private property.
	But the armies and police only exist because of violations of private property, which is the opposite of capitalism.
	You just can't have it both ways. They exist to protect surplus and protect property from the masses.
	Okay, I don't know why you guys don't know this.
	How are the police and the military funded?
	Are they funded voluntarily or through coercion?
	It doesn't matter how they're funded. It doesn't matter how they're funded?
	What are you talking about? Are they funded voluntarily?
	They're funded by the religion class at the time, whatever class that is, is going to fund their existence.
	Are they funded? Yes, no question, guys.
	Let's not filibuster this, okay?
	It doesn't matter how they're funded. They're funded by and for the ruling class.
	It matters to the NAP definition.
	It's like saying it doesn't matter whether it's rape or lovemaking.
	Of course it fucking matters.
	If they're funded through violence, they're not part of capitalism.
	I can't believe I'm going to say it.
	JF has been waiting patiently.
	I can't believe I'm saying it.
	Let's hear it from JF. It matters because it tells you who initiated the violence.
	Brent is trying to apply the NAP to a situation where there's bilateral violence.
	This is not what the NAP serves.
	The NAP tells you the state in which there is no violence on either side.
	And that's the place of society we want to be headed for.
	The NAP doesn't tell you what happens when two people are going at it against each other.
	That's not what it's been designed for.
	How do you enforce the NAP, Jean-Francois, and how do you...
	You punish the violations of consent.
	How do you establish who actually owns what?
	How do you establish who actually owns what?
	Because as far as I can tell within the history of our planet, it is one violation of property rights after another, after another, after another, going back in an infinite regress.
	How did you get this? I got it from my father.
	How did he get it? He got it from his father.
	How did he get it? He fought for it.
	Okay, then. We'll fight you for it.
	Wait, who did you steal your comic book from?
	I'm sorry? You wrote a comic book, right?
	Yeah. Who did you steal it from?
	Um... I don't understand what you're talking about.
	I'm talking about property like as in physical things.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Let me ask, let me ask. So you're saying all property is stolen, but you're creating and you have a piece of property.
	Hang on, let me finish, let me finish, let me finish.
	You have a piece of property called a comic book, right?
	That would be, yeah, I guess intellectual property and physical property.
	Did you create that or did you steal it?
	I created it. Okay, so there's a piece of property that was not stolen.
	Okay, but I'm not talking about that.
	I'm talking about like land. I'm talking about large property.
	Oh, you're talking about all the other property that's not part of what you've created.
	Because property is a large term.
	Do you know the difference between private property and personal property, Stephan?
	I'm not sure that you do. Okay, so a personal property is like your toothbrush and private property would be like your computer or your microphone and so on, right?
	No. Computer and microphone are still personal property.
	The way you want to see the difference between personal property and private property is what can you personally hold and control And what do you need a state to control because someone else uses it on your behalf?
	But here's the thing, guys. A factory is private property.
	If you ask how...
	I understand the curiosity.
	I really do. But we're kind of getting to science fiction land here.
	And what I'm saying is that...
	Think of slavery, right?
	So slavery was ended because it was evil and immoral, exploitive in a coercive and violent manner.
	And of course, it was a giant state program because all of the costs of enforcing slavery were offloaded to the general population through taxation.
	So when someone comes along and says...
	We've got to end slavery. It's just immoral.
	And then you say, oh, you've got to tell me how cotton is going to be picked without slaves.
	You've got to tell me how food and vegetables is all going to be picked without slaves.
	And if you can't tell me that, we can't end slavery because we'll all starve and freeze to death because we won't have any food.
	We end things peacefully.
	Because they're immoral.
	Now what happens afterwards is not that relevant.
	It can't be predicted. Like no one would have said, no one would have said, To the question of what happens after slavery.
	No one would have said, hey man, I know exactly how things are going to go after slavery.
	Relatively soon, we're going to have these big giant robots made of metal that are half the width of the entire field and they have these big giant turning wheels and they'll go up and down and they'll pick it automatically and they're going to run on crushed dinosaur juice I mean, someone would look at you and say, well, that's not an answer.
	That's insane. But that's actually what happened.
	We don't know what's on the other side of the non-aggression principle.
	We don't know what's on the other side of genuine human freedom.
	And trying to plan for it is simply stalling progress and saying, well, we can't have the future until we know exactly what it looks like.
	But we don't know exactly what it looks like any more than we knew what the end of slavery looked like.
	Can I respond to that?
	And then I want to respond to Jean-Francois' earlier question, just to be nice to him.
	So, Seth, I'm glad, I'm impressed that you say we don't exactly know how a post-state society would look.
	This is exactly what Marx argued against the utopian socialists, which were the leftists of his time.
	As for, Jay, after a question about...
	Wait, but you were demanding answers as to how things get solved.
	You were demanding answers as to how things get solved, but then you said, oh, Mark said that you can't ever know how things get solved.
	That's utopianism. Who was demanding answers on how things should get solved?
	You asked how do we distinguish a property that was properly acquired with a property that was acquired through aggression.
	So we're explaining it to you.
	That has nothing to do with a hypothetical future society.
	That has to do with right now.
	You can't establish the NAP if you can't establish that.
	True. This is what common law was seeking to do with principles of tort.
	It may not be perfect in its implementation, but the idea that you are taking something against the will of the person having it, who has in turn obtained it legally, that would be what we're looking for.
	And if you've done things like defaming in the process or frauding or defrauding, that would be punished.
	It's as simple as this.
	Yeah, so that only works as far back as we have legal records and assuming that we have a legal system that can be utilized in a fair manner, which we do not.
	What I'm saying is that calling for the NAP right now is like you've been playing a game of King of the Hill.
	And one little asshole pushes his way to the top of the hill and gets up there and says, I'm King, guess what?
	No pushing. That's aggression.
	You know, it's a ridiculous way to try to look at the world.
	No, you just made up a ridiculous scenario and called it ridiculous.
	I'm not sure what input that has to our conversation.
	No, no, no. It's ridiculous because it's utopian in that it doesn't, unlike Marxism or even anarchism, really, it doesn't explain how you get there.
	It's just an idealist notion.
	It's like, we should all just have this idea.
	Oh, no, no. I'm sorry. Sorry to interrupt.
	Anarchism does have theory to get there.
	Yeah, I know how to get there.
	I'm just going to touch on this because I know we've all got lives to live.
	People can go to bombinthebrain.com.
	So I did a lot of work interviewing subject matter experts, psychologists, and scientists on child abuse.
	Why are people violent?
	They're violent because they were abused as children.
	Why do they become criminals?
	They become criminals with very few exceptions like brain tumors and stuff like that.
	They become criminals because they were abused as children.
	How do we end the state?
	Well, the state has all the military and controls education and the media and obviously to some degree my access to corporations.
	So the way that we end it is we spread peaceful parenting, we raise children peacefully and rationally, so they can think for themselves, so they're not traumatized, so they're not hysterically aggressive, so they're not entitled, so they're not paranoid, so they're not drug addicts and promiscuous, and all of these effects of child abuse.
	And there's something called the adverse childhood experience, which everyone should really take just to measure how your childhood was.
	And if you are raised relatively peacefully, it doesn't have to be perfectly, there's no such thing as perfection this side of heaven, then you will grow up to be robust.
	Child abuse takes an average of 20 years off people's lifespan.
	It contributes to ischemic heart disease and cancer and promiscuity and addiction and violence, as I mentioned.
	I have a quick question here. Let me just finish.
	If we raise children peacefully, and that's been my major mission for the last 16 years and even before that in my private life, We raise children peacefully.
	They won't grow up to be feral and aggressive towards others.
	There will, of course, not be everybody raised peacefully, so we also need to raise them with confidence and avoiding bad situations or self-defense if necessary, because it's not like the whole world suddenly becomes peaceful tomorrow.
	And from that particular process, the state is invested in child abuse because child abuse creates predators and destabilization and terrible diseases and all of that.
	And so we say, oh my gosh, there's all these dangerous people in society.
	We better hang on to the state to protect us.
	If we can apply the non-aggression principle where it has its most traction, which is in early childhood, particularly up to the age of sort of six or seven seems to be the important aspect of it, then we grow up seeing more benevolent people around us, more helpful people around us.
	We'll have more empathy, more charity, more help for the people who are doing less well, more sympathy.
	This is the IQ argument. We don't blame people.
	I understand where you're going with this.
	So with the IQ argument, we don't get mad at people or blame them for things that are beyond their control.
	And the science is pretty clear that IQ is about 80% genetic by our late teens.
	20% is still a lot to work with, which is why I do a philosophy show.
	And so the long-term goal is not a violent revolution.
	It's not stringing up the bourgeois by their necks or anything like that.
	All that does is create a new cycle of violence and trauma and get more millions killed.
	It's to take the non-aggression principle, bring it to life in your own life.
	That's not utopianism.
	Raising children without aggression is not utopianism, I can tell you.
	I've done it for 13 years almost.
	It's very achievable. It's idealism.
	No, it's not idealism. It's strictly in a philosophical sense, but hang on.
	So first off, I've been meaning to say this for the entire debate.
	If you're against child abuse and, like, you were talking about mass rape and all this stuff, what in the world are you doing, like, working with a guy who is funded by the largest known mass rapist in the entire freaking world, Jeffrey Epstein?
	If this is something you care about, why are you partnering with JF? I'm here to debate communists.
	Who I'm with is less important to me, right?
	I mean, you guys are calling mass murderous idiots.
	Let's hear from JF. I give you the choice.
	A world in which Jeff Epstein keeps the $25,000 in his bank account or a world in which we remove it from his bank account?
	Which world do you prefer?
	I mean, money isn't real, so it doesn't actually make a difference.
	Bitcoin's real. Which world?
	You have to choose one.
	A world in which he keeps the money or a world in which we remove it from his bank account?
	Well, being that you used it to spread hate...
	No, don't talk about me.
	I'm giving you a hypothetical.
	You leave the money in his bank account or you make it disappear.
	What do you think is the best?
	I would say, from an ethical standpoint, you leave the money in his bank account.
	You don't take that man's money, period.
	Because if nobody took his money, he wouldn't have his power.
	You want him to buy one more prostitute?
	No, I want everyone to turn down his money because, again, money isn't real.
	No, but I didn't say turn down.
	I'm presenting you a hypothetical and you're refusing to engage with it.
	I get what you're trying. I think you're engaging in extremely bad faith in this debate.
	But let's move on because that was just a ridiculous attack and you're clearly not equipped to answer because we both know the answer.
	It's that you would remove the money from his bank account, which is what I did.
	I mean, I would remove the money from his bank account, but I wouldn't.
	I probably saved more women from prostitution by doing this than you will ever in your life.
	Oh my god. No, money isn't real, dude.
	This money isn't real idea is a great way to return to the communism topic.
	Yeah. All right, so I did have that question, but yes, well, I'm sorry, go.
	Yeah, Stephan, so a lot of the stuff you said, you know, I agree with you, it would be great to do those things you are saying, but the problem I see, you know, as a materialist is that, again, you're talking idealism here, you haven't changed fundamentally the relations society, the power structures that are keeping, that are reproducing all the same things you hate about the state and about coercion and about violence.
	And you also said that the state wants people to be, you know, fucked up and wants child abuse.
	That's actually backwards.
	The state wants, you know, it educates people for a reason.
	It wants healthy people who can go into the army, be its soldiers, fight its battles, and create economic profitability for it because the state is a bourgeois state, and bourgeois states need to reproduce themselves through profitability and through imperialism.
	The government wants its citizens to be healthy?
	Then why on earth is the government-mandated food pyramid producing such unbelievable levels of child obesity and adult obesity?
	It wants them to be healthy enough to do the paperwork.
	Hang on, you asked a question.
	Hang on, you made a statement.
	Let me rebut it. And how is it possible that the government is funding the mass drugging of children with psychotropics?
	And how is it that the government is funding the separation of fathers from their children through family courts and the welfare state?
	And how is it that the government is making the army less and less ready with a variety of mad initiatives that make it less combat ready?
	And what you're talking about, that the government wants a healthy population, the government's...
	And why is it that children are not allowed to go out and run around And play anymore in schools.
	The government doesn't want you healthy.
	The government just wants you sick and frightened and dependent and aggressive and jumpy and unprotected so that you're constantly running to this giant fascistic structure called the state for your sucker.
	This is a great question.
	So the state, fundamentally, is the central committee of the bourgeoisie.
	The bourgeoisie gets to organize itself in the most long-term way it can, because it can't do that, you know, as corporations, and it's on its own.
	It's going to make, there's all kinds of fractions within it, and because it's a bourgeois state, it's going to have its own forms of corruption, right?
	Because money and monopoly Free power.
	And that means all those corporations have interest in the state.
	And that's why you get things like the open opioid epidemic, which also happened to run counter, right?
	have, and it depends on whether you elect the right wing of the bourgeoisie or the left wing of the bourgeoisie.
	There's ups and downs to both, right?
	What percentage, sorry, I didn't drop.
	I don't know.
	I feel like this is the closest we've come to a good discussion.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Sorry.
	I'm genuinely confused.
	I don't know what you mean by the bourgeoisie.
	I understand some general arguments for it, but what percentage of society are you talking about here?
	So the bourgeoisie is the capitalist class, the owners of the means of production, the big bourgeoisie.
	Like the 1%?
	It wouldn't include small business owners.
	It would include big landowners as well.
	So like a guy who owns a convenience store would be in the bourgeoisie?
	No, that would be petite bourgeoisie.
	That's petty bourgeoisie.
	Okay, but that's part of the bourgeoisie.
	It's just a subsection, right?
	Petite bourgeoisie is kind of a swing class.
	It's its own thing. It's artists, artisans, and small business owners.
	So you with the comic book would be petty bourgeoisie, right?
	They actually have different interests.
	Yeah. I was a worker before, and now that I've got my own business, I'm a petite bourgeoisie.
	Wait, if you're a communist, though, why would you go from the working class to the exploiting class?
	I mean, I don't exploit anyone.
	It doesn't matter what you do.
	Wait, you can be a bourgeois and own the means of production without exploiting people.
	No, you can't. Yeah.
	You ever heard of a guy called Robert Owen?
	There was a famous socialist called Robert Owen in the 1800s who was one of the first utopian socialists.
	And he was one of the guys that helped pave the way for Marxism.
	But yeah, you can be in any class and be a Marxist and be a communist.
	That's true. Or anarchist. I'm just confused, right?
	Because I thought it was scientific, which means no exception.
	So you can control the means of production without exploiting the workers.
	No, you will exploit the workers, absolutely.
	You would absolutely be exploited.
	No, but the guy with the comic book, he owns the means of production.
	He controls the production of his comic book, right?
	No, he doesn't, because he's a small business owner, and in fact, probably a sole proprietor, actually.
	Yeah, I'm a sole proprietor.
	The only person being exploited by my comic book business is me.
	He's exploiting himself.
	How do you produce the comic book?
	He's exploiting himself. Do you print it with your own hands?
	Do you roll a kind of wooden thing to print your comic book?
	No, no. I contract out my printing, but I make sure to print it within the United States.
	Do my best to avoid going overseas.
	Where people are getting exploited, right?
	The United States? Even if he did, it wouldn't matter because the goal, like how you get to socialism and communism is not by being a moral person or being the truest.
	We're not idealism. This is how you guys think.
	This is not how the reality works, though.
	You don't just... Okay, so hang on a sec.
	I really, really appreciate this, and I don't mean to sound snarky.
	I genuinely really, really appreciate this.
	So you're saying that you can do evil within the current system in order to achieve your goal?
	I mean... Yeah, I wouldn't call it evil.
	I would say it's...
	No, no, you said you don't have to be virtuous, which means that you would be doing something that's not virtuous or the opposite of virtue, which would be evil, right?
	Yeah, I mean, Thomas Jefferson raped his black slave, but he did also lots of great things, and I would call him a great man anyway.
	So what are the evils that you would do?
	This is straight up Dostoevsky, right?
	This is straight up crime and punishment, right?
	Like you've got this really bad woman who's a porn broker who's ripping off students as the Raskolnikov thinks, and he goes and kills her.
	So what evils or...
	evils would you guys commit because you know you're talking about me hate speech from jf and inciting violence to me like it's you know and and now we're at the place where you guys are like oh yeah we would totally do immoralities under the current system in order to achieve a goal is there a limit like what else you do not do hang on i'm just Neither one of us said that.
	He said hypothetically someone could do that.
	No, no, no. He said you don't have to be a good person.
	You can't be virtuous to achieve your goals.
	I said it's not about virtues.
	Okay, it's not about virtues.
	So what immoralities would you guys, this is your argument, not mine, and I'm not trying to be snarky.
	I'm genuinely curious, right?
	But we don't define them as immoralities.
	Because look, you said you're going to exploit the workers because you're controlling the means of production through paying people to produce your comic book, right?
	And you say that's fine. So okay, exploiting the work.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	That does not track.
	Exploiting the workers is bad, but it's okay if it produces a comic book that advances communism, so the ends justify the means.
	And I'm just trying to explore that.
	No, no one has made that argument, Stephan.
	No, no. Well, it's recorded, so you can deny it, but it's recorded and can be played back, so I don't know where we're going from here.
	Yeah, and you will find when you record it and play back, no one's made that argument.
	That is your characterization. Robert Orrin was a factory owner in the 1800s, and he argued for socialism.
	He wrote about it. He was involved in socialist actions, but he owned factories.
	And what he did was, he made experiments where he, see if he could up productivity from his workers by lowering the amount of hours of work they did and upping their pay.
	And sure enough, he found that he got better work out of it.
	He got more productivity out of treating his workers better.
	Now, he was still exploiting them, and he had to.
	As a capitalist, that's his role in society.
	He could have given it up, but that wouldn't have helped the cause anymore.
	So I would like to make the case.
	It's irrelevant. It's also irrelevant.
	No, but he's not exploiting the workers by this means, right?
	No, he is. He is exploiting the workers.
	He's still making a profit off of them.
	So he is exploiting the workers, but it was good.
	Just less. It was less bad.
	So doing less bad is good.
	Yes, exactly. So what I'm going to invite you guys, and you know, look, you care passionately about good in the world, and look, we're all here trying to help people, and I know we're slinging a lot of mud.
	We care about progress and human emancipation, not about good and bad.
	Progress and human emancipation.
	Is progress and human emancipation, is that not good?
	It allows the greatest freedom.
	And is the greatest freedom not good?
	Are you allergic to the word?
	Why can't you say the word good?
	I mean, is it not good what you want?
	So the reason why is he's not doing a moralistic critique of political economy.
	He's talking specifically materialist about the actual physical relationships between people and food.
	Okay, but I get all of that.
	But isn't it better or preferable for there to be more freedom in the world?
	I mean, yes, absolutely.
	That's why I'm a communist. Okay, so what the hell are you twisting me around for?
	I say it's good and better. Oh, no, I don't want to say that.
	It's like, why not? Are you allergic?
	Does your dark lord not allow you to say these words?
	What are you talking about? I think you and I, we have slightly different moral systems.
	We do have just about a minute left.
	Can I answer Stefan's question, actually?
	Well, I'm just... Let me just...
	Very briefly, and then if we can go just a little bit over.
	Honestly, I just think 30 seconds.
	So, guys, what I'm going to offer you, and whether you take it or not, it's completely up to you.
	It's still a relatively free society.
	I'm offering you a path to oppose state power that doesn't require you to compromise morality, but rather enact it.
	So if you focus on...
	The better treatment of children, anti-spanking, anti-circumcision, anti-abuse, then you will be doing far more than anyone else to undermine the power of the state.
	Hierarchy comes from the family.
	The child is the father of the man, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.
	Hierarchy comes from family.
	If the family is hierarchical and brutal, the society will be hierarchical and brutal.
	I'm inviting you to work with me in this area where you don't have to compromise your morality.
	You don't have to say, well, Jefferson raped people and blah blah blah.
	You can just say, I'm going to pursue the good without having to do bad or justify it or dodge around it.
	I'm going to focus on building a free society from the crib up, which is the only way it can be built.
	You don't have to make compromises.
	is you don't have to kind of stutter around the edges of these morality issues.
	You don't have to have this Rekolnikov, should I club the porn broker to death?
	And you can have a very clean conscience when it comes to pursuing a better world.
	Okay, sorry, thanks.
	Okay, so the problem with that is that the state structure itself is self-replicating, and it creates incentives that drive people...
	It functions a lot like an AI, if you want to think of that, with regard to capitalism.
	It's one of the reasons why we could have very easily had as successful a response to COVID in the United States as Vietnam had.
	Unfortunately, we have no ability because of capitalism and the state structure and the level of incentives That we had to actually respond meaningfully, and what, 600,000, what is it now?
	800,000 people are dead as a direct result of that.
	Individual morality, even if you had 100% of the people in the world behaving in a very, as you would consider it, a virtuous manner, the state would still continue to replicate itself.
	Because again, it's like a machine.
	It is a web of human intelligence and a web of human relationships that has been running our society since about 6,000 years ago.
	And we cannot destroy it simply by wishing it away or being better people.
	We have to actually destroy it.
	You have to actually break the machine.
	And how do you do that? What are you talking about here?
	What are you talking about in terms of breaking this machine?
	Are you talking about violence?
	So what you do is you collectively, with workers and a party, you take over the means of production.
	You take over the things you need on the society.
	How do you do that? You literally take them. Do you take that through violence?
	Actually, you don't have to use violence.
	The Russian Revolution was bloodless.
	The violence came after in the reaction by the Tsarist regime.
	The German government funded Lenin with massive amounts of arms and sent him through Finland to take out Russia from the First World War.
	Okay, cool. Cool story.
	There was no blood spilt in the actual taking of the Duma.
	So a revolution with a weak capitalist government does not need to be violent at all.
	The violence happens in the reaction by the ruling class.
	Wait, so the violence of the Russian, the violence of the Soviet state was the bourgeois?
	It was the fault of the bourgeois? The communists took power essentially in a bloodless coup and the bourgeois attacked them afterwards.
	Well, I know about the war that came after that, but there was quite a lot of violent taking over of things by Lenin and there were concentration camps in the 1920s.
	I mean, this is not, of course they were attacked from outside.
	And no one's advocating this model.
	The point was that you can actually take power bloodlessly.
	Now, I'm going to answer this question in a good faith way, because this is actually a really good question.
	And this is something that I wrestle with.
	I am a Nichiren Buddhist, and very much I believe in karma.
	Not in the way that most people imagine believing in crime, but I don't believe that you can kill your way to a better world in much the same way that I would not make the choice that Raskolnikov made to kill the woman.
	I think that's, you know, brilliant book, Crime and Punishment.
	How do we move forward?
	And how do we get ourselves out of this problem that we have found ourselves in because of the actions of men long dead?
	I think that there are a number of approaches to it.
	Partially, I think it involves raising consciousness.
	And I think it will need to be a change in consciousness away from an egotistical way of looking at the world.
	This goes back to my Buddhist principles.
	You were talking about good and evil, and the way I think of good and evil is in the terms of fundamental darkness, which is the part of our brains, the aspect of consciousness that makes us think that we are just ourselves and only ourselves and that we ended our skin and nothing else.
	It is this mistake That cause us to think that we can gain from another's harm.
	That we can gain while somebody else takes the blame or whatever.
	I think that moving forward we need a reformation in how we resolve each other to our environment and perhaps some of that can happen within the family.
	But we also need to simultaneously take action within material reality to destroy and dismantle these sections of power.
	That will eventually mean a world revolution where we do away with military and police and nations and borders and everything.
	Now will that happen bloodlessly?
	I hope so. I feel, you know, in the history of our species, such things have not happened bloodlessly, but you know what?
	Things change. They always do.
	And I think that that has to be the way forward.
	So I don't think we can go with a pure idealist approach, and I don't think we can go with a pure Machiavellian approach.
	I think we need to do both at once.
	And I'm very excited to see what happens in the future as we do work to throw off the shackles of the state and capitalism.
	But we have to identify the real problem and attack it at the root.
	We cannot get sidetracked by blaming ethnicities or, you know, other people, you know, who are ultimately exactly like us.
	They just look a little different and maybe talk differently.
	We cannot get there.
	And famously, anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, essentially.
	And James, so James, are we in our concluding statements?
	Yes. Okay. So just in conclusion, I'll say, here we have two communists who don't, they have a project for society.
	They think that a stateless society will converge toward what they want through persuasion.
	It just won't happen. Society has already, I'd like to, I'm just concluding here.
	Society has already converged naturally toward the state of capitalism because, precisely, people have the means without the state to defend property.
	They can defend it with threat.
	They can defend it with the potential for violence.
	In the same way you defend your toothbrush, first, it's because not much people want your toothbrush.
	They don't want to share it with you.
	Second, it's because if your toothbrush is somehow valuable to you, you have a potential to defend it violently.
	This is the natural basis for property.
	And even in a stateless society, someone like Jeff Bezos would certainly have the means to protect his lands with private security forces without the intervention of this state.
	Would Brent simply start calling the property of Jeff Bezos in such a world personal property because he has the means to defend it?
	No, I'd call it a state and I'd destroy it.
	It's closing statements, guys. In the end, all I'll say is ignore these guys.
	They think the world will converge one way.
	Either they're right and you won't do anything about it, or they're most likely wrong and communism will stray away from existence and will remain an idea in their head.
	You got it. So I'll tear you out any last words before you go into the Q&A section.
	Yeah, sure. I'll just make the, you know, the most obvious point that, you know, the things that Stefan and Jean-Francois are arguing for, you know, the markets and private property literally require the very thing they're against, which is, again, the state.
	You can't... Oh, that's okay.
	I'm still here. No, you're still there. Keep talking. I'm still here.
	Yeah, you can't enforce the NAP or private property rights or any of this stuff without armed bodies of men, which is what a state is.
	So I'll just leave it at that.
	You got it. Everybody feel good about going to the Q&A. Do I get a closing statement?
	You got it. Okay, I'll keep it brief.
	So you can't...
	Bludgeon your way to utopia.
	I think we can all accept that's been one of the horrible lessons, I mean really, of everything from the Greeks to the Romans to the Ottomans to the bloody wars of the 20th century to Nietzschean will to power out of Nazi Germany.
	You simply cannot initiate the use of violence to create a utopia.
	If you want to create a better world, you begin by enacting the non-aggression principle In your own life, in your own society.
	That means peacefully parenting your children and also keeping people out of your life who resolutely, resolutely support the use of violence.
	Violence, the initiation of violence, always achieves the opposite of its stated goal.
	If you want a woman to love you and you kidnap her, she's going to end up hating you.
	If you're Hitler and you want to protect Germany and then you initiate national socialism, then you end up with Germany being destroyed from end to end and culturally destroyed in the end of time.
	If you want to create a classless, egalitarian society through communist takeover of the Duma in Russia, then you end up with A far greater disparity of political power in your system than you ever had of economic power.
	And if the only way you can solve inequality, economic disparities, disparities in income, disparities in capital accumulation, if the only way you can solve that and the only way that has been proposed by the left to solve that is to create a massive powerful state that redistributes everything, then you're taking away or you're trying to solve the problem of economic I think we want to teach kids how to be entrepreneurs.
	I think we want to teach them how to compete with the ruling classes.
	We need to reduce or eliminate the power of the state so it's a more even playing field.
	But if you're going to try and solve economic inequality with massive political disparities, in other words, the state controls the means of production and everybody else just get in line and go to the gulag, you've fucked up royally.
	You cannot solve economic inequality with massive political inequality.
	We have to get rid of this notion that we can bludgeon our way to a better world.
	And there are those, of course, out there in the world doing massive evils.
	And they tempt us into wishing to return evil to them.
	They've got the club, so we grab the club.
	An eye for an eye simply leaves the whole world blind.
	We start with the family, we start with that which we can control, and we can grow a beautiful world out of the peaceful raising of children.
	That's what science tells us, and there's no other way.
	Okay, I'll keep mine short and pithy.
	Yeah, very short and pithy.
	So first of all, I would recommend that anyone who's looking for a model for a better society that we can all live in really needs to look into, there are two documentaries you need to watch, The Take by Naomi Klein.
	And about the Argentinian Recovered Factories movement, which was done bloodlessly, and Living Utopia, which is free online.
	It is about the anarchists during the Spanish Civil War.
	And I would highly recommend you look into the history of the Zapatistas in Shaipas, of the CNT Phi, In Spain, and especially, most recently, the PKK-YPG in Rojava, based on the philosophy of Mori Bookchin.
	These new societies are not perfect.
	They have problems, but as we move forward as a species, I genuinely believe that this model has a lot to offer.
	I will also say that in order to take back the property from the moneyed classes, from the capitalists, you don't need a huge bloody revolution.
	You simply have to eliminate the state as an ability to control it.
	Once you get rid of the military and the police and private security, And any other force of armed men, suddenly the property goes and defaults to exactly where it has always been traditionally in the 246,000 years of human history, which is possession and use and common, overwhelmingly common.
	Thank you. You got it.
	Thank you very much. And folks, I want to let you know we have so many questions that we will not be able to get to any new questions.
	So please don't submit any more questions.
	We do want to get our guests out of here at a decent hour.
	And also, gentlemen, if you can do a favor and try to, if you...
	Absolutely have to give a response to what somebody had said while answering their question.
	If you could do that as seldom as possible, just because everybody is really excited to get to hear your guys' responses to their question, they're really excited to hear that.
	And so that way we'll be able to move fast.
	But I do want to remind you folks, our guests are linked in the description so you can hear plenty more in case you don't get to hear your question asked.
	Sorry to be annoying, just one tiny suggestion.
	I would prefer it because we've had a lot of back and forth.
	Let's audience focus and just focus on answering the questions from the audience rather than shots at each other.
	I'm down to do that.
	Everybody okay with that? Let's do it.
	I wanted to attack Brent, but okay, I'll do it.
	Thank you for non-aggressing.
	This one coming in from Mr.
	Krabs. Not quite related to communism, but if you guys are willing to humor it, they say to both sides, is it okay to be white?
	And if you can't say yes, then is it okay to be black?
	Yes, it's okay to be every ethnicity, and we should learn to understand each other, understand our differences, live in peace and harmony.
	It is absolutely okay to be every ethnicity.
	Yeah. It's okay to be white is something that is superficially true, but advanced primarily by fascists and white nationalists who use it as a bad faith argument.
	The fact is, is that race is used by the state to control all of us.
	The whole reason...
	The whole reason the ethnicities are the way that we see them is specifically because it was convenient to the Victorians so that they could justify murdering and subjugating people all around the world.
	In a sense, it is always okay to be yourself, but also look around and see how you are being manipulated.
	One of the major ways everyone is manipulated is through race.
	But race is not merely a point of manipulation by the state.
	Yes, it is. It absolutely is.
	Let me continue.
	It will take hours if we can't speak.
	Race is a concept that has value for the individual, for who their daughters will date, for who they will interact with, for who they identify with.
	And so it has private, legitimate uses, and it is not mere manipulation by the state.
	I love being white because it gives me privileges that other people don't have.
	It's pretty cool. I will say, though, that I am half Irish and half Ukrainian.
	And 100 years ago, I wouldn't be counted as white.
	So, I mean, this is just to show you how stupid the entire concept of whiteness is.
	But that's it. This one coming in from Not Trom says, Would you prefer to live in a peaceful capitalist society where you cannot have children or a society based on violence where you do get to have children?
	I don't answer silly theoretical.
	Sorry, that's just not my name.
	Yeah, false decademy. Stupid question.
	I will actually answer it, and I'd say I would have children because I think that ultimately, I think the negative aspects of life, you can't have the good without the bad.
	So I would prefer that life continue than to live in a paradise where life does not continue.
	You got it. I want to warn folks, if you happen to submit a so-called question, but it's really just insulting one of the speakers, I'm not going to read it.
	Coding Jesus says, unless it's funny.
	When you reward people for having needs, you encourage the having of needs instead of the creation of value.
	Oh my god, I meant to...
	Hold on, they said capitalism rewards serving others.
	Okay, no it doesn't.
	It only sometimes rewards serving others.
	So first off, this is really weird to hear from capitalists that needs are infinite.
	Needs are infinite, but not the same need is not infinite.
	We know this because of marginal utility.
	So like the paradox of water versus diamonds.
	As you get one more, or even better, slices of pizza.
	The first slice you have, great.
	Second slice, wonderful. Third slice, getting a little full.
	Sixth slice, oh my god, why am I doing this to myself?
	So it's not about that society will be this infinite belly that constantly wants everything all the time.
	It's that needs and desires can be guided in socially beneficial directions.
	And that would be what a sane economic system would do.
	The problem of marginal utility is that it's focused on people, on single individuals, but that at the biological level, someone who has needs will eventually have many more copies of themselves in the world through babies, and they will have more needs.
	So marginal utility doesn't apply to groups of people that can multiply exponentially.
	No, it still would apply, because those same individual people...
	It would apply to the individuals, not to the group.
	This one coming in from Joshua Larson says, Swole is...
	Let's see. Oops.
	Not exactly what I'm looking for.
	This one coming in from...
	Well, at least it's a compliment.
	A long story short says, Jeff and Stefan, mega power of philosophy like when Hulk Hogan teamed up with Macho Man Randy Savage.
	Very nice. Very kind.
	Ergoth says, Communists are not against capitalism.
	They just want to climb the ladder through social shaming and moral signaling rather than meritocracy.
	Manipulate your value by accusing the competition of being morally bankrupt.
	Well, sorry, let me just answer that because I didn't get to answer the last one.
	Let me just real briefly on that.
	So I was, you know, I would never have dreamt in my life of looking up Swole or Brenton's history and finding out, oh my gosh, someone said something bad about them or someone made up something bad about them or they did something that was unacceptable or out of the bounds of polite society.
	I never would have imagined doing that.
	Now, you guys, of course, did that with me.
	You did that with J.F., I would just sort of say that when it comes to intellectual debates, it's kind of lazy.
	You know, just looking up, ooh, someone said something bad.
	Ooh, there seems to be something negative that I can interpret.
	I mean, it's not simply bad.
	It's a public service now.
	Hold on. Hold on.
	Still talking. Still talking.
	Still talking. And the reason that I would do that, and I wrote this whole book called Out of the Argument.
	You can get it at outoftheargument.com, is that...
	You can't verify these things.
	I've rebutted all of this nonsense that's said about me six million different ways from Sunday, and I've rebutted it even here, and you accused me of things that weren't true.
	So the reason I wouldn't do that is I like to think on my feet.
	I like to really work with the information that's coming to me and deal with people with as much respect as I can give to them in the moment rather than trying to pick something from the past, which seems kind of intellectually lazy, finding people who said mean things or bad things and As a whole, I think that we can't really...
	And it started off in a really bad way because of that, because it's annoying and it's lazy and boring and just the rent, right?
	It's just trashy, right?
	It's like listening to two boxers trash-talk each other or two wrestlers trash-talk each other.
	I think that we really...
	This is my suggestion for the next time.
	Just come in and deal with the person's facts, reasons, evidence, and argument rather than just immediately starting with the ad-homes and the trashing.
	It's just... It's, you know, we got to try and find a way to elevate debate in society, and this didn't do it.
	Can I answer that?
	Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies.
	They know that their remarks are frivolous and open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly.
	What are we talking about anti-Semites for?
	You just exactly did what you shouldn't do.
	No, it's copy pasta.
	Let's move on to the next question.
	Can you re-read?
	I think it's fair to want to debate communism.
	Unless it has to do with communism, Swole, I do want to move to the next question.
	I want to answer the audience question.
	Can you re-read it for me? You got it.
	They had said... Ergoth says Communists are not against capitalism.
	They just want to climb the ladder through social shaming and moral signaling rather than meritocracy.
	Manipulate your value by accusing the competition of being morally bankrupt.
	Okay, so yeah, I just wanted to say that that's funny because capitalism by definition prevents meritocracy because you end up with classes that make that impossible and which creates incentives and influences that makes it and corruption that make it so meritocracy.
	True meritocracy is impossible.
	There's always a degree of meritocracy.
	If you want meritocracy, And I do.
	You want communism, so get on board.
	The other point is, I don't think capitalism is evil.
	I think capitalism is absolutely progressive, a progressive force over feudalism.
	I'm so glad we're in capitalism now, and I'm so glad I live in liberal democracy in Canada, but I want to complete the ideals of the bourgeois revolution, liberty, fraternity, and equality.
	This one coming in from Mr.
	Krabs says, never forget the 7 to 11 million Christian Ukrainians murdered by communists in the USSR. Right.
	Very, very important.
	The Holodomor is one of the very under-reported on, under-discussed genocides in history.
	And I think it's absolutely tragic.
	And I think it shows the control that leftists and communists have over the educational system that you don't hear much about it at all.
	And then when we did come up here, I think it was Brenton just said, oh, there were some bad apples in the mix and that's why it happened.
	And Stalin was No, no.
	I said the famines specifically.
	Now, Holodomor involved aspects of famines.
	And there is some historical disagreement over whether that was an intentional genocide or an accident.
	I think it was monstrous one way or the other.
	But you can't lay that purely at the feet of Lysenko.
	Just the famines themselves were Lysenko's fault.
	I am Ukrainian, and I'm willing to admit it wasn't an intentional genocide.
	What he was doing was not giving a fuck about the Ukrainians, but also I think Kazakhstan had more deaths than Ukraine.
	And also Russia had lots of deaths.
	Almost all countries in that part of the world had millions and millions of people die, but more Kazakhs die, and yet the right in Ukraine drummed up this narrative Of intentional genocide.
	That's fake news, okay?
	Stalin was a piece of shit and made the famine worse, the drought worse, but it was not something like trying to kill Ukrainians as a race.
	That's ridiculous. I would say if people want to look into Ukrainian history, I would look into the Black Army under Nestor Makhno.
	They were phenomenal.
	And while the Reds and the Whites fought over to conquer the country, they battled to free it.
	And actually, Nestor Makhno was the reason why Largely the reason why the Reds won the war, ultimately, and then was chased out of the country, and a lot of his lieutenants were murdered.
	Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
	Yeah, no, it's a beautiful part of history, and also, coincidentally, Nestor Machna will appear in Issue 2 of Trudy.
	This one coming in from SnakeWasRight says, Brent, what about the Chinese communist famines that necessitated re-privatization of farms?
	Lysenko. Lysenkoism?
	Yes, Lysenko. The Chinese believed the propaganda that were put out by the USSR. That's why they ate up their food stores for years, like in just a couple of months.
	That's why they did the thing where they killed all the sparrows.
	They thought they were going to have this giant explosion of food and they were looking to look into the future and to protect it.
	But they've been lied to.
	Does it not trouble you that you have a system where one person makes a mistake and 20 or 30 or 40 million people start to death?
	I mean, yes, but that's not my system.
	That definitely does trouble me.
	I don't think we should do the USSR's political structure.
	Poofy says, Hi, Stefan.
	Have you read Thomas Sowell's conclusions about culture's effects on IQ? And do you agree or disagree with them?
	And why do you take your stance on them?
	Well, again, it's not my stance.
	I have 17 experts from the left and from the right talking about IQ differences between ethnicities and races, and this is a fact.
	I mean, it's going to have some effect on outcomes.
	I would love to have a world where, and I've talked to black people, Hispanic people on my show, helped them with issues, helped them fix their marriages and fix their parenting, and it's a wonderful thing to do in the realm of philosophy.
	It would be wonderful if we could close these gaps.
	Nobody has found a way to do it.
	Nobody has found a way to do it.
	Now, Tom Sowell has arguments which runs, I'm paraphrasing him, he's a fantastic writer, just read him on anything you can get a hold of.
	Also, by the way, former Marxist, switched sides when he saw which way the wind was blowing, uses literal Stalinist tanky arguments, just inverts them.
	Okay, so you're just insulting him rather than making an argument because I guess that's kind of...
	No, I'm pointing out... No, you are insulting him.
	Own your shit, man.
	You're a Buddhist. Own your shit.
	You're insulting him. It's an important thing to know.
	No, you're not making any arguments.
	You're not rebutting any of his data.
	You're not rebutting any of his facts.
	You're just insulting the poor man.
	Like, just grow up and learn how to debate like an actual fucking adult.
	Just learn how to debate like an adult.
	Rebut facts and arguments, not with just petty, stupid, grade school insults.
	So, hang on.
	So, let me get back to Dr.
	Sowell's... Yeah, I'm trying to argue it.
	He just interrupted. That's fine.
	Okay. So, Dr.
	Sowell makes the case. He says, look...
	There are IQ differences between blacks and mixed bloods and whites and so on.
	He says, look, if you were a slave owner and you raped, because you can't have consensual sex with a slave, it's always rape, right?
	So you rape one of your black slaves, you're a white slave owner, then you're going to end up with, you know, a mulatto, a half white, half black kid.
	Now, because he's half yours, you're going to put a lot more effort into educating him, you're going to try and teach him to read, and you're going to try and raise him up, and so he's got lots of really good arguments, and his perspective is That there's much more environmental factors with regards to differences in IQ. I think that's a wonderful argument.
	I would love to explore that.
	But again, people have for the last hundred years, actually more than a hundred years, for the past couple of hundred years, have been trying to find a way to close this gap.
	The whole Head Start program, $100 billion spent, of course, by the state, which we would assume is pretty much disastrous, did close the black-white gap for a couple of years, and then it generally tended to spread out again.
	Reasons for that, again, nobody knows if it's genetic or environmental.
	My guess is some combination of the two, but I'm not a geneticist.
	I don't know.
	But wherever it is, we don't know at the moment how to change it.
	Now, I think peaceful parenting, more cohesive and positive family structures, which you can't achieve under the welfare state, would do wonders for the black family, just as it did for the black family during its time of greatest progress from the 1920s into the 1960s.
	Blacks were coming into the middle class enormously quickly.
	Black families were solid.
	The black middle class was growing and widely increasing.
	Wonderful. That's exactly what we want in society.
	How far that could have gone, I would love to have seen.
	I would love to. Who wouldn't want this kind of equality?
	It would be a wonderful, wonderful thing to have in society.
	That progress was entirely eviscerated by the state program of the welfare state as was predicted by Moynihan and sadly has come to pass.
	I think you should, everyone should read as much as possible on this issue.
	You should read the people who are environmental.
	You should read, although it's distasteful, I understand, and I feel that distaste as well.
	You should read the people who make the genetics argument, and you should just try and understand this issue.
	Dr. Sowell has wonderful arguments.
	They're quite convincing, and I would absolutely be overjoyed if he was right.
	This one coming in from Mr.
	Crabb says, Brent, if you go from New York to Kentucky and use the emergency room without insurance, how is that not welfare?
	I mean, so first off, anybody can use the emergency room without insurance anywhere, and medical bills are largely a giant scam anyway.
	So no, that wouldn't be welfare.
	Like, if I used the emergency room in New York without insurance...
	Be exactly the same.
	So that doesn't make any sense.
	I mean, the idea is, do we help people who are dying if they can't afford it?
	Yes, obviously we do.
	Because a life, a single human life is worth more than all the money in the world.
	Because again, money isn't real.
	It's just a measure of wealth.
	Like inches. From Tranquilo.
	Go for it. Says, communism works in a society or tribe of about a hundred people.
	Laugh out loud.
	I mean, that's ridiculous because we've seen it function like on the national and regional level.
	We've got the CNT-Fi in Spain who stopped the fascist war machine dead in its tracks and collectivized the entire city of Barcelona and the surrounding Argonne Front for like three years.
	We also have, you know, the PKK-YPG, which were the single best fighters against ISIS In Kurdistan and Syria.
	And we also have the Zapatistas who've been doing their thing in Shaipas since the 90s.
	And all of these societies are far bigger than 100 people.
	You're just ignorant. Imagine if conservatives actually read history.
	Conturian 420 says, for both sides, starting with JF and Stefan, thoughts on the increasing economic and political power of pharmaceutical corporations?
	Hmm. Well, it's a problem, and it's especially a problem in which we have states that are interacting with corporations.
	The state comes in and screws the free market.
	If it was just corporations setting things at the price that they want and benefiting from it, that wouldn't be a big problem.
	But when you get their agents from the corporations acting into the state and giving a veneer of legitimacy to vaccines, to certain medications, and they essentially are agents of the corporation, but they claim to be agents for public good, that is a very bad mix to have.
	Yeah, I'm not a fan.
	I like, in a sort of free society, the way that you would make money as a healthcare provider is if people stayed healthy.
	You know, there was a great system in China in the Middle Ages where you paid your doctor every month until you got sick, and then you stopped paying him until you got better.
	So he had an incentive to keep you healthy.
	And people should be paid for your health.
	They should not be paid for your sickness.
	Socialist medicine makes money off people being sick.
	It does not make money off people being healthy.
	A free market, a voluntary system would, of course, you would want everyone to make money when you're healthy and lose money when you're sick, but that doesn't work into the existence.
	All of the incentives are completely backwards.
	And when the incentives are backwards, there'll be a few people still doing the right thing.
	But for the most part, people just kind of give in and go with the flow, and it's really terrible.
	The average doctor in Canada listens to patients for 18 seconds before prescribing something.
	18 seconds! And if you have complicated medical issues, people may not want to see you.
	We've got waiting lists two years to two and a half years.
	I once needed to see a specialist, and I was told I'd have to wait for 16 months, in which case, hey, I'm better or I'm dead.
	So we do have a pretty bad system.
	A free system, the kind of systems that evolve spontaneously in a free society are systems where they only make money when you're healthy and then are obligated to treat you through contracts when you're unwell.
	I think that would be a wonderful way to move forward.
	Right now, it's entirely backwards.
	And I had, just very briefly, I had a guy, I was just talking about this with my daughter today, Mad in America, a fantastic book, Robert Whitaker.
	And he's pointing out, he said, look, when we got antibiotics, the number of infections went down.
	When we had vaccines, the number of those illnesses went down.
	Now we have these psychotropics, and the incidence of mental illness are going through the roof.
	It seems we're entirely backwards, and we've become this pharmaceutical-dependent, hobbled society where people won't eat well and exercise.
	They just stuff themselves full of drugs that their grandchildren are going to have to pay for with their liberties, and it's just absolutely wretched.
	I'm sure we're all on the same page that we don't like the existing system.
	I just hope that we can get to a peaceful one down the road.
	What Stefan just said about Canadian doctors is a lie.
	The 18 seconds refers to the time before a doctor interrupts a patient, which is still bad, but that's all because of capitalist incentives, not communists.
	We don't live in a communist society.
	Wait, the socialist healthcare system run by the government is a capitalist system?
	It's literally not socialist, it's literally capitalism.
	Okay. Socialism is worker ownership by the means of production.
	In Cuba, they have lots of doctors, and in fact, they get much better care, much better time with their patients.
	And even the same thing can be said actually for Venezuela, at least back in the late 2000s before they ruined their own economy there.
	Yeah. I'll say that big pharma is horrifying and incentives for profit to be tied to health care is one of the worst things you can possibly do because everybody gets sick.
	So you essentially have a captive audience and it will only you have a captive consumer base and it will only get worse as society continues.
	That said, and I'm going to put put this out.
	So like I'm from Manhattan.
	And I'm gonna tell you right off the bat, get vaccinated.
	Because I have seen what this, what freaking COVID can do.
	It just killed my wife's cousin.
	I watched two...
	My friend, both of her parents died of COVID within a week at the very beginning of this thing.
	I'm talking like runny nose at the beginning, you know, in the hospital by Wednesday, on the respirator by Friday.
	Dad's dead by Saturday.
	Mom's dead by Monday.
	And now she's an orphan.
	She's not much...
	I'm not very old.
	And she's not much older than me.
	And her parents were healthy.
	I'm incredibly angry at Communist China for facilitating the spread of this disease into the world by not informing people as they were bound to do by the most solemn treaties in the world, by informing people of a potential pandemic, by disappearing doctors who criticized, by downplaying human-to-human transmission.
	They facilitated the spread of this by closing down internal travel, While still encouraging people to travel overseas, they spread this damn thing across the world, and that's just another body count for communism.
	You mean literally capitalism?
	Everything I don't like is capitalism.
	Strikes again saying, commies, who decides who owns what in any stateless society?
	I mean, what can you hold and control?
	Just by yourself.
	That's what you own.
	And when you stop holding and controlling and using it, then somebody else can come by and take it.
	That's how anarchists have always defined property rights.
	It is based upon possession and use.
	You've heard possession is nine-tenths of the law.
	Where we start to get tetchy is when you try to own and control something you neither use nor possess and instead use state violence to enforce that ownership relationship.
	So yeah, this is a pretty silly question.
	Like, yeah, personal property is yours.
	It's factories. It's big government institutions or the socialist versions of those.
	It's small farms that you get to run yourself.
	Big farms are naturalized for the production of everybody.
	But yeah, it's not complicated.
	Wait, nationalized? What do you mean?
	Nationalized in a stateless society.
	How do you nationalize something in a stateless society?
	Sorry, I misspoke.
	Okay, no, no, I'm not trying to get you.
	I'm just generally confused.
	Expropriated. Yeah, he meant to say expropriated.
	And run democratically by the workers.
	Got it. This one coming in from Taylor H says, Brent, will you please directly address JF's argument about infinite needs?
	I did, so let's keep going.
	This one coming in from, appreciate your question, Poofy says, Brent, please explain, quote, money isn't real.
	Given that you say that, is personal property tradable or is it also not real?
	I mean, personal property as in the physical things that you have, your computer, your food, that's real.
	That's wealth, if you want to think of it like that.
	Money is not wealth.
	Money is a measure of wealth.
	It has the same kind of reality as language.
	It's like inches, you know, so it is a system that we use to try to manage how we distribute goods.
	It has some good qualities towards it, but it also has a lot of really, really bad qualities.
	And I would like to see, as we move into the future, where we go with...
	And this, ironically, JF kind of mentioned this when he said you can't use the will of the mob or mobs intelligence.
	Look up swarm technology.
	We have actually seen...
	This technology has been around since the 1930s.
	It's getting even more, and it's a way of...
	Integrating individual inputs in such a way that the swarm becomes smarter than the sum of its parts.
	And it's actually outperformed both experts and markets and was able to successfully predict the winner of the Kentucky Derby multiple years running, if I'm not mistaken, and not just the winner, but like the trifecta.
	So it's outperformed both central planning and markets.
	And I really think if we can make it work politically, swarm technology is the way of the future.
	On how we can distribute goods and services within the society.
	The entirety of human society is a swarm.
	And it's a swarm that makes babies.
	And you have to be careful.
	There's a different type of evolutionary relationships that applies to groups that make babies than swarms that are coordinated through some sort of technological internet communication.
	Okay, so it's like with bees.
	With a swarm of bees and bees make babies, the swarm is more intelligent than any individual bee.
	No individual bee can even conceive a proper hive placement, but together they actually wind up finding the hives.
	It's funny that you mention bees.
	Yeah. Because bees are actually, the relationship between all of the bees of a colony between each other are the same as between the cells in our body.
	So a bee colony is actually one individual biologically because it has only one queen that will carry their genes.
	I mean, I don't see where you're going from that, but the point is we can capture, like we can wear like a suit of bear fur to be warm, we can capture this power that bees have through swarm technology.
	Rum Runner says, I know a guy who became rich because he bought a bunch of Bitcoin in 2013 and he sold it last year.
	What exactly did he, or who exactly did he exploit to become rich?
	Well, for one, he exploited the planet because Bitcoin is terrible for the environment and he exploited future generations because he contributed to global warming.
	As far as actual Bitcoin mining, he got lucky.
	He found a loophole in the system for a while, speculated and made some money.
	But again, money isn't wealth.
	And if I were that guy, what I would do is I would take that money immediately and exchange it for something real, actual property.
	Actually, productive things that he needs within his life.
	Don't hang on to it because, again, it's nothing.
	On the plus side, Brenton's comic has zero carbon footprint.
	So that's totally different.
	I mean, it's got as low a carbon footprint as I can.
	Yeah, no, I understand. So everything you don't like is bad for the environment, but your stuff is fine.
	No, Bitcoin is uniquely bad for the environment.
	Absolutely not. It takes up more energy.
	Hey, you want to go Bitcoin with me, man?
	I've been doing this since 2010.
	Let's do Bitcoin. Yeah, let's fucking do Bitcoin, man.
	We'll do a debate on Bitcoin later.
	I'll keep this brief. So Bitcoin is the most fantastic thing for the environment because fiat currency promotes the absolute raping and pillaging of Mother Nature through massive debt, wars.
	Okay, that's whataboutism. I'm sorry, can I make my argument?
	Can I make my argument?
	Thank you. So what we want to do is we want to limit human consumption and not turn it into a cancer or a tumor where we just grab and consume everything at will.
	So Bitcoin will massively limit excess human consumption in a way that fiat currency can never do.
	Bitcoin also will end war, because wars are funded through fiat currency.
	Bitcoin will end injustice, enslavement, because it will match the limited nature of our material resources.
	So Bitcoin, as you know, is limited to 21 million.
	Nature is limited. We can do a lot with it, but it still eventually is a finite situation.
	So moving from a fiat currency system where you can create value out of thin air and thus allow people to go into massive debt or hyperinflation.
	Allowing governments to print money.
	Debt is simply deferred consumption.
	When you borrow $1,000 and you buy a computer, you're just deferring not buying a computer down the road or not buying something else when you pay that money back.
	Bitcoin does not allow for the intergenerational pillaging of the unborn, surely the worst exploitation in the history of the world.
	And so Bitcoin, by pushing back against the state and its capacity to buy allegiance by printing money, is going to be the biggest thing to limit our consumption, to limit and end war, accept an extremity of defense.
	It is the greatest thing for anti-statism.
	It's the greatest thing to actually protect I came out of the environmental industry.
	I spent 15 years as an environmental entrepreneur, so I know to some degree whereof I speak.
	This is the most incredible technology to protect us from the pillaging of resources and our liberties through the infinite creation of imaginary money.
	The whole reason we have wars in the first place is currency.
	Just so we don't go too deep on this one.
	This question's for you, Brenton.
	They say, how do you justify taking the surplus value of the labor of your contractors?
	I don't take the surplus value of the labor of my contractors.
	Again, like a surplus-value labor situation is when you have an employee who's paid hourly for your wages.
	Like, that's what happens because like, for instance, I worked as a manager in the past and at my job people were paid minimum wage and I had orders to fire anyone who wasn't generating at least $40 an hour Per hour they worked.
	Now, that is taking surplus value because that individual is generating significantly more than what they are paid back.
	Now, we can find a more equitable way of doing that because there is, you know, people in management do things.
	That's a thing. I'm not going to say that all management is bad.
	I'm not even going to say necessarily that all ownership are all involved.
	But what I am saying is that what we need to have is we need to have employment contracts Where they are negotiated from an even playing field where each party, when they negotiate, stands to gain and lose roughly the same amount.
	And when I'm dealing with a contractor, that's what's happening.
	I don't have a coercive controlling share over the people who choose to work with me and I choose to work with.
	So the specific labor theory of value exploitation doesn't actually apply to my business model.
	You got it. And the Legend Riv says, Communism can't work.
	Look at how the Political Bureau failed the Russian economy.
	Central planning has a knowledge problem because of our individual liberty.
	Oh, that's such bullshit. Okay, so first off, if you want to say that the Politburo, their central planning didn't work, I'm sorry, you're just wrong.
	Like, they had their problems, but Russia went from a limping pre-industrial power to a superpower, able to go toe-to-toe with the United States after smashing the Nazi war machine in a matter of decades.
	Now, the human cost to that was horrifying, and I would not recommend that anyone do that for any reason.
	But what I am saying is, is that they are very, very good at coordinating and especially functioning in, like, more primitive societies that have Sorry, I thought you said that Marx said communism was not applicable to more primitive societies.
	Marx said that, and the USSR tried to still do that.
	So Marx is wrong about that? I would say he was kind of right on that, in that they haven't been able to reach communism yet.
	I think you need to move through those veritable stages of history.
	But also, I'm an anarchist, so my idea of socialism and communism is more rooted in peasant traditions anyway.
	So I would say he was probably wrong with that.
	So, and just for those of you who don't know, I'll keep this very brief.
	This is a Misesian argument that comes out of the 1920s, and it was considered to be a nail in the coffin for central planning, which was that without the information of price, there's no way to efficiently allocate resources.
	So if you have a...
	Just a moment. It's so weird.
	Sorry, I've heard this so many times.
	Well, I'm not talking to you, man.
	I'm talking to the guy who asked the fucking question, okay?
	It's not all about you, okay?
	So if you've got a ton of steel, where do you allocate that?
	Well, in the free market system, you allocate it to the person who's willing to bid the highest, who believes he can get the most value out of it.
	Now, again, value is not objective, it's subjective, so it's all a matter of perception.
	Without the signal of price, there's simply no way to...
	Allocate things efficiently. So what happens is, instead of going to the highest bidder, it goes to the most politically connected or the guy who's got the most blackmail material on the central commissioner and so on.
	And to my knowledge, I haven't studied this in a while, but to my knowledge, there's no way to replicate these spontaneous decisions of hundreds of millions of people or billions of people around the world, which manifests itself in price.
	There's no way to replicate that pull signal from price by some push signal which is based on politics.
	This is very easy to answer.
	Literally, democratic production, right?
	You don't need a state even.
	You just need to democratically ask, you know, you get delegates for each community, for each city, and you vote on what needs to be done, right?
	If all of a sudden you find out, oh, we didn't get enough bananas this quarter, okay, you fix it the next quarter by adding more bananas.
	I can't believe how...
	I can't believe the level of vanity of you guys is true.
	Like, everyone's an idiot except you.
	It's so easy to answer.
	It's so stupid. It's just so blindingly obvious.
	People who've studied this for decades are just like, the vanity is truly astounding.
	I think you're just saying that because I said vanity at the beginning.
	So, we will jump into the next question.
	We only have a couple left here.
	This one, coming in from Eric Olofsson, says the Holodomor was not intentionally having people starve, and thus it wouldn't be murder.
	Yeah. I don't care.
	Well, I mean, this idea that we can read the minds of the people and, oh, did they want genocide?
	Was it an accident? Was it political?
	Was it punishment for the Ukraine's resistance to collectivization?
	How about we have a system where we don't have to try and mind read a century back to people long dust?
	How about we just have a system where people are free and own their own stuff and aren't subject to these whims of these individuals?
	This one coming in from, do appreciate your question.
	McKay says, one argument against communism is that governments can't decide what we need to produce.
	Could AI solve this in the future, possibly?
	If so, wouldn't that be a decent society to live in?
	No, it can't.
	We already answered this and yes.
	Go ahead, y'all. I was just about to say, the problem is to leave into the decision of something that doesn't pay the price of a bad decision.
	And whether it's a group of people, a mob, or an AI, if you have things that make decisions for other people, they are not incentivized to do the right decision.
	That's why the free market and free engagement with society is the only alignment of choices that punishes the right people.
	If you want to go skydiving, you go skydive, but then you take the risk of dying.
	If you want to eat McDonald's, you eat McDonald's, but then you take the risk of getting fat.
	The only proper alignment of society is when each decision that is made ultimately is made by the individual who will pay the price for it.
	Imagine basing your society around who to punish.
	That's all I got to say. Who to reward also.
	Same thing. You got it.
	And that's it for our questions.
	We do want, wait, there's one more, sorry.
	The Legend of Rev says, since 1862, America has had over 40 federal regulations that have destroyed capitalism.
	That's one of the main causes to our record high trade deficit.
	Inflation follows, which is a factor of communism.
	Regulations are a necessary evil of capitalism.
	You can't have a capitalist society run correctly or run efficiently enough without them.
	If you have no regulations, you end up with Miami and you have buildings collapsing.
	You end up with Afghanistan and buildings collapsing.
	Or the Berrios in Brazil.
	Same with the welfare state, right?
	These are just things you have to have in capitalism.
	There's no formula that's going to be successful either way.
	No matter what you do, it's going to be full of competition.
	Well, no, there is. Sorry. So what has happened, and this comes out of the banking industry originally.
	The bankers would lend out multiples of their deposits and leverage lending, and then sometimes they would bet wrong.
	And in the past, when the bank went bankrupt, they would be able to take the houses of all the bank executives, and they would end up living under a bridge, which to me is just if you waste people's money or you should have consequences for your own bad decisions.
	So... Bankers didn't really like that, so they pressured governments and governments were happy to comply in return for donations.
	They created a corporation which we sort of mentioned earlier.
	So now if you screw up as a business owner, your personal assets are shielded from all liability.
	And so because people have this fictional fascistic corporate shield I mean, if you wanted to put your money into a bank, would you rather put your money into a bank where the guy would lose his home if he screwed up or where a guy would keep all of his three homes if he screwed up?
	You'd want to be in the guy who was more liable.
	So corporations were created to allow massive pillaging without risk from the aristocracy, from the 1%, the bourgeois, I think you guys mentioned.
	So now you need regulation because people aren't personally liable for the bad decisions, the corruptions, the messes, the shortchanging, the bad things that they do if we simply allowed the restoration as it would be in a free market of personal liability for people.
	The decisions that you make as a business owner, we wouldn't need regulation because people would be regulated not by regulatory agencies they could basically just buy out and the revolving door of regulatory capture is well known.
	They'd lose their home. They might go to prison and that doesn't happen.
	As you know, not one person went to prison for the 07-08 financial crash except in Iceland.
	Everybody got away with it and you can't expect people to do better if they keep getting away with stuff.
	Point of information.
	Corporations have nothing to do with fascism.
	When Mussolini said that fascism ought to be called corporatism, he wasn't talking about corporations.
	He was talking about corporatism as in of the body.
	It had a lot to do with, like, the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, and not at all to do with what we call it, like, corporatism or corporatocracy, usually.
	What do you mean when they try to talk about corporations?
	The union of large business and state power.
	I didn't mention Mussolini.
	I mean, let's just try and deal with what I'm talking about.
	But that's not what fascism is.
	It's not the union of large businesses and state power.
	That's part of it. But like, again, fascist corporatism is a very specific thing.
	And that's not to harp on you.
	A lot of people get that wrong, Stephen.
	It's just it's a pet peeve of mine.
	Well, you just got my name wrong, but that's all right.
	Okay. And again, the arrogance that I've just got it wrong, and you're just like, if you've got to lose something, you're linked to the Wikipedia of facts.
	You must have most things wrong. Okay.
	We are going to want to say, folks, our guests are linked in the description.
	That includes at the podcast.
	So if you're listening to this via podcast, if you look in the description box, you will find our guest links.
	We really do appreciate them.
	So I want to say, Stefan, JF, Brent, and Swoletariot, it has been a true pleasure to have you on with us tonight.
	Thank you for the opportunity. I really appreciate it.
	And thank you to all the listeners. It was a great pleasure to be able to present information to you, and I thank everyone for the great questions.
	Yeah. And Stephen, I will send you those eggs if you give me a P.O. box.
	I don't want your eggs. I just want you to grow up and start debating like an adult.

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