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Speaker 1: It's our first ever book club. Where's the wine. It's

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Speaker 1: Armstrong and Getty extra large because four hours. Simply this

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Speaker 1: is Armstrong and Getty extra large. The book is Heaven

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Speaker 1: on Earth, The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism by

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Speaker 1: one Joshua Moravchik. I have a couple of complaints about

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Speaker 1: the book. Number one, it's very long. It's not eighty

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Speaker 1: pages like I prefer. But it was sure as how interesting.

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Speaker 1: And to discuss the book here, I am Joe Getty.

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Speaker 1: That's Jack Armstrong over there, Craig the healthcare Guru, Slash

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Speaker 1: the healthcare gangster, Craig Gottwalls, joins us um also uh,

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Speaker 1: Tim the lawyer, Tim Sandifor, the Goldwater Institute constitutional scholar, author,

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Speaker 1: et cetera. Gentlemen, thank you for being here. Did I

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Speaker 1: get the wrong book? My mine is titled The Rise

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Speaker 1: and Fall of Socialism and it's the hardcover. Here's the

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Speaker 1: interesting thing about that. This is what's interesting about that.

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Speaker 1: So he wrote that book, the original book, in two

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Speaker 1: thousand two, thinking he was writing about and historical event

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Speaker 1: that had ended like the Battle of Hastings. I mean,

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Speaker 1: it's over. Nothing new will be said about this then,

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Speaker 1: Bernie came along, and Venezuela and AOC and he said,

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Speaker 1: apparently the story's not over, how very Francis Fukuyama of

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Speaker 1: him exactly. So he put out another book with the

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Speaker 1: epilogue and it's saying, I guess socialism back. Of course,

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Speaker 1: socialism is the perennial disease every And that was one

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Speaker 1: of my complaints about the bookcause he doesn't start with Plato,

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Speaker 1: he doesn't start with the ancient Greeks he taught. He

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Speaker 1: starts with the French Trible Revolution, and and I can

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Speaker 1: and there's good reason for that to keep it short

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Speaker 1: for for Joe, but and and other simplesons. But I

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Speaker 1: mean to leave that, to leave out the Republic, and

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Speaker 1: leave out Aristotle's refutation of Plato, where where Aristotle actually

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Speaker 1: makes fun of Plato. It's one of the few parts

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Speaker 1: in Aristotle where he makes a joke. He ridicules Plato

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Speaker 1: by saying that every now and then somebody comes along

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Speaker 1: and says, well, if everybody just owned everything in common,

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Speaker 1: everybody would just be everybody else's friend, which is surprisingly

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Speaker 1: sarcastic for Aristotle, who normally reads like Stereo Instructions and

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Speaker 1: stereo instructions and totally not talk about any of that

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Speaker 1: stuff in the book. It is kind of surprising. Was

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Speaker 1: kind of surprising to me. But here's what I wonder

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Speaker 1: about this conversation. Like, if you do a book club

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Speaker 1: and you're talking about I don't know, the latest fiction

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Speaker 1: novel that the Girl with the Dragon tattoo or whatever,

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Speaker 1: you're probably just gonna talk about that book and there's

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Speaker 1: going to be But with this book club, we could

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Speaker 1: just talk about socialism for an hour. It doesn't have

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Speaker 1: to be so I don't know whether we're talking about

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Speaker 1: the book and the I would like to suggest book review.

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Speaker 1: I'm really not comfortable with club because it does sort

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Speaker 1: of connote the line and the cheese in the Middle Age.

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Speaker 1: You're the one that brought the donuts. I'm married for them.

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Speaker 1: This is for us. Lennon was a piece of ship.

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Speaker 1: Let me throw that in there real quick, because we

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Speaker 1: can curse on this thing. Here's the thing that always

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Speaker 1: sticks out to me about anything with socialism. I wish

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Speaker 1: I remembered how old I was, but I was. I

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Speaker 1: remember I was a pretty little kid when I asked

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Speaker 1: my dad. Not pretty as an adorable, were very attractive

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Speaker 1: young child was horrible with hair blond curls. When I

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Speaker 1: said to my dad, for some reason, I'm picturing living

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Speaker 1: in Illinois, which means I would have been six um.

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Speaker 1: And when I said to dad, my dad, why don't

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Speaker 1: they just take everything and divide it equally? And he said, well,

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Speaker 1: if you did that, nobody would try very hard because

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Speaker 1: you get the same amount whether you try hard or not.

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Speaker 1: And even at whatever angel I was, I thought, okay,

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Speaker 1: and never thought about it again. Never ever in my

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Speaker 1: life have I even touched upon thinking that would work.

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Speaker 1: Ever again. That explanation sufficed for the rest of my life.

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Speaker 1: Of course, that's the way it works. Much so how

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Speaker 1: does it keep being reborn among intellectuals? Much like the

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Speaker 1: most complicated shape in the shape oh Ball, the time

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Speaker 1: honored Al's toy. His explanations so perfectly fit your question

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Speaker 1: that you're satisfied by it as as you should have been.

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Speaker 1: I think it's revealing that we use socialism as a

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Speaker 1: form of punishment a lot of the time. If a

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Speaker 1: child brings gum to class, what does the teachers say,

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Speaker 1: did you bring enough for everybody? It's not If not,

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Speaker 1: I'm gonna take your gum away. Well, that's socialism right there.

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Speaker 1: It's used as a form of punishment because we know

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Speaker 1: that we know the consequences of taking stuff from people

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Speaker 1: and and forcing them to live for the sake of others,

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Speaker 1: which is really the the essential evil of socialism. Aside

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Speaker 1: from all of the it doesn't work stuff that the

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Speaker 1: book gets into is the essential moral evil of socialism,

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Speaker 1: which is the idea that you live for the sake

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Speaker 1: of other people. So, you know, we're somewhat deliberately not

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Speaker 1: structuring this discussion in advance, um, although you know, you

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Speaker 1: have four guys here who have read the book and

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Speaker 1: enjoyed it and have a lot of different ideas on

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Speaker 1: the topic and the rest of it. Just a quick

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Speaker 1: note on the structure of the book itself. It goes through,

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Speaker 1: in roughly chronological order, various people and regimes, um and

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Speaker 1: movements that have been you know, major moments in the rise,

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Speaker 1: fallen afterlife of socialism, which I found actually pretty entertaining. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and it's a lot of stuff that you had kind

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Speaker 1: of vaguely heard of out of the corner of your

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Speaker 1: ear once but didn't know much about. Like the Paris Commune.

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Speaker 1: I thought that was very interesting, and the part at

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Speaker 1: the end about the Israeli Kibbitz system was by far

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Speaker 1: the best part of the book. I thought that was

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Speaker 1: really fascinating, and it contains Craig Gottwall's very favorite quote

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Speaker 1: from the book. I think, Craig, do you have that

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Speaker 1: that handy do let me have that quote and listen.

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Speaker 1: I hate to go to this so quickly because it

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Speaker 1: is the absolute classic Armstrong and Getty criticism of socialism. Um.

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Speaker 1: Probably because it's so freaking obvious. Um. But so you know,

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Speaker 1: we can talk about how we want to approach the

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Speaker 1: book that we want to go in order do we

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Speaker 1: want to just pick our favorite parts? Lennon was a

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Speaker 1: piece of shit? The point worth repeating it's the quote

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Speaker 1: in the book is very short. I added to it,

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Speaker 1: but I for context for the listeners. The kibbutz and

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Speaker 1: so even the very best of socialist communities proved to

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Speaker 1: be a paradise for slackers and a purgatory for producers. So,

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Speaker 1: for those who haven't read the book, the book starts

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Speaker 1: off um with the French Revolution, and it says the

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Speaker 1: French Revolution is kind of the roots of socialism as

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Speaker 1: we know it today in the world. Although Tim Tim

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Speaker 1: has issue with that as we start off, and then

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Speaker 1: the book ends with the kibbutz and the Kibbutz Um.

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Speaker 1: These were these were outposts of of the Israeli state

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Speaker 1: going into the Palestine area where people lived in a

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Speaker 1: communal fashion and kind of kind of in a warlike setting,

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Speaker 1: you know, because they were they were invading a an

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Speaker 1: enemy territory. And the book makes the point that probably

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Speaker 1: of all the various forms of socialism we looked at

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Speaker 1: from you know, eighteen hundred through today, the kibbutz was

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Speaker 1: the most successful. But what's interesting, and I just want

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Speaker 1: to see if you guys picked up on this, it

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Speaker 1: was it was that's a good point to it. It

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Speaker 1: certainly started the crumble, as the quote says, but it

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Speaker 1: talks about how socialism needs to succeed, it needs to

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Speaker 1: overcome the family. And it was both the French Revolution

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Speaker 1: and the Kibbutz that kind of showed ultimately family broke

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Speaker 1: down socialism and the kibbutz it was that it was

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Speaker 1: that you ultimately wanted to live with your kids and

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Speaker 1: not send them off to live in a communal home

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Speaker 1: to be educated. Can you imagine that as a parent

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Speaker 1: sending your kids off to just to to be well,

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Speaker 1: you know, you don't parent them. I mean, that's just

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Speaker 1: that's every instinct I've gotten my life every day since

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Speaker 1: I had children, is to parent my children. I've had well,

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Speaker 1: as I've told you, I had college professors that advocated

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Speaker 1: that point of view in in school, and I was

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Speaker 1: so utterly blown away by that. I was convinced that

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Speaker 1: they were mentally ill. It turns out as correct. It's

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Speaker 1: funny you should bring that up, though. I just started

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Speaker 1: to read a piece and I've barely cracked the cover

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Speaker 1: about how the identity politics panic they think maybe a

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Speaker 1: substitute for uh, family dynamics, family self identification. I'm part

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Speaker 1: of this family. This is my mother, my father, my sisters,

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Speaker 1: my brothers, my cousin's blah blah blah. That's broken down

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Speaker 1: so much. People are desperate for some sort of identification.

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Speaker 1: But anyway, well, it takes perfect sense because Mark's theory

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Speaker 1: was that um nationalism and family and all that stuff

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Speaker 1: would subside once we got people to understand it's all

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Speaker 1: about a class struggle, and ultimately, the Bolshevik Revolution and

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Speaker 1: Lenin proved that that just wasn't gonna happen. You needed

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Speaker 1: to have something else. And then and then you get

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Speaker 1: to the perversion of Hitler and Mussolini, who say, yeah,

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Speaker 1: nationalisms where it's at. But that's where we're at today,

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Speaker 1: where I think I think most of these true Marxists

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Speaker 1: would say, yeah, the class struggle has failed, so we

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Speaker 1: need to do it based upon intersectionalism and tribal identity

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Speaker 1: politics to keep it going. This thing about the family, though,

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Speaker 1: I think that was one of the attractive things about

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Speaker 1: socialism a century ago and possibly still was precisely the

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Speaker 1: fact that it seems to a lot of people to

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Speaker 1: be not necessary earlier breaking, but a liberation from the family, which,

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Speaker 1: especially in the nineteenth century, consisted a lot of unchosen

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Speaker 1: obligations that you would really rather not have, or even

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Speaker 1: more extreme positions like the um the Oneida community, for example,

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Speaker 1: under John Humphrey Noise in the nineteenth century, which was

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Speaker 1: a free love kind of you know, it was a

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Speaker 1: sex cult basically, and it was an example of an

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Speaker 1: early communist effort in the United States. And Noise went

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Speaker 1: on to write a book on the history of American

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Speaker 1: communisms in which he went through all the different socialist

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Speaker 1: communities have been founded in the United States, and I

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Speaker 1: would I'm not so sure that it's true that the

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Speaker 1: kibbutz is the most successful form of socialism in the

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Speaker 1: United States anyway, it would certainly be rivaled with the

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Speaker 1: Shaker communities. You know, the Shaker communities in the nineteenth century.

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Speaker 1: There are still Shakers alive to this day. Now. They

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Speaker 1: certainly were anti family, They were anti individualists all down

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Speaker 1: the line. I mean, the in the Shaker community, how

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Speaker 1: you folded your hands was literally dictated to you by

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Speaker 1: the elders in charge of the Shaker commu. It was

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Speaker 1: the right hand, the right hand is over the left hand.

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Speaker 1: I mean, every single little bit quick question on that topic. Um.

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Speaker 1: You know, everybody listens to the show knows. I've quoted

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Speaker 1: Sebastian Younger's tribe many times, but he makes the point

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Speaker 1: that in your socialist tribal societies, those who did not

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Speaker 1: contribute were either killed or shoved out to starve to death. Um.

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Speaker 1: Did the Shakers have to share that element? They would

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Speaker 1: expel you. They were also they were um so in theory,

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Speaker 1: they not only held no private property and had no

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Speaker 1: family structure, but they were rigidly celibate. So these can

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Speaker 1: they're Christian of some sort, that's right. And they depended

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Speaker 1: entirely on converts to bring in new members to the

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Speaker 1: to the community because they were rigidly segregated by sex

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Speaker 1: and the Yeah, exactly, But it turns out, it turns

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Speaker 1: out I'm sorry you hadn't mentioned that in the pamphlet. Hey,

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Speaker 1: thanks for the butter, really nice, really good and fresh.

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Speaker 1: But is there is there's some leader that gets to

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Speaker 1: have sex with everybody, right, No, But it turns out

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Speaker 1: that archaeology old Shaker sites has turned out turned up

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Speaker 1: a whole bunch of items that Shakers weren't supposed to

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Speaker 1: have in hidden in hidden junkyards on the Shaker communes,

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Speaker 1: because of course they broke the rules and they sneaked

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Speaker 1: little private property items into their communities, and they were

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Speaker 1: breaking the rules all the time. So it didn't even

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Speaker 1: work in the Shaker what you instead find is a

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Speaker 1: lot of the time. And this happened in the Cobitz also,

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Speaker 1: and he moractually gets into this in the book. But

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Speaker 1: it happened to Oneida. It happened in a manner. We

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Speaker 1: know those names today because those communities turned into factories

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Speaker 1: that produced money by selling products and became capitalists exactly,

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Speaker 1: which you know, is kind of funny because this is

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Speaker 1: Aldas Huxley's critique of society in Brave New World. He

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Speaker 1: he's essentially complaining in Brave New World that capitalism absorbs

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Speaker 1: its own critique, which is the point that was made

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Speaker 1: in the brilliant episode of Black Mirror of what is

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Speaker 1: It a Million Credits? I think it's called where you know,

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Speaker 1: you try to fight the system, and then the system says, oh,

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Speaker 1: isn't that cute and makes your fight against the system

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Speaker 1: into part of the system itself, which is very frustrating

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Speaker 1: to revolutionary. Right, But that's one of the great things

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Speaker 1: about capitalism, is it it kind of steps into the blow,

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Speaker 1: It kind of cushions the blow from critics when it's

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Speaker 1: allowed to. Well, that gets into Bernstein's critique of Mars

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Speaker 1: and Angles, right, because Bernstein was was looking at what

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Speaker 1: was happening as we moved into the nineteen century, and

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Speaker 1: he was saying Bernstein was the number one protege of Angles,

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Speaker 1: who an Angles for those who haven't read the book,

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Speaker 1: was was was basically the brighter of the two between

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Speaker 1: marks and Angles, and aware of that until I read

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Speaker 1: this book and they had a split. Well. Bernstein later

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Speaker 1: on in the years, as as we approached d noticed that, hey,

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Speaker 1: wait a minute, labor unions and labor laws and all

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Speaker 1: these things that capitalism is co opting and sort of

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Speaker 1: Tim's vernacular is making the workers standard so much better

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Speaker 1: that maybe we don't eat a revolt, Maybe we don't

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Speaker 1: need this massive upheaval um. And then it was a

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Speaker 1: few years after that Lennin that absolutely hated that approach,

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Speaker 1: and he became the polar opposite of maintaining that, you know,

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Speaker 1: kind of the Antifa model, we need a big revolt.

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Speaker 1: Bernstein was more or less along the Elizabeth Warren Bernie

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Speaker 1: Sanders track. What's the most interesting realist than Mark? It's

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Speaker 1: the most interesting thing about Bernstein that stands out from

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Speaker 1: almost everybody else in the whole book. Grew up in poverty.

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Speaker 1: He and his family had to work for a living.

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Speaker 1: Almost everybody else were either rich or sucking off of

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Speaker 1: somebody else. The just the description of the relationship between

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Speaker 1: Angles and Marx, how Angles supported Mark. Marx never worked

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Speaker 1: really earned in his money his entire life. Can we

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Speaker 1: stipulate the Marks was a piece of ship as well? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: absolutely stipulate that And angles just kept sending him money,

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Speaker 1: and marks would spend to meet the allowance he was

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Speaker 1: getting and beyond and then say I need more money.

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Speaker 1: He actually had maids taking care of his house right

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Speaker 1: while he was broken making well. It was cursor to

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Speaker 1: the U. S Congress. And he's talking for the working

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Speaker 1: class to take over. So for those, I don't want

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Speaker 1: to be quite too hip for the room, so I'll

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Speaker 1: keep dumbing it down. Um. Mars believed that. And and

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Speaker 1: this was the legitimacy of of Marx, that he was

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Speaker 1: a scientific scientists, scientifically studying the inevitable progress of mankind.

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Speaker 1: And he said that capitalism would inevitably result in the

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Speaker 1: workers rising up and and throwing off the change blah

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Speaker 1: blah blah, and based on class, etcetera, etcetera. And what Bernstein,

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Speaker 1: who was like the only guy in the book with

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Speaker 1: the capacity for any self doubt, let overstates it. Because

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Speaker 1: there are a few He was one of the few

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Speaker 1: guys that said, you know, I might be wrong, but

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Speaker 1: I think um as opposed to you know, thundering like

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Speaker 1: gone on high um. But what kept happening is the

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Speaker 1: workers said, no, why don't we just improve a lot

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Speaker 1: by doing this? That and the other, And then you

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Speaker 1: move into the twentieth century and the various great communist

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Speaker 1: thinkers um and this is what really unifies all of

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Speaker 1: them to me engaged in this my boggling egotism. No, no, no,

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Speaker 1: you don't you tell me you're happy. Don't you tell

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Speaker 1: me you're getting more wealthy by the week. Don't you

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Speaker 1: tell me that life is good. It's not good enough.

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Speaker 1: And by god, if I have to kill every man,

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Speaker 1: Jackie h, I'm gonna lead you to salvation. I'm gonna

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Speaker 1: go back to my job of thinking and not making

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Speaker 1: any money with servants while somebody else pays for it. Yeah. No,

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Speaker 1: what's the old joke about how the socialist has to

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Speaker 1: exterminate the people and replace them with a new one

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Speaker 1: in order to serve the system, you know, because the

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Speaker 1: people are never good enough for socialism. And and this

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Speaker 1: is unfortunately, this is the the comment you often hear

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Speaker 1: from conservatives. They always say they very often you hear

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Speaker 1: them say, well, socialism, it sounds like a great theory.

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Speaker 1: It's just it's it's too good for human beings. Human

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Speaker 1: beings just aren't good enough for socialism, which is absurd.

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Speaker 1: That's like saying that sawdust is the ideal diet for

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Speaker 1: human beings. It's just that we're incapable of digesting it.

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Speaker 1: I mean, if if the system, if the system is

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Speaker 1: contrary to human nature, then it's not that human nature

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Speaker 1: has to change, which, as morav Check rightly says, is

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Speaker 1: really the essential element of socialism is to try and

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Speaker 1: change human nature to suit the theory of the way

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Speaker 1: around is now one problem that there's there's a big

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Speaker 1: problem that I have in the rav Check is that

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Speaker 1: although it's a very interesting and entertaining and enlightening history

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Speaker 1: of socialism, he never really gets into the theoretical problems

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Speaker 1: the reason why socialism cannot actually work. And there are

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Speaker 1: there are three of those, and they were the they

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Speaker 1: were uncovered by economists in the twentieth century. And unfortunately,

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Speaker 1: if you look in the index, he doesn't mention any

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Speaker 1: of these people. And that is Friedrich Kayaks knowledge problem,

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Speaker 1: ludgnses is uh calculation problem and the individualism problem, which

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Speaker 1: I will attribute to iron Rand, although there are many

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Speaker 1: other intellectuals who talk about this also. The calculation problem

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Speaker 1: is that if the government owns all of the resources,

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Speaker 1: there's no way to make economic decisions at all. How

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Speaker 1: do you make economic decisions. You make them by comparing

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Speaker 1: what it's going to cost with what the benefits are.

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Speaker 1: But if the government own is absolutely everything there, it's

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Speaker 1: actually literally impossible to make that calculation, so you can't

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Speaker 1: even come up with something like prices. That's what prices do.

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Speaker 1: But as Mess pointed out, it's impossible to come up

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Speaker 1: with prices in a truly communist economy. And the knowledge

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Speaker 1: problem that Hi pointed out is that nobody can possibly

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Speaker 1: have the information necessary to plan out in economy. There's

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Speaker 1: just too much information, too many details to actually have

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Speaker 1: a plan for the entire economy. You can't even plan

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Speaker 1: out your your own day, let alone actually plan out

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Speaker 1: an economy. And the problem with of individualism is that

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Speaker 1: people not only think about their lives in terms of

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Speaker 1: their own costs and benefits, but that it's right for

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Speaker 1: them to do so. And socialism demands instead that they

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Speaker 1: live for the sake of others and that they make

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Speaker 1: their decisions based on the collective good, which, aside from

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Speaker 1: being a meaningless phrase, means sacrificing who they are and

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Speaker 1: what they dream and and what they have a right

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Speaker 1: to dream for the benefit of some abstraction. And there's

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Speaker 1: that's why there is no argument in favor of socialism

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Speaker 1: that is not equally an argument in favor of cannibalism

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Speaker 1: and human sacrifice, because scialism, he is human sacrifice and

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Speaker 1: it's and it's immoral as well as being unworkable. And

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Speaker 1: I'm what I my big beef against the book because

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Speaker 1: he doesn't talk about that. Well, well, he hits it

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Speaker 1: pretty hard in He hits at least two thirds of

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Speaker 1: it pretty hard in the it just when he goes

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Speaker 1: through what happened to the USSR and communism, But you're right,

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Speaker 1: he doesn't really he doesn't really explain what was leading

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Speaker 1: to that. He just shows what happened because it's a

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Speaker 1: history book. He's not it's not a theory book. And

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Speaker 1: I don't blame him for that. But if you're looking

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Speaker 1: for a book that's going to really show you a

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Speaker 1: single volume, Tim's pick for our next book, guys, drumroll please. Oh.

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Speaker 1: I wasn't gonna say it. I was gonna say not

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Speaker 1: this one. But there are are an awful lot. No

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Speaker 1: I've I've got my idea for a book that's gonna

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Speaker 1: lift Jack Spirits. When the time when the time comes,

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Speaker 1: I'm still advocating for strange with true hockey stories. My

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Speaker 1: favorite book is an eight year Old Boy. I was

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Speaker 1: happy to see never got to his book. I don't

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Speaker 1: have a suggestion, right were saying that for the end

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Speaker 1: of the show. Okay, I was happy to realize because

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Speaker 1: I've I've always uh been a little confused of what

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Speaker 1: socialism is. You know, you look it up in the

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Speaker 1: dictionary and the definition will be whatever it isn't usually

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Speaker 1: as some sort of state controlled this or that. But

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Speaker 1: it's clear in the book, as he points out, it's

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Speaker 1: meant different people, different things to different people throughout history.

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Speaker 1: It still does when when somebody calls Bernie a socialist,

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Speaker 1: it might mean something different than when Bernie Sanders himself

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Speaker 1: calls himself a socialist. And so the definition and that

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Speaker 1: and communism being interchanged and stuff throughout history. It's so

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Speaker 1: at what period and who were we talking about? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it does feel nowadays to be a socialist means you

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Speaker 1: think that the Social Security Act is a good idea

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Speaker 1: or something, you know, what it was exactly the other

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Speaker 1: aspect of that, because there were multiple, multiple interpretations of

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Speaker 1: what it is and what it ought to be and

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Speaker 1: the various arguments, the bitter bitter arguments that these people

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Speaker 1: would have, and they'd publish their tracts in their newspapers,

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Speaker 1: and the book length blasts at each other like a

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Speaker 1: Monty Python's scene. It's like the People's Friend of Judia scene,

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Speaker 1: right exactly. And it reminds me very much of various

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Speaker 1: geeks arguing about the Avengers and stuff like that. These

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Speaker 1: people are so obsessed with their own passions they're just nitpicking.

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Speaker 1: I mean, they're picking the nits off of larger knits. Okay,

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Speaker 1: now I'll step back and I will defend marks here

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Speaker 1: and I and that is I think a lot of

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Speaker 1: one a piece of ship. So his theories and that

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Speaker 1: is this. First of all, the workers have in fact

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Speaker 1: sees the means of production in the United States. We

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Speaker 1: all own four O one k s or four O

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Speaker 1: three bs that consist of mutual funds, which consists of stock,

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Speaker 1: which means that and and we are the workers, which

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Speaker 1: means the workers do indeed own the means of production

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Speaker 1: in the United States. The second one is that his

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Speaker 1: criticisms of capitalism, a lot of them are well founded.

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Speaker 1: Not just his criticisms of the economic system system of

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Speaker 1: his time, which he wrongly thought was capitalism, but also

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Speaker 1: his critique of the family. We're talking about the family earlier.

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Speaker 1: You know, there's a part in the in the Communist

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Speaker 1: Manifesto where he says, you know, we get accused of communists,

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Speaker 1: we get accused of favoring free love. But what he

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Speaker 1: is capitalist marriage. If it's not free love, serial monogamy,

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Speaker 1: these wealthy, these wealthy celebrities going around and sleeping with,

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Speaker 1: sleeping around with whoever they want to, How is that

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Speaker 1: any better than free love? Well, he's got a point

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Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen, and as far as his criticisms of

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Speaker 1: what he thought capitalism was a lot of the time

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Speaker 1: he's talking about stuff like overseas colonialism and he calls

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Speaker 1: that capitalism, which I would disagree with. But when he

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Speaker 1: says things like we're talking about a system where politically powerful,

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Speaker 1: wealthy people use the government to to get their way

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Speaker 1: at the expense of the poor, he's absolutely right about

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Speaker 1: the right, which is what we frequently point out as

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Speaker 1: chrony capitalism. It was rife in the nineteenth century when

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Speaker 1: he was writing about that. That's what they did. Absolutely, Um,

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Speaker 1: do you do you in your own mind differentiate between

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Speaker 1: the term capitalism and the free market. No, or is

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Speaker 1: that slic. I define capitalism as a says them, where

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Speaker 1: all property is privately owned and all decisions about economic

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Speaker 1: transactions are made by individuals. And then one more quick

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Speaker 1: note and then Craig, I know you want to throw

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Speaker 1: something in, But the stuff about family, it also strikes me.

428
00:22:10,600 --> 00:22:12,520
Speaker 1: It's funny. Judy and I were flipping channels last night.

429
00:22:12,560 --> 00:22:15,120
Speaker 1: We came across was it the Favorite? Got a lot

430
00:22:15,119 --> 00:22:17,560
Speaker 1: of attention? A couple of gals vying for the favor

431
00:22:17,600 --> 00:22:20,840
Speaker 1: of the queen. Blah blah blah. Um, oh the movie. Yeah,

432
00:22:20,840 --> 00:22:24,040
Speaker 1: the movie, pretty good movie. Yeah it was. It's quite enjoyable.

433
00:22:24,080 --> 00:22:27,199
Speaker 1: But um, the one gal was constantly having to apologize

434
00:22:27,240 --> 00:22:29,840
Speaker 1: and or explain that she was, you know, quite educated

435
00:22:30,000 --> 00:22:32,320
Speaker 1: and bright, and she wasn't just a scholar early made,

436
00:22:32,359 --> 00:22:35,000
Speaker 1: but scullery made. But her family had fallen on hard

437
00:22:35,000 --> 00:22:37,120
Speaker 1: times blah blah blah. And so it was a reminder

438
00:22:37,200 --> 00:22:41,320
Speaker 1: of how incredibly limiting family could be in Marx's time too.

439
00:22:41,400 --> 00:22:43,600
Speaker 1: You were just never going to rise above your stage.

440
00:22:43,720 --> 00:22:46,480
Speaker 1: The class system left over from feudalism that was still

441
00:22:46,560 --> 00:22:48,919
Speaker 1: prevalent in Britain in Europe at the time, and in

442
00:22:48,960 --> 00:22:51,720
Speaker 1: some ways still is. And when you're only alternative to

443
00:22:51,880 --> 00:22:55,640
Speaker 1: that is some sort of Edmund Burke crap. I mean,

444
00:22:56,000 --> 00:22:58,720
Speaker 1: is it any surprise that people embrace socialism when when

445
00:22:58,760 --> 00:23:00,560
Speaker 1: you look around you and you see all this injustice,

446
00:23:00,600 --> 00:23:02,760
Speaker 1: and you look for somebody to champion your cause, and

447
00:23:02,800 --> 00:23:06,320
Speaker 1: you have Edmund Burke standing there saying, oh, no, the

448
00:23:06,640 --> 00:23:09,639
Speaker 1: feudalist structure of of the past is a wonderful thing,

449
00:23:09,680 --> 00:23:12,880
Speaker 1: precisely because it has no justification for it, precisely because

450
00:23:12,920 --> 00:23:16,000
Speaker 1: it's pure habit and has no theoretical rationale. And and

451
00:23:16,200 --> 00:23:20,119
Speaker 1: and I'm against economics because it remember Burke's exact words,

452
00:23:20,160 --> 00:23:23,480
Speaker 1: He says, it would rudely tear off the decent drapery

453
00:23:23,520 --> 00:23:27,080
Speaker 1: of life furnished from the moral imagination to cover the

454
00:23:27,119 --> 00:23:30,320
Speaker 1: defects of our naked, shivering nature. Like what kind of

455
00:23:30,320 --> 00:23:33,879
Speaker 1: crap is that? And that's the that's the alternative you have.

456
00:23:34,119 --> 00:23:36,359
Speaker 1: What he means by that is we should not ask

457
00:23:36,440 --> 00:23:40,160
Speaker 1: what government is for. We shouldn't indulge in in abstract

458
00:23:40,200 --> 00:23:43,680
Speaker 1: analysis of questions about justice, because then that would disrupt

459
00:23:43,720 --> 00:23:46,320
Speaker 1: the state. Well, if that's the alternative, then you're damn right,

460
00:23:46,320 --> 00:23:49,080
Speaker 1: I'm gonna disrupt the state. I'm pretty sure that if

461
00:23:49,119 --> 00:23:51,360
Speaker 1: I lived a hundred and fifty years ago, I would

462
00:23:51,359 --> 00:23:53,600
Speaker 1: have been a socialist myself, precisely because that was the

463
00:23:53,640 --> 00:23:57,560
Speaker 1: alternative they had. Wow, you wouldn't have you wouldn't have

464
00:23:57,800 --> 00:24:00,200
Speaker 1: taken the approach that Frederick Douglas said and said, man

465
00:24:00,200 --> 00:24:02,320
Speaker 1: will only work for two reasons. I would hope so,

466
00:24:02,680 --> 00:24:04,840
Speaker 1: and and one reason is to avoid punishment, and the

467
00:24:04,840 --> 00:24:06,879
Speaker 1: other reason is to gain riches. And I've seen the

468
00:24:06,920 --> 00:24:09,800
Speaker 1: avoidance of punishment method and that's the worst possible method

469
00:24:10,000 --> 00:24:11,880
Speaker 1: for those who are unfamiliar with that. Douglas Is first

470
00:24:11,920 --> 00:24:16,400
Speaker 1: biographer wrote, uh, this this marvelous passage where he describes

471
00:24:16,440 --> 00:24:19,480
Speaker 1: Douglas's views and Douglas, he says, was of the view

472
00:24:19,680 --> 00:24:22,720
Speaker 1: that people that he was against socialism because he said

473
00:24:22,760 --> 00:24:26,280
Speaker 1: people will work either for profit or to escape punishment.

474
00:24:26,440 --> 00:24:29,439
Speaker 1: And if you eliminate profit, as socialism does, then you

475
00:24:29,440 --> 00:24:31,720
Speaker 1: will have to have a system of punishment. So that

476
00:24:31,800 --> 00:24:35,800
Speaker 1: he says, socialism will be indistinguishable from negro servitude. And

477
00:24:35,880 --> 00:24:38,120
Speaker 1: I actually like it's that simple. I think it's really

478
00:24:38,200 --> 00:24:41,159
Speaker 1: that questle. There's only that's it to motivating factors, right,

479
00:24:41,200 --> 00:24:45,040
Speaker 1: getting back to my childlike view and understanding of socialism

480
00:24:45,040 --> 00:24:47,119
Speaker 1: that has never left me. I don't understand on the

481
00:24:47,240 --> 00:24:49,400
Speaker 1: very basic level, Like some of that theory you put

482
00:24:49,440 --> 00:24:51,840
Speaker 1: out there is interesting and and and true and all

483
00:24:51,840 --> 00:24:54,000
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff, but at the very basic level,

484
00:24:54,040 --> 00:24:55,960
Speaker 1: with a small group of people, in some of these

485
00:24:56,000 --> 00:24:59,879
Speaker 1: different experiments they did, there were slackers that just didn't

486
00:25:00,040 --> 00:25:02,320
Speaker 1: driver hard, and then the other people said, screw this,

487
00:25:02,800 --> 00:25:05,200
Speaker 1: how do how does it? How does socialism ever make

488
00:25:05,240 --> 00:25:09,320
Speaker 1: it even pass that level to get any credibility because

489
00:25:09,359 --> 00:25:12,679
Speaker 1: anything obviously true. A fourth grader that's compelled to do

490
00:25:12,760 --> 00:25:15,399
Speaker 1: a team project. Note, I think the answer. I believe

491
00:25:15,440 --> 00:25:17,800
Speaker 1: that the answer to that is because of the continuing

492
00:25:17,880 --> 00:25:21,240
Speaker 1: prevalence of the idea that morality consists of self sacrifice.

493
00:25:21,680 --> 00:25:26,439
Speaker 1: It's because we teach the non slackers that the moral

494
00:25:26,520 --> 00:25:29,480
Speaker 1: and just thing to do is to devote their lives

495
00:25:29,840 --> 00:25:32,879
Speaker 1: to other people, and so they think it's a good

496
00:25:32,960 --> 00:25:35,919
Speaker 1: thing to have their the fruits of their labor seized

497
00:25:35,960 --> 00:25:38,479
Speaker 1: and given to somebody else, and to support a political

498
00:25:38,520 --> 00:25:40,560
Speaker 1: system that does that. And the only way that we

499
00:25:40,600 --> 00:25:43,879
Speaker 1: will ever truly triumph over socialism is to eliminate the

500
00:25:43,920 --> 00:25:47,400
Speaker 1: morality of self sacrifice. That's very Iron Randy, and I'm

501
00:25:47,400 --> 00:25:52,919
Speaker 1: an objectivest interesting Well, you know the point just standing

502
00:25:52,960 --> 00:25:56,800
Speaker 1: up for people might take a slightly less um committed

503
00:25:56,880 --> 00:25:59,120
Speaker 1: view to that idea. It's like everything else in life

504
00:25:59,160 --> 00:26:01,800
Speaker 1: are gonna say, You've you've got to recognize the need

505
00:26:01,880 --> 00:26:05,680
Speaker 1: for balance and and and not ask people to live

506
00:26:05,760 --> 00:26:09,399
Speaker 1: in a way that has never really happened. That's and

507
00:26:09,640 --> 00:26:12,399
Speaker 1: back to the the incredible egotism of so many of

508
00:26:12,400 --> 00:26:17,440
Speaker 1: the characters in the book. There they felt like they

509
00:26:17,480 --> 00:26:21,959
Speaker 1: were gods as they pitched this, you know, theory of

510
00:26:21,960 --> 00:26:25,960
Speaker 1: of of equality and and there's a sense in which

511
00:26:26,000 --> 00:26:28,440
Speaker 1: they're right. Follow me here. So my favorite part of

512
00:26:28,440 --> 00:26:30,840
Speaker 1: the book is when he's talking about the Kibbitz and

513
00:26:30,880 --> 00:26:33,440
Speaker 1: he talks about what really was the destruction of the

514
00:26:33,480 --> 00:26:36,399
Speaker 1: kibbits And you mentioned Iron Rand earlier, the president of

515
00:26:36,440 --> 00:26:38,480
Speaker 1: the Iron Rand Institute today, as a guy who grew

516
00:26:38,520 --> 00:26:41,320
Speaker 1: up in one of these Kibbitts, and and he tells

517
00:26:41,320 --> 00:26:42,880
Speaker 1: exactly the same story. I don't know if you read

518
00:26:42,880 --> 00:26:44,399
Speaker 1: the book or not. I just heard him speak a

519
00:26:44,400 --> 00:26:46,320
Speaker 1: few weeks ago, and he's telling the story what happened

520
00:26:46,359 --> 00:26:48,600
Speaker 1: was after World War two, a lot of these soldiers

521
00:26:48,640 --> 00:26:51,840
Speaker 1: came back I mean after after Israel Wiz was built.

522
00:26:51,840 --> 00:26:53,639
Speaker 1: I mean it was after the I'm sorry, after the

523
00:26:53,680 --> 00:26:56,680
Speaker 1: Arab Israeli war. The soldiers came back to the Kibbits

524
00:26:57,080 --> 00:27:01,200
Speaker 1: with items, you know, toasters, clothing or radio is in

525
00:27:01,200 --> 00:27:03,840
Speaker 1: in in. In this one fellow's case, it was a radio.

526
00:27:04,200 --> 00:27:06,760
Speaker 1: And you know, it's for his wife or it's for

527
00:27:06,800 --> 00:27:09,600
Speaker 1: his kid. And now you have the apple in the

528
00:27:09,640 --> 00:27:13,000
Speaker 1: garden of Eden. Right now, you all of a sudden,

529
00:27:13,040 --> 00:27:18,000
Speaker 1: you have the disruption in this placid, unchanging, permanent society

530
00:27:18,040 --> 00:27:20,600
Speaker 1: that you've built, where well, gosh, I want a toaster,

531
00:27:20,920 --> 00:27:22,920
Speaker 1: and now what do we do, Well, we'll share the toaster. Well,

532
00:27:22,920 --> 00:27:24,920
Speaker 1: that's doesn't make anybody, have you? Or you you take

533
00:27:24,960 --> 00:27:27,360
Speaker 1: the kids radio away from him because he can't share

534
00:27:27,400 --> 00:27:29,880
Speaker 1: it with others? How cruel is that? Right? And and

535
00:27:29,960 --> 00:27:35,240
Speaker 1: that it becomes the crack in the edifice of this frozen, permanent,

536
00:27:36,080 --> 00:27:40,919
Speaker 1: brilliantly sculpted, unchanging sculpture that is socialist idealism instead of

537
00:27:40,920 --> 00:27:44,760
Speaker 1: the dynamic, living, changing world of a free market. And

538
00:27:45,000 --> 00:27:46,960
Speaker 1: I loved that part of the book, that is because

539
00:27:46,960 --> 00:27:49,359
Speaker 1: that's the crack. And then eventually everybody else has to

540
00:27:49,400 --> 00:27:50,920
Speaker 1: have a toaster, and then you have to build toast,

541
00:27:51,000 --> 00:27:53,080
Speaker 1: you have to buy toasters, and people kids are leaving

542
00:27:53,119 --> 00:27:55,280
Speaker 1: in order to go buy a better toaster, which is

543
00:27:55,320 --> 00:27:58,800
Speaker 1: so beautiful. It's like the flower poking up between the

544
00:27:58,840 --> 00:28:03,119
Speaker 1: cracks of the sidewalk. Yeah, And people people listening that

545
00:28:03,160 --> 00:28:05,520
Speaker 1: may not have read it that the Kippets were so

546
00:28:06,119 --> 00:28:10,440
Speaker 1: purely communistic in their little organizations that the women shared

547
00:28:10,880 --> 00:28:14,120
Speaker 1: state issued clothing. I mean, they had nothing of their own.

548
00:28:14,119 --> 00:28:16,560
Speaker 1: They had these identical little huts that they lived in

549
00:28:16,600 --> 00:28:20,520
Speaker 1: at the beginning, and and it worked moderately well until

550
00:28:20,960 --> 00:28:23,879
Speaker 1: soldiers started bringing back trinkets and and women see that

551
00:28:23,920 --> 00:28:26,640
Speaker 1: they could have their own blouse, that they could launder, etcetera,

552
00:28:26,880 --> 00:28:29,159
Speaker 1: and that just and then once once it got to

553
00:28:29,160 --> 00:28:31,480
Speaker 1: the point of the they talk about the third generation

554
00:28:31,560 --> 00:28:34,280
Speaker 1: problem where the parents were pretty good at it. The

555
00:28:34,840 --> 00:28:37,880
Speaker 1: first generation, the kids were they they lived with it.

556
00:28:38,080 --> 00:28:39,960
Speaker 1: But then when you got to the grand kids that

557
00:28:40,040 --> 00:28:43,560
Speaker 1: started to rebel against their against their grandparents, and they

558
00:28:43,600 --> 00:28:45,640
Speaker 1: wanted to have their own toaster, and they wanted to

559
00:28:45,640 --> 00:28:47,120
Speaker 1: go do their own thing, and they wanted to live

560
00:28:47,120 --> 00:28:50,400
Speaker 1: with their family. And then once once they relented and said, okay,

561
00:28:50,480 --> 00:28:53,000
Speaker 1: kids can now live with the family. Will now, now

562
00:28:53,040 --> 00:28:56,240
Speaker 1: you needed to build larger homes, and you basically bankrupted

563
00:28:56,240 --> 00:28:59,160
Speaker 1: these things. And you know, Rousseau talks about this in

564
00:28:59,520 --> 00:29:02,200
Speaker 1: his books, so talks about this in almost literally these

565
00:29:02,360 --> 00:29:04,960
Speaker 1: these these adamant eve terms. He says, if he could

566
00:29:05,000 --> 00:29:07,880
Speaker 1: go back and in time, he would stop the first

567
00:29:07,920 --> 00:29:11,160
Speaker 1: person who used the word mine, because the idea of

568
00:29:11,240 --> 00:29:15,760
Speaker 1: property was the destruction of this idyllic, primitive society that

569
00:29:15,800 --> 00:29:19,040
Speaker 1: he envisions. And now when I look at it, I think,

570
00:29:19,360 --> 00:29:23,200
Speaker 1: what a beautiful experience to own your first thing, to

571
00:29:23,360 --> 00:29:25,600
Speaker 1: have this, to have that something that you can say

572
00:29:25,600 --> 00:29:28,080
Speaker 1: belongs to me and to nobody else. What a special

573
00:29:28,080 --> 00:29:30,240
Speaker 1: moment that is. And to mention Douglas again, there's that

574
00:29:30,320 --> 00:29:32,840
Speaker 1: marvelous passage in his memoirs where he talks about earning

575
00:29:32,880 --> 00:29:35,440
Speaker 1: his first dollar as a freeman and he says he

576
00:29:35,480 --> 00:29:37,600
Speaker 1: held this money in his hand and he realized that

577
00:29:37,840 --> 00:29:40,200
Speaker 1: his hands were his own and could make more of

578
00:29:40,240 --> 00:29:43,360
Speaker 1: the precious coin. I mean, that's what a beautiful moment.

579
00:29:43,400 --> 00:29:46,840
Speaker 1: And a socialist looks at that and thinks it's evil

580
00:29:46,920 --> 00:29:49,360
Speaker 1: and thinks it's bad. It's incredible, and it's not just

581
00:29:49,440 --> 00:29:52,200
Speaker 1: the property like Jack, like you were saying, it's it's

582
00:29:52,520 --> 00:29:54,480
Speaker 1: it was. It wasn't just state issued clothing. And so

583
00:29:54,560 --> 00:29:57,920
Speaker 1: kids couldn't even sleep with their parents, right, they were

584
00:29:57,960 --> 00:30:00,600
Speaker 1: required to sleep in these collective chill Dan's hut so

585
00:30:00,640 --> 00:30:03,160
Speaker 1: that they would grow up without the idea of private property,

586
00:30:03,880 --> 00:30:08,160
Speaker 1: literally stunting their moral growth as a human experiment in

587
00:30:08,280 --> 00:30:11,520
Speaker 1: order to create monsters. That's what this that was, and

588
00:30:11,560 --> 00:30:15,760
Speaker 1: it still didn't work. It's still I mean, and this

589
00:30:15,840 --> 00:30:19,440
Speaker 1: when Gorbachev visited the Kibbutz in the nineteen eighties, he

590
00:30:19,480 --> 00:30:23,240
Speaker 1: actually said, this is what we've been missing in the U.

591
00:30:23,280 --> 00:30:25,760
Speaker 1: S s R. This is what we intended. This is

592
00:30:25,800 --> 00:30:29,040
Speaker 1: the most pure example. And fortunately was it going. As

593
00:30:29,080 --> 00:30:35,760
Speaker 1: the great political philosopher uh said, life uh finds a way. Yeah,

594
00:30:35,880 --> 00:30:38,120
Speaker 1: you you mentioned that, what's your favorite part of the book.

595
00:30:38,600 --> 00:30:40,360
Speaker 1: Maybe my favorite part of the book, not the most

596
00:30:40,440 --> 00:30:42,320
Speaker 1: learned part of the book. And I don't remember which

597
00:30:42,400 --> 00:30:44,960
Speaker 1: iteration of socialism and whose idea this was, but some

598
00:30:45,000 --> 00:30:47,800
Speaker 1: of the great thinkers had the theory that not only

599
00:30:47,840 --> 00:30:50,480
Speaker 1: were we going to perfect men on earth, we're going

600
00:30:50,520 --> 00:30:54,720
Speaker 1: to perfect wildlife once human beings. When you said that,

601
00:30:54,760 --> 00:30:56,600
Speaker 1: I was trying to remember where that was that French

602
00:30:56,640 --> 00:31:01,160
Speaker 1: Revolution stuff or was that some time? But it was.

603
00:31:01,680 --> 00:31:04,480
Speaker 1: It was the theory that once people start behaving properly,

604
00:31:04,720 --> 00:31:07,880
Speaker 1: then animals will observe that and they will start behaving properly.

605
00:31:10,520 --> 00:31:14,640
Speaker 1: Lions will stop eating antelopes and perfection. I mean that

606
00:31:15,080 --> 00:31:18,760
Speaker 1: there's really crazy stuff. And you're getting into crazy though,

607
00:31:18,880 --> 00:31:20,240
Speaker 1: and it's not the last time that happened. I was

608
00:31:20,240 --> 00:31:22,600
Speaker 1: just checking a double check that he doesn't mention trophem Lessenko.

609
00:31:23,000 --> 00:31:26,320
Speaker 1: Lysenko is this Soviet geneticist who said that, according to

610
00:31:26,360 --> 00:31:29,640
Speaker 1: true communist doctrine, you could transform winter wheat into summer

611
00:31:29,640 --> 00:31:32,720
Speaker 1: wheat by exposing it to heat. Because the idea of

612
00:31:32,760 --> 00:31:38,080
Speaker 1: genetics was the idea of genetics was a capitalist, individualistic notion.

613
00:31:38,440 --> 00:31:40,720
Speaker 1: And and this theoretically kind of makes a sense because

614
00:31:41,000 --> 00:31:45,400
Speaker 1: communism says there is no real nature, there's just a

615
00:31:45,480 --> 00:31:49,480
Speaker 1: human construct. Everything is a social construct. Right, So the

616
00:31:49,560 --> 00:31:53,400
Speaker 1: dialectical materialism then says, well, then then there's no reason

617
00:31:53,520 --> 00:31:56,800
Speaker 1: why you couldn't transform an entity from one nature to

618
00:31:56,880 --> 00:32:00,640
Speaker 1: another by changing its environmental surroundings. That's what we're doing

619
00:32:00,640 --> 00:32:02,880
Speaker 1: with humans with communism, giving it a good stern talking

620
00:32:02,960 --> 00:32:07,240
Speaker 1: so we can change genetically transform wheat by just exposing

621
00:32:07,240 --> 00:32:10,000
Speaker 1: it to heat or cold, and Stalin loved this and

622
00:32:10,080 --> 00:32:14,240
Speaker 1: made Lisenco the head of his of his uh scientific department.

623
00:32:14,400 --> 00:32:17,680
Speaker 1: Lessenko went and had all of his scientific opponents executed,

624
00:32:17,960 --> 00:32:20,600
Speaker 1: and sure enough, the Soviet Union suffered when the crops failed.

625
00:32:20,600 --> 00:32:23,400
Speaker 1: When sure enough, summer wheat won't grow in in the winter,

626
00:32:23,640 --> 00:32:26,480
Speaker 1: and you can't change that, no matter how hard you tried.

627
00:32:26,520 --> 00:32:29,720
Speaker 1: But socialism says that you can use the will to

628
00:32:29,960 --> 00:32:35,320
Speaker 1: overcome natural laws. This is akin to Gwyneth Paltrow talking

629
00:32:35,360 --> 00:32:38,520
Speaker 1: sternly to water in her group publication. There's no It's

630
00:32:38,560 --> 00:32:41,240
Speaker 1: not a coincidence that socialists that tend to be into

631
00:32:41,280 --> 00:32:44,880
Speaker 1: crazy pseudosciences. I'm looking through my notes. I'm trying to

632
00:32:44,920 --> 00:32:48,040
Speaker 1: find that part about the beasts all getting at it highlighted,

633
00:32:48,080 --> 00:32:52,480
Speaker 1: but I don't remember where that was. It wasn't Rousseau

634
00:32:52,480 --> 00:32:55,560
Speaker 1: because Russo says that in in the Discourse on Inequality,

635
00:32:55,600 --> 00:32:59,360
Speaker 1: he says that in primitive society before the introduction of reason,

636
00:32:59,720 --> 00:33:04,040
Speaker 1: that that primitive man was never attacked by wild animals. Fantastic,

637
00:33:04,480 --> 00:33:06,680
Speaker 1: But I came across my other note that I wanted

638
00:33:06,680 --> 00:33:08,560
Speaker 1: to remember, and I've always thought this was I've known

639
00:33:08,600 --> 00:33:11,520
Speaker 1: this was true in the modern world. Nobody's ever actually

640
00:33:11,600 --> 00:33:16,640
Speaker 1: read these these long marks books, capitals, and even at

641
00:33:16,640 --> 00:33:19,040
Speaker 1: the time they knew that, I didn't realize that. They

642
00:33:19,080 --> 00:33:21,320
Speaker 1: still they distilled it down to like a forty five

643
00:33:21,400 --> 00:33:24,720
Speaker 1: page summary so people could have some idea what they're

644
00:33:24,720 --> 00:33:26,920
Speaker 1: talking about. It was way more important to have it

645
00:33:26,960 --> 00:33:29,360
Speaker 1: on your bookshelf for your coffee table than to have

646
00:33:29,400 --> 00:33:33,320
Speaker 1: because nobody could actually read the Bible. It was to

647
00:33:33,360 --> 00:33:38,400
Speaker 1: summarizehy It was really more of a theory and a gesture.

648
00:33:38,440 --> 00:33:40,960
Speaker 1: It was a virtue signaling for socialism than to actually

649
00:33:41,000 --> 00:33:44,080
Speaker 1: read the book, which is hilarious. You know, on that topic.

650
00:33:44,080 --> 00:33:46,200
Speaker 1: I didn't find the animal part, but this is almost

651
00:33:46,200 --> 00:33:51,200
Speaker 1: as good. Um, this is one of your French socialists

652
00:33:51,200 --> 00:33:55,080
Speaker 1: when you're leading thinkers at the time. Uh. Mary Schaal's

653
00:33:55,240 --> 00:34:00,760
Speaker 1: Manifesto of Vehicles. Um that essentially, if okay, if there

654
00:34:00,800 --> 00:34:02,560
Speaker 1: is a single man on earth who is richer and

655
00:34:02,600 --> 00:34:06,000
Speaker 1: more powerful than his fellows, then the equilibrium is broken.

656
00:34:06,120 --> 00:34:09,360
Speaker 1: Crime and misfortune are on earth. Therefore, it was imperative

657
00:34:09,400 --> 00:34:12,359
Speaker 1: to quote removed from every individual the hope of ever

658
00:34:12,440 --> 00:34:17,080
Speaker 1: becoming richer or more powerful or more distinguished by his intelligence. Okay,

659
00:34:17,160 --> 00:34:19,239
Speaker 1: number one, that sounds a hell of a lot to

660
00:34:19,320 --> 00:34:23,520
Speaker 1: me like slavery and oppression. But why would you do this? Well,

661
00:34:23,520 --> 00:34:26,279
Speaker 1: this would lead to and I quote, the disappearance of

662
00:34:26,280 --> 00:34:32,040
Speaker 1: boundary marks, hedges, walls, door locks, disputes, trials, thefts, murders,

663
00:34:32,360 --> 00:34:40,920
Speaker 1: all crimes, courts, prisons, gallows, penalties. Also the removal of envy, jealousy, insatiability, pride, deception, duplicity,

664
00:34:41,000 --> 00:34:45,759
Speaker 1: and in short, all you're going to remove envy and

665
00:34:45,840 --> 00:34:48,319
Speaker 1: jealousy from human nature. You're gonna get rid of all vices. Jack.

666
00:34:49,719 --> 00:34:52,960
Speaker 1: What all that that really says is if you transform

667
00:34:53,040 --> 00:34:57,799
Speaker 1: human beings into cattle, they will be cattle or angels. Yeah,

668
00:34:57,880 --> 00:34:59,960
Speaker 1: well yeah, and and there's one sure way to train

669
00:35:00,120 --> 00:35:02,239
Speaker 1: from them into angels, and socialists have been really good

670
00:35:02,280 --> 00:35:05,279
Speaker 1: at that. You kill them and then their angels. Right.

671
00:35:05,360 --> 00:35:08,239
Speaker 1: So here's here's one thing that keeps I think about

672
00:35:08,280 --> 00:35:10,440
Speaker 1: this all the time. And maybe to discuss this, we

673
00:35:10,480 --> 00:35:12,800
Speaker 1: would have to have a book club meeting about Thomas

674
00:35:12,800 --> 00:35:15,520
Speaker 1: soul Well's a conflict divisions, because how does some people

675
00:35:15,719 --> 00:35:19,640
Speaker 1: immediately react to the stuff we're laughing about as it's hilarious,

676
00:35:19,640 --> 00:35:21,960
Speaker 1: It's so wrong, and how do other people think? Yeah,

677
00:35:22,000 --> 00:35:23,560
Speaker 1: that makes sense to me. How do how do you?

678
00:35:23,920 --> 00:35:25,960
Speaker 1: How do you get there? I think there's two answers

679
00:35:26,000 --> 00:35:28,319
Speaker 1: to that. I think there's the primitive answer, which is

680
00:35:28,360 --> 00:35:30,759
Speaker 1: that people are grow up on fairy tales and that's

681
00:35:30,880 --> 00:35:32,759
Speaker 1: the farthest they go, and so then they just think

682
00:35:32,760 --> 00:35:34,680
Speaker 1: sharing is a good thing. So socialism is a good thing.

683
00:35:34,719 --> 00:35:36,640
Speaker 1: That that's they don't think about further. Yeah, But the

684
00:35:36,640 --> 00:35:39,240
Speaker 1: other one timey fairy tales when kids actually get cooked

685
00:35:39,239 --> 00:35:41,360
Speaker 1: and eaten by the witches, which is how it always

686
00:35:41,440 --> 00:35:44,880
Speaker 1: ends with social That's a fairy tale. But the second

687
00:35:44,880 --> 00:35:48,280
Speaker 1: one is as the prevalence of a of a philosophical

688
00:35:48,360 --> 00:35:52,080
Speaker 1: view that says that justice is about distribution. And the

689
00:35:52,120 --> 00:35:54,120
Speaker 1: person really responsible for this in the United States is

690
00:35:54,160 --> 00:35:57,759
Speaker 1: John Rawls. And if you look throughout any college campus,

691
00:35:57,800 --> 00:36:01,000
Speaker 1: what what philosophy departments are teaching about just is John Rawls.

692
00:36:01,000 --> 00:36:03,800
Speaker 1: And that's the idea that justice consists of dividing things

693
00:36:03,880 --> 00:36:06,720
Speaker 1: up and giving those things to people. And the reason

694
00:36:06,800 --> 00:36:09,880
Speaker 1: we have a society is to divide up and decide

695
00:36:09,880 --> 00:36:12,200
Speaker 1: who gets what rights to what, and we do so

696
00:36:12,440 --> 00:36:15,720
Speaker 1: in order to accomplish social goods. That is as opposed

697
00:36:15,800 --> 00:36:18,839
Speaker 1: to the classical liberal conception of justice that you find

698
00:36:18,840 --> 00:36:21,759
Speaker 1: in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, which

699
00:36:21,760 --> 00:36:24,279
Speaker 1: says justice means that if you make it, you keep it,

700
00:36:24,400 --> 00:36:25,799
Speaker 1: If you buy it, you keep it. If as long

701
00:36:25,840 --> 00:36:27,640
Speaker 1: as you don't steal it from somebody, then it's yours.

702
00:36:27,840 --> 00:36:31,480
Speaker 1: End of story. And though it's those are the competing visions,

703
00:36:31,680 --> 00:36:35,000
Speaker 1: And unfortunately for well, Rawls wrote his book in the sixties.

704
00:36:35,000 --> 00:36:38,160
Speaker 1: I think ever since then, college has been dominated by

705
00:36:38,160 --> 00:36:42,000
Speaker 1: this idea that justice means distribution. Whenich it doesn't. I've

706
00:36:42,000 --> 00:36:44,080
Speaker 1: found the passage we're talking about. Let me hit you

707
00:36:44,120 --> 00:36:47,200
Speaker 1: with this, then we can move on. But um uh,

708
00:36:47,239 --> 00:36:49,960
Speaker 1: the uh, the the human race would change, and not

709
00:36:50,000 --> 00:36:52,600
Speaker 1: only it, there will be no cruelty in man's nature,

710
00:36:52,680 --> 00:36:54,960
Speaker 1: not even towards other creatures. And as a result, the

711
00:36:55,000 --> 00:36:58,640
Speaker 1: animal creation will also become different in character. More species

712
00:36:58,640 --> 00:37:00,800
Speaker 1: would be domesticated, and those it could not be tamed

713
00:37:00,840 --> 00:37:04,440
Speaker 1: would be destroyed. Oh that's enlightened, so that a terrestrial

714
00:37:04,480 --> 00:37:07,160
Speaker 1: paradise be formed in which harmony will pervade all that

715
00:37:07,200 --> 00:37:11,560
Speaker 1: will exist upon Earth, including the domestication of lions and whales.

716
00:37:12,080 --> 00:37:15,040
Speaker 1: That would free human beings from from work and so

717
00:37:15,160 --> 00:37:18,400
Speaker 1: either lions would start wearing pants and stop eating antelope

718
00:37:18,520 --> 00:37:22,240
Speaker 1: or kill them off right exactly in the name of harmony,

719
00:37:22,960 --> 00:37:26,800
Speaker 1: which gets back to, uh, to the egotism. Hey, listen,

720
00:37:26,840 --> 00:37:30,400
Speaker 1: just real quickly, um, not probably not real quickly. I

721
00:37:31,000 --> 00:37:32,960
Speaker 1: like to learn. So I'm fine with when I'm wrong

722
00:37:33,000 --> 00:37:34,879
Speaker 1: about things, but i like it better when I'm right.

723
00:37:35,239 --> 00:37:47,520
Speaker 1: And I'm a little bit a little bit fragile. Uh.

724
00:37:47,600 --> 00:37:50,000
Speaker 1: But I've been saying for a very long time as

725
00:37:50,080 --> 00:37:55,279
Speaker 1: people get in these soul numbing arguments about um that

726
00:37:55,680 --> 00:37:58,880
Speaker 1: Hitler was actually a socialist and and the rest of it,

727
00:37:58,960 --> 00:38:01,520
Speaker 1: and then then calm and is blah blah blah. But

728
00:38:01,600 --> 00:38:04,760
Speaker 1: just like you're you're very very basics of political theory,

729
00:38:04,760 --> 00:38:09,319
Speaker 1: which just are are thought provoking but practically useless. Functional

730
00:38:09,360 --> 00:38:14,560
Speaker 1: difference Please, between Lennon and Hitler, anybody want to take

731
00:38:14,600 --> 00:38:16,799
Speaker 1: that one? How about you go for his own come

732
00:38:16,840 --> 00:38:19,200
Speaker 1: after you. I mean, Lennon talked about race, Hitler talk

733
00:38:19,480 --> 00:38:23,399
Speaker 1: realized I'm sorry, Lennon talked about class, and Hitler said,

734
00:38:23,560 --> 00:38:27,520
Speaker 1: nobody's dancing to the class beat. Let's make it about nation. Well,

735
00:38:27,600 --> 00:38:30,440
Speaker 1: Mussolini actually, you know, kind of led Hitler into that thing.

736
00:38:30,480 --> 00:38:33,880
Speaker 1: But yeah, I was gonna functionally though well functionally man

737
00:38:34,680 --> 00:38:39,680
Speaker 1: the USSR and fascist Italy. Anyway, we're so similar that

738
00:38:40,320 --> 00:38:43,400
Speaker 1: I think it's a distinction without a difference really because

739
00:38:44,360 --> 00:38:46,840
Speaker 1: Lennin and in my opinion, I kind of want to

740
00:38:46,840 --> 00:38:49,320
Speaker 1: get all your views. I think Lennon's the worst character

741
00:38:49,360 --> 00:38:51,200
Speaker 1: in the book. I mean, he is just an evil.

742
00:38:51,200 --> 00:38:53,839
Speaker 1: I envisioned the Joker sitting up a top of pile

743
00:38:53,920 --> 00:38:55,880
Speaker 1: of cash saying I just want to watch it. You know.

744
00:38:55,920 --> 00:38:59,759
Speaker 1: The belief was for decades that Lennon was actually a

745
00:38:59,760 --> 00:39:03,400
Speaker 1: fair early benevolent human being who wanted socialism. Stalin was

746
00:39:03,440 --> 00:39:07,560
Speaker 1: the evil person. And the more resun covers that, the

747
00:39:07,600 --> 00:39:09,640
Speaker 1: more recent biographers who has had a chance to dig

748
00:39:09,640 --> 00:39:12,399
Speaker 1: into the Soviet Union's you know, papers and stuff like that,

749
00:39:12,600 --> 00:39:15,880
Speaker 1: Lennon was more evil s ob than Stalin was. Lenin

750
00:39:15,960 --> 00:39:20,799
Speaker 1: was certainly as bad. Lenin was just he loved it.

751
00:39:21,320 --> 00:39:23,759
Speaker 1: So when you say the difference between would you say

752
00:39:23,840 --> 00:39:28,520
Speaker 1: Lenin and Hitler, Well, Lenin was making it up as

753
00:39:28,520 --> 00:39:31,280
Speaker 1: he went along, right, So he's he's coming. He believes

754
00:39:31,360 --> 00:39:34,759
Speaker 1: Marx and Engels philosophy that you need a revolution. Bernstein

755
00:39:34,880 --> 00:39:36,480
Speaker 1: comes along and says no, no, no, no no, no, we

756
00:39:36,520 --> 00:39:39,680
Speaker 1: can Bernie Sanders slow roll this, and then Lenin as

757
00:39:39,760 --> 00:39:43,560
Speaker 1: kind of a response a backlash against Bernstein, said no, no, no,

758
00:39:43,640 --> 00:39:46,239
Speaker 1: we need violence and we need an enemy. But when

759
00:39:46,239 --> 00:39:49,200
Speaker 1: he saw that Russia was a grarian and it was

760
00:39:49,280 --> 00:39:52,360
Speaker 1: not an industrialized nation, he had to create the enemy.

761
00:39:52,680 --> 00:39:54,920
Speaker 1: So he named the kol Locks, the small, the more

762
00:39:55,000 --> 00:39:58,840
Speaker 1: successful family farms, which had an average of half of

763
00:39:58,880 --> 00:40:02,560
Speaker 1: an employee. Half of these farms didn't even have one employee.

764
00:40:02,600 --> 00:40:04,880
Speaker 1: But they were the closest thing you had to wealth

765
00:40:05,000 --> 00:40:07,920
Speaker 1: in old Russia. So Lennon, making it up as he

766
00:40:07,960 --> 00:40:10,600
Speaker 1: went along, said that's the enemy. That's who we kill,

767
00:40:10,719 --> 00:40:13,720
Speaker 1: that's who we revolt against. And so he just wrote

768
00:40:13,800 --> 00:40:17,239
Speaker 1: his own deal at that point. But Hitler and Mussolini,

769
00:40:17,719 --> 00:40:20,960
Speaker 1: observing this, said na, na, na, na, You need a

770
00:40:21,040 --> 00:40:24,799
Speaker 1: You need a something more tribally and and and and instinctive.

771
00:40:24,840 --> 00:40:28,000
Speaker 1: And that was you hate the other, You stick with

772
00:40:28,040 --> 00:40:31,760
Speaker 1: your tribe. You use racism, national socialism, your race, your gender,

773
00:40:31,800 --> 00:40:35,480
Speaker 1: your kind as the enemy. So is that a real difference.

774
00:40:35,480 --> 00:40:37,520
Speaker 1: In my opinion, it's not. I I have a little

775
00:40:37,520 --> 00:40:40,120
Speaker 1: bit different view. I think that I think the roots

776
00:40:40,239 --> 00:40:44,879
Speaker 1: of fascism are um, you know, in a conscious rejection

777
00:40:45,520 --> 00:40:50,160
Speaker 1: of the intellectualism that the fascists saw as being the

778
00:40:50,400 --> 00:40:54,239
Speaker 1: foundation of communism. So the history fascism starts with the

779
00:40:54,360 --> 00:40:58,040
Speaker 1: romanticist movement that begins with Rousseau, and so if it

780
00:40:58,160 --> 00:41:01,719
Speaker 1: certainly has it is certainly so realism, but it's an

781
00:41:01,800 --> 00:41:07,640
Speaker 1: anti civilization movement. Fascism in true fascism is this idea

782
00:41:07,920 --> 00:41:14,360
Speaker 1: that of tribalism and culture and tradition as opposed to

783
00:41:14,800 --> 00:41:20,839
Speaker 1: the allegedly artificial civilization and law and constitutions and things

784
00:41:20,880 --> 00:41:26,120
Speaker 1: like that. The culture arises from the gut. It's a spiritual, mystical,

785
00:41:26,680 --> 00:41:31,000
Speaker 1: physical quality that can't be explained in rational terms. That's

786
00:41:31,000 --> 00:41:33,959
Speaker 1: what the fascist says, and the socialist rejects that because

787
00:41:33,960 --> 00:41:35,880
Speaker 1: he says, no, we're going to scientifically plan out the

788
00:41:35,880 --> 00:41:39,080
Speaker 1: economy in order to accomplish the collective good, blah blah blah,

789
00:41:39,080 --> 00:41:41,120
Speaker 1: We're gonna do it through a bureaucracy, and all we're

790
00:41:41,120 --> 00:41:43,800
Speaker 1: gonna have all these debates and all this fascist says no,

791
00:41:43,920 --> 00:41:46,480
Speaker 1: and I'm not gonna have any debates about rational planning.

792
00:41:46,520 --> 00:41:48,480
Speaker 1: What we're gonna have is the feer is going to

793
00:41:48,600 --> 00:41:52,160
Speaker 1: articulate the spirit of the folk and and what he

794
00:41:52,360 --> 00:41:58,200
Speaker 1: says that mystical spiritual uh a, a rational anti rational

795
00:41:58,239 --> 00:42:01,840
Speaker 1: principle is going to guide the tribe towards the future.

796
00:42:02,040 --> 00:42:03,680
Speaker 1: So I think it's I think there is a deep

797
00:42:03,760 --> 00:42:07,120
Speaker 1: difference between the two in that fascism is very reactionary

798
00:42:07,200 --> 00:42:10,640
Speaker 1: and it's all about the tradition of our people versus

799
00:42:10,640 --> 00:42:13,560
Speaker 1: the tradition of those people, whereas communism is supposed to

800
00:42:13,560 --> 00:42:15,719
Speaker 1: be universal to all humans. That leads me to the

801
00:42:15,840 --> 00:42:17,479
Speaker 1: question I wanted to hit Joe. I know you're coming

802
00:42:17,480 --> 00:42:21,480
Speaker 1: in back. My My question was don't we think that

803
00:42:22,160 --> 00:42:27,280
Speaker 1: socialism and communism are ultimately, almost always in every case,

804
00:42:27,400 --> 00:42:30,920
Speaker 1: going to lead to fascism because of tribal instincts? Well

805
00:42:30,960 --> 00:42:33,600
Speaker 1: that that that was part of my question about Lenin

806
00:42:34,160 --> 00:42:38,600
Speaker 1: and Hitler. Is any pretense toward we're going to have

807
00:42:38,680 --> 00:42:41,520
Speaker 1: debates and counsels and the rest of it in Lennon's

808
00:42:41,560 --> 00:42:45,360
Speaker 1: case was completely artificial. Yeah, yeah, he's a practical politician

809
00:42:45,680 --> 00:42:48,400
Speaker 1: and so and all this stuff is is fraud. So

810
00:42:48,440 --> 00:42:50,560
Speaker 1: it's kind of like you know, angels dancing on ahead

811
00:42:50,560 --> 00:42:52,960
Speaker 1: of a pin kind of debates right back to political

812
00:42:53,000 --> 00:42:55,800
Speaker 1: theory class. But it and it is true that communism

813
00:42:55,880 --> 00:42:59,439
Speaker 1: will turn into fascism because people are going to fall

814
00:42:59,480 --> 00:43:02,720
Speaker 1: back on their tradition, on their family or racial loyalty

815
00:43:02,920 --> 00:43:05,000
Speaker 1: is not pulling their load. And then you're gonna so

816
00:43:05,000 --> 00:43:07,160
Speaker 1: you're gonna have the you're gonna have the committee that's

817
00:43:07,160 --> 00:43:10,360
Speaker 1: in charge of the factory. Well, you know, the Bob

818
00:43:10,440 --> 00:43:14,320
Speaker 1: is friends with Joe and and they and and Richard

819
00:43:14,320 --> 00:43:16,680
Speaker 1: over there. He's black, so he's totally out. And you

820
00:43:16,680 --> 00:43:18,360
Speaker 1: know that sort of those sorts of attitudes are going

821
00:43:18,400 --> 00:43:21,560
Speaker 1: to affect how they run their committee. So eventually these

822
00:43:21,560 --> 00:43:24,960
Speaker 1: sort of tribalistic or family loyalties are going to pervade

823
00:43:25,000 --> 00:43:27,080
Speaker 1: the system. And that's what we saw in this over union.

824
00:43:27,160 --> 00:43:30,239
Speaker 1: They called them the noman clatura, and that's what we're

825
00:43:30,239 --> 00:43:34,239
Speaker 1: seeing now in the college snowflake phenomenon moving toward Antifa.

826
00:43:34,640 --> 00:43:37,640
Speaker 1: I mean, you're seeing this segregation out on the other

827
00:43:37,680 --> 00:43:40,160
Speaker 1: where Joe always likes to talk about what kind of

828
00:43:40,200 --> 00:43:42,359
Speaker 1: blood do you got in you is becoming more and

829
00:43:42,400 --> 00:43:45,840
Speaker 1: more relevant to these people, which is the opposite of

830
00:43:45,840 --> 00:43:47,640
Speaker 1: where they were supposed to have started. This whole this

831
00:43:47,800 --> 00:43:49,960
Speaker 1: perpetual debate is going to be the communism is going

832
00:43:50,000 --> 00:43:52,520
Speaker 1: to say we're for the whole world, and then the

833
00:43:52,600 --> 00:43:54,840
Speaker 1: Nazi is gonna come along and say, well, yeah, but

834
00:43:54,840 --> 00:43:56,520
Speaker 1: you can't really be for the entire world. You have

835
00:43:56,520 --> 00:43:58,839
Speaker 1: to draw lines somewhere, so why don't we draw them

836
00:43:58,880 --> 00:44:02,000
Speaker 1: along racial or now sational boundaries? And then they go

837
00:44:02,040 --> 00:44:03,879
Speaker 1: back and forth and the rest of us are sent

838
00:44:03,920 --> 00:44:07,520
Speaker 1: off to the extermination camp? What happened to England? This

839
00:44:07,600 --> 00:44:11,160
Speaker 1: is all so uplifting. Well, I don't know. You know

840
00:44:11,200 --> 00:44:13,840
Speaker 1: that you hope to have a little joy, a little success,

841
00:44:13,840 --> 00:44:17,200
Speaker 1: little satisfaction, and like if you can avoid third degree

842
00:44:17,239 --> 00:44:21,160
Speaker 1: burns and puncture wounds, that's that's pretty good too. So

843
00:44:21,360 --> 00:44:24,759
Speaker 1: just let's warn people off. I mean, I want to

844
00:44:24,760 --> 00:44:27,800
Speaker 1: get back to Jack's question. Tim gave a very tim answer.

845
00:44:27,840 --> 00:44:31,960
Speaker 1: I mean, it was incredibly it's either praiser in attack.

846
00:44:32,000 --> 00:44:34,040
Speaker 1: I would have simplified the hell out of this. Jack said,

847
00:44:34,040 --> 00:44:36,200
Speaker 1: why do people still believe in it? And I think

848
00:44:36,280 --> 00:44:38,680
Speaker 1: Joe and I have a disagreement on this front. Joe said,

849
00:44:38,719 --> 00:44:41,839
Speaker 1: blame an envy because the politics of blame and envy

850
00:44:41,920 --> 00:44:46,400
Speaker 1: are irresistible to vast amounts of people, and I think it.

851
00:44:46,560 --> 00:44:48,799
Speaker 1: I think one thing you need in addition to blame

852
00:44:48,840 --> 00:44:50,880
Speaker 1: an envy is a third element and that third element

853
00:44:50,920 --> 00:44:54,160
Speaker 1: could either be laziness, lack of ability, or lack of confidence,

854
00:44:54,440 --> 00:44:56,759
Speaker 1: because if if you're just a blame, confidence is a

855
00:44:56,800 --> 00:44:58,960
Speaker 1: good one. Yeah, one of those, because you need blame

856
00:44:59,000 --> 00:45:01,279
Speaker 1: plus envy plus I know I can never do it.

857
00:45:01,400 --> 00:45:03,400
Speaker 1: So that's people who here you can go as far

858
00:45:03,440 --> 00:45:05,279
Speaker 1: as you want with your effort and your talents. And

859
00:45:05,280 --> 00:45:07,040
Speaker 1: and secretly or in your own mind, you're thinking, I

860
00:45:07,080 --> 00:45:09,760
Speaker 1: really don't have any talents. I'm gonna I'm gonna fail.

861
00:45:09,760 --> 00:45:11,560
Speaker 1: If that's the way you think you're going to be

862
00:45:11,600 --> 00:45:14,120
Speaker 1: pro socialist, I just don't see any way around that.

863
00:45:14,200 --> 00:45:16,800
Speaker 1: I'm not so sure it's it's essential, but it certainly

864
00:45:16,880 --> 00:45:19,640
Speaker 1: is very common that you find socialism is popular among

865
00:45:19,640 --> 00:45:22,360
Speaker 1: people who have a weakness of self esteem, no question

866
00:45:22,400 --> 00:45:24,279
Speaker 1: about it. I've lately so this kind of a little

867
00:45:24,280 --> 00:45:26,560
Speaker 1: bit off talking about I've lately been obsessing on the

868
00:45:26,560 --> 00:45:30,120
Speaker 1: writers Zora'neil Hurston. If any of you read she, her

869
00:45:30,120 --> 00:45:31,960
Speaker 1: most famous book is is a novel called Their Eyes

870
00:45:32,000 --> 00:45:35,239
Speaker 1: Were Watching God. And I don't know, I think she

871
00:45:35,320 --> 00:45:37,839
Speaker 1: may be the best writer after Twain. What an amazing writer.

872
00:45:37,960 --> 00:45:40,400
Speaker 1: And she was a black rider working from about what

873
00:45:40,719 --> 00:45:45,280
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty two she died nineteen sixty and she rejected

874
00:45:45,320 --> 00:45:48,720
Speaker 1: socialism and communism, which are very popular among the Harlem

875
00:45:48,719 --> 00:45:51,880
Speaker 1: Renaissance crowd, people like Langston Hughes. And when you get

876
00:45:52,000 --> 00:45:55,680
Speaker 1: down to the bottom, it's because she couldn't stand the

877
00:45:55,800 --> 00:45:59,440
Speaker 1: lack of pride. She couldn't And it's it's so it's

878
00:45:59,440 --> 00:46:02,600
Speaker 1: she beautiful expresses it so beautifully in her novels. How

879
00:46:02,760 --> 00:46:07,600
Speaker 1: people could possibly want other people to set the terms

880
00:46:07,600 --> 00:46:11,600
Speaker 1: of life for them. And that's what socialism really gets

881
00:46:11,600 --> 00:46:13,680
Speaker 1: to is it's this idea of, well, I'm going to

882
00:46:13,800 --> 00:46:15,360
Speaker 1: leave it to big brother to plan my life for

883
00:46:15,400 --> 00:46:18,200
Speaker 1: me or something. How could you stand a life like that?

884
00:46:18,280 --> 00:46:20,520
Speaker 1: And that's what what has attracted me so much to

885
00:46:20,520 --> 00:46:22,960
Speaker 1: her writing because I've I've always thought that too. I

886
00:46:23,080 --> 00:46:25,200
Speaker 1: think my you know, you talk about your your dad,

887
00:46:25,440 --> 00:46:30,200
Speaker 1: uh jack to saying we should know sharing everything when

888
00:46:30,239 --> 00:46:33,160
Speaker 1: you're six. In my case, it was being forced into

889
00:46:33,160 --> 00:46:36,920
Speaker 1: the California public school system and and having to daily

890
00:46:37,040 --> 00:46:39,719
Speaker 1: be bossed around and told what I could say and

891
00:46:39,760 --> 00:46:41,920
Speaker 1: what I could do all the time, and this is

892
00:46:41,960 --> 00:46:43,719
Speaker 1: for your own good and it's good for the good

893
00:46:43,719 --> 00:46:46,440
Speaker 1: of the state, and blah blah blah. How can you

894
00:46:46,680 --> 00:46:49,359
Speaker 1: how can you stand that? But there are people who

895
00:46:49,440 --> 00:46:51,560
Speaker 1: really like being told what to do because it takes

896
00:46:51,560 --> 00:46:54,760
Speaker 1: the responsibility. Is there anything to the fact that almost

897
00:46:54,880 --> 00:46:59,000
Speaker 1: everybody in this book, Mark's Lennon, so many of the

898
00:46:59,040 --> 00:47:04,440
Speaker 1: people we're yeah, we're children of privilege. How does that

899
00:47:04,520 --> 00:47:07,560
Speaker 1: factor in? Are they worried that they can't be as

900
00:47:07,600 --> 00:47:09,720
Speaker 1: successful or do they have some sort of weird guilt

901
00:47:09,800 --> 00:47:12,440
Speaker 1: over the idea that you don't deserve what you've earned

902
00:47:12,600 --> 00:47:15,120
Speaker 1: is just easier to sell somebody who hasn't really earned

903
00:47:15,160 --> 00:47:17,200
Speaker 1: a lot. I think you see that a lot among

904
00:47:17,200 --> 00:47:20,120
Speaker 1: our celebrity socialists in Hollywood today. Or you're afraid of

905
00:47:20,160 --> 00:47:22,640
Speaker 1: hard work, so use devise the system that props you

906
00:47:22,760 --> 00:47:25,200
Speaker 1: up and you don't have to work hard. Privilege the

907
00:47:25,280 --> 00:47:27,960
Speaker 1: liberal guilt thing. I don't know, the privilege of being

908
00:47:28,000 --> 00:47:31,359
Speaker 1: a socialist. It's too it's too consistent to not be

909
00:47:31,440 --> 00:47:36,600
Speaker 1: based in something that they were children of privilege. So

910
00:47:36,760 --> 00:47:39,799
Speaker 1: when we look at socialism or so called socialism, like

911
00:47:39,840 --> 00:47:44,040
Speaker 1: in the election cycle right now, is it is it

912
00:47:44,200 --> 00:47:48,799
Speaker 1: just an argument over to what extent we milk the

913
00:47:48,880 --> 00:47:52,719
Speaker 1: engine of the free market and and hand that delicious

914
00:47:52,760 --> 00:47:55,480
Speaker 1: milk to other people. At this point, because I'm looking

915
00:47:55,520 --> 00:47:59,080
Speaker 1: at English socialism post w W two as a Churchill freak.

916
00:47:59,120 --> 00:48:01,239
Speaker 1: It it just broke my heart that they went away

917
00:48:01,239 --> 00:48:05,160
Speaker 1: from Churchill and Natalie. Although like like like Trump and

918
00:48:05,200 --> 00:48:08,600
Speaker 1: this will be the first and last message or mentioned Trump,

919
00:48:09,600 --> 00:48:12,000
Speaker 1: A certain fatigue does creep in when you have a

920
00:48:12,040 --> 00:48:14,640
Speaker 1: really really really strong personality on the scene. But anyway,

921
00:48:14,920 --> 00:48:19,120
Speaker 1: so Britain, after their incredible bravery and sacrifice and and

922
00:48:19,120 --> 00:48:20,880
Speaker 1: and helping save the free world, blah blah blah, the

923
00:48:20,880 --> 00:48:22,760
Speaker 1: fact that they went to socialism and has always broken

924
00:48:22,760 --> 00:48:27,799
Speaker 1: my heart. Um, is it more complicated than how much

925
00:48:27,960 --> 00:48:31,600
Speaker 1: milk do we take from the producers and give out?

926
00:48:32,680 --> 00:48:36,640
Speaker 1: I mean, because nobody's calling for college textbook socialism. George

927
00:48:36,640 --> 00:48:37,920
Speaker 1: Will has been talking about this a lot in the

928
00:48:37,920 --> 00:48:40,480
Speaker 1: past couple of years, that that socialism has just completely

929
00:48:40,520 --> 00:48:43,719
Speaker 1: transformed its definition from owning the means of production to

930
00:48:43,880 --> 00:48:47,319
Speaker 1: now just a large welfare state, welfare state, and the book,

931
00:48:48,040 --> 00:48:50,200
Speaker 1: which I guess is a progress of the progress of

932
00:48:50,239 --> 00:48:52,520
Speaker 1: a sort. I guess that the socialists aren't actually even

933
00:48:52,560 --> 00:48:55,480
Speaker 1: arguing for socialism anymore. I guess so if the definition

934
00:48:55,560 --> 00:48:58,560
Speaker 1: has changed, when we see those poles that say you

935
00:48:58,680 --> 00:49:00,960
Speaker 1: people approve of socialism or like that. Should we get

936
00:49:00,960 --> 00:49:03,239
Speaker 1: nervous or should we think, well, it's a different word.

937
00:49:03,440 --> 00:49:04,799
Speaker 1: I think so. I think it's a good I think

938
00:49:05,320 --> 00:49:08,200
Speaker 1: states are terrible too. You're right, that's where the book starts.

939
00:49:08,200 --> 00:49:11,400
Speaker 1: I mean, the author, Moravchik, grew up in a in

940
00:49:11,440 --> 00:49:14,319
Speaker 1: a socialist family. His parents were socialists as grandparents, I

941
00:49:14,320 --> 00:49:16,600
Speaker 1: think we're even socialists. He was born and bred in

942
00:49:16,600 --> 00:49:18,600
Speaker 1: the system. And he makes the point that when he

943
00:49:18,640 --> 00:49:20,000
Speaker 1: was in high school he was a member of the

944
00:49:20,040 --> 00:49:23,080
Speaker 1: same socialist organization that Bernie Sanders was, although he doesn't

945
00:49:23,080 --> 00:49:25,200
Speaker 1: think he ever met Bernie at that time, but he's

946
00:49:25,719 --> 00:49:28,040
Speaker 1: in this edition. It might not be in Tim's edition. Actually,

947
00:49:28,080 --> 00:49:31,320
Speaker 1: he he's talking about how he had his book release party,

948
00:49:31,400 --> 00:49:35,080
Speaker 1: his ceremony, and his eighty five year old father shows

949
00:49:35,200 --> 00:49:39,560
Speaker 1: up to protest him and hand out pamphlets, pamphlets about

950
00:49:39,560 --> 00:49:42,280
Speaker 1: how he and his mother were living on social Security

951
00:49:42,280 --> 00:49:45,440
Speaker 1: and Medicare, and he he makes the comment that I

952
00:49:45,480 --> 00:49:48,879
Speaker 1: guess it is somewhat of a victory that socialists now

953
00:49:49,040 --> 00:49:52,000
Speaker 1: just look to a big welfare state as their consolation prize.

954
00:49:52,200 --> 00:49:54,800
Speaker 1: But he was writing at the time, he was thinking

955
00:49:55,120 --> 00:49:58,200
Speaker 1: this thing is clearly dead and there's no way that

956
00:49:58,360 --> 00:50:01,360
Speaker 1: Chavez or Bernie Sanders could revive it. So that's what

957
00:50:01,440 --> 00:50:04,359
Speaker 1: he thought. By the Just because you mentioned Churchill, I'm

958
00:50:04,360 --> 00:50:06,919
Speaker 1: reminded of the old story that Churchill once went into

959
00:50:06,960 --> 00:50:09,400
Speaker 1: the to the men's room at the Parliament, at the

960
00:50:09,400 --> 00:50:11,600
Speaker 1: House of Commons, and you know, there's a stall for

961
00:50:11,680 --> 00:50:14,040
Speaker 1: every member of Parliament. And when he went in, he

962
00:50:14,040 --> 00:50:16,680
Speaker 1: saw that at Lee was standing at the first at

963
00:50:16,680 --> 00:50:18,560
Speaker 1: the first yearnal. So he went all the way to

964
00:50:18,640 --> 00:50:21,799
Speaker 1: the end and at least said, well, sir Winston, what

965
00:50:21,920 --> 00:50:23,799
Speaker 1: you You're not going to stand next to me? And

966
00:50:23,880 --> 00:50:26,320
Speaker 1: Churchill turn to him and said, uh, whenever you socialists

967
00:50:26,360 --> 00:50:28,480
Speaker 1: see something big that works, well, you want to nationalize it.

968
00:50:30,040 --> 00:50:37,080
Speaker 1: Probably not a true story, but cares. And speaking of

969
00:50:37,080 --> 00:50:39,359
Speaker 1: George Will, he you know, one of the one will

970
00:50:39,480 --> 00:50:41,360
Speaker 1: Ism that has really stuck with me is that he

971
00:50:41,680 --> 00:50:45,719
Speaker 1: mentioned one time the only genuine proletarian revolution in the

972
00:50:45,719 --> 00:50:50,120
Speaker 1: twentieth century with solidarity in Poland. We you know, you

973
00:50:50,200 --> 00:50:53,040
Speaker 1: talked to Jack about about socialism being a disease of

974
00:50:53,040 --> 00:50:56,160
Speaker 1: the intellectual class, and when you look at what the

975
00:50:56,239 --> 00:50:59,640
Speaker 1: working people actually want, the only time they ever actually

976
00:50:59,719 --> 00:51:03,080
Speaker 1: rose up without the without that kind of leadership with solidarity.

977
00:51:03,960 --> 00:51:06,960
Speaker 1: You might also add things like Tanement Square or what's

978
00:51:06,960 --> 00:51:09,200
Speaker 1: going on in Hong Kong right now to that. So

979
00:51:09,320 --> 00:51:12,799
Speaker 1: when the people are really genuinely given a choice, they'll

980
00:51:12,840 --> 00:51:14,520
Speaker 1: choose a welfare state a lot of the time, but

981
00:51:14,560 --> 00:51:17,400
Speaker 1: they don't actually choose. Correct me if I'm wrong. The

982
00:51:17,400 --> 00:51:21,120
Speaker 1: Founding Fathers recognized that tendency in human nature in our

983
00:51:21,160 --> 00:51:26,359
Speaker 1: system is designed to resist the impulse toward sheepyness. Not

984
00:51:26,440 --> 00:51:29,080
Speaker 1: only that, but now the Founding Fathers are mostly dead

985
00:51:29,120 --> 00:51:33,239
Speaker 1: by the time socialism really started to begin. But one

986
00:51:33,280 --> 00:51:35,640
Speaker 1: who was still around as James Madison. He lived to

987
00:51:35,760 --> 00:51:38,879
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty six, and he actually he got to know

988
00:51:39,239 --> 00:51:41,680
Speaker 1: Robert Owen's efforts with Owen has talked about a lot

989
00:51:41,719 --> 00:51:44,360
Speaker 1: in the book, and Madison was actually approached by Owen

990
00:51:44,520 --> 00:51:48,239
Speaker 1: about his ideas, and Madison said this ridiculous. He said,

991
00:51:48,239 --> 00:51:51,040
Speaker 1: if you take away people's property, then you're not only

992
00:51:51,080 --> 00:51:53,520
Speaker 1: will they will they not labor for subsistence, but you'll

993
00:51:53,600 --> 00:51:55,920
Speaker 1: end up depriving them of all their rights. So we

994
00:51:56,000 --> 00:51:58,080
Speaker 1: know quite well what the Founding Fathers would have thought

995
00:51:58,080 --> 00:52:01,320
Speaker 1: of socialism. They would have rejected it, and rightly so Owen.

996
00:52:01,400 --> 00:52:05,719
Speaker 1: Owen brought socialism to America and and and created uh

997
00:52:05,760 --> 00:52:08,279
Speaker 1: the idea for at least and he started the very

998
00:52:08,320 --> 00:52:11,719
Speaker 1: first New Harmony, was the first commune in America. And

999
00:52:11,719 --> 00:52:13,480
Speaker 1: then it went on. There were two hundred and fifty

1000
00:52:13,480 --> 00:52:17,480
Speaker 1: to three hundred more of these little utopias inspired by him,

1001
00:52:17,520 --> 00:52:19,640
Speaker 1: and the book points out that by the early nineteen

1002
00:52:19,719 --> 00:52:22,200
Speaker 1: hundreds all of them have failed in their median lifespan

1003
00:52:22,320 --> 00:52:24,879
Speaker 1: was two years. But let's just let's not get out

1004
00:52:24,880 --> 00:52:27,080
Speaker 1: of this section without sharing. And the ones that succeeded

1005
00:52:27,120 --> 00:52:31,920
Speaker 1: were the ones that transformed into factories. Like Robert Dale

1006
00:52:32,000 --> 00:52:35,560
Speaker 1: Owen's son, one of his oldest sons, who was summarizing

1007
00:52:35,719 --> 00:52:38,600
Speaker 1: his experience with socialism in these in these colonies and

1008
00:52:38,680 --> 00:52:42,040
Speaker 1: New Harmony, said, now this is the guy's son. All

1009
00:52:42,040 --> 00:52:45,239
Speaker 1: cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and

1010
00:52:45,280 --> 00:52:49,640
Speaker 1: industrious as and to the ignorant idol must work to

1011
00:52:49,680 --> 00:52:52,680
Speaker 1: their own downfall, for by this unjust plan of remuneration,

1012
00:52:52,719 --> 00:52:56,200
Speaker 1: they must of necessity eliminate the valuable members who find

1013
00:52:56,239 --> 00:53:00,320
Speaker 1: their services reached by the indigent, and retain only the impress, evident,

1014
00:53:00,440 --> 00:53:05,120
Speaker 1: unskilled and vicious members. So obviously true, and it happens

1015
00:53:05,120 --> 00:53:08,719
Speaker 1: in today's welfare state. Also what happens in the welfare state.

1016
00:53:08,760 --> 00:53:10,719
Speaker 1: We come along, we say, well, you know, we feel

1017
00:53:10,760 --> 00:53:12,239
Speaker 1: bad that all these people are poor, so we're going

1018
00:53:12,280 --> 00:53:15,160
Speaker 1: to give them all, let's say, a thousand dollars a month. Okay,

1019
00:53:15,160 --> 00:53:17,880
Speaker 1: in a couple of months, pretty soon they're squandering their

1020
00:53:17,920 --> 00:53:21,560
Speaker 1: thousand dollars on meth or something. And so then the

1021
00:53:21,640 --> 00:53:23,600
Speaker 1: legislature says, well, we can't just keep giving people a

1022
00:53:23,600 --> 00:53:26,080
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a month to use meth, so we're gonna

1023
00:53:26,080 --> 00:53:28,080
Speaker 1: put put in a rule that says you can't spend

1024
00:53:28,080 --> 00:53:30,200
Speaker 1: your thousand dollars on meth. You can only spend it

1025
00:53:30,239 --> 00:53:32,400
Speaker 1: at the grocery store. Well, then they go to the

1026
00:53:32,400 --> 00:53:34,399
Speaker 1: grocery store and they start buying steak, and you say, well,

1027
00:53:34,400 --> 00:53:37,200
Speaker 1: they shouldn't really be buying steak. So they pass another rule.

1028
00:53:37,200 --> 00:53:39,080
Speaker 1: It says, no, you have to buy healthy stuff and

1029
00:53:39,239 --> 00:53:43,480
Speaker 1: you have to buy quantities of moderately priced food instead. Right,

1030
00:53:43,520 --> 00:53:46,560
Speaker 1: And this process continues and continues and continues until the

1031
00:53:46,560 --> 00:53:48,960
Speaker 1: government is putting strings on every dollar it gives you.

1032
00:53:49,040 --> 00:53:52,600
Speaker 1: And that's how the government ends up controlling everything in

1033
00:53:52,640 --> 00:53:55,759
Speaker 1: a socialist society because it has to control something, or

1034
00:53:55,760 --> 00:53:57,400
Speaker 1: the people are just going to squander the money all

1035
00:53:57,400 --> 00:53:59,880
Speaker 1: the way anyway, even if the system does work. And

1036
00:54:00,120 --> 00:54:02,560
Speaker 1: so that's why you get on the get to the

1037
00:54:02,560 --> 00:54:07,400
Speaker 1: situation where totalitarianism flows from socialism necessarily because the government's

1038
00:54:07,400 --> 00:54:09,239
Speaker 1: going to have to control everything that's going to plan

1039
00:54:09,280 --> 00:54:11,319
Speaker 1: in the economy. So the idea that you can have

1040
00:54:11,360 --> 00:54:15,040
Speaker 1: socialism with without totalitarianism is like the idea that you

1041
00:54:15,040 --> 00:54:18,359
Speaker 1: can have the convex without the concave. The too necessarily

1042
00:54:18,400 --> 00:54:22,360
Speaker 1: go together. So is the indispensable freedom than the freedom

1043
00:54:22,400 --> 00:54:26,359
Speaker 1: to fail. If we prevent that, then we start down

1044
00:54:26,400 --> 00:54:30,080
Speaker 1: the road that inevitably ends with what you're describing. Sure,

1045
00:54:30,200 --> 00:54:32,719
Speaker 1: now it's the indispensable freedom is the right of an

1046
00:54:32,760 --> 00:54:36,520
Speaker 1: individual to his or her own life period, and that

1047
00:54:36,760 --> 00:54:38,480
Speaker 1: includes the right to fail, but also means the right

1048
00:54:38,520 --> 00:54:41,080
Speaker 1: to succeed. People have the right to succeed. People don't

1049
00:54:41,120 --> 00:54:43,879
Speaker 1: talk enough about the right to succeed and to keep

1050
00:54:43,920 --> 00:54:46,880
Speaker 1: the fruits of their labor when they have succeeded, because,

1051
00:54:47,000 --> 00:54:49,920
Speaker 1: as I said, the pervasive notion of self sacrifice and

1052
00:54:49,960 --> 00:54:53,080
Speaker 1: that there's something wrong with being wealthy having succeeded through

1053
00:54:53,120 --> 00:54:54,799
Speaker 1: your own hardware, you have to put a structure in

1054
00:54:54,840 --> 00:54:56,759
Speaker 1: place for that though, because it is human nature. Has

1055
00:54:56,800 --> 00:54:58,880
Speaker 1: been proven by all kinds of different polls that if

1056
00:54:58,880 --> 00:55:00,919
Speaker 1: our neighbor gets a bigger house, we now feel worse

1057
00:55:00,960 --> 00:55:02,640
Speaker 1: than we did before he got a bigger house, and

1058
00:55:02,680 --> 00:55:04,160
Speaker 1: you want to go and take stuff from We were

1059
00:55:04,160 --> 00:55:06,680
Speaker 1: perfectly fine with our house until he got a bigger house.

1060
00:55:06,880 --> 00:55:09,360
Speaker 1: Now I'm miserable. That's just human nature, and the tendency

1061
00:55:09,400 --> 00:55:11,320
Speaker 1: of people in that situation to go and take stuff

1062
00:55:11,360 --> 00:55:14,279
Speaker 1: from the neighbor is why most of human history has

1063
00:55:14,320 --> 00:55:17,600
Speaker 1: been an unbroken chain of of Stone Age property. By

1064
00:55:17,600 --> 00:55:19,319
Speaker 1: the way, since Owen came up on I mentioned this

1065
00:55:19,360 --> 00:55:21,360
Speaker 1: another sex note. There was like one line in the

1066
00:55:21,400 --> 00:55:23,719
Speaker 1: book that says Owen at the New Harmony might have

1067
00:55:23,760 --> 00:55:26,560
Speaker 1: been sexing up all the wives that they clearly don't

1068
00:55:26,560 --> 00:55:28,319
Speaker 1: have enough evidence on her that or he just spent

1069
00:55:28,400 --> 00:55:30,680
Speaker 1: more time on it. But there there are some comments

1070
00:55:30,680 --> 00:55:32,799
Speaker 1: about that through a street being a dictator if you

1071
00:55:32,880 --> 00:55:40,000
Speaker 1: can't so chah but so like, but wow is the

1072
00:55:40,120 --> 00:55:45,720
Speaker 1: Chinese Jeffrey Epstein, but so all like all cult leaders

1073
00:55:45,840 --> 00:55:47,840
Speaker 1: or dictators or whatever you know, where there's so some

1074
00:55:47,960 --> 00:55:50,839
Speaker 1: have been laden or whoever the hell um Owen might

1075
00:55:50,880 --> 00:55:52,720
Speaker 1: have been sexing up the wives there at New Harmony.

1076
00:55:52,760 --> 00:55:54,160
Speaker 1: That was his interest. That's why he came back to

1077
00:55:54,239 --> 00:55:56,040
Speaker 1: check on it everything. And he would he would set

1078
00:55:56,040 --> 00:55:57,960
Speaker 1: these these places up, and then he would leave his

1079
00:55:58,000 --> 00:55:59,400
Speaker 1: son to run him and he would leave and then

1080
00:55:59,400 --> 00:56:03,760
Speaker 1: just come back every every sex But you guys, you guys,

1081
00:56:03,840 --> 00:56:06,799
Speaker 1: it's gonna be different this time. Yeah, Well that's the

1082
00:56:06,920 --> 00:56:10,600
Speaker 1: That's the constant theme throughout the book is that socialists

1083
00:56:10,800 --> 00:56:13,399
Speaker 1: to this day get to still say, well, it's never

1084
00:56:13,440 --> 00:56:16,160
Speaker 1: been properly executed. They screwed it up. If you did

1085
00:56:16,160 --> 00:56:18,319
Speaker 1: it right and be perfect. And I think that's part

1086
00:56:18,320 --> 00:56:20,640
Speaker 1: of the brilliance of the book, guys, that we haven't

1087
00:56:20,640 --> 00:56:24,160
Speaker 1: really hit upon expressly, is it. Every chapter reads like

1088
00:56:24,200 --> 00:56:27,680
Speaker 1: its own short story on socialism, starting with the French Revolution,

1089
00:56:27,880 --> 00:56:30,160
Speaker 1: ending with the Well and then he has a PostScript

1090
00:56:30,200 --> 00:56:33,200
Speaker 1: on Bernie and and uh and Chavez, but some nice

1091
00:56:33,200 --> 00:56:35,600
Speaker 1: stuff on African republics as well. Well, that's just it is.

1092
00:56:36,040 --> 00:56:39,080
Speaker 1: He they go through, Um, look, here are the violent

1093
00:56:39,120 --> 00:56:45,919
Speaker 1: overthrow guys, Marks Angles, uh Russias, Mussolini didn't work. Then

1094
00:56:46,239 --> 00:56:49,400
Speaker 1: here are the people that perverted it to fascism, Mussolini

1095
00:56:49,440 --> 00:56:51,879
Speaker 1: and Hitler. It didn't work. And then oh, by the way,

1096
00:56:52,280 --> 00:56:56,640
Speaker 1: India and Tanzania and England sort of tried this slower, kinder,

1097
00:56:56,760 --> 00:56:59,760
Speaker 1: gentler approach where you take the Bernie and Elizabeth Warren's

1098
00:57:00,000 --> 00:57:02,480
Speaker 1: aisle and oh, by the way, they don't work, and

1099
00:57:02,520 --> 00:57:06,280
Speaker 1: it's they just they just systematically. He goes through every

1100
00:57:06,560 --> 00:57:09,279
Speaker 1: iteration we've seen over the last two hundred years and says,

1101
00:57:09,760 --> 00:57:13,000
Speaker 1: this is why they won't work, because the the argument

1102
00:57:13,040 --> 00:57:15,480
Speaker 1: that it's it's not the system, it's the leader. You

1103
00:57:15,520 --> 00:57:18,040
Speaker 1: can't keep saying that after we've gone through twenty three

1104
00:57:18,080 --> 00:57:20,800
Speaker 1: different leaders, everybody from his meek as at Lee to

1105
00:57:20,920 --> 00:57:24,840
Speaker 1: as harsh as lenin. Well, I can just imagine the

1106
00:57:24,880 --> 00:57:27,439
Speaker 1: one socialist who's bothered to listen to this far into

1107
00:57:27,480 --> 00:57:31,760
Speaker 1: the podcast saying saying, well, yeah, but isn't that true

1108
00:57:31,760 --> 00:57:33,680
Speaker 1: what you libertarians say. You say, there's never been a

1109
00:57:33,680 --> 00:57:36,680
Speaker 1: real capitalism either, So what's the difference between those two,

1110
00:57:36,880 --> 00:57:39,200
Speaker 1: to which my answer would be, no, that's true, but

1111
00:57:39,240 --> 00:57:42,840
Speaker 1: we've approached capitalism in many ways and what we expect

1112
00:57:42,880 --> 00:57:45,960
Speaker 1: to see, which is rising standards of living even for

1113
00:57:46,000 --> 00:57:49,160
Speaker 1: the poorest, have been the result. So it's it is

1114
00:57:49,200 --> 00:57:51,160
Speaker 1: not really it is true that we've never had a

1115
00:57:51,200 --> 00:57:53,960
Speaker 1: truly capitalist society. But the closer you get to it,

1116
00:57:54,400 --> 00:57:56,640
Speaker 1: you know, the warmer and the more humane and the

1117
00:57:56,680 --> 00:57:58,920
Speaker 1: better that situation really is. And that's even true for

1118
00:57:59,000 --> 00:58:02,960
Speaker 1: these social countries, these the China of the China's of

1119
00:58:03,000 --> 00:58:06,040
Speaker 1: the world, for example, the more they become capitalist, the

1120
00:58:06,120 --> 00:58:08,440
Speaker 1: wealthier they get, and the better off they are than

1121
00:58:08,480 --> 00:58:10,600
Speaker 1: they were under Chairman Mouth. Now you know, on that point,

1122
00:58:10,600 --> 00:58:12,600
Speaker 1: there's another book that actually I think is better than

1123
00:58:12,640 --> 00:58:14,480
Speaker 1: this one, although it focuses only on Russia, and that

1124
00:58:14,560 --> 00:58:17,320
Speaker 1: is there's a book by Martin Malia called Um the

1125
00:58:17,360 --> 00:58:20,600
Speaker 1: Soviet Tragedy, which talks about in the context of the

1126
00:58:20,640 --> 00:58:23,160
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, this this this argument that it wasn't really

1127
00:58:23,160 --> 00:58:27,600
Speaker 1: communism where and you know, there's not a single criterion

1128
00:58:28,000 --> 00:58:31,840
Speaker 1: of communism that the Soviet Union did not endorse and embrace.

1129
00:58:31,920 --> 00:58:35,040
Speaker 1: They wrote the book, they created it. And and this

1130
00:58:35,360 --> 00:58:40,160
Speaker 1: this idea, that um of of thawing and freezing your economy,

1131
00:58:40,200 --> 00:58:42,439
Speaker 1: because that's what Soviet history largely did, was it would

1132
00:58:42,600 --> 00:58:46,320
Speaker 1: it would have these tier short periods of apparent thawing

1133
00:58:46,400 --> 00:58:51,440
Speaker 1: and slightly more economic activity and slightly more capitalism, and

1134
00:58:51,520 --> 00:58:53,200
Speaker 1: in order to generate enough wealth for it to come

1135
00:58:53,240 --> 00:58:55,320
Speaker 1: along and freeze again. And that's and that, of course

1136
00:58:55,400 --> 00:58:57,680
Speaker 1: is exactly what's happened in China and is continue to

1137
00:58:57,720 --> 00:59:01,160
Speaker 1: happen in China. I'm in of this. Author Kotkin has

1138
00:59:01,160 --> 00:59:03,400
Speaker 1: written a lot of books about Russia and Stalin and everything,

1139
00:59:03,440 --> 00:59:06,920
Speaker 1: and he accessed all the all the papers that are

1140
00:59:07,120 --> 00:59:09,240
Speaker 1: in the old Soviet Union archives and everything, and he

1141
00:59:09,280 --> 00:59:12,960
Speaker 1: said one of the biggest revelations to him reading through

1142
00:59:13,000 --> 00:59:17,160
Speaker 1: their private correspondence was they were actually communists, Stalin and

1143
00:59:17,160 --> 00:59:19,400
Speaker 1: his friends, and are they're actually coming? But they believed this.

1144
00:59:19,480 --> 00:59:21,880
Speaker 1: Crist I could believe it for Stalin, but Lenin I

1145
00:59:21,920 --> 00:59:24,120
Speaker 1: find hard to believe because he was so sin They

1146
00:59:24,160 --> 00:59:26,960
Speaker 1: actually believe this crap in their in their personal diaries

1147
00:59:27,000 --> 00:59:28,920
Speaker 1: and their correspondence to each other that they didn't expect

1148
00:59:28,920 --> 00:59:31,440
Speaker 1: anybody else to read. They they talked to the language

1149
00:59:31,440 --> 00:59:33,560
Speaker 1: of the proletariat and the heaven on earth, and only

1150
00:59:34,040 --> 00:59:36,640
Speaker 1: were they wondering why it wasn't working, as I don't know.

1151
00:59:36,920 --> 00:59:39,400
Speaker 1: That's that's the part that I don't know on that front,

1152
00:59:39,440 --> 00:59:41,120
Speaker 1: because you mentioned that on the air, and then and

1153
00:59:41,160 --> 00:59:43,480
Speaker 1: then Joe said something I thought was fantastic, And this

1154
00:59:43,600 --> 00:59:46,600
Speaker 1: was weeks ago. But that's that's about my rate. Once

1155
00:59:46,640 --> 00:59:49,200
Speaker 1: every few weeks, and when you say fantastic things, he

1156
00:59:49,240 --> 00:59:53,920
Speaker 1: remembers it for weeks. Stand Out, you can always remember

1157
00:59:53,960 --> 00:59:57,520
Speaker 1: six things on your street. You wouldn't forget it. So

1158
00:59:57,600 --> 01:00:00,320
Speaker 1: Jack said that talking about COSTCA, And then Joe said,

1159
01:00:00,640 --> 01:00:06,000
Speaker 1: every movement has three categories, true ideologues, cynical manipulators, and

1160
01:00:06,120 --> 01:00:11,360
Speaker 1: useful idiots. And so I wanted to ask each of you, well,

1161
01:00:11,960 --> 01:00:14,760
Speaker 1: not where you are, but you know, if you look

1162
01:00:14,800 --> 01:00:18,880
Speaker 1: at socialism today and you look at the popularity it

1163
01:00:18,920 --> 01:00:21,439
Speaker 1: has that half of our college kids want to see

1164
01:00:21,440 --> 01:00:27,040
Speaker 1: it implemented. God forbid, what what percentage in your candidate casino? Casino?

1165
01:00:27,080 --> 01:00:29,680
Speaker 1: If you will? What percentage? So I'll start, I said,

1166
01:00:29,840 --> 01:00:34,920
Speaker 1: I think true ideologues are about two percent, Cynical manipulators

1167
01:00:35,200 --> 01:00:38,120
Speaker 1: and useful idiots are eight percent. Useful idiots are a

1168
01:00:38,160 --> 01:00:40,600
Speaker 1: big chunk of it. No doubt in terms of the electorate,

1169
01:00:40,640 --> 01:00:43,720
Speaker 1: a whole or the people are for it. This movement,

1170
01:00:43,760 --> 01:00:46,200
Speaker 1: that's for it, this this ideology. What do you think

1171
01:00:46,240 --> 01:00:48,000
Speaker 1: the breakdown is? I mean, how many of them do

1172
01:00:48,040 --> 01:00:52,320
Speaker 1: you think are really truly believe in it? Oh? And

1173
01:00:52,320 --> 01:00:55,960
Speaker 1: and have the knowledge enough to to actually know what

1174
01:00:56,000 --> 01:00:59,120
Speaker 1: they believe in. Well true, Yeah, No, that's a that's

1175
01:00:59,120 --> 01:01:02,800
Speaker 1: a good question, Joe, because that's like asking how many

1176
01:01:03,360 --> 01:01:07,960
Speaker 1: members of the church are true Christians? You know, you

1177
01:01:08,320 --> 01:01:11,520
Speaker 1: have to have a certain amount of knowledge to even qualify.

1178
01:01:11,560 --> 01:01:13,640
Speaker 1: And then what how do you determine whether someone who

1179
01:01:13,840 --> 01:01:16,440
Speaker 1: doesn't know a lot about religion but really believes it

1180
01:01:16,600 --> 01:01:18,400
Speaker 1: versus a person who knows a lot and does and

1181
01:01:18,440 --> 01:01:20,320
Speaker 1: also really believe that. How do you compare those? I

1182
01:01:20,320 --> 01:01:25,080
Speaker 1: don't know how you'd compare that quantity quantite, right, But

1183
01:01:25,200 --> 01:01:28,480
Speaker 1: I will say I think the true useful idiots with

1184
01:01:28,520 --> 01:01:33,600
Speaker 1: American socialism today is the right is self professed conservatives

1185
01:01:33,720 --> 01:01:39,120
Speaker 1: who failed to address the moral problem with socialism and

1186
01:01:39,200 --> 01:01:43,240
Speaker 1: who resort to sound bites instead of actually confronting the

1187
01:01:43,320 --> 01:01:46,800
Speaker 1: moral challenge of socialism and and saying, oh, socialism doesn't work.

1188
01:01:47,200 --> 01:01:49,320
Speaker 1: You know, saying it doesn't work. Yeah, it's true, it

1189
01:01:49,320 --> 01:01:51,680
Speaker 1: doesn't work. But that's not going to convince somebody who

1190
01:01:51,680 --> 01:01:54,800
Speaker 1: believes that socialism is moral. They're going to find a

1191
01:01:54,840 --> 01:01:56,680
Speaker 1: way to make it work if they think it's the

1192
01:01:56,760 --> 01:01:59,840
Speaker 1: right thing to do, which is not. Uh. Incidentally, you

1193
01:02:00,000 --> 01:02:04,040
Speaker 1: mentioned China and Africa. I am reminded of a professor

1194
01:02:04,080 --> 01:02:05,960
Speaker 1: I heard once speak who said, you know, if if

1195
01:02:06,200 --> 01:02:11,240
Speaker 1: Western colonial powers have anything to apologize to the third

1196
01:02:11,280 --> 01:02:15,920
Speaker 1: world for, it's for socialism. Socialism isn't a native idea

1197
01:02:16,040 --> 01:02:19,080
Speaker 1: to those continents. It was imported to those continents by

1198
01:02:19,120 --> 01:02:23,480
Speaker 1: Western colonialists, and although it's now practiced by native populations,

1199
01:02:23,760 --> 01:02:26,000
Speaker 1: they do so because they've been taught it by the West.

1200
01:02:26,040 --> 01:02:27,960
Speaker 1: If the West has anything to apologize to the rest

1201
01:02:28,000 --> 01:02:31,720
Speaker 1: of the world for, it's socialism, which has condemned so

1202
01:02:31,760 --> 01:02:34,760
Speaker 1: many people in those countries to poverty. Yeah, yeah, I wonder,

1203
01:02:34,840 --> 01:02:36,520
Speaker 1: getting back to something you just said earlier, I wonder

1204
01:02:36,520 --> 01:02:38,200
Speaker 1: if what we really need to do with our culture

1205
01:02:38,200 --> 01:02:41,520
Speaker 1: and our politics is to give people more confidence that

1206
01:02:41,600 --> 01:02:44,840
Speaker 1: they can succeed in capitalism. That's a lie, That is

1207
01:02:44,960 --> 01:02:51,520
Speaker 1: a that's a white power lie, intersectional patriarchal. Yeah. Yeah,

1208
01:02:51,600 --> 01:02:53,439
Speaker 1: that's what I hear all the time, that that land

1209
01:02:53,480 --> 01:02:55,920
Speaker 1: of opportunity is a terrible, terrible you know, the blame

1210
01:02:56,000 --> 01:02:58,600
Speaker 1: and lack of confidence. You know so much, Jack, That's

1211
01:02:58,600 --> 01:03:01,000
Speaker 1: so right. I've been my wife had been watching a

1212
01:03:01,000 --> 01:03:04,000
Speaker 1: lot of sixties television and movies, were watching Star Trek

1213
01:03:04,000 --> 01:03:05,960
Speaker 1: and Twilight Zone and stuff like that, And it occurred

1214
01:03:06,000 --> 01:03:10,120
Speaker 1: to me the other day, Hollywood just does not make movies. Well,

1215
01:03:10,160 --> 01:03:12,520
Speaker 1: every now and then they do, but very rarely doesn't

1216
01:03:12,560 --> 01:03:15,000
Speaker 1: make the kind of movies that were very common in

1217
01:03:15,040 --> 01:03:19,200
Speaker 1: the fifties and sixties about business successes and about working

1218
01:03:19,320 --> 01:03:23,240
Speaker 1: hard to accomplish something in a bourgeois sense. Uh, there's

1219
01:03:23,400 --> 01:03:25,440
Speaker 1: there are some movies today. There was a movie called

1220
01:03:25,560 --> 01:03:27,840
Speaker 1: Joy just a few years ago that was really good

1221
01:03:27,880 --> 01:03:32,000
Speaker 1: on this point there and but about the vacuum at

1222
01:03:32,040 --> 01:03:35,520
Speaker 1: the hangars. She invented hangers. Marvelous movie had this wonderful

1223
01:03:35,560 --> 01:03:38,640
Speaker 1: passage in there where that we're talking about opportunity and

1224
01:03:38,720 --> 01:03:42,680
Speaker 1: success and beautiful movie. But they're so rare, they're they're

1225
01:03:42,680 --> 01:03:46,760
Speaker 1: even rarer than Joe's wise comments. And it's a real

1226
01:03:46,840 --> 01:03:50,120
Speaker 1: shame because they used to make movies like The Executive Suite,

1227
01:03:50,160 --> 01:03:53,600
Speaker 1: which was what n or something like What a marvelous Movie.

1228
01:03:53,600 --> 01:03:55,960
Speaker 1: The entire movie is about a guy who runs a

1229
01:03:56,000 --> 01:03:59,480
Speaker 1: furniture company and he refuses to compromise and make cheap,

1230
01:03:59,520 --> 01:04:01,960
Speaker 1: lousy furniture. That's what the plot of the movie. What

1231
01:04:02,040 --> 01:04:05,320
Speaker 1: a beautiful movie. Of course it makes a wonderful double

1232
01:04:05,320 --> 01:04:08,280
Speaker 1: feature with the Fountain but but it's a shame that that,

1233
01:04:08,840 --> 01:04:12,400
Speaker 1: because Hollywood is so rigidly anti individual, so rigidly anti

1234
01:04:12,440 --> 01:04:14,920
Speaker 1: economic success, that you very rarely find these kinds of

1235
01:04:14,960 --> 01:04:17,200
Speaker 1: movie There. Chef was another really good one that came

1236
01:04:17,200 --> 01:04:20,240
Speaker 1: out a few years ago with the John Favreau in it.

1237
01:04:20,440 --> 01:04:22,680
Speaker 1: But but there're very few and far between these these

1238
01:04:22,960 --> 01:04:26,120
Speaker 1: stories about economic success. Which was the one with the

1239
01:04:26,200 --> 01:04:31,400
Speaker 1: mouse chef? Oh? Yeah, what raditui? Yeah? You know, it's funny,

1240
01:04:31,400 --> 01:04:33,680
Speaker 1: And it's probably just because I'm a guy who follows

1241
01:04:33,680 --> 01:04:36,000
Speaker 1: politics day by day and it will cost me my

1242
01:04:36,080 --> 01:04:38,680
Speaker 1: soul um and I'm looking for an alternate, you know,

1243
01:04:39,080 --> 01:04:41,000
Speaker 1: source of income. Oh, I thought you meant an alternate

1244
01:04:41,000 --> 01:04:45,320
Speaker 1: soul that'll be your ultimate source of as soon as

1245
01:04:45,520 --> 01:04:48,440
Speaker 1: as soon as they perfect the old soul transplant. I'm

1246
01:04:48,440 --> 01:04:51,200
Speaker 1: waiting in line now. But you're talking about how conservatives

1247
01:04:51,240 --> 01:04:53,160
Speaker 1: have done such a crappy job of talking about the

1248
01:04:53,200 --> 01:04:56,760
Speaker 1: moral problems with um, with socialism and defending the free

1249
01:04:56,760 --> 01:04:58,520
Speaker 1: market and the rest of it. And I agree completely,

1250
01:04:58,520 --> 01:05:01,480
Speaker 1: But I think our cult sure, and culture is malleable

1251
01:05:01,480 --> 01:05:04,280
Speaker 1: and it goes back and forth. Our cultures has evolved

1252
01:05:04,280 --> 01:05:07,120
Speaker 1: to a point where that is such a hard sell

1253
01:05:08,240 --> 01:05:11,800
Speaker 1: everybody's looking for Santa Claus all the time. We just

1254
01:05:11,960 --> 01:05:15,560
Speaker 1: want to be given stuff. Now here, here's my artist say.

1255
01:05:15,760 --> 01:05:18,120
Speaker 1: The World War two generation, which was all about duty

1256
01:05:18,160 --> 01:05:21,360
Speaker 1: sacrifice itself, sure, and and going through a catastrophe like

1257
01:05:21,400 --> 01:05:24,520
Speaker 1: World War Two changed the moral perspective of a lot

1258
01:05:24,600 --> 01:05:28,040
Speaker 1: of people beyond our capacity to appreciate. But Jack, this

1259
01:05:28,320 --> 01:05:30,640
Speaker 1: this gets to my optimism is I still believe And

1260
01:05:30,720 --> 01:05:33,080
Speaker 1: maybe it's a foolish thought on my part, but I

1261
01:05:33,120 --> 01:05:37,280
Speaker 1: still believe in in the idea from of like like

1262
01:05:37,600 --> 01:05:40,280
Speaker 1: in high Noon, you know Gary Cooper is all by

1263
01:05:40,400 --> 01:05:43,000
Speaker 1: himself and confronting the bad guys. I don't think that's true.

1264
01:05:43,120 --> 01:05:47,240
Speaker 1: I think in in America today that if you stand

1265
01:05:47,320 --> 01:05:50,520
Speaker 1: up for what's right, people will rally to you. I've

1266
01:05:50,560 --> 01:05:52,760
Speaker 1: seen it happen and I think it will still happen,

1267
01:05:52,800 --> 01:05:56,360
Speaker 1: and so I'm optimistic that eventually somebody will be found.

1268
01:05:56,840 --> 01:05:59,880
Speaker 1: And in American history there has always been somebody found.

1269
01:06:00,240 --> 01:06:02,680
Speaker 1: There was there have been people who have stood up

1270
01:06:02,680 --> 01:06:05,040
Speaker 1: and said no to to the wrong when the when

1271
01:06:05,040 --> 01:06:07,280
Speaker 1: the moment came, and they've been rallied behind. Now it's

1272
01:06:07,280 --> 01:06:09,200
Speaker 1: not there's no, it's not a utopia. It's not gonna

1273
01:06:09,200 --> 01:06:11,960
Speaker 1: be overnight success, be very challenging, it could be dangerous

1274
01:06:11,960 --> 01:06:15,360
Speaker 1: even But I do think that if conservatives have the

1275
01:06:15,400 --> 01:06:19,080
Speaker 1: guts to stand up for the principles of the American Constitution,

1276
01:06:19,080 --> 01:06:21,800
Speaker 1: people would would would rally to them. Because because he

1277
01:06:21,840 --> 01:06:23,840
Speaker 1: said utopia, I just wanted to throw in something I

1278
01:06:23,920 --> 01:06:25,720
Speaker 1: learned in the book that I hadn't I didn't even

1279
01:06:25,720 --> 01:06:29,680
Speaker 1: know silly enough that that the utopianism, the idea of

1280
01:06:29,800 --> 01:06:32,840
Speaker 1: utopia was a Robert Owen idea, and that was that

1281
01:06:33,040 --> 01:06:42,000
Speaker 1: you didn't need a violent overthrow. You could just you could.

1282
01:06:42,040 --> 01:06:45,000
Speaker 1: You could simply you set aside some land, some assets,

1283
01:06:45,040 --> 01:06:46,400
Speaker 1: and some money, and you could all live in a

1284
01:06:46,440 --> 01:06:49,120
Speaker 1: communal fashion. And it was Marks and Angles that came

1285
01:06:49,120 --> 01:06:51,800
Speaker 1: along and said and they ridiculed that. They actually ridiculed

1286
01:06:51,800 --> 01:06:54,280
Speaker 1: the concept of utopia. And that's that's another one of

1287
01:06:54,280 --> 01:06:57,240
Speaker 1: these splits between the sort of the soft road and

1288
01:06:57,280 --> 01:07:00,160
Speaker 1: the hard road and socialism. I just don't understand the

1289
01:07:00,240 --> 01:07:04,320
Speaker 1: kind of mentality that thinks that collectivism would be utopia.

1290
01:07:04,680 --> 01:07:07,760
Speaker 1: When I think of utopia, I think of living in

1291
01:07:07,840 --> 01:07:11,200
Speaker 1: my little house with my wife on a hill in

1292
01:07:11,240 --> 01:07:14,080
Speaker 1: the middle of nowhere, and leave me alone, and leave

1293
01:07:14,160 --> 01:07:17,320
Speaker 1: me alone. Everything is delivered by drone. That's the way

1294
01:07:17,320 --> 01:07:19,320
Speaker 1: you're made man. That gets back to my my point

1295
01:07:19,360 --> 01:07:22,040
Speaker 1: about the Founding fathers. They understood there are way more

1296
01:07:22,040 --> 01:07:24,960
Speaker 1: sheep than than sheep, dogs or wolves or whatever metaphor

1297
01:07:25,000 --> 01:07:26,640
Speaker 1: you want to use. Well, there would be no place

1298
01:07:26,720 --> 01:07:29,120
Speaker 1: for me. Come the revolution. They'll be up against the

1299
01:07:29,120 --> 01:07:30,720
Speaker 1: wall and shot, and then then they won't have to

1300
01:07:30,720 --> 01:07:33,960
Speaker 1: worry about missing therops like myself. You know, just real quickly,

1301
01:07:33,960 --> 01:07:38,480
Speaker 1: it's funny you mentioned well, uh, Marxism on ism. The

1302
01:07:38,520 --> 01:07:40,480
Speaker 1: rest of it's a couple of my favorite characters in

1303
01:07:40,480 --> 01:07:43,080
Speaker 1: the book were the twentieth century American labor leaders like

1304
01:07:44,360 --> 01:07:48,520
Speaker 1: Georgia meaning Miny, who who were adherentstall of this and

1305
01:07:48,560 --> 01:07:51,240
Speaker 1: then looked around and saw it was a bunch of

1306
01:07:51,320 --> 01:07:54,720
Speaker 1: snooty intellectuals looking down on their peeps who are hard

1307
01:07:54,760 --> 01:07:57,760
Speaker 1: working people there. This is a load of crap, you know.

1308
01:07:58,400 --> 01:08:00,640
Speaker 1: You know we mentioned iron Rand or leer it at.

1309
01:08:00,680 --> 01:08:04,160
Speaker 1: Ironrand loved labor unions. You know, it's really surprising to

1310
01:08:04,200 --> 01:08:06,720
Speaker 1: a lot of people, but she credited labor unions with

1311
01:08:06,800 --> 01:08:09,720
Speaker 1: staving off socialism in this country. She was cisely for

1312
01:08:09,760 --> 01:08:11,600
Speaker 1: that reason, was right. Now, there are some who are

1313
01:08:11,600 --> 01:08:13,440
Speaker 1: pretty bad guys. Who is the guy who in charge

1314
01:08:13,480 --> 01:08:15,320
Speaker 1: of the United Mine Workers went on strike during World

1315
01:08:15,360 --> 01:08:17,479
Speaker 1: War Two because he was an outright communist. But there

1316
01:08:17,479 --> 01:08:20,599
Speaker 1: were a lot of of union leaders who were not

1317
01:08:20,800 --> 01:08:23,840
Speaker 1: single handedly responsible, but very largely responsible for the for

1318
01:08:23,880 --> 01:08:27,599
Speaker 1: the defeat of communism. And the number one labor union

1319
01:08:27,720 --> 01:08:31,799
Speaker 1: leader responsible for the defeat of communism anybody, Ronald Reagan,

1320
01:08:31,840 --> 01:08:34,240
Speaker 1: who is the only union president ever to serve as

1321
01:08:34,240 --> 01:08:37,160
Speaker 1: President of the United States. Okay, yeah, I thought I

1322
01:08:37,240 --> 01:08:39,160
Speaker 1: was gonna say, Joe, we could not ever leave a

1323
01:08:39,160 --> 01:08:41,840
Speaker 1: discussion about this book without talking about labor unions. Because

1324
01:08:41,840 --> 01:08:44,640
Speaker 1: that also surprised me was that the author himself, at

1325
01:08:44,640 --> 01:08:47,200
Speaker 1: the end of the book concludes he said, ultimately the

1326
01:08:47,320 --> 01:08:51,040
Speaker 1: number one downfall of socialism was the inability to defeat

1327
01:08:51,080 --> 01:08:54,439
Speaker 1: the biggest capitalist society, the United States. And the really

1328
01:08:54,479 --> 01:08:56,640
Speaker 1: the reason they couldn't do it they couldn't get our

1329
01:08:56,680 --> 01:09:00,479
Speaker 1: workers because Gompers and Mini were so against so salism

1330
01:09:00,479 --> 01:09:05,080
Speaker 1: as the bourgeoisie high salutant idealism that wanted to see

1331
01:09:05,120 --> 01:09:07,679
Speaker 1: workers go through something as bad as a revolt before

1332
01:09:07,680 --> 01:09:10,760
Speaker 1: they got anything good right. And it was this incrementalism

1333
01:09:10,800 --> 01:09:13,120
Speaker 1: that the labor unions made life better, which is than

1334
01:09:13,120 --> 01:09:15,479
Speaker 1: I rand in philosophy. There's and there's the old story

1335
01:09:15,520 --> 01:09:21,080
Speaker 1: about the Soviets showing a propaganda films about American poverty

1336
01:09:21,479 --> 01:09:24,439
Speaker 1: to Soviet workers to show how to try and teach them, Well,

1337
01:09:24,479 --> 01:09:27,439
Speaker 1: it's not any better in the United States. Would look

1338
01:09:27,439 --> 01:09:30,559
Speaker 1: at the films and say, Wow, they have cars. Wouldn't

1339
01:09:30,560 --> 01:09:32,280
Speaker 1: it be awesome to see one of those today. I

1340
01:09:32,320 --> 01:09:34,559
Speaker 1: would love to see one of They're out there, They're

1341
01:09:34,560 --> 01:09:37,080
Speaker 1: out there. Yeah. The thing I loved about the labor

1342
01:09:37,200 --> 01:09:39,920
Speaker 1: leaders was that they had a very clear eyed recognition

1343
01:09:39,960 --> 01:09:43,559
Speaker 1: that all that we want to achieve, the engine of

1344
01:09:43,600 --> 01:09:46,320
Speaker 1: it is the free market. It's capitalism. We want to

1345
01:09:46,360 --> 01:09:48,479
Speaker 1: reform the way it's done, we want to better share

1346
01:09:48,520 --> 01:09:52,320
Speaker 1: for the working people, etcetera, etcetera. But they were absolutely

1347
01:09:52,520 --> 01:09:57,080
Speaker 1: unconfused about the natural state of man. Now, as I

1348
01:09:57,120 --> 01:09:59,920
Speaker 1: read that, I did get a little sad because I wonder,

1349
01:10:00,040 --> 01:10:02,960
Speaker 1: and I am curious what you guys think do our

1350
01:10:03,120 --> 01:10:06,639
Speaker 1: labor union leaders today Do they feel the same way,

1351
01:10:06,680 --> 01:10:09,840
Speaker 1: do you think? Or are they more infected with the

1352
01:10:09,880 --> 01:10:14,599
Speaker 1: socialist bug? Well, the rhetoric changes based on the culture.

1353
01:10:14,680 --> 01:10:17,920
Speaker 1: Like we're talking about a couple of minutes ago. I

1354
01:10:17,920 --> 01:10:19,280
Speaker 1: don't know how to answer that. I don't know. I

1355
01:10:19,280 --> 01:10:22,040
Speaker 1: don't know labor union leaders, so I can't really answer that.

1356
01:10:22,080 --> 01:10:25,840
Speaker 1: But I I do think that, Um, if you look

1357
01:10:25,880 --> 01:10:29,880
Speaker 1: around for the world's most exploitative corporations today, their labor unions.

1358
01:10:30,479 --> 01:10:33,400
Speaker 1: Those those are the exploitative corporations that exploit the workers

1359
01:10:33,439 --> 01:10:36,000
Speaker 1: because they used the They use the state to extract

1360
01:10:36,040 --> 01:10:38,360
Speaker 1: wealth from the workers against their will in order to

1361
01:10:38,400 --> 01:10:41,160
Speaker 1: achieve political goals that they think are better for the workers.

1362
01:10:41,720 --> 01:10:44,960
Speaker 1: So yeah, But but as far as whether union leaders

1363
01:10:45,000 --> 01:10:46,679
Speaker 1: today are more or less socialists, I really I don't

1364
01:10:46,680 --> 01:10:48,479
Speaker 1: know how to answer that. I would just have to

1365
01:10:48,520 --> 01:10:50,640
Speaker 1: be kind of careful because I negotiate with many of

1366
01:10:50,640 --> 01:10:53,840
Speaker 1: these entities. But I would just say that, um, sort

1367
01:10:53,840 --> 01:10:58,360
Speaker 1: of that clear eyed um defensive capitalism from Gompers and Mini,

1368
01:10:59,200 --> 01:11:02,160
Speaker 1: I don't I don't see that as much in today's labor. Well,

1369
01:11:02,200 --> 01:11:03,880
Speaker 1: we don't have a Cold War going on, you know,

1370
01:11:03,960 --> 01:11:05,960
Speaker 1: and that that made a lot of difference, helped you

1371
01:11:06,200 --> 01:11:08,840
Speaker 1: haven't being rivals with the Russians, I think meant a

1372
01:11:08,880 --> 01:11:12,800
Speaker 1: lot to union leaders in the fifties and sixties. It's back,

1373
01:11:13,560 --> 01:11:15,200
Speaker 1: and you know, it's funny because I you know, we're

1374
01:11:15,240 --> 01:11:17,479
Speaker 1: talking now in a in a time when a lot

1375
01:11:17,560 --> 01:11:20,559
Speaker 1: of college students, certainly I have no memory of the

1376
01:11:20,560 --> 01:11:23,000
Speaker 1: Cold War. And it's really amazing. I grew up in

1377
01:11:23,000 --> 01:11:25,240
Speaker 1: the Cold War right now. I I was thirteen when

1378
01:11:25,240 --> 01:11:26,840
Speaker 1: the Berlin Wall fell, so I don't know, It's not

1379
01:11:26,880 --> 01:11:29,600
Speaker 1: like it was always throughout my life, but but I

1380
01:11:29,680 --> 01:11:31,800
Speaker 1: grew up in a Cold War family. My father was

1381
01:11:32,040 --> 01:11:34,760
Speaker 1: an engineer for Lockeed skunk Works on spy planes, and

1382
01:11:34,800 --> 01:11:36,800
Speaker 1: so is his father. So the Cold War was a

1383
01:11:36,920 --> 01:11:40,400
Speaker 1: very large part of my life. And to look back

1384
01:11:40,600 --> 01:11:44,000
Speaker 1: at at this, at this era and see people who

1385
01:11:44,360 --> 01:11:48,479
Speaker 1: have no awareness of Soviet aggressive Soviet communism. They don't

1386
01:11:48,479 --> 01:11:53,639
Speaker 1: know anything about Prague Springing or the Hungarian revolt, revolt

1387
01:11:53,800 --> 01:11:56,000
Speaker 1: or any of this. They don't know any of this history,

1388
01:11:56,120 --> 01:11:58,080
Speaker 1: and they don't they don't remember what it was like

1389
01:11:58,120 --> 01:12:01,799
Speaker 1: in nine to watch the inks run over those Chinese kids,

1390
01:12:01,920 --> 01:12:05,920
Speaker 1: or to watch the Berlin Wall fall, the greatest moment

1391
01:12:05,960 --> 01:12:09,200
Speaker 1: of liberty. And it's just astonishing to me that these

1392
01:12:09,280 --> 01:12:11,679
Speaker 1: kids don't know it today. And and if you're looking

1393
01:12:11,720 --> 01:12:14,320
Speaker 1: for for stuff on this, the material is out there,

1394
01:12:14,320 --> 01:12:16,519
Speaker 1: it's a little hard to find. I would start right

1395
01:12:16,560 --> 01:12:19,679
Speaker 1: off by recommending the marvelous movie The Singing Revolution, which

1396
01:12:19,720 --> 01:12:22,960
Speaker 1: is about the Baltic States standing up against the Soviet Union.

1397
01:12:22,960 --> 01:12:25,120
Speaker 1: If that movie doesn't make you cry nothing, well, what

1398
01:12:25,160 --> 01:12:28,679
Speaker 1: a beautiful film about the willingness of these these people

1399
01:12:29,360 --> 01:12:33,200
Speaker 1: literally while the Soviet tanks are barreling down on them,

1400
01:12:33,479 --> 01:12:36,400
Speaker 1: to stand up and declare independence from the Soviet Union.

1401
01:12:36,800 --> 01:12:39,200
Speaker 1: Just amazing to see, and that history is in danger

1402
01:12:39,240 --> 01:12:42,000
Speaker 1: of being lost today. Amazing. Well, so you grow up

1403
01:12:42,000 --> 01:12:44,720
Speaker 1: in a world where there are two choices for the

1404
01:12:44,760 --> 01:12:46,920
Speaker 1: way to structure society, and you got the you know,

1405
01:12:47,000 --> 01:12:51,280
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union out there. Now, I think in our

1406
01:12:51,320 --> 01:12:53,320
Speaker 1: own minds, we're going to compare ourselves not to the

1407
01:12:53,320 --> 01:12:56,400
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, but all the stuff we see on social media.

1408
01:12:56,439 --> 01:12:59,040
Speaker 1: And they seem to have more stuff than I. So

1409
01:12:59,120 --> 01:13:01,559
Speaker 1: I need more stuff, and I'm getting ripped off because

1410
01:13:01,560 --> 01:13:03,759
Speaker 1: I don't have as much stuff as everybody else. Okay,

1411
01:13:03,800 --> 01:13:06,320
Speaker 1: So now now is seeing as how we've gone on

1412
01:13:06,360 --> 01:13:08,160
Speaker 1: for almost an hour and a half, I it's time

1413
01:13:08,240 --> 01:13:09,960
Speaker 1: and I gotta run because I gotta I've got a

1414
01:13:09,960 --> 01:13:12,400
Speaker 1: thing I gotta get to. Um. I will introduce the

1415
01:13:12,400 --> 01:13:14,679
Speaker 1: book that I was was going to recommend that we

1416
01:13:14,840 --> 01:13:18,639
Speaker 1: consider for the next book round, and that is review

1417
01:13:18,680 --> 01:13:23,120
Speaker 1: a book review, and that is Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker.

1418
01:13:23,160 --> 01:13:26,280
Speaker 1: Are you familiar with this book? Ye? Yeah, yeah, I

1419
01:13:26,320 --> 01:13:28,280
Speaker 1: texted you about it a while back and I okay,

1420
01:13:28,400 --> 01:13:31,760
Speaker 1: So Enlightenment Now. It's a bit long, and we can

1421
01:13:31,840 --> 01:13:33,720
Speaker 1: if you want, we could skip the last hundred and

1422
01:13:33,720 --> 01:13:37,960
Speaker 1: fifty pages or so. But what's Pinker is a Harvard

1423
01:13:38,000 --> 01:13:40,600
Speaker 1: professor who wrote a book a while back called The

1424
01:13:40,600 --> 01:13:42,479
Speaker 1: Better Angels of Our Nature in which he tried to

1425
01:13:42,520 --> 01:13:45,240
Speaker 1: prove that the world is becoming more peaceful and less warlike,

1426
01:13:45,760 --> 01:13:48,400
Speaker 1: and so many people argued with him about it that

1427
01:13:48,479 --> 01:13:51,320
Speaker 1: he put this book together, Enlightenment Now, as a defense

1428
01:13:51,479 --> 01:13:54,400
Speaker 1: of the Enlightenment, the defense of the principles of the

1429
01:13:54,439 --> 01:13:57,800
Speaker 1: eighteenth century Enlightenment. It's somewhat similar to Jonah Goldberg's book

1430
01:13:58,120 --> 01:14:00,280
Speaker 1: The Death of the West, but he's talking about how

1431
01:14:00,280 --> 01:14:02,960
Speaker 1: the Enlightenment is that's right. But he starts out with

1432
01:14:03,040 --> 01:14:07,040
Speaker 1: like two hundred pages of statistics and he puts them

1433
01:14:07,120 --> 01:14:09,840
Speaker 1: very well. It's not boring at all. That are mind blowing,

1434
01:14:10,000 --> 01:14:12,720
Speaker 1: mind bogging, how much better life is today than it

1435
01:14:12,760 --> 01:14:14,800
Speaker 1: was two hundred years ago. And he puts it in

1436
01:14:14,840 --> 01:14:17,320
Speaker 1: ways that you would never think of stuff. One of

1437
01:14:17,360 --> 01:14:21,400
Speaker 1: my favorite examples is he compares the danger to pedestrians

1438
01:14:21,400 --> 01:14:24,800
Speaker 1: caused by cars to the danger to pedestrians caused by

1439
01:14:24,800 --> 01:14:27,719
Speaker 1: horse drawn buggies. We don't often think about how dangerous

1440
01:14:27,800 --> 01:14:31,400
Speaker 1: to pedestrians it was to have horses running around all

1441
01:14:31,439 --> 01:14:33,160
Speaker 1: the time. But you know Governor Morris who wrote the

1442
01:14:33,160 --> 01:14:35,759
Speaker 1: Constitution at his leg taken off by a horse drawn belgie.

1443
01:14:35,800 --> 01:14:37,800
Speaker 1: I mean, it happened all the time. And so he

1444
01:14:37,920 --> 01:14:41,000
Speaker 1: goes to all of these marvelous details. And boy, Jack,

1445
01:14:41,040 --> 01:14:43,679
Speaker 1: if you've finished that book and you're not optimistic about

1446
01:14:43,760 --> 01:14:46,720
Speaker 1: about human humanity and the state we're in, nothing I

1447
01:14:46,760 --> 01:14:49,439
Speaker 1: like the idea of a more positive conversation. Are we

1448
01:14:49,479 --> 01:14:56,120
Speaker 1: about social objections? You can get it on audio too,

1449
01:14:56,200 --> 01:14:59,080
Speaker 1: So three months from now, at some point roughly three

1450
01:14:59,080 --> 01:15:00,800
Speaker 1: months from now too. Three from now, we'll do that.

1451
01:15:00,840 --> 01:15:03,280
Speaker 1: One very brief final thought then on the book, Tim

1452
01:15:03,320 --> 01:15:05,320
Speaker 1: your your thing about the Baltic States was beautiful. You

1453
01:15:05,320 --> 01:15:07,200
Speaker 1: want to rest on that one or you know, I

1454
01:15:07,280 --> 01:15:10,520
Speaker 1: remember watching it because I became interested in in Lithuania,

1455
01:15:11,600 --> 01:15:14,720
Speaker 1: and I watched them stand up to Soviet tyranny, and

1456
01:15:14,760 --> 01:15:18,880
Speaker 1: it was the most on awesome and spirit ennobling and

1457
01:15:19,040 --> 01:15:22,240
Speaker 1: terrifying thing to watch on CNN at the time, and

1458
01:15:22,280 --> 01:15:24,640
Speaker 1: to think about those people who had the bravery to

1459
01:15:24,680 --> 01:15:26,920
Speaker 1: stand up to a tyranny that you and I, I

1460
01:15:26,960 --> 01:15:31,280
Speaker 1: hope will never be able to imagine. And if people

1461
01:15:31,280 --> 01:15:34,080
Speaker 1: out there are unfamiliar with that, you kids today, you

1462
01:15:34,160 --> 01:15:36,840
Speaker 1: don't know what it was like. For goodness sake, learn

1463
01:15:36,880 --> 01:15:40,200
Speaker 1: about this stuff. There's a marvelous documentary series called Cold

1464
01:15:40,240 --> 01:15:42,200
Speaker 1: War that CNN did a few years ago, and get

1465
01:15:42,200 --> 01:15:45,160
Speaker 1: it on DVD that covers these things. If if you

1466
01:15:45,240 --> 01:15:48,200
Speaker 1: don't know the history of the tyranny and the war,

1467
01:15:48,439 --> 01:15:50,599
Speaker 1: and the misery and the horror of the Cold War

1468
01:15:50,680 --> 01:15:53,760
Speaker 1: of Cold War communism, learn it, man, and and count

1469
01:15:53,800 --> 01:15:57,120
Speaker 1: your blessings every day. Gottwhall's final thought on Heaven on Earth, Arise,

1470
01:15:57,160 --> 01:16:00,919
Speaker 1: Fall after Life. Socialism. Yeah, let's let's hit British socialism

1471
01:16:00,960 --> 01:16:02,920
Speaker 1: because we touched upon it briefly and I just want

1472
01:16:02,920 --> 01:16:09,520
Speaker 1: to just yeah, the Christian capitalism or just playing Christianity

1473
01:16:09,640 --> 01:16:13,760
Speaker 1: Christian socialism Tony Blair. This was this was the socialist

1474
01:16:13,800 --> 01:16:16,360
Speaker 1: side of of of the UK and around two thousand

1475
01:16:16,800 --> 01:16:19,439
Speaker 1: reducing taxes while acknowledging that the era of tax and

1476
01:16:19,520 --> 01:16:23,120
Speaker 1: spend is dead, reducing the welfare roles. Labor Party is

1477
01:16:23,160 --> 01:16:26,360
Speaker 1: now the party of work and order. Governments don't raise children,

1478
01:16:26,479 --> 01:16:28,960
Speaker 1: families do. That was socialism in the UK at the

1479
01:16:28,960 --> 01:16:32,080
Speaker 1: turn of the century. That's right of our current Democratic Party. Wow,

1480
01:16:32,160 --> 01:16:36,200
Speaker 1: that's interesting, that's amazing. Final notes thought, they added one

1481
01:16:36,400 --> 01:16:40,760
Speaker 1: word to our thoughts in the Declaration of Independence when

1482
01:16:40,760 --> 01:16:43,800
Speaker 1: they are creating their constitution for the French Revolution, they

1483
01:16:43,800 --> 01:16:46,599
Speaker 1: more or less agreed with life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

1484
01:16:46,600 --> 01:16:48,840
Speaker 1: But they also threw in the word equality, and that's

1485
01:16:48,880 --> 01:16:51,880
Speaker 1: what set off the whole socialist modern socialist movement. And

1486
01:16:51,920 --> 01:16:53,479
Speaker 1: if you throw in the word of quality, I mean

1487
01:16:53,560 --> 01:16:56,440
Speaker 1: you wanted quality at the end, well you're gonna have socialism.

1488
01:16:56,640 --> 01:16:58,960
Speaker 1: There's no way to avoid it. My final thought, looking

1489
01:16:59,000 --> 01:17:02,440
Speaker 1: into all the characters in the book, um some curiosity

1490
01:17:02,479 --> 01:17:06,120
Speaker 1: as of history, some people who are responsible for tens

1491
01:17:06,120 --> 01:17:08,519
Speaker 1: of millions of deaths, was you had two groups. You

1492
01:17:08,520 --> 01:17:12,759
Speaker 1: had the fools, um, who just didn't understand human nature,

1493
01:17:13,200 --> 01:17:16,320
Speaker 1: and then you had the monsters. And they're the ones

1494
01:17:16,360 --> 01:17:18,680
Speaker 1: that really matter. And you know, as a combative kid

1495
01:17:18,760 --> 01:17:21,880
Speaker 1: from working class Chicago, Uh, my question is who the

1496
01:17:21,880 --> 01:17:25,520
Speaker 1: hell are you? Who the hell are you to determine?

1497
01:17:26,000 --> 01:17:29,479
Speaker 1: Never mind me, but mankind and the way it has

1498
01:17:29,600 --> 01:17:33,200
Speaker 1: to go. Who the hell are you? And that's the

1499
01:17:33,200 --> 01:17:35,640
Speaker 1: way I came away from finds beautiful, No, that is

1500
01:17:35,680 --> 01:17:38,599
Speaker 1: the right hand is beautiful. Final final note, Lenin marks

1501
01:17:38,600 --> 01:17:42,800
Speaker 1: for pieces of ship around around the hearn who was

1502
01:17:42,840 --> 01:17:45,599
Speaker 1: your least favorite character in the book? Minds Lenin, Marx

1503
01:17:45,760 --> 01:17:49,800
Speaker 1: what a loser. Lennon is the worst person. He killed people,

1504
01:17:49,800 --> 01:17:53,599
Speaker 1: but Mars just not sad pathetic piece of ship. Lennon

1505
01:17:53,680 --> 01:17:56,360
Speaker 1: wasn't much better. Lenin was a yeah, he was an

1506
01:17:56,360 --> 01:17:59,720
Speaker 1: extra big piece of I'm gonna only because I don't

1507
01:17:59,720 --> 01:18:02,240
Speaker 1: know up about now, but arguing because I know he

1508
01:18:02,280 --> 01:18:07,559
Speaker 1: was weel stones. Let's not fight the book review, gentlemen,

1509
01:18:07,600 --> 01:18:11,040
Speaker 1: will do it again in a few months. Extra large