Latest / Yaron Brook Show / Stanford Lets a Socialist Define Capitalism -- Answering Chiara Cordelli | Yaron Brook Show
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: M L and an individual loss. This is show. Yeah, alright,
- 0:24Speaker 1: everybody walk up to you one book show. Sure, what
- 0:29Speaker 1: is going on here?
- 0:30Speaker 2: A little technical glitch? Let me just get Let me
- 0:35Speaker 2: just try to see if I can soul with this.
- 0:38Speaker 1: Huh M.
- 0:42Speaker 2: Give me a second. It's affecting my capacity to do
- 0:46Speaker 2: super jazz. There's not more than one video alive?
- 0:51Speaker 1: All right, Uh, give me a second. All right, Uh,
- 0:57Speaker 1: welcome to a fighting shows.
- 1:01Speaker 2: Let's see it's got that and uh all right, hmm
- 1:09Speaker 2: let me see.
- 1:14Speaker 1: All right, let's.
- 1:15Speaker 2: See if I can Hey, is this live? It's a mystery, Yes,
- 1:25Speaker 2: it's live.
- 1:33Speaker 1: H all right?
- 1:37Speaker 3: Uh no video, yes, I know. One second? All right, okay.
- 1:46Speaker 1: Sorry about all that. And I still don't have a solution.
- 1:49Speaker 1: So let me just try to figure out this out
- 1:51Speaker 1: one second.
- 1:53Speaker 2: Uh, I see why that is doing that. It's the
- 1:58Speaker 2: first time. There's a time for everything. Uh, and I
- 2:03Speaker 2: don't know how to solve it. Damn. I wonder if
- 2:10Speaker 2: I can stop this, stop this video.
- 2:19Speaker 1: Okay, I think I know what I need to do.
- 2:22Speaker 1: Give me a second.
- 2:24Speaker 2: Uh, let me go there and shut that down and
- 2:31Speaker 2: let me.
- 2:33Speaker 3: Yeah mhmm, okay, live, let's do that, and let's do.
- 2:53Speaker 1: The lead, lender, stand the lead forever. All right, all right, okay, okay,
- 3:09Speaker 1: sorry about that. All right, Welcome to your Friday show
- 3:12Speaker 1: on the Critics of Capitalism, ME responding to the critics
- 3:16Speaker 1: of capitalism. This is going to be a regular feature
- 3:18Speaker 1: on Fridays, not next week. Next week of traveling, so
- 3:23Speaker 1: there will be no show next week, but the following
- 3:26Speaker 1: week on Friday will have another one of these. Now,
- 3:29Speaker 1: usually what I will do is I will show a
- 3:32Speaker 1: video of a critic of capitalism, and we will we
- 3:39Speaker 1: will analyze the video, and I will respond to the
- 3:45Speaker 1: critique of capitalism. I also already have the video I
- 3:48Speaker 1: want to do next lined up, and indeed I was
- 3:51Speaker 1: going to do it today, but instead I decided to
- 3:57Speaker 1: kind of shift track a little bit. I found out, right,
- 4:03Speaker 1: I found out that earlier this month on August fifth,
- 4:10Speaker 1: Stanford Encyclopedia a Philosophy, the Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy, so very
- 4:15Speaker 1: prestigious encyclopedia run by Stanford University again in philosophy, so
- 4:23Speaker 1: it's a philosophy encyclopedia, but very prestigious. Anyway, they published
- 4:28Speaker 1: for the first time a entry on capitalism and given
- 4:37Speaker 1: kind of what we're doing here. And given that I
- 4:40Speaker 1: knew it would be somewhat negative, I figured this would
- 4:44Speaker 1: be a great opportunity to discuss what is actually written
- 4:48Speaker 1: in the Stanford. In the Stanford Encyclopedia, they have an
- 4:54Speaker 1: entry on socialism. So but this is this is the
- 4:58Speaker 1: entry on on capitalism. They gave the uh you know.
- 5:05Speaker 1: Usually they their points or they ask an author to
- 5:09Speaker 1: come in and write the entry. And in this case
- 5:13Speaker 1: they chose a University of Chicago philosopher by the by
- 5:19Speaker 1: the name of Chiara called Daily Shalla Cold Daily uh
- 5:23Speaker 1: an Italian uh Bet who works at the University of Chicago,
- 5:27Speaker 1: assuming in philosophy department. I think she's a political philosopher,
- 5:33Speaker 1: and they asked her to read it. And here's the thing, right,
- 5:42Speaker 1: Cook Deli is a massive critic of capitalism. She has
- 5:49Speaker 1: very little, if anything positive to say about capitalism in
- 5:53Speaker 1: her work. Her work is in the you know, her
- 5:59Speaker 1: work is at least in the tradition of I wouldn't
- 6:02Speaker 1: say she's a Marxist, but she takes a lot of
- 6:04Speaker 1: her concepts from Marx and her work is dedicated to
- 6:10Speaker 1: a critique of capitalism for the purpose of establishing an
- 6:18Speaker 1: overwhelmingly socialist, what you would call democratic socialists, but socialists.
- 6:24Speaker 1: And we'll see what they mean by democratic socialists. They
- 6:27Speaker 1: don't mean by democratic socialists Sweden or Denmark. They mean
- 6:33Speaker 1: by democratic socialism that everybody gets the vote and everything. Right,
- 6:37Speaker 1: so they mean the means of production to run democratically.
- 6:41Speaker 1: Everything is run democratically, and investment who run democratically. We'll
- 6:44Speaker 1: get to that. So here's the thing, right, So when
- 6:49Speaker 1: they chose to write the section on socialism, they generally
- 6:55Speaker 1: picked somebody sympathetic to socialism, and it comes across and
- 6:59Speaker 1: you can see in just the tone and the nature
- 7:04Speaker 1: and the citations, the citations that are involved. I'll give
- 7:09Speaker 1: you a statistic, right, I'll give you let me see
- 7:12Speaker 1: if we can find this quickly. I've got a statistic
- 7:15Speaker 1: here that's pretty alarming, right, just to give you a
- 7:18Speaker 1: general sense. Right, So somebody film Magnus and Caleb Patty
- 7:24Speaker 1: published a review of the Stanford article and Capitalism, and
- 7:31Speaker 1: they did a little bit of analytical stuff, which Magnets
- 7:34Speaker 1: is very good at, and he looked at all the
- 7:38Speaker 1: people in all the citations. So there were one hundred
- 7:42Speaker 1: and sixty nine authors cited in the Capitalist entry. So
- 7:46Speaker 1: there's capitalism, and then there's a whole write up. We'll
- 7:48Speaker 1: go through the write up, and then there's all these citations.
- 7:53Speaker 1: More than half a hostile critical of capitalism, roughly eight
- 8:01Speaker 1: percent are supportive. Now, if you look at the socialism
- 8:07Speaker 1: entry right the socialism article which is published in twenty
- 8:11Speaker 1: eighteen an updated in twenty twenty, four of one hundred
- 8:15Speaker 1: and sixty authors cited in the socialism articles about the
- 8:19Speaker 1: same number only two only two of rutally critical of socialism,
- 8:27Speaker 1: and nearly two thirds were supportive. I mean, so I
- 8:33Speaker 1: wondered right about about the Encyclopedia Philosophy, and I went
- 8:39Speaker 1: to look at the Anti Fine Ran, and there's a
- 8:46Speaker 1: lot of criticize about the entry Fine Ran, but I
- 8:51Speaker 1: have to say the Anti Fine Ran is one hundred
- 8:53Speaker 1: times better than the engine capitalism. They picked somebody who
- 8:57Speaker 1: is not hostile to inman, somebody friendly. I don't think
- 9:01Speaker 1: she really understands Iran. I don't think she's uh, she's uh,
- 9:06Speaker 1: you know, has a complete understanding of it. And she's
- 9:09Speaker 1: not definitely not a supporter of objectivism. But somebody who
- 9:14Speaker 1: studied it and and has some sympathy towards it kind
- 9:17Speaker 1: of a libertarian philosopher who's somewhat sympathetic towards Iran. And
- 9:21Speaker 1: a lot of the citations are people you know who
- 9:25Speaker 1: are who who are objectivists, And you know, it's it's
- 9:30Speaker 1: not a it's not a great presentation ryan Man philosophy,
- 9:33Speaker 1: but it's not horrible in the same sense as it's
- 9:37Speaker 1: not obviously hostile. The entine capitalism is obviously hostile. And
- 9:49Speaker 1: and and I'll show you how, uh, I mean, Angie
- 9:53Speaker 1: begins with Marx because this is is long dispeeded theory
- 9:58Speaker 1: of exploitation without giving readers any standard objections economical or molo,
- 10:06Speaker 1: and repeatedly subjects capitalism's defenders when they describe them to rebuttals.
- 10:18Speaker 1: The critics of capitalism don't get rebuttals. The defenders of
- 10:21Speaker 1: capitalism good rebuttles left and right. I mean, the very assumption,
- 10:26Speaker 1: the whole way in which this is written is yeah,
- 10:30Speaker 1: we all know capitalism is wrong. We all know capitalism
- 10:34Speaker 1: is a bad system. There's something really horrific, there's something
- 10:40Speaker 1: really bad about thought about capitalism. I'm gonna explain to
- 10:46Speaker 1: you kind of I'm gonna give you some background about
- 10:49Speaker 1: how I'm going to give a little bit of lip
- 10:51Speaker 1: service to the defenders. And then we're going to get
- 10:54Speaker 1: into kind of all the different ways in which it's
- 10:56Speaker 1: being criticized by all kinds of people, in all kinds
- 10:59Speaker 1: of directions. And again we will see that. Now you
- 11:05Speaker 1: could say, Okay, I mean, this is just one scholar
- 11:07Speaker 1: writing an article on capitalism, and that's true. I mean,
- 11:10Speaker 1: if it was just her writing an essay, Okay, this
- 11:12Speaker 1: is how if you have capitalism, take it or leave it.
- 11:16Speaker 1: But this is Stanford, this is Stanford selected the athen
- 11:26Speaker 1: Stanford accepted the structure, accepted the content, and published it
- 11:32Speaker 1: under the authority of an encyclopedia a a you know,
- 11:38Speaker 1: a source of knowledge, a source of truth hopefully. And
- 11:43Speaker 1: when Allie you know, in all of her work, clearly
- 11:51Speaker 1: believes that capitalism is wrong and it needs to be abolished.
- 11:55Speaker 1: We need to move into a post capitalist world, into
- 11:58Speaker 1: ideally kind of a depending on how socialist you want
- 12:03Speaker 1: to go about as socialist as it can get. So
- 12:09Speaker 1: I want to look at her argument, look at the
- 12:11Speaker 1: way she presented capitalism, not really argument, and then I
- 12:15Speaker 1: was going to I was going to find a lecture
- 12:18Speaker 1: by her. I was going to find a lecture by
- 12:21Speaker 1: Codeli on her crit of capitalism, so that we could
- 12:26Speaker 1: analyze it. But the reality is that I found two
- 12:30Speaker 1: and one from Harvard and one from LC Lenin School
- 12:35Speaker 1: of Economics. But they are so academic and so technical
- 12:40Speaker 1: that I decided it would drive me and you crazy
- 12:44Speaker 1: to have to listen to it. I mean, I listened
- 12:46Speaker 1: to one of the lectures in completion and it was
- 12:49Speaker 1: just too difficult. So I've got a couple of clips
- 12:53Speaker 1: from the Q and A at the LC, and we
- 12:56Speaker 1: can discuss them if we have time and this interest.
- 13:00Speaker 1: But I thought, what we do instead is just go
- 13:02Speaker 1: over the article. Go over the the you know, encyclopedia article,
- 13:09Speaker 1: So I mean, here it is. Let me just find
- 13:11Speaker 1: it for you. Yeah, you can see it right there,
- 13:16Speaker 1: right that is That is the article. It says on
- 13:19Speaker 1: the top standard Encyclopedia A Philosophy and this is published
- 13:25Speaker 1: in August first, twenty twenty six. So interesting that in
- 13:28Speaker 1: article in something about philosophy capitalism, you know, an important
- 13:33Speaker 1: social political economic system. It's taken them until twenty twenty
- 13:38Speaker 1: six to publish something on this. See there you go,
- 13:42Speaker 1: you can see. I'm not sure I'm trying to figure
- 13:45Speaker 1: out what exactly you can see.
- 13:49Speaker 2: When I flip through this. Okay, I think that's good,
- 13:53Speaker 2: So you can see it basically what I am seeing.
- 13:57Speaker 1: All right, So wait to go over this. I'm gonna
- 14:02Speaker 1: read a few passages from I'm not gonna read the
- 14:04Speaker 1: whole thing. Obviously, the whole thing is pretty pretty long.
- 14:08Speaker 1: I don't expect you to be reading off the screen.
- 14:11Speaker 1: But partially I wanted to show you because I want
- 14:14Speaker 1: to show you just the volume of writing on the
- 14:19Speaker 1: different topics like how much does she dedicated how much
- 14:23Speaker 1: does she dedicated to car Marks versus how much does
- 14:27Speaker 1: she dedicate to an Ohiak Friedman or in Rand. Now
- 14:36Speaker 1: it's important to put to say this right. There's a
- 14:40Speaker 1: sense in which this all makes sense. In that sense
- 14:45Speaker 1: is that this is not an encyclopedia economics. This is
- 14:50Speaker 1: an encyclopedia of This is an encyclopedia of you know, capitalists,
- 14:57Speaker 1: I'm sorry, a philosophy. And the reality is the reality
- 15:04Speaker 1: is then in philosophy. In philosophy or philosophy, they are
- 15:14Speaker 1: almost no defenders of capitalism if we think about philosophers,
- 15:21Speaker 1: not economists who do some philosophical writing. I don't know
- 15:25Speaker 1: von Mesu's hyac But we think about philosophers, can you
- 15:29Speaker 1: think about philosophers in the last two hundred and fifty years,
- 15:34Speaker 1: Philosophers who actually talk about in a positive way defan
- 15:43Speaker 1: make arguments for any kind of form of capitalism. So
- 15:51Speaker 1: if you look at the philosophy and you know, I'd
- 15:54Speaker 1: welcome to be corrected by the philosophers who you know
- 16:00Speaker 1: on on the show or on on YouTube. Uh So,
- 16:09Speaker 1: if you're reviewing, if you're if you're.
- 16:11Speaker 4: A reviewer of if you're a reviewer that is there
- 16:20Speaker 4: is reviewing.
- 16:23Speaker 1: You know, a philosophical perspective on on capitalism, then yeah,
- 16:31Speaker 1: it's it's very very, very limited and biased. Right, You've
- 16:40Speaker 1: basically got Nosic the libertarian philosopher, and you've got Advance
- 16:48Speaker 1: and who else. I mean, if you want to think
- 16:52Speaker 1: about the origins of capitalism as in private property, you
- 16:56Speaker 1: could go to John Locke. But John Locke didn't really
- 16:58Speaker 1: write about capitalism as a as a as a as assistant,
- 17:02Speaker 1: although it would be nice if he was mentioned at
- 17:05Speaker 1: least in this article. Who else would you? I'm curious
- 17:11Speaker 1: if anybody else has any ideas of philosophers written positively
- 17:16Speaker 1: on on capitalism. So if you look at the philosophy literature.
- 17:26Speaker 1: What you get is overwhelmingly negative criticism. So it's somewhat
- 17:34Speaker 1: understanding if you're writing an article for philosophy audience that
- 17:40Speaker 1: you give weight to the philosophy content, and the philosophy
- 17:45Speaker 1: content is again all all negative. And I'm curious, I
- 17:53Speaker 1: you know, I mean, Feedman defended capitalism, but he was
- 17:58Speaker 1: not philosophical. He's not a filo, So I can understand
- 18:02Speaker 1: them bracketing freedmen and to some extent high ache and
- 18:06Speaker 1: not even mentioning measas because they're economists, so that would
- 18:12Speaker 1: be my only It also tells you something, right, It
- 18:17Speaker 1: tells you something about the state of a field. Here
- 18:23Speaker 1: is a field, maybe the most important field of human knowledge,
- 18:28Speaker 1: the foundational field of human knowledge, and has nothing really
- 18:32Speaker 1: positive to say about a political economic system. Let's call
- 18:39Speaker 1: it just an economic system, because that's how they viewed, right,
- 18:42Speaker 1: an economic system with massive political implications that has led
- 18:48Speaker 1: to the wealth creation of the last two hundred and
- 18:52Speaker 1: fifty years. I mean, think about there is no other
- 18:59Speaker 1: period in all of human history compatable with the last
- 19:03Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty years in terms of the material
- 19:06Speaker 1: advancement of human life, not even close knowing in and
- 19:13Speaker 1: it's recognized even by the critics that this is a
- 19:17Speaker 1: period dominated in one way or another bay capitalism. And
- 19:22Speaker 1: while they all talk about capitalism sick the goal it
- 19:25Speaker 1: causes crisis, maybe I mean put that aside, okay, but
- 19:30Speaker 1: they also recognize that, and Mark certainly recognize this that
- 19:33Speaker 1: has created enormous material wealth and change the world in
- 19:37Speaker 1: profound ways. And then all the profession of philosophy can
- 19:46Speaker 1: do is to criticize the system, poke holes in the system,
- 19:51Speaker 1: benegrate the system, challenge the system, and not try to
- 19:56Speaker 1: look at it and say, hmm, human life is better
- 19:59Speaker 1: in meaningful way, what's going on here? I mean, just
- 20:07Speaker 1: there's a curiosity. Wouldn't you want to know? Here's how
- 20:14Speaker 1: it begins. The case can be made that a more
- 20:17Speaker 1: contested concept than capitalism does not exist, and I think,
- 20:23Speaker 1: I think to all largingstan she's right. It is an
- 20:27Speaker 1: incredibly contested concept, and it's an incredibly important concept. But
- 20:36Speaker 1: in the world in which we exist today, it has
- 20:40Speaker 1: a few defenders, and almost no defenders in the field
- 20:45Speaker 1: of philosophy. She says, there is no agreement upon how
- 20:50Speaker 1: a weather to define it. Now, I don't even know
- 20:54Speaker 1: what the weather means. I mean, I understand that it's difficult.
- 20:59Speaker 1: You know, how to define it is difficult, But you'd
- 21:03Speaker 1: think that you want to define all your terms, all
- 21:06Speaker 1: your important terms. There is no agreement about how or
- 21:10Speaker 1: where they're define it. Many would identify capitalism with an
- 21:14Speaker 1: economic system where productive assets are privately owned, labor is
- 21:21Speaker 1: hired for money, wages through market contracts. Commodities are traded
- 21:27Speaker 1: through exchanged markets. Markets govern allocation of resources between productive
- 21:36Speaker 1: and other activities. Investment is largely in private hands, and
- 21:42Speaker 1: production is oriented towards profit. I mean, it's fascinating how
- 21:50Speaker 1: these people think. I mean, this is very much the
- 21:55Speaker 1: way Marxists think. What is missing from this? For example,
- 22:02Speaker 1: I mean, there's such a thing as productive assets, and
- 22:06Speaker 1: they're utilized for profit, and in order to utilize them,
- 22:12Speaker 1: labor is hired for money, okay, and all of that
- 22:18Speaker 1: is market contracts, and the outcome, the product of the
- 22:24Speaker 1: productive stuff is traded in market exchange in markets, and
- 22:31Speaker 1: all these resources are governed by market phenomena. An investment
- 22:36Speaker 1: is made privately. What is missing? What is missing here?
- 22:41Speaker 1: And this, by the way, is missing from almost all
- 22:44Speaker 1: discussions of capitalism. Even by its supporters. I mean, no,
- 22:49Speaker 1: there's trade here, right, Commodities are traded through exchange markets.
- 22:53Speaker 1: That's there, and rights are not here. That's true. But
- 22:58Speaker 1: in her own terms, they're identifying capitalisms and economic systems
- 23:02Speaker 1: to put rights out of it, take rights for sick
- 23:05Speaker 1: and out of it, because rights are really a moral concept,
- 23:07Speaker 1: not an economic concept. But what is missing from this
- 23:11Speaker 1: economic system? There's even production because she says we're productive.
- 23:16Speaker 1: Assets are privately owned, and the production is alway in
- 23:19Speaker 1: towards profit. But what's still missing, and this is the
- 23:25Speaker 1: major flaw with almost everybody who talks about capitals, who
- 23:32Speaker 1: talks about capitals, what's missing is the entrepreneur. What's missing
- 23:42Speaker 1: is the producer. The whole way in which Marks and
- 23:53Speaker 1: his followers and most people, most people in the world
- 23:56Speaker 1: today think about markets and capitalism. One entity that does
- 24:01Speaker 1: not exist is you know, the Silicon Valley founder. You'd
- 24:07Speaker 1: think it's right staring them right in the face, but
- 24:11Speaker 1: doesn't exist. He's just I don't know what is He's
- 24:15Speaker 1: a productive asset or where is he here? He's a laborer,
- 24:18Speaker 1: he's not exactly a laborer. He doesn't fit into any
- 24:22Speaker 1: of these categories. And yet they are no productive assets
- 24:30Speaker 1: other than maybe land without an entrepreneur. I mean, somebody
- 24:34Speaker 1: had to create the steam engine. Somebody had to have
- 24:37Speaker 1: the idea of using the steam engine in the production
- 24:42Speaker 1: of textiles. Somebody had to have the idea of putting
- 24:47Speaker 1: a steam engine on top of wheels and building a
- 24:52Speaker 1: railroad system. They take it all of that for granted.
- 25:03Speaker 1: This is and this is by the way, this is
- 25:06Speaker 1: Rand's genius. Right there are there being others who've identified
- 25:09Speaker 1: the entrepreneur. Maybe we'll get to that, you know, we'll
- 25:12Speaker 1: say how long this takes. But the reality is that
- 25:19Speaker 1: Rand is the only one who fully appreciates that. It
- 25:23Speaker 1: is the genius, the work, that the passion, the focus,
- 25:28Speaker 1: the integrity of the producer that moves the world. And
- 25:34Speaker 1: it is a producer. It's not the manual laborer. It
- 25:42Speaker 1: is not markets, although markets are crucial, but markets are
- 25:46Speaker 1: driven by producers at every single level. You know, uh,
- 25:55Speaker 1: entrepreneurs in arbitrage, in investment, in futures, markets, in buying, selling,
- 26:03Speaker 1: the merchants, who's a buyer and seller of goods? All
- 26:06Speaker 1: of them are crucial. But you know, it's just an
- 26:11Speaker 1: abstraction the market. But the market is made up of people,
- 26:15Speaker 1: individuals using their mind as individuals based on their values.
- 26:22Speaker 1: But the thing that really drives us forward economically is
- 26:27Speaker 1: the entrepreneur, and he has no place, it turns out,
- 26:32Speaker 1: in capitalism. She goes up. However, each of these features,
- 26:37Speaker 1: if taken separately, can be shown to have existed for
- 26:39Speaker 1: a lot very long time. That's true. But what is
- 26:43Speaker 1: she missing. She's exactly missing what has not existed for
- 26:48Speaker 1: a very long time, so she says. However, each of
- 26:52Speaker 1: these features, if taken separately, can be shown to have
- 26:55Speaker 1: existed for a very long time, leaving open the question
- 26:58Speaker 1: of what makes capitalism ay start distinctive economic system. What
- 27:03Speaker 1: makes capitalism a historically distinctive economic sist? Yes, I agree
- 27:11Speaker 1: with him. We've had in various times and places productive
- 27:15Speaker 1: assets are being in private hands land, for example, they
- 27:20Speaker 1: mean different errors. Labor is hired for money wages. That
- 27:26Speaker 1: that's happened before markets exist in exchanges. You can go
- 27:31Speaker 1: to markets in the Middle Ages or even three thousand
- 27:34Speaker 1: years ago. Markets govern that location between productive and other activities.
- 27:40Speaker 1: To some extent that's existed in the past, not completely.
- 27:44Speaker 1: Investment is largely in private hands. Kings have always dabbled
- 27:49Speaker 1: in that, and production is always in toowards profit. What
- 27:52Speaker 1: is unique about capitalism, Well two things. One that all
- 27:59Speaker 1: of these things, all of these things exist under capitalism
- 28:04Speaker 1: all at once, and that is important. And second that
- 28:12Speaker 1: capitalism is the first system in human history where entrepreneurs flourish,
- 28:21Speaker 1: where production driven by entrepreneurs flourishes. And then the question
- 28:26Speaker 1: is why what is it about capitalism and made astry
- 28:30Speaker 1: if possible for all these things that exist at the
- 28:32Speaker 1: same time and innovation to explode, and entrepreneurs to be
- 28:37Speaker 1: everywhere and to you know, and and to events and
- 28:42Speaker 1: produce new things all the time, and to facilitate a
- 28:48Speaker 1: system of you know, sustained long term economic growth never
- 28:55Speaker 1: seen before in all of human history. The only period
- 28:59Speaker 1: of sustain long term economic growth, something she never mentions,
- 29:05Speaker 1: has been under capitalism, has been the last two and
- 29:12Speaker 1: fifty years. So the question should be, Okay, here's the system,
- 29:19Speaker 1: it's got all these features, what makes that tick? What
- 29:23Speaker 1: makes that happen? And then you can say, well, this
- 29:28Speaker 1: is a period in which rights you know, her being
- 29:32Speaker 1: been you know, relatively protected. This is a system of
- 29:36Speaker 1: individual liberty and individual freedom, and that that is what
- 29:44Speaker 1: makes all these things able to happen at the same time.
- 29:50Speaker 1: When people are free, when their rights are protected, they
- 29:54Speaker 1: contractually arrange to work for a wage. When people are free,
- 30:00Speaker 1: they invest largely in private handsment. But no, I mean
- 30:04Speaker 1: that that would be that would be thinking, that would
- 30:08Speaker 1: be actual thinking. And the holes in the description, never
- 30:14Speaker 1: mind everything else, are astounding. Then she goes on to say, furthermore, further,
- 30:20Speaker 1: there is disagreement as to whether there's disagreement as to
- 30:23Speaker 1: whether capitalism can be reduced in economic system in the
- 30:26Speaker 1: first place. Good for that is a good question. As
- 30:29Speaker 1: some scholars have argued, capitalism may be understood, is more
- 30:33Speaker 1: than just a way of organizing the economy. I like
- 30:36Speaker 1: this of organizing the economy. There's already a collectivistic and
- 30:42Speaker 1: top down implication thing, right, somebody organizes the economy capitalism,
- 30:48Speaker 1: Maybe it says more than just a way to organize
- 30:50Speaker 1: an economy. It is an institutionalized social order, a way
- 30:57Speaker 1: of organizing society, and it's its reproduction as a whole.
- 31:03Speaker 1: I don't know what that means, but a way of
- 31:05Speaker 1: organizing siety. Yes, as a man said, it's a social system.
- 31:12Speaker 1: She continues, the distinction feature of this mode of social
- 31:15Speaker 1: organization in this view includes a sharp separation of economic
- 31:20Speaker 1: sphere from the political and social sphere, or from the
- 31:23Speaker 1: political sphere. I'm not sure what she means by the
- 31:26Speaker 1: social sphere in terms of a separation. Economic activities, including
- 31:33Speaker 1: relations of production and market exchange, are detached from familial,
- 31:41Speaker 1: social and political relations, not if you're in a family
- 31:45Speaker 1: business I guess I don't, and presented as autonomous. Well,
- 31:51Speaker 1: but are they really autonomous? For example, the political system
- 31:56Speaker 1: has to at least protect property rights for there to
- 31:58Speaker 1: beat property rights, for them to be private property. So
- 32:02Speaker 1: again this is kind of you know, thinking within these
- 32:08Speaker 1: narrow categories and not being willing to think. However, it
- 32:14Speaker 1: is arguing that such autonomy is largely a fiction. That's true,
- 32:20Speaker 1: there is no real autonomy, which obscures the fact that
- 32:23Speaker 1: economic production, as well as the smooth functioning amount of markets,
- 32:28Speaker 1: ultimately and necessarily depends on the care labor primarily performed
- 32:39Speaker 1: by women within the household, as well as the exploitation
- 32:43Speaker 1: of nature and the presence of stable political institutions. So
- 32:50Speaker 1: I want you to get this right. This is just
- 32:52Speaker 1: an introduction to the chapter on capitalism. We're introduced to
- 32:56Speaker 1: the idea that markets cannot function, cannot function, and it's
- 33:03Speaker 1: meaningless to think of Marketer's function without the labor performed
- 33:10Speaker 1: by women within the household. Yeah, okay, And as well
- 33:20Speaker 1: as the exploitation of nature. Okay, nature definitely gets exploited
- 33:25Speaker 1: under capitalism. Capitalism is the system of exploiting nature, you know,
- 33:33Speaker 1: one of the things capitalism does. And the presence of
- 33:41Speaker 1: stable political institutions. What kind of political institutions, the politically
- 33:47Speaker 1: you think something about the political institution is the foster
- 33:50Speaker 1: private property? No, but she goes on, But if capitalism
- 33:54Speaker 1: can be found at work everywhere, this raises the question
- 33:58Speaker 1: of how to delimit the phenomena, God, you want to
- 34:01Speaker 1: rip your hero out? What are you talking about? Beyond
- 34:07Speaker 1: disagreement about where the capitalism is an economic system or
- 34:09Speaker 1: ad institutionalized social order, there's also a disagreement about how,
- 34:15Speaker 1: through which method and with the help of which disciplines
- 34:19Speaker 1: to answer the question of what capitalism is in the
- 34:22Speaker 1: first place. She's writing the section of capitalism. She doesn't know.
- 34:30Speaker 1: While some believe that answering this question should be the
- 34:32Speaker 1: purview of economic theory and conceptual analysis, others emphasize how
- 34:37Speaker 1: capitalism as an historical and historically specific phenomena, the constitution
- 34:44Speaker 1: and development of which can only be identified through the
- 34:46Speaker 1: study of history, whose complexity may confound analytic precision. Given
- 34:52Speaker 1: these disagreements, it is not surprising and that no unitary
- 34:56Speaker 1: conversation about capitalism exists among disciplines. That's true, But isn't
- 35:02Speaker 1: that part of what you're trying to do. This is
- 35:03Speaker 1: the job of philosophers to being about a conceptual understanding
- 35:10Speaker 1: that makes it possible for us to talk about these
- 35:12Speaker 1: things across the disciplines, And wouldn't As a philosopher you have
- 35:16Speaker 1: to integrate ideas from economics and from history and from
- 35:22Speaker 1: philosophy to gain an understanding of what the phenomena phenomenon
- 35:29Speaker 1: like phenomenon of capitalism actually is, and maybe move towards
- 35:35Speaker 1: some kind of definition. She continues. Surely, an energy such
- 35:41Speaker 1: as this one might cover an extraordinary variety of themes
- 35:45Speaker 1: and thinkers, but coverage must be selective and disputable, leaving
- 35:51Speaker 1: aside matters that others might plausibly argue are no less
- 35:55Speaker 1: essential than what is chosen for discussion here is this
- 36:00Speaker 1: is an entry primarily addressed to people who have philosophical
- 36:03Speaker 1: and normative interesting interests in capitalism. We will exclusively focus
- 36:09Speaker 1: on those accounts of capitalism that have most influenced contemporary
- 36:14Speaker 1: philosophical work on the subject, so that that gives it
- 36:17Speaker 1: all away, Right, So if you're only focused on the
- 36:21Speaker 1: things that are most influenced contemporary philosophical work on the subject,
- 36:25Speaker 1: and the reality is, and what this entry really brings
- 36:29Speaker 1: forward is this reality. The reality is that you know,
- 36:38Speaker 1: contemporary philosophical works on the subject all almost all exclusively negative,
- 36:48Speaker 1: confrontational of capitalism. And that's why this, this whole thing
- 36:55Speaker 1: is exactly that. I mean, she says, you know, the
- 37:03Speaker 1: kind of questions we need to ask, all legit questions,
- 37:06Speaker 1: What normative reasons and values, if any, support a capitalist
- 37:10Speaker 1: organization of the economy and of society. By contrast, what
- 37:13Speaker 1: reasons and values support the case for overcoming capitalism in
- 37:16Speaker 1: order to try to bring about alternative modes of economic
- 37:19Speaker 1: and social organization. No, she'll talk more, you know, let's
- 37:22Speaker 1: talk more about the second than the first. Is there
- 37:25Speaker 1: anything wrong or miss with the way capitalism organizes economics
- 37:28Speaker 1: and social life? That'll that's almost the entire entry is
- 37:32Speaker 1: just about that. If so are these wrongs or ill
- 37:36Speaker 1: is distinctive of capitalism? Are they contingent to it? Or
- 37:40Speaker 1: necessary such as they cannot be overcome by leading capitalism behind?
- 37:45Speaker 1: Is capitalism unjust? Is it illegitimate? Is capitalism? If capitalism
- 37:50Speaker 1: is unjust, which I think is her implicit assumption is
- 37:55Speaker 1: absolutely And by the way, her implicit assumption is the
- 37:59Speaker 1: capitalism unjust because it leaves the inequality, And that is
- 38:03Speaker 1: all the way through this entry. Inequality is the enemy.
- 38:10Speaker 1: If capitalism is adjust could it be tamed or regulated
- 38:14Speaker 1: in ways that would make adjust while still remaining capitalism. Yeah,
- 38:21Speaker 1: she says, we will leave aside questions concerning socialist alternatives
- 38:24Speaker 1: to capitalism and the process of social transition to them,
- 38:28Speaker 1: as they have received extensive treatment in the entry on socialism.
- 38:34Speaker 1: Notice there's no thinking here of maybe we're not in a
- 38:38Speaker 1: capitalist world, we don't live under capitalism, and maybe what
- 38:42Speaker 1: we should be discussing is ways to transition towards greater capitalism,
- 38:47Speaker 1: more consistent capitalism. No, that that that would not even
- 38:53Speaker 1: that would not be considered. Okay, so well you know quickly,
- 38:56Speaker 1: So that's that's the that's kind of the intro. And
- 39:00Speaker 1: then she says theories of capitalism. Section one is theories
- 39:05Speaker 1: of capitalism. So this is, I assume theories about what
- 39:10Speaker 1: capitalism is and how it runs, how it functions, how
- 39:12Speaker 1: it works, what's at the essence, what's at the heart
- 39:15Speaker 1: of it, theories of capitalists. So what would you expect
- 39:19Speaker 1: to be the first thing you would present as a
- 39:22Speaker 1: theory of capitalism. Well, you might consider maybe talking about
- 39:28Speaker 1: Adam Smith or even even Hume, who wrote about markets
- 39:34Speaker 1: and and say, you know, while they don't use the
- 39:37Speaker 1: term capitalism, clearly is understood that at least Adam Smith
- 39:41Speaker 1: is describing something akin to the capital capitalist system, and
- 39:47Speaker 1: and that is true of kind of humans, discussion of
- 39:50Speaker 1: trade and is economics writings. You could even go back
- 39:56Speaker 1: and again talk about Locke under the idea that ultimately
- 40:03Speaker 1: capitalism rests on this idea of private property. Everything, all
- 40:06Speaker 1: the descriptives involve private property, and it is it is
- 40:11Speaker 1: it is Blocke who really has the deeper philosophical discussion
- 40:16Speaker 1: of property, private property and what it is. So if
- 40:20Speaker 1: you think about doing it historically, you think you'd go
- 40:23Speaker 1: back to that, But no, there's only one place this
- 40:28Speaker 1: discussion of capitalism can actually begin, and that is with
- 40:33Speaker 1: call Maas, that is with Carmas. Now this again somewhat
- 40:46Speaker 1: makes sense. It makes sense because I think that and
- 40:50Speaker 1: I don't know enough about contemporary philosophy to say it,
- 40:54Speaker 1: but I think more broadly in the social sciences, in
- 40:57Speaker 1: the humanities, and in in other fields outside of economics.
- 41:02Speaker 1: Put it that way, Outside of economics, the only prism
- 41:06Speaker 1: through which people look at capitalism is a Marxist prism.
- 41:10Speaker 1: It's in everything. Now, some of it is kind of
- 41:14Speaker 1: in a post Marxist post modern prism, but even postmodernism,
- 41:20Speaker 1: you know, it takes when it comes to capitalism, takes
- 41:24Speaker 1: a Marxist perspective. And this says, okay, but Marx was
- 41:26Speaker 1: wrong on all these other things, and we're going to
- 41:28Speaker 1: do something different, but they're all start with Marx. Any
- 41:32Speaker 1: I mean, it seems like almost all discussions out there
- 41:35Speaker 1: in the world about capitalism in academia outside of economics
- 41:44Speaker 1: start with Mars. Marx is the events mark And what
- 41:47Speaker 1: does Marx say? What is the essence of capitalism? It's
- 41:51Speaker 1: not according to her, And and I'm not going to
- 41:54Speaker 1: critique her understanding of box, but just just discuss what
- 42:00Speaker 1: she presents Marx as Saint capitalism is relentless accumulation. And
- 42:08Speaker 1: here's how she starts. As far as theorizing capitalism is
- 42:10Speaker 1: concerned above anyone else, above anyone else, not even historically,
- 42:15Speaker 1: just above anyone else, is car Marks. While he really
- 42:20Speaker 1: very rarely employed the word the term capitalism titled his
- 42:25Speaker 1: multi volume Opus Capital A Critique of Political Economy. She
- 42:31Speaker 1: goes on, for Marx, notice, above all else, for Marx,
- 42:35Speaker 1: the relentless accumulation of capital is the driving dynamic of capitalism.
- 42:44Speaker 1: The relentless accumulation of capital is the driving dynamic of capitalism. Now,
- 42:50Speaker 1: you know, Marx believes that. But is there going to
- 42:55Speaker 1: be any critique of this view? Is this true? Is
- 43:00Speaker 1: history shown him to be white on this? What about
- 43:04Speaker 1: growing standard living which is something Marx understood, and increasing
- 43:08Speaker 1: wages among the working classrooshoes again Marx understood. But no,
- 43:17Speaker 1: it's the relentless accumulation of industrial capital or the means
- 43:21Speaker 1: of production. Now, she says, Look, Marx is very complex.
- 43:24Speaker 1: We're not gonna get in theory of capitalism is very complex.
- 43:27Speaker 1: We're not gonna get into everything. But you know, but
- 43:33Speaker 1: it's accumulation of capital and its exploitation. She says, she writes,
- 43:41Speaker 1: the whitespread prominence of wage labor and the absence of
- 43:45Speaker 1: alternatives to it is a necessary condition for the existence
- 43:49Speaker 1: of capitalism. Again, God, this is so upside down. I mean,
- 44:00Speaker 1: waged labor is a way in which people organize themselves
- 44:05Speaker 1: when they are free from feudal shackles. And of course
- 44:12Speaker 1: they are free to organize themselves in other ways. They can,
- 44:16Speaker 1: for example, form what do you call it, communes, They
- 44:21Speaker 1: can form co ops, they can form other means by
- 44:28Speaker 1: which to associate and to produce. They can become partners,
- 44:32Speaker 1: they can form partnerships. But again, the wage labor is
- 44:40Speaker 1: a nessive condition for the existence of capitalism. Maybe capitalism
- 44:44Speaker 1: makes possible I eat, the freedom a free political lodo
- 44:52Speaker 1: makes possible wage labor, which is a good because we
- 44:58Speaker 1: consider it a good because it'svallma. But here's here's how
- 45:02Speaker 1: she business marks ways. Laborers must be divorced from the
- 45:08Speaker 1: means of production for capitalism to exist. This divorce happens
- 45:13Speaker 1: when one class, the capitalist, own the meaning of production
- 45:17Speaker 1: as their private property, and the other class, the proletariat,
- 45:23Speaker 1: own nothing else but they labor. But they labor power. Well,
- 45:30Speaker 1: I mean, there's a lot that can be said. Here.
- 45:33Speaker 1: We're not going to do a whole thing on Mars, right,
- 45:35Speaker 1: but I mean, you know, the reality is that why
- 45:42Speaker 1: is that a divorce? The labor owns their own labor
- 45:49Speaker 1: power and they get compensated for that labor power the capitalists. See,
- 45:54Speaker 1: here's the thing. It goes back to that entrepreneur. You
- 45:56Speaker 1: remember I talked about early that what they always miss,
- 45:59Speaker 1: was always excluded, is the entrepreneur the businessman. The businessman
- 46:04Speaker 1: which iman celibates the businessman is completely missing because the
- 46:10Speaker 1: reality is that they don't understand what a businessman does.
- 46:15Speaker 1: This is why isn't exploited. So the businessman doesn't do
- 46:20Speaker 1: anything except own the means of production everything that actually
- 46:25Speaker 1: gets done. And only an academic can believe this, and
- 46:28Speaker 1: this is why, this is why you don't have many
- 46:33Speaker 1: Marxists who are not intellectuals. But you know, the businessman
- 46:40Speaker 1: does nothing but own the means of production, and therefore
- 46:42Speaker 1: he's separated from the labor. But if the businessman assus
- 46:47Speaker 1: not actually works, actually does stuff, he's not just a
- 46:51Speaker 1: paper shuffler, but he's actually producing, actively engage in productive activity,
- 46:56Speaker 1: he's in a sense a laborer. He's a worker, he
- 47:00Speaker 1: also owns the means of production. And God forbid, if
- 47:03Speaker 1: you are to give the workers some shares like in
- 47:07Speaker 1: their pension plan or for one k, and they are
- 47:11Speaker 1: now quote capitalists and they own some of the means
- 47:14Speaker 1: of production. She can't even I mean marks can't and
- 47:18Speaker 1: she can't comprehend such combinations. So the workers are forced,
- 47:25Speaker 1: by the inability to independently access the means of subsistence,
- 47:28Speaker 1: to work for the capitalists. So here's the thing they hands.
- 47:35Speaker 1: They can't work to earn a living. They can't earn
- 47:38Speaker 1: a living. They can't feed themselves other than by working
- 47:42Speaker 1: for the capitalists. And in that sense, right, that is,
- 47:47Speaker 1: since they lack their own means of production, they are
- 47:50Speaker 1: forced forced course to sell the only commodity they own,
- 47:54Speaker 1: their labor power, in order to survive. So is coursive.
- 48:01Speaker 1: It's forced, because what's the labor gonna do stuff? That's
- 48:05Speaker 1: not a choice. He can't go back to subsistence farming,
- 48:10Speaker 1: they would argue, because how would he buy the phone?
- 48:14Speaker 1: So the only way he can survive is by getting
- 48:19Speaker 1: a job, which means that's cursed. That's false, And of
- 48:24Speaker 1: course who's forcing him that? The capitalists now you could
- 48:29Speaker 1: argue that it's forced. Forced. The in quotation works by nature,
- 48:36Speaker 1: by reality, by the fact that you have to produce
- 48:40Speaker 1: the stuff that you're going to consume. And if you're
- 48:42Speaker 1: gonna eat, you have to produce that stuff that you're
- 48:45Speaker 1: gonna eat, and that is what so work is necessary.
- 48:55Speaker 1: And then the question is what type of work are
- 48:57Speaker 1: you engaged? You you know, the farmers could have stayed
- 49:02Speaker 1: on their land and be a subsistent farm. They chose
- 49:06Speaker 1: to leave because waged labor actually turned out to be
- 49:10Speaker 1: more valuable than substant in farming, more valuable to their lives,
- 49:18Speaker 1: more valuable by the standard of their life. Now, you know,
- 49:26Speaker 1: I don't want to go into the whole thing of Marx.
- 49:28Speaker 1: I want to show you something though. So all of this,
- 49:31Speaker 1: you know, there's a next paragraph starts in additional commodification,
- 49:35Speaker 1: commodification of labor power for marks. A related py condition
- 49:39Speaker 1: for the existence of capitalism is the widespread prominence of
- 49:42Speaker 1: market exchange and the generalization of the commodity form. Work
- 49:47Speaker 1: is produced neither for their own direct consumption nor for
- 49:50Speaker 1: immediate consumption by the employer. Rather, they produce commodities for
- 49:53Speaker 1: the sale in the marketplace. Okay, obvious, and he goes
- 49:57Speaker 1: on the dual prominence it noticed how long this is,
- 50:00Speaker 1: by the way, the due prominence of wage, labor and
- 50:03Speaker 1: market exchange. Marx assumes the existence of perfect market competition
- 50:08Speaker 1: when modeling the exchange for all commodities. For Marx, labor
- 50:11Speaker 1: is necessarily exploited by owners of capital. Marx is widely
- 50:15Speaker 1: thought to use the term exploitation and a technical, non
- 50:18Speaker 1: moralized sense as extraction of soil plus value sol plus
- 50:24Speaker 1: value from labor. However, however, Marxist understanding your exploitation has
- 50:31Speaker 1: been used to go on many normative critiques of capitalism
- 50:33Speaker 1: as unjust because exploitative system. But what is exploitation for
- 50:40Speaker 1: Marx is more about She says, according to Marxist labor
- 50:44Speaker 1: theory of value, the value of commodities determined by them
- 50:47Speaker 1: out of socially necessary labor required for its production. And
- 50:50Speaker 1: she goes on, capitalists may extract absolute so plus value.
- 50:54Speaker 1: And then she goes on because of market competition, to say,
- 50:57Speaker 1: in business, capitalists have no choice other than to pay
- 50:59Speaker 1: their work as the and wage the labor market will allow.
- 51:03Speaker 1: They also have no choice because of market competition, So
- 51:07Speaker 1: there are really no choices. In capitalism, everything is imposed
- 51:10Speaker 1: by nobody, by a market phenomena which is anonymous. This
- 51:16Speaker 1: is her, this is really her. Big thing is this
- 51:19Speaker 1: anonymizing force that is placed on all of us. The
- 51:23Speaker 1: unending need to extract relatives of plus value is the
- 51:27Speaker 1: engine of capital accumulation, as well as capitalism's drive to
- 51:31Speaker 1: incessantly revolutionize all methods of production. Incessively revolutionized. That's called innovation.
- 51:37Speaker 1: But it just happens. It just happens, doesn't require anything,
- 51:42Speaker 1: any particular thing for people to do. Thus, for marx
- 51:47Speaker 1: capitalism is an economic system premised upon relentless of systematic
- 51:51Speaker 1: accumulation of capital, the use of innovative, disruptive technologies of
- 51:56Speaker 1: production just happens, and last, but not least, labor exploitation.
- 52:03Speaker 1: And then she says, in the fast Marxist literature, verious
- 52:06Speaker 1: commentators and philosophers and emphasizes different dimensions and marx analysis
- 52:10Speaker 1: of capitalism. Some emphasized class classes, some emphasiss other stuff,
- 52:15Speaker 1: and then others have explored Marxist emphasis on various crisious tendencies.
- 52:20Speaker 1: Marxist is by theories of racial capitalism. We'll get to that.
- 52:25Speaker 1: Marx focus is in an equal exchange in the capitalism
- 52:27Speaker 1: is led right as an imperialism. All this stuff, and
- 52:30Speaker 1: what is missing from all of this? She doesn't mention
- 52:35Speaker 1: one posts, one post who is actually critical of Marx.
- 52:44Speaker 1: She mentions Marx, She writes a Marx, no question about
- 52:48Speaker 1: labor theory value is true, Like labor theory of value
- 52:52Speaker 1: has been recognized by economists as untrue since at least
- 52:55Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies eighteen seventies, one hundred and fifty five
- 53:00Speaker 1: six years ago. Does she mention that when she's writing
- 53:06Speaker 1: about Marx, does she critique it? No? Are they writers
- 53:13Speaker 1: out there who think that there is no such thing
- 53:18Speaker 1: as exploitation in the wage relationship? Wage relationship? Yeah, they're
- 53:27Speaker 1: writers like that. Does she mention any of them? No?
- 53:30Speaker 1: Now again, maybe they're not in the philosophy literature. Is anybody?
- 53:34Speaker 1: Is there anybody out there who challenges the idea that
- 53:39Speaker 1: profit is so plus value and the profit is unknown.
- 53:43Speaker 1: Maybe profit is a reward on risk. Maybe profit is
- 53:46Speaker 1: a reward for time. Maybe profit is a reward for
- 53:49Speaker 1: the labor of the entrepreneur, the manager, the capitalists. No,
- 53:55Speaker 1: is there any challenge to these? None? Zero? Not a
- 54:00Speaker 1: present it as is and then said, oh, there are
- 54:02Speaker 1: all kinds of people who do all kinds of things
- 54:04Speaker 1: with this Marxist stuff. But the challenging any of the
- 54:08Speaker 1: Marxist assumptions zero, not a nothing. So the whole article
- 54:12Speaker 1: becomes that just about capitalism, quamax on everybody else, so
- 54:24Speaker 1: on almost everybody else, all the positive presenters of capitalism.
- 54:29Speaker 1: She mentions, all the critics, all the people who are criticized.
- 54:35Speaker 1: So you saw how long Marxist section is. Here's Reba
- 54:39Speaker 1: is the partisan ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Why
- 54:42Speaker 1: this is so highly regarded. I have no idea, but
- 54:45Speaker 1: I guess this is the idea of the capitalism is
- 54:47Speaker 1: more than just economics. The capitalism is culture and society.
- 54:54Speaker 1: But even Reba doesn't believe that modern capitalism is faded
- 54:58Speaker 1: to last forever. And you know, and and he's not
- 55:02Speaker 1: particularly a fan of capitalism. But she says, regardless of
- 55:08Speaker 1: all cultural accounts and capitalism, whether they focus on Protestantism
- 55:12Speaker 1: or other cultural milieu, follow in Weber's footsteps and regard
- 55:17Speaker 1: cultural and ideological phenomena rather than only or primarily material
- 55:21Speaker 1: ones is crucial to understanding the birth development of the
- 55:24Speaker 1: essence of capitalism. So the alternative here is Marks the materialist,
- 55:28Speaker 1: all about economics, and Weber, who understands the ideas and
- 55:33Speaker 1: maybe religion impact this kind of stuff, And that's the alternative.
- 55:41Speaker 1: And then of all the economists out there social thing
- 55:44Speaker 1: as economists, she chooses shumte because shimp Tee actually brings
- 55:49Speaker 1: in the entrepreneur and you know, but you know, she
- 55:56Speaker 1: mentions entrepreneurs are largely responsible for capitalisms. It was irrepressible
- 56:01Speaker 1: gales of creative destruction. And then again she says, you know,
- 56:09Speaker 1: she's she uses the people themselves to undermine. She says,
- 56:15Speaker 1: eventually shut the speculated capitalist society's devalue entrepreneurship, paving the
- 56:21Speaker 1: way for a post capitalist, bureaucratic socialism. I don't think
- 56:27Speaker 1: schimp did so that as a positive development, but she
- 56:29Speaker 1: doesn't tell us she didn't view it that way. Schute
- 56:33Speaker 1: held the bouts of creative destruction create both winners and losers,
- 56:37Speaker 1: a general social fatigue with relentless change and sufficient material
- 56:42Speaker 1: abundance and comfort for intellectuals, including professors to criticize capitalism shortcoming.
- 56:48Speaker 1: You would think that she would take that to hearts.
- 56:51Speaker 1: The tim Tette saw it coming but again, there's no
- 56:55Speaker 1: definition of capitalism. There's no real explanation of what capitalism is.
- 56:58Speaker 1: And look how much space she gives Shumpteter and compare
- 57:02Speaker 1: that to what she gave to Marks several pages worth,
- 57:09Speaker 1: Web a little bit, Shimpedeta even less, Hyakin, Freedman almost nothing,
- 57:14Speaker 1: almost nothing. Other important approaches to capitalism descent from other
- 57:18Speaker 1: intellectual traditions than Marx. Oh yeah, really the most prominent
- 57:23Speaker 1: non Marxist approach, claims the Scent, rightly or not, because
- 57:27Speaker 1: the left likes to think Adam Smith is one of them,
- 57:31Speaker 1: which is interesting, But anyway, from Adams smithster author of Nations.
- 57:35Speaker 1: According to this account, the two necessary conditions for capitalism
- 57:39Speaker 1: are the free market and private property. Arguably, Milton Friedman's
- 57:46Speaker 1: and Frederick hayak distinctive variants of this approach have been
- 57:50Speaker 1: the most influential. And then then she just writes stuff
- 57:54Speaker 1: that's just absolutely not true. She writes, from all these
- 58:01Speaker 1: exchanges she talks about the exchanges, an equilibrium, perhaps a
- 58:05Speaker 1: general equilibrium, spontaneously arises in capitalist economy. That's absolutely not
- 58:13Speaker 1: what Frederick Hayak believes. She's using spontaneous oder here, I
- 58:16Speaker 1: assume she's talking about hyak, and it's not what free,
- 58:19Speaker 1: certainly not what Hya believes. Maybe free, but she's using spontaneously,
- 58:26Speaker 1: so she's talking about hyak. Pyakek doesn't believe you attain equilibrium,
- 58:32Speaker 1: certainly not general equilibrium. Pike believes that you're constantly in motion. Indeed,
- 58:38Speaker 1: this is one of the innovations of Austrian economics. You're
- 58:41Speaker 1: constantly in motion. You never achieve the so called equilibrium
- 58:47Speaker 1: the end because this constant people's values are constantly changing,
- 58:55Speaker 1: realigning Hia tear values is constantly shifting, the prices are
- 59:01Speaker 1: constantly changing, weather constantly change. Everything is changing, and therefore
- 59:05Speaker 1: everything changes. Hyk is all about information, prices, the dynamism
- 59:11Speaker 1: of markets, not about equilibrium at all. So she isn't
- 59:16Speaker 1: even getting it. And of course such an economy, that's
- 59:21Speaker 1: when you've got it as spontaneous. Or do they love
- 59:22Speaker 1: the idea of spontaneous because you know, well, she hates
- 59:26Speaker 1: the idea of its being spontaneous, she says. They argue that,
- 59:33Speaker 1: premised upon the spontaneum flow fee market exchange, capitalism is
- 59:37Speaker 1: the most efficient economic system in Hemilton. It has no
- 59:41Speaker 1: real crisis tendencies that it cannot self correct. Capitalism goes
- 59:45Speaker 1: wrong when it is politically interfered with see below. So
- 59:53Speaker 1: she gives a little section to kind of the free
- 59:55Speaker 1: market view of capitalism. The only view that really matters
- 1:00:00Speaker 1: an institutionalist account of capitalism. So this is the idea
- 1:00:03Speaker 1: that capitalism derives from certain institutions like property rights. Here
- 1:00:08Speaker 1: she cites Kass and North and Williamson and Ostrom, all
- 1:00:11Speaker 1: good sources, but the idea, And she says, you know,
- 1:00:16Speaker 1: but again, look how little she's giving it. She's giving
- 1:00:18Speaker 1: it a little space again, all that stuff on marks,
- 1:00:21Speaker 1: and then a little bit on the institutionalists who emphasize
- 1:00:26Speaker 1: private property in the rule of law. And then she
- 1:00:29Speaker 1: goes on to the new institutionalist and here she cites Piquetti,
- 1:00:36Speaker 1: who is about as anti capitalist as you can get.
- 1:00:42Speaker 1: She says, but in the admittedly rough grouping other prominent
- 1:00:45Speaker 1: scholars in different, very countrat even contradictory ways, have moved
- 1:00:49Speaker 1: away from the market paradigm altogether, whether, for instance, to
- 1:00:52Speaker 1: underscore the ideological prerequisites of capitalism Piquetti twenty twenty. Here's
- 1:00:57Speaker 1: the ideological prerequisites of capitalism all wrong? Or relationship between
- 1:01:02Speaker 1: capitalism and egalitarianism and any galitarian institutions. So she gives
- 1:01:13Speaker 1: short thrift to whoever's attempted over the last one hundred
- 1:01:18Speaker 1: and fifty years or two hundred years to defend capitalism.
- 1:01:22Speaker 1: She gives them almost nothing. And then and then she
- 1:01:24Speaker 1: goes to Polani, you know, who's a Austrian Hungarian. You know,
- 1:01:31Speaker 1: he has an account of nineteenth century liberal capitalism in
- 1:01:33Speaker 1: his in his book The Great Transformation for nineteen forty four.
- 1:01:37Speaker 1: But he's not he's again a hostile to capitalism. And
- 1:01:42Speaker 1: look how long she gives him. She gives him much
- 1:01:44Speaker 1: more than Higherkan Freedman, much more than the coasts and
- 1:01:48Speaker 1: to North and Williamson. And by the way, where's mccluss key.
- 1:01:55Speaker 1: She throws her out in a note here at some point.
- 1:02:00Speaker 1: But and uh, you know so anyway, and then ultimately
- 1:02:13Speaker 1: Kane's investments center capitalism, whatever the hell that means. The
- 1:02:20Speaker 1: existence of money is a store of value under capitalism
- 1:02:23Speaker 1: means the capitalists can decide, on the basis of their
- 1:02:25Speaker 1: expectations about the announcer in the future, whether to invest
- 1:02:29Speaker 1: in production or exercise that they could be preference by
- 1:02:32Speaker 1: either hoarding that goes hoarding again or speculating in liquid
- 1:02:38Speaker 1: money like assets. Okay, let me step back a second
- 1:02:42Speaker 1: here before we go on, and she gives a little
- 1:02:45Speaker 1: bit more roomful for Knes. One of the reasons I
- 1:02:50Speaker 1: wanted to do this is because all the popular people
- 1:02:54Speaker 1: who do podcasts who criticize capitalism, we all getting the
- 1:02:59Speaker 1: bad stuff from people like her. Like of the people
- 1:03:06Speaker 1: will never hear of her, never read any of her stuff,
- 1:03:10Speaker 1: never read this entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia. But the
- 1:03:16Speaker 1: professors read this. The intellectuals read this, and they pick
- 1:03:20Speaker 1: up concepts like boarding and then they send it out there,
- 1:03:25Speaker 1: or exploitation or you know, sou plus value, the Marxist terminologies,
- 1:03:38Speaker 1: and they will pick up on this general attitude to
- 1:03:44Speaker 1: its capitalism, and then they will put their bells and
- 1:03:47Speaker 1: whistles on it. This is how this is how ideas
- 1:03:51Speaker 1: spread in a culture. The intellectuals, the philosophers write essays
- 1:03:55Speaker 1: like this. Lots of other people not lots, but dozens
- 1:04:00Speaker 1: of other people who read this and say, oh, this
- 1:04:02Speaker 1: is capitalism, okay, and then now write their own pieces
- 1:04:06Speaker 1: on it. And then the piece below that the common
- 1:04:09Speaker 1: podcast stuff will will get the derivative of derivative, deservative
- 1:04:13Speaker 1: of this. So we're going not to the source because
- 1:04:17Speaker 1: the sources kind of marks and the sources of the
- 1:04:19Speaker 1: people she's citing. But we're getting we're getting closer to
- 1:04:22Speaker 1: the source of the ideas that the podcasters who will
- 1:04:27Speaker 1: go back to next show we'll do are going to
- 1:04:31Speaker 1: popularize and the mythologies that they are gonna popularize. All right,
- 1:04:42Speaker 1: Now she goes to a second section. So those are
- 1:04:44Speaker 1: theories of capitalism. Now she's talking about normative normative defenses
- 1:04:50Speaker 1: of capitalism. So in other words, why is capitalism good?
- 1:04:54Speaker 1: So justifications for couple of for capitalism, and she has
- 1:05:01Speaker 1: a number of these, so you know, the first one
- 1:05:04Speaker 1: is welfareest arguments. So this is kind of a more
- 1:05:09Speaker 1: utilisam maane argument human beings are better off under capitalism.
- 1:05:12Speaker 1: And notice how much she gives this a short paragraph.
- 1:05:19Speaker 1: Capitalism has been defended on consequential as grounds as an
- 1:05:22Speaker 1: economic system the best promotes over all social often compared
- 1:05:26Speaker 1: to alternative systems. In contemporary debates such as arguments often
- 1:05:30Speaker 1: appeal to Adam Smith's influence of defensive markets and of
- 1:05:33Speaker 1: commercial society. Right, and he goes on, assuming this is true,
- 1:05:41Speaker 1: you know, we we here leave aside the empirical debate.
- 1:05:45Speaker 1: We're not gonna we're not gonna think about whether capitalism
- 1:05:48Speaker 1: has done any good materially. We're not gonna debate that
- 1:05:53Speaker 1: this is an entry on capitalism. Isn't that important? She says,
- 1:05:58Speaker 1: then a Smith, Then a s inspired defense of capitalism
- 1:06:01Speaker 1: is supported by a utilitarian notion, a welfare maximization, that's right,
- 1:06:06Speaker 1: coupled with a sufficientarian ideal of a society where no
- 1:06:12Speaker 1: matter how many inequality, how much inequality exists, all enjoy
- 1:06:16Speaker 1: a decent standard libty. Notice, inequality is snuck in here.
- 1:06:23Speaker 1: Why is inequality important? What gives inequality validity? Why does
- 1:06:30Speaker 1: inequality have any weight, any weight in a discussion about
- 1:06:34Speaker 1: normative stuff? No argument is made for that. It's just
- 1:06:38Speaker 1: accepted because that's what's out there in the culture among
- 1:06:41Speaker 1: intellectuals at least. The second is efficiency based argument. Efficiency
- 1:06:46Speaker 1: is a decenter of defenses of capitalism. You know, for example,
- 1:06:50Speaker 1: high spontaneous order. A political aimer of liberty is also
- 1:06:55Speaker 1: necessary for the market to function efficiently. Such a regime
- 1:06:58Speaker 1: of liberty is in turn instrumentally valuable because it allows
- 1:07:02Speaker 1: the pursuit of achievement of a variety of valuable human purposes,
- 1:07:05Speaker 1: including the preservation of liberty itself right plans. By contrast,
- 1:07:16Speaker 1: she writes, can only achieve their goals. This is Hyak
- 1:07:20Speaker 1: can only achieve their goals by imposing their own conception
- 1:07:22Speaker 1: of values and everyone else thereby generating tyranny. And then
- 1:07:27Speaker 1: she does something which she hasn't done at scale yet.
- 1:07:31Speaker 1: This is the first time she really brings it in.
- 1:07:34Speaker 1: Critics may wonder. She says, what happens to each in
- 1:07:38Speaker 1: justification of capitalism if what people happen to want or
- 1:07:41Speaker 1: prefer is a fully egalitarian redistribution of wealth or the
- 1:07:45Speaker 1: common ownership of the means of production. Now further, Hyak
- 1:07:50Speaker 1: himself is aware of the fact that when an e
- 1:07:53Speaker 1: moral market becomes the predominant means of social coordination, the
- 1:07:58Speaker 1: alien nation and greed that such mechanisms may and gender
- 1:08:03Speaker 1: could destabilize the poper operations of markets themselves. So everybody
- 1:08:11Speaker 1: knows that markets create alienation and greed. How it caimself
- 1:08:14Speaker 1: admitted it. Hike's response to these potential problems invokes the
- 1:08:20Speaker 1: markets superior epistemological capabilities compared to conscious human action, as
- 1:08:27Speaker 1: well as the role of markets in fostering community. Now,
- 1:08:30Speaker 1: notice the contrast here, and again I'm picking I'm picking
- 1:08:35Speaker 1: particularly woods, but it's important. Notice the contract here between
- 1:08:40Speaker 1: market superior pistemological capabilities compared to conscious human action. What
- 1:08:46Speaker 1: is the market superior pistemological capabilities? And this is the
- 1:08:50Speaker 1: fault of Hyak. I'm not blaming her here, I'm blaming
- 1:08:52Speaker 1: Hyak here. What is the market superior pistemological capabilities. It's
- 1:08:59Speaker 1: individual conscious human actions, or more precisely, individual conscious human thinking,
- 1:09:08Speaker 1: individual conscious human reasoning, which plays out in the marketplace
- 1:09:16Speaker 1: as these epistemological capabilities, the pricing mechanism and the information
- 1:09:21Speaker 1: that imbodles. But that is only made possible through the activities,
- 1:09:27Speaker 1: the epistemological activities, the reasoning activities of individual human beings.
- 1:09:34Speaker 1: You don't get group think, a thought coming out of
- 1:09:38Speaker 1: a group. What you get is individual thinking that is
- 1:09:42Speaker 1: then coordinated by some mechanism, market mechanism, or just negotiations
- 1:09:46Speaker 1: into the statement of the group. Anyway, she goes into this.
- 1:09:54Speaker 1: But here she's bringing in, you know, a bunch of
- 1:09:59Speaker 1: people who might disagree, and then there's freedom based arguments.
- 1:10:08Speaker 1: So she gave Hajake a little bit more room. Here
- 1:10:10Speaker 1: freedom based arguments. Capitalism is often the fed other grounds
- 1:10:15Speaker 1: of freedom, and here she says this is the idea
- 1:10:18Speaker 1: of negative freedoms. Thou shalt not while negative liberty the
- 1:10:22Speaker 1: absence of coercion restraints on action has figured prominently in
- 1:10:26Speaker 1: such defenses Smith seventy six. Freedman Hayek Brennan argument for
- 1:10:33Speaker 1: capitalism is also relied on alternative conceptions freedom. And here
- 1:10:36Speaker 1: she brings in people like Thomassi and all kinds of
- 1:10:40Speaker 1: people who've compromised on the very nature of capitalism. And
- 1:10:44Speaker 1: she talks about this, she talks about republican freedom. But
- 1:10:47Speaker 1: again in every one of these she then includes a
- 1:10:51Speaker 1: section of the critics and why it doesn't you know,
- 1:10:53Speaker 1: it doesn't really make any sense. Right again, critics dispute
- 1:10:59Speaker 1: the care organization of mark relationships as non dominating, especially
- 1:11:03Speaker 1: in the context of capitalist labor markets, pointing out the
- 1:11:06Speaker 1: relations of domination and undue dependence characterize many, if not all,
- 1:11:12Speaker 1: employment relations under capitalism. She's just right. She didn't criticize marks,
- 1:11:18Speaker 1: but now she's criticizing all the people who come up
- 1:11:22Speaker 1: with positives they pound out following marks that those who
- 1:11:26Speaker 1: have their appearance are free and systematically situated contracting bodies
- 1:11:31Speaker 1: are in fact workers who often have no reasonable alternatives
- 1:11:35Speaker 1: but to put themselves under the arbitrary power of their employers,
- 1:11:39Speaker 1: the arbitrary power of their employers. And then there's a
- 1:11:44Speaker 1: whole sections about positive freedoms, which is, you know, the
- 1:11:48Speaker 1: capacity of form, pursue and revise and self authorship. And
- 1:11:53Speaker 1: she brings in laws here, and you know, this is
- 1:11:56Speaker 1: pretty long section because of this a section because laws
- 1:11:59Speaker 1: is is such a big deal. Tomasi, who was a
- 1:12:03Speaker 1: professor at Brown, he's not evenore there, but he was
- 1:12:07Speaker 1: a first that Brown political science professor wrote the whole
- 1:12:09Speaker 1: thing about how how Rolls was consistent with free markets.
- 1:12:15Speaker 1: It was one massive rationalization. It was like I like walls,
- 1:12:20Speaker 1: I like free markets. I'm going to somehow put them together.
- 1:12:23Speaker 1: It doesn't go together. A bunch of libertarians try to
- 1:12:26Speaker 1: do this, and she likes it because it's Rolls and
- 1:12:29Speaker 1: Walls is in the galician Walls makes a bad deal,
- 1:12:32Speaker 1: lot of inequality. And then there's you know, which he
- 1:12:38Speaker 1: calls normative normative, nomative defenses of Sorry, we talked about
- 1:12:49Speaker 1: positive freedom, we talked about political freedom. Normative defenses capitalism
- 1:12:54Speaker 1: have also appealed to the value of political freedom. Freedman
- 1:12:58Speaker 1: predominantly august the economic freedom an indispensable means towards the
- 1:13:02Speaker 1: achievement of political freedom. And then she talks about the
- 1:13:06Speaker 1: entitlement based arguments. Entitlement based arguments, which is a weird
- 1:13:11Speaker 1: way of framing it, But here she brings out Robert Nosic.
- 1:13:14Speaker 1: She says, in contemporary philosophy of Robert Noosic's libertarianism is
- 1:13:18Speaker 1: often taken to provide the most direct and unequivocal defense
- 1:13:21Speaker 1: of capitalism, one based on the principle of self ownership
- 1:13:25Speaker 1: and on historical entitlement theory of justice in holdings. And
- 1:13:31Speaker 1: I'm not going to go through the whole Nosics section,
- 1:13:33Speaker 1: but you know how she gives Nosick a little bit
- 1:13:36Speaker 1: here about his views in capitalism. But again she says,
- 1:13:49Speaker 1: ohever Nosics, libertarianism does not require capitalism. All that it
- 1:13:53Speaker 1: demands is that people be left free to do as
- 1:13:56Speaker 1: they please within justly acquired property, and that they know
- 1:13:59Speaker 1: before to give up what is rightly there. And she
- 1:14:04Speaker 1: says Nosic can't object to them then forming communes and
- 1:14:08Speaker 1: living under socialism. He also can't object to slavery contracts,
- 1:14:18Speaker 1: So then she's talking about kind of Nosic. This is
- 1:14:26Speaker 1: where she brings in Rand. She says, because philosophical libertarianism
- 1:14:31Speaker 1: does not necessarily lead to capitalism. I think that's right,
- 1:14:37Speaker 1: characterizing popular defenders of capitalism, such as, for example, Ein
- 1:14:42Speaker 1: Rand as libertarian risks generating confusion Rand, nineteen sixty four.
- 1:14:50Speaker 1: She's referring to the virtue of selfishness. Unlike Nosic would
- 1:14:54Speaker 1: judge voluntary socialist associations as morally impermissible because incompatible with
- 1:15:03Speaker 1: ethical egoism, according to which one should, morally speaking, act
- 1:15:08Speaker 1: according to one's rational self interest. But Rand's egoism is
- 1:15:13Speaker 1: completely extraneous to libertarianism as a theory of justice, not capitalism.
- 1:15:20Speaker 1: So I mean, she's really onto something here. But why then,
- 1:15:26Speaker 1: is they're not a section on Rand? And she ignores
- 1:15:31Speaker 1: in the bibliography, including in the bibliography Rand's capitalism not
- 1:15:37Speaker 1: non ideal and the first essay is what is capitalism?
- 1:15:45Speaker 1: I mean, at least give it. I mean, you mentioned Ran,
- 1:15:50Speaker 1: you mentioned egoism. Why not actually address Rand's defense of capitalism?
- 1:16:00Speaker 1: Maybe because it's too complicated because it relies on the
- 1:16:04Speaker 1: existence of objective values. But at least LIPSI or something.
- 1:16:13Speaker 1: All right, then there's virtue based arguments, these arguments to
- 1:16:15Speaker 1: say the capitalism is good because it encourages ethical behavior.
- 1:16:19Speaker 1: But then there's a whole literature that says it, actually,
- 1:16:21Speaker 1: it discourages ethical behavior and encourages a bad behavior. And
- 1:16:27Speaker 1: then there's the normative critiques of capitalism. So that was
- 1:16:29Speaker 1: the normative defenses of capitalism. So let's go through the
- 1:16:32Speaker 1: normative critiques of capitalism quickly and then we'll call it
- 1:16:38Speaker 1: a day. Functionalist critiques functionals critics argue the capitalism is
- 1:16:43Speaker 1: inhabitently prone to undermining its own functioning. Such argument tend
- 1:16:48Speaker 1: to appeal to Marxist argument about crisis tendencies of capitalism,
- 1:16:51Speaker 1: whether the tendency of profit rate to fall, a tendency
- 1:16:54Speaker 1: towards systematic anarchy, the Beach financial crisis, or the need
- 1:16:58Speaker 1: for reserve army of unemployed to suppress wages and living standards.
- 1:17:07Speaker 1: There is debate on whether pointing to these tendencies requires
- 1:17:10Speaker 1: taking an independent normative standpoint. God, why isn't there anything
- 1:17:17Speaker 1: here about the fact that all of this is bullshit?
- 1:17:22Speaker 1: That you know that while that capitalism does not lead
- 1:17:28Speaker 1: to crises, that while profits tend to fall until new
- 1:17:35Speaker 1: innovations arise that cause profits to rise again, and that
- 1:17:40Speaker 1: tendency of profits to fall as a consequence of competition,
- 1:17:43Speaker 1: which drives quality and prices down for consumers and therefore
- 1:17:48Speaker 1: has huge benefits to all of us. And that it
- 1:17:55Speaker 1: is absolutely nonsense that it's a tendency towards systemic anarchy.
- 1:18:02Speaker 1: What does that even mean? Define it and breach financial crisis?
- 1:18:06Speaker 1: Governed intervention is what breach financial crisis? Or the need
- 1:18:10Speaker 1: for a reserve army of unemployed? That is complete nonsense. Indeed,
- 1:18:18Speaker 1: in the in the heyday of capitalism, the reserve army
- 1:18:23Speaker 1: of unemployed were immigrants, but they were employed where they were.
- 1:18:29Speaker 1: They just switched jobs. So none of this, no, none
- 1:18:34Speaker 1: of the critics of functional critiques are presented here, whereas
- 1:18:38Speaker 1: the defenses were all you were given criticisms of None
- 1:18:42Speaker 1: of this is given criticisms of distributive critiques. Capitalism is
- 1:18:47Speaker 1: you can criticize on the grounds of distributive justice. Especially
- 1:18:50Speaker 1: in his later's work, John Rawles argued both lesser fair
- 1:18:53Speaker 1: and welfare state capitalism are incompatible with the principle that
- 1:18:57Speaker 1: art the government arrangements of society's basic structure in order
- 1:19:00Speaker 1: for society to be just. And she goes on. She
- 1:19:04Speaker 1: gives Walls this argument, she rules this critique of the
- 1:19:08Speaker 1: warfare state. Why it's not enough, you need more of that.
- 1:19:11Speaker 1: By the way, this is a lengthy passage on Walls,
- 1:19:14Speaker 1: which makes complete sense. Against Walls was a philosopher. He
- 1:19:19Speaker 1: wrote in their language, and he came to dominate. He
- 1:19:23Speaker 1: came to dominate this wall. Now, the criticisms of Walls
- 1:19:29Speaker 1: that she presented are mainly criticisms of Walls not going
- 1:19:32Speaker 1: far enough, or criticisms of Wars that what he's proposing
- 1:19:41Speaker 1: is not an alternative to capitalism, is just a tinkering
- 1:19:43Speaker 1: of capitalism. What we really need is an alternative to capitalism.
- 1:19:47Speaker 1: But there's no criticisms of Wars that his whole theory
- 1:19:50Speaker 1: is wrong and his whole approach is wrong. From let's say,
- 1:19:53Speaker 1: pro capitalist people exploitation, the deployential critique of capitalism is
- 1:20:02Speaker 1: contained in Marks's account of exploitation, although, as we saw
- 1:20:06Speaker 1: Marx debatable did not provide such an account as a
- 1:20:09Speaker 1: moral critique, but rather as a description of capitalism's objective functioning.
- 1:20:18Speaker 1: But does does anybody question whether capitalism is exploited. Now
- 1:20:30Speaker 1: she has some stuff. Yet defenders of capitalism would further
- 1:20:33Speaker 1: object that appropriation of surplus value by capitalist does not
- 1:20:36Speaker 1: necessarily amount to unequal exchange, because the capitalist entrepreneur offers
- 1:20:40Speaker 1: special inputs into production, including risk taking. Then why is
- 1:20:43Speaker 1: it Then why is she even using simplus value? And
- 1:20:50Speaker 1: it's not simplest value. But she continues, See here she
- 1:20:56Speaker 1: press a critique, but then she answers the critique to
- 1:20:59Speaker 1: this could be answered that workers are not better off
- 1:21:02Speaker 1: in a capitalist economy because they must work in order
- 1:21:04Speaker 1: to achieve the same level of consumption longer hours than
- 1:21:08Speaker 1: they would if the capital stock was collectively owned. But
- 1:21:14Speaker 1: there's every where that every way that the capital stock
- 1:21:18Speaker 1: is collectively owned, production grinds still a halt, and they're
- 1:21:23Speaker 1: not better off. So when she finds a criticism of
- 1:21:31Speaker 1: marks an exploitation, she answers the criticism. When she's criticizing
- 1:21:36Speaker 1: the defenders of capitalism, there's no answer that they provide.
- 1:21:41Speaker 1: I mean, her presentation is so non objective. She says.
- 1:21:52Speaker 1: The question of the wrongfulness of exploitation would then seem
- 1:21:55Speaker 1: to depend on the previous question of whether the background
- 1:21:58Speaker 1: and unequal distribution of productive property can be justified the
- 1:22:02Speaker 1: question of wrongful the wrongfulness of exploitation, but the idea
- 1:22:06Speaker 1: of exploitation is not being questioned. And then, you know,
- 1:22:10Speaker 1: she goes on a second According to a second account,
- 1:22:13Speaker 1: the problem with capitalist exploitation is that it amounts to
- 1:22:15Speaker 1: unfair advantage taking. And uh, you know, and she goes on,
- 1:22:21Speaker 1: and exploitation gets a long section again because this is
- 1:22:25Speaker 1: what a lot of people write about, and it goes on,
- 1:22:28Speaker 1: and then domination. Critiques grounded in a concern for domination
- 1:22:34Speaker 1: can be broadly divided into interactional and structural critiques. And
- 1:22:39Speaker 1: I'm not going to read this, but the point is,
- 1:22:41Speaker 1: look how much is given to the critiques of capitalism,
- 1:22:45Speaker 1: normative critiques of capitalism. Look how much was given to
- 1:22:48Speaker 1: defense of capitalism. Not much normative critiques of but critiques
- 1:22:54Speaker 1: of capitalism lots of them. So we got God, we
- 1:22:59Speaker 1: got domain nation after domination as political self determination, criticues
- 1:23:05Speaker 1: of capitalism, of capitalism undermines political values, including democratic legitimacy
- 1:23:11Speaker 1: and political self determination. This is something you hear all
- 1:23:16Speaker 1: the time out there, in so far as it allows
- 1:23:19Speaker 1: for large inequalities of wealth and capital that those politics
- 1:23:23Speaker 1: we're told. I just did a show yesterday, a segment
- 1:23:26Speaker 1: on the show yesterday to show that money doesn't buy
- 1:23:31Speaker 1: you votes. Indeed, people who spent a lot of money
- 1:23:34Speaker 1: didn't win their election. There's no necessary relation between the two.
- 1:23:38Speaker 1: And in so far as economic and equality can be
- 1:23:40Speaker 1: converted through a variety of mechanisms into political inequality, capitalism
- 1:23:45Speaker 1: is the facto incompatible with proper functioning of democratic process
- 1:23:48Speaker 1: and with the basic democratic principles and as a principle,
- 1:23:51Speaker 1: a fair opportunity for the political influence. This is the
- 1:23:54Speaker 1: problem when you don't define capitalism, you don't define what
- 1:23:58Speaker 1: you mean by democracy. Why is democracy a good? By
- 1:24:03Speaker 1: the way, I'm doing a debate about democracy, why I'm
- 1:24:07Speaker 1: taking the position the democracy is not a good. So
- 1:24:12Speaker 1: I'm taking the anti democracy position at a debate in
- 1:24:15Speaker 1: the Festival of Philosophy and Music in London in September.
- 1:24:21Speaker 1: So if you're in London and you like to come,
- 1:24:23Speaker 1: you can buy a one day ticket. It's let the
- 1:24:29Speaker 1: Light in something like that it's called, but it's the
- 1:24:32Speaker 1: full the conference of It's a festival of philosophy and
- 1:24:40Speaker 1: music and it's in London September. I can't remember I
- 1:24:47Speaker 1: think it's twenty twenty four something like that. And I'm
- 1:24:49Speaker 1: on the Sunday and I'm doing two panels, one on freedom,
- 1:24:53Speaker 1: one on freedom and one on democracy. What is freedom?
- 1:25:03Speaker 1: So yes, a whole thing about how we think about
- 1:25:05Speaker 1: it with democracy, and then the whole thing about alienation
- 1:25:07Speaker 1: again unchallenged. Capitalism is also being criticized of the gods
- 1:25:11Speaker 1: of individual and social alienation. Alienation is generally understood as
- 1:25:16Speaker 1: a pathological relations, a relation of separation, or of psychological
- 1:25:21Speaker 1: state of detachment between a subject and an object. Individuals are,
- 1:25:26Speaker 1: for example, said to be alienated from their own life
- 1:25:29Speaker 1: when they cannot identify with it, or when they feel
- 1:25:32Speaker 1: indifferent to how life goes. Workers are said to be
- 1:25:35Speaker 1: alienated from the product of their labor when they cannot
- 1:25:39Speaker 1: understand and relate it to it as the product of
- 1:25:42Speaker 1: their own actions as their own and rather perceive or
- 1:25:45Speaker 1: relate to it as a separate alien product. This is
- 1:25:48Speaker 1: state out of Marx eighteen forty four. Alienation is yeah,
- 1:25:55Speaker 1: I mean the way Marx thinks of it. Capitalism can
- 1:26:00Speaker 1: be regarded as being alienating in more than one way
- 1:26:02Speaker 1: and in relation to more than one domain. And she
- 1:26:06Speaker 1: has a whole theory of how because individuals make investments,
- 1:26:12Speaker 1: and those investments are guided by the market and profitability,
- 1:26:17Speaker 1: even those everybody is alienated from the product of those
- 1:26:22Speaker 1: investments because they didn't make the investments, so she she
- 1:26:27Speaker 1: writes here. More recently, some she cites herself, have argued
- 1:26:32Speaker 1: that capitalism generates an alienated relation between citizens and their
- 1:26:37Speaker 1: social political order because by leaving transformative investment decisions in
- 1:26:43Speaker 1: personal market forces, it deprives citizens of control over the
- 1:26:48Speaker 1: future of their society. Now this you can see right now,
- 1:26:52Speaker 1: this is what's going on with artificial intelligence. This is
- 1:26:55Speaker 1: what's going on with the data centers. Individual individuals, citizens
- 1:27:03Speaker 1: have not been consulted about the deployment of data centers,
- 1:27:09Speaker 1: and therefore, she would argue, and I think this is
- 1:27:12Speaker 1: what has been promulgated out there to the culture that
- 1:27:19Speaker 1: they alienated as a consequence, there's a data center going up,
- 1:27:22Speaker 1: But I don't want a data center. I had no
- 1:27:24Speaker 1: say in this, and I should have a say in this.
- 1:27:28Speaker 1: This is you know, it's gonna affect my future. There's
- 1:27:31Speaker 1: gonna be AI. I don't know if I want AI.
- 1:27:36Speaker 1: So this is the sense in which it's alienating it's
- 1:27:39Speaker 1: we're going to get the Internet whether we want it
- 1:27:41Speaker 1: or not. We're gonna get AI whether we want it
- 1:27:44Speaker 1: or not. Now who's we? It's democracy the majority, She writes,
- 1:27:49Speaker 1: Under such conditions, citizens cannot be reasonably expected to regard
- 1:27:53Speaker 1: their society as the result of the collective doing and valuing,
- 1:27:57Speaker 1: and cannot affirm it as their own. Capitalism is alienating
- 1:28:01Speaker 1: because all this stuff like the Internet, came about nobody
- 1:28:04Speaker 1: asked me about it. I didn't create the Internet. I
- 1:28:07Speaker 1: didn't participate in creating I didn't vote to invest in it.
- 1:28:12Speaker 1: Who so it's not mine? So I feel alienated from it?
- 1:28:17Speaker 1: I mean, do you find this really really bizarre? A
- 1:28:20Speaker 1: bizarre way of thinking about the world. I use it,
- 1:28:26Speaker 1: I interact with it. I may create pages on it,
- 1:28:30Speaker 1: so I do make stuff on it. I am participating
- 1:28:33Speaker 1: of it. And if I don't want to use it,
- 1:28:36Speaker 1: I don't use it. But she continues, well, it may
- 1:28:41Speaker 1: be that only workers are exploited on the capitalism, all citizens,
- 1:28:48Speaker 1: whether capitalists, are not as socially alienated, which is bizarre.
- 1:28:53Speaker 1: Do you feel alienated? This leaves open the further question
- 1:28:57Speaker 1: of where the capitalism by by necessarily alienating citizens from
- 1:29:02Speaker 1: this social political world generates a distinctive kind of unfreedom,
- 1:29:08Speaker 1: different from domination, interference, and mere lack of autonomy. This
- 1:29:13Speaker 1: is her writing, this is her theory, this is what
- 1:29:16Speaker 1: she believes, so of course there's going to be no criticism. Further,
- 1:29:21Speaker 1: insofar as an interest in non alienation can be regarded
- 1:29:25Speaker 1: as a grounding value of political self determination, and the
- 1:29:30Speaker 1: latter should be arguably exercised compatibly with its grounding values
- 1:29:35Speaker 1: to augue the capitalism is necessarily socially alienating, mainly in
- 1:29:39Speaker 1: support to the view of that capitalism is illegitimate may
- 1:29:41Speaker 1: sub may whether or not it is also unjust. I
- 1:29:52Speaker 1: don't know exactly what that last sentence meant, and I'm
- 1:29:55Speaker 1: not going to read it slowly to get it. You
- 1:29:58Speaker 1: get the kind of language, though. We're all alienated from
- 1:30:01Speaker 1: capitalism because capitalism produces results that we had no say
- 1:30:08Speaker 1: The market produces results that we had no say in
- 1:30:12Speaker 1: bringing about, which is uh, you know, really really striking
- 1:30:24Speaker 1: and interesting. You know, she's I think this is originally
- 1:30:28Speaker 1: original for her, right, you know, investment decisions determine our future.
- 1:30:32Speaker 1: How much money is invested in AI is going to
- 1:30:34Speaker 1: determine the future of all of us, and yet we
- 1:30:37Speaker 1: don't make decisions bout investment. But the thing is, if
- 1:30:44Speaker 1: you believe progress is beneficial, progress is good for human beings,
- 1:30:52Speaker 1: then we are all the massive beneficiaries of other people's
- 1:30:58Speaker 1: investment decisions, and other people's investment decisions are only going
- 1:31:02Speaker 1: to be successful if we embrace that future. That is,
- 1:31:10Speaker 1: if investors, because of market pressures, invest in a technology
- 1:31:16Speaker 1: that turns out to be something we don't want, we
- 1:31:21Speaker 1: just don't want, they will lose their money. So the
- 1:31:29Speaker 1: market is self correcting in a way as to make
- 1:31:35Speaker 1: sure the investments that actually get made. The meaning that
- 1:31:39Speaker 1: those investments are profitable is that they are embraced by consumers,
- 1:31:46Speaker 1: they're embraced by participants in the marketplace, they're embraced by us,
- 1:31:50Speaker 1: now maybe not a majority of us, but a significant
- 1:31:53Speaker 1: number of us for them to be really profitable. That's
- 1:31:59Speaker 1: a simple critique that I just came up with on
- 1:32:02Speaker 1: the fly to that one. But there's no critique here,
- 1:32:07Speaker 1: and the section of criticism of capitalism is not ended yet,
- 1:32:09Speaker 1: because there's a feminist critique which basically says that you know,
- 1:32:15Speaker 1: house work, the birthing and rearing of children, the care
- 1:32:18Speaker 1: of adults, the elderly, and the unemployed is done by
- 1:32:23Speaker 1: women who don't get compensated for that. Without such unpaid labor,
- 1:32:29Speaker 1: production would not be it would be impossible. And yet
- 1:32:32Speaker 1: capital does not value such work. Indeed, it does not
- 1:32:35Speaker 1: accord it even a subsistence salary. But it does, I
- 1:32:44Speaker 1: mean not in a sense that you know, whoever, Yeah,
- 1:32:52Speaker 1: because that work is not economically productive, and to the
- 1:32:57Speaker 1: extent that it's economically productive, and to extent that you know,
- 1:33:01Speaker 1: in a household a woman does certain things, then she
- 1:33:04Speaker 1: also shares in the income of her husband, or the
- 1:33:08Speaker 1: other way around. So in this way is capitalism exploits women,
- 1:33:13Speaker 1: contributes to the reproduction of gender inequality and patriarchy called
- 1:33:18Speaker 1: domination within the household women today in many respects i'll
- 1:33:23Speaker 1: earn men and reproduces a mystified idea of the family
- 1:33:27Speaker 1: as a private sphere rather than an integral part of
- 1:33:30Speaker 1: the economy. But family is a private sphere. Family is
- 1:33:34Speaker 1: not a part of the economy. Family is not the economy.
- 1:33:37Speaker 1: Not everything is the economy. Again, no criticism of this,
- 1:33:47Speaker 1: you know, just more elaboration. Feminists of us expanded their
- 1:33:49Speaker 1: critique of capitalism by denasi capitalism's tendency towards feminization of labor,
- 1:33:54Speaker 1: whatever the hell that means, as well as radicalization of
- 1:33:58Speaker 1: care work. Racialization a racialism by feminization as meant the
- 1:34:03Speaker 1: increased expansion of forms of employment and service jobs that,
- 1:34:06Speaker 1: because of their precarious, low wage and care related characters,
- 1:34:11Speaker 1: share many of the exploitative features of forms of domestic play,
- 1:34:14Speaker 1: but traditionally performed by women. And then there's racial capitalism. Recently,
- 1:34:22Speaker 1: there's been growing attention to the interpretation and interrelation between
- 1:34:25Speaker 1: capitalism and white supremacy, and to what has become known
- 1:34:29Speaker 1: as racial capitalism. In its stronger version, racial capitalism indicates
- 1:34:33Speaker 1: a non contingent, necessary, and inherent relationship Bedeen capitalism and
- 1:34:37Speaker 1: white supremacy. I mean, this is so ahistorical it drives
- 1:34:42Speaker 1: me nuts. Have not the most capitalist places on earth
- 1:34:46Speaker 1: been the ones that have eliminated slavery? First England the
- 1:34:52Speaker 1: United States? Have they not been the ones that ultimately
- 1:34:56Speaker 1: fought against racial discrimination? It was the North not a
- 1:35:01Speaker 1: beneflace in the South, the North being capitalist, the South
- 1:35:05Speaker 1: being more feudal. She writes, capital can only accumulate by
- 1:35:17Speaker 1: producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups,
- 1:35:22Speaker 1: the very existence of inequality, suggest racial racism and a
- 1:35:30Speaker 1: and then capitalism and nature, the exploitation of the environment,
- 1:35:33Speaker 1: the destruction of the environment. And then she talks about
- 1:35:37Speaker 1: further topics, and most of these further topics again topics
- 1:35:41Speaker 1: that relate to criticisms of capitalism. She says, there she
- 1:35:48Speaker 1: has provided an overview. This is the ending right of
- 1:35:50Speaker 1: many complexities involved in theorization of capitalism. Privileging these accounts
- 1:35:55Speaker 1: of capitalism that have directly influenced contemporary debates and political
- 1:35:59Speaker 1: theory and philosophy. It is shown how a plurality of
- 1:36:02Speaker 1: values and principles grounded the normative cases for the fall
- 1:36:07Speaker 1: and against capitalism, yeah, but mostly against. The Enchie is
- 1:36:11Speaker 1: as a clarified how many defenses and critiques of capitalism
- 1:36:14Speaker 1: are ultimately only defenses and critiques of some of its aspects.
- 1:36:19Speaker 1: And then what counts as a distinctive normative critique of
- 1:36:22Speaker 1: capitalism remains unsettled. Overall, the Enchie demonstrates that there's a
- 1:36:27Speaker 1: growing interest in capitalism as an object of normative analysis
- 1:36:30Speaker 1: and critique. I wish, all right, so let's some guy
- 1:36:38Speaker 1: has already gone an now in forty minutes, which is
- 1:36:41Speaker 1: long for this stuff. How do I switch out of this?
- 1:36:45Speaker 1: And I'm not going to show you any of her
- 1:36:46Speaker 1: video because it's not worth it. It's repetitive. Notice that
- 1:36:55Speaker 1: for our intellectual class. And as we'll see when we
- 1:36:59Speaker 1: discuss Patrick Deneen with with Nicos on Sunday, as I
- 1:37:05Speaker 1: discussed Patrick Deanian with Nicos on Sunday, this is true
- 1:37:08Speaker 1: of the right. Suddenly, elements of the right as well
- 1:37:11Speaker 1: as the left. Underlying all discussions of capitalism is marx
- 1:37:18Speaker 1: They might not all be Marxists in the sense of
- 1:37:22Speaker 1: agreeing with Marxists entire system a Marxist philosophy. Very few
- 1:37:27Speaker 1: people a Marxist in that sense, but they all take
- 1:37:32Speaker 1: Marxist ideas for granted. The idea of exploitation is taken
- 1:37:38Speaker 1: for granted. The idea of you know, excess value, that
- 1:37:45Speaker 1: is the fact that the capitalist gets it gets excess
- 1:37:52Speaker 1: value from the employee is taken for granted. You know,
- 1:37:58Speaker 1: the idea that capital and just accumulates, the idea of alienation,
- 1:38:05Speaker 1: which is again goes back to Marx, the idea of alienation,
- 1:38:09Speaker 1: which is huge. It's all over. This woman's work is
- 1:38:17Speaker 1: taken direct from Marx. The idea that there's something wrong
- 1:38:22Speaker 1: with inequality is taken from others other than marx But
- 1:38:29Speaker 1: the premise of almost all the discussion of capitalism out
- 1:38:32Speaker 1: there today among left and right, are anti capitalist ideas.
- 1:38:39Speaker 1: That's the starting point, that's where they're coming from. That's
- 1:38:44Speaker 1: the fundamental assumptions and the basis. And to some of us,
- 1:38:48Speaker 1: when we hear them talk about this stuff, it's like,
- 1:38:50Speaker 1: what are they talking about? This is and unless you
- 1:38:55Speaker 1: realize that the whole field, the whole way in which
- 1:38:59Speaker 1: people approach a topic of capitalism is shaped by Marxism,
- 1:39:03Speaker 1: and therefore and today by by you know, intersectionality and
- 1:39:08Speaker 1: identity politics, and this is the feminization and the racialization
- 1:39:13Speaker 1: and all of this stuff by postcolonial which is just
- 1:39:17Speaker 1: exploitation taken to another dimension. This is what frames the
- 1:39:25Speaker 1: entire discussion. You wonder why it's so difficult to make
- 1:39:29Speaker 1: progress out there against these people, it's because there's a
- 1:39:33Speaker 1: sense in which we're not in the same reality. We're
- 1:39:35Speaker 1: not talking about the same stuff. We're not We certainly
- 1:39:41Speaker 1: don't have the same kind of foundation. We don't know
- 1:39:45Speaker 1: the same history, and we don't understand our relationship in
- 1:39:48Speaker 1: the marketplace, in the same way. I mean, this idea
- 1:39:52Speaker 1: of alienation is just I don't know what. I don't
- 1:39:54Speaker 1: know what they're talking about. Now there is a sense
- 1:39:58Speaker 1: in which this alienation. There's an excellent article, I think
- 1:40:03Speaker 1: maybe his best article by Nathaniel Brandon in Capitalism Unknown
- 1:40:07Speaker 1: Ideal about alienation. But it's a very different concept when
- 1:40:12Speaker 1: people are told they're being exploited, when people are told
- 1:40:16Speaker 1: them out of control, when people are told they don't
- 1:40:20Speaker 1: benefits of progress, when people are told that they're just
- 1:40:24Speaker 1: being exploited and used by the rich, and that AI
- 1:40:30Speaker 1: is just going to take their jobs, it's not going
- 1:40:32Speaker 1: to give them anything, there's no benefit to them, there's
- 1:40:35Speaker 1: just downside. Then yeah, they are going to feel alienated.
- 1:40:40Speaker 1: The alienation doesn't come from anything in reality. The alienation
- 1:40:47Speaker 1: comes from the fact that the intellectuals's job it is
- 1:40:50Speaker 1: to explain what's going on in reality too, common folk
- 1:40:57Speaker 1: explain it in ways that alien a common folk from
- 1:41:04Speaker 1: what is actually going on. But it's the explanation is alienating,
- 1:41:11Speaker 1: not the phenomena itself. Not the phenomena it self. It's yeah,
- 1:41:22Speaker 1: it's it's super frustrating because again, on any one of
- 1:41:25Speaker 1: these you need to write an essay. Any one of these,
- 1:41:28Speaker 1: you need to write a book. And Iman wrote a
- 1:41:29Speaker 1: lot of that, wrote a lot of books, wrote a book,
- 1:41:33Speaker 1: wrote capitalism not know an ideal which is not cited
- 1:41:35Speaker 1: here on the whole thing on capitalism? Is Iinman? Is
- 1:41:39Speaker 1: not that book of Iinmands? Is not there at least
- 1:41:42Speaker 1: virtue of selfishnesses that can throwaway to Iman? But why
- 1:41:45Speaker 1: not capitalism, why just the one little tiny paragraph Knowsic
- 1:41:52Speaker 1: gets a whole section. Why because Nosic was a formal
- 1:41:55Speaker 1: philosopher in a philosophy department, and he deserves attention, not
- 1:42:00Speaker 1: she has an outside Hyek is respected, Milton Friedman is respected.
- 1:42:06Speaker 1: So they get but even they get a little bit.
- 1:42:09Speaker 1: Marx huge amount, and the critics massive quantities. But again
- 1:42:14Speaker 1: that's because in the world of philosophy there are very
- 1:42:18Speaker 1: few defenders, very few defenders. Most of the defenders in
- 1:42:22Speaker 1: the world of economics and if are not taken that
- 1:42:25Speaker 1: seriously by philosophers. So as we go through critiquing the critics,
- 1:42:37Speaker 1: we will see a lot of these issues keep coming back.
- 1:42:41Speaker 1: A lot of myths about how capitalism functions, about how
- 1:42:46Speaker 1: it works, what it does, and human relations and how
- 1:42:49Speaker 1: people relate to one another under capitalism And of course no,
- 1:42:53Speaker 1: and this is really important. There's a whole entry here
- 1:42:55Speaker 1: on capitalism, and entire entry and not a single attempt
- 1:42:59Speaker 1: to define what it is she's talking about. So there's
- 1:43:03Speaker 1: a mishmash here of capitalism, some capitalist elements, mixed economy, statism.
- 1:43:10Speaker 1: There's no Charvidyan what exactly what we're talking about? What
- 1:43:15Speaker 1: is this thing that marks mean marks at ball cravity
- 1:43:20Speaker 1: over capitalism than she does. And even when she talks
- 1:43:24Speaker 1: about capitalism but marks the view of capitalism, she does
- 1:43:28Speaker 1: not present a lot of the material about how capitalism arose,
- 1:43:32Speaker 1: about the fact that it benefited the worker, but the
- 1:43:34Speaker 1: fact that rising standard living, none of that makes it
- 1:43:37Speaker 1: into her description of Marxist It's just about exploitation, alienation.
- 1:43:45Speaker 1: That's what these people are interested in. So uh and
- 1:43:52Speaker 1: if you watch her videos, she is an out and
- 1:43:56Speaker 1: out socialist. She wants everything to be voted on within
- 1:44:03Speaker 1: the corporation, so within the business, the business should be
- 1:44:07Speaker 1: owned by its workers, everything should be voted on. Twenty
- 1:44:11Speaker 1: first century motor from Atlas Shrugged is exactly that she wants.
- 1:44:17Speaker 1: That that's to solve the alienation of the workers in
- 1:44:22Speaker 1: the wage relationship with the employers. But then, ultimately, the
- 1:44:27Speaker 1: most important part of solving the alienation of all of
- 1:44:31Speaker 1: us in the system is to socialize, democratize all investment decisions,
- 1:44:43Speaker 1: and to have everything central. The planned and for has
- 1:44:47Speaker 1: to have a political incentive to vote, because everything comes
- 1:44:53Speaker 1: from the top down, and you have experts who make
- 1:44:56Speaker 1: investment decisions or recommend investments to all of us who vote.
- 1:45:03Speaker 1: But here again is the dismissal of the individual human mind,
- 1:45:12Speaker 1: the idea that anybody can invest, that anybody can make
- 1:45:15Speaker 1: in decisions about the future, that anybody knows what's good
- 1:45:20Speaker 1: and bad versus, and so we can all vote on
- 1:45:26Speaker 1: stuff we know nothing about. Let's vote on AI. I
- 1:45:28Speaker 1: don't know what AI is, I don't know how it works,
- 1:45:30Speaker 1: but let's vote on it. And then, you know, the
- 1:45:37Speaker 1: disregard for the fact that in a private market in capitalism,
- 1:45:43Speaker 1: if you invest and you're mistaken, you suffer the cost
- 1:45:50Speaker 1: for that, and not a lot of people get hurt
- 1:45:55Speaker 1: in a sense, But if central planners make a mistake,
- 1:46:00Speaker 1: the damages are huge. Everybody suffers. And the fact when
- 1:46:07Speaker 1: I'm investing other people's money and I'm going to you know,
- 1:46:11Speaker 1: through voting. My attitude is going to be very different
- 1:46:14Speaker 1: than I'm investing my money or other people's money that
- 1:46:17Speaker 1: have given me introducy responsibility to invested for them. The
- 1:46:24Speaker 1: whole way in which they approach this is again Marxist
- 1:46:27Speaker 1: in a sense. It's deterministic. If we just got rid
- 1:46:33Speaker 1: of the capitalists, we got rid of investment, If we
- 1:46:35Speaker 1: democratized everything, progress would still happen. Good decisions would still
- 1:46:40Speaker 1: be made, they just be made differently. They'd be made democratically,
- 1:46:44Speaker 1: and we'd all own them. How it's like innovation would
- 1:46:50Speaker 1: still happen. How if the innovators are not allowed to innovate,
- 1:46:56Speaker 1: If the innovators might gues must get a vote in
- 1:46:59Speaker 1: order to innovate, must get other people to vote for
- 1:47:01Speaker 1: their innovation. How does that work? The idea of people
- 1:47:09Speaker 1: specialize in investment, people specialize in entrepreneurship, people specialize in innovation,
- 1:47:14Speaker 1: that is beyond the capacity to understand all of that
- 1:47:18Speaker 1: would just happen spontination. I almost write a book by
- 1:47:21Speaker 1: these leading environmentalists and they and they were saying, look,
- 1:47:25Speaker 1: we need all this technology that can produce that's a
- 1:47:29Speaker 1: clean energy, and it's like, where will they How will
- 1:47:33Speaker 1: we get it. It'll just happen, It'll just arise, you know,
- 1:47:39Speaker 1: and will centralize everything. Everything will be under government control
- 1:47:43Speaker 1: and the technology will just show up. It's this unbelievable determinism.
- 1:47:51Speaker 1: All right, I hope you found value in that. I
- 1:47:54Speaker 1: know that was not necessarily easy. We'll keep refinding the
- 1:47:58Speaker 1: format of these and as I said, next time, we'll
- 1:48:00Speaker 1: do a podcast, a popular podcast who's critical of capitalism,
- 1:48:06Speaker 1: and we'll do that. I've already got which one lined up.
- 1:48:09Speaker 1: It's got like two point six million views already on it,
- 1:48:13Speaker 1: and so you can see it. But it's just horrible.
- 1:48:17Speaker 1: I'll just end with it's just horrible that Stanford would
- 1:48:21Speaker 1: choose Stanford Encyclopedia a philosophy. This is a serious place,
- 1:48:25Speaker 1: a serious encyclopedia. Serious effort goes into these essays. That
- 1:48:30Speaker 1: they would choose somebody who is so biased, somebody who
- 1:48:37Speaker 1: has an agenda, and to choose the publican essay that's
- 1:48:40Speaker 1: so skewed in one direction, it's I think, really horrible.
- 1:48:49Speaker 1: And you know, just look at the citations, as I said,
- 1:48:54Speaker 1: and compared to the Anger and Socialism, where they got
- 1:48:57Speaker 1: somebody who's pro socialism. But they could have found philosopher
- 1:49:02Speaker 1: who's pro capitalism to write up the entry on capitalism,
- 1:49:06Speaker 1: but no, they chose a critic of I mean, it
- 1:49:09Speaker 1: would have been interesting. It could have got Grigs Olimari
- 1:49:12Speaker 1: to write it. Or there's plenty. There are lots of
- 1:49:15Speaker 1: philosopher's out there, the libertarian philosophers. There are plenty of
- 1:49:18Speaker 1: philosophers out there. Not a lot, but they's some who
- 1:49:21Speaker 1: are pro capitalists and could have done a decent job
- 1:49:25Speaker 1: presenting the pros and cons and presenting a real thing
- 1:49:28Speaker 1: on capitalism. But that's not what they chose. They chose
- 1:49:33Speaker 1: an anti non on capitalism, but on the critique of
- 1:49:35Speaker 1: capitalism and the and and and a Marxist view of
- 1:49:38Speaker 1: capitalists as the theme and the essence of it. All right,
- 1:49:46Speaker 1: thanks guys, uh, I hope as I said, I hope
- 1:49:49Speaker 1: you enjoyed that. Let's see, we have a lot of
- 1:49:53Speaker 1: super chat questions and you guys have been pretty generous
- 1:49:57Speaker 1: on the super chat. I appreciate that. Thank you. Let
- 1:50:03Speaker 1: me let's do this. Let's stop by thanking the sticker,
- 1:50:08Speaker 1: the stickers, let's see selfie subscriber fifty dollars.
- 1:50:13Speaker 5: Thank you, Enrik, Thank you, Dum Dum Bonnie, thank you, Barry,
- 1:50:21Speaker 5: thank you, and Alan thank.
- 1:50:25Speaker 1: You quite a few stickers. This is good. And Roland
- 1:50:30Speaker 1: thank you. Yeah, thank you, guys really really appreciate it.
- 1:50:38Speaker 1: And let's see we're going into our third hour now,
- 1:50:40Speaker 1: so that's great. Okay. Prime mover has asked as asked
- 1:50:47Speaker 1: a like a multipod question. So even though his question
- 1:50:52Speaker 1: doesn't have any one of the parts of it doesn't
- 1:50:55Speaker 1: have the most dollars associate with it accumulative it dots
- 1:50:59Speaker 1: right disease. This is like a pot five, pots six,
- 1:51:02Speaker 1: pot seven part seven said seven times twenty one hundred
- 1:51:06Speaker 1: and forty dollars questions. So thank you Prime mover. So
- 1:51:09Speaker 1: let's read this lengthy question and I'll try to answer it.
- 1:51:13Speaker 1: This is prime moving pot one. Well, I won't read
- 1:51:16Speaker 1: the parts. I haven't heard you address this angle on AI.
- 1:51:20Speaker 1: I would like to hear the thoughts. I understand your
- 1:51:23Speaker 1: admiration for the technological achievement of LLLMS. However, isn't there
- 1:51:27Speaker 1: some reason to be concerned given the technology's capability for
- 1:51:31Speaker 1: integrating large swaths of info. Isn't there reason to think
- 1:51:36Speaker 1: that the massive data centers center expansion is creating the
- 1:51:40Speaker 1: infrastructure from massive expansion of the surveillance state. In the
- 1:51:45Speaker 1: context of Snowden, he showed that companies like Verizon, T
- 1:51:49Speaker 1: and T et cetera were secretly feeding information to the NSA.
- 1:51:53Speaker 1: What are stopping company is like opening eye on topic
- 1:51:56Speaker 1: Facebook that want to be regulated from utilizing their models
- 1:52:00Speaker 1: and massive data capabilities too, for example create secret social
- 1:52:06Speaker 1: scores or profiling for political dissonance, or go after people
- 1:52:11Speaker 1: who have heard Trump's feelings. So let me just catch
- 1:52:15Speaker 1: up here further. What happens when the AI data center
- 1:52:25Speaker 1: boom cycle goes bust and all the access excess capacity
- 1:52:31Speaker 1: is just sitting around with nothing to do. Who is
- 1:52:33Speaker 1: the buyer of last result? Is it not the NSA?
- 1:52:39Speaker 1: Snowden showed There's no such thing as privacy online. It
- 1:52:45Speaker 1: is a matter of everything you say or do being
- 1:52:49Speaker 1: cataloged the day that you oppose the wrong administration. All
- 1:52:54Speaker 1: the information needed to bury all to bury you is
- 1:52:58Speaker 1: a click away. I see no company today besides perhaps Apple,
- 1:53:05Speaker 1: that is going to stand on principle against such an overreach.
- 1:53:08Speaker 1: With authoritarianism on the rise, do you think that pushing
- 1:53:13Speaker 1: back against data centers is completely unreasonable? Yes, but I
- 1:53:19Speaker 1: understand your point, and it's a point while taken, but
- 1:53:23Speaker 1: I still think it's wrong. I mean, if we really
- 1:53:28Speaker 1: took Cure arguments us, we would say, look, we should
- 1:53:35Speaker 1: have never invented, we should have never supported the invention
- 1:53:39Speaker 1: of the microprocessor. We should have shut it down right
- 1:53:42Speaker 1: then and there, because of course, none of this is
- 1:53:45Speaker 1: possible without the micro processor. And of course the Internet,
- 1:53:49Speaker 1: as you said, nothing you said on the Internet is private.
- 1:53:52Speaker 1: Now you have the option not to go on the Internet,
- 1:53:55Speaker 1: but the reality is when you go on the Internet,
- 1:53:57Speaker 1: nothing is private. And the NSA could if they wanted
- 1:53:59Speaker 1: to access it and score you whether you had data
- 1:54:05Speaker 1: centers or not. All the data centers do is they
- 1:54:07Speaker 1: make it more efficient. They make it more efficient. So yes,
- 1:54:16Speaker 1: all advancements intoechnology from the beginning of time in a
- 1:54:20Speaker 1: sense of let us to where we are today, and
- 1:54:25Speaker 1: all of them can be used in various ways. And
- 1:54:29Speaker 1: that's always been true. I mean, do you know that
- 1:54:34Speaker 1: I just read this today? When Apple left, when Steve
- 1:54:37Speaker 1: Jobs left Apple, they started a company called Next. It
- 1:54:40Speaker 1: turns out the NeXT's biggest customers with CIA was the CIA.
- 1:54:44Speaker 1: CIA bought Next computers and in a sense kept Next
- 1:54:47Speaker 1: alive until they you know, jobs moved to Apple, bought
- 1:54:52Speaker 1: next use the operating system on Apple. I mean every
- 1:54:59Speaker 1: every you know that we use is going to be
- 1:55:02Speaker 1: used by the government. The military today is incorporating AI
- 1:55:05Speaker 1: in all its weapons systems. Those weapons systems we turned
- 1:55:09Speaker 1: on us easily. But again let's step back. The automobile
- 1:55:18Speaker 1: led to the invention of a tank.
- 1:55:21Speaker 6: The rifle led to the invention of you know, repeating
- 1:55:25Speaker 6: rifle and automatic weapons today, which the military has in
- 1:55:29Speaker 6: huge quantities that can be turned on us.
- 1:55:33Speaker 1: Nuclear weapons can be turned on us. So my point
- 1:55:39Speaker 1: is absolutely AI data centers, massive quantities of computing can
- 1:55:47Speaker 1: be turned on us. They can't be turned against us
- 1:55:51Speaker 1: the citizens. They can't be turned to spy on us,
- 1:55:56Speaker 1: to control us, to give us social scores. Indeed, to
- 1:55:59Speaker 1: some extent or another, that is already happening in China.
- 1:56:05Speaker 1: What do you do about it? Do you consciously promote
- 1:56:10Speaker 1: the stopping of growth, of technological growth? Do you relatively
- 1:56:16Speaker 1: suppress progress? And maybe you advocate for going backwards. I mean,
- 1:56:23Speaker 1: this is where Michael Knowles is right. In twelve twenty,
- 1:56:28Speaker 1: you could go out into the mountains and live your
- 1:56:30Speaker 1: life and probably not be harassed by anybody. You could
- 1:56:33Speaker 1: be a subsistent farmer somewhere and not be harassed. You
- 1:56:38Speaker 1: could avoid people. You know, maybe even one hundred and
- 1:56:42Speaker 1: fifty years ago, you could probably find a spot in
- 1:56:46Speaker 1: the mountains where nobody would ever find you. It is
- 1:56:55Speaker 1: true that as technologists progressed, we have satellites to give
- 1:57:00Speaker 1: you satellite images. They can find a dime, they can
- 1:57:03Speaker 1: find you know, anybody. Anyway, do we stop technological advance
- 1:57:10Speaker 1: because we're afraid of government? And my answer is no.
- 1:57:17Speaker 1: What it means is we have to work into different domains.
- 1:57:21Speaker 1: We have to, you know, pursuit the improvement in our
- 1:57:28Speaker 1: own lives, progress, economic progress, technological progress. I mean, think
- 1:57:34Speaker 1: of life today without the internet, Think of life today
- 1:57:36Speaker 1: without an iPhone. But the Internet and the iPhone makes
- 1:57:39Speaker 1: surveillance of you much more likely and much more possible
- 1:57:42Speaker 1: than the flip phones of the past, or even you know,
- 1:57:46Speaker 1: maybe the landlines were even more accessible to surveillance. But
- 1:57:51Speaker 1: it's all accessible to surveillance. But now we have our
- 1:57:56Speaker 1: whole lives and these phones. Break into those phones, and
- 1:57:58Speaker 1: there's technology that allows them to break into the phones.
- 1:58:01Speaker 1: They've got everything. But do we want to live without them?
- 1:58:07Speaker 1: I say no. So we have to find out two funds.
- 1:58:10Speaker 1: The first is to fight for continued progress, and the
- 1:58:14Speaker 1: second is to fight political encroachment, to fight the nsay
- 1:58:19Speaker 1: listening to our devices, to fight the Patriot Act, to
- 1:58:22Speaker 1: fight Trump, to fight authoritarianism. Will we lose, probably, But
- 1:58:30Speaker 1: I'd rather live in a world a progress of innovation,
- 1:58:38Speaker 1: a better products of AI and everything that it can
- 1:58:42Speaker 1: make possible, and ultimately lose. We all die at some
- 1:58:49Speaker 1: point then consciously accept the idea of I'm going to
- 1:58:57Speaker 1: retard progress. I'm going to not use the best in technology.
- 1:59:02Speaker 1: I'm gonna stop entrepreneurs from developing it. I'm gonna stop
- 1:59:05Speaker 1: entrepreneurs from moving forward. Am I gonna still land up
- 1:59:09Speaker 1: with authoritarianism? Absolutely? Even more so because the very act
- 1:59:16Speaker 1: of stopping entrepreneurs is an authoritarian act. You're basically saying, yes,
- 1:59:21Speaker 1: the government has the authority to stop them. Yes, we
- 1:59:25Speaker 1: by vote should be able to stop them, should be
- 1:59:27Speaker 1: able to control them, and that is sanctioning authoritarianism. In
- 1:59:33Speaker 1: my view, stopping the building of data centers will speed
- 1:59:38Speaker 1: up authoritarianism. We'll speed up centralize control of what we do,
- 1:59:46Speaker 1: and they'll use whatever tools are available to them. Yes,
- 1:59:48Speaker 1: they won't be the best tools. There still be tools.
- 1:59:51Speaker 1: The Nazis did a pretty good job of controlling all
- 1:59:54Speaker 1: of us without AI. Yes, AI makes it more efficient,
- 2:00:00Speaker 1: get that. But AI also makes fighting them more efficient.
- 2:00:05Speaker 1: It makes my growth more efficient, It makes the level
- 2:00:08Speaker 1: of the knowledge that I have greater, It makes the
- 2:00:12Speaker 1: tools of the fight greater. I argue this about the Internet. Yes,
- 2:00:17Speaker 1: the internet makes the control over me more possible, but
- 2:00:20Speaker 1: the incident also makes it possible for me to get
- 2:00:22Speaker 1: my ideas out there to the bigger, big audience. Now
- 2:00:25Speaker 1: there's no givantee I will win and they lose. It's
- 2:00:27Speaker 1: likely they win and I lose. But I have to fight,
- 2:00:31Speaker 1: and in that fight, I want the best tools available.
- 2:00:37Speaker 1: I want AI. And do I know that by wanting AI,
- 2:00:44Speaker 1: the governor also gets say yeah, absolutely, And look here's
- 2:00:47Speaker 1: the other thing. So one, opposing data centers will actually
- 2:00:51Speaker 1: lead to more authoritarianism. Nonetheless. Second, if we stop open
- 2:01:01Speaker 1: AI and anthropic and matter from building AI, who do
- 2:01:06Speaker 1: you think will pick up the slack? Well, one, we're
- 2:01:10Speaker 1: not going to stop the Chinese, So they're going to
- 2:01:13Speaker 1: pick up the slack, maybe to the point where they'll
- 2:01:15Speaker 1: establish authoritarianism and get such a lead that they will
- 2:01:18Speaker 1: take America one day and will all become slaves of
- 2:01:23Speaker 1: a Chinese state. Maybe that's far reaching, but it responds
- 2:01:28Speaker 1: to Chinese advancing. What do you think the American government
- 2:01:32Speaker 1: will do. They will invest in AI, they will build AI.
- 2:01:38Speaker 1: You know, maybe it won't be quite as efficient as
- 2:01:40Speaker 1: open AI and the thropic. All these data centers will
- 2:01:44Speaker 1: be will be nationalized and new ones won't be built,
- 2:01:50Speaker 1: but they'll be built by the government, will tax fair money.
- 2:01:54Speaker 1: That's not a problem. So I see so many downsides
- 2:02:09Speaker 1: the idea of infringing on liberty. You could So my
- 2:02:13Speaker 1: view is you just don't infringe on liberty. You never
- 2:02:17Speaker 1: advocate for policy of infringing on liberty, infringing on freedom,
- 2:02:22Speaker 1: because that plays into the eyes of the authoritarians, the
- 2:02:25Speaker 1: bad guys. They are going to use whatever technology is available.
- 2:02:30Speaker 1: They're going to try everything in the book. They're going
- 2:02:32Speaker 1: to try to take over the world. They're going to
- 2:02:34Speaker 1: try to enslave you one way or the other. The
- 2:02:38Speaker 1: only way to resist them is not by slowing down freedom.
- 2:02:42Speaker 1: It's not by slowing down progress. It's not by slowing
- 2:02:45Speaker 1: down entrepreneurs. It's by liberating them and fighting the authoritarians
- 2:02:53Speaker 1: explicitly acknowledging and fighting them not easy. I acknowledge that
- 2:03:02Speaker 1: it's not easy. I guess I don't see an alternative, though.
- 2:03:10Speaker 1: So now Tommy wants to be enslaved by Russia, you
- 2:03:17Speaker 1: could do that. You can get it on a plane
- 2:03:18Speaker 1: and go to Russia. You don't have to wait. God,
- 2:03:21Speaker 1: I don't get these people. Just go. They'll welcome you
- 2:03:25Speaker 1: with open hands. You could say, I want to go
- 2:03:28Speaker 1: to the UGA's camps out west. They'll take you, They'll
- 2:03:32Speaker 1: drive you there, They'll they'll they'll give you a right.
- 2:03:37Speaker 1: I wonder if Tommy's ever been to China. I'm curious.
- 2:03:42Speaker 1: People often most adam out about things they know nothing about.
- 2:03:49Speaker 1: So no, I mean, I get the fear. I understand
- 2:03:53Speaker 1: the fear. I think it's real and we should be
- 2:03:55Speaker 1: monitoring it. But I don't think AI is going to
- 2:04:01Speaker 1: make the difference. If we're moving towards the Theratianism, they're
- 2:04:04Speaker 1: gonna get us anyway. I put out my stuff on YouTube.
- 2:04:08Speaker 1: They don't need they don't need AI to find me.
- 2:04:18Speaker 1: And I'm not gonna stop because I'm worried. They're not
- 2:04:20Speaker 1: not gonna stop making fun of Trump or you know,
- 2:04:24Speaker 1: attacking Trump. I'm gonna continue fighting, and so most of
- 2:04:30Speaker 1: us are going to be found out even with the
- 2:04:33Speaker 1: tools they have today. So they get better tools. Yeah,
- 2:04:36Speaker 1: but we also get better tools. I couldn't have anywhere
- 2:04:41Speaker 1: near the reach that I have today, anywhere near the
- 2:04:43Speaker 1: reach I have today without the Internet, and I can
- 2:04:46Speaker 1: only imagine what my reach is going to be once AI,
- 2:04:52Speaker 1: once I figure out how to use AI, and once
- 2:04:55Speaker 1: AI is fully developed. So I view it as a
- 2:04:58Speaker 1: tool challenge the author twoians. But they might win. It's
- 2:05:03Speaker 1: likely that they win. They've got a head start on us. Fine,
- 2:05:08Speaker 1: no matter what tools they have them winning is catastrophic,
- 2:05:16Speaker 1: all right, Okay, fifty dollars Michael. Objectivism is growing slowly
- 2:05:22Speaker 1: because altruism is such a cold belief system to so
- 2:05:25Speaker 1: many people. They get hysterical when you attack it. It's
- 2:05:29Speaker 1: like you're trying to take away something that provides them
- 2:05:32Speaker 1: with their identity, yes, their model, identity, their whole view
- 2:05:37Speaker 1: of what is right and what is wrong, what is
- 2:05:39Speaker 1: good and what is bad right, what is good and
- 2:05:45Speaker 1: what is bad, And it goes to the core of
- 2:05:51Speaker 1: who we are. We almost all of us want to
- 2:05:54Speaker 1: be good, and of course it's something that's drilled into
- 2:05:58Speaker 1: us from a very young age. It's associated with our parents.
- 2:06:03Speaker 1: It's associated without teachers, without preachers, without religion, with the deepest,
- 2:06:08Speaker 1: most cherished beliefs. So it's very hard to give up on.
- 2:06:13Speaker 1: And it's something that, yeah, we get very upset when
- 2:06:16Speaker 1: it's attacked. So you can understand because it deals with
- 2:06:20Speaker 1: the most fundamental question of right and wrong, good and evil,
- 2:06:26Speaker 1: what to do with your life, what's the right path?
- 2:06:29Speaker 1: And the older people get, the more committed they get
- 2:06:32Speaker 1: to the ideas that they grew up with, the more
- 2:06:36Speaker 1: difficult it is to dislodge. It wes a fifty dollars stick.
- 2:06:41Speaker 1: I think you think you thank you. Of course, as
- 2:06:43Speaker 1: I suggest that Tommy has never been to China, you
- 2:06:46Speaker 1: should go. He should go. It's an amazing place. I
- 2:06:49Speaker 1: recommend everybody to go to China and check it out
- 2:06:52Speaker 1: because it is an amazing place. I love China. I've
- 2:06:57Speaker 1: enjoyed all my trips there, even though the last one
- 2:07:00Speaker 1: they were kind of looking for me, but I enjoyed.
- 2:07:02Speaker 1: How much you have to say, I won't go back,
- 2:07:04Speaker 1: not anytime soon. Not well, she is running things, but
- 2:07:08Speaker 1: it's It's truly an amazing place. You'll learn a lot
- 2:07:11Speaker 1: by going to China. But I do find it interesting
- 2:07:13Speaker 1: that people are very passionate and very engaged and have
- 2:07:18Speaker 1: strong opinions about things they know nothing about. Michael, it
- 2:07:33Speaker 1: seems to really stop another fifty dollars, thank you, Michael.
- 2:07:36Speaker 1: It seems to really stop technological progress. You need communism,
- 2:07:40Speaker 1: You need such a litariant oppression and abolition of private property.
- 2:07:44Speaker 1: Short of that, economies grow even at a snail space.
- 2:07:49Speaker 1: I mean maybe. I mean, there's a bunch of economies
- 2:07:55Speaker 1: out there in the world who don't have communism, we're
- 2:07:57Speaker 1: having completely abolished private property. They grow because America grows.
- 2:08:04Speaker 1: I mean, I really believe if you look at the
- 2:08:06Speaker 1: economies of the world, a large number of them a
- 2:08:12Speaker 1: free writing in a sense off the United States, off
- 2:08:15Speaker 1: the fact that we still innovate. I mean, how many
- 2:08:19Speaker 1: countries around the world have an Internet because it was
- 2:08:21Speaker 1: invented in creating in the United States, and it wouldn't
- 2:08:24Speaker 1: exist and they wouldn't be able to use it without us.
- 2:08:27Speaker 1: And the economic growth that comes from using the internet
- 2:08:30Speaker 1: is there. How many of them have better healthcare because
- 2:08:33Speaker 1: of innovations that happen in the United States. So if
- 2:08:37Speaker 1: the United States eroads doesn't turn all communists, but significantly eroads.
- 2:08:44Speaker 1: It's private property, maybe it could grow a little bit,
- 2:08:48Speaker 1: but I fear that a lot of the other countries
- 2:08:52Speaker 1: would ground a Holt and maybe dessent, So you know,
- 2:08:59Speaker 1: I don't buy them a little bit of private property
- 2:09:01Speaker 1: is enough. I think you need a lot more than that,
- 2:09:05Speaker 1: And it depends on, of course, the context. Stephen Harper,
- 2:09:09Speaker 1: thank you for the sticker. Nature Observer, thank you for
- 2:09:11Speaker 1: the sticker. Really appreciate you, guys. Michael do Laadites always lose?
- 2:09:18Speaker 1: These medivil anti data center policies won't ultimately stop the
- 2:09:23Speaker 1: AI revolution. Even the anti capitalist nihilists in California wouldn't
- 2:09:28Speaker 1: stop Waimo in the self driving car revolution. I mean,
- 2:09:32Speaker 1: we will see. It could really slow things down. There's
- 2:09:37Speaker 1: probably enough places around the country where you could build
- 2:09:40Speaker 1: data centers where people won't object, so they probably won't
- 2:09:44Speaker 1: win out. But it is kind of scary the number
- 2:09:48Speaker 1: of Republican and democratic governors who are announcing a slowing
- 2:09:54Speaker 1: down and massive restrictions on data center It's not a
- 2:09:57Speaker 1: complete end to them. Always lose, always lose no here,
- 2:10:03Speaker 1: What is the biggest example, What is the number one
- 2:10:06Speaker 1: example of luad eight's winning. Anybody have a good example
- 2:10:11Speaker 1: of lud eight's winning. I mean two and a half.
- 2:10:16Speaker 1: There's one and a half that I can think of
- 2:10:18Speaker 1: off the bat, I can think of one and a half. No,
- 2:10:21Speaker 1: I can think of a lot more than one and
- 2:10:23Speaker 1: a half. I can think of more. I can think
- 2:10:25Speaker 1: of quite a few places where lud eights have one.
- 2:10:28Speaker 1: But what's the one obvious one staring us in the face. Well,
- 2:10:32Speaker 1: if you look in the right direction, well, the obvious
- 2:10:36Speaker 1: one is nuclear energy. Nuclear energy has been ground to
- 2:10:40Speaker 1: a halt, zero zilch, not a for what since the
- 2:10:44Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, fifty years. Maybe it's coming back now, maybe
- 2:10:50Speaker 1: we'll see. And even recently we saw in Germany shut
- 2:11:00Speaker 1: down you clip hop plants. So in Germany it's it's
- 2:11:03Speaker 1: it's recent and they're not rebuilding them, even though now
- 2:11:06Speaker 1: they've learned their lesson. So lud eyes are completely shut
- 2:11:09Speaker 1: down nuclear. They tried to shut down fossil fuel, but
- 2:11:13Speaker 1: that was too much of a lift, so I only
- 2:11:15Speaker 1: shut it down a little bit. So Germany. Places in
- 2:11:19Speaker 1: Germany with no sun and no you know, it relies
- 2:11:21Speaker 1: on solar and wind, and we have way too much
- 2:11:26Speaker 1: solar and wind in the United States, way more than
- 2:11:29Speaker 1: it's justified. Because the lud ice won to some extent
- 2:11:33Speaker 1: at least on fossil fuels, and then thinks about the
- 2:11:37Speaker 1: extent to which the luad eyes win in biotech, huge,
- 2:11:42Speaker 1: huge cloning. There's almost no research done in cloning. Gene
- 2:11:48Speaker 1: therapy is very difficult to get it done, very difficult
- 2:11:52Speaker 1: for it to be succeeding. So yeah, I mean lightites
- 2:12:09Speaker 1: can win, and they do win. Nuclear energy is something
- 2:12:13Speaker 1: we should really keep in mind, exit says the CIA.
- 2:12:19Speaker 1: This is in a chat the she is turning China
- 2:12:22Speaker 1: and to Tompkin Village, beautiful skyscrapers with empty and uninhabited
- 2:12:26Speaker 1: in materials, both cities with no inhabitants. You know, you
- 2:12:30Speaker 1: really need to make sure that that's true. Like there
- 2:12:33Speaker 1: are a lot of buildings that have been built whole
- 2:12:36Speaker 1: neighborhoods with no inhabitants because the real estate markets completely
- 2:12:39Speaker 1: collapsed and there was overbuilding and overinvesting in building. But
- 2:12:43Speaker 1: almost but most of skyscrapers are fall If you go
- 2:12:47Speaker 1: to Shanghai, skyscrapers is all inhabited. I mean hearing about
- 2:12:50Speaker 1: these empty cities and empty skyscrapers for a long time,
- 2:12:53Speaker 1: and when I went to China, I didn't see any
- 2:12:56Speaker 1: of that. But things are getting worse. Things are getting worse.
- 2:13:00Speaker 1: But don't overdo it in the in the empty stuff Shang.
- 2:13:05Speaker 1: When you go to Shanghai, the place is vibrant and
- 2:13:09Speaker 1: filled with people and filled with energy. And the skyscrapers
- 2:13:14Speaker 1: are filled now. They they're I mean the they are
- 2:13:20Speaker 1: massive real estate developments all over China that are empty
- 2:13:24Speaker 1: because of massive overbuilding that happened. And we saw the
- 2:13:29Speaker 1: real estate collapse in China over the last what is
- 2:13:32Speaker 1: it six seven years has been devastating and is devastating.
- 2:13:36Speaker 1: In the economy, the economy is doing very badly right now,
- 2:13:41Speaker 1: very badly right now. But and China's doing very badly
- 2:13:53Speaker 1: right now. China's economy, I wouldn't I wouldn't take Chinese
- 2:13:56Speaker 1: economy for the American economy at all. I wouldn't take
- 2:14:00Speaker 1: China's economy right now. You know, I think it's in deep, deep,
- 2:14:04Speaker 1: deep trouble. If America is in deep, deep trouble, China's
- 2:14:06Speaker 1: in deep deep trouble. Yeah, in speeds it still hasn't
- 2:14:14Speaker 1: solved the real estate crisis. It's got a massive debt
- 2:14:17Speaker 1: crisis that they haven't resolved. The stand of living, quality
- 2:14:22Speaker 1: of life of individuals in China is declining in spite
- 2:14:26Speaker 1: of there's no being technically a recession. It's declining. And
- 2:14:32Speaker 1: there's a lot of malinvestment. There's huge amount of investment
- 2:14:35Speaker 1: into areas where they cannot make a profit and ever
- 2:14:39Speaker 1: justify this investment. And it's one of the you know
- 2:14:44Speaker 1: things I wanted to point out about China, and I
- 2:14:47Speaker 1: can't remember, so yes, So China is yeah, oh yeah, unemployment.
- 2:14:58Speaker 1: Unemployment of young people seventeen to thirty is really high,
- 2:15:07Speaker 1: I mean massively high, three times four times as high
- 2:15:11Speaker 1: as in the United States. So you know, Iran is backward,
- 2:15:17Speaker 1: completely and utterly a backward place and a backward society
- 2:15:21Speaker 1: and a backward economy and a backward culture. China is
- 2:15:27Speaker 1: forward looking and aggressive and innovative, but it has a
- 2:15:32Speaker 1: real structural problems and a struggling economy. And I beant
- 2:15:39Speaker 1: to China, and I know a lot of people in China,
- 2:15:40Speaker 1: and I've looked into the Chinese economy in detail. But
- 2:15:44Speaker 1: anybody who think that Iran is not backward. Modern Iran
- 2:15:48Speaker 1: is not backward. Doesn't know anything about Iran and is
- 2:15:53Speaker 1: ignorant of geopolitics. Is ignorant of just not geopolitics, it's
- 2:15:57Speaker 1: just ignorant of the place of the place. Has not
- 2:16:00Speaker 1: studied its history, has not studied what's actually going on.
- 2:16:03Speaker 1: There's not talk to Iranians. It would advance, it would
- 2:16:06Speaker 1: advanage you to talk to Iranians. If you're going to
- 2:16:08Speaker 1: comment on Iranians. All right, yeah, Jennifer says, I'll just
- 2:16:15Speaker 1: out of out of Odell. I'll use this. Look at
- 2:16:17Speaker 1: the growing anti vaxx movement, luod it's a gaining ground there. Yeah,
- 2:16:21Speaker 1: I mean, look at look at the anti Vaxx HSS,
- 2:16:24Speaker 1: the the RFK, I mean, yeah, they're winning their winning
- 2:16:32Speaker 1: Andrew for fifty dollars. Why is the right less intellectual
- 2:16:35Speaker 1: than the left? A thought. It's a group who mostly
- 2:16:38Speaker 1: want to be poor American But the altruism freedom contradiction
- 2:16:42Speaker 1: is so extremely intellectually inconsistent that their patriotism can't be
- 2:16:46Speaker 1: rationally defended. I mean, I think that's true. I think
- 2:16:51Speaker 1: that's true, but it's also true. I mean, there's a
- 2:16:55Speaker 1: lot of reasons why the right is less intellectual. They
- 2:16:59Speaker 1: want freedom and altruism when they claim they want freedom,
- 2:17:02Speaker 1: and but they can't give up an altruism, and that
- 2:17:05Speaker 1: creates a contradiction which they cannot defend, and it's stultifies.
- 2:17:09Speaker 1: It holds their ability to really develop and develop intellectually.
- 2:17:17Speaker 1: But they're also guided by faith. Right, the right is
- 2:17:20Speaker 1: also religious, so they undermine their reason with faith and
- 2:17:25Speaker 1: they have to promote freedom and at the same time
- 2:17:29Speaker 1: promote faith. And faith and freedom are incompatible, the incompatible epistemologically. Epistemologically,
- 2:17:36Speaker 1: faith requires accepting what you know commandments, accepting dictates not
- 2:17:47Speaker 1: by through reason but through fear and through dictate. And
- 2:17:54Speaker 1: so they have the problem of religion. They can't completing
- 2:18:00Speaker 1: based technology and science because you know what if it
- 2:18:05Speaker 1: contradicts their religion. So the right is lessen So all
- 2:18:09Speaker 1: I show because religion and altruism, yes, but I think
- 2:18:21Speaker 1: altruism freedom connection is contradiction is definitely part of it.
- 2:18:25Speaker 1: But you also have to add the faith freedom contradiction. Andrew,
- 2:18:31Speaker 1: I asked this previously, and you asked me to ask
- 2:18:34Speaker 1: again in a couple of weeks. Oh, did you make
- 2:18:36Speaker 1: any new integrations and objectivism or fortify any particular knowledge
- 2:18:41Speaker 1: of the philosophy. In preparing for doing your I ran course,
- 2:18:47Speaker 1: oh god, I mean I I don't think so. I
- 2:19:00Speaker 1: think I gained a better appreciation of the epistemology because
- 2:19:07Speaker 1: I mostly because you know, I don't think of it
- 2:19:13Speaker 1: that philosophically usually. And I had to think of the
- 2:19:17Speaker 1: problem of universals, and they had to think of what
- 2:19:19Speaker 1: is Iman's contributions to that, and how solving the problem
- 2:19:23Speaker 1: of universals and it's crucial to objectivity, right, the whole
- 2:19:27Speaker 1: idea of objectivity, and then how that is then crucial
- 2:19:30Speaker 1: for the idea of capitalism. Now I know that in
- 2:19:33Speaker 1: a sense because I read what is capitalism and capitalist
- 2:19:36Speaker 1: and that's all about objectivity. But because I had to
- 2:19:40Speaker 1: present the pistemology and had to talk about the theory
- 2:19:45Speaker 1: of universals, it kind of better integrated for me. I
- 2:19:47Speaker 1: think that's that's the area, oh the other places. And
- 2:19:52Speaker 1: I think I think it was Greg who really helped
- 2:19:54Speaker 1: me with this. Greg Slamari Will helped me with this.
- 2:19:57Speaker 1: In preparation for this, it's yeah, this is this is
- 2:20:02Speaker 1: a good point, which which I hadn't really It's something
- 2:20:07Speaker 1: I didn't know. I knew it, but it I hadn't
- 2:20:10Speaker 1: made explicit the sense in which everything is the primacy
- 2:20:14Speaker 1: of existence. That is, everything is ultimately goes back to
- 2:20:22Speaker 1: every every challenge in philosophies ultimately goes back to but
- 2:20:26Speaker 1: what are the facts? Indeed, every challenge and every aspect
- 2:20:30Speaker 1: of life is ultimately well, but what's in reality? So again,
- 2:20:36Speaker 1: the need to integrate metaphysics into everything else, I think
- 2:20:39Speaker 1: kept me going back to you know, in reason, right.
- 2:20:44Speaker 1: So so let's take values, and again this is where
- 2:20:48Speaker 1: Greg was very helpful. In values like this is an
- 2:20:53Speaker 1: important value to me and and you know, but it
- 2:20:57Speaker 1: has to be consistent with the primacy existence. That is,
- 2:21:01Speaker 1: it has to factually, in reality, be consistent with my life.
- 2:21:05Speaker 1: It has to truly promote my life. And in that
- 2:21:10Speaker 1: sense it has to be congrued with reality with facts,
- 2:21:16Speaker 1: not emotions, not whims, not wishes, not passion. So you know,
- 2:21:21Speaker 1: people say follow your passion, No, only if that passion
- 2:21:27Speaker 1: is consistent with what reality facts, with my life, with
- 2:21:34Speaker 1: the needs of my life, which I can only know
- 2:21:37Speaker 1: by looking at reality. So I found again not new
- 2:21:44Speaker 1: being better integrated into every aspect of life. The integrating
- 2:21:52Speaker 1: primacy of existence into every aspect of the philosophy and
- 2:21:56Speaker 1: then from man to every aspect of life and consciously,
- 2:22:02Speaker 1: you know, having that as a as a as a
- 2:22:06Speaker 1: having that as a theme in RAN's philosophy. In a
- 2:22:09Speaker 1: sense that integration was it shouldn't be new, but it
- 2:22:13Speaker 1: was a yeah, it was definitely in a sense of
- 2:22:16Speaker 1: new integration. I don't know. I hopefully that answers it, Andrew,
- 2:22:20Speaker 1: And of course I contradicted to myself, because first I
- 2:22:22Speaker 1: said no, and then now I'm saying yes. I just
- 2:22:25Speaker 1: had to think it through. Chasba joined late. Even land
- 2:22:37Speaker 1: wouldn't be as much of an asset if it weren't
- 2:22:40Speaker 1: for the back ho bulldozer, dump truck, chainsawk, fertilizers, cement mixer. Absolutely,
- 2:22:48Speaker 1: But you know, for thousands of years, some knowledge had
- 2:22:53Speaker 1: to go into land. You had to know how plants
- 2:22:56Speaker 1: grow and you need to water it, and what seasons
- 2:22:59Speaker 1: and what to go what, and all kinds of knowledge.
- 2:23:03Speaker 1: But there wasn't a lot of innovation. And for thousands
- 2:23:08Speaker 1: of years, there's very little innovation. When it came to that,
- 2:23:11Speaker 1: innovation was very slow. It's only under capitalism that innovation
- 2:23:14Speaker 1: just just accelerates. Ooh, we just raised I mean super chat.
- 2:23:22Speaker 1: I just got the six sixty six number of the Beast.
- 2:23:27Speaker 1: Not a good thing. We should somebody should make a
- 2:23:29Speaker 1: quick contribution so we can get off of the sixty
- 2:23:31Speaker 1: six to six. All right, Harison, not a review request.
- 2:23:37Speaker 1: Those are twenty Those are not twenty dollars. But anyone
- 2:23:41Speaker 1: who's interested should give Spade of Spartsa a listen. He's
- 2:23:45Speaker 1: a Canadian dude who makes neat music about the American military.
- 2:23:51Speaker 1: Interesting Spade of Sparta. Uh, there's a part two to that.
- 2:23:58Speaker 1: I particularly like the song big E, which is a
- 2:24:02Speaker 1: very energetic tune about the nuclear powered American supercarrier named Enterprise.
- 2:24:09Speaker 1: All right, thank you, Harrison. All right, Noah. In response
- 2:24:15Speaker 1: to your answer on multipolarity, I agree with you, But
- 2:24:19Speaker 1: do you think it's true that the USA hegemony in
- 2:24:24Speaker 1: the world is not sustainable as far as blood and treasure,
- 2:24:29Speaker 1: not to mention no political will. I think it's definitely
- 2:24:34Speaker 1: sustainable given treasure and blood, because I don't think it
- 2:24:38Speaker 1: takes much treasure or blood if there's real commitment. I
- 2:24:42Speaker 1: agree with you there's no political will. But that's what
- 2:24:45Speaker 1: we're trying to argue about. That's what we're trying to reverse.
- 2:24:48Speaker 1: That's what we're trying to debate. That is. The solution
- 2:24:52Speaker 1: is not, Okay, there's no political will, so let's advocate
- 2:24:58Speaker 1: for multipolarity. No, the solution is we need to advocate
- 2:25:02Speaker 1: for American polarity or American superiority, American hegemony, and we
- 2:25:09Speaker 1: need to try to change the political will. I can't.
- 2:25:14Speaker 1: I don't have the power to change that. So we're
- 2:25:16Speaker 1: going to get multipolarity. That might be the reality that
- 2:25:19Speaker 1: we get, but that's not the reality we should argue for.
- 2:25:24Speaker 1: It's like the data centers. We might get the surveillance state,
- 2:25:30Speaker 1: but the way to argue for that is not. The
- 2:25:33Speaker 1: way to argue against that is not by suppressing technology.
- 2:25:38Speaker 1: We might get multipolarity, but you don't want to support multipolarity.
- 2:25:43Speaker 1: You want to advocate for American victory. You want to
- 2:25:46Speaker 1: advocate for America's strength, you want to advocate for America's dominance,
- 2:25:52Speaker 1: and the political will to do that. Now, if we
- 2:25:56Speaker 1: drive us our bankrupt, we won't have the money to
- 2:25:58Speaker 1: do it, and again we'll get something that's not good.
- 2:26:01Speaker 1: We'll get something worse. We'll get a multipolar ward. The
- 2:26:04Speaker 1: point is that multipolarity is not good. It might be inevitable.
- 2:26:09Speaker 1: You might be right, we can't avoid it, but it's
- 2:26:12Speaker 1: not good. Okay, The profit says two questions. Is CFA
- 2:26:21Speaker 1: worth it if index investing outperforms even finance professional stock picking?
- 2:26:26Speaker 1: What is the more practical finance certification learning for capital
- 2:26:30Speaker 1: allocation and business? Well, I definitely think CFA will teach
- 2:26:35Speaker 1: you how to allocate, how to allocate well. And look,
- 2:26:41Speaker 1: it's not that even index investing can be done well
- 2:26:46Speaker 1: and can be done poorly. How which indexes do you weight?
- 2:26:51Speaker 1: How do you weight them? What is the most efficient
- 2:26:54Speaker 1: frontier given your risk preferences? All of those considerations, and then,
- 2:26:58Speaker 1: of course, the only way the market can resemble efficiency,
- 2:27:04Speaker 1: and the only way you can get to a point
- 2:27:06Speaker 1: where indexes beat most overwhelmingly most professional stock because is
- 2:27:13Speaker 1: to have professional stock Because why are beating the market?
- 2:27:16Speaker 1: I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it is it.
- 2:27:20Speaker 1: They are a minority of investment professionals who beat the market,
- 2:27:26Speaker 1: but they are not managing your money. They're in They're
- 2:27:31Speaker 1: not in mutual funds, they're in hedge funds. They're in
- 2:27:36Speaker 1: places where they can be rewarded for their ability to
- 2:27:40Speaker 1: beat the market. So a mutual fund basically pays its investors,
- 2:27:48Speaker 1: the people who run the fund a salary, and they
- 2:27:50Speaker 1: can give them bonus, but the bonus cannot be related
- 2:27:53Speaker 1: directly to their performance. Hedge fund, you get twenty percent
- 2:27:58Speaker 1: of the profits you do, the more money you make.
- 2:28:03Speaker 1: Renaissance technologies beat the market. Yeah, hugely and stematically and consistently.
- 2:28:11Speaker 1: I mean that, and then the guy who ran Renaissance
- 2:28:15Speaker 1: became a billionaire many times out as a consequence. Lots
- 2:28:20Speaker 1: of people out there beat the market, but they don't
- 2:28:24Speaker 1: beat the market in a way that is easy for
- 2:28:27Speaker 1: you to invest, and figuring you out who is going
- 2:28:36Speaker 1: to beat the market and who is not is very difficult.
- 2:28:39Speaker 1: Venture capital, for example, beats the market. Now maybe they don't,
- 2:28:44Speaker 1: maybe it's just a risk award, but their reward is
- 2:28:46Speaker 1: often so much greater that it's it's beyond any consideration
- 2:28:51Speaker 1: of risk. COYA over the last fifty years as beating
- 2:28:53Speaker 1: the market. Some private equity firms beat the market, some don't.
- 2:28:59Speaker 1: But historically, at least the ones that are beaten are
- 2:29:03Speaker 1: beaten repeatedly up until two thousand at least, maybe not
- 2:29:06Speaker 1: after that. So it's those people. Training that makes the
- 2:29:12Speaker 1: market for the amateur impossible to be is a c
- 2:29:20Speaker 1: ifa worth. It depends what you want to do. But yeah,
- 2:29:22Speaker 1: it's a tough task. But having those credentials matters when
- 2:29:28Speaker 1: you're looking for a job. It's a credential, right, and
- 2:29:33Speaker 1: I think it matters when people are hiring. And because
- 2:29:38Speaker 1: the tests are so hard, even if you never use
- 2:29:40Speaker 1: the skills in particular, that you learned it, it's an
- 2:29:43Speaker 1: indication that you're smart that you passed it, if lit
- 2:29:49Speaker 1: key or something. I'm celebrating the fact that cracked the
- 2:29:52Speaker 1: tough work assignment today by supporting my values. Thank for
- 2:29:55Speaker 1: all your work. Thank you. I appreciate this being how
- 2:29:59Speaker 1: you celebrate love. The pro capitalism contact, Kim says, we
- 2:30:04Speaker 1: really needed right now. Thank you, Kim. Andrew. What do
- 2:30:08Speaker 1: you think of the notion of negative freedom? I don't
- 2:30:11Speaker 1: like it because freedom is a positive Freedom is the
- 2:30:14Speaker 1: ability to live your life based on your values, you know,
- 2:30:21Speaker 1: which is based on your rational thinking. We you know,
- 2:30:26Speaker 1: in the absence of coersion force. But it's not We're
- 2:30:32Speaker 1: not just interested in the absence. We're interested in the action,
- 2:30:36Speaker 1: that is the pursuit of values of the pursuit of
- 2:30:39Speaker 1: rational values. That's why freedom is valuable. So I don't
- 2:30:44Speaker 1: like to zenig it in negative terminology. Michael, can you
- 2:30:50Speaker 1: do a show with Alex on data centers. Yeah, that's
- 2:30:53Speaker 1: a good idea. I'll contact Alex. I mean he's super busy,
- 2:30:57Speaker 1: but hopefully he'll agree to do a show, Michael. Leftists
- 2:31:03Speaker 1: regard workers with condescending regard. Leftist regard workers with condescending regard.
- 2:31:10Speaker 1: To be guided by the educated, Yes, I think. I
- 2:31:14Speaker 1: think academic leftists particularly regard workers. They look down on them.
- 2:31:19Speaker 1: It's they don't you know manual labor. Yeah, Paul, thank
- 2:31:26Speaker 1: you for the point for point challenge this academic pseudo sophis.
- 2:31:34Speaker 1: How do you pronounce that word papalum, pablum, something like that,
- 2:31:38Speaker 1: Thanks Paul urban Pocupine. I think my critique of her
- 2:31:43Speaker 1: argument would be that we have no say over the
- 2:31:46Speaker 1: actions of others until our rights are affected. Yes, I
- 2:31:50Speaker 1: think that's absolutely right, but that's not enough. I wish
- 2:31:54Speaker 1: it was. That would be easy. We have to convince
- 2:31:57Speaker 1: people of all the little details. In addition to that, Frank,
- 2:32:02Speaker 1: isn't visible hands sort of like rising tide floats? All boats?
- 2:32:06Speaker 1: What does could DELI say about the cost of the
- 2:32:10Speaker 1: employer or the role of the customer. There's the customer
- 2:32:15Speaker 1: never appears in what she wrote, at least I don't
- 2:32:18Speaker 1: remember it appearing, so I don't know what she says.
- 2:32:21Speaker 1: And then cost of the employer, I don't know what
- 2:32:24Speaker 1: that means. What's the cost of the employer? She doesn't
- 2:32:28Speaker 1: get into the details. None of these people do. They
- 2:32:30Speaker 1: talking abstractions. The examples are not very useful. Yeah, so no,
- 2:32:39Speaker 1: there's nothing about. There's nothing about. It isn't visible hands
- 2:32:43Speaker 1: sort of like yeah, it sort of like rising tide
- 2:32:46Speaker 1: lifts all boats, but it's less visible the tide you
- 2:32:51Speaker 1: get invisible hand is invisible. You don't see how the
- 2:32:56Speaker 1: boats are being lifted. The boats lift by an invisible hand.
- 2:33:04Speaker 1: There can be no This is envy. There can be
- 2:33:06Speaker 1: no complete democratic socialism. It's not possible for each individual
- 2:33:09Speaker 1: to vote and every action in society. Socialism requires centralized
- 2:33:13Speaker 1: authorities making decisions for everybody. Yes, yes, and those socialises
- 2:33:18Speaker 1: authorities will be elected democratically, but they still have to
- 2:33:22Speaker 1: make decisions that are not going to be voted on
- 2:33:24Speaker 1: for everything. Although remember us Perot wanted to quick all
- 2:33:27Speaker 1: of us with a button. Yes, no button, and that
- 2:33:30Speaker 1: every law that came before Congress would be voted on
- 2:33:32Speaker 1: by everybody. What a disaster. But yes, socialism has to centralize.
- 2:33:40Speaker 1: And you know, it's like the anarchists, they narco capitalist.
- 2:33:46Speaker 1: It's complete rationalism to assume that you can somehow create
- 2:33:50Speaker 1: this total democracy, it's complete nonsensical. Michael was just a
- 2:33:57Speaker 1: Scalia fundamentally a bad guy. I don't know if he's
- 2:34:00Speaker 1: a fundamentally a bad guy, but he was. He was
- 2:34:04Speaker 1: not a defensive individual rights. He was super smart. He
- 2:34:09Speaker 1: was a conservative, but it wasn't clear what he wanted
- 2:34:12Speaker 1: to conserve. He wasn't a good guy, but I don't
- 2:34:15Speaker 1: know that he's fundamentally a bad guy. We'd have to
- 2:34:18Speaker 1: define our terms what we meet here by good and bad.
- 2:34:23Speaker 1: Long descent a. California can't stop way more because California
- 2:34:26Speaker 1: doesn't rule the world. If it did, it could force
- 2:34:30Speaker 1: destroys the mind and its produces partial force ecause partial
- 2:34:33Speaker 1: destruction no way around principle. That's right, But California didn't
- 2:34:40Speaker 1: really try in San Francisco, so they didn't even try
- 2:34:45Speaker 1: to do Harrison. How do you feel about it? Where
- 2:34:51Speaker 1: in the world as you're on brooke bit where you
- 2:34:54Speaker 1: give us clues about our location and we have to
- 2:34:57Speaker 1: guess where you are this week. Yeah, we could do that.
- 2:35:00Speaker 1: I usually tell you in advance, so it's kind of
- 2:35:04Speaker 1: you know, I'd have to really hold back on telling
- 2:35:07Speaker 1: you where I'm going and then have a clue. But yeah,
- 2:35:10Speaker 1: we can do that. We can do that. You know,
- 2:35:13Speaker 1: I won't be in Barcelona next week, and we can
- 2:35:18Speaker 1: we can try. We can try, and I'll give you
- 2:35:20Speaker 1: clues and yeah, we can do that. I think it's
- 2:35:23Speaker 1: I'm not very good at this. I think my clues
- 2:35:26Speaker 1: will be too obvious and you'll guess too quickly. All right, guys,
- 2:35:31Speaker 1: thank you to all the super chatters. Thank you for
- 2:35:33Speaker 1: being with me for two and a half hours. I
- 2:35:35Speaker 1: appreciate that. I again, this will be a regular feature,
- 2:35:39Speaker 1: this Capitalism Show, but we'll do more popular podcasts. I'll
- 2:35:44Speaker 1: try to limit the super academic academics. We'll still do
- 2:35:49Speaker 1: academics because they're really important, but we'll try to do
- 2:35:52Speaker 1: more academics that attack a particular points rather than these
- 2:35:56Speaker 1: floating and it's good to refute the issues with mars.
- 2:36:03Speaker 1: So I think what we did today was important that
- 2:36:05Speaker 1: we'll do more of this type of stuff as well.
- 2:36:08Speaker 1: We'll do a whole variety of stuff. Jasus says, I
- 2:36:13Speaker 1: think you'll be in southern Europe. You'll have to wait
- 2:36:16Speaker 1: until next week when we have the I don't know
- 2:36:21Speaker 1: what the prize will be, but when when we run
- 2:36:24Speaker 1: a little expert you know when we do this, and
- 2:36:27Speaker 1: I'll give you some clues, bhie. Guys, have a great weekend.
- 2:36:33Speaker 1: It's Friday night over here. It's Friday afternoon on the
- 2:36:37Speaker 1: East Coast, and I will see you all tomorrow for
- 2:36:42Speaker 1: an AMA at three pm East Coast time. Three pm
- 2:36:46Speaker 1: East Coast time for the AMA tomorrow. If you a
- 2:36:49Speaker 1: regular monthly contributed at twenty five dollars or more, then
- 2:36:56Speaker 1: you should have the link and join us. Buy everybody
- 2:37:02Speaker 1: s