 Ευχαριστούμε για την συμφωνία της Ευρώπης Βολιμ 4. Και σήμερα η συμφωνία είναι για το Βελφερ Σταίτης. Ο Βελφερ Σταίτης είναι ένα σύγχρονο παιδί στην Ευρώπη, όχι μόνο στην Ευρώπη. Επίσης, στην Ευρώπη, όταν είμαστε πίσω ότι η ΝΕΤΕΣ είναι η ΝΕΤΕΚΟΡΑΤΑ, και ότι μετά το Βελφερ Σταίτης, οι παράδειγες που παίρνουν, δεν υποστηρίζουν, ο Βελφερ Σταίτης, δηλαδή δεν θέλει για την συμφωνία σας και η πρόσφυγη είναι, είναι η στιγμή της δημιουργίας της πιστής. Λοιπόν, εμείς θα συμβείς με το Γεγγς Κορζο σήμερα, ο πρόσφυγος της Γεγγς, Γεγγ, όπως μπορείς να δείτε στον παιδί, είναι η καλτουρά της Ευρώπης, που είναι ένα παιδί, εντυπωσμένοι σε διελόγ, σύστημα, φιλωσφή, πώς πιστείτε με τον κόσμο. Βρινμύχος και παιδί. Τι λιγόνιζα είναι ο σύστημα της Γεγγς, φιλωσφή, πώς πιστείτε με τον κόσμο, εσείς με τον κόσμο, πάλι�ICK, διελόγιζε της. Βρινμύχος, πιστείτε με τον κόσμο, εάν θα μην είναι ο Βελφερ Σταίτης, ο Πάης, ο Πάης, ο Πάης, ο Πάης, ο Βεγγς. Τι λίγες είναι, Γυαρόν Μπρουκ, γυαρόν, είναι ο κύριες της Άνουρας Ιησίτουτς και είναι ο οθόρος και ο χώρος της Άνουρας Μπρουξώ. Είναι η Άνουρας Ιησίτουτς και είναι ο κύριες της Άνουρας Ιησίτουτς. Ευχαριστώ για τον Άνουρας Ιησίτουτς, για να βαθύσω αυτά τα προσπαθή και να βοηθήσω εξαιρετικά και εξαιρετικά. Μετά από πέρας εξαιρετικά, ξέρω την πρόσφαση από τα απόσταση και την εταρρκή από Γυαρόν, Απίστευτε με κάποιες εξεγέντες σφάρτες από Greg και τώρα θα έχουμε κάποιο επίσκτημα, και όταν μπορείτε να σήμερατε σε κάποιες σπίτι τις πνεύσεις από Super Chat, Raz θα προσπαθεί το Super Chat και όταν τα Super Chat μετά θα ήθελα να πω σε τις πνεύσεις. Ευχαριστούμε πολύ για όλους διότι είστε με μας. Ευχαριστούμε για τη διότη μας. Προχωρώτε, Yaron, τα διότητα της σύμβουσης στο Δωρό. Ευχαριστούμε, Nikos, και Greg, για να κάνουμε αυτή. Βλέπω ότι είμαι εξαιρεβάνς της Βαθμικής Θεός, είμαι εξαιρεβάνς της Βαθμικής Θεός για επίσης και two reasons. Θα ν' υπάρχειseat της Βαθμικής Θεός εμερικής, εθνικά, και προοδεκτικά, πολιτικά και διδιά. Προτελέως, πρώτα με την εψη Candidate. Θεώ πιστεύω ότι η Βαθμική Θεός είναι μια δημιουσιακή επόμενη εξαιρεφάνηση. Προσπαθεί πάνω, που μπορεί να γινήσουν την ευκαιρία τους και να πιέθουν τους, να δεν πιέθουν. Δεν έχουν καθόλια, δεν έχουν καθόλια σκόλια στην καθόλια, και το κόσμο θα ανοιχθεί τους, να είχε πίσο, να αδελφεί, να ανοιχθεί και να δεν είναι αυξεστικές. Είναι η αποστηρισμότητα αυτή που είναι ο καλύτερος σε την πρώτη γενότητα που βρήκε αυτή, αλλά ερώτητα μετά από διεθνούδες γενότητα, αυτό είναι αμύριще διεθνότητα. Και για την αποστηρισμότητα, νομίζω ότι στην αισθύνη της δημιουργίας που παράδειζεται το Βαθιστό Μεγαύρι, διεθνότητα βρήκει καλοσταστική ναυμανική. Μετά πιστεύει ότι οι άντρες είχουν αποστηρισμότητα. βλέπουμε ένα δεκλήνο στην αμπισία και δεκλήνο στην ασφαλήση για να δημιουργήσουν τους ζωές τους καλύτερους ζωές που μπορούν να είναι. Έχουν δημιουργήσει ένα σύγνωμα, ένα πραγματικό σύγνωμα, ότι δεν μπορούν να δημιουργήσουν τους ανθρώπους. Αυτό σε σπίτι από την εμπισία των last 200 χρόνων, στην Ευρώπη και στην Ελλάδα, στην Ευρώπη, και στην Ασία και το όνομα της, ότι η ευρώπη μεγιωτή είναι ένας δεκλήνος, γιατί εκείνης είναι καλά από το 90% ή αλλιώς από το 99%. Οι άνθρωποι μπορούν να καταφέρουν τους σπίτι, μπορούν να καταφέρουν τους σύγχρονες, τα πράγματα της ζωής, η πρόκληση της ζωής, ότι η Ευρώπη δημιουργήσουν τους σπίτι, τελείωσ成 στην Ελληνικά but i t Conference, but I think this is true Europe as well. We see this incredible success of the poor in China and the hundreds of millions of people of now turn middle class. But you see it in South Korea Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. You see poor people succeeding you, you see poor people being ambitious. You see people actually attaining middle class to it. Είναι ο λόγος που καταγωνεί κλαστήκο. Και εγώ φορά ότι η Βόρφη αιθανήκεσαν και πέρα σε αυτήν. Και νομίζω ότι αυτή είναι η επικυθήκη. Έτσι, μια ιδιακτά διέξα, χρήσει να κυρίσουν δυο πόβο. Και συμφωνιζεύει, σήμερα, σε δυο πόβο. Λοιπόν, είναι το γράφος αυτής. Γιατί όμως δεν είναι να διημιουργίσω το δυσυπιό της Βόρφης, But it also dehumanizes the payer into the welfare system, that is, the productive, those who have to pay the taxes to pay for the welfare. They are now viewed as, in a sense, sacrificial cows. A big chunk of the reason they work is in order to fund the quality of life stand of living of those who receive the welfare check. The purpose in life, or at least the section in the purpose life, is to serve others. Again, the state institutionalizing immorality of altruism and immorality of sacrifice into kind of the social system, into the social economic system, whereby some people pay, other people receive. And this is not only, what's interesting here, is this is not only based on economic status. One of the phenomenons of the welfare state is that it is ever growing and that a majority of its growth is not in support of the poor. But the majority of its growth is in support of the middle class. That is, if you look at most welfare programs, and their expansion, their expansion happens when the beneficiaries of state, large yes, call it, our middle class people. And in this case, the transformation or the redistribution of wealth is not from rich to poor. In this case, the redistribution of wealth is from young to old. And there is a massive redistribution of wealth from young to old happening in Western countries. Again, I'm familiar with the circumstances in the United States more so than the circumstances in Europe. But it has to be the same in Europe, particularly given the aging population, particularly the low birth rates. It has to be the case that the burden on young people is ever increasing, they're ever more going to place themselves in debt in order to pay for the social benefits to those people who want to retire at 65. 65 and age of retirement set when life expectancy was under 60. And today when life expectancy is well over 80, they get 20 years of retirement often at the expense of young people. I mean, there are many, many ways in which this inhibits the lives of young people, cripples again their ability to invest in themselves, to take risks, to save, to make sure that they are not dependent on the welfare state for their retirement ultimately. So it is devastating and crippling to the young. So morally, I think this is offensive to the young, this is offensive to the poor, and this is offensive to those who are successful who get taxed in order to pay for much of this. It is also, if we're doing this young old, it is, I think in some deep sense, debilitating for the old as well, for people who are going to be old. People are trained not to save. People are trained not to take care of themselves regarding retirement. People are trained to assume that the state will take care of them, and therefore not to think, not to plan, not to invest, not to do the kind of things that normally we would do if we faced uncertainty in the future. And therefore again, it limits human potential, human possibilities, human abilities. So that I think my main problem with the welfare state, it's the fact that it uses coercion and through coercion cripples everybody it touches. It hurts everybody it touches. I'll just mention quickly that I think it's devastating economically. I think it is a waste of resources. It takes money away from investment and turns it into consumption. It reduces the number of jobs in the economy overall. So it actually reduces the opportunities of poor people to actually engage in work so that they can exit poverty because it reduces investment because it's taxing the rich. What is characteristic of taxing the rich? It's taxing investment and saving, which go into productive activity to create jobs. The same with taxing the young, taxing the young who would save. It reduces saving rates, which is again unhealthy for economic progress, for economic growth and for job creation, which hurts more than anybody. It hurts the poor or the ambitious poor, the poor who would like not to be poor anymore. So I think economically it is destructive, it hampers the economy, and from our perspective it is unjust. Thank you very much. Greg, you have 10 minutes. Okay. First off, I wanted to say, I'm not going to do the typical thing of saying that the welfare state reduces poverty and capitalism is evil because it makes people poor or any of that. I think capitalism is fantastic. I think it's the greatest system of distribution that human beings have created when it comes to generating goods, distributing them efficiently without surpluses and shortages and so on and so forth. So I want capitalism to be the system that wins in the culture wars politically, economically and so on and so forth. The problem I have with capitalism is that although it is the best system relative to the alternatives, it has a huge moral problem. And that it is a moral paradox. And the thing I like about the welfare state is the welfare state has the capacity to stop it being a moral paradox and turn it into an unconditional moral good, which is what I wanted to be because I want capitalism to win. So what do I mean by moral paradox? Well, I mean it does something really fantastic and amazing, which I just stated, which Yoran talked about a bit, which is the distribution element. And also there's high levels of freedom, high levels of creativity, high levels of dynamism. There tends to be good human rights laws and capitalist societies and so on and so forth. That's the good bit. The bad bit is capitalism can generate its wealth by having two sites of two kinds of traders. So there's one kind of capitalist trader who is the self-interested trader who trades to optimize their well-being and makes those kinds of decisions economically when deciding what kind of a job to get. And then you have the self-abasing trader who basically trades to avoid huge threats like loss of a house, loss of food, loss of healthcare, loss of running water, whatever it might be. And both of those groups of people are creating the wealth that capitalism thrives off of. And the problem I have is I don't see any moral justification for the self-abasing trader, for the trader who has no support and has to go about getting jobs and finding work in a way which is at odds with their well-being. So the difference between like a self-interested trader and a self-abasing trader would be the self-abasing trader would have to ask questions like, you know, who do I have to blow next so that I can get some drugs and stay on someone's couch for a few weeks. The self-interested trader would say something like, should I have a flat in Nottingham or a flat in Leicester because there might be pros and cons to each choice. Now my worry, especially in countries that have huge economic booms without welfare states, is that they have a tendency for that economic boom to ride on the base of self-abasing trading rather than self-interested trading, where the majority of the process by which people come out of poverty is by having to at least temporarily behave like wage slaves. And the thing that I like about the welfare state is it has the potential to allow everyone to be a self-interested trader rather than a group of self-interested traders and a group of wage slaves. Now you could say an objection to that, well what about if the wage slaves for instance wind up becoming middle class after they work in the sweatshops for a couple of years. I think that's better than where they started out, I agree on that point, but I don't think that's moral. And I think the idea of somebody having to do whatever they have to do to survive even terrible things to be able to transition from poverty to non-poverty is a moral problem with capitalism. And it's such a deep moral problem that I think even sacrificing some economic growth is worth making sure that nobody has to be a self-abasing trader. And that's why I think welfare states at least minimally well-designed welfare states to guarantee things like housing and healthcare and food for instance are superior to societies that have even huge economic booms without welfare states. So I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the objections that you're on raised to welfare states. So the first one being coercion. I don't see the coercive element in collecting taxes is particularly problematic. Because I think that in any kind of a state, in order to get the benefits of civilization, you have to be on the recipient end of state coercion. So even a state where there is no taxation, even a state where you get to keep all your money, they're going to be lost. And any state with any law whatsoever is a state that in order to get the benefits of it means you have to be under some kind of coercion coming from the state. So for me, the coercion element isn't a problem of whether there should or shouldn't be coercion morally speaking. The issue is what kind of coercion. Are we going to have coercion forms that enable society to produce better outcomes where people feel more free and have more choices and have more security and are able to behave more like self-interested traders? Or are we going to have forms of coercion that dehumanize people? I know Yon thinks that collecting money to give to poor people is dehumanizing, but I'll talk a bit about that in a minute why I don't agree with that. Now when it comes to the claim that the welfare state has incentivized people to be poor, I have two problems with this claim. The first claim, the first problem I have is it doesn't give the recipient to the welfare check agency. So it says that the lack of incentive to work and be entrepreneurial is something that the welfare check does to you rather than something that you choose to be motivated by once you get the welfare check. It's a bit like saying that video games incentivize people to ruin their lives by playing video games all day long, therefore nobody should have video games. I would say there's a multiplicity of different welfare incentives that happen when you get a welfare check, one of which might be to sit on your ass and do nothing. One of which might be to be embarrassed and then think I want to get some work and one of which might be I'd like to get some work which actually gives me more money than this welfare check. So it's a multiplicity of different incentives that you can get psychologically when you receive a welfare check. The fact that some people have chosen the bad incentives to be motivated by is their fault, it's not the fault of the welfare check. When it comes to the dehumanizing elements that everyone described, I think that the most dehumanizing aspect of not having a welfare state is being in a position where you might have to trade as though you are a slave. You might have to trade as though you have to do whatever it takes to get food and shelter and healthcare even if you have to take jobs that are potentially bad for you, degrading, humiliating and things for which you might even have economic trade-offs that are disadvantageous to you in the long run. That's the greatest level of dehumanization that happens in the capitalist society. To then say that the person who has to pay a little bit in taxation is being dehumanized more than the person who has to trade like a slave in order to go from poverty to non-poverty, that seems a bit crazy to me. Although I'm open to hearing some arguments as to why it might not be crazy, so there's a little bit of ambiguity there even from me. When it comes to the claim about it being economically destructive, I think we can certainly say that the welfare state doesn't minimize inequality the way that a lot of people would like it to. I think what we can say is that it adds a level of moral legitimacy to the capitalist society that means that even when it does create certain economic tendencies which cause a lack of growth, as long as the lack of growth is not extreme, it's justified. And the detriment to the economies that welfare states have done to at least the US and Europe and Canada I think are thoroughly justified given the moral benefits of what the welfare state can bring. When it comes to things like the welfare state being described as sacrificial rather than altruistic, I see it the other way around. I think that the welfare state is very much a self-interested idea because what it means is that you as an agent, if you give a little bit of your money away to the tax collector, you can live in a society in which two things happen. People value dignity and liberty in ways where they won't want you to have to behave like a slave in order to transition from poverty to non-poverty. And also it's a society that will guarantee that no matter where you are, even if you're in the extreme minority which you aren't described, you'll have a cushion of sorts that wouldn't be there otherwise. And it seems to me that given that morally speaking, the welfare state does these two things quite effectively or at least those two things can be done quite effectively if the welfare state is designed well. That's enough of a compensation for whatever diminishment of economic growth that the welfare state causes. And given what we know of welfare states, you know, the US and Europe, these aren't places that are doing horrible economically if we talk about the last 50 years. These are not economic disasters. These are relatively prosperous societies. So whatever damage that the welfare state is doing, I think is compensated by the moral benefits of giving capitalism a level of moral legitimacy that it would not have otherwise. And with this moral legitimacy, hopefully capitalism can win in the battle between capitalism and its alternatives. Thank you Greg. So this is the part where we do the rebutal. So Yaron is going to have like 5 minutes and then Greg is going to have 5 more minutes. Jonathan raises a metaphorical super chat glass to Yaron in honor of his. So thank you very much Jonathan. So again, you can send your questions via super chat. So now let's go to the rebutal phase, the discussion phase. So Yaron and then Greg. Sure. Yeah, I mean, my main concern here is with the premise, this idea that there was a moral problem. I don't see a moral problem. It's not like everybody was doing phenomenally well. Nobody had to take jobs that they didn't like. People were living long, happy, successful lives and in came capitalism and destroyed that utopia. The fact is that nature creates a circumstance in which human beings are poor. That is the state of nature for human beings. It is a massive achievement to rise up from poverty and I don't view taking jobs. Now yes, if you have to blow somebody, but most people don't actually have to do that. 99.9% of poor people don't have to do that in order to rise out of poverty and haven't done that in history. But yes, it's hard work to get out of poverty. It was hard work 300 years ago before capitalism to get out of poverty and 90% of people didn't succeed at doing it. And we're held back by the authorities who didn't want them to succeed. Finally, people were liberated. People worked hard and rose out of poverty. I don't believe anybody, particularly in western states today, who is not either mentally deficient or crippled, has to engage in truly self-abasing activities in order to survive, in order to do okay economically in a western country today. They might have to take a job they don't like. Okay, so what? So I don't find that morally offensive or morally problematic. Again, morality, in my view, is about the pursuit of your life. It's about the pursuit of your own flourishing. It's about the pursuit of your own success as a human being. Part of that requires you to do the kind of jobs that might be necessary in order to rise up from poverty. When I was a teenager, I used to sweep the floors in our condo building and sweep the trash cans, which today I look upon and it feels like the most disgusting thing I've ever done, right? But so what? That's what I did as a teenager to make some bucks. I didn't view it as self-abasing. I viewed it as that was the thing you had to do to make some money so that you could have money so that you could live better. So the whole framing of it in terms of wage slaves, I don't think there is such a thing. I think it's the meaning to slavery. I mean, it's unfortunate because it puts down the true horror of slavery. Slavery is truly horrible. And to compare it to people who have a job even in a sweatshop is just unjust to the slaves. Slavery is about violence. It's about coercion. It's about force. And it's about no options and no alternatives under any circumstances. That is not the same as what a wage a person does. And it's certainly not equivalent to the lifespan of somebody entering the workforce and how they progress through that workforce. So I think the whole moral framing, we disagree about the whole wage in which we framed this. Capitalism is moral because it is a system that leaves people free to engage in those jobs that allow them to pursue their values. Without somebody dictating to somebody, oh no, that's a wage. That's itself the basic job. You shouldn't have to do that. Let me give you a check so you don't have to do that. Who is anybody to tell somebody what is and is not a self-embasic job? Yeah, I think it's important to know kind of the starting point of almost everybody. Okay, there's a lot here. Yeah, I agree with your commentary about agency. At the end of the day, yes, the purpose and has to accept, but incentives matter. They don't dominate necessarily. They don't overwhelm everything else, but at the margin, they matter. And at the margin, a person who might have been ambitious and might have gone out and done something with his life, at the margin because he gets a check from the government might not, particularly when you consider that almost every welfare state is designed in a way that the marginal tax rate of getting a job of that first income is something like 70-80%, right? So it's just not worth getting that job because you're making more money on the welfare state. So it's at the margin. I also would claim that after several generations, there's a certain inculcation into culture and let's not ignore culture. There's agency, but there is an impact of culture and people who grew up in a culture of welfare find it more difficult to escape than people who don't grow up in a culture of welfare. And finally, yeah, moral benefits versus growth. I mean, this to me is again, who are you to make that calculation? Who is anybody to make that calculation? Leave us free. You know, we could easily voluntarily recreate the welfare state. We can dedicate 10, 20, 30, 40, 50% of our income to charity and reduce economic growth and improve the welfare of the poor through charity without having coercion and without a philosopher king or somebody in authority telling us what the trade-off needs to be between moral benefits and economic growth. We could make that a voluntary decision that we make as individuals. So, and then, you know, Greg said a number of times a well-designed welfare state. I'm curious if he has one in particular in mind because I'm not familiar with very many. Certainly the United States welfare system is about as badly designed even from the perspective of a believer in welfare as possible and I see no efforts to try to better design it. I see many efforts to try to make it even worse designed than possible. So, I will leave it at that. That's five minutes, I think. Thank you, Yaron. Greg, rebutals to the rebutal. Okay, so when it comes to the benefits morally versus growth who decides problem, for me that answer is answered by the population. It's democracy and voting that decides whether or not we have a welfare state or whether we don't. It's not a philosopher king. So I'd be happy to live in a society where there's no welfare if the people didn't want it. But if people do want it, I think there are good reasons to support the people in choosing to have one. When it comes to charity, I think actually that if you are against the welfare state, I don't know how you can consistently be in favor of charity because if you think people deserve whatever financial amount of money they have and if they're poor, they deserve to be poor, I don't see how you can then justify giving people who deserve to be poor money in the name of charity any more than you can justify giving them money through the welfare state either. Either people deserve money they don't have when they're poor, they don't. And if they don't deserve money, I don't see why you would give people who don't deserve money money. You might say that the benefit of charity is while it's voluntary rather than coercive, but I don't see why you would voluntarily give poor people money if you thought that being poor was a kind of justice of sorts that was based on not making good choices in the marketplace, not taking opportunities, sitting on your ass and so on and so forth. Now, a lot of what you're on said, I think is really interesting because when you get into the real defenses of having to work hard in the capitalist economy without a welfare state, to me it starts to sound like collectivism. It starts to sound like wanting to do shit work which you don't like for the greater good and making sure nobody has to pay for it and potentially you can in the future maybe go from poverty to middle class or poverty to non-poverty. But what you certainly can't do is choose what jobs that you particularly find degrading or not. You have to depend on other people to give you whatever work is there even if the work is quite bad for you. Now, I agree with you on that probably the majority of people who are poor don't have to give blowjobs. But I think there are a lot of jobs for a lot of different kinds of people that are as bad as having blowjobs given their particular temperaments and their particular needs because part of what capitalism does which is good is it makes us all quite sensitive to the fact that there's a diversity of different kinds of people in this world and for some people things that are pretty easy are for other people really really difficult to the point where they can't do them. Certain people with mental health conditions couldn't do the kind of picking up of garbage that you're on and talked about doing earlier on. And vice versa. There are some people that find sex work really easy but who find working in an office something that would give them panic attacks. The absence of a welfare state basically says it doesn't matter who you are what your particular conditions are, what your subjectivity is, what your self-interest is even. You have to do whatever other people need you to do in order to make sure that they don't have to pay for you even if they can quite easily pay for you. So to me that sounds very much like a collectivist idea more than an individualist idea because what it does is it makes you subservient to the voluntary choices of others who are better off than you are and it makes you until you reach the point where you have economic autonomy and can trade like a selfish trader something like a slave. Now the reason I think wage slavery is actually a good thing to talk about and why it's not demeaning to slaves is it says look if the relationship that you have to your employer has too many features in common with slavery that means you have a bad relationship to your employer. If you're doing things that are like what a slave is doing in A and B and C and D and E that means this is not a good relationship between labor and capital you have. So it's really important I think to talk about wage slavery not because we're saying that people who are wage slaves are literally slaves, we're saying we want to make people who earn wages as far away from slaves as possible. When there are too many analogies between a working person and a slave that means the conditions under which people are working needs to change. Okay let's go to a couple of super chats and then Jaron will have more chance to get back. So Jeff says send a super chat in honour of the t-shirt that Rasi was wearing yesterday for more of that go to the ARC UK store to get the inside joke but Marilyn asks Greg so Greg you use the term coercion Marilyn asks who gets coerced so who is coerced in whom because coercion means that someone is coercing you into something and coercion has a definition so when you say that people get coerced to work can you a bit get deeper into that and tell us what do you mean by coercion and who is coercing whom? Well there's individual coercion where the individual might coerce you to do something but then there is social coercion where the entire society coerces you to do something and in a world without a welfare state you're being coerced to take whatever work is there no matter how bad it is for you no matter how degrading it is for you and that seems to me to be something that people in capitalist societies are finding increasingly unethical because one of the great things about capitalism is it makes you more sensitive Okay Jaron you can reply to this and then we're going to get to the next super chat for Greg Yeah I mean this is this is a I think a very very wrong application of the word coercion I don't think that you are the metaphysical fact in nature that you have to work in order to survive and that survival is not a given there's no food you're not just going to wander around eating food and nuts and actual work has to happen whether that work is hunting or whether that work is agriculture some work has to happen in order for you to survive and that is not coercion that's not nature coercing you to work so indeed nobody is not coercing you to work in order to survive nature is in a sense right reality is the metaphysical fact of reality is the need to change the world around you to feed you because we are not we're not granted with the genes to just know exactly what to do in order to feed ourselves in order to survive we as conceptual beings actually have to work to survive that's the nature of man and the nature of the environment or the world in which we live it's a given you know if you're religious it's the consequence of being thrown out of the Garden of Eden and what's amazing to me is the extent to which the Garden of Eden metaphor myth is stuck in people's minds right some we live in some kind of idea where we just lay around and stuff comes to us right no effort needs to be engaged in order to achieve a survival that's bizarre that is one of the great great great sense of religion that it is given us that mythology no in order to survive we need to work just like any other animal needs to work and therefore it's not coercion that is the fact of reality now we do engage in coercion when we take from Greg to give to Nikos because Nikos for whatever reason doesn't want to work can't work is incapable of work that indeed is coercion if Nikos dies because he cannot work he was not cursed into death he dies that's nature that's the way it is if you don't work you die now somebody could help Nikos or somebody can take stuff from Greg and give to Nikos those are two options in which we provide to Nikos but the one is coercion and the one is voluntary and that's the difference between coercion and charity we can talk about the justice of charity so laws that are protective in nature laws that protect individual rights laws that help define and protect property rights are not coercive laws they are coercive towards those who initiate force but if you initiate force you are the one who started the force and therefore coercion doesn't apply to you if I punch you we don't say Greg defending himself is using coercion you say you aren't using coercion and Greg defending himself those are two different activities but you are forced to initiate so I think this is important and again it goes to the nature of slavery there is nothing in common I mean nothing between wages and slavery slavery is the initiation of force by one human being over another and placing him under severe constraints there might be circumstances in certain countries where people are forced into labor and then you could argue it's slavery but the metaphysical fact that you have to work in order to survive does not make a job anything like slavery even a job you don't like even a job you don't like that you have to do for many years there are lots of things we do in life that we don't like but we don't attribute them to coercion against us ok gentlemen as a result of the discussion being interested we have too many super chats so I have to start asking you to maybe cut a little bit the length of the answers we have to charge UK ARC UK more money in the future given how profitable they are becoming without these super chats so super chat from super kp so to Greg so Greg you talked about self-abasing people and the question is aren't there self-abasing people in the welfare state the welfare state mitigates that problem the self-abasing people that exist in the welfare state are being self-abasing of their own volition the self-abasing people in the market are being self-abasing because they don't want to lose their house they don't want to fail to be able to eat they don't want to die because they can't pay for medical bills that's the difference I agree with you very quickly about how you have to work in nature to survive and that is quite a brutal fact of nature but I think a society is supposed to be distinct from the state of nature and that it's supposed to make the ways that you survive less brutal and if the ways that you survive are less brutal depend on people having to pay a little bit of money that is quite easy for them to pay I'm all for that because the other relationship that you have to society where everybody gets to keep their money because everyone's afraid of coercion is one where you're subservient to the market even if you're rising on the economic ladder which I'm against because I don't think anybody should be subservient to anyone and I think people often assume that again coercion is the sort of thing that is really really terrible that nobody should ever do but again if you never do coercion you can't live under any state at all because any state law, even an economic law even in a case of a state law where you're not having anything taken away from you financially that's still a form of coercion so the issue isn't whether we shouldn't have coercion it's what kinds of coercions are optimal for achieving human flourishing including a sense of human freedom versus what coercions from the state diminish those things significantly but coercion itself is a fact of life just like survival is but we can have good coercion and good survival rather than no coercion and really brutal survival in a capitalist society which is supposed to be better than that So can I just, I want to challenge this idea that survival in a capitalist is brutal even for those who have tough jobs but I don't think that's the case I think part of the challenge is that we've lived under a welfare state for so long we don't know what the potential of capitalism and this relates to this trade-off between growth and moral benefits If we look at the evolution of jobs from the early 19th century to the mid 20th century a period where the United States at least didn't have a welfare state and you see the changes and the kind of jobs that people are engaged in you see a massive increase in the variety of jobs so people can choose so it's not true that low-income jobs in a capitalist society all have to go to sweatshops it's amazing the wide variety of jobs that people have people can choose between to work in a nail salon to collect garbage to work in a factory or to go and work at a startup and be successful and a million other options this idea that capitalism is a monolithic of one type of job for everybody and therefore everybody stuck in this one type of job is I think a complete falsehood capitalism produces exactly the opposite it produces a plethora of a wide variety of jobs that people actually can't self-select and choose what to take we live in societies in which because I think of state control and because of the welfare state and again Greg articulates the puny amount of money we have to pay for welfare I used to live in California where I used to pay over 50% of my income to the state most of which ultimately went to welfare programs overwhelming majority of that went to welfare programs certainly that's during the United States I think it's even more true in the UK and other places so no, it's a significant amount of money that goes to welfare programs if you took that money and you actually invested in capitalism the amount of jobs and the interesting jobs and the variety of jobs would be even dramatically greater than it is today and the pay for those jobs because productivity rises all the time would be dramatically higher so poverty is probably ultimately not even an issue under capitalism if we actually allow capitalism to happen but we don't at the height of the crisis in Greece my father was paying close to 75% in taxes ok next question is on charity which is good because I think it's a part where more could be said so Marilyn says didn't we have a pretty good private charity system in this country in the States 100 plus years ago incidentally I scrubbed floors and cleaned toilets when I was young same here Marilyn and first time I could say good money in my life was when I was sweeping the roads in the morning surprisingly well paying job and I had my podcast so it was actually also an easy job anyway that's because the Greek government taxes everybody at 75% so they can pay street sweepers well that was actually in Kent good money off of the States now we get it that was in Kent but the point is correct ok so good charity but actually Greg if you see the statistics the the lower the taxes the more people would give to the charities and actually we believe in solidarity and human agency so shouldn't we prefer a system where you choose who you help and you build this let's say this ground roots networks to answer that question I would say one virtue of charity is it's voluntary but the downside is it's very difficult to justify it because if you believe that people should have the amounts of money to have because those are products of dessert based on what they've done in the market based on trying to get voluntary exchanges of money to give someone charity is like coming up with a de facto welfare state it's voluntary but it's still a kind of welfare state so I don't see why you would want to give to charity if you were consistent if you didn't like welfare states number one and number two the reason why I would prefer welfare state to charity is because I wouldn't want someone to only not be self-abasing in the way that they made money if other people voluntarily gave them money because that's the problem with the capitalist market without the welfare state in the first place it's contingent it's precarious it depends on whether or not you can find someone who will pay you to do what they want you to do and then that means to some extent you're under their control so if you want a society where everybody can trade in the market as a self-interested trader with maximal freedom for themselves to decide which jobs they want which ones they don't you have to have a welfare state that allows for people to have enough of a financial cushion to not have to be beholden to others in such a brutal way and in response to what Jaren said about the diversity of jobs in the capitalist market in the last 150 years I don't disagree with any of that empirically but but morally what I would say is even if capitalism comes up with more and more jobs for more and more people there's still going to be a minority of people for whom either the jobs that they need aren't available to them or it's not good for them to do the jobs that are and those are the people that need cushions and if you have a society with the minimal amount of people like that possible great but I don't want to live in a society that as long as it has a lot of economic growth essentially tells those people to survive you have to be subservient to others and do things that you find horrible because that to me doesn't sound like a free society that sounds like a collectivist society where there's lots of subservient power relations that's unnecessary given that there's so much wealth in that society anyway Jaren So it's actually the exact opposite right as you were saying this I was thinking wow that is quite a collectivist ethical collectivistic perspective right because the standard here is not individual liberty individual freedom individual ability it's somebody's somebody doing because any society even in the welfare state we know this there's certain people who for whatever reason unhappy there's some people in the welfare state who take self-abasing jobs there's some people in the welfare state who are not going to achieve and it's okay because there's some people to sacrifice other people for their sake now I consider it a sacrifice I consider taking 50% of my income an act of sacrifice against me I consider that a limitation on my ability to pursue my happiness on my ability to pursue so we're taking one group a minority I think we all agree it's a minority who can't take care of themselves who might find these self-abasing jobs as a necessity and we're structuring the whole society and all of our hierarchies and all of our values and how much we get to keep of our own production and this group I think that is a collectivist way of organizing society and distortive yes life can be rough during periods of time life can be rough for certain people most people who have agency who choose to engage in being human find that those rough periods are short and they can overcome them and they can strive to be better but let me address the charity point one is I think the beauty of charity is the charity is much more likely to engage in desert that is you're absolutely right Greg certain people don't deserve the warfare state in my mind and don't deserve charity and I don't think they get it so I was using my talks I used the example of the wife beating drunk I don't think the wife beating drunk should get charity I don't think he should get a warfare check either now he does today he gets a warfare check in spite of the fact that he's a wife beating drunk that he's never going to go work that he's never going to do anything to promote his own life that he's hurting other people in some significant way he's neglecting his kids he probably has a bunch of them and he's just a bad human being and yet he's getting paid for that a charity system is much more likely to be a system that allocates the money that people decide based on deserts and therefore that's why people would give me and said I have a charity that gives money to wife beating drunks I would say I'm not giving you a dime but if somebody came to me and said I've got a charity that helps young kids who are born in poverty get a better education so they can rise up from poverty I'm saying yeah absolutely they deserve that but not their fault that they were born in poverty I want to help those kids get the best education that they can and you know we can all based on our individual values scale what we perceive as deserve deserving you know there's a charity that helps people whose business is burned down and didn't have insurance for some reason or whatever now I'd add to that the markets are very creative so in the 19th century in the US in addition to a lot of charity there were also insurance again against unemployment there was insurance against poverty there was mutual aid societies there were all kinds of market mechanisms to deal with the issues of accidents and bad outcomes and difficult situations and that's in a society that was not very rich certainly as compared to societies today I mean that was just the beginning of capitalism when society wasn't very prosperous so I much prefer charity I think it would be you know because it is aligned with the giver's values Alright thank you so Jonathan says asks so you mentioned the situation where an employer has a bad relationship with the employee you mentioned it in your I think in your opening remarks and Jonathan asks is capitalism responsible for a bad relationship between an employer and an employee or is it or is that more of a human feature well it certainly can be a human feature if you've got two essentially fucked up people or one fucked up person working in an environment sorry we're going to get demonetized sorry messed up not fucked up messed up but market pressures market situations market contingencies and so on can create situations in which people have to work in environments that are objectively bad for them and because there is such a diverse array of different kinds of human beings we can't allow any kind of hard and fast rules about what is good or not good for you but if you have a job unless you can choose that to some extent for yourself if you live in a free society if you can't choose that for yourself if you have to go wherever the workers even if it's something horrible then I don't see how you're free when it comes to things like being an entrepreneur as an expression of your reason and so on to me being entrepreneurial is a talent it's like being a good musician I love entrepreneurs but I wouldn't expect everyone to be one and I wouldn't say if you're a bad entrepreneur anymore than I'd say if you were a bad musician and when it comes to charity I think what I would say in response to you is the kind of relationship between the charity giver and you in the charity that he supports is one where you're subservient to them because if they don't like you for whatever reason you don't get their charity even if it's for a reason that's much worse than they don't like you because you're a drunk that beats your wife maybe they don't like you because you have brown skin maybe they don't like you because you're fat maybe they don't like you for all sorts of reasons but they don't like what you deserve so again in situations where you're having to do things for other people that you don't choose and that don't express what you think are best for yourself given your innate preferences of what's good for you what's valuable for you I don't see how you have a lot of autonomy even if you live in a capitalist society with a lot of growth and a lot of formal freedoms in it Salud, go to the next super tator have you got something burning I find this idea that we need to be free of other people's judgments and just bizarre it's okay for me to curse you into giving me money and that allows me to be free but if I have to ask you for money that is somehow I'm now dependent on you in a way that my cursing you eliminates that dependency one of the messages of Atlas Shrugged is maybe you're dependent on me even if you're cursing me because if I stop working you can't take my money anymore and if the welfare state collapses because people won't pay into it then you're dependent on it as well but in all situations in life so many situations in life you have a book coming out on love but even in love relationship there is a certain dependence on the other person reciprocating and if they don't and you're screwed and that's life and to somehow say I know I need to create a situation where I'm not dependent on other people's that's not freedom freedom is sometimes freedom involves rejection sometimes freedom involves I have to do things I don't want to do I don't like doing because I haven't satisfied whatever cause is necessary or activity is necessary in order to lead to a particular cause so I don't understand why in economics it's somehow oh no you have to have some kind of flaw that's okay and it's okay to use coercion because his feelings might get hoods or he might feel like he's dependent on them yeah he's absolutely dependent on them and I want him to know that he's dependent on because I want him to get out of that dependency I want him to to take it seriously I want him to know that he needs to get up on his own two feet and do something worthwhile with his life and I think that's what private charity succeeds much better okay so from now on I'll have to do the three the super star three at the time and you pick what you answer Greg battle of idea style so hate this battle of idea style just so you know I'm I've accepted the fact that sometimes I have to do things I hate okay that's good so the taxpayer forced to pay for welfare states as George is way closer to being a slave than an employee entering into a mutually voluntary transaction that's a statement not a question so I'll include it with the other question the analytics aesthetic like Hotomi says should people who aren't forced to pay direct taxes in our current system have the right to vote so should people who aren't forced to pay taxes have the right to vote and the third question is not being allowed to coerce is not being allowed to commit a crime basically coercion so basically this I assume this goes to the to the point of Greg on how he defied questions so gentlemen you pick whatever you want from this and you run and then we have another set of some super chat you want to go yeah I'm happy to go so let me just say this is also really something Greg said I mean in this context I'm not a big fan I'm not a fan of democracy in terms of absolute majority rule it goes to the point Greg earlier said people choose to do this so therefore it's okay I don't think the collective in that sense there's a right to rule over the minority the limits have to be the limits that I think are specified or attempted to be specified in the American constitution that is the limits of individual rights the majority does not have a right to coerce the individual and I don't agree that all laws are coercive laws are there to protect us from coercion by other people so the fact that people want it I don't think and this relates to this voting look I think the issue of who should be allowed who should vote or not vote is a complex issue you know when we get to live in a free society where that becomes an issue where you have voluntary taxes should people who don't pay the voluntary taxes should they be allowed to vote or not that's an interesting question I have a particular view on it but I don't think it's that important given the context in which we live and I can't remember the last one but I think you track it my core buster too the third one was for Greg because it had to do with the definition of coercion and basically it said that anyway I'll let Greg deal with it okay so he's not being allowed to coerce sorry he's not being allowed to commit a crime an example of coercion for me yes definitely any law is an example of coercion because what a law does is it says whatever you would like to do that this law prohibits you from doing you can't do whatever you had to walk into my house I've taken away from you by having this house legally be my house if you want to walk into my house with impunity and do whatever you want so any law whatsoever any benefit of civilization that comes from laws is actually a byproduct of coercion so like I said for me the problem isn't whether there is or isn't coercion it's what kind of coercion with regards to the question about democracy I think that democracies are an essential condition of having any kind of law that functions in a way which is stable I think all rights are fundamentally precarious you have to argue for them no matter what they can always get challenged even our most cherished rights need to be subjected to routine reviews and that's why even though I'm pro-choice for instance I don't agree with prohibiting people from raising questions about whether or not we should have a pro-life society even though I'm not in favor of that and when it comes to the idea about why should in the name of freedom everyone be forced to give you money that guarantees your freedom rather than have people contingently give you money I think this is the point you aren't made I think the answer is that if you want to have an essential freedom for somebody it has to be universal it can be contingent on whether or not they like you or whether they think you're a life beater it's very similar to protection you can't have a police force if the police say I don't really want to look after the Mexicans I don't like them but I'll look after the white people so freedom if it's guaranteed even if it's freedom from having to be a self-abasing trader that has to be universal it can be contingent on people's whims any more than protection can be contingent on people's whims if you want to have protection protection in your society and finally the question about whether taxpayers should be sorry was the question people who don't pay taxes should they be allowed to vote was that the question? I think you addressed it with your democracy answer but yeah that's the question the answer to that question is I think I would probably agree with you on that one I don't know ok right so next and probably last round of supersons because we are almost at the so Vegard says should be clarified that a lot of people who live of the welfare state are content but not necessarily happy just look at Finland and Norway next question what is the epistemological justification that an individual may ignore reality to survive think and produce yet sustain himself by leaching off the productive minds of others do rich people have a basket of fees that produces infinite sustenance sustenance another question Yaron do you agree with your opponent's claim that the welfare state that the welfare system reduces the amount of self-abasing traders at least the ones who do it out of necessity and last super chat I've learned of many trash service people who receive welfare if we get rid of it could that potentially increase property crime so basically if without welfare wouldn't you expect crime to rise I'm not sure what trash service refers to but I think you get the gist of the point of the question ok last round if you think something should be mentioned now is the time so why don't you go first since I started ok with regards happiness I'm probably a bit skeptical about happiness studies as a guy do anything happiness strikes me as kind of a subjective notion people try and set out the conditions of happiness and statistical analysis that always seems a bit question begging to me or it seems like they're always missing out important information so I wouldn't be particularly persuaded by somebody who says let's be more like Sweden with a welfare state like theirs because they're more happy because I find those kind of arguments a bit like slights of hand to try and avoid the actual difficult questions about why ethically we should have a welfare state which may be more like theirs their welfare state in some ways is more right wing than the US one but nobody talks about that the second question what about ignoring reality to take money away from the productive I think if you engage with reality and you ask yourself what kind of a society do I want to live in the answer is a society in which I'm not so beholden to others and their fickle decisions that my life involves me having to make decisions where I'm constantly self-harming to have outcomes that are like the other members of my society who live relatively okay lives you want to create a society in which everyone can live a relatively okay life or at least have a pathway towards that where there is as minimal as possible self-abasing elements involved in the capitalist trading if it's a capitalist society and I agree with the criticisms about too much money being taken away for the welfare state too much taxation but to me that's a bureaucratic issue about how to efficiently design the welfare state that's not an ethical blow against the welfare state the only kind of economic blow against the welfare state that I would consider serious would be that if a welfare state transformed an economy from like a first world to a third world economy then I would say maybe welfare states are economically calamitous but because everywhere I know that has a welfare state seems to be doing okay enough and the ways in which the welfare state correlates with economic problems or a lack of growth even in those cases I'm not certain that it's the welfare state rather than a correlation with the welfare state there might be other problems that are also contributing to the economic difficulties that those countries are having other than the welfare state so again I'm always leery of trying to conflate correlations with causation even in those circumstances so yeah I think at the end of the day we should try and make our capitalist project that we believe in as morally decent as possible given that capitalism as a whole tends to make us very sensitive to the diversity of human beings and the kind of things that we need and that's not going against reality that's actually appreciating finer details of reality that more survival based societies are more insensitive towards because they're only interested in surviving but when you can have a society that really excels at allowing people to thrive rather than survive it's understandable that people in that society would become more sensitive to the elements of domination that exist when people are in survival mode which presumably a capitalist society should try and create something better than and it does in many many respects except when there's no welfare state when there is a welfare state despite the problems it at least seems to me that the capitalist state is trying to grapple with the fact that it needs to balance its productivity and its efficiency and its innovation and its dynamism with a concern for those people who might be marginalized by that very same system and have to work in ways where they are self-abasing rather than self-interested because I want a society where everyone is a self-interested trader in a capitalist world rather than anybody who is self-abased either because of the market or self-abased because they live in some sort of a capitalist society sorry a communist society or anything like that which is deeply inferior to capitalism so I just want to end by saying I hope that this whatever I've said might go towards the project of making capitalism more defensible to a greater number of people so before we go to Yaron just to read this super chat because I think it's very nice so Jeff says thanks ARC UK for the debates thanks Yaron and Greg for being respectful of each other even when you disagree and also let me say how rare it is to find a debate on the welfare state which both parties says I'm gonna talk based on morality and not is the tax gonna be 32.8% or 31.2% which is usually the debate so I really appreciate that you both went to the center of the topic so Yaron final thoughts Yeah so I think we agree on happiness studies skeptical and I think it's they mean very little I always I always have problems with the kind of commentary that says I think it's okay enough How do you know? How does anybody know? We indeed don't have the parallel universe in which we're five times richer because we didn't have a welfare state and granted I can't prove that that would happen because I can't point to it and your right correlation is not causation but I would strongly argue that there are good theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that the welfare state drains an economy from growth potential and that growth is substantial and it hurts I think a lack of growth hurts those people you're trying to help more than it hurts anybody else so I think actually in the long run they are worse off as an economic argument What kind of society I want to live in which was raised a number of times Yeah I want to live in a society where individuals can be freed from the domination of a majority Talk about slave wages There's also a sense in which when you are impotent to fight against a majority they can vote to have all kinds of things done to you including 50% of your money taking away that feels much more like slavery than an employer employee relationship where the party could walk away and start over living in a society where you never know what the voters are going to vote for you never know what the legislature is going to vote for and you are impotent in influencing that and yet they have total control over your life is I think overall scary and we can see that in some uncertainty in how seriously people take politics which I don't think should be such an important area in human life as it has become I think politics should be a minor field but it affects you to the extent that it does today because the majority can pass any law they want but a lot of our disagreement boils down to a fundamental I don't think it's just a definitional issue because I think it's deeper than a definitional issue and that is with regard to what the word freedom means I don't consider anybody having their freedom limited because they can't walk into your house and take your stuff that is not a freedom limiting thing people shouldn't don't have, freedom doesn't encompass those acts the concept of freedom doesn't encompass those acts that involve violating the rights of other people to involve violent coercion against other people so it is only the defense of property rights and the defense of individual rights that makes freedom possible because it creates a definition of the spaces and the kind of behavior that is a free behavior what is good behavior and what is not, what is acceptable and what not and that relates to what is coercion and what is not cursing somebody not to steal from me is not coercion the sin is the initiation of course not the self defense the sin is somebody trying to steal my stuff the sin is somebody walking onto my property that is a violation of freedom me defending myself, violating their freedom and in that sense I see a lot fewer conflicts between human beings I don't think there is a conflict between I don't see every interaction between human beings as engaging in conflicts people have boundaries and rights are clear, the criminal is in the wrong clearly I am not restricting his freedom any kind of way by defending myself and I think that goes to the heart of it but it also is I mean it is funny we both want to position ourselves as individuals but I really do think Craig's position ultimately is the collectivist position it is okay to cripple parts of society for the benefits of others it is okay to use coercion against them if it benefits other people but again he has a very expansive and I think wrong definition of coercion and what freedom means that allows him to get away with that I think that should be something he questions so thank you thank you very much to both of you so you are not going to be back next week but let me say something about Greg's work so you can go to cultureontheoffensive.com and you can see a preview of his book which comes out on the 4th of July it's called Postsocratic Dialogues Colón Love Postsocratic Dialogues Love and also you'll find there some preview of his book in terms of videos on YouTube so many thanks Greg many thanks Yaron I hope people appreciate the discussion huge thank you to the Super Chatters for your support many thanks to the Einran Institute for the support and we're gonna be back next week hopefully with another great discussion I appreciate your time and I appreciate you being with us see you soon bye everyone