Latest / Yaron Brook Show / Live From Lisbon--Debate: 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙈𝙤𝙧𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙤𝙛 𝘾𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙩𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙢 W/ Miguel Morgado, Carlos Guimarães Pinto, & Yaron

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Live From Lisbon--Debate: 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙈𝙤𝙧𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙤𝙛 𝘾𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙩𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙢 W/ Miguel Morgado, Carlos Guimarães Pinto, & Yaron · Yaron Brook Show

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Hello, everyone, Thank you so much for being here and supporting.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: My name is Miguel Almela. I am part of the
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Objectivism Portugal group. In conjunction with the Atlas Campus, we
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: have organized these conferences. We organized one in Portal last
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Tuesday and we are organizing this one now in Lisbon today.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: The conference will be about the morality of capitalism and
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: we want to answer the following question, if capitalism is moral,
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: why this isn't the right defended properly? And to do
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: that we are going to count with the help of
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: these three gentlemen. The first person I will introduce to
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: you is the chairman of the Iron ran Institute. He
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: is the author of Equalism, Unfair, Free Market Revolution and
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: in Pursuit of Wealth. He also hosts his own podcast.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: It's called The Iron Broods Show, and if you like
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: what you hear today, you can just check it out.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: And so please just put your hands together for your
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: on Brook. Thank you so much for being here. The
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: next person I'm introducing here today is someone that I
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: could stay here for the whole night talking about his accomplishments,
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: but I'll just say this he is He has a
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: PhD in economics, he's He's done a lot of things.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: He is someone that we all Portuguese society, we all
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: should be very grateful for him pushing liberal ideas in
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: the European sense in Portugal. And he's just published another
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: book called Sorry, leave it a Lil mumund and please
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: just put your hands together for calls I spins. And
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: the next person I'm going to introduce here today is
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: someone that you all know for sure. He has a
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: pH d in political science. He's a professor, he's a
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: political commentator and analyst on Primetime TV. He's someone that
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: I admire for his bravery and intellectual capability. And he
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: just published his book on He's written many books, but
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: he just published his last book called in Troutsell, I
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: leave a lesion and please put chance together for you
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: and to help us moderate this discussion we have here today,
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: someone that at a very young age has already done
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: a lot. So I'm very proud to introduce someone that
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: is an investigator at E I at E E P
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: I E P sorry for in political science and basically
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: has written a book already. It was published in twenty
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: twenty three. It's called Mikhaelbachov, findwin Pert and she's a
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: writer at Espresso and a commentator and analyst at Now's
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: New and Observador for International Politics. So put yours together
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: for Daniel Lenunz.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much, and the floor is yours.
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Miel can you can
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: you hear me? Is that fine? Okay? Good evening everyone.
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: Just before we start, I have prepared some welcoming words
• 3:56
  Speaker 3: to you, so welcome to our conference on the Morality
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: of Capitalism here at the beautiful tivoli of Nita Deliverdad.
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: It's really a pleasure to me to see such a
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: full room full of people who feel couriers, thoughtful and
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: probably ready to engage in new ideas and ideas that
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: truly matter for all of us. As you probably know,
• 4:26
  Speaker 3: tonight's event is actually part of the Road to Iron
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: Rent Conference twenty twenty six, bringing some of today's leading
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: voices on individual liberty and capitalism closer to audiences here
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: in Portugal. And our goal is actually very very simple.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: It's to spark meaningful discussion, to challenge assumptions, and to
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: leave each of us with something to think about right
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: after this session. So thank you all for being here.
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: Whether you're a long time admirer of iron Rain's ideas
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: or just curious to hear new perspectives. You're in the
• 5:12
  Speaker 3: right place either way, so thank you very much, Miguel.
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: You have already done part of the job. So let
• 5:20
  Speaker 3: me just say that we're very fortunate to have such
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: a distinguished panel of speakers with us. The first one,
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: of course, Yarren Brooke, who is an economist and chairman
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: of the Iron Rain Institute. As you already know most
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: is one of the most well known advocates for capitalism
• 5:40
  Speaker 3: as a moral system and not just as an efficient one,
• 5:45
  Speaker 3: and his talks challenges to rethink the principles that underline freedom,
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: success and also human flourishing. And joining him we have
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: another two well known Portuguese voices in political and economic thought,
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: Migel Morgad and karg Shpintu. As you know as well,
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: Miguel Morgad was a member of the Portuguese Parliament from
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: twenty to fifteen to twenty nineteen and served as senior
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: political Advisor to the Prime Minister from twenty eleven to
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: twenty fifteen. He's also a senior fellow at the Institute
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: for Political Studies, from where I came from as well
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: and from where he holds a PhD in political science too,
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: as well as a familiar face to all those who
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: watch sign tes Kasgieve Shpintu is a member of the
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: Portuguese Parliament. He's He has served as president of Innicity
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: of Liberal from twenty eighteen to twenty nineteen, as well
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: as executive director of Institute to Much Liberdad. He is
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: also aldo also a PhD in economics from UNIFADU Portu.
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: So please join me in welcoming our guests. Thank you
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: very much.
• 6:55
  Speaker 4: Where the last yeas one of the.
• 7:01
  Speaker 3: Well we're going to get started in. My first question
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: goes right to Miguel, and it's actually a very simple one.
• 7:09
  Speaker 3: So Miguel, in a sentence, and please in the sentence,
• 7:13
  Speaker 3: what is capitalism.
• 7:17
  Speaker 4: It's a novel way of organizing production and consumption of goods.
• 7:21
  Speaker 4: It's the modern economic form par excellence, without any historical precedent.
• 7:29
  Speaker 3: Okay, Carus, anything to add to this definition.
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: No, I disagree completely with this definition. I don't think
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: it's a novel way whatsoever. I think it's the way
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: that people have lived for centuries and millennials. We just
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: decided in the nineteenth century to call reality capitalism. But
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: I cannot explain that in one sentence. If I have
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: more time, i'll do it after Why Why I think
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: capitalism just normal life and we just decided to that recently.
• 8:01
  Speaker 3: Okay, you're on. You definitely have something to add.
• 8:04
  Speaker 5: Yes, I'll disagree with both of you. I think capitalism
• 8:09
  Speaker 5: is an innovation. It's an innovation that is a consequence
• 8:12
  Speaker 5: of the discovery of the concept of individual rights. It
• 8:15
  Speaker 5: is the system political, social economic system that recognizes individual
• 8:20
  Speaker 5: rights and where the government's sole responsibility only responsibility is
• 8:24
  Speaker 5: the protection of those rights, and where all property is
• 8:27
  Speaker 5: privately owned.
• 8:28
  Speaker 6: It's an unknown ideal.
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: Okay, so you in a few words you have mentioned
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: individual responsibility, property rights, and I'd like to ask you
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: why is that such a crucial fundamental part of your
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: definition of capitalism. Why does it matter that much?
• 8:54
  Speaker 5: Well, I think something changed in the beginning of the
• 8:58
  Speaker 5: nineteenth century, something fundamentally changed there. You know, people call
• 9:02
  Speaker 5: it the industrial evolution, or it's more than that, because
• 9:04
  Speaker 5: it was political, it was social, it was cultural. And
• 9:07
  Speaker 5: since then we've seen this hockey stick phenomena. We've seen
• 9:10
  Speaker 5: wealth grow exponentially at a rate and in a way
• 9:15
  Speaker 5: that we haven't experienced in you know, one hundred thousand
• 9:18
  Speaker 5: years or more of human history.
• 9:20
  Speaker 6: So something unique changed.
• 9:23
  Speaker 5: And if you look at what that is, it is
• 9:26
  Speaker 5: it really, I think is symbolized by the founding of America.
• 9:30
  Speaker 5: It's symbolized by this idea that individuals ends in themselves
• 9:35
  Speaker 5: they have rights. The government should stay out of their
• 9:38
  Speaker 5: lives other than to protect those rights. And property is
• 9:42
  Speaker 5: essential for life, the fundamental right. There's only one right really,
• 9:46
  Speaker 5: of all the rights, there's only one, and that is
• 9:48
  Speaker 5: the right to life. And the property is a manifestation
• 9:51
  Speaker 5: of that right. You can't have a right to life
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  Speaker 5: if you don't have a right to the stuff that
• 9:55
  Speaker 5: you create, that you make. So you observe that that
• 10:00
  Speaker 5: this recognition of rights happens, people are left free for
• 10:03
  Speaker 5: the first time in human history. They're left free to
• 10:06
  Speaker 5: pursue their own lives. There's a recognition that you know,
• 10:12
  Speaker 5: reason is is efficacious and powerful and and oh wow,
• 10:17
  Speaker 5: all right, unexpected, you know, all right, yeah, I guess,
• 10:35
  Speaker 5: I guess.
• 10:35
  Speaker 6: So the size of a group. Yeah, absolutely, they didn't.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: Throw paint that you you should consider yourself lucky. They
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: didn't throw anything at you.
• 10:42
  Speaker 6: Oh, no, I had a lot worse, believe me, a
• 10:45
  Speaker 6: lot worse.
• 10:47
  Speaker 5: She didn't have her face covered and she didn't stage,
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  Speaker 5: so we didn't get antea for here.
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  Speaker 3: Oh sorry, it's not time for questions from the audience. Okay, please,
• 11:02
  Speaker 3: it's not the time for questions from the audience. It's
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: not the time for questions from the audience.
• 11:13
  Speaker 6: Oh so there we go. Okay, So keeping you, there's
• 11:26
  Speaker 6: going to be more.
• 11:27
  Speaker 5: I think, all right, we'll see all right, So say
• 11:31
  Speaker 5: individual rates people are liberated, the free. They have an
• 11:36
  Speaker 5: opportunity to pursue their own values, their own goals, free
• 11:39
  Speaker 5: of cosion, free of force. Suddenly in the early part
• 11:42
  Speaker 5: of the of the nineteenth century, late part of the
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  Speaker 5: eighteenth century in some parts of Europe and the United States.
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  Speaker 5: And what you get is the manifestation of this freedom
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  Speaker 5: is a boost of entrepreneurial activity, business activity, wealth creation,
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  Speaker 5: and we call that capitalism. Marks looked around, I mean marks,
• 11:59
  Speaker 5: the large sent help define this Tom. But he looked
• 12:02
  Speaker 5: around at what he saw was real, and he actually
• 12:04
  Speaker 5: describes it pretty well. I mean to Marxist credit, you know,
• 12:08
  Speaker 5: which is different than a lot of the Marxists today.
• 12:10
  Speaker 5: He recognized what's going on around him, and he sees
• 12:13
  Speaker 5: the wealth being created in the rising stand of living.
• 12:16
  Speaker 5: He mistook it to it and he believes it's gonna
• 12:19
  Speaker 5: lead to all these hollers. But he sees something real
• 12:22
  Speaker 5: and he called it capitalism. Okay, we you know, quite
• 12:24
  Speaker 5: happy to take that term. Capital comes from head, which
• 12:29
  Speaker 5: means mine think from Latin. Uh And if not a
• 12:32
  Speaker 5: bad not a bad term. So capitalism is the term
• 12:35
  Speaker 5: describing this phenomena explosion of productivity as a consequence of freedom.
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: Okay, thank you.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: So I presume we.
• 12:46
  Speaker 6: The door is over there. I'm not gonna respond. Not
• 12:52
  Speaker 6: the topic another time, another place. H m hmmm.
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: Shall we keep going?
• 13:41
  Speaker 6: Okay?
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: Uh?
• 13:42
  Speaker 3: As I was saying, I presume we need to state
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: first of all, to exist and then to develop some
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: part of the work. So, miguel, what work or in
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: what sectors should the government be involved when it comes
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: to a capitalist society in your view?
• 14:02
  Speaker 4: Of course, capitalism has been evolving for a long time
• 14:05
  Speaker 4: and adjusting to different social needs. I mean, there's this
• 14:09
  Speaker 4: big argument since the late nineteenth century among liberals about
• 14:14
  Speaker 4: what the states should do in order to make effective
• 14:20
  Speaker 4: the protection of human rights, of individual rights and some
• 14:24
  Speaker 4: of the liberals actually came to the conclusion that the
• 14:27
  Speaker 4: state had a lot of things to do, had a
• 14:30
  Speaker 4: lot of responsibilities that it had to take, for instance,
• 14:33
  Speaker 4: to make sure that no one is miserably poor, make
• 14:37
  Speaker 4: sure that no one works for a miserable wage, make
• 14:42
  Speaker 4: sure that people have access to healthcare or to education.
• 14:47
  Speaker 4: So you know, I disagreed deeply with your own because
• 14:52
  Speaker 4: it makes capitalism and social system, while in fact it
• 14:55
  Speaker 4: is not. Capitalism only makes sense since that moment in
• 15:00
  Speaker 4: time when in Western consciousness we started to think that
• 15:04
  Speaker 4: we live in different dimensions political dimension on one side
• 15:08
  Speaker 4: and social demenson on the other side, but an economic
• 15:11
  Speaker 4: dimension on the other. It's all a fiction. As we
• 15:13
  Speaker 4: all know, we are not economic beings or political beings.
• 15:16
  Speaker 4: We are total beings. But anyway, we started to think
• 15:18
  Speaker 4: of ourselves as parttaking of all these dimensions, and capitalism
• 15:24
  Speaker 4: describes one way, one historical novel, absolutely novel without precedent
• 15:31
  Speaker 4: in history, of organizing our so called economic life. But
• 15:36
  Speaker 4: then again, what sort of economic life is adjusted to
• 15:41
  Speaker 4: the liberal ideal, which is that everyone is free. That
• 15:47
  Speaker 4: leaves a kind of freedom in which equality is an ingredient.
• 15:51
  Speaker 4: So at the end of the nineteenth century beginning of
• 15:54
  Speaker 4: the twentieth century, a lot of people started to think, well,
• 15:56
  Speaker 4: liberalism is supposedly about the emancipation of every single individual,
• 16:02
  Speaker 4: and for that task we need the power of the state.
• 16:07
  Speaker 4: We need to tax the rich, get a lot of
• 16:09
  Speaker 4: fiscal resources, and distribute wealth. And even if some sort
• 16:16
  Speaker 4: of goods, of economic goods are not available in the
• 16:21
  Speaker 4: amount that we want, then the state should assume that
• 16:25
  Speaker 4: responsibility as well, and so on and so forth. So
• 16:29
  Speaker 4: even in the family of liberals from the nineteenth century onwards,
• 16:36
  Speaker 4: there's this big route, this big discussion, this big argument,
• 16:41
  Speaker 4: even a fracture within the liberal family. That's perhaps some
• 16:47
  Speaker 4: of the liberal slash capitalist tenets, that is, the sanctity
• 16:52
  Speaker 4: of the right of property, the sanctity of freedom of
• 16:55
  Speaker 4: contract should actually be conditioned were limited, And that's why
• 17:03
  Speaker 4: we have the current state of politics in the West.
• 17:06
  Speaker 4: We are all, in one sense or the other liberals,
• 17:09
  Speaker 4: because we all want society in which everyone is free.
• 17:14
  Speaker 4: So in that sense, liberalism one. But there's this division
• 17:18
  Speaker 4: between the left and right because the liberals have themselves
• 17:22
  Speaker 4: divided around this question. Is it true that only the
• 17:28
  Speaker 4: freedom to act as economic being without any political or
• 17:32
  Speaker 4: state restraints lead to this emancipation of each individual, or
• 17:38
  Speaker 4: on the contrary, we need the state to emancipate each
• 17:42
  Speaker 4: and every one of us, at least the poorest of us,
• 17:46
  Speaker 4: the most vulnerable of us in society. So this is
• 17:49
  Speaker 4: an argument around within the liberal family.
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: Can you tell us, then, what's the difference between the
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: capitalists society that Miguel was describing and a socialist society.
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: Fart by saying why I was teasing earlier on about capitalism,
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: I think it's important to speak about this. I think
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: capitalism is in the human nature itself. We always wanted
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: to work, we always wanted to save, we always wanted
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: to trade, So that was always part of the human being.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: What we call the emergence of capitalism in the nineteenth century,
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: it's basically the creation of the institutional setting that allowed
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: human beings that already were capitalistic in the sense that
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: they wanted to work, they wanted to trade, they wanted
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: to invest. That that has always always happened. I have
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: a friend that is somewhere there that is telling me
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: that that capitalism was the world that was actually created
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: in nineteenth center by anti capitalists. To describe the world
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: as it is. So they found out because there's always
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: problems with the world, they identified a few issues that
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: the world had because it will it had, it will
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: always have, and they decided to call it capitalism. So
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: they called a capitalism to reality as it was. What
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: I think, this hockeyistic development that we saw from the
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: nineteenth century was not the creation of capitalism, because capitalism
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: was already there. It was the creation of the institutional
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: setting that allowed capitalism to thrive, that allowed for people
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: to have equal rights, that allowed people to save, to
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: have property rights that was essential to be able to
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: save in the long term, to do proper training, et cetera.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: And that, yes, that the creation of that institutional setting,
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: with all the liberal revolutions allowed, with all the rights
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: that came from these revolutions, allowed them for this huge
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: development that we have seen. And we must not forget
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: how huge this development was. If we think about how
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: a peasant lived in the eighteenth nineteenth century, and it
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: was not very different from a peasant lived two thousand
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: years before. There was not there were small technological developments,
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: But if we compare that and how a regular person
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: living in the beginning of the eighteenth century or in
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: the middle of the eighteenth century compared with anyone two
• 20:38
  Speaker 2: thousand years earlier, there was no big difference. They had
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: to work from day to night to eat their children.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: Half of the children would die. They would die before
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: they would turn forty. And if we compare the what
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: even the poorest of the people today in developed society
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: is leave. There was a huge jump in the quality
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: of life. And that was what that institutional setting meaning
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: letting capitalism actually work to the good of people, brought
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: to us. And I think that's the biggest, the biggest
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: change of that we've faced in the last three hundred years.
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: Okay, I understood. So let's deepen our conversation into the
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: topic that we want to understand, which is why capitalism
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: is a moral social system. So roon, let me ask
• 21:34
  Speaker 3: you what is morality from your point of view and
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: how can we integrate that idea of morality in this
• 21:45
  Speaker 3: debate on capitalist societies and capitalism itself.
• 21:50
  Speaker 5: Well, I think a moral system or morality is a
• 21:54
  Speaker 5: code of values by which human beings can live their lives.
• 21:59
  Speaker 6: The distinguish between what is pro they lives, what is.
• 22:03
  Speaker 5: Good for them, and what is bad for them. That
• 22:05
  Speaker 5: it is a guide to living life well. It is
• 22:08
  Speaker 5: a guide to human flourishing. And I think one of
• 22:13
  Speaker 5: the things that human beings need in order to live
• 22:17
  Speaker 5: a moral life and to achieve their flourishing, to achieve happiness,
• 22:20
  Speaker 5: to achieve prosperity, is they need freedom.
• 22:25
  Speaker 6: But we need to be careful about the word freedom.
• 22:27
  Speaker 5: Freedom is a wood, and I think will probably disagree
• 22:30
  Speaker 5: about even what freedom means, right, because I mean, you
• 22:33
  Speaker 5: can go in front of any group of people and
• 22:36
  Speaker 5: ask them do you believe in freedom, and everybody, a
• 22:40
  Speaker 5: group of communists, a group of fascists, everybody will say yes,
• 22:44
  Speaker 5: because they're all.
• 22:45
  Speaker 6: Defining it very, very differently.
• 22:48
  Speaker 5: I believe freedom is the absence of collusion, the absence
• 22:55
  Speaker 5: of force, the ability to live your life based on
• 22:58
  Speaker 5: your own values, your own thought, reasons, your own reason
• 23:03
  Speaker 5: in pursuit of your own happiness, with nobody inflicting violence
• 23:09
  Speaker 5: and force and causion, and an authority to tell you
• 23:11
  Speaker 5: what you can and cannot do. So I you know, so,
• 23:14
  Speaker 5: so I think morally, I reject the idea that we
• 23:18
  Speaker 5: can tax some people because we want to give it
• 23:20
  Speaker 5: to somebody else, because they're suffering right now, and these
• 23:23
  Speaker 5: people are doing better than those people, so we should
• 23:25
  Speaker 5: tax them and give it to them. I mean, we
• 23:28
  Speaker 5: used to call that theft, and and you know now
• 23:31
  Speaker 5: we've created state institutions to kind of facilitate that, and
• 23:35
  Speaker 5: it's no longer theft.
• 23:36
  Speaker 6: Fine, but the reality is that that is them.
• 23:40
  Speaker 5: We've taken freedom away from some in order not to
• 23:43
  Speaker 5: enhance the freedom of others, but to make them dependent.
• 23:46
  Speaker 5: So I think it's destructive. I think it's anti freedom.
• 23:49
  Speaker 5: You're not liberating anybody. So a moral system is that
• 23:54
  Speaker 5: which leaves individuals free, free of coursion, free of force.
• 23:57
  Speaker 5: It's not a system that facilitates. It's not freedom is
• 24:01
  Speaker 5: not It's a positive in terms.
• 24:03
  Speaker 6: Of it allows people to do stuff.
• 24:05
  Speaker 5: It's not a positive in terms of it gives people
• 24:08
  Speaker 5: or provides them with values.
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: Okay, So basically uron is kind of titing that what
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: Miguel and Carlous just said about capitalism just a while
• 24:20
  Speaker 3: ago is not really capitalism but some kind of mixed economy.
• 24:25
  Speaker 5: Yes, I would define what we have today in the world,
• 24:29
  Speaker 5: and really we've always had to some extent is a
• 24:31
  Speaker 5: mixture of capitalism and elements of statism, whether you call
• 24:34
  Speaker 5: it socialism or other form of statism, the elements of
• 24:37
  Speaker 5: both private.
• 24:38
  Speaker 6: Property, some freedom you can or to them all.
• 24:40
  Speaker 5: You can buy pretty much what you wanted, though we're
• 24:42
  Speaker 5: going to be taxed in between, with a vat or
• 24:44
  Speaker 5: a sales tax. So there's the state force is always there,
• 24:48
  Speaker 5: but it's a mixture of some freedom and a lot
• 24:51
  Speaker 5: of controls. And different countries have different levels of a
• 24:55
  Speaker 5: little bit more freedom, a little bit less freedom. But
• 24:58
  Speaker 5: we have these mixtures, and we usually a debating kind
• 25:02
  Speaker 5: of different little variations right, a little shift this way,
• 25:05
  Speaker 5: or you know, left or right, or whatever you want
• 25:07
  Speaker 5: to describe it. And what I'm arguing is there is
• 25:10
  Speaker 5: a system called capitalism that's out here. It's an ideal.
• 25:14
  Speaker 5: It purifies it from all the statism. The state is
• 25:17
  Speaker 5: necessary for very few things. You asked before, what should
• 25:21
  Speaker 5: the state?
• 25:21
  Speaker 4: Do you know?
• 25:22
  Speaker 5: For exactly what the state is built for. It's it's
• 25:26
  Speaker 5: there to protect our rights. To do that, you need
• 25:28
  Speaker 5: a military or police force and a judiciary. Other than that,
• 25:32
  Speaker 5: you need nothing. It needs to be able to arbitrate
• 25:34
  Speaker 5: issues of individual rights. It needs to protect us from
• 25:38
  Speaker 5: the use of force, from coersion, from people stealing our stuff,
• 25:42
  Speaker 5: taking our stuff, or silencing us. Like some people try
• 25:46
  Speaker 5: to do here. That is the role, that is the
• 25:49
  Speaker 5: role of the state. Other than that, the state has
• 25:52
  Speaker 5: no role. Any other role it takes on is by
• 25:55
  Speaker 5: definition of violation of rights. And therefore, and move away from.
• 25:59
  Speaker 6: Freedom, then.
• 26:02
  Speaker 3: Why then should governments do more than just protect individual
• 26:08
  Speaker 3: and property rights, Just like Iran was mentioning, why I.
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: Understand that having this internally coherent vision of the world,
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: that and any type of of of taxation is some
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: sort of of of cohercion, and so there shouldn't be
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: any there. And that departs from a standpoint that I
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: do not have, which is a fully individualistic standpoint that
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: we there's no values, that we don't have values as
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: the community. And I do believe that we do have
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: some values as a community, and we do have responsibilities
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: towards each other, and and they should be assured by
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: by by taxation, by some level of taxation. Of course,
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: as we were speaking yesterday, there's there are certain degrees
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: of this. Yesterday we were speaking about on one extreme
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: full capitalism, which I don't like to call it full capitalism,
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: but full individualism, I would say, and on the other
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: extreme full communism. And neither of these has ever been tried.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: So we ask anyone has has this ever been tried?
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: And no one can give one one full example. And
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: you aren't told me, which is true, that it's true
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: that we haven't tried any of these extremes. But the
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: more we get close to one of the extremes communism,
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: the more misery we create, the more we get closer
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: to the other, and the more development we have and
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: so on, which is which is true. But there's also
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: probably a reason why we do not get so close
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: to that extreme and and societies tend, even developed societies
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: that have that provides a lot of well being to
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: their members, do not get even close to this level,
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: this extreme level. And it's because there's there is a
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: sense of community. We have the sense that our children
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: cannot go without the education, so we need to ensure
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: that we have the sense that we cannot leave anyone
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: to die of hunger. And yes, it's true, I know
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: that there would be voluntary ways to uh to provide
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: the education to children, to provide to provide health care.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: But then but then we would have another problem that
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: everyone would wait for everyone else to do that. So
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: we would benefit from the social cohesion all of us
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: would benefit from it, but then we would wait for
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: anyone else. And that's the reason why, why why we
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: need government to ensure this, this base level of of
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: of welfare, to ensure that no children goes without the education,
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: that anyone that falls into uh a severe health problem
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: has a type of support that no one dies of
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: hungary in elderly age. And I do believe there's a
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: there's a role for that, and yes, we we will
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: need some cohercion in order to do that. And that
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: does not destroy my my belief in in capitalism much less.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: I think these these are pillars that we we need
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: for capitalism to work and h and to have democratic
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: alision to the capitalist values.
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: Miguel I, I presume you kind of agree with with Carlush,
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: But tell if tell us if you if you do,
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: And concerning taxation, tell us, is it moral for a
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: government to collect taxes from the people, of course, to
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: to perform some kind of activities in in societies and
• 29:53
  Speaker 3: which ones and why?
• 29:55
  Speaker 4: Well, let me start by saying why I disagree with
• 29:58
  Speaker 4: your own when as if society needs government besides providing
• 30:06
  Speaker 4: the you know, the judiciary function, security function, defense function.
• 30:12
  Speaker 4: My short answer would be such a society wouldn't be
• 30:18
  Speaker 4: would not be a free society. And I'll give you
• 30:22
  Speaker 4: a reason. There's many reasons why I say this, I'll do.
• 30:25
  Speaker 4: Let me just give you an example, just for the
• 30:27
  Speaker 4: sake of argument. Human beings, contrariwise to the revolutionary liberal motto,
• 30:38
  Speaker 4: are not born free. Every one of us knows that
• 30:43
  Speaker 4: we are not born free. We are born every one
• 30:47
  Speaker 4: of us was born in an absolute state of subjection.
• 30:52
  Speaker 4: What is a baby just born, just thrown out in
• 30:57
  Speaker 4: the world. There's no example in the world of nature
• 31:01
  Speaker 4: of such a state of subjection and total dependence than
• 31:05
  Speaker 4: a human being just born. Why is it important? Why
• 31:09
  Speaker 4: does it matter? Because it the survival of the human
• 31:13
  Speaker 4: race requires authority, the presence, the existence, the functioning of
• 31:20
  Speaker 4: authority from day one of our individual existence, and that
• 31:25
  Speaker 4: has a whole universe of consequences even after we are born.
• 31:32
  Speaker 4: So we are not born free, but we are born
• 31:38
  Speaker 4: to freedom. That's a very different thing. So we need
• 31:42
  Speaker 4: to be prepared to be free beings in our own future.
• 31:46
  Speaker 4: So we need authority to guide us. You can call
• 31:49
  Speaker 4: it religion, you can call it parental authority, you can
• 31:52
  Speaker 4: call it whatever you want. But you cannot dispense with authority.
• 31:57
  Speaker 4: That was one of the big mistakes of you know,
• 32:00
  Speaker 4: the second and third wave of liberalism since the nineteenth
• 32:04
  Speaker 4: century onwards. Although first generation liberals in the seventeenth century
• 32:09
  Speaker 4: they all understood that, but then it was forgotten for many,
• 32:14
  Speaker 4: many reasons. So on top of that, you have to
• 32:19
  Speaker 4: say that freedom, like Urin was saying, everyone wants freedom.
• 32:26
  Speaker 4: Why is it so? Because freedom has moral value. That's
• 32:31
  Speaker 4: the reason why we think freedom is a good. Even
• 32:35
  Speaker 4: when we say that freedom is that particular good that
• 32:37
  Speaker 4: allows for the fruition of every other remaining good, it's
• 32:42
  Speaker 4: a good. It has a moral value. So if freedom
• 32:46
  Speaker 4: is valued because it has moral value, it's because freedom
• 32:52
  Speaker 4: allows us not to live according to radical contingency, That
• 32:57
  Speaker 4: is to say, we don't value life that is hostage
• 33:04
  Speaker 4: to arbitrariness. Arbitrariness has no moral value. So we organize
• 33:14
  Speaker 4: ourselves in societies. In full functioning societies, there are human
• 33:21
  Speaker 4: communities in order to be stable, need to be organized
• 33:26
  Speaker 4: around the principle of governance. Again, the principle of authority,
• 33:30
  Speaker 4: and that implies that freedom is not limitless. This human
• 33:36
  Speaker 4: community needs to be governed. So now we say, well,
• 33:41
  Speaker 4: we want to be free, because everyone has the right
• 33:45
  Speaker 4: to do whatever they want, just to respond to corlige
• 33:49
  Speaker 4: given and spins. One of the reasons that it cannot
• 33:51
  Speaker 4: say that capitalism is just the name that the enemies
• 33:55
  Speaker 4: of capitalism came up with to describe what we were
• 34:00
  Speaker 4: doing as mankind for millennium. And here Jaron and I
• 34:05
  Speaker 4: are in agreement, of course, that this is an absolute
• 34:07
  Speaker 4: novelty is for the simple reason that no one, no
• 34:13
  Speaker 4: group of people anywhere in the south, in the north,
• 34:17
  Speaker 4: in the east, in the west of the world, before say,
• 34:22
  Speaker 4: the nineteenth century, every thought that as a pside could
• 34:26
  Speaker 4: be ruled and lived in which each individual would make
• 34:31
  Speaker 4: up his own mind about what is supremely good for himself.
• 34:35
  Speaker 4: There's no such an example in the past and the
• 34:38
  Speaker 4: history of mankind. It's as simple as that, either we
• 34:41
  Speaker 4: ask the gods to let us know what it was good,
• 34:45
  Speaker 4: or some priests or some ruler, or some you know,
• 34:50
  Speaker 4: old man wiser than we were. We never lived according
• 34:54
  Speaker 4: to this moral notion that we can only agree to
• 35:00
  Speaker 4: what is evil, but not we cannot agree. We cannot
• 35:05
  Speaker 4: come up to an agreement concerning what is good to
• 35:09
  Speaker 4: everyone of us that is new, and without that moral outlook,
• 35:15
  Speaker 4: there's no capitalism. Capitalism depends on this new moral framework
• 35:21
  Speaker 4: that Urine can call it freedom. It's a good name
• 35:25
  Speaker 4: as anyone else, as anything else, but it's a different
• 35:30
  Speaker 4: moral outlook, a different moral horizon, and it's new. It's
• 35:34
  Speaker 4: radically new, and it came not from the spontaneous action
• 35:39
  Speaker 4: of human individuals. It came from the mind of a
• 35:43
  Speaker 4: very few number of thinkers actually in Europe, in the West,
• 35:50
  Speaker 4: not outside the West, in the West. So it's everything
• 35:54
  Speaker 4: but old, everything but spontaneous. So what should I mean taxation?
• 35:59
  Speaker 5: Is?
• 36:00
  Speaker 7: Is it.
• 36:01
  Speaker 6: Legitimate?
• 36:03
  Speaker 4: We must agree that, of course it is, according to
• 36:07
  Speaker 4: which principle is taxation legitimate? According to the liberal principle consent?
• 36:13
  Speaker 4: If people consent to being taxed, well it becomes legitimate.
• 36:18
  Speaker 4: I mean, I'm just repeating what liberals have been saying
• 36:21
  Speaker 4: for centuries.
• 36:23
  Speaker 8: Now.
• 36:23
  Speaker 4: Taxation with no consent, all right, that should that is illegitimate,
• 36:30
  Speaker 4: should be disobeyed, should be immoral. But once it's consented to, well,
• 36:36
  Speaker 4: taxation is legitimate. Now we must ask the question to
• 36:40
  Speaker 4: what degree should taxation go to to what kinds, to
• 36:44
  Speaker 4: what kind of objects should state taxation be directed to
• 36:49
  Speaker 4: which is more efficient, which one is less efficient. But
• 36:54
  Speaker 4: that's a different kind of conversation.
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: I would say, Uh, I want to say something. Just
• 37:03
  Speaker 3: just let me just let me ask you concerning what
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: Miguel just said, and Cardles as well. I cannot resist
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: asking you, and I know you have something else to say.
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: But shouldn't governments provide at least I don't know, roads, healthcare, education,
• 37:29
  Speaker 3: or if not provide, shouldn't governments pay the private sector
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: to do it?
• 37:37
  Speaker 6: Yeah, so there's a lot to say that.
• 37:40
  Speaker 5: That was pretty dense and a lot of a lot
• 37:42
  Speaker 5: of interesting contents, some of which I agree, so most
• 37:45
  Speaker 5: of which I don't. Let me let me just let
• 37:49
  Speaker 5: me comment on this idea that we're born dependent, and
• 37:52
  Speaker 5: we certainly are born dependent, there's no question we're completely
• 37:54
  Speaker 5: dependent on the authority.
• 37:56
  Speaker 4: Of the parent.
• 37:57
  Speaker 5: To extrapolate from our state as children to our state
• 38:01
  Speaker 5: as adults. Is I think a big mistake. We are
• 38:04
  Speaker 5: born without the capacity to reason, we are born without
• 38:07
  Speaker 5: the capacity to think, We're born without the capacity to
• 38:11
  Speaker 5: be rash.
• 38:11
  Speaker 6: We have that potential and.
• 38:12
  Speaker 5: We develop it through childhood, and the whole point of
• 38:15
  Speaker 5: parenting at the end of the day is not to
• 38:17
  Speaker 5: inflict some authority on the child, but to guide the
• 38:22
  Speaker 5: child towards independence, That is, to guide the child towards
• 38:26
  Speaker 5: being able to use his own mind in pursuit of
• 38:28
  Speaker 5: his own values, in pursuit of his own life. We
• 38:32
  Speaker 5: guide the child to be an independent human being who
• 38:34
  Speaker 5: can think and take care of himself. And indeed, I
• 38:37
  Speaker 5: think the biggest revolution that makes capitalism possible if you
• 38:41
  Speaker 5: think about the eighteenth century, and we talked about the
• 38:43
  Speaker 5: few people that make it possible, and I think it
• 38:45
  Speaker 5: is a few people. Maybe the most important person is
• 38:50
  Speaker 5: somebody like Newton, right, not a political philosopher, but a
• 38:54
  Speaker 5: scientist who shows us the capacity of reason to understand
• 38:58
  Speaker 5: the world, the efficacy of science, that we no longer
• 39:03
  Speaker 5: have to depend on authority of the past, whether those
• 39:06
  Speaker 5: authority is of religion or whether those authorities are ancient philosophies.
• 39:10
  Speaker 5: The philosophers who are the Scholastics and others took verbatim
• 39:16
  Speaker 5: right as the word of God. In a sense, but
• 39:19
  Speaker 5: we can think for ourselves. Everybody has the capacity to
• 39:22
  Speaker 5: reason and therefore think for himself, and therefore to be
• 39:25
  Speaker 5: an independent agent.
• 39:27
  Speaker 6: And that doesn't mean to be on a desert island.
• 39:30
  Speaker 5: That means they interact with other people as an independent
• 39:33
  Speaker 5: agent in trading relationships. So I, I you know, the
• 39:37
  Speaker 5: whole point is adulthood is when you don't need authority anymore.
• 39:42
  Speaker 5: You need values, You need a philosophy to guide your life.
• 39:45
  Speaker 5: You need experts to tell you you know, you know,
• 39:50
  Speaker 5: to diagnose your disease and to help you in a
• 39:52
  Speaker 5: hospital or something like that. You need experts, but you
• 39:54
  Speaker 5: don't need authorities in the sense of somebody who courses you,
• 39:58
  Speaker 5: or somebody who forces their ideas on your throat, or
• 40:01
  Speaker 5: a government that.
• 40:01
  Speaker 6: Tells you to what you what you should live for.
• 40:05
  Speaker 6: So I think the idea.
• 40:07
  Speaker 5: The idea is that as adults who are capable of reasoning,
• 40:11
  Speaker 5: capable of rationality, capable of discovering their own values, capable
• 40:15
  Speaker 5: of using that reason to discover those values, you know,
• 40:18
  Speaker 5: authority needs to be out authority at least that can
• 40:21
  Speaker 5: inflict violence if.
• 40:23
  Speaker 6: We disagree with it. And and government, of course is
• 40:26
  Speaker 6: such an authority that can inflict violence on us.
• 40:29
  Speaker 4: So I can show up to you right there. Well,
• 40:33
  Speaker 4: I just wanted to add something. Well, as you may say,
• 40:35
  Speaker 4: as it may expect me to say, now, is that
• 40:39
  Speaker 4: you're going to make made the argument that I was
• 40:41
  Speaker 4: making about authority. You have authority right there. So freedom
• 40:46
  Speaker 4: is not spontaneous. Freedom is created, and it's created by authority,
• 40:50
  Speaker 4: an authority that is there to leave us in a
• 40:54
  Speaker 4: position of guidance once we are endowed with freedom. That's excellent.
• 40:59
  Speaker 4: That's that. That was my point precisely. But since he
• 41:02
  Speaker 4: mentioned Newton, and I think Newton is very relevant here,
• 41:06
  Speaker 4: let me just add someone one generation older than Newton
• 41:10
  Speaker 4: that is even to my mind, even more important to
• 41:12
  Speaker 4: the creation of the capitalist mentality. Another in englishman, another
• 41:17
  Speaker 4: in English scientist Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon by himself created
• 41:25
  Speaker 4: the whole moral outlook of what we call capitalism today.
• 41:30
  Speaker 4: He came up with these thoughts, very simple thoughts, like
• 41:35
  Speaker 4: Carlos was saying, we have as mankind experiencing this mirrorable,
• 41:40
  Speaker 4: miserable state of absolute poverty since ever, since ever an
• 41:47
  Speaker 4: ex expectation of living of what's say, thirty years of age,
• 41:51
  Speaker 4: you know, spending your whole day with being hungry. You know,
• 41:58
  Speaker 4: that's the experience of mankind. Bacon thoughts, for the first
• 42:02
  Speaker 4: time in.
• 42:03
  Speaker 6: Our history that it was not supposed to be this way.
• 42:08
  Speaker 4: But we have the ability to completely transform the world
• 42:13
  Speaker 4: only if we understand that what we have been given,
• 42:18
  Speaker 4: the world that we have been given, is not enough,
• 42:22
  Speaker 4: and we should not be thankful for the poor world
• 42:26
  Speaker 4: that we've been thrown into to get a living. So
• 42:30
  Speaker 4: that's what Bacon is saying, be demanding, be demanding about
• 42:35
  Speaker 4: God's God has not given us enough, So it's up
• 42:40
  Speaker 4: to us to completely transform the world and make it plentiful.
• 42:45
  Speaker 4: It's not God that's going to make the world plentiful
• 42:48
  Speaker 4: for us. It's going to be us. But we have
• 42:51
  Speaker 4: to scientifically organize. For the first time in the history
• 42:56
  Speaker 4: of mankind, we have to scientifically organize the way we
• 42:59
  Speaker 4: work because spontaneously we have not been doing things with
• 43:04
  Speaker 4: a purpose of productivity like we would say today. Productivity
• 43:08
  Speaker 4: was never an objective in the history of mankind, neither
• 43:12
  Speaker 4: in China, neither in ancient Greece, neither in the tribes
• 43:15
  Speaker 4: in Gaul, in Roman gol never. Bacon said, only if
• 43:20
  Speaker 4: we organize ourselves to actually state goals productivity, goals in science,
• 43:27
  Speaker 4: in our economic life, will we be able to transform
• 43:30
  Speaker 4: the world. And that's exactly what happened. Let me just
• 43:33
  Speaker 4: finish with giving this example. Carlos has been saying, well,
• 43:36
  Speaker 4: we have this institutional setting that allowed us to make
• 43:40
  Speaker 4: capitalism what it was, natural and spontaneous universal. Actually, capitalism
• 43:45
  Speaker 4: depends on one specific institution that was not created by
• 43:50
  Speaker 4: no philosopher or politician. But it's absolutely central and it's
• 43:55
  Speaker 4: very new. It's the enterprise. It's the company. Existed before,
• 44:02
  Speaker 4: but once in the sixteenth century seventeenth century, we see
• 44:05
  Speaker 4: these little human communities designed to scientifically work for a purpose,
• 44:11
  Speaker 4: to get more money, to get more products, to get innovation.
• 44:15
  Speaker 4: It never happened before. So actually bacon is very important
• 44:18
  Speaker 4: to Here'm sorry, so sorry, sorry for.
• 44:19
  Speaker 5: An Interructionability agree about bacon and I disagree about the corporation.
• 44:23
  Speaker 6: I think I think business corporation.
• 44:25
  Speaker 5: Yeah, business ultimately is the corporation is ultimately a product
• 44:30
  Speaker 5: of freedom, and the first corporations in the sixteenth seventeenth,
• 44:33
  Speaker 5: eighteenth century we indeed unfree right monopoli is King granted
• 44:38
  Speaker 5: a monopoly and it's only with the breaking of that
• 44:40
  Speaker 5: in the nineteenth century under freedom. But the fundamental concept
• 44:44
  Speaker 5: that makes capitalism capitalism is not the corporation. It's the
• 44:47
  Speaker 5: Because of the corporation, what makes the corporation possible, which
• 44:51
  Speaker 5: is property rights, which, of course property rights depend on
• 44:54
  Speaker 5: the concept of individual rights, and that's John Locke. So
• 44:57
  Speaker 5: if we're gonna if we're gonna attribute it to a philosophy,
• 45:00
  Speaker 5: you know, John Locke is here crucial because he's defining
• 45:03
  Speaker 5: what property rights are.
• 45:04
  Speaker 6: He's defining what rights are.
• 45:06
  Speaker 5: You can disagree with his definition, but the idea of
• 45:08
  Speaker 5: the fundamental idea comes from there, and it's only the
• 45:12
  Speaker 5: application of that that ultimately leads the breakup of these monopolies. Really,
• 45:16
  Speaker 5: you know, real property rights and that is it comes
• 45:19
  Speaker 5: about in them. But except the text in the nineteenth century,
• 45:21
  Speaker 5: except taxation.
• 45:23
  Speaker 4: If taxation is consented, then it's legitimate.
• 45:25
  Speaker 5: Well, but this is the problem with Let's talk about
• 45:28
  Speaker 5: consent for a minute. What does consent actually mean. Right,
• 45:31
  Speaker 5: Consent means democracy. Consent means we vote a majority, but
• 45:35
  Speaker 5: there's a minority that is not consenting, a minority that
• 45:37
  Speaker 5: voted against.
• 45:38
  Speaker 6: A particular proposition.
• 45:40
  Speaker 5: So, you know, as as I think the founders of
• 45:42
  Speaker 5: American and I think many thinkers have discovered, the problem
• 45:45
  Speaker 5: with any kind of democracy is that it oppresses the minority.
• 45:50
  Speaker 5: It's two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. Right,
• 45:54
  Speaker 5: we know how that goes, and we know how it's
• 45:55
  Speaker 5: always going to go. So what about those who don't consent?
• 45:59
  Speaker 5: In every demo, See, there are plenty of people who
• 46:01
  Speaker 5: don't consent to be taxed. I don't consent to be taxed,
• 46:03
  Speaker 5: and yet I'm going to be taxed anyway, and I'm
• 46:05
  Speaker 5: going to be caused. Of course, we consent all kinds
• 46:09
  Speaker 5: of things that you probably disagree with, that majorities, you know,
• 46:12
  Speaker 5: vote for that violate our rights. And this is the
• 46:15
  Speaker 5: this is the the innovation that is I think the
• 46:18
  Speaker 5: American Constitution in its original form and its original intent,
• 46:22
  Speaker 5: and that is the idea that individual rights are beyond voting,
• 46:27
  Speaker 5: beyond this majoritarian idea of consent. And then the question
• 46:32
  Speaker 5: is what are those rights? As For example, in America,
• 46:34
  Speaker 5: a majority can decide we don't want to hear your
• 46:37
  Speaker 5: on speak anymore, we don't like his ideas, we're going
• 46:40
  Speaker 5: to silence it. And yet the Constitution protects your right
• 46:43
  Speaker 5: to speak. And if the Constitution better protected your right
• 46:47
  Speaker 5: to property, then a majority maybe couldn't vote to take
• 46:50
  Speaker 5: some of your property away.
• 46:52
  Speaker 6: And give it to other people.
• 46:53
  Speaker 5: So so I reject the idea that majorities determine consent
• 46:57
  Speaker 5: because individuals don't consent to everything a major already decides
• 47:01
  Speaker 5: for them, and the smallest minority, always, the smallest minority
• 47:05
  Speaker 5: in any society, is the individual. And the individual doesn't
• 47:09
  Speaker 5: consent to most things that the government does today, which
• 47:12
  Speaker 5: is the problem of government today. So many of us
• 47:16
  Speaker 5: don't like what it's doing and yet have no ability
• 47:18
  Speaker 5: to actually change it.
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: So the question was what about the roads. That's all
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: very interesting, I know, but what about the roads healthcare? Education?
• 47:29
  Speaker 4: And at one more point, can I just make a
• 47:32
  Speaker 4: comment other question of consent?
• 47:33
  Speaker 6: Something you said just before you leave the question of consent?
• 47:36
  Speaker 4: Can I do your mind your mine? There's this this,
• 47:40
  Speaker 4: this very old problem in liberal discussion about the majority principle.
• 47:46
  Speaker 4: So there is this nice guy version of why we
• 47:50
  Speaker 4: accept majority principle, and there's this, you know, rug guy
• 47:56
  Speaker 4: version of why liberals accept the majority of in principle.
• 48:00
  Speaker 4: So let's begin with the nice guy. The nice guy
• 48:03
  Speaker 4: says that we have to accept decisions by the majority
• 48:08
  Speaker 4: because it's very difficult to get to an nanimous response,
• 48:11
  Speaker 4: of course, about all sorts of issues. So we have
• 48:13
  Speaker 4: to decide anyway, So why the majority, Well, because we
• 48:16
  Speaker 4: accept that we are all politically and morally equal. If
• 48:20
  Speaker 4: we don't accept majority decisions, then we are allowing to.
• 48:25
  Speaker 5: Give equality, rejecting equality because we're saying that those in
• 48:30
  Speaker 5: the majority are more equal than.
• 48:33
  Speaker 4: We just say that majorities are contingent. This is the
• 48:36
  Speaker 4: nice guy's version. A majority is contingent. Uh, So we
• 48:42
  Speaker 4: have to make up decisions. We have to get a
• 48:45
  Speaker 4: decision about taxation or any other issue. So what is
• 48:51
  Speaker 4: the most proper criteria? According to liberal equality, we would say,
• 48:55
  Speaker 4: if we don't accept the majority, we are in fact
• 48:58
  Speaker 4: giving a feed to a minority, and in one extreme situation,
• 49:04
  Speaker 4: to a single individual, that would be the most un
• 49:07
  Speaker 4: unequal solution we can think of. So this is the
• 49:10
  Speaker 4: most moral version. The less moral version comes from someone
• 49:13
  Speaker 4: that you're unus quoted, this big you know, liberal hero
• 49:18
  Speaker 4: called John Locke, this Englishman of the late seventeenth century.
• 49:21
  Speaker 4: He actually gives a ground for accepting majority decisions, a
• 49:26
  Speaker 4: very different ground. He says, it's all a question of force,
• 49:31
  Speaker 4: a force.
• 49:33
  Speaker 6: So we are adding not votes, but force.
• 49:36
  Speaker 4: The majority is stronger than the minority. And why does
• 49:40
  Speaker 4: Locke accept such an immoral argument because it says that
• 49:45
  Speaker 4: societies have their own inner movement, and that inner movement
• 49:49
  Speaker 4: is given precisely by the stronger party. Now, why are
• 49:55
  Speaker 4: we as liberals. Well, I'm actually not a liberal, as
• 49:58
  Speaker 4: you may have guessed. But anyway, liberals in this larger sense,
• 50:03
  Speaker 4: why do we accept that Uran doesn't accept this principle,
• 50:06
  Speaker 4: but the majority of us do that if you're richer,
• 50:10
  Speaker 4: you should pay more taxes for one very single simple reason,
• 50:14
  Speaker 4: because if you are already rich. Notice this, I'm not
• 50:19
  Speaker 4: texting you because you are white or because you are black. No,
• 50:24
  Speaker 4: it's because you are richer.
• 50:26
  Speaker 6: Than the average.
• 50:27
  Speaker 4: So you got more from the society you live in
• 50:32
  Speaker 4: than I did as a poor guy.
• 50:34
  Speaker 2: Let me just kiss this.
• 50:36
  Speaker 4: So we are trading goods.
• 50:37
  Speaker 6: We are trading goods.
• 50:39
  Speaker 4: Get you got more from us, not because you exploited it,
• 50:43
  Speaker 4: but because you live here. Right, try to be rich
• 50:47
  Speaker 4: as Zelene Musk living in Burkino Fasu it may be
• 50:50
  Speaker 4: more difficult than living in America. So living in America
• 50:54
  Speaker 4: as a whole, as a society makes it easier for
• 50:57
  Speaker 4: you to get rich. And you did. You got rich.
• 51:01
  Speaker 4: Now give it something back to the others who for
• 51:05
  Speaker 4: no for arbitrary reasons. Uh, didn't God as rich as
• 51:11
  Speaker 4: you and need that money because you know, we need
• 51:14
  Speaker 4: free schools, or you need free healthcare.
• 51:17
  Speaker 6: Or you need to security.
• 51:18
  Speaker 4: Complete perversion of of of how people, complete perversion of
• 51:23
  Speaker 4: liberalism has been written.
• 51:25
  Speaker 5: No, I know, I disagree with liberalism as obviously. You know,
• 51:29
  Speaker 5: rich people create the wealth that we all benefit from.
• 51:33
  Speaker 5: They're the massive beneficiaries of mankind.
• 51:35
  Speaker 6: They're not takers.
• 51:36
  Speaker 5: They give us and they're rich and and they're rich
• 51:39
  Speaker 5: there because they've given, right, but you agree they've traded,
• 51:42
  Speaker 5: but you agree.
• 51:43
  Speaker 4: That being rich is better than being poor, of course, right,
• 51:45
  Speaker 4: So they get that benefit. They are benefits, but they
• 51:49
  Speaker 4: created that benefit.
• 51:50
  Speaker 5: It is attributed to them, and everybody else has already
• 51:52
  Speaker 5: benefited from the fact that they become rich. When when
• 51:55
  Speaker 5: when when when you know, Steve Jobs becomes rich by
• 52:00
  Speaker 5: producing the iPhone, we all benefit because we get iPhones
• 52:03
  Speaker 5: and he's become rich, so he doesn't have to give
• 52:05
  Speaker 5: back anything, and if anything, we should say thank you
• 52:08
  Speaker 5: to Jobs above and beyond the billions that he's already made.
• 52:11
  Speaker 6: So it's it's exactly upside. How does it so?
• 52:15
  Speaker 4: In my view?
• 52:15
  Speaker 5: In my view, the rich have given so much to
• 52:18
  Speaker 5: all of us, they should be text less than everybody else.
• 52:21
  Speaker 5: I mean, if you if you're gonna, if you're gonna go,
• 52:23
  Speaker 5: based on how much you've contributed, they should be text
• 52:25
  Speaker 5: less than everybody else because they've contributed to human life
• 52:28
  Speaker 5: so much more.
• 52:29
  Speaker 6: You're poor. You haven't contributed anything to the rest of man.
• 52:34
  Speaker 5: Maybe maybe maybe yes, we don't know why somebody is poor,
• 52:40
  Speaker 5: why somebody, But the fact is to.
• 52:41
  Speaker 6: Become rich in a free society, you have to produce,
• 52:44
  Speaker 6: you have to do something.
• 52:46
  Speaker 4: How do you use that argument? A universal argument about
• 52:49
  Speaker 4: tax session all the rich to those guys who inherit
• 52:52
  Speaker 4: their wealth, who have done nothing for men.
• 52:55
  Speaker 6: All I'm saying, well, but the people you need the
• 52:58
  Speaker 6: money got to choose what to do with it.
• 53:00
  Speaker 5: Sure, you could have bound it. Sure, and they had
• 53:02
  Speaker 5: a right to do that. Your father is your father,
• 53:05
  Speaker 5: you are, you are a rich you.
• 53:06
  Speaker 4: Never did anything for men kind of sure then you know,
• 53:08
  Speaker 4: putting coke in your nose.
• 53:10
  Speaker 5: Or whatever, you know, And in the capitalist society you're
• 53:14
  Speaker 5: not an infector to anyone. I mean, there was a
• 53:16
  Speaker 5: phrase in the nineteen per century, your property is sure,
• 53:19
  Speaker 5: but you know phrase in the nineteenth century, from short
• 53:23
  Speaker 5: sleeve to short sleeve in three generations. You know, those
• 53:27
  Speaker 5: who don't make the money, who really live the it's
• 53:31
  Speaker 5: not theirs, lose it very quickly. So so yes, okay.
• 53:35
  Speaker 5: So some people are rich because they inherited it, because
• 53:38
  Speaker 5: the person who gave them money has the property rite
• 53:40
  Speaker 5: over it. They created it, they get to do whatever
• 53:42
  Speaker 5: they want with it. But most people, at least in
• 53:46
  Speaker 5: the United States, and the more capitalists you become.
• 53:48
  Speaker 6: The more this is true.
• 53:49
  Speaker 5: Most people who are rich create that wealth. They're not
• 53:52
  Speaker 5: rich because of an inheritance, the rich because of the creation.
• 53:55
  Speaker 6: And you can see that.
• 53:56
  Speaker 5: Take the take the Fortune five hundred list of the
• 53:59
  Speaker 5: richest people in America, and you will see that an
• 54:01
  Speaker 5: overwhelming majority of that list of people who created the
• 54:05
  Speaker 5: wealth themselves. You know, just look at the top ten.
• 54:08
  Speaker 5: Most of them are tech entrepreneurs. They're very few families
• 54:11
  Speaker 5: in that top ten.
• 54:13
  Speaker 6: You're quite oh. One more thing I want.
• 54:15
  Speaker 5: To say before the question, one more thing, because it
• 54:18
  Speaker 5: was brought up about the morality, right, because this is
• 54:20
  Speaker 5: a discussion about reality. It's not that I believe that
• 54:23
  Speaker 5: freedom is equal to morality. I don't think freedom is
• 54:27
  Speaker 5: a moral concept. I think freedom is a political concept,
• 54:31
  Speaker 5: and morality is about your ability to pursue your own
• 54:36
  Speaker 5: self interest. It's about the ability to pursue your own
• 54:39
  Speaker 5: rational values. That's what morality is. And what freedom allows
• 54:44
  Speaker 5: is you to be moral. It allows you to go
• 54:46
  Speaker 5: out and pursue those values. It allows you to pursue
• 54:50
  Speaker 5: yourself for interest. And so capitalism is a moral system
• 54:53
  Speaker 5: because it gives individuals the freedom to choose their values,
• 54:59
  Speaker 5: to rationally figure out what makes sense for them to
• 55:03
  Speaker 5: go and pursue, and it leaves them free to do so.
• 55:06
  Speaker 5: It leaves them uncoorsed, unforced to do exactly that. So
• 55:10
  Speaker 5: that's what makes it all. Now why roads and everything else? Look,
• 55:13
  Speaker 5: you know, we could have a whole session on roads, right,
• 55:16
  Speaker 5: but there's zero reason, there's just zero reason why roads, healthcare,
• 55:20
  Speaker 5: education cannot be provided by the private sector, indeed much better.
• 55:24
  Speaker 6: I mean, I've driven on the roads here in lisbon I.
• 55:27
  Speaker 5: I you know, I come from Puerto Rico, where the
• 55:29
  Speaker 5: roads are even worse than here, much worse than here.
• 55:33
  Speaker 5: I know how good government roads are. I mean just
• 55:36
  Speaker 5: sending traffic over there. And you know, in any any
• 55:39
  Speaker 5: city in the world, and you see that I think
• 55:41
  Speaker 5: we could do better. Now, we could have a whole
• 55:43
  Speaker 5: discussion and how government could, how private sector we deal
• 55:45
  Speaker 5: with roads, But that's.
• 55:46
  Speaker 6: For another time.
• 55:48
  Speaker 5: Healthcare, God, I mean, you know, we are so retarded
• 55:53
  Speaker 5: in terms of healthcare because it's all bureaucratized and all
• 55:56
  Speaker 5: run by government, and we don't have the the you know,
• 56:01
  Speaker 5: market incentives that drive costs down and and.
• 56:05
  Speaker 6: And you know, a quality up that we have in
• 56:08
  Speaker 6: every other sector.
• 56:09
  Speaker 5: Why in this so crucial sector to all of human life,
• 56:12
  Speaker 5: do we relying on socialism to provide us with the
• 56:16
  Speaker 5: goods instead of relying on capitalism. I mean, one can
• 56:20
  Speaker 5: only imagine what a capitalist system applied to health care.
• 56:23
  Speaker 5: And don't tell me the United States is capitalists when
• 56:25
  Speaker 5: it comes to health care, because it is not. But
• 56:27
  Speaker 5: if only we applied the principle of capitalism to health care, wow,
• 56:31
  Speaker 5: we would live so long, we would live such healthy lives.
• 56:35
  Speaker 5: It would all be completely different. And the same with education,
• 56:38
  Speaker 5: I mean public education. Government education sucks. It's really really bad,
• 56:43
  Speaker 5: at least in the United States. And by the way,
• 56:45
  Speaker 5: the poorer you are, the worst education you get. That
• 56:49
  Speaker 5: is the worst education in the United States today is
• 56:52
  Speaker 5: provided in the in the in the slums, in the
• 56:56
  Speaker 5: you know, in the neighborhoods and minorities where people are really,
• 56:59
  Speaker 5: really poor. That's the worst place, the worst education you
• 57:01
  Speaker 5: can get. Surely entrepreneurs could do better than that. Surely
• 57:06
  Speaker 5: you can.
• 57:06
  Speaker 6: Figure out a way to improve that.
• 57:10
  Speaker 5: You know, the incentives that the government creates distort the
• 57:14
  Speaker 5: provisioning of any services, whether it's healthcare or whether it's education.
• 57:19
  Speaker 6: So a market, a market driven.
• 57:22
  Speaker 5: Education market or a healthcare market would surely do a
• 57:26
  Speaker 5: much better job than what we have today.
• 57:28
  Speaker 3: So Carls, what should we do? And after this fiery discussion,
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: what should we do to someone in front of the
• 57:42
  Speaker 3: emergency services at the hospital with no means to pay
• 57:48
  Speaker 3: for their healthcare? And then to to MiG out another example,
• 57:54
  Speaker 3: what should we do to the key that can't go
• 57:57
  Speaker 3: to school because of money reasons?
• 58:00
  Speaker 2: But now it's come I think the question was answer.
• 58:03
  Speaker 2: First of all, I must I must admire your restrain
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: of not saying you roll a bunch of socialisms.
• 58:08
  Speaker 6: Just live in the room like you know it would be.
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: Although although I I must say that I tend to
• 58:17
  Speaker 2: agree with Maria ne Mortago here. I think she's quite
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: you don't know who Maria Ne Mortago is Alex fainyway no,
• 58:26
  Speaker 2: but it was a really interesting discussion. And to pull down,
• 58:30
  Speaker 2: to pull down a bit of discussion, I like to
• 58:32
  Speaker 2: call some steps back and go back to the nature
• 58:34
  Speaker 2: of capitalism, because I don't I do think it's it's
• 58:38
  Speaker 2: it's something that is quite important to to understand how
• 58:42
  Speaker 2: how capitalism was always part of of human nature and
• 58:47
  Speaker 2: it was described like that. Actually, the word capitalism started
• 58:50
  Speaker 2: being used by anti capitalists to define the world as
• 58:54
  Speaker 2: it was, and Miguel said something before that I completely
• 58:59
  Speaker 2: disagree that that productivity was never a goal of human beings.
• 59:05
  Speaker 2: It was always the goal of human beings. I mean
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: from the moment that we invented the first tools. Why
• 59:13
  Speaker 2: did we invent the first tools because we were worried
• 59:15
  Speaker 2: about productivity, our own productivity. Why did we build the
• 59:20
  Speaker 2: first boats because we were worried about And that was
• 59:23
  Speaker 2: way before, way before the nineteenth century, way before the
• 59:27
  Speaker 2: eighteenth century. So this need to trade, to invest, to start. Actually,
• 59:32
  Speaker 2: the first cities appeared because human beings were able to store,
• 59:38
  Speaker 2: to start storing food for next winternets and so on,
• 59:42
  Speaker 2: and that's why cities came up. The farming itself was
• 59:47
  Speaker 2: a way of investing, so we could be recollectors and
• 59:51
  Speaker 2: go and pick up fruits and spend our days doing
• 59:55
  Speaker 2: like that. At some point we thought, as human beings,
• 59:58
  Speaker 2: well if we plant some seeds now, so we do
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: an effort that will not lead to us eating right now,
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 2: we will plant seeds. That This is investment. That's the
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: definition of investment. To do an effort, to do some work,
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 2: to put some of our work in order to collect
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 2: something in the future. This is investment. And this is
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 2: in the nature of human beings. Investing, trading, working, increasing
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 2: our own productivity was always in the human nature is
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 2: part of the human development. We just got an institution,
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 2: a different institutional setting that was based on equality, on
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 2: on opportunities, on property rights. I'm sure that on enterprise
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 2: all or enterprise was there a bit before that allowed
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 2: what was already in the human nature, what was already
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: within us. This needs to be more productive. This one
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 2: to say this the need for us to be better
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 2: and to be safer, including economically safer. That allowed it
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 2: to to bring us to the point where we are today.
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 2: And that's why I said earlier on that I do
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 2: not believe that capitalism in the way that it was
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 2: defined initially by anti capitalist by the French philosophers on
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 2: that was that used to say not that property was theft.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 2: It was one of the first philosophers to use the
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 2: word capitalism because it was strongly anti anti capitalists. The
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 2: way that it was used used originally was was something
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: that already was in the in the human beings. And
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 2: there's one reason I I'm I'm I'm a pragmatist, so
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 2: I'm not as an expert in in philosophy as my
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 2: two colleagues here. I'm a pragmatist and I look at
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 2: world around me and I don't understand it fully. I
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 2: don't have the capacity to process and storage all the
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 2: knowledge like no one has. But I look at the reality.
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 2: And there's probably one reason why there are so many
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 2: experiences in the world of political organization and none of
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 2: those is what you're on defense. There's probably one reason
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 2: for that. And the reason for that is probably the
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 2: same that there was never real communism, is that it
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 2: would be impossible to actually work. Although I admire the
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 2: coherence of the thought of the the way that you
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 2: just avoid coersion at all costs, and that's very coherent.
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 2: But then the reality the world is made of nuances,
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 2: and those nuances probably some nuances that we don't understand
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 2: because we don't have capacity to fully understand. It's the
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 2: reason why when I that have come is neither we
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 2: have the world that you'd like to us to live
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 2: in Two quick comments.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 5: One is I agree with most of what you said
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 5: in terms of human nature, right. I think we do
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 5: strive to succeed, to invest, the bill to create when
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 5: we're left free. I think one of the reasons. So
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 5: all of that is true. I just wouldn't call it capitalism.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 5: I think that's part of human nature. Capitalism is when
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 5: this idea of individual rights is identified and then institutions
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 5: are created to protect it, and that's the form.
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 2: I think our difference is more about the definition of
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 2: capitaliity than any comment.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 5: But I want to integrate this with Francis Macon because
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 5: there is a sense in which vice is making is
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 5: innovative in you in a sense of progress, but that
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 5: is in the context of his time and the context
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 5: of his place. Because it is true also that you
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 5: can convince human beings through ideas and philosophy not.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 6: To strive, not to improve not to perfect, and that's
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 6: why you get dark.
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 5: Ages, that's why you get declines in civilization, when you
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 5: get periods in which people stop making those investments, people
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 5: stop trading, people stop looking at this world. There's importance
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 5: and maybe you know, strive towards another world as the
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 5: primary rather.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 6: Than improving a lot in this world.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 5: And it's important that Francis Bacon comes at a time, right,
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 5: a renaissance, a rebirth of Western civilization after a period
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 5: of decline, of lack of investment, of lack of trade,
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 5: of lack of innovation, and it says, hey, we can
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 5: indeed progress, we can improve. Knowledge is useful for humankind
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 5: to improve its lot. So I'll say something even more
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 5: controversial and what I've said up until now, I really
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 5: do think that that Western civilization was retarded for about
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 5: a thousand years because of religion that deemphasized this world
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 5: and emphasized another world. And in need of Francis Bacon
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 5: and a bunch of other thinkers to bring this world
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 5: back into focus so that we could trade, innovate, invest
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 5: and do all those things. And you know, there's a
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 5: reason it's called the Renaissance. And then an enlightenment because
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 5: first we had a resurrect kind of Greek ideas that
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 5: were very focused on this world, and then we had
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 5: a a you know, discover reason, rediscover reason and apply
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 5: it to human life, which I think ultimately leads to capitalism.
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 3: Just let me go back to catch please and concerning
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 3: societies or government's responsibility on helping others, whether it's about
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 3: healthcare or education, what kind of thoughts do you have
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 3: about that? The question I think was what should we
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 3: do in front when someone is in front of a
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 3: at the hospital with no means to pay for their healthcare,
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 3: or or if a kids cannot go to school because
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 3: of money reasons? How should governments and societies act when
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 3: it comes to the lack of capabilities money capabilities?
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 2: I think government should should be But but I said
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 2: that I agree with you, right, I was close to you.
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 2: You will never forgive me for this onother No, No,
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 2: of course, I I do believe that that that government
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 2: should ensure access to it, to healthcare, vacation. I said
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 2: it earlier. I do believe that we are part of
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 2: the community and that's also triggering our our freedoms that
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 2: although it does require some level of cohercion, individual level.
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 2: It's also a trigger of of liberty and freedom to
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 2: ensure to ensure that that no one gets into misery
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 2: or dies because he has no financial means, and that
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 2: no children is kept without education because their parents wouldn't
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 2: wouldn't allow and there will be I think we can
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 2: have a topic vision of the world in which that
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 2: would never happen, that under voluntary agreements, that that would
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 2: be provided for. And we know we know that's not
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 2: the case. We know that wouldn't be, that wouldn't always
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 2: live be the case. I lived in a very next
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 2: met there was an area where people were were quite poor,
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 2: and at that time, the state didn't provided with a
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 2: pre preschool education, pre preschool care, and I saw kids
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 2: of four or five year old that were just stuck
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: at home for for the whole day, that didn't develop
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 2: language until they were five because they didn't at the
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 2: proper care from their parents' either because they couldn't or
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 2: because they were alcoholic or whatever. So I do not
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 2: think we should live in the world where these basic
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 2: things are not offered. And I think we as the community,
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 2: and once again, there is a reason why in the
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 2: developed world, why in the developed world that had this
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 2: progress in the last two three hundred years. Those things
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 2: are provided for. It's because as a community we agree
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 2: that there is no example in the world, as there
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 2: is no example of communism working. There is no example
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 2: in the developed world where children don't have access to
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 2: education provided by the state, where elderly people don't have
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 2: access to healthcare provided by the state. And there's a reason.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 2: And you can always say, but elder people, if they
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 2: chose not to have an insurance, then they should just
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 2: take the responsibility for that. Yes, but then you are,
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 2: you are seventy, and you regret, and what can you do.
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 2: You cannot go back and be thirty again and take different,
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 2: different choices in your life. And as a community, it
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 2: would be extremely hard for us to accept that people
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 2: would live under the under those under those conditions. So, yes,
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: we're both Marianna Mortagos here, but compared to jar and.
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 6: Of course, but two one, there's a slippy slope, It's
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 6: obvious there is. We see it. We see it every way.
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 5: And and second, the fact that you regret not buying
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 5: insurance when you're seventy that somehow gives you a right
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 5: to take my stuff.
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 6: It does, I mean and and not to.
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 5: Come and ask me, not to voluntarily ask people to
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 5: help you. But it gives you a right, literally to
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 5: use coursion against those who were responsible. So the system
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 5: we have today is one that rewards irresponsibility. It benefits irresponsible,
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 5: its expensive the responsible, and it courses the responsible to
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 5: take care of the irresponsible.
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 6: And it's something you know, morally offensive about that.
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 3: Okay, just just let me make a brief situation I
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 3: can I for the seconds. Please.
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 4: Well, there's a lot of injustice and suffering and evil
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 4: in the world. That's why we cannot leave everything to
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 4: the arbitrariness of our best choices. So I would say
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 4: that our moral standing is not well. If you didn't
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 4: take if you didn't make the right choices before, you
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 4: cannot coerce me in order to help me helping you. Now,
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 4: it's actually the other way around. I because I'm a
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 4: member of the same community that you are, I will
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 4: take care as long as everyone else of you that
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 4: are suffering. And because you are a three year olds
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 4: and you have an alcoholic parent that hits.
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 6: You, nobody is objecting to voluntary help. No, no, no,
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 6: I mean I mean you just you just said I
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 6: want to help.
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 4: But that is.
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 6: I'm talking about, But you're talking about coursing people.
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 4: I'm talking about a moral political that makes sense to
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 4: a political community, and that has to be translated into
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 4: a political position and an apparatus of state apparatus to
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 4: make sure that that position is actual policy. Let me
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 4: just give you Let me just say something about the
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 4: naivetatd that you know, in my opinion, is being is
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 4: haunting us while talking about human nature. So there's this
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 4: idea that we all been as human beings in the past,
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 4: wanting to strive and to prosper Who doesn't look around,
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 4: everyone wants to prosper. So people two thousand years ago,
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 4: four thousand years ago didn't. My answer is yes, they didn't.
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 4: They did not. Let me give you an example, two examples. Actually,
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 4: why we have two twenty five hundred years of Western literature.
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 4: There's not one single instance of someone saying that man
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 4: as man, wants to strive, wants to be prosperous, wants
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 4: to be better tomorrow than is today materially speaking. Only
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 4: beginning in the eighteenth well seventeenth century do we start
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 4: to have people say that. Never before and in the
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 4: seventeenth century actually, one of these guys, one of these
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 4: big and Uvedas, said the following, You all agree that
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 4: human beings want to live, right, not being prosperous, want
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 4: to live. It's better than being dead. Right, everyone agrees
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 4: on that. There Surely there's no more common sensical proposition
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 4: about human nature than this one. We want to live
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 4: rather than die. Well, actually, this guy was cleverer than
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 4: we are because we were saying, well, actually, I know
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 4: a lot of people who prefer death to being alive.
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 4: And he gave two examples. One, the nobleman, the great Warrior.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 4: He prefers to die rather than live in shame. Yeah,
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 4: people actually prefer to die than to live in shame.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 4: Not in this room, of course, but in other places
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 4: and in the past. Second example he gave us the
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 4: religious martyr. You're on, the religious martyr. He rather prefers
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 4: to die and go to heaven, then say alive and
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 4: live in life of a fidelity to God. Actually, this
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 4: was the majority of the Western population until two hundred
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 4: years ago. Right, but now we don't longer believe in God.
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 4: We think that our forefathers lived like we live before
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 4: we live now. Wrong, it's just wrong. So this guy
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 4: called Thomas Hams said, it would be excellent if everyone
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 4: believed that, according to human nature, it is better to
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 4: live than to die. But since human nature is not
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 4: as constant as that, let us follow the following procedure.
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 4: Let us make shameful to be a religious martyr. Let
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 4: us make shameful to be a great noble warrior. Once
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 4: we have that, once we get rid of the religious martyr,
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 4: once we get rid of the achilles of the great
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 4: noble warrior, then we can say human nature is all
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 4: about wanting to live in, getting prosperous and better our
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 4: own condition.
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: Like Adam Smith said, we're.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 3: Actually coming to an end. Do we have time for
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 3: a last question? Miguel, do we okay? This last question
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 3: is actually the same for the three of you. Why
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 3: does not the right, meaning advocate for capitalism defend a
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 3: kind of complete Lazare capitalism. We can start with Uran
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 3: than Carlouge, than Michael.
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 4: Well.
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 6: I mean, the right is a.
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 4: Yeah, a bunch of.
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 5: I mean, the right is an interesting tone because I
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 5: mean there's somewhat arbitrariness in terms of left and right
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 5: and how we define this. I mean, I like a
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 5: political spectrum that goes from collectivism to individualism rather than.
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 6: From left to right, because you know, right and left merge.
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 5: And become one, as you're seeing in the world around
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 5: us in terms of their statism and in terms of
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 5: their rejection of capitalism. I think the main reason why
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 5: people generally reject capitalism is because they have a morality
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 5: that is inconsistent with capitalism. I mean, we've seen this, right,
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 5: I mean there's a real tug at the heartstrings of
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 5: what about that child, what about that one person that
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 5: gets left behind? What about those people? Shouldn't it be
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 5: okay to sacrifice some to others? Sacrifice, after all, is noble,
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 5: it's good we live. The conventional morality we all believe
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 5: in is a morality of sacrifice.
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 6: Sacrilge is a good thing.
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 5: Now, I think that is a very slippery slope, and
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 5: I think that's a morality of socialism. It's not a
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 5: morality of freedom. It's not a morality of capitalism. I
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 5: think what's lacking is a real morality of individualism. We
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 5: start with the individual. We start with the individual living
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 5: for himself, living a life in pursuit of his own values,
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 5: using his own reason, and that kind of morality is
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 5: lacking in the world, and it's you know, we can
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 5: have debates about economics that I think are relatively easy.
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 5: I think I can actually even these guys who are
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 5: a little skeptical, I can show them that one hundred
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 5: percent private healthcare would work a thousand times better than
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 5: the healthcare system we have today.
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 6: Economics is easy. The challenge is morality.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 5: The challenge is to get really philosophical and get down
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 5: to individual morality, what you should live for. And I
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 5: think capitalism demands that we change on morality. It means
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 5: turning upside down the jude O Christian ethical code. It
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 5: means rejecting that and coming up with something new, something
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 5: that's focused on an individual well being, something that returns
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 5: to a more riskatilian a view of morality, something about
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 5: human flourishing as an individual, the individual flourishing. And if
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 5: we start there, I think, then what we realize is
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 5: cosion of force are the enemy of individual flourishing. Cousion
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 5: and force of the enemy of individual reason. In the
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 5: you know, cosion and force are the enemies of the
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 5: pursuit of happiness, and therefore the one thing we need
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 5: to extract from society, the one thing we cannot allow
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 5: in society is force and cousion.
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 6: And then once we get rid of those, we all
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 6: these other details.
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 5: What happens to kid in front of the emergency room,
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 5: all of that are details that can be worked out
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 5: fairly easily.
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 6: I mean, we've talked about people, you know, we've talked
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 6: about you know, people wanting to help. Well, okay, that's voluntary,
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 6: so hope.
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 5: And if the majority helps in a minority doesn't help,
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 5: that's fine because somebody's rights were violated. But if the
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 5: majority forces the minority to help, now you're using coursion.
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 5: Now you're using force, and now you're moving away from freedom,
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 5: away from capitalism, and you're actually applying an immoral standard.
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 5: You're forcing people to do things they don't believe in
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 5: because you've decided it's good. It's good to help the child,
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 5: it's good to help the seventy year old, by your standards.
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 6: But it's the individual that matters.
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 5: And so the reason the rights and the left and
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 5: pretty much everybody else doesn't believe in capitalism is because
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 5: they don't believe in an individualistic moral code.
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 6: And that's that's the that's the challenge, that's the struggle.
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 2: I think in the way I think the question there
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 2: or an extreme version that's probably neither the right or left,
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 2: and most people would not believe. But I think the
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 2: main question is why the right sometimes tends to escape
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 2: from a free mark uh thought, why they do not
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 2: defend more more free market than than they do well
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 2: well in democracy. It's very hard to do that. It's
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 2: very it's very hard to win elections by defending by
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 2: defending free markets or a path towards free markets. That's
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 2: that's that's really complicated. Plus, when there is this struggle
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 2: between left and and right, usually the answer every time
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 2: we see right emerging like we've seen right now is
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 2: true populist right so and and the populism and free
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 2: markets do not get along very well. Sometimes they they
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 2: do use it as a tool to as an initial
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 2: tool to differentiate themselves, but once in power, they will
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 2: never they will will never do that in this sexame version.
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 2: It's just because it's it's just not possible. I do believe,
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 2: I do believe that that that this is, as I
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 2: said before, internally coherent. Yes too, to avoid the cohersion
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 2: at at all costs. It just doesn't work in in
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 2: reality it's it doesn't it would be impossible to keep
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 2: the community united, knowing that that old people will be
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 2: without without health care, or unprotected, or children would be
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 2: And and the reason why why I say that it's
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 2: it's empirical. It's because it did not exist. It's the
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 2: same thing that we always ask to communists when we
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 2: have our debates, where has it worked? And they always say, well,
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 2: it has never been tested. This has never been tested.
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 2: And for a reason, because it would be impossible to
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 2: keep to keep a community working under this this political premises.
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 4: Yeah, well, in the person in the nineteenth century there
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 4: was a political right pretty much anti capitalism. But after
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 4: the Second World War, to a large extent in the
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 4: West at least, that political right has been defeated and
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 4: it's become marginal in every single country. So we should
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 4: not be you know, we should not make complaints about
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 4: the political right. It's not a binary thing, either complete
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 4: stalinism or the non ideal. It's you know, you have
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 4: a matrix of choices. And actually I think in the
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 4: last sixty years, the political right, beginning with in Portugal,
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 4: if it was not for the political rights, I mean,
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 4: the two main political parties before Chiga came along, and
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 4: before it's liberal came along. If it were not for
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 4: PSD and CDs, well we would be living in a
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 4: socialist country to Korch. So it was due to the
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 4: PSD mainly that we actually have a free market economy,
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 4: of course, with a lot of Stadism, a lot of
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 4: mixed economy like every like every other country in Europe.
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 4: So I mean, for me, it's not such a big deal.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 4: In the past. Yeah, in the nineteenth century there was
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 4: actually a romantic political right that was against capitalism. You know,
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 4: you have this writing even by Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist.
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 4: He himself assumes the responsibility that if we have to
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 4: get rid of trains, yeah, so be it. Thomas Carlyle,
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 4: Thomas Carlyle was a conservative, a romantic conservative. Perhaps he
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 4: was even more anti capitalism than Marx, and Marx learned
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 4: a lot from Thomas Carlyle. I mean, Marx is welcoming
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 4: the capitalist revolution. He's welcoming into the world. He wants
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 4: to make it strong and fast in order to overcome it.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 4: But he's welcoming it. It's not you know, in the
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 4: least be nostalgic about what came before capitalism. Quite the contrary, actually,
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 4: Thomas Carlisle was he said, this is all bad news
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 4: in all front. Henny came from the right. You know,
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 4: the German Romantics were all anti capitalism and they were
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 4: all defeated. So I think we should be thankful. Just
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 4: let me give you a final word about what Joran
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 4: said that I think is a very serious, really serious
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 4: topic about the relationship between what it calls the culture
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 4: of individuality, of the morality of individualism on the one hand,
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 4: and Christianity on the water. I think he has a
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 4: point there. I mean, we are on different sides of
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 4: this discussion again, but I think he's right. I mean,
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 4: Christianity brought into the world this big revolution, the first
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 4: revolution of love, and it brought the politics into ethics,
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 4: the idea, the very strong idea of compassion for suffering.
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 4: And I think compassion for suffering coming from Christianity, even
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 4: though people no longer believe in God uh is actually
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 4: quite strong and explains a lot of our political attitudes today.
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 4: So I think even though we are on the other
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 4: on opposite sides on this specific topic, I think is right.
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 4: I mean, there's this incompatibility. I think I'm regretting the
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 4: loss of Christianity in our culture. Maybe he is clapping
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 4: his hands out, but I don't know. But you know,
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 4: I think it's a very very serious.
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 5: Point to Christianity's being secularized. Right, secular cultures adopted Christianity,
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 5: that's it. And so the struggle is still between christian
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 5: values and capitalism. I don't think they're compatible. And that's
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 5: why we don't get capitalism, because because the values of
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 5: Christianity are still strong in the culture, even in our
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 5: I would say thank God, I would say the opposite,
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 5: Thanks very much.
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 3: We're now going to open for debate. But before giving
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 3: the flaw to the audience, I think Miguel has something
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 3: to tell you.
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: Yes, yes, so thank you for being here. Please clap,
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: Thank you all so much onjin for being here. Before
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: we move to the questions period, let me just tell
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: you that on your seats you're going to find some flyers.
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: You might be wondering what they're for. We are hosting
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: next year in portso Iron Ran conference. It's going to
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: be from the seventeenth to the nineteenth of April. So
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: that you are code links you connects you to a
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: to a website, where you can sign up and even
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: apply for a scholarship and attend it for free. It's
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: going to be three days and if you want to
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: know more about objectivism and iron RAN's ideas, you can
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: apply for it.
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 6: Please do so.
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: For the ones that are watching online at the end
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: of this broadcast, you're gonna have an image as well
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: with it you are code. You can do the same
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: if you don't find any flyers on your seats when
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: you go down on the roll up, you have the
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: you are toad as well, and you can you can
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: can the CHR code. There another annuncement that I want
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: to make. Yes, sorry, just like confused because they're both
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: margad He won the essay contest, so I'll be round
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: of applause for him.
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 6: At the end.
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: Just come to the front and I'll deliver the prize
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: to you. Okay, So if anyone wants to ask questions,
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna ask you to make a line there on
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: that side and I'll hand you the mic. Please be
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: brief on the introduction of the questions and just one
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: question per person. Okay, thank you. If anyone wants to
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: ask them, Yeah.
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 6: There we go. Mm line is over there.
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 2: Okay, there's a line, Oh that's the first time.
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: Hello.
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 9: My name is Francis, and my question is I am
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 9: currently reading Atlas Shrugged, and there's this notion that a
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 9: lot of characters talk about about how it's basically the
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 9: fault of the capitalist that they let themselves be labeled
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 9: as immoral. You know, the very fact that we have
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 9: in a conversation about morality and capitalism shows this.
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 4: That there is this idea that the two are separate.
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 9: So even they mentioned the example of Robinhood, you know,
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 9: a very old title in which a thief, which is
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 9: the good guy, is the guy who steals from a
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 9: rich So my question to you is where does this
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 9: come from? Do you think it's intrinsic to the human
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 9: being to almost hate the rich and the owners of
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 9: companies or is there a knowledge into this Where do
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 9: you think it comes from?
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 6: Well, I mean I think it is.
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 5: It Certainly, it's very ancient in the sense that the understanding,
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 5: the understanding economics and how people get rich was based
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 5: on a zero sum mentality. That is, for most of
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 5: human history, people didn't understand the win win relationship of trade.
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 5: They didn't understand the value added a production and creation.
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 5: And indeed, most rich people, if you go to Europe, example,
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 5: five six hundred years ago, did not become rich because
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 5: they produced. They became rich because they stole right. They
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 5: were very good at cosion and force, and that's how
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 5: they got rich.
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 6: So and even if you go back to Aristotle and you.
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 5: Go to the Greeks, they had very little understanding of
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 5: the mechanisms of trade and the very essence of win wins.
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 5: So the idea that the rich are somehow you know,
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 5: confiscating their wealth comes from a historical experience and there
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 5: wasn't a shift it neither knowledge nor in morality. During
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 5: the nineteenth century, suddenly wealth was being created for the
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 5: first time in human history on scale.
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 6: Wealth was being.
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 5: Created rather than redistributed, rather than being confiscated, and we
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 5: didn't our knowledge system didn't adapt to the social and
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 5: economic realities of what was going on.
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 2: Just say one thing. I think it's very optimistic to
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 2: believe that most people already understand that that trade is
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 2: not a win win situation even today.
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 6: I agree with you, but it is.
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 5: And this is part of the big problem is most
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 5: people today still see the world of zero sum. You know,
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 5: you can you can see that in American politics story
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 5: now very very you know, really real sense.
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 6: So this is a real achievement.
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 5: I mean, it seems pretty straightforward the traders win win,
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 5: But that is a huge cognitive achievement to get to
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 5: that point.
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 2: That is, every day it's easier to.
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 4: Persuade people that an economic relationship can be a win
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 4: win situation when there is economic growth all around. If
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 4: there isn't, people actually start to make this rational you know,
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 4: conclude lusion into this rational conclusion that well, if this
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 4: is more or less the same wealth, you're in and
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 4: you're out. If one gets more then I get less.
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 4: It makes sense. It all ends with economic growth. That's
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 4: why there is this very important emancipating moral effect of
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 4: economic growth as such, such an important phenomenon.
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 10: Good afternoon to the guests and to the panel. I'm
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 10: theatergos Office bachelor student for EP. My question poses to
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 10: the economic boom that was mentioned in the nineteenth century,
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 10: mainly in the second part of the century. My question
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 10: is we know that that economic boom consequently gave us
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 10: political stability in Europe that can consequently gave us broad
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 10: social com in an era that were of extremists. But
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 10: when we enter that era, do don't do? Don't you
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 10: think that the social part, the social development and the
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 10: social worry about about the population that came with the
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 10: economic growth was the terd in the capitalism era. So
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 10: maybe it was a capitalism was a forum of economic development,
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 10: but two extremists to the point that it discards the
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 10: social part of uh, the that that era.
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 6: Yeah, I don't know exactly what you mean by a
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 6: social part, but no, I don't. I don't think that
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 6: that is that is true.
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 5: I think that if you look at societies that approach capitalism,
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 5: yes they never reached the ideal, but they approach capitalism
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 5: during the late part of the nineteenth century, I don't
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 5: think the societies there were necessarily unsocial or unhealthy in
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 5: that sense.
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 6: This is an error.
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 5: I mean, let's remember, capitalism did amazing things to mankind,
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 5: not only economic wellbeing, but political emancipation. Political imagination was
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 5: a feature of capitalism. The abolition of slavery was a
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 5: feature of capitalism. And I think that once you have
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 5: a society in which causion is extracted, not fully but
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 5: to a large extent, human relationships become healthier. Because I'm
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 5: not thinking constantly is this guy stealing my stuff? Is
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 5: he part of the majority that's trying.
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 4: To vote me?
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 5: You know, I think that the more you get a
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 5: society in which the majority is voting away rights of
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 5: people constantly, what you get is tribalism and tribal mentality
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 5: and people fighting each other.
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 6: So you get social strife.
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 5: Democracy leads to social strife because you want to form
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 5: majorities to protect yourself. You want to it rather than
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 5: win win relationships. Trade is a beautiful thing, and capitalism
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 5: emphasizes trade. It emphasizes win win, and I think you
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 5: get better societies, not worse societies.
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 2: It's a member of parliament is also a member of parliament.
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 4: A member of parliament, I mean, yeah.
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 6: We've got a prestigious, very prestigious audience.
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 4: Not as prestigious as parlous.
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 6: So I'm George.
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 11: Yes, I'm a member of Parliament, and I have a
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 11: question about you were talking about that pure capitalism or
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 11: truly unbridled markets have never been tried. Actually, I think
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 11: there was a very brief period transition history where you
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 11: were close to that, which was during the nineteenth century.
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 11: We were doing away with all the old structures and
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 11: you were putting in place all the institutionals set up
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 11: that allowed for capitalism, and for some reason, at the
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 11: same time you started seeing more concerns with welfare otherwise
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 11: as well. People started talking about unions, the rights of children,
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 11: for instance, and the rights of workers. And my intuition
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 11: is maybe that happened for a reason. Maybe people realized
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 11: at the time that you couldn't get a stable model
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 11: if you only had completely free markets without any of
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 11: the other things. I don't think Bismarck started implementing the
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 11: welfare state because he was concerned about poor people. I
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 11: don't think that was his perspective. So I would ask you,
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 11: do you think you could get that state of pure
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 11: free markets, you know, the government just doing the minor
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 11: kiss model, without the poor eating the rich.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 6: That would be my question.
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 11: And then a side comment, I don't think you were
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 11: always comparing, you know, society and our capitalism versus before.
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 11: I don't think you explored the extent to which moving
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 11: from a society where wealth came mostly from owning land
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 11: to a society where you could produce way more and
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 11: get richer without owning word land, which was a key
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 11: factor in the in the transition.
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 5: But remember even even land ownership was land that was
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 5: taken by false I mean, it was always defended by fos.
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 5: But look, in my view, history is determined by ideas.
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 6: Ultimately, ideas shape history.
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 5: And the reality is that in the nineteenth century, while
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 5: the world was moving towards capitalism, there were no there
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 5: was no intellectual foundations for it.
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 6: The Enlightenment was dying.
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 5: As we said, German Romantics who were the dominant intellectuals.
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 6: In the nineteenth century.
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 5: If you look at you know, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx,
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 5: they dominated.
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 6: They were anti capitalists. All of them were anti capitalists.
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 5: And so you got a particular momentum out of the
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 5: Enlightenment that was moving in a particular direction, in direction
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 5: of capitalism. And at the same time you got an
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 5: intellectual backlash against the Enlightenment that elevated socialism or various
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 5: nationalisms or you know, the nationalist movement in the nineteenth
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 5: century was not pro capitalists, both on the left and
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 5: the right. So there was unanimity across the political spectrum
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 5: that this phenomenon of capitalism was not good, and some
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 5: of the liberals tried to defend it, and I think
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 5: did a pretty poor job of it. You know, whether
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 5: it's male or others, I think they sold out on
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 5: the principles of what is required for capitalism. So look,
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 5: the battle of ideas was won by the anti capitalists,
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 5: and what you got was a compromise. What you got
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 5: was the mixed economy, which is a compromise between the
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 5: force of freedom that the Enlightenment set off and the
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 5: anti capitalist voices of the nineteenth century, the philosophers.
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 6: And the intellectuals. And we're still living through that.
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 5: We're still having this debate, we're still fighting this fight
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 5: between those different forces.
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 6: And reality is, how many intellectuals in the world are
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 6: really pro capitalism, very few. How many philosophers out there
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 6: in the world are pro capitalism very few? So we're
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 6: still losing.
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 2: Why do you think it's that?
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 5: Because I think that the morality of Christianity is so
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 5: deeply entrenched in the culture, both in the secular form
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 5: and in a religious form, that it's going to take
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 5: a long time to uproot it and to get rid
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 5: of it and replace should do something better. And until
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 5: that's done, right, until that's done, you will not get
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 5: lovely fake capitalism. You will not get a fully capitalist
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 5: fully capitalist world wealley is much more difficult to fight
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 5: over than as I said.
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 6: The Economics.
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: Monumentee in English.
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 12: My name is Andrea Andrea, and my question is cent
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 12: words on whether capitalism is the solution for the future
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 12: of human kind because we all know that we willn't
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 12: have enough planets if all of the Earth population had
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 12: the same consumption style as the United States of America.
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 12: And since that all of the capitalists want people to
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 12: consume more and more, how can we create a sustainable future?
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 5: I highly recommend reading an economist by any of Julian Simon,
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 5: who talked about the ultimate resource Any shows in his
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 5: work that there is no limit. There are no there's
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 5: no limited resources. Resources are unlimited. Indeed, the only limited
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 5: resources the human mind. We are innovative species. There is
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 5: I mean, think of any resources and there are substitutes
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 5: and their products, and we could be mining the asteroids.
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 5: There's just no limit to how many people can survive,
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 5: how many people could be on eatho the population.
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 6: Is shrinking, and how many resources we can get out there.
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 6: So I think the whole idea of limited.
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 5: Resources is false. We could all be living much better
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 5: than Americans eight billion people on planet Earth could be
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 5: living much better than Americans with the you know, with
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 5: the technological knowledge we have today. Never mind, the technological
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 5: knowledge will have been one hundred years.
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: No.
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 4: Franstans Bigham, the guy was telling you about in the
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 4: sixteenth century, said the Dutch have the best minds in
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 4: the world, but the Netherlands didn't have any minds. I
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 4: mean to get out an order. Not a single mind
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 4: there was in the Netherlands. So what war the minds
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 4: the Dutch themselves? Like I said, that's the ultimate economic
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 4: resource right there. That's why the Netherlands is the richest
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 4: country in the world at the end of sixteenth century.
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 2: Of course, absolutely, so good afternoon. My name is Andrea.
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 2: I'm a student of EPI.
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 13: I look, we would like to ask Aaron Broke about
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 13: the It's not probably about the morality of capitalism that
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 13: was mentioned here, but is related. I think it's a
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 13: relation between psychology and the capitalism. I believe in the
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 13: idea that the actual mental crisis that we have nowadays
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 13: in the twenty first century is caused by the capitalism
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 13: in many aspects. Because of capitalism until the until the
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 13: nineteenth century, I suppose we have the idea and the
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 13: idea that individuals should work to survive. Nowadays, you have
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 13: the thesis idea that you shoul work for that we
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 13: work for live for working. And I think that this idea,
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 13: in the psychological point of view, it's the main cause
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 13: of the mental health problems that individuals have nowadays, such
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 13: as anxiety depression. So I believe in this aspect, I
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 13: think the capitalism is the best best system that we
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 13: have in thecnomical point of view. But I think that
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 13: in the ethical philosophical point of viewmans, I think that's
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 13: a lot of these eventures in the spect that instrumentalized
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 13: as the individual as a part of a system which
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 13: the main purpose is just to produce and doesn't matter
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 13: the value. The doesn't matter in respect us values because
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 13: many because capitalism, in the moral point of view, is
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 13: just statistics and not values and aspirations.
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 2: So I think that the crisis the mental health crisis.
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 2: I think.
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 13: I know that you disagree, but what you think about
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 13: my idea.
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 4: The curious is my student, Okay, think it is, and
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 4: I think it is.
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 5: So I don't think capitalism is about statistics. I think
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 5: capitalism is about values. It's about trading values. It's about
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 5: offering values into the marketplace, and and people either value
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 5: or don't value what you're offering, and they either buy
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 5: it or don't buy it.
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 6: They either trade with you or they don't trade with you.
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 5: That's true in terms of employment, that's true in terms
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 5: of customers.
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 6: That's true of all the relationships.
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 5: I either trade value for value relationships or they walk away.
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 5: I don't think that that the that the psychological crisis
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 5: that we're living through has anything to do with capitalism.
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 5: I think it's quite the opposite. I mean, if only
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 5: we taught people about the virtue of capitalism and how
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 5: they should live, and the idea the work.
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 6: You shouldn't live to work. You should live to live.
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 6: You should work to live. You should work to be happy,
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 6: You should work to achieve your values. Work is a means, but.
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 5: It's also a psychological means. We gain most of our
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 5: self esteem from work. Most of our self esteem comes
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 5: from work, and it will always be that way. So
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 5: embrace a career that you love. Embrace something that you
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 5: are going to enjoy doing that you value that. Then
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 5: you can achieve things and you can gain pride from
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 5: which then leads to increased happiness. I don't think you
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 5: can be happy in life unless you do work that
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 5: you enjoy. Unless you do you gain value from your work.
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 5: It's not about the money, it's about the self esteem.
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 5: It's about the achievement of values. So if we live,
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 5: if there are people who live to work and work
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 5: as an end in itself somehow for them, then yeah,
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 5: they can have psychological problems. I agree, But that's not
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 5: the fault of capitalism. That's a fault of I don't
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 5: know the ideas that they're holding. And maybe our educational system,
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 5: by the way, which is run by the government, not
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 5: by the free market, it's the fault of educational system,
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 5: and it's the fault of the values that our society holds.
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 8: So hello, my name is Almy and I'm Marish. PhD masochists.
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 8: So I can pay less taxes.
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 6: Which PhD masochist I just wanted to get.
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 8: So I just can't pay less taxes according.
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 6: To you, I was a poor PhD.
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 8: No, I want to be considered resource less taxes. What
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 8: I would like an answer for mission is one of you.
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 8: What would you call a sociological system that liberates the
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 8: capability of individuals to trade.
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 2: Goods, call it anything. I think, just human nature, human
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 2: human beings. As I was saying before, I always wanted
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 2: to do that. I always wanted to trade. It's part
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 2: of of of of human nature. I know you probably
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 2: call it capitalism, I'll guess, and and and probably according
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 2: to that definition, yes, it's it's capitalism, and it has
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 2: been here for the last three centuries. But I do
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 2: believe that's that's part of human nature.
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 4: Would you call it capitalism or your.
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 8: I made a question because you were always arguing about
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 8: the definition, and I couldn't see your guys disagree with
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 8: this definition.
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 4: Oh all right, I get it.
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 5: So the capital it is a system that leaves you
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 5: free to do that and protects you protect your property
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 5: rights so that you can engage in that. So yeah,
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 5: but but but you need that protection, right because if
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 5: somebody can intervene as you're trading goods and take the
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 5: stuff away, then then you're you're.
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 6: Likely to trade less, you're likely to benefit less. So
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 6: you need that protection. That's what what a system of capitalism.
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 6: It's a system provides. But as a.
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 4: System, it also requires this concern with progress. I mean,
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 4: if we think about it the way we work in organize, production,
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 4: and investment. It's all about making more tomorrow than today.
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 4: If we remove that, we remove the whole capitalist capitalist arise.
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 4: And I think so there's yeah, we trade with each other,
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 4: we want to emancipate each other's capabilities, that's for sure.
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 4: But if we remove this progressive notion that we are
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 4: ever trying to change the future by what we do
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 4: in the present investing, studying, researching and all that, I
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 4: think we missed a central point about capitalist.
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 2: But people always wanted to be better than before. It's
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 2: it's the Bible. I mean, it's the Bible that people
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 2: wanted to start to get rich. There were rich people.
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 4: In the Bible, so yeah, But the Greek said, name
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 4: a specific name for advice of rich people. It was
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 4: called play on. Next, pat was a big name for
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 4: someone who wants to accumulate.
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 2: It was you know, so there was people who wanted
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 2: to accumulate exactly, but today's view negative.
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: No, no, no.
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 4: There were also people in ancient Greece who actually believed
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 4: in human sacrifices, and the Greek said, no, that's wrong. Yeah,
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 4: it's the same thing.
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 6: There were other people will.
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 4: Think about, well, I want to make a lot of
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 4: money until I can't even count my own money.
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 2: But people, accumulation is wrong. Some people say that today,
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 2: But that's what you call the socialist idea.
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 6: Real progress is a real intellectual achievement.
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 5: And again in the West, it didn't really exist until Bacon,
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 5: until until uh you know, you know, and that's part
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 5: of what made the West the West.
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 2: But if we started to believe that there, it's different.
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 2: Is it a thing that only started to happen recently,
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 2: in the last two or three centers because we still
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 2: we started having the institutional setting that allowed us to happen,
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 2: or people did not want that before, Because I don't
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 2: believe the second version. I don't believe that before before
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 2: the institutional setting was there, people did not want to
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 2: community did not want progress. I do believe that they
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 2: wanted they just didn't have institutional setting.
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 5: If you read the only early thinkers from the first
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 5: thousand years AD, they are constantly talking about the fact
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 5: that this world doesn't matter.
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 6: You know, a progress in this world is insignificant.
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 5: Now I'm not saying, you know, individuals out there probably
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 5: try to make the best they could, But there was
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 5: a whole intellectual tradition that advocated for Yeah, I forget
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 5: about progress.
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 6: Progress is impossible.
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 2: Electually, but we still have fingers that said that. No,
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 2: the and there's the difference between what thinkers were saying
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 2: and what people were striving for. And that's what all right, Okay,
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 2: So then at some point they had settings that allowed
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 2: us for people to achieve what they were striving.
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 4: This was the old I mean, there was this Carlos,
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 4: this idea that the elites were completely blind to what
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 4: was happening around them. That's a possibility, that's a possibility.
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 4: What's wrong with what it's saying is that you have
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 4: no vestige, You have no evidence of what happened in history.
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 2: You have no people wanted to progress and have a life.
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 6: They didn't leave, They didn't leave the village, the substance.
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 2: They build villages, just the move from being recollectors to
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 2: establish villages and cities. It showed that that they wanted
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 2: to progress, they wanted to be able to have a
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 2: better life, and that happened in people.
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 5: They were in history with people strive for a better life.
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 5: But there are long stretches of history where nothing happens,
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 5: nothing happens, and people are not striving. But and you
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 5: can see places in the world today where people are
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 5: quite satisfied with not advancing, not moving sure, not no progress,
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 5: not going anywhere, because for example, religious modelor them, religious
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 5: modelor them, you know, often dictates look at the Islamic
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 5: world often dictates stagnation and not polished, and they embrace
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 5: an individual embrace that in the name of the religion.
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 4: And you have to, I mean, Caddles is saying people
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 4: want to do better, all right. So if you're saying
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 4: that I'm being devoured by wild beasts because I live
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 4: in the woods by myself, and I want to protect
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 4: myself from the wild beasts, and I get a weapon
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 4: and I come up with this way of bringing fire
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 4: and that scares the beasts away. Caddles that you see
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 4: people want to strive. Well, I mean that's self.
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 2: Protection, of course, but that's what's more than that.
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 4: That was That's not what he's here under discussion about development,
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 4: about economic development, about the transformation of the world, about
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 4: concepts such as economic growth, concepts such as progress. There
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 4: was no such thing before and for thousands and thousands
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 4: of years. You have to give an account of that,
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 4: and they have to explain why is why the change
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 4: was so dramatic.
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 2: I agree there was no economic progress before that, but
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 2: the strive to have economic individual strive to.
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 6: Look at the movement today of the growth.
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 5: You know, there's a there's a real movement today to
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 5: stop going to stagnate, which which is hard to imagine
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 5: anything worse than that.
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 6: You know, there are real people out there who don't
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 6: want me, really don't want to.
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 2: Let me give you this example, which doesn't mean that
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 2: most people still don't want it. They do want it,
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 2: even though there are some thinkers that want to. The
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 2: growth doesn't mean that. But the think is influential, and
• 1:51:01
  Speaker 2: the human nature did not change three hundred years ago.
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 5: But what I'm saying is that a thousand years ago
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 5: the thinkers were the growth thinkers in a sense, they
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 5: didn't have a concept of the growth, but the influence
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 5: was such that most people just accepted the way of
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 5: the world was. They couldn't imagine anything better. Of course,
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 5: they just couldn't imagine a future that was better than
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 5: the past. People because they'd always been the same.
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 4: People accepted that they were supposed to die and die
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 4: early rather than late.
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 6: Amazing, it's actually have better. We got two less questions
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 6: just this, uh.
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 4: What happened with Bacon again? The cart also is that
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 4: that they were starting to make the following reasoning with
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 4: the transformation of the world technologically applying our mental strength
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 4: to transform the world, we can't conquer mortality. And that's
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 4: what we've been doing so far. I mean, first thirty
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 4: years old, than forty and fifty, now ninety and perhaps
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 4: the next generation we are able to recompose our bodies
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 4: and never die. I mean, that's the whole different dream.
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 4: You didn't have that dream before, and you started to
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 4: have that dream beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 14: Sorry for interrupting, guys. I love your guys, banter. I
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 14: love you how you interact with each other, the clash
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 14: of personalities and beliefs. My name is Manuel, and I
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 14: also love how you are organized from left to right,
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 14: to the most radical to the least radical. In terms
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 14: of defense of capitalism. I don't know if it's not
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 14: intentional or not. My question is for your own book,
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 14: because you said that Christianity and Christian values are incompatible
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 14: with capitalism, and I was going to ask that if
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 14: that is the case, then why is it that in
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 14: the in the US and the United States. People who
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 14: tend to be more leftists and anti capitalists tend to
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 14: be atheist leftist socialists, and people who tend to be
• 1:52:55
  Speaker 14: more pro capitalism tend to be right wing Christian citizens.
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 6: Well, let's be.
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 5: Clear that, you know, the right wing Christians in the
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 5: United States and not pro capitalism in the sense of
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 5: what I mean by capitalism. But you know, it's a
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 5: good question because it's unique to America. It's not clear
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 5: that Christians elsewhere are proprey markets as much as Americans are.
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 5: They tend to be more left wing cuerdainly, the Catholic
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 5: churches tended to be more left and right economic terms,
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 5: with the exception maybe of a pope here are there.
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 5: You know, I tell my Christian friends in America that
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 5: many of them what happens is that they love America,
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 5: and they love the Constitution, and they love people like
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 5: Thomas Jefferson and so on. And then what they do
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 5: is they take their Christian values and they take the Bible,
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 5: and they morph them to adapt to their love of
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 5: America and their love of the Founding. So the primary
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 5: for them is their patriotism, and then they find what
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 5: they want which is, you know, the beauty of I
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 5: think religious writing is you can find what you want
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 5: in it, and people can find of all colors can.
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 6: Find it Americans. Americans.
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 5: Those Americans are particularly patriotic and particularly love America.
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 6: And before they find that in the Bible, they find
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 6: that in the reading of Christianity.
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 5: I don't think there's anything about specific about Christian values
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 5: that leads to America. You know, the founders of America
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 5: were not particularly Christian. Many of them were Deists, some
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 5: of the one conventional Christians or outside of the mainstream
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 5: of Christianity.
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 6: And I don't think the founding documents of.
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 5: America particularly Christian in spite of the fact that these
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 5: conservatives believe they are.
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 4: Can I just add something, there's a specifically American story
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 4: to tell about the flourishing of American Protestantism and the
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 4: way developed this affinity for free market economics, you know,
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 4: and you have the Max Favors story and all that,
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 4: the Max Weber and narrative, But I just wanted to
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 4: say that in Europe, maybe Christians have learned in the
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 4: last sixty years or so to appreciate free market economies
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 4: for the reason that Christians began for the first time
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 4: to be afraid of the intrusion of states and ideologically
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 4: driven policies that affects them as Christians. So even the
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 4: Catholic Church started to develop this great love for the
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 4: autonomy of civil society as a whole from state intrusion
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 4: in order for the Catholic Church to survive against the
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 4: attacks by the atheistic state. And also the Catholics and
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 4: Christians have a lot of other institutions schools or in
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 4: charities and hospitals that they want to preserve their independence
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 4: from the state. Again, so the free market economy gave
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 4: to Christians framework vision of society that actually not only
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 4: is more prosperous than socialis and so on and so forth,
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 4: but also brings protection to them as Christians because as
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 4: they have driven into this corner as a minority, they
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 4: began to be afraid of state intrusion intermission in their
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 4: own activities.
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 7: I would say, yeah, okay, my name is well Scouts,
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 7: and I would like to thank everyone for this great evening.
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 4: I have a question.
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 7: It can be for everyone, but in particular too Yarn.
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 7: First of all, I have to somewhat disagree with the
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 7: with the idea that neither Judaism nor Christianity has contributed
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 7: to the development of capitalism itself, as many Christians and
• 1:56:50
  Speaker 7: Jews in particular were incredibly how do I say, successful
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 7: in creating many popular and into prices out there. And
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 7: I remember watching your your your podcast on Zooka TV
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 7: and you said something really interesting which has to do
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 7: with a growing rise of anti Jew hatred even in
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 7: libertarian circles. And my question here and considering that this
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 7: kind of hatred I tend to see more in collectivist
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 7: circles like a national not socialism, fascism, and even communism,
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 7: as you could see here from these people that left
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 7: the room, do you believe there is a correlation which relates,
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 7: for example, of the to the capital sin of Christianity,
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 7: which is envy with them with there is a correlation
• 1:57:49
  Speaker 7: of this with collectivism and with the anti Jew hatred.
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 5: I mean I I so let me just say, I've
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 5: got a couple of talks online on YouTube if you
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 5: put in you on volcantic Semtism that kind of talk
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 5: about anti Semitism and anti capitalism, and the two are
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 5: definitely related. Marx was a real anti semit and to
• 1:58:11
  Speaker 5: to see this, uh, the first essay he got published.
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 6: The first essay Marx published was.
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 5: Called on the Jewish Question, which was a question in
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 5: Germany at the time about assimilating Jews into society, whether
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 5: to do it, whether or not to do it, and
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 5: how to do it. And you everybody should read necessay
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 5: because it goes to the heart of what Marx is
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 5: all about. Max is not a scientific economist. Marx is
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 5: a hater.
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 6: What does he hate?
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 5: He hates self interest, he hates individualism, and he associated
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 5: and he he literally says, the problem with the Jew
• 1:58:47
  Speaker 5: is he's self interested. The problem with the Jew is
• 1:58:50
  Speaker 5: he's capitalists, he's trying to make it. And the problem
• 1:58:52
  Speaker 5: with Christian society is it to become Jewish. He literally says,
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 5: you know, the Jewish question, the probably the way to
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 5: solve the Jews question is for Christians to stop being Jews.
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 5: Never mind the Jews, stop being Jews, everybody should stop
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 5: being Jews. So so so Marks really makes that link
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 5: between capitalism and the Jew and uh and condemns the
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 5: Jew because he manifests self interest in his behavior.
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 6: This is this is his argument.
• 1:59:20
  Speaker 5: So there's a deep relationship between the left and anti Semitism.
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 6: And always has been. And and Communism Inspitteter of the fact.
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 5: That some of its intellectuals were Jewish, was very antisemitic
• 1:59:30
  Speaker 5: throughout throughout most of its history. But you know, you
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 5: said something about Jews and Christians contributing to capitalism. Look,
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 5: I didn't say there was a conflict between Jews and
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 5: Christians and capitalism. I said there was a conflict between
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 5: the ideas of Christianity and Judaism and capitalism, which is
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 5: not the same thing. Of course, people as individuals, they
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 5: build businesses, They they even contributed ideologically. I mean John
• 1:59:54
  Speaker 5: Locke was a Christian, so obviously people who held beliefs
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 5: contributed enormously to the creation of of of a of
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 5: a capitalist society. You know, they anti Semitism is always
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 5: and you know, it's a sad way to end this,
• 2:00:11
  Speaker 5: but kind of the discussion. But it's it's it's always
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 5: a feature of tribalism and collectivism when it's your tribe
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 5: against the other tribe. When it really is when it
• 2:00:20
  Speaker 5: becomes when people have a sense that it's existential. Uh,
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 5: they're looking for scapegoes, they're looking for somebody to blame
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 5: the problems andto and to and to lash out at uh.
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 5: And and that is that is a feature that develops
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 5: on the left, and it's a feature that develops on
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 5: the right. And we're living in the United States right now.
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 5: It is truly scary as you're seeing anti semitism grow
• 2:00:42
  Speaker 5: in both the left and the right. I mean, there's
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 5: a big crisis now on the right with heritage and
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 5: Tucker Calson if you if you know this stuff. But
• 2:00:51
  Speaker 5: but it is a consequence of this what's called polarization
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 5: with this this really these these the division of society.
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 6: Into tribal mentality, into tribes.
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 5: And you know, so we need to form a coalition
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 5: on the right because everybody's welcome as long as they
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 5: anti left. The unifying factor is the hatred of the left,
• 2:01:10
  Speaker 5: and of course much of the left, the unifying factors
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 5: hatred of capitalism or hatred.
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 6: Of the right, or however they define it. So tribalism
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 6: and the enemy collectivism in that sense is the enemy. Uh.
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 5: And in individualistic societies, societies to treat people as individuals.
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 5: You know, by definition, I'm not going to be anti
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 5: semitic and are going to be racist. Uh, They're gonna
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 5: treat each person as individual I mean, I love modern
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 5: Luther King's statement about you know, look at people's character,
• 2:01:38
  Speaker 5: not the color of their skin, not not their ethnic
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 5: origen but but who are they? What is the what
• 2:01:43
  Speaker 5: are they qualities as individuals?
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 4: But the Christian added to the words inequalities, not to
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 4: mention other stuff. It's very, very complex. Let me give
• 2:01:54
  Speaker 4: you an example. So Christianity so the underdogs in society,
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 4: the poor, the slaves, even because the Christianity didn't when
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 4: Christianity emerged, it it didn't stand for the abolition of
• 2:02:07
  Speaker 4: slavery that was afterwards. So they told the poor and
• 2:02:13
  Speaker 4: the slave accept inequality, accept it, don't revolt against inequality.
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 4: You have your masters, you have your rich, accept them,
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 4: and use your position of inferiority as a sort of
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 4: training ground for humility that will bring you the favor
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 4: of God. That's one goal. The other goal was not
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 4: Christianity right directing itself to the poor and the slaves,
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 4: but to the rich and the powerful. The Church said,
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 4: I told those subordinate to you that they should accept
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 4: your position of privilege. But bear in mind that you
• 2:02:55
  Speaker 4: occupied that position of privilege with no merit of your own.
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 4: So Christianity, the legitimated positions of wealth, of superiority, of
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 4: social superiority, at the same time that it tried to
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 4: smooth the potential for envy and revolt among the poorest.
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 4: That's why Marx then said that Mark has this very
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 4: famous line that religion is the opium of the people,
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 4: and he was thinking mainly about Christianity, but everyone forgets
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 4: what it says afterwards about religion. He said, well, this
• 2:03:35
  Speaker 4: is a big insult to religion, right, because religion is
• 2:03:38
  Speaker 4: a sort of narcotic and you forget about the oppression
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 4: that you are subjected to. You are supposed to be
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 4: leading the revolution, you're not because you believe in false gods.
• 2:03:48
  Speaker 4: But afterwards Marx says in the same sentence that religion
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 4: is the only heart that is left in a heartless world.
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 4: So you see how complex Christians and it can be,
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 4: even for the formation of the socialist mentality as well
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 4: as for bringing about the capitalist world as we know
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 4: it today. It's really really compared to very subtle.
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 1: Wind wind. On a positive note, just to remind you
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 1: all that you have those flyers with you, you can
• 2:04:18
  Speaker 1: stand the QR code and access the link that allows
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 1: you to sign up or apply for a scholarship and
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 1: attend for free the conference next year. The ones watching
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: online now, at the end of the broadcast, you'll have
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 1: an image with that QR code as well. I just
• 2:04:32
  Speaker 1: want to know that when you're leaving the room, on
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 1: your right, you're going to have a table with some booklets.
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 1: Just choose the booklets that interest you the most and
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: take them. They're free to leave. Okay, once again, I
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 1: want to thank everyone on this panel. Please put your
• 2:04:48
  Speaker 1: hands together. I also want to thank Lola and SFL,
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 1: the partners of this event, and the Iron Ran Institute
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 1: for being the sponsor. And once again, let's hear it
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 1: for the Spanel. Thank you very much for being here.
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 2: It's great Africa.