 and let private enterprise enter into these neighborhoods and start competing for that money and start innovating around education and start providing the best service and let parents, parents in the South side of Chicago decide on what school to send their kid rather than some state-regulated sighting work and suddenly you will get a flowering of innovation, progress, competition and a dramatic improvement of education for the poorest of the poor here, for the people who most at this point need it. Is it possible for me to respond or not? Yes, go ahead Dr. Moore. Okay, there's another make-believe here about private and public. Let me tell you about Yale University that you may not know. It loves to represent itself as a private university, but it isn't. The largest single source of revenue for Yale University are grants from the United States government. They get way more money at that private school than most of the public schools in the United States could ever dream of getting. And the same is true of U Penn and of Harvard and of all of the others because one of the consequences of capitalism that organizes its enterprises top down with a few people at the top is that those few people use the system for themselves and not for the rest of us. And they've organized the university and they've organized the government that my opponent keeps wanting to blame to do their bidding, which is why Yale has the money that it has because it siphons off from the government way beyond what any welfare mom could dream of. You're making my point, that's what happened under cronyism, not capitalism. Yeah, calling it cronyism doesn't erase the capitalism that it's the crony of. No, it's not crony capitalism, it's just cronyism. So we only have time for one more question. So I want to take the person at the front of the line. First, sorry to everyone for not doing it, stand in line, let me check. So hello, I have a good question for Dr. Richard Wolfe. So it sounds to me like one of the biggest arguments against socialism is that like the masses of the people are not qualified to run a successful business. And so if you bring democracy to the workplace, suddenly you'll have all these people who are not trained to run a successful business, running the business. So I think that issue kind of shows itself when it comes to things like setting salaries or hourly wages. So I was wondering if you could comment on the details of what democracy in the workplace would look like and why do you think the workers should have a say on how to run the business? I'd be glad to do that. By the way, the arguments that the workers can't run a business, that workers can't together run a business, those are the same arguments that were used to tell us that we can't have parliamentary government, that we can't have elections because we need leaders who are specialists who are so excellent, like that retarded king that we've had for the last 40 years because he had the great good luck to be born to retarded parents or whatever else story we're told. It's an insult to human beings. When workers get together to run a co-op and we have thousands of examples across the world right now, they're not stupid. They know that some people have skills in one area more than another and they accommodate that in a variety of ways. What they don't do is allow some people to lord it over others because of the structure that gives them the place to do that. They rotate functions. So if you're in a leadership position now, you'll be in a non-leadership position later which is a very good guarantee that you don't abuse the position that every capitalist in power has always done. So yeah, a worker co-op uses the belief in the democracy of each individual to make an informed decision together and believe in it and the resulting enterprises are now more efficient than any capitalist enterprise. I mean, the ignorance of how a business runs is stunning. I mean, this isn't how business works. I mean, yes, let's vote on the shape of the iPhone. Let's figure out how the iPhone should be constructed based on, let's rotate positions between programmer, janitor, and CEO of Apple. That'll work really well. It's stunning. We live in a complex technological society and we think we can vote on things that we can think we can rotate jobs like we did on a kibbutz. It's exactly, I mean, everything that is being described functioned on a kibbutz in Israel and it failed. It could never competed. It was subsidized by government from day one before the state of Israel was subsidized by which Jews were on overseas. It has never been a model that has succeeded. It can't because it denies the nature of specialization. It denies the advantages of nature, the division of labor. It denies the fact that we have different capabilities, different abilities, different skill sets and provide different contributions to the productive venture. And this denial is destructive. Yeah, I mean, that will be one of our closing statements for the last time for our speakers. Each speaker will have five minutes and then we'll start with Dr. Ward. Okay. I'm amazed at the contents of this discussion. I think it could have been a lot more productive. I don't find the debate between private and state enterprises all that meaningful. My understanding is that state enterprises have long ago in most societies copied what private capitalist enterprises did. That is they copied the employer employee structure, whether it was public or private, which is why the workers in both of these types of enterprises share the same alienation, the same resistance, the same dissatisfaction. You know, the history of the human race, at least for much of the last two or 3000 years, displays a sequence of economic systems that have something very troubling in common. In the slave system, we had two positions basically, master, slave. One had all the power and accumulated the wealth and the other ones did the work. And when that was no longer tolerable, at least in Europe, it was overthrown and it was replaced by a feudal system in which once again we had two positions, a lord and a serf. And the lord were few and the serf were many and the lord had the power and the wealth and the serfs did the work until they couldn't stand it and they made revolutions and we had capitalism. And when capitalism arrived, it promised something. It promised in the French revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity. And in the American revolution, they added democracy. And those were supposed to be brought by capitalism. Well, we got capitalism. Fuedalism was gone and slavery was gone. But guess what? Capitalism, which made big promises, didn't deliver and Marx figured out why? Because they had replaced the master slave and the lord serf with the employer and the employee. Notice the parallel of tiny minority or employers. They gather the wealth and power and the employees, the vast majority, do the work. As long as you organize your economic system that way, liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy are gonna be dreams you have unless and until you realize them by making the social change that was at the root of all of the earlier ones. Namely to finally have a social and economic system that wasn't broken into a minority that run the show and the rest of us that are squeezed spectators. And the way to do that is to bring the democracy home into the economy because it was never there. The political democracy we had was formalistic and hollow and inadequate as we know it to be. The solution is to bring democracy to the workplace, to tap all of the skills that are now not tapped because we don't educate, we don't recognize, we don't respect and we don't value the vast majority of people who are, after all, merely employees. Capitalism doesn't recognize the individual, it disrespects the individual at every turn and that in the end will be one of the major reasons the transition to socialism, which you now see around you will likely succeed. So my opponent has never talked about the force, the coercion, the authoritarian nature of his so-called democracy. What if you don't wanna play the game as they have set it up? What if you want to start a business? What if you want to be an employee? Can you do this under this new system of socialism? Can you open your own bank? Can you distribute your own capital? Of course not. Of course not. You're constrained to let the majority dictate for you. We replace the lord of the manor with the mob. The mob will decide on what job you have, what your salary should be. The majority will decide on what you get to do and not do what job you rotate into or not. Maybe on who you marry, like in Plato's Republic, why not since all wisdom lies in the majority under democracy? Coercion is an essential element of socialism. You cannot manifest it. You cannot bring it into reality without forcing, coercing people into doing things they don't want to do. Maybe some do, but some people will not wanna do it. And this is the exact opposite of capitalism, which is the system not that exists today. Imagine, you have a little bit of imagination. Imagine a system in which there is no cronyism because the government is too small and insignificant in terms of its economic involvement to give you anything. Imagine a world in which you can choose. You wanna start a co-op. You can start a co-op. You wanna start a keyboard. You can go voluntarily as long as you don't force anybody. You can do it and you can suffer the consequences of those choices. You wanna start an Amazon and you wanna be employed by Amazon, you can do that too. You wanna go to the moon, raise the capital, make the money, go to the moon. It's up to you. You get to make decisions free, free of coercion, of authority. And you get to benefit from the consequences if it goes well and you get to suffer the consequences when it goes badly. It's your personal life, your personal responsibility. Live it. Don't live it for the sake of some collective and common good. Live it for your sake. Figure out what your values are. Figure out how you wanna live. And hopefully you're still in a political system which allows you to manifest those values, allows you to strive to act, to pursue your values. Somebody mentioned, let me also say, it seems to me such a poverty of imagination. Imagine a world where you divide everybody into two groups, employees and employers. Bizarre. How many employers become employees? How many employees become employers? How many people have multiple jobs? How many people start multiple companies but then become employees or start as employees, learn the skill, figure out how to do it and then start a business? We have an opportunity and the capitalism, we live in a mixed economy today, so the capitalism would be 10 times greater. We have an opportunity to do so many things with our life. What a poverty of thinking. The number of businesses started in the United States is in millions a year. People start their own businesses because they don't wanna be employees. Great, that's wonderful. And they land up employing people and those people learn a skill and ultimately they become employees. I have to say something about the poor because somebody mentioned it and he's right. The only system in human history to raise people out of poverty is being capitalism. The only places in which people have come out of poverty have been places that apply some capitalism. It is socialism that enslaves the ambitious poor into a mediocre life of choosing between an employee and an employer. No, you have a richness to life. The possibilities are infinite if you are free to make those choices. Don't let's evolve into a system where we are less free. Let's not evolve into a system where we reduce choices. Let's not evolve into a system where we have less imagination. Let's embrace a system that expands human freedom, that expands human prosperity, that expands the possibilities of what can be done. Imagine new business forms that none of us have thought of and the capitalism you can make them real and the socialism you need permission. I want a permissionless society. I want a free society. I want a capitalist society. Thank you. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me, you get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe, press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.