 As so, socialism's on the rise everywhere, including in some countries in Latin America in spite of Venezuela, capitalism's on the decline in terms of popularity, even though everybody can see right before their eyes the consequence of socialism. And everybody should be able to see, if they know a little bit of history, if they know something about the world, the outcome of capitalism. And yet, everybody chooses socialism instead of capitalism. They choose poverty, starvation, and eating their pets over the kind of world that is possible of great prosperity, great life expectancy, great quality of life, great standard of living. They don't want that, it turns out. Why? Why the rise of socialism? If capitalism is so great and socialism is so bad, why the rise of socialism, especially in the United States? Well, I'd say first you have to understand, the first thing to understand is that we don't live under capitalism. The left has been very good at defining every problem that exists in the world today as a problem caused by capitalism, right? But we don't have capitalism today. We have what is a mixed economy. We have elements of private property and freedom, and lots of controls and regulations and taxes and massive government spending. So lots of statism, lots of socialism, if you will. So it's a mixture of capitalism and socialism. And the left has been very good for 100 years, really, in the United States, blaming every problem we have on the capitalist piece of it, and claiming that the solution is always more state, more state. And the capitalist side, the people who believe in capitalism, have been terrible. I mean, gross negligence is at defending capitalism and explaining what it is and why all these problems are not caused by capitalism. I mean, one example from recently is 2008 financial crisis. Everybody thinks it's capitalism. It's not capitalism. There's no capitalism in 2007 in the banking sector and the mortgage sector that would explain the collapse, right? These are two of the heaviest regulated industries in the United States, heavy, heavy regulations. That's what caused the financial crisis. And we could talk more if you want about what caused the financial crisis. And yet nobody went out, except me and Peter Schiff, maybe, and said, no, no, no, capitalism didn't do this. Even George Bush, who is Republican supposedly, right? He said, no, this is caused by capitalism. We need to bail out all the banks and to save capitalism. Capitalism, capitalism, I mean, a mishmash of nothingness, right? And in complete capitulation. So, so you've got, you've got the left being very good at blaming every problem of capitalism and the people who advocate for capitalism, not standing up for capitalism. Part of the question is, why don't they stand up for capitalism and why did the people buy into the left's propaganda? Because they do and they bought into it for over a hundred years now, since the progressive era, since 1914 with such, you know, it's a hundred and something years, since Woodrow Wilson at least, if not even before that. And the reason is, you know, that fundamentally we all grow up with a, well taught, a moral code, an ethical code that is consistent with socialism. So what did our mothers teach us is good. Share. Share. Think of others first. Think of yourself last. Now they don't believe this. No mother actually believes any of this. But that's what we say. That's what we present as the moral ideal. Be selfless. Being selfish is bad. Thinking about yourself is bad. You've got to always share it. You've got to always think about other people. And sacrifice, we are told by our mothers often, is a wonderful thing. It's the most virtuous thing. I mean, they tell us how much they've sacrificed for us, how much we owe them because of all the sacrifices they've committed to. Sacrifice is like a noble word. I mean, to me, it's the essential evil in our world is the idea that people are sacrificing, right? Why sacrifice? But put that aside, to sacrifice, to be selfless, to share, that's good. Well, what does socialism want? It wants us all to share, right? It wants us to think of others first, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. There are people out there who are suffering. There are people out there who don't have as much as we have. It's our moral duty to help them. And if we're not helping them, then all the government is doing is helping us be a little bit more moral by taking stuff from us and giving it to them. So that's one piece is this depiction of morality as otherism, altruism. We all think altruism is fantastic, right? But altruism is about placing the well-being of other people above you. But there's a second twist to this, right? So that's one piece of it. The second piece of it, we've been taught since we were very little that self-interest is what? It's about what? It's about exploiting other people. It's about being nasty to other people. It's about lying, cheating, stealing. It's about doing whatever it takes to get you away, whatever it takes. That's self-interest. So think about what that means. So we've got a file folder in our mind, in a sense. Our mind, our concepts are like files, file folders. And in the file folder we've put in, so the file folder at the top says self-interested people, selfish people. And in that file folder we have lying, stealing, cheating, backstabbing, getting, doing whatever it takes to get you away. But what else do we have in that file folder? We all know that what business is about is making a profit. We all know that when Steve Jobs got up every morning he was like, I want to do something for myself. I'm going to make something that makes me happy. I'm going to build something beautiful for me. Yeah, everybody else benefits too, but business is about self-interested. Business is about doing what they love doing, what they enjoy doing, what they have fun doing and what makes them a lot of money. Capitalism is about self-interest. You go shopping. When you go shopping, you're thinking constantly in your mind, this is great. I'm helping my fellow man. I'm making sure people have jobs. Yeah, exactly. Nobody thinks that. Now, I'm buying shoes because I know that salesperson needs a job and I'm contributing to their ability to have a job. Nobody thinks that. We buy shoes. We buy iPhones. We buy whatever it is that we buy because we're trying to make our lives better. We're being selfish. We're being self-interested. So you've got this file folder in our mind which has lying, cheating, stealing, SOB and businessmen, capitalism, markets, all in the same file. Financiers like you talk about? Certainly financiers. They're after-profit. They can't even hide the product. I mean, Steve Jobs can say, look, I've made your life better. I gave you the iPhone. So I deserve the billions. What does the bank or city bank do? Well, city bank's a bad example because it's a bad bank. But Goldman Sachs, what does he do? What does he present the world? Right? Yes, I financed Apple. I made Apple possible, but that's an abstraction. That's hard to get. So all of these things go into the file folder of selfish and they mix up. So implicit assumption, our instinctual assumption, our immediate assumption is, businessmen equals crook. Capitalism equals a system of exploiting lying, cheating, SOBs that are going to do bad things. You know, why do we have... You walk into an elevator here in LA or anywhere in the country and you walk into an elevator and there's a little diploma on the thing that says, a government bureaucrat has inspected this elevator. It won't drop and kill you. Why do we have that? Because we're convinced that those greedy, selfish, profit-seeking businessmen would build elevators that killed us if not for the government inspector. Right? Because the best way to make money in business is to kill your customers. We believe that. We truly believe that. Right? If there were no food inspectors, restaurants would poison us all the time, like McDonald's. Every time we'd go and get a hamburger at McDonald's, you would get food poisoning and some of us would die. So we need food inspectors to make sure that doesn't happen because those greedy, selfish SOBs, right, we know business equals selfish, selfish equals lying, cheating, stealing. They're going to lie, cheating, and steal. So we regulate them. We control them. If you're in business, if you're selfish and you're in business and I know you have the potential to be a lying, stealing, SOB, what am I going to do? I'm going to put a government bureaucrat right behind you, watching everything that you do and making sure that you don't do it. Right? You don't die, steal or cheat. So this moral framing of sacrifice, sharing, taking care of people, frames everything, everything that we think about in the world out there. And that selfishness is bad and lying, cheating, stealing. That's the behavior. That way of framing the world has to lead to socialism or it has to lead to some statism. It leads away from capitalism because capitalism, capitalism, no matter what you think of it, capitalism is a system of self-interest. It's a system where people pursue selfish, their selfish interests. So if selfishness means truly lying, stealing, cheating, then capitalism is a system of lying, stealing, and cheating. And we have to regulate and control it. And then we have to help those other people because that's our moral duty and the only way to help them because you're too selfish to help them yourself. It's for me to tax you and to give the money to them. So I think everything, everything we experience today in the world can be explained in terms of this moral view. And unless you have an alternative to this moral view, you can't fight socialism. You can't fight socialism. You can't fight AOC on the basis of how you're going to pay for it. Because there are sophisticated economic economists out there, whether they're modern monetary theorists or they're Paul Krugman, who is anti-modern monetary theory but pro-Keynesian economics. He can fight a justification for, people will justify the economics of it. They'll find a way to pay for it. You have to challenge on morality, but what's the alternative? Republicans have exactly the same morality, moral code as the Democrats. That's why the Republicans have drifted left every year. They're more socialist. I mean, if you take the Republican Party of after the New Deal, FDR's New Deal, Republicans swore that when they got into power, they would undo the New Deal. They got into power in Eisenhower. They didn't, they didn't do anything. And contrary, they protected the New Deal. And what exactly was the New Deal? The New Deal was massive regulation of financial industry, massive. Every aspect of finance became regulated. Every aspect of banking became regulated. The New Deal was entitlements, the first kind of real entitlements, primarily social security. Social security ensued at the beginnings of a welfare state. The first time America really engaged in industrial activity, the big Tennessee Valley projects and building dams and building these things. So it was big government projects where the government is directly involved in the economy. Did Republicans undo that? No. Did they undo social security? No. Did they undo the financial regulations? No, in spite of what some on the left would claim. And then we had the Great Society. So the Great Society was now a big step towards full welfare. So it's Medicare and Medicaid. It's real welfare. Actually giving people, at the federal level, giving people who are poor money, food stamps. Food stamps were introduced, I think, in the New Deal. But direct cash payments were introduced in the 1960s during the Great Society. And then Republicans swore at the time, as soon as we get into power, we're going to undo all this. Never happened. And the contrary. Now, somebody like Donald Trump runs and says, we will not touch social security and Medicare. We're going to make them stronger. We're going to make the welfare state work better. But we're huge advocates of the welfare state. All the Republicans hold that. So what you have is a complete shift to the left of both political parties. But it's inevitable. Because how are you going to say you're going to do away with Medicare? I mean, old people. You're not going to take care of old people? What's going to happen to old people? I mean, the heart starts pounding. I mean, you start feeling bad. And markets, you're going to let those greedy. You're going to let those lying, stealing SOBs do health care for old people. They're going to exploit them. They're going to take advantage of them. They're going to cause these old people to die. We know that, right? Because that's what markets do. Because that's what selfishness does. So unless you challenge the fundamental underlying moral premises, you can never get rid of the policies, right? And nobody is willing to do that. Nobody is willing to do that. And there's even ideas deeper than that. Because, you know, statists, socialists, others always claim, one of their basic claims is that most of us don't know what's good for us. We're too stupid is one way to think about it. But more importantly, they would argue philosophically they would say it's not so much about stupidity. It's about the fact of truth, what's really important, what's really true. It's just not accessible to simpletons like us. You know, you need to be, you need to kind of commune with the spirits to really discover what's true. This is Plato, right? If you go back to Plato. You know, only the philosopher king knows the real truth. Only the philosophers see the sun. We all live in a cave. We see shadows. We don't really know what's good for us. We don't know how to live. So the philosopher needs to tell us how to live. And it's okay for him to force us how to live because it's better for us. So we should embrace the force inflicted on us. And if you think about every authoritarian regime, it's always, well, we know what's good for you. You don't know what's good for you. So again, how do you challenge that philosophically? You have to, you have to change the terms of the debate. So what I ran does, what I ran, why I ran, I think is the most important philosopher of the last 2000 years. And I think the most important thinker in all of these realms is because she challenges that assumption that you can't think for yourself. She challenges the idea that you can't figure out what's good for you. And then she challenges the whole morality of sacrifice or selflessness of other people. And she's the first philosopher in a comprehensive systematic way to actually challenge the conventional wisdom, the conventional approach, which I think conventional is statism, conventional is socialism, conventional is other people making decisions for you.