 There are two big objections to capitalism. One from the left and one from the right, if you will, traditionally, although you could argue that today both the left and right are making the same arguments. But the left, remember, is materialist, at least the Marxist left, is materialist. They don't believe in any kind of spiritual values. They don't believe in the importance of spiritual values. They believe, following Marx, what's important is stuff, material. This is part of their rejection of religion, although, of course, religion doesn't have a monopoly over spiritual values. Everything is real, but it's part of their rejection of free will. It's all about materialism. It's all about atoms bouncing around. It's all about the material wealth that we have. And therefore, the left is obsessed with redistribution, with wealth, with who has what, who has stuff, and who doesn't have stuff. And they're obsessed with the idea that workers are exploited because they're materialists. What they see in terms of production is they see a worker put things together. That's the work. What financial markets, what capitalists, what CEOs, what managers, what marketing executives do, is amorphous. It's kind of the spiritual realm. It's not real. It's not observable. It's not something I can touch. Not something I can feel. Not something I can hold. And therefore, it is unimportant, insignificant. The only thing that is significant, you can see this in what's his name, Richard Wolff, the economist, the only thing that adds value is labor. The people who produce create with their physical muscles, with their hands, or today with their typing fingers. That's what counts. That's what counts. So capitalism, so to them, capitalism is immoral, capitalism is wrong, capitalism is objectionable because, because capitalism rewards the people who use their mind and not who use their muscle. Because the worker is not compensated for what he actually makes. See, the way that Marxists think about this, if you think about Apple producing computers, what really matters is the person who assembles this. That's where the real value added is. It's in the people who assemble this. And if you take all the iPhones in the world, and you take the revenue from all the iPhones in the world, and divided by the number of employees, the people who literally do their work to assemble this, and to maybe some, you know, some most sophisticated Marxists get the idea that somebody has to have an idea and maybe you have to have marketing, suddenly the CEO and suddenly the top executives and suddenly the capitalists, the investors didn't do anything. So you take all the revenue produced for this and you divide it by the number of employees, that should be their salary. And that of course is not their salary. It's not how we determine their salary. But they produced this and they're not getting the full value of what they produced. So therefore they are being exploited. Now that is upside down morally and economically. Workers do not produce this. There is no iPhone without a vision for an iPhone, Steve Jobs. And that vision of an iPhone makes the iPhone possible and by making the iPhone possible, it makes possible all the jobs that everybody has associated with the entire supply chain that makes iPhones. There are no jobs. There is no manufacturing. There is nobody working. There are no workers without the idea. And of course the idea cannot go anywhere. The idea cannot go anywhere unless somebody is willing to fund the idea. To provide capital, to build the plant, to buy the equipment, to pay the wages. So the prime responsibility for any business, for the existence of any product and therefore the existence of employees, for the existence of workers, for the existence of any wages is with the CEO and with the capitalist. And then you can go down the pyramid where every layer of senior managers is benefiting the organization far more than the cumulative impact of all the workers at the bottom. Workers who are relatively easy to replace, by the way, because their skill set is pretty low, therefore there are lots of people who share that skill set. And the higher up you go in the organization, the more difficult it is to find people. So you get supply and demand impacts. But the more important aspect of it is capitalism is the system of justice. It rewards people based on what they contribute. It rewards people based on the values they produce. It rewards people based on what they do. Not on how hard they work, but on how much they work contributes, adds to the actual value, to the value of the thing being produced. So capitalism is a system of justice. Indeed, socialism is a system of injustice because it treats the people who produce the least as the most important, who add the least amount of value as the most important. And it takes the people who actually make everything possible and treats them like shit, treats them really, really badly, negates their contribution. And by the way, it's because capitalism is a system of justice that it is successful, that it motivates, that it incentivize, that it ultimately leads to the production of huge amounts of wealth and the increase in the standard of living of individuals across the board on a scale that is unimaginable. Somebody says, what is surplus value? There is no such thing as surplus value. So the value is what the Marxists call the value above and beyond what the worker put into the product. So the value that the firm gets that it doesn't pay out in wages. But that's not surplus value. That's the value. Substance value is the profit. But the profit is the value of the product and the profit only exists because the people who supply the capital, the people who supply the ideas and the people who supply the management skill make the product possible. So it's not surplus value. It is the reward, the just reward, the just reward for those who contribute the most to the production of the good, the production of the value. Lewis says, sorry, beneficiary, did I say something different? I don't know. So one objective is a material objection. It's why do they have so much? Why do these people have so little? Why do these people have so little when they did all the work? Because all they can do is be perceptual. They can't understand how products are actually created, how things really come into existence. The crucial role the capitalist plays, the crucial role the entrepreneur and the CEO play. That is typically the criticisms on the left. The left is obsessed with distribution. The left is obsession. Who has the money? The left is obsessed with who has what? How much has been given? Because the left is obsessed with material values. What is the typical complaint about capitalism from the right? Now, the right traditionally views material values as less important. Though what really matters is spiritual values. What really matters is how we live and the spiritual values involved in it. And again, that's why the right is typically religious. And again, not because religion has a monopoly over spiritual values, but that's because since they are religious, they value spiritual values. So they care less about the distribution of wealth. They care less about how things are produced and who gets what from that production. What they care about is how capitalism corrupts the human spirit. How the profit motive takes people away from community and family and other values that they deem as more important than the material values. They are much more likely to be nostalgic to some imagined past in which we didn't work so hard and in which families were more together and in which we embrace some kind of communal zeitgeist and lived happy, you know, fulfilling lives without being obsessed by work and production and creation and building and making money. It's, you know, early on in the history of capitalism, in Germany there were many thinkers that were really upset by capitalism. Capitalism was emptying the villages and people were going into the cities to pursue their jobs. There was production. There were factories being built where there used to be forests and where there was this beautiful scenery and nature. And the original German conservatives were, they wanted to conserve the old way of living. The village, the community, religion, altruism, and they saw capitalism as a threat to all that. And indeed many American conservatives, British conservatives, saw the threat as well. And that's why conservatives have never really been advocates for lazific capitalism, for real capitalism. Because they think, I mean this goes back to if you remember who Irving Kristol was, Irving Kristol was a prominent conservatives in the 1970s, well mainly the 80s, well 70s and 80s, 70s and 80s. And Irving Kristol wrote a famous book called Two Cheers for Capitalism. And he said, look it produces the wealth, there's no question about that. And it allows people these freedoms. There's no question about that, that's great. But what does it do to the human soul? When people are consumed by the pursuit of profit, when people are consumed by work and don't have enough, when people are giving too many options. For example, one of the traditional conservative critiques of capitalism is too many options, too many choices, too much consumerism. Don't you hear that all the time? We're a consumerist society and it's bad to be a consumerist society. And we spend, we utilize this freedom to consume to buy trivialities. By the way, the third cheer for capitalism which we refused to give, Irving Kristol refused to give, was because it was too obsessed with being self-interested, consuming what you wanted, producing what you wanted, living your life the way you chose to live it. It was too self-interested. And it abandoned that sense of community and altruism. So for the right, capitalism is morally offensive, spiritually offensive, too materialistic, too materialistic. And yeah, Irving Kristol not accidentally was a communist in his youth, he was a Trotskyite. As were all the originators of the New York conservative movement, they were originally all Trotskyites. And they converted to being conservatives during the 1970s, no, sorry, during the 1960s as they became more and more and more anti-Soviet and as they realized more and more the evils and damage of socialism, but they never, never, ever fully embraced capitalism because they couldn't embrace it spiritually. That is their objection. So the anti-consumer society, too much freedom, too much individualism, too many choices, that is the critique you get from the right. And of course, both left and right, agree with one thing, that businessmen are not ultimately to be trusted. That that self-interested motive that guides businessmen, the profit motive, is not to be trusted. And that's why both left and right regulate. The left regulates more because the left is more concerned with the material, but the right regulates, if you go back to the Nixon administration, the Bush administration, heavy regulators, control, limit, the scope of what these businesses can do because we don't trust them. Okay, so one has to develop the ability to address both concerns. One has to be able to talk about the morality of capitalism and why morality of capitalism is based on the idea of individualism, why individual freedom is a good thing, the only good thing, why it is necessary, why spirituality does not involve community, spirituality does not involve altruism. Spirituality means using your mind, applying it, embracing it. Spirituality means that of human consciousness. The consciousness. Spirituality is not the exclusive realm of religion and it's not the exclusive realm of collectivism. And you have to be able to argue against the claims of the Marxists about distribution. One thing to note that almost everybody assumes when entering the marketplace and critiquing it is they all assume that the products that we have, the wealth that we have, the iPhones already exist. They assume that everything that we have is just there. That's why, by the way, the field of economics is obsessed with the idea of scarcity. When they should be obsessed with the idea of production, economics should not be the study of scarcity, it should be the study of production. How do we get the stuff that we have? How do we get more stuff? And if you study that, then you realize the spiritual element involved in producing, in creating, in building, in making. The immense spiritual values that are necessary in order to do all that. What economics should study is how to produce abundance, how to grow the economy, how to make stuff, produce stuff, create stuff. Not how to distribute it. That comes straight out of kind of a Marxist idea. There is no pie that we then have to distribute. The real question is how do you bake a pie? And how do you keep growing that pie constantly? And who bakes the pie? And how do they do it? And how's the best way to bake a pie? That is what economics should study. It should be the study of production and trade. Once you make the try, pie, how do you get it to your customers? That's the trade side of it. So production and trade, those are the two features economically of capitalism. Those are the two features of economics. Those are the two features that economics should study and should be focused on. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broads. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now. 30 likes, that should be at least 100. 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