 Hey everybody, tonight we're debating whether or not there should be welfare and we are starting right now. With Mouthy Infidel's opening statement, want to let you know folks Mouthy Infidel is linked in the description. He has a popular YouTube channel called Mouthy Infidel and with that the floor is all yours. Yeah, so I think that when people generally think about poverty, people think about the harms of poverty purely in terms of how it harms our opportunities in life. If we're growing up in poverty, we're less likely to have access to a good education, we're less likely to have access to costly enrichment activities, less likely to have access to quality tutoring, or even just social circles that might have opportunities present in them. And I think that this is certainly very important to think about when we're thinking about the harms of poverty. However, I think that the harm of poverty actually goes significantly deeper than this. So scientists and epidemiologists are increasingly finding that poverty actually has strongly detrimental permanent irreversible effects on our brains, on our bodies. Poverty can make it more likely for us to develop a heart disease, poverty makes it more likely for us to develop diabetes, poverty shortens our lifespan, the stress associated with poverty literally harms the physical development of our brains. And I think that Elizabeth Stoker summed this up very well when she made the analogy that poverty is like lead. It physically harms us, it makes us sick. Poverty is simply put a poison. It is a very miserable predicament to be in. Now, how does this relate to welfare? Well, if you look at census data, about 50% of the population simply doesn't work. These people are classified as non-workers. It's about half of all people. And you might think, well, the solution is if people can't find jobs to just create more jobs, maybe if we let the free market work its magic, it would create enough jobs that nobody lives in poverty, which is a tempting line of thought. But the problem with this is that the vast majority of this, when you break down this non-worker category, are people who are disabled, too disabled to work, people who are like very elderly, people who are children, people who are caretakers and are too busy taking care of a sick or disabled family member to work. And these people are people who I think a decent society can acknowledge shouldn't be compelled through threat of poverty to be forced to enter the labor market in order to receive an income and obviously not be in poverty. However, because a totally free market doesn't distribute money to people unless they work, these people are simply locked out of the labor market and therefore the only way to avoid dooming these groups of people, these math swaths of the population to poverty, is to provide some mechanism through which via taxation we can provide an income to these people that is not conditional upon their participation in the labor force. And I think that is fundamentally welfare. So that's my, yeah, that's basically my argument. Thank you very much, Ethan. We will kick it over to Iran Brook for his opening statement. Do want to give him an introduction first and also want to remind you folks that both Mouthi and Iran Brook are linked in the description. So as you're listening throughout this debate at any point in time, you can click on their link in the description and that includes if you're listening to the modern day debate podcast, as we also link our guests in the description there. Now for Iran's introduction. Thank you very much, Iran, for your patience. Iran Brook is the host of the Iran Brook show, renowned bestselling author and world class speaker. Brook's podcast can be heard on the Iran Brook show at Spreaker and YouTube. Brook was the executive director of the Anne Rand Institute, AI for 17 years from 2000 to 2017. He remains chairman of the board of AI and its primary spokesperson. So with that, thanks so much for being with us tonight and the floor is all yours. Thank you, James. Thank you, Mouthi, I guess. I'm not going to argue that poverty is a good thing. We're going to agree on that. Poverty sucks. But it's also true that poverty is the state in which human beings have lived forever. I've been telling about 250 years ago, everybody with exception of maybe a small number of aristocrats lived under poverty that is indeed hard to imagine the extent of that poverty. As compared in the world we live in today, you would have to go to places like places in Africa, places in Asia to even see the kind of poverty that we all basically lived under 250 years ago. Yeah, life expectancy is low. Indeed, the poor today have far dramatically better lives than anybody did 250 years ago. They live longer, they live healthier, they live in relative luxury. They have running water, flushing toilets, electricity, iPhones, many of them, air conditioning, automobiles, at least if we're talking about the United States. So poverty sucks. Today's poor in the United States are far better off than poor people have ever been in all of human history. And yeah, there's a lot of them who can't work. Some of them choose not to work for a variety of reasons. We can talk about the role welfare has in providing motivation not to work and providing incentives not to work. Some of them are old. Yeah, but they had a lifetime to save. So there's no reason they should be poor. Some of them are sick. Hopefully they have family members who can take care of them. And yeah, lots of other reasons people might be poor. The question fundamentally is this. Two questions. One is the fact that somebody's poor, how does that create a claim on me? How is their suffering and accept all this suffering as possible? How is their suffering, even if they cannot find work, a demand on me? Morally, that sounds offensive. The idea that because you are struggling, you are hurting, you have a hard time, somehow you should be able to steal, take my money from me in order to nourish or facilitate your need. So I don't think anybody should be forced to work. And I don't believe anybody should be forced to pay somebody to live because that's what taxation is. It is forced. It's not voluntary. The whole point is that it's forced. So yes, it's a bad situation. And it does not, the fact that you are in a bad situation that does not give you a right to my stuff. I have two objections to welfare. First, it's immoral. And secondly, it's impractical. It's immoral. First reason it's immoral is because it takes what I produce, what I create, what I make, and it uses coercion and force to take that away from me. It is theft that is somehow be legitimized by the democratic process. But if we did it one-on-one, if Malty came to me and said, I don't have money to pay my medical bills, give me money. And I said, no, we wouldn't accept the idea that he could pull a gun out of me and take my money by force. But somehow it's okay for him to go to the neighbors and get everybody to vote. And if they vote to take my money, it's not theft anymore. Now it's democracy and it's okay. So it's the use of force. It's immoral. It's unjust. And force I think is bad uniformly, whether it's used by the individual or whether it's used by the state. So I think it's immoral because it takes stuff from me, but I also think it's immoral because it does harm to the recipient. It's true that to be poor is difficult. But to be poor and to receive welfare is actually worse. To be poor and to receive welfare, you are told implicitly that you're hopeless, that you depend on others for your survival, that you don't have the skill and ability to take care of yourself. If self-esteem comes from achievement, you are denied for life of self-esteem because nobody expects you to achieve anything. You don't expect yourself to achieve anything. Just accept what the government gives you. I think welfare institutionalizes people into what poverty, and we can see that with the so-called war on poverty. People are stuck. They've been trained to accept the gift of poverty or the gift and quote of poverty. And not destroy for themselves and not to achieve and not to succeed and not go out there and find a job. So we're incentivizing them not to work. And it destroys, as I said, the ability to have self-esteem and therefore really the ability to be happy to achieve happiness. Finally, welfare is impractical. It doesn't work as we see the poverty rates in the United States not really budging in spite of gazillions of dollars thrown at poverty at both the federal, state, local levels. We see resentment and victimhood on the part of the recipient. Recipients are not exactly happy. They're not exactly flourishing. All these medical problems, all these issues were poverty. They still exist in spite of how long have we had 50 years now? 50 years of a war on poverty since the late 1960s. We discourage people from saving by promising them social security. Social security, really the biggest pyramid scheme in all of human history. And yet, has it made them that better off? Many people retire and suddenly discover, wait a minute, social security's not that much money. Can I really live on this? And yet, we've taught them not to save their entire life. The lack of saving destroys economic activity and the jobs created through saving and investment and yet a whole economic policies around welfare are targeted at consumption. You can see that we tax the middle class and the rich who tend to save and invest and we provide money to the relative poor who tend to consume and not save and invest. Welfare programs have been expanded to include much of the middle class, not just poor people. And of course, they have been failures and inevitably, they must be failures. So I think of all poverty, so I think of all what poverty is a bad thing. The solution to poverty is a free market. It does create lots of jobs and creates good jobs, creates high paying jobs. And yes, children don't have to work. That is the beauty of capitalism. Capitalism liberated the children from work. All of human history, the last 100,000 years, children have worked on the farm and ultimately factories and then capitalism provided their parents with jobs that paid well enough that these children could then go out and get an education and still have food on their tables. We're at about six and a half minutes for that opening statement. Yeah, so that's fine. So if you want to get people at poverty, the only system in all of human history to get people out of poverty is free market capitalism. Thank you very much, gentlemen. For those opening statements, I want to remind you folks, our guests are linked in the description and we're thrilled to have them. So we want to remind you to be your regular friendly cells in the chat, criticizing the arguments instead of the person. And so thanks so much, gentlemen. The floor is all yours for that open conversation. Yeah. So I guess there's a lot to address there. I'll try not to try to address it all because I don't want to just be exchanging monologues, but I'll try to sort of address the broad strokes of what you're saying. So you made a few appeals to the idea that just empirically, just empirically the practicality of welfare. So you say that the empirical evidence points to the idea that welfare is impractical, that free markets are the best way to alleviate poverty. I, of course, take a serious issue with this. I think that if you look at like cross-national correlations, for example, there is a very strong and undeniable correlation between more so whoops, you foes spending and greater poverty reduction. What did you say? Oh, sorry, I froze. You froze. Am I back? Everything, but there was a lag, but you're caught up now. Okay. Okay. Cool. Yeah. So from what I'm familiar with, the OECD statistics that I'm familiar with, when you measure the relationship between the final poverty level as a percentage of market poverty level and net social spending, the relationship between welfare and poverty reduction across countries is an R-squared correlation of 0.64, which seems pretty significant. You appealed to the idea of sort of this concept of like dynamic effects of, well, if you didn't have welfare, old people might save more sick people, might have families that take care of them. The problem is we can see empirically that when we reduce how much we spend on welfare, these things simply aren't enough to compensate for the massive reduction in poverty that welfare brings. You appealed to the war on poverty being a failure. I think this is a very common thing on here, but the main problem that I see with this is what you're appealing to is the fact that if you look at the official poverty rate, it hasn't budged much since the war on poverty started. But the problem is the official poverty rate does not take into account things like capital gains or non-cash benefits such as public housing, Medicaid, SNAP, the earned income tax credit. And so as a result, families who benefit from tax measures such as the earned income tax credits or income support such as SNAP appear to be no better off than families who are not enrolled in these programs according to the official poverty metric. So in other words, these statistics are basically saying that if you measure the effectiveness of federal anti-poverty policies using a measure of poverty that explicitly ignores the impact of those same policies, then the impact seems small. And yeah, of course, I would agree with that, but I think it's a faulty usage of statistics. And an analysis by the Council of Economic Advisers shows that when safety net programs are taken into account using something called the disposable income poverty rate, the poverty rate actually fell from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012, which is a reduction of more than one third, which I see as pretty significant. And I guess just the other point, we could get to more stuff such as the saving and investment stuff, which I also obviously disagree with, but to keep it short, I'll just address one more thing, which is he talked about the harms that it causes to welfare recipients and how it institutionalizes poverty. And I think this is sort of an antiquated way of viewing things. So for example, there is a really interesting literature review in 2018 by somebody whose name I, there's no way I'm going to correctly pronounce. I think the name is Iona Marinescu. And basically what they found was that various unconditional cash transfer programs tend to boost incomes, boost health, boost education. And despite the widespread belief that welfare benefits encourage people not to work, there's just no substantial outcome to that effect at all. So programs that give out cash unconditionally like payouts from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes natural resource revenue to the people of Alaska, the reduction in employment was like nowhere to be found. And one other thing is that a recent in a recent experiment, you may have heard of this, some philanthropists randomly selected 125 residents of poor neighborhoods in the city of Stockton, California, and gave them $500 and unconditional cash transfers. And instead of working less, the people who got the cash actually worked more. Interviews with the Stockton residents who received the $500 a month spent it almost entirely on necessities like food and utilities. And in interviews, they reported feeling more confident, more engaged, even more entrepreneurial. And people who got the money were healthier, happier, less anxious, more stable and well off, etc. And so I think what this suggests is that contrary to this antiquated view about poverty being a product of this sort of culture of poverty that keeps people with this dependent mindset, it seems to be the case that poverty keeps people down through a variety of day-to-day difficulties and hassles and bills, which make it very hard for poor people to better their situations. Just to be sure that we move, we'll kind of try to work on getting each of these exchanges to shrink it down as we go. Yeah, this is my last point. So the basic idea here is that contrary to this idea of the culture of dependency or whatever, it seems that poverty keeps people down through a flurry of day-to-day difficulties and hassles that make it harder for poor people to better their situations. It makes them harder for them to go to school, to become a nurse instead of a cashier, makes it harder for them to move to a better neighborhood, to look for a better job, etc. And so instead of working on their futures, people in poverty are trapped by the need to pay the bills of the moment. And therefore, through this model, providing welfare actually gives people the breathing room that is required for them to focus on the future and actually meaningfully better their situation. So that's all I'd say. So we could go back and forth with empirical studies. I mean, I could be citing the Finnish study that did universal basic income and found almost no impact one way or the other. And there are plenty of studies that show the detrimental effect of welfare recipients. But look, if you were right and welfare worked so well, then we wouldn't hear constant complaining and demands for more and more and more and more. Poverty rates around the world, if you actually look at poverty rates around the world, if you take away the relative minor differences between the United States and Europe, but you look at the globe, the places in the world that have reduced the most poverty have done it without any welfare. So China has reduced poverty rates by almost a billion people have come out of poverty in China over the last 40 years with basically no welfare, zero welfare. So in spite of the idea that China's communist or socialist, there's almost no transfer payments in China. Same is true of India, which has almost no transfer payments and yet has seen a massive reduction in poverty. I'm not even going to mention a place like South Korea, which has gone from being as poor as North Korea to being as rich as Europe or Taiwan or Singapore or Hong Kong, which has almost no welfare and has yet to seen a massive reduction. I like the way you use stats. I wish more people would do that on your side, because the way you use stat inequality hasn't increased in the United States very much over the last 30 to 40 years. Because if you include transfer payments and all the things that you included there, inequality has not gone up. So you can challenge Stiglitz and another Nobel Prize winners in terms of how they do the stats and inequality. You know, it's a shame that people are using statistics in the way that seems convenient to them at the time. So yes, by some measures, by some measures of poverty, poverty has gone down in the United States. It doesn't feel that way because people complain and people make a big deal as if poverty is as bad or worse than it has ever been. But look, all of this is, in my view, all the stats and all this is a waste because the fundamental point here is that we'd be far better off without welfare, but I can't show you that. I can't point to an alternate universe in which welfare never came into being. You point out that poverty has declined from 20-something percent to 16, I think you said, which I believe the number seemed right. How do we know what would have happened if there was no welfare? How do we control for the non-existence of welfare? I mean, I can speculate. I think you speculate quite well that poverty would actually be lower than 16%. If we match the rate of decline of poverty in countries that were growing at GDP growth of four, five, six percent, which I think the United States could achieve, poverty would have shrunk significantly more than it has shrunk. Indeed, growth of GDP contributes to reduction in poverty far more than any redistribution programs. So the studies, the stats that you are mentioning, I think are correct, but I think it's a question of how we interpret them and what we actually make of them. In my view, if you eliminated poverty, if you lower taxes in accordance with that, if you deregulated the economy, if you made an economy actually free, you would have dramatically higher wealth creation, dramatically greater business activity, massive numbers of new jobs, which many of those jobs would be taken by welfare recipients today, driving them out of welfare. Productivity would increase dramatically. As productivity would increase, wages would increase. As wages would increase, people would have much more money to be able to afford the healthcare, to afford to be able to take care of a sick cousin or sick aunt or sick relative, to be able to take care of all these people who supposedly fall between the cracks, who are so poor. But yet poverty is shrinking. So this seems to be constant complaint about poverty, and yet it's shrinking significantly. So all of this old sick and other could be easily taken care of by the difference in economic growth. If you eliminated the role, the heavy intervention of government in the rest of the economy. So the solution to poverty is two at the end of the day. One is job creation, wealth creation, and second is private charity. So to the extent that some people do indeed fall between the cracks, I think it would be a tiny fraction of the number that today are defined as poor. To the extent that there are people who fall between the cracks, those people will be taken care of through family and through private charity. Americans have been some of the most generous people in all the history of mankind. And there's plenty of charity to take care of those people who actually need it. And charity, when it's private, is not given unconditionally the way the government does it. It's not given in the kind of bureaucracy and the inefficiency that the government does welfare. It would be more efficient. It would require those who can work to work. It would be much more linked to actual virtuous activities. And as a consequence, help people in a much more substantial way get out of poverty much faster and much more effectively. Yeah, so I guess there's a few things I would take issue with there. So I guess to get a smaller point out of the way, you brought up the example of Finland's Universal Basic Income. And I am somewhat familiar with that. There are a variety of problems with Finland's Universal Basic Income. It only lasted for two years. So the effects that we've seen, we have very limited data to draw off of, whereas programs that have been in existence for a much longer time, like Alaska's Permanent Fund and have been more extensively studied, seem to have a lot better outcomes. There's a lot of bureaucratic problems in Finland as well. And Finland is widely regarded as an example of a place where Universal Basic Income failed because of a variety of very conditional and bureaucratic factors that were specific to Finland. But if you look at other experiments and social spending more generally, this seems to be undeniably the exception rather than the rule. And so you talked about how if welfare was working, we wouldn't see complaining or demands for more. I don't know how I feel about that argument. I feel like, in large part, the reason for, there were some interesting papers showing that there's some correlation between higher levels of income inequality and more popularity and populist right-wing and left-wing populist parties. So I feel like a lot of the fervor of among many people with regards to they feel like we're not spending enough on social spending is, A, driven by largely the fact that we don't do enough social spending. If we look at places like the Nordic countries, for example, these places are very cohesive. People seem very content. There's not a lot of social discontent, or at least to the extent that there is in the U.S., and it's because they engage in sufficient social spending that people generally feel as if they're taken care of. You talk about how the places in the world, if you zoom out from places like the United States and Europe that have reduced poverty the most, did so through capitalism. And I certainly agree that market mechanisms, I'm not advocating for a planned economy here. I certainly agree that market mechanisms do have a substantial role in eliminating poverty. The question then becomes, do countries which allow for market mechanisms and social spending and have become rich through market mechanisms, can these countries, if they implement social spending, reduce poverty more than countries which have market mechanisms and don't implement social spending alongside that? And the answer seems to be yes, based on correlations among OECD countries between social spending and poverty reduction. You talked about we can't like control for, we don't have like a control example. We don't have an example of a place with no welfare that we can really look at to compare this. But it seems like the further we go, at least among OECD countries for example, the further that wealthy countries go from social spending and from welfare and towards the direction of sort of what you're talking about, the less poverty is reduced. In fact, there was an interesting paper from like 2014 from the Institute for the Study of Labor. It was titled, The Welfare, State and Anti-Poverty Policy in Rich Countries. And it reviewed a bunch of different papers and it found that quote, no advanced economy has achieved a low level of poverty with a low level of social spending. So it seems like the further we go in the direction that you're advocating for, while we don't have a perfect example of what you're advocating for, the further we go, the less effective we are able to reduce poverty. One more thing that you brought up was charity, which is like a big example. And it seems like, so I mentioned earlier that if you look at the correlation among OECD countries between market poverty level and net social spending, or the final poverty level as a percentage of market poverty level and net social spending, you see that the relationship between welfare and poverty reduction is about 0.64. If you look at the same data, you can see that the correlation between the post-transfer poverty rate and net private social spending, in other words, charity, is about a R-squared correlation of 0.0. It seems like a collective action problem where people without some coercive element or without taxation and welfare, not enough people just voluntarily choose to help out poor people to substantially reduce poverty. And I guess just the final point is that you brought up wages and jobs, like if we had a free market, people would be earning more, more people would have jobs, and so people would have more money. I could grant that for the sake of argument. I'm sure we could quibble over the details about that. I could grant that for the sake of argument and still say that based on the data that we currently have, it seems like a free market deregulated economy, even if that was the best way to raise jobs and raise wages, with social spending and welfare alongside that would seem more effective at reducing poverty than just the free market with no social spending. That seems to be what the empirical evidence suggests. I'm going to, just to, the next one we're going to like limit it to maybe like three and a half to four minutes or so. We'll give Iran the same amount of time to respond. And thanks so much, guys. And reminder, folks, our guests are linked in the description. Go ahead, Iran. All right. I mean, it's hard to attain everything. I apologize because these, Matthew's going long, but on almost every point, take the so-called social cohesion that exists in some of these other countries that don't result in, I don't know, right wing populist movements. I take Sweden. Sweden is the country that people love to love, right? People are happy and people, is there real social cohesion in Sweden? Really? Has anybody visited Sweden recently over the last five years? I have. I've been there several times. If you look at the right wing populists, they actually have 20 to 30 percent of the vote in Sweden. Not very happy. If you want to have a discussion about the effect of Islam or Muslims on Swedish society, you can't even speak because they'll shush you up because it's just not acceptable to even talk about the issue and raise the issue. So I'm very skeptical about this notion of Sweden being some kind of heaven either socially, economically, from a poverty perspective or any perspective for that matter. And Sweden is the last, you know, while Sweden redistributes a lot of wealth, it has actually been cutting its welfare over the last few decades as a consequence of the fact that the welfare spending they had almost drove them bankrupt. Let me take a different tact here because, you know, I think we could argue about the details. I mean, if you go to Asia, Asian countries, you can find very little social spending and very low rates of poverty in places like Korea and Taiwan. Europe, there seems to be some correlation between social spending and the number of poor. In China, again, in developing countries, there's zero social spending and yet poverty has shrunk dramatically. I'd give one more example, which I think is important. I would give the example, maybe the most important example, is the United States and Europe in the 19th century, which saw dramatic, very fast reductions in the rate of poverty with almost no state intervention, with almost no redistribution of wealth. And indeed, you could argue that with the establishment of the modern welfare state in the United States in the 1930s and in Europe, depending on exactly where Germany in the late 19th century, the rest of Europe sometime in the 20th century, you saw a massive reduction in economic growth, massive reduction in wealth creation and generally a lower standard of living than otherwise was possible. Europe is relatively poor to the United States and part of the relative poverty that Europe has vis-à-vis the U.S. is a consequence of the fact that they redistribute masses amounts of wealth instead of investing it and instead of encouraging entrepreneurship. But I want to take, I want to step back from this kind of line of argument. We could continue it if you want, but I want to step back. Let's even assume that everything in the mouth he says is true. Let's assume that all these poverty programs quote work in a sense that they reduce poverty. And if we did more of them, poverty will reduce even more. I would argue they're still wrong. That is, the standard of goodness is not poverty. The standard of goodness is not how many poor people they are. The system that we should be thinking about creating the kind of society that we want is not a society that is correlated somehow with the rates of poverty. Early 19th century America, well let's say mid century, let's get outside of slavery, let's say late 19th century America had very, very high rates of poverty. And yet it was an amazing place in which innovation and production and the rate of growth and the rate of reduction in poverty were some of the highest in all of human history. Why this poverty matter? What makes poverty important? I don't care to be kind of a little outrageous. I don't care about the poor. I care that ambitious, moral, rational people have the opportunity to achieve happiness, success in their lives. I want people to be able to live the best life that they can live, every person, rich, middle class, poor. I don't care about the rich. I really don't care about the middle class and I don't care about the poor. I don't care about any of those groups. I care about individuals having the freedom, having the ability, having the opportunities to achieve the most in their lives. If we look at what welfare does to children, the way, again, it institutionalizes a mindset. So the children of welfare recipients are likely to be welfare recipients, not in a marketplace, not when the culture is a culture that expects them to work, that expects them to take care of themselves, that expects them to achieve, to advance, to progress, to take responsibility for their own lives, not in a culture where maybe their parents are getting private charity. And by the way, the statistics on charity are really distorted because you're taking a world in which has welfare and now you're layering on charity and you're saying that charity doesn't have an impact. Great, because the charity is miniscule as compared to the welfare state. But of course, I give exactly zero to poverty reducing charities today, right? Why? Because 50% of my income goes to that. Why would I give more, right? A big chunk of my money is already going to do that. But if I was free, I would be happy if I didn't have to pay 50% of my taxes. I'd be happy to give to specific charities that instituted programs that made sense to me in terms of alleviating poverty because I do care, ultimately, right, about people not being poor. But I don't care about the poor. I'd like to help children get a better education. But the welfare state denies that the welfare state provides them with an inferior product called public education. I care about why do they have all these problems health wise? Well, a lot of it is because of the lifestyle they engage in and the lifestyle they engage in is made possible because of welfare, whether it's the eating habits, the lack of exercise habits, right, that obesity. This is the problem of poverty in the United States. It's a problem of obesity. They're so poor, they eat too much. It's not healthy, right? But if you, for example, if you linked certain behaviors as a private charity, probably were too certain to the ability to get help, you might have a healthier population and maybe problems of health would reduce. So I want an individualist response rather than a collectivist response. I don't view the poor as all equal. Some people deserve to be poor. Some people do not deserve to be poor. Some people benefit from charity. From welfare, my guess is that 90 plus percent of them do not, not in the big picture. And you can poo-poo the kind of economic growth that capitalism achieves. But if you look again at the fact that 98 percent of humanity was poor 250 years ago, less than 8 percent is extremely poor. Today, almost all of that is a consequence of markets, of wealth creation, of capitalism. Imagine if we had more of that. Imagine if those job creating, wealth creating engines, there was much more of that. Poverty would be reduced dramatically. So I think the solution is freedom. And I think part of the challenge you is I challenge the moral assumption that it's okay to use force to take money from me and give it to other people, even if it quote works. Thanks very much. And multi for this next one, just to constrain, I know that you've got a round in the chamber ready to fire at each of Iran's arguments. However, just if you want to pick your, your, the ones you most want to discuss and just choose those will kind of shrink it down a minute, put a timer for about three minutes just to try to kind of get the back and forth going more quickly. I'll try to really speed run the points. Okay. Yeah, sure. So you mentioned this idea of charity is sort of crowded out by welfare. And if we had less welfare, people would give more to charity. And that's the problem with me citing these charity statistics. The problem that I see is that if that just quickly, Europeans have never been charitable. So in Europe, you get zero child, you've always received almost no charity. Americans have been incredibly charitable. And charity for poverty has declined as we become more welfare oriented. Sorry, I just wonder. Yeah, yeah. So if that if the effect of welfare crowding out was as you say, such that getting rid of welfare would lead to more charity that is enough to compensate for the anti welfare effects or the anti poverty effects of welfare, then we wouldn't see statistics that we see with regards to when we spend less and less and less on social spending across countries, we get further and further and further away from successfully addressing the problem of poverty. You briefly brought up the issue of Sweden, social cohesion and poverty. Of course, Sweden isn't perfect with regards to social cohesion or poverty. But if you look at it, like relatively, if you look at, you know, statistics with regards to social cohesion or how content Swedish people are with their lives or even relative poverty metrics or absolute poverty metrics, it's just seems to be the case that Sweden is doing much better than we are like factually. You also mentioned that Sweden is cutting welfare because of social spending almost drove them bankrupt. I don't really agree with this narrative. Social spending in Sweden was increasing since the 1900s. Even in the golden age of Swedish social democracy, GDP growth was pretty healthy for the most part. For example, between 1980 and 1990, GDP per capita grew in Sweden by 20%, between 1960 and 1970, real GDP per capita doubled in Sweden. There was a collapse in the 90s that led to the reforms that you're talking about, but I think that was more a product of deregulation of credit, bad monetary policy, other geopolitical issues happening at the same time, etc. So I wouldn't really pin that on social spending. You talk about how a lot of Asian countries have reduced poverty without welfare. I'm not denying that you can significantly reduce poverty without welfare. Market mechanisms do a great job at reducing poverty. However, it seems to be the case that market mechanisms plus social spending reduces poverty more than just the market mechanisms that has reduced poverty significantly in the Asian countries. You talk about GDP growth and entrepreneurship. In terms of entrepreneurship, the economist Gareth Olds has done a lot of interesting work demonstrating that more social spending can actually lead to more entrepreneurship because it allows people to feel more comfortable taking risks and allows people to save more for investment. In terms of GDP growth, I think that reducing inequality leads to a pretty significant reduction in GDP growth because it allows people to develop their human capital more and so on. In terms of morals, I think that my moral case, even if it was all correct, you said even if it works, then it shouldn't matter because of the morals. I think that our morals align more than you might think. I am a psychological egoist. I think that we're all out to further make the best society for ourselves possible. But I think that having a society that's more cohesive with less poverty, with less crime, with better growth, I think this is conducive to all of our own interests. And I agree that people should be trying to achieve the most in their lives possible. But I think that poverty helps people be able to do that by giving them the breathing room that they need to sort of better their circumstance rather than being trapped by the cluster of daily hassles and bills that poverty traps them under. Thank you very much. I mean, we could have a debate about psychological egoism. But I'm an egoist and I don't want my money taken away from me. And if you think it's in my self interest to give money to the poor, then convince me of that. But you don't want to convince me to give money to the poor. You want to pull out a gun and take my money by force to give to the poor. So if indeed you're an advocate of some form of egoism, then you should be promoting a voluntary system of welfare in which individuals are convinced one another that is true that it's in our self interest to benefit. And the problem of coordination is way, way overstated. If you can convince me to give 20, 30, 40% of my money towards poverty reduction, and if we can create a competitive environment among charities, then you would get a far more efficient welfare system than we have today where much of the money that goes into welfare today is eaten up by a bureaucracy and is a complete waste. So on an ethical basis, the fact that you think or that a majority of people think that welfare is somehow creates a good society and is egoistically better for you doesn't give you the right to force me to fund it. You believe it, you fund it. That's great. So the fact that there's a collective action problem is your problem, not mine in that sense, right? You have to convince enough people to group together to do what you think they should do. That's what collective action problems require. So if you're truly an egoist, then you shouldn't be causing other people to do what you think is good for you. You should be letting them do what they think is good for them. Look, we again, we can get into a whole debate about this, but there is no economic theory that links inequality to GDP growth. None. And I know the OECD studies that have showed inequality connected to GDP. Let me just, let me just, I think the technical word for the quality of the research there is that it's BS. It's complete. And if we had the study and I went through the statistics because it sounds like you like to do the stats right, I could show you that the stats are BS. When you include Zimbabwe as having high inequality in the United States having high inequality and using both of those countries on an axis, then you're going to get crazy and irresponsible results, which is exactly what these people do. Inequality, there's no economic theory linking into GDP. Indeed, I would argue it's the opposite. It's societies in which that leave people free tend to have high inequality and also have high GDP and also have low consumption inequality, which is really the inequality that is important, which is the differences in consumption and the difference in consumption in rich countries in high inequality countries are far smaller than what you'd expect from the income or wealth inequality. These content studies, and I notice you haven't used happiness, so that's your credit because happiness studies are dubious in terms of the definition of happiness. So yes, Swedes say they're content. It's fascinating, but Swedes in America say they're content too. Swedes in America, or at least studies I saw about Denmark, Danes in America are richer than Danes in Denmark. They are happier or they are more content than Danes in Denmark and maybe there's something going on here with how people define content and what that means. I usually find people who are not very ambitious and who are not very entrepreneurial are very content people and people that tend to be ambitious and entrepreneurial tend to be not very content. And Scandinavians who are super ambitious tend to not stay in Scandinavia. They tend to go to Switzerland to the UK or to the United States of America, particularly if they've made a little bit of money and don't want to be taxed at the rates that Scandinavia taxes them. So you've got a selection bias, you've got a survival bias in all of those studies. Look, at the end of the day, I think that the issue here is twofold. From a moral perspective, your right to coerce me to provide for what you think is socially good. And I think the second point is what is going to create a better society, a society in which we coerce each other based on what we think is going to be all a society in which we leave people free to make choices for themselves. That includes the poor and that includes the wealthy and let the dice fall where they may. Thank you very much. Yeah, so a few points there. So for one, you talk about how if I was truly an egoist, I should be trying to convince other people to donate to charity rather than using a coercive force like taxation and redistribution. I guess the reason why I would take issue with this is because I think that sort of part of the nature of collective action problems is that if we all had to chip into a certain thing, it makes all of us better off. However, it's simply infeasible and we've seen empirically that just no society ever has been able to convince enough people to chip in to have the positive effects that welfare has. So even if it's coercion, even if it's involuntary, I think having people democratically decide that we are going to agree to have this coercive force, I think that can make everybody better off, even if it is coercive. You're not any utilitarian at the end. Oh, I mean, sure, but ultimately my dedication to utilitarian comes from my desire to personally live the best life that I can. And I think the best life for me and the best life for most people can happen in a society that is flourishing. And so I guess a couple other points. You talked about how under a charity, we'd have a more efficient system. I guess I don't want to like beat a dead horse like keep going over the same points, but I just, I guess I just feel like we haven't seen that. We've seen that when we try to rely more on charity and less on welfare, the system has gotten less efficient and the outcomes related to it have gotten a lot less positive. You talked about inequality and GDP growth that there's no sound economic theory linking equality to GDP growth. And I agree with you that there have been some very bad studies. So some of the OECD studies that include countries like Zimbabwe have been really poor because they distort the data. There was one interesting paper from 2014 from the International Monetary Fund which specifically included rich countries like the European countries, America, Japan, to get that bias out of the way. And basically what they did is that they used a cross country data set that distinguishes market inequality from net inequality to calculate redistributive transfers for a large number of country year observations. And what they found is that inequality is robustly correlated with faster and more durable growth for a given level of redistribution. And redistribution is generally benign, somewhat negative, but benign in terms of its impact on growth. And therefore the combined direct and indirect effects on redistribution, including growth effects from the resulting lower inequality are on average poor pro growth. In terms of the economic theory, I would say that the economic theory is that having more equality allows people to develop their like human capital more. It can actually lead to more investment because it creates more social and political stability, which makes people feel like investing is safer. And finally, in terms of the content studies, I agree that some of them can be culturally biased, but I guess pointing out that there could be a flaw in the data set isn't enough for me to abandon it. I would need to see if the cultural bias is prevalent enough and goes in a certain direction enough to negate the conclusion that I'm drawing from it. And in terms of the immigrants who are just as content in America, I do think, I think that's where like the real selection bias occurs because the kinds of people who are specifically moving to America are going to be the people who are more likely to be happy when they've moved to America. So I see a selection bias with using that argument in that way, I guess. So yeah. Potentially, the problem there is when you go to third and fourth generation Swedes and Danes in Minnesota or in places like that, where it's no longer a selection bias unless you think that it gets transferred in the genes, which I am skeptical of. I think the key here is the moral point, and we can discuss some of the empirical stuff, but the moral point that you have a collective action problem, you believe that it results in a certain thing. And you think that anything that you can convince 51 percent of the people is okay to do to me. My speech might be offensive enough as to cause harm to enough people so that you, in your utilitarian world, believe that my speech is causing real harm to people, maybe to convince people to vote against welfare. And as a consequence, I am a danger to poverty in the world, so we should silence me. Free speech, one can imagine, could be, you know, the idea of free speech in the Constitution, at least, is not based on utilitarian framework. Thank God. Well, thank whatever. But given that speech is not necessarily, in spite of what Mill says, always, not everybody perceives it as good for society, put it that way. And a majority often perceives it as bad for society. And we've decided that it doesn't matter what a majority thinks, leaving people alone and allowing them to be free and allowing them to engage in speech freely is the right thing to do on principle, and it does not require a majority in order to achieve it. I believe that it's true in terms of property. I believe that it's true in terms of people's work and believe that it's true in terms of my income. My life is mine. It's not yours to decide as a majority whether you think it should be deployed at x or y because you have a collective action problem. That is your problem, not mine. So morally, if you believe that individuals should be allowed to pursue their values, to pursue the optimal life for themselves, then you're trying to inflict your values and your way of living on me. I mean, one of the things I always tell, and I'm not accusing you of being a socialist or communist, but one of the things I often tell my people who are socialists and communists is great. Under capitalism, you can be a communist. You can go and start a commune. You can, from each according to his ability to each according to his need, and I want him to feel with you. You can start your own welfare little system as long as you don't use force to take money away. As you mentioned, I think in California, the entrepreneur who gave people a check. Great. If private individuals want to do private charity and want to do experiments of private charity, I'm not going to, I'm not going to oppose that. That certainly would not be illegal under my system. But for you to force me to participate in such an experiment, and for you to then, you know, use as justification a bunch of empirical studies, as if that should convince me that it's in my self interest, that you know, whereas I can imagine what I would have done with 50% of income that was taken from me. And I think what I would have done would have done to my life much more and actually maybe could have helped put people even more. But I'm not given the opportunity to experiment, you know, to manifest my ideas because you're using a gun against me because you're using force against me. So I think that that morally, you know, running your own social experiment using coercion on me is in my view immoral and wrong. And that to me is the ultimate, my ultimate argument against welfare. Let me just say this about charity because you've said this a couple of times, the studies that show that, you know, when you reduce social spending, charity doesn't go up or something like that. There's only one country that has any kind of history of charity, and that is the United States. I don't know when would be the period in which we reduced social spending to such an extent that the private sector would have entered into this and charity would have been a replacement, but it hasn't been significant. The changes in social spending have been marginal. You wouldn't expect a result. My guess is that if it went to zero tomorrow, charity would increase substantially. The same, you've got the same problem in that study that the European Bank or the World Bank did on inequality. The differences between Europe and the United States are so small in terms of social spending that to come to robust statistical conclusions about the different levels and whether social spending is being pro-growth or not is dubious statistically. And I would argue if that were the case, then Denmark would be significantly richer than the United States. And it's not. It's quite a bit poorer. We'll give four minutes to each of you to kind of draw together the threads from this discussion. And so we'll kick it over to Mouthi. And after this four minutes from each of you, we'll jump into the Q&A. So thanks for your questions, folks. And Mouthi, the floor is all yours. All right. So I haven't seen any data on third and fourth generation immigrants from Denmark and Sweden or Norway. I guess I could see an argument that maybe there are some like some of the selection biases carried over, maybe not through genes, but just through upbringing and kind of, yeah, like through upbringing, I guess. Like if you're a parent immigrated to America because they wanted to be in America, they're super happy with America, and they raised you to sort of have that same outlook. You're going to report to studies looking, saying that you are more content living in America. So I guess I'm not sure. I would just have to see more data on that. With regards to the moral stuff, you said you talked about free speech, utilitarianism. You think that the majority can think some people's speech is bad, but that wouldn't justify us sort of doing away with free speech. And I agree with that. But that's because I think that free speech, even if a majority of people think it's bad. And to be clear, I'm not arguing that welfare is good, because a majority of people think it's good. I'm saying it's good because of its empirical outcomes. And I think that the empirical outcomes of allowing for free speech are on the net positive for everyone in society, just like the empirical outcomes of doing welfare are net positive for society. You talk about how my life is mine, and it's immoral to inflict force on me or prevent me from living the way that I want to live. I guess this is just like a fundamental disagreement between us. I think that if you can have a coercive element that in some way uses coercion to interfere with how people would have otherwise lived their lives in the absence of coercion, but nonetheless that the existence of that coercion creates a more prosperous society and allows every individual to live, in general, happier lives in a more flourishing society, I think that that is a net good, even from an egoist perspective. I think that people are, every individual is happier when they're less likely to fall into deep poverty in some point in their lives, when they're less likely to be assaulted in the streets because of lower inequality, etc. So I think that coercion is not necessarily antithetical to people's interests. But I guess that's just a sort of a fundamental disagreement. You talk about how only one country has a history with charity and that's the USA. Well, even in the USA, when we massively ramped up social spending, I sent the statistics earlier, when we massively ramped up social spending during the war on poverty, what we saw was a massive reduction in poverty. If all that welfare did was crowd out charity and charity before that would have just been more and would have compensated, then we wouldn't have seen that massive reduction in poverty as a result of increased social spending. And as the US has spent more, we've seen that when the US spends more and more in social spending, there's a reduction in poverty. And when we reduce social spending, there's an increase in poverty as a result of that. So I just don't see any evidence that even in the US, charity has the capacity to compensate for welfare. At best, this is an unfalsifiable claim and at worst, it's contrary to all of the available evidence that we currently have. Finally, you talked about how the studies I reference differences between Europe and the USA are so small, it's statistically dubious. I don't actually, I don't really think that is necessarily true. So for example, if you look at social expenditures as a percentage of GDP, it's like 30.8% in Finland and it's like 19% in the US. That is a very stark difference and there are statistical, it seems there are statistical methods that we can use to look at the differences and say, do these differences when we use control variables and regression analysis and other statistical methods, can we see these differing levels of social expenditures and inequality having an impact on growth? And it seems that we can. So yeah, I guess, yeah. Thank you very much. We'll give the same amount of time to Iran and then we'll go into that Q&A. Sure. Be aware of these statistical methods and particularly when the researchers have a bias. As somebody who used to do these kind of statistical stuff as a finance professor a long, long time ago, it's very easy to manipulate the data to get what you want. But and many of these people do. And also if for all of you, for everybody listening, if you're going to look at statistics, look at all the studies, including those that might not correlate with the desired results. The United States since the war on poverty, we have seen significant GDP growth. If you look at poverty rates before the war on poverty started, they had been declining, certainly they'd be declining since 1800, but they had been declining post World War Two and into the 1960s already to attribute whatever poverty reduction to the welfare state. I think as dubious, given that you had economic growth, you had levels of employment, particularly in certain periods, levels of employment that have not been seen. You also had a significant and dramatic increase in the quality of life and standard of living. I actually think poverty in the United States is much lower than what the stats would even suggest it is, not because of welfare, but because poor people today, as I mentioned earlier in the United States, tend to have a conditioning, tend to have because electricity is so cheap, tend to have iPhones. I mean, how do you even measure the value of an iPhone to anybody? Our estimations of poverty are very primitive and very dubious. Estimates generally of income and wealth are very dubious because they don't take into account the massive consumer surplus that is a result of the great products that we have today. We don't know how to measure the benefit of technology has on our life. So again, I can't run an experiment, but I would guess, and this is based on my understanding of economics and my understanding of how people behave, if we had not engaged in a war on poverty in the 1960s, my guess is poverty rates today would be dramatically lower. There'd be far more jobs, there would have been a lot more investment, there would be a lot more entrepreneurship in the United States and the country as a whole would be richer and individuals in it would be richer as well, including since we're talking about them, the poor would be in a much better situation than they are today. Economic growth would have accelerated dramatically. But here's the important point. Malthy says that according to his theory, everybody is better, literally everybody is better off if we have welfare. Well, I am not. I'm not. Now, I can show you all the different ways that I'm not. A lot of my income is gone. I should have had it. I could have done amazing things with it. I don't believe the correlation between inequality and crime. I don't believe that's true. I don't believe it exists. There are reasons why there's more crime in the United States than there is in Europe and I'm not sure it has anything to do with inequality, but we'll put that aside. But I am an example of a victim of somebody who, you say you want to make everybody better off. You've got a Wallsian thing going. Nobody is worse off because of my move, right? Everybody, well, I'm not. And I know a lot of people who are not. And I know a lot of poor people who are not because you might deny in the aggregate that welfare does harm to poor people. But suddenly there were individuals who would, under other circumstances, be more ambitious, who would under these under free market circumstances worked harder, who would under free market circumstances, got a better job, forced themselves to get a better education, found better means to improve their lives. And at least at the individual level, even if you can't see it in the aggregate, there has to be an effect of incentives that has discouraged certain people and institutionalized this poverty and caused children of people who accept welfare to expect welfare in the future and not to seek out new jobs. One of the great tragedies, I think, of the welfare state and the world poverty is what has happened to the African American community in the United States. And the fact that so many of them now are multi-generation in poverty, continuously receiving welfare and yet I'm not able to break out from that welfare. So, and I think welfare has done horrors to many poor people. And it's any utilitarian theory sacrifices some for others. And here I think you have sacrificed many too many. Time. All right. Thank you very much. Both of our guests want to remind you folks, couple of things. Both of our guests are linked in the description. So if you want to hear more, you can hear more by clicking on those links below. And that includes if you're listening to the Modern Day Debate podcast episode of this debate. As we do have a podcast, folks, check it out. And so you can find our guest links there as well. And then last, before we jump into this Q&A, we are stoked. Destiny will be returning this coming Tuesday. He'll be debating Pogan on capitalism versus Marxism. So that should be a juicy one. And don't forget to hit that subscribe and notification button so you don't miss it. So thanks for your first question. This one coming in from Robert Nasir says, if I invest capital via Super Chat, does that make it too obvious which side I support? Haha. Thanks for putting on the event game. Thanks very much. And I want to say a huge thanks to our guests as they are indeed linked in that description. Jonathan Honig says, in support of Iran. Yoran. Oh gosh. Iran, Iran. You got it right the first time. Thank you. Thank you. Stephen Steen says, in support of communism. All right. Thank you, Stephen. Brad Becker says, value for value. Thanks for the debate. And Go Iran. Thank you very much. And Chali Sama says, go Iran. And Brad Becker says, reality is greater than wishes. And says, inequality means we are free to earn wealth as we choose. Inequality is not inherently bad. Malti, if you want to respond to that, because that's where we're starting to get into more of the context. Can I just say that I wrote a book called Equal is Unfair, which is a book on inequality and why inequality is a bogus issue. Poverty might be a real issue, but inequality is a non-issue. But there it is right there. Equal is unfair. You can see it there. Go buy it from Amazon. I'm going to add that. I'm going to add that in the description as well if it's not already there. We've got a number of links. And so go down, Malti, if you want to respond. Yeah. So I mean, I guess this just kind of gets back to a broader disagreement that Yoran and I were having, which is that I fundamentally believe that the vast majority of people in society are better off when their society is flourishing, when their society is more cohesive, has a greater economic mobility. And I think that these kinds of outcomes are more likely to be found in a society just sort of empirically when society is reducing inequality. I was familiar that Yoran Brook just sort of as a matter of morals just isn't really interested in the question of inequality. And that's why I kind of tried to tailor my arguments more so towards poverty. But yeah, I do think that inequality has a number of negative externalities that the vast majority of individuals in society are better off without. But yeah. So if we can respond quickly, you know, I don't think that's true. So just take economic mobility. There's no evidence to suggest that economic mobility is greater is related to equality in the country. Economic mobility in the United States was far higher 100 years ago. And far higher when inequality is was at its highest and in the in the late 90s, century early 20th century, the studies that compare the United States to Sweden or Denmark, let's say. Again, I mean, you can do lots of stuff with with with statistics. When the gap between the rich and the poor is very small, then to be mobile means very little. When the gap is high to be mobile means a lot. But the fact is that the mobility in the United States, if we do cross section analysis over time in the US, mobility is much higher when capitalism is thriving and mobility gets reduced as we redistribute more wealth. Give you a quick chance to respond, Ethan, because it was originally for you and then I'll jump to the next one. We've got to give you a pity response. Yeah, yeah, really quickly. So I guess what I would say there is I do think that I'm not familiar with the data among the longitudinal data with regards to the United States, with regards to how inequality and mobility have been correlated. I do think that we sort of have to be cautious when we are approaching things like this because it's very easy to see a correlation and assume a causal relationship. I generally like to avoid just, you know, when I'm referencing data, I generally try to avoid just, you know, bear correlations and try to incorporate papers that engage in like more statistical analysis and so on to try and control for certain variables and use dummy variables or like regression analysis and so on. However, with regards to the what Iran mentioned, which is just that when you reduce inequality, of course, it's going to look like you increase social mobility because, because like the so let's imagine like a like a hypothetical where it's like there's two ladders, one of which has spokes that are further away from each other. That's like a more unequal society. And the other one has sort of legs that are closer together. That's like a more equal society. And you could say that reducing those legs or the reducing the distance between the legs, of course, is going to make it look like you, like you were climbed higher, you climbed more legs. But that's only because like they're closer together, but you haven't actually gotten richer in like a sort of absolute terms. I guess if that analogy makes sense. But yeah, just really quickly, really quickly. There was an interesting paper called the Scandinavian fantasy that looked at income mobility in Denmark and the US. And basically what it found is that before taking into account taxes and transfers, the US has greater or they have about even income or economic mobility. But after taking into account taxes and transfer, Denmark has much greater economic mobility because of welfare. And it seems like even in absolute terms, people are able to get richer and able to like start businesses and be more innovative because of more social spending. So it's not just like a statistical illusion brought about by less inequality. This next one coming in from bubble gum gun says the existence of the state is against everything Brooke says. There is no such thing as free market under the state. Fascism is just the price we pay. Give you a chance to respond to that if you'd like Iran. Sure, it's off the debate topic, but there is no such thing as free markets without the state. I am not an anarchist. Anarchism is the dissolution of markets into gang warfare and violence. And it is abhorrent. Got you. And Jacob Carlin says, for mouthy, have you ever heard of Hong Kong? No welfare there. Yeah, so again, I'm not going to. This was a point that was also brought up earlier, which is that you can see. Well, first of all, I don't agree with the idea that Hong Kong has absolutely nowhere welfare. I don't know if any countries have zero like literally zero welfare or zero social spending. But I do think that like you can have significant reductions in poverty through like market mechanisms and so on. I'm not denying that empirical fact. But what I am saying is that market mechanisms seem to reduce poverty. Social spending along with market mechanisms seem to reduce poverty more than just market mechanisms alone could. So yeah, that's I guess I'll just say this. All poverty is reduced by market mechanism because even welfare is taking money from the market. It's taking money from taking money from the producers in the marketplace. Wealth that was created in the marketplace and redistributed. So when you don't have a marketplace, you have zero reduction in poverty because you have to somebody has to create the wealth to redistribute. And my point is that somebody who creates the wealth should have a visa in how that wealth is used and that majorities should not be in a position to dictate to individuals how their wealth should be used. Yeah, of course, I do agree with the first point. I disagree with the second point. Yeah, I do think that without markets, you're not going to have as good of a welfare state. Of course, I think markets are really important for productivity and growth. Whether or not you want to say that the resulting reduction in poverty from welfare is just a product of markets or whether we should just say that's because of markets as well. I think it's sort of like a semantic issue. But the fundamental point I'm making is that markets plus welfare I think reduces poverty more than just markets could. Yeah. But yeah, I disagree with the morals, of course, for reasons we started earlier. Yeah. Thanks so much. Sorry for rushing you guys. I seriously hate doing that. It's just that we have a lot of great questions I want to squeeze in and still respect your guys's time. Sigma and he said, Sigma uses voluntary donation. It's super effective. Thank you for that. And Brandon Arlene says, Iran, how do you feel about taxes being used to equip poor people with the education and resources needed to rise out of poverty? As I already said, I think it's a disaster. I don't think tax money should be used to give anybody anything. That is tax money should be used. I mean, there should be no course of taxation. The government should do one thing and one thing only and that is to protect our rights, to protect our freedoms. So there should be a police, a military, and a judicial system. And that is it. Education is far too important as a health care to be granted to a government monopoly. We can see what happens when you have that government monopoly. The product is awful and the customer turns out to be not the students, the customer turns out to be the teachers. The teachers rule the day. You can see that with COVID with schools shutting down and being closed and continue to be closed in spite of the fact that it's not good for the kids because nobody cares about the kids. It's not about the kids. So I am a huge advocate for improving education by privatizing it, by eliminating the state control over it. Certainly it's production. The best way to equip people to rise up from poverty is to give them a great education. The best way to get them a great education is to create a competitive educational system that actually produces results. Chandler Sander says, so should we lower the standard for poverty in our country like China did so that the number of those in poverty dramatically drops overnight? No, I mean, that's silly, right? We shouldn't. I don't know that we should measure poverty. I don't know what the value of measuring poverty is. What I want to measure is freedom. What I want is to leave people free to pursue their own opportunities, including poor people. You know what you can do to help poverty? You could eliminate licensing laws. You could eliminate the massive difficulties to open businesses. You want to open a nail salon? The unbelievable amount of costs and effort you have to go into bureaucratic, it can take two years to get a license to open a business in a poor neighborhood. So you want to help poor people get rid of all the obstacles and the obstacles are all created by the state. The obstacles are all created by regulations. And one of the obstacles, in my view, is the existence of a paycheck if I just sit at home and don't do anything. And that's an obstacle to people actually rising out of poverty. Got you. And Super K-Pill says, Malthy, what about the moral argument that it's simply wronged to forcefully take wealth from some and give it to others? Yeah. So like I said, my sort of moral framework is that I want the best possible world for myself. I'm motivated by my own self-interest. I think that everyone else fundamentally is motivated by their own self-interest. And I think that everybody, or generally the vast majority of people's self-interest, mine included, can be most well met in a society with welfare. I fundamentally am happier with my life. And I think most people are happier with their life when they're less likely to sink into deep poverty at some point in their life, when they're less likely to have like a family member in poverty, when they're less likely to be, you know, assaulted on the street because of higher poverty leading to higher crime, when they're in a society that's more cohesive and has stronger growth. So I disagree with Iran's fundamental premise that coercion is fundamentally antithetical to our self-interest because I think coercive structures can actually serve the self-interest of the vast majority of people in society. And I think we can see this sort of empirically. Yeah. Sorry, guys. Let me just quickly note that in the 19th century in the United States, one could buy insurance against poverty, one's own poverty, one could buy in the private markets, all kinds of mechanisms if one was responsible enough to secure one's ability to survive if bad stuff happened to oneself. The difference is that then it is you taking action, your responsibility, your voluntary transaction in order to engage in making sure you don't get poor versus this coercive collectivization and treating everybody the same rather than letting individuals be individuals and making their own choices in life. Yeah. So really, really quickly. So I guess I think that, so it's true that you could have some forms of insurance in like 1968, for example, in the United States, but it's also the case that, you know, as we've ramped up social spending since 1968, poverty has decreased. So it seems like, and of course from the cross-country correlations between poverty and welfare, we can see that these sorts of dynamic effects that you are referring to don't properly compensate for a good, successful welfare state. And when it comes to, you know, it's your responsibility. Yeah, I guess just fundamentally, I don't inherently care about things being voluntary. I care about things being voluntary insofar as something being voluntary serves the self-interest of people in society. And I think that some coercive structures that are not voluntary in the sense that you mean the word voluntary can be conducive to people's self-interest. We've got one from Super K-Pill. Who is people's self-interest? Not what I view as people's self-interest. And the only way for us to resolve it is by force. The only way to resolve it is through coercion. You've got Super K-Pill who asks, this one for Iran, they say devil's advocate question, are you in favor of raising minimum wage to $15 since you're against welfare? No, I mean, of course not. I'm against any minimum wage. Minimum wage should be lower to zero. And minimum wage is the government intervening in a voluntary exchange between an employee and the government has no business in that exchange. It is immoral to force people to pay a certain amount or to accept. And it's only rich people like minimum wages because they send their kids to do internships that get paid exactly zero. Poor kids are not allowed to do internships. Only rich kids are allowed to do internships. Poor kids have to be paid 15 bucks so they never get the job. No, the empirical studies and I know, you know, the empirical studies are overwhelming in terms of the negative effects of minimum wages. Now, yes, there's one or two studies that show counter results, but those studies are being challenged and refuted. The overwhelming majority of the empirical evidence out there shows that minimum wage is harmful to the people who need the minimum wage. That is, it makes it more difficult for the poorest to the poor or the people who have the wrong color skin or whatever it is. They have a disability, they're ex-cons. There's a multitude of ways in which people discriminate against people once you increase minimum wage. And there's no accident that the minimum wage was a racist policy instituted by white unions to keep blacks from getting jobs as they migrated north during the 19 was the 20s and 30s, I think. And they didn't want to wage competitions. They instituted a minimum wage to keep their jobs and that's what it is today. It's to protect unions and others from competition. No, Robert Nassir has a question and this one, some of these as both of you have noticed, these are things you've kind of already addressed. So if you want, you can add like an extra tidbit in terms of answering this. I think you probably just answered this roughly. Robert asked by what right does anyone seek to impose by government force their view of quote the good society on those who ask nothing more than to be left free to live by their own best judgment? Yeah, so I guess this is sort of where I'll use my opportunity to sort of respond to what you're on was saying to my answer to the last question of this effect, which is that I agree that so when you said like by your standard of self-interest, it is like, you know, coercion can be good, but not by mine. I think that so there's sort of two things that you can mean by that. I think in the first sense, I think that there is sort of almost objective ways to measure what is conducive to people's well-being. Like for example, I reject the idea that there is a large swath of society who just enjoys being sick and in pain and in poverty all the time. So I think there are generally like certain like objective metrics that we can use to examine people's well-being. And I think that we can show that like the kinds of policies that I advocate for, or at least I think obviously you would disagree and this was kind of the point of the debate. But I think that the kinds of policies that I advocate for do increase these objective measures of well-being for the vast majority of people in society. Now, I think that you're right in that some people might disagree, right? Like there might be, I'm not calling like you psychopathic or something, but there could be like a psychopathic billionaire who enjoys seeing people starve and their self-interest might be contradicted by welfare. But I think that these kinds of people just fundamentally, I don't care about like these kinds of people. I think that I want to create the most successful society possible. And if people have interests that are antithetical to that, they either are going to have to leave or just accept the coercion, I guess, which is obviously sounds very morally abhorrent to you. But I guess we just, you know, in that respect. Well, it's a, you know, I'm not going to defend a billionaire who enjoys, not going to defend anybody who enjoys seeing people in poverty. I think that is not a right counterfactual to use. The fact is that there might be people who think that they could use their money instead of having it taken by the state to promote their own happiness better than your view of how to promote my happiness, which is to reduce poverty. It might be that I believe that reducing poverty is good for me. And then I can put money into your collective, you know, action pool. It might be that I believe that it could be otherwise. It also is true that I think that poverty has reduced much more through no welfare than through the engagement of it. But much more important to me is you don't have a right, and I don't care what kind of measures you have. How do you measure my suffering, if you will, from having 50% of my income taken away from me, from somebody else's benefit, you know, whatever it happens to be? How do you do that measurement? You can't. Again, you can say it's not good for people to be sick, okay? You can say it's not good for people to be poor, okay? But you don't have a measure of, I don't know what, the suffering and the pain versus the pleasure and the happiness or whatever, all of that. And you don't have a right to engage in that kind of math anyway. Imagine if you had that measure. And now we had kind of a meter where we, you know, you shouldn't be doing this debate. You should be right now working at the soup kitchen. So go off, you know, I've got a gun to the back of your head, because the soup kitchen is actually going to make you happier if you work in the soup kitchen, or you should have been a doctor, you should have gone into finance or into, you know, into intellectual life. You should have been what Mouthy thinks you should have been, because Mouthy has run the algorithm, and Mouthy knows that you would be happier if only you'd done X, Y, and Z. I mean, this is the problem with all forms of central planning. You don't know what's good for me. You can't tell what's good for me. You don't know even what the poor person, you don't know if giving them 100 bucks, or leaving them alone is better for them, objectively better for them, you actually don't know. You cannot measure those kind of things, and you don't have the counterfactual. You can do the statistics, but you don't actually have the power of the universe in which you didn't give them the $100, and you saw that maybe they worked hard and got a job, and were incredibly successful and did amazing things with their lives, and achieved far greater happiness for themselves and for five generations following them, because their kids, you know, benefit from all that as well, rather than be stuck as a welfare, welfare mother or father. So all of that is you putting yourself and your values and imposing them on other individuals, and doing some kind of measurement, and aggregating them across all of that. And I think that's what's important about this whole mechanism. And that's why I'm against, you know, I'm against coercion, even if you, I mean, I'm against coercion no matter what, but I'm certainly against coercion when it's clear to me that you don't know what my values are, and you don't know what anybody's values are, except your own. We've got a few questions. We've got to try to, like, Can I just do like a really pithy response to that? Okay, okay. So, yeah, so I guess when you say like, you know, I might not like welfare, welfare might be antithetical to my interests. I sort of think that I think that this whoever's saying that is going to usually be wrong in like the vast majority of cases, because I think that the vast majority of people do objectively benefit from having coercive things like welfare that I think makes society flourish more in general. You talk about how I don't like have a measurement for this. I think we can use certain measurements like the health of a population, how content a population reports being with their lives, you know, social cohesion happening, I think there are certain metrics we can use to see whether or not on the aggregate, the policies I'm advocating for make society flourish more for the vast majority of people we can use social mobility if you want. And I think that the data tends to suggest that the kinds of policies that I advocate for do have this effect. And I do think it's justified to coerce people away from what they otherwise would have done if doing so makes the vast majority of the population able to pursue their own self interest more and make society flourish more. I hate to push in, but just because the original question was the mouthy, so we'll jump to the next one, but do want to rush through a couple of quick ones, and then we might be able to squeeze in maybe one or two more. You could say questions per se, but this one comes from the optimistic pessimist who says, can you please set up a debate with Iran, Brooke and Destiny or Vosh? We'll sure try folks, and then also one similar to that in terms of debate request. Corey Florez said, I'd love, thanks for your generous super chat, by the way, Corey said, I'd love a round two on statistics, especially the one cited by Mouthy in this debate. I'd like to see someone who has studied statistics like Iran. By the way, I didn't know that it was Dr. Brooke. I just learned that, but Iran, they said, I'd love to see, they said, would love to see Iran give his take on those stats as Iran seemed ready to take on this debate morally, whereas Mouthy was ready statistically. So that could be juicy. And so thank you very much for your question, this one, as we said, we do we're a little bit over time. So I do want to just quick, maybe get one or two more in Duncan Curry said, everyone knows that feeding squirrels at the park makes them dependent and is harmful. Doesn't the same apply to a more complex animal, such as humans, doesn't welfare love our fellow humans to death? What is the difference? Yeah, so I guess like my counter argument is that it just seems to be based on the data that I've engaged with regards to unconditional cash transfers. It seems to be that rather than making people dependent and leading to them work less, it actually leads to people working more. And you can see this for the people who receive the unconditional cash transfer in Stockton, California, because people receiving additional money gives them the breathing room that they need it is because they're sort of trapped by sort of day to day hassles and bills that make it harder for them to focus on the future focus on going to school to get a better job or move to a different neighborhood maybe and sort of having that additional cushion to sort of take care of like the bear subsistence needs of life gives people the breathing room that they need to sort of focus more on the future and ultimately become productive members of society. So that's sort of my counter narrative to that that narrative and it seems to be corroborated by the evidence that I'm engaged with. So notice how we treat we treat the productive members of society as these sacrificial animals. Not only are they going to they're going to have to fund people in their lives to give them enough room and enough time to do whatever they want to do and so on. And then they have to provide the jobs and they have to create the businesses. You know, one of the power one of the I think one of the powerful messages in Iron Man's Atlas shrugged is what if those people stopped? You know, what if they stopped? What if they what if they said enough enough of just milking us dry, because this individual here is going to be a little bit better and that and no I don't want to give it to that individual. The whole system collapses. I have to say something about social cohesion. You know, the welfare state was invented in Germany by Bismarck. It then that same country went on to start really two World Wars, you know, massacre millions and millions of people. The fact that it was a welfare state. All of it was a welfare state. You know, throughout that post Bismarck era was a welfare state didn't change the fact that it led to wars, destruction. I would argue the exact opposite that capitalism, freedom, a reduction in in the idea that some people owe other people a living somehow, that somehow we have to maximize social well being social cohesion. It's exactly this kind of thinking the public interest, the good the the welfare, that you know, the good of the of everybody utilitarian calculus. All of that is what leads us into warfare. It was lead us into strife. It's what lead us into conflict. Indeed, it is it is the lack the lack of social cohesion in America today is not a consequence of too little welfare. I would argue it's a consequence of a mentality of expectations of welfare. It's a mentality of sitting people sitting on there and doing nothing to make their own lives better and expecting the steel job to come home from China expecting to have a job in Cincinnati when there's a job two states over but who the hell is going to get in the car and drive two state over when my welfare check is associated with Ohio and in Arkansas I might not get that welfare check. I mean there's so many stories of people who don't do the minimal that they need to do in order to go get a job because our intellectuals, our culture and our welfare system has created passivity and a lack of personal responsibility and a willingness to just sit around and wait and blame the other. Who do we blame for all the problems in this country? We blame foreigners, we blame Chinese, we blame immigrants, we blame everybody except the fact that our own people won't get up and actually go and do their jobs. So no, I think the lack of social cohesion in America is a consequence of the welfare state. Now you'll give me the counterfactual of what about Denmark and Sweden and all those wonderful countries. As I said, as somebody who's visited Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, many times, particularly Sweden and Denmark, particularly Denmark, researchers like to overestimate the social cohesion over there and there's a massive selection by in terms of who stays and who goes, particularly successful people leaving. But I would love to run an experiment. This is the experiment I would love to run and I wonder what Mouty thinks of this experiment. I would like to have open borders. I'd like to have generally and pro-immigration but I would like to eliminate all barriers to immigration between the United States, Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark. And I would like, I'm curious what people think, what the flow of immigration would be. Now I'm willing to put a lot of money on the bed that the flow of immigration would be from Scandinavia to the United States, not the other way around in spite of the greater social spending in Scandinavia. And it won't be a little immigration, it won't be a trickle. It would be a flood and it would be primarily poor people immigrating from Scandinavia to the United States because the United States in spite of all its problems as many still has more opportunities than Scandinavia does to rise up and be successful. Social mobility in Scandinavia is no big deal but if you can make it in the America, still and it's becoming less and less the case, but still you've really made it in life. We'll give you a quick response and then we'll go to the last question before we say goodbye. Thank you. So yeah so I guess a few points. So you talked about what if the rich just stopped because of social spending and I think that of course that would be bad but you know I think that we've seen across the world that we can have you know very robust levels of social spending without the rich just you know up and leaving and you know not creating any more jobs or not being productive anymore. And even if we were to prove that at some point you know if we taxed too much and I'm sure there is such a point you know if we taxed too much and redistributed too much the rich would just leave. I would still make the argument that it would still be good to do social spending up to a point before we reach that maximum limit right. You talked about how you know in Germany it seems that welfare actually reduced social cohesion. I'm not sure. I think that there can be a lot of factors that influence social cohesion in a country so I guess I'm just skeptical of you know saying that there was a lot of welfare here and there was low social cohesion so therefore you know these this must have been the cause. I generally I try to like look at like broader I guess sample sets and try to do more like specific analysis so I guess I'm just sort of like skeptical of that. In terms of the idea that welfare has created a culture of expectation of welfare in the U.S. and that this actually decreases social cohesion I think that I don't really bind to this narrative especially because the U.S. has one of the most stringent and you know work fair based welfare systems in the world and our biggest programs like the earned income tax credit you have to work in order to receive them and this seems to be the case with a lot of our programs and if we look to other countries even if because you said like we should just you know get out of you know Sweden get out of Denmark get off Norway sure we can do that but even if we look at broader correlations it seems like reductions of inequality across the world even when you just discount like these countries seem to be correlated with increases in social cohesion and I don't think that we would see that if the concept of welfare leads to this culture of expectation and I think that the idea of a culture of expectation is also undercut by the idea that we can see things like increases in social spending leading to more entrepreneurship like entrepreneurship in the Nordic countries where social spending is very high according to the OECD enterprise birth index is actually higher than it is in the United States and Gareth Olds has done a lot of work that is corroborating this as well and yeah I guess finally I disagree the idea that the U.S. has less opportunity I think that the Nordic countries have better employment higher rates of entrepreneurship I think they have plenty of opportunity there despite their high social spending we must go to this final question Ben Miller thank you very much said Iran how can you keep pointing the countries like China and South Korea that have gone to great lengths to reduce poverty with zero social spending quote unquote when they all have free public health care China doesn't China does not if you can't pay for health care in China you die in the street there's no charity and there's no free public health care in China the South Korea does but China does not by the way no no health care is free health care is paid for through taxes through coercion and a big chunk of the health care expenditure in places like Europe and South Korea and all the socialized health care countries is paid for by American taxpayers we are basically subsidizing the health care of the rest of the world the rest of the world is free writing off of American health care 70 plus percent of all medical innovations happening sorry 60 plus percent of all health care innovations happening in the United States because we have still have a little bit of freedom in health care and they free write off of that we pay higher prices on drugs so that drug companies can do research and development they pay basically cost on drugs so drug companies don't make any money from other countries to fund research and development they have to make all their research and development money in the United States that's also true of Swiss European drug companies European drug companies make their money in the U.S. subsidize Europe so we are basically subsidizing the health care of the rest of the planet the worst thing that could happen to health care in South Korea and in Europe would be for the United States socialize it's health care system that would devastate health care systems all over the world because they wouldn't have the sacrificial lamb to sacrifice anymore to milk and it's the same Marty just said yeah we're gonna tax businessmen up to the point just before they leave right or they reduce their production well yeah I mean that's the attitude the attitude is that they're not individuals they don't have their own values and utility functions they don't have their own ability to make choices about their own life and how to spend their own money we collectively have decided that their money is best spent on welfare reduction and therefore we are going to take as much of it as much of it as we can get away with in order to reduce poverty and to me that's immoral and it's bad economics you know because one of the things you're not measuring is and and again you're gonna do cross-sectional analysis across countries which I think is dubious throughout but you know what you're not measuring is what those rich people would have done with their money you're not measuring if you take Elon Musk's money do we get to Mars in 10 years is they good is a good thing to go to Mars in in by 2030 well poor people benefit from the ability to go to Mars in 2030 is it good for humanity what's the value of that but if you tax Elon Musk up to a certain point we won't go to Mars so and and my guess is there are a lot of going to Mars like projects that we have not done because wealthy people have been taxed up to the point where they didn't have the kind of volume that the wealth in order in to engage in those kind of massive investments so again we're assuming a static world in which every country has a welfare state we're assuming that the differences between these countries are minor we're controlling for welfare but we're not controlling for levels of regulations and other things we're controlling for you know we're doing we're doing statistics which in my view you know often very very dubious but even if they were all true you can't actually run the experiment where people weren't forced to give up their money and where other stuff happened and you're using a bad morality to inflict great pain on humanity in my view can I just give like a really quick response because I think it's a very important part so in terms of you know Elon Musk I'm skeptical that Elon Musk is going to take us to Mars it seems like Elon Musk is more focused on reinventing the subway but more inconvenient at the moment and in terms of the idea of you know an opportunity cost it seems that there might be some opportunity cost to you know if you take somebody's money they're less likely to do productive things with it but you also have to take into account that the idea that you know if we give other people money now they have a greater capacity to do greater things as well you know if you give someone more economic security less shield them more from economic risk they have you know give them welfare that allows them to save more for investment they're more likely to be able a poor person is more likely to be able to start a business if you shield them from the anxieties and the stresses of of poverty they're more likely to be able to innovate or do something productive with their lives and I think this is generally born out you got it we do want to say there's one last superjack Cory Florez says also you're on please unban me so I don't know what that story is I tried Cory I really have tried but I can't figure out on YouTube how to unban somebody once you I apologize I screwed up I banned him by accident I can't figure it out on so if somebody out there has the technical knowledge of how to unban somebody on YouTube please get in touch with me and let me know and I'd be happy to unban uh unban Cory let me just say sorry maybe Elon Musk will invent the unbanning technology you know uh I I find it dubious that anybody should speculate on what Elon Musk can and cannot do or will or will not do um but uh or should or should not do but let me let me also just as a as a caveat for the listeners but also for Malti I am very very very skeptical about any research that shows this more entrepreneurship in Scandinavia than there is in the United States I would I would look at at other research that maybe has different results as far as I know the the the two most entrepreneurial places right now is the United States and Israel and Scandinavia lags behind but you know go go look at the empirical evidence and uh and check it out but uh because one one uh social thinker and I've given that I wrote a book in inequality I've seen a lot of Nobel Prize winners do crummy statistics there's a whole book called uh Dust Capitel for the 21st century by uh by uh on the spaghetti which is which is um garbage on stilts from a statistical and data perspective uh and it is he gets waved about constantly so be be quite skeptical about these uh these statistics particularly when there's a political agenda behind them yeah so I'm just citing I'm not citing like an academic paper this time or anything I'm just citing the OECD Enterprise uh or the OECD Enterprise Birth Index which I generally think is like a pretty credible source and it generally shows that there are more business startups in the in the Nordic countries than in the U.S. And I think uh Gareth Olds additionally has done work showing that even just within the U.S. programs like food stamps and medicare have been shown to increase uh business startups by giving people you know more economic security and so on. We want to let you know folks our guests are linked in the description please do check out their links as we have really appreciated our guests and want to say a huge thank you both to Iran as well as to Ethan Mouthi Infidel it has been a true pleasure and so folks I'll be back in a just a minute or so with a post-credits scene on upcoming debates for modern day debate and want to say one last thank you though to our guests it's been a true pleasure to have both of you yeah thanks for having me yeah this was fun absolutely so that I'll be back in just a moment as mentioned folks want to say another huge thank you to our guests both Iran and Ethan or Mouthi Infidel are linked in the description and so folks I'm guessing that you're probably you're still here you must have enjoyed this debate and so whatever I didn't even encourage you not just the side that you agree with in this debate but even the side that you don't agree with you can click on their link as well and consider that and it's valuable because hey it's good to be acquainted with the arguments from you could say the opposing side on whatever issue it is I mean it's a it would be a sad thing to only know like only have a great depth of the arguments for your position it's good to have a great depth depth of familiarity with the arguments against your position absolutely essential folks so with that you want to say first couple of things in terms of upcoming debates that we are excited about as well as get to say hello to people in the chat see a lot of new people in the chat which is exciting so Stephanie Bond thanks for coming by Mark Reeves really glad you're with us Robert Nasir thanks for coming by and wonder Freeman thanks for coming by thanks for your thumbs up appreciate it that's right if you enjoyed this debate want to let you know you probably like long form content we are on podcast in this debate will be loaded onto the podcast shortly and want to let you know we have all of our debates 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like hey we're really it's like if there's i mean if the views are that insane that it's like well what's the harm in platforming and they'll just get exposed anyway if we you know platform these interesting controversial uh ideas so we have no apology so uh jonathan sheffield and dr boys as well as dr josh and jim majors will be here debating on friday on the book of daniel prophecy or forgery so that should be a lot of fun and then maybe one week from today i have gotten in touch with the youtube and twitch streamer demon mama and we might be hosting a debate between t jump and demon mama on d platforming tom takes a view that hey i'm not for d platforming as a blanket rule blanket statement i would say no like i don't think it's any good i think it's even bad in some cases and demon mama would say well i think there are some cases where it's actually good to d platform and so that debate is in the works it's not confirmed so i i want you to know that demon mama is mulling it over please don't pressure any of the speakers either because sometimes we do announce debates that are like in the works and we don't want you to pressure anybody uh i don't think you guys would but i i just i don't want them to be like oh james like i didn't say i for sure would do it why do people think that so i'm just saying it's just in the works we're we're attempting to set that up but nocturnal prelude good to see you and dr truth thanks for coming by as well as mr c and gene walters good to see you apollo zoos thanks for coming by dave langer said it was a great debate don't think anyone talked over the other person once that rarely ever happens i agree that was great both of them really professional really friendly and fresh tree glad you're here as well and i agree we rarely really have a a dumpster fire like most of our debates are actually quite civil and so when people are like oh we're the we're gonna you know offer this alternative on youtube where it's like civil discussions and it's like but like there are plenty of them out there actually so we apricots loth are glad to have you here and also let's see nate main glad you made it says hello guys we're glad you came by nate hope you're doing well thanks tuss beatbox for your feedback says great setup james really like this debate all credit to the speakers we are so thrilled and thankful that they came on so both uran and i almost said nephilim free uh why am i thinking about nephilim free uran and mouthy infidel are linked in the description and so you can hear more from them as well as read more from them and that's in the description what you're listening via youtube or podcast also hats had hats again thank you for coming by we're glad you're adam el bill yeah good to see you staying up late with us adam we like it bad to the bone are you still you're in israel right well we're glad you're here and thanks for staying up late with us it's gotta be super late there so nocturnal prelude says smash that like button please do it helps the stream that's the word on the streets is that it allegedly helps with the algorithms i've always i would think it probably does right because it would be it gives like maybe it's like a small like it's one of the pieces of the puzzle that leads the algorithm you could say sigma and he says i think james won this debate that's funny i won by just getting to enjoy it so much because we were really thankful for our guests and that was honestly phenomenal it was i'm so excited to see people's positive feedback in the chat that people really enjoyed it and that the likes i think we're at 189 likes which is awesome uh that's really good so people really enjoyed that shazbot thanks so much for coming by and you're right shazbot said what about the guy whose question wasn't asked that's you among two or so other people um some of them want to be fair i say i well email me at moderndatabate at gmail.com because we don't want to leave you out to dry we do appreciate when you give a super chat and so if it doesn't get read frankly i do want to send it back via like paypal or venmo something like that and so um i also want to say if it's if it's your first time here want to remind you that sometimes there's a point in the debate we're all pin a chat and it'll say like hey folks i'm really sorry we can't take any more questions we've got too little time and so i just want to i'm like i said i'm happy to send you that super chat value back because we just appreciate that you're willing to do a super chat and we always want to read them and so when we don't get to read them it's like hey i i get where you're coming from shoot me an email at moderndatabate at gmail.com and i'll send that value back the same amount for the super chat but do want to mention that uh basically we do try to give people a heads up where we we can't we the speakers have their time is valuable we want to honor that and so sometimes we we have to stop before we need to read all the questions and it's just my estimation frankly is not always great in terms of knowing how many we're going to get to read so i'm still working progress i'm a work in progress brandon grace is best but yeah thanks for coming by brandon gray and perfect one good to see you and stuck in florida good to see you again and let's see stephen burns thanks for coming by it's a great debate i'm so glad you liked it stuff in and my is it michael or michelle i think it's michael we're glad you were here michael and rdf thanks for coming by as well as momos caught up hannah anderson good to see you as well as let's see nero good to see you again apollo zoos thanks for coming by and let's see so steve coat said still a possible a j appearance that's possible shasabot thanks so much that's kind of you to say you're not worried about the superchot uh balance i totally appreciate i want you to know that i was like oh it was so hard to get questions in because i love that our guests are spirited and so both of them wanted to share as many of the things that they've read which is the value of the channel that's what makes the value the channel like fun and you get to learn like the best of each side that's in my opinion why it's great so yeah thanks for your patience as i really i i remember seeing yours and i was like i want to read but um but yeah so sorry that we had run out of time and so brook chavis says let's get to 200 likes thanks for your support appreciate that brook as well and then super k pill said can they do a part two i'm open to it uh let me you know see if that might be uh something that'd be interested because i think that'd be fun adamel billy says yeah bro here in israel currently five a.m. in the morning wow thanks for being up with us gail parker says bye all take care gail we hope you have a good night thanks for coming by and the analytics synthetic dichotomies says good night everybody thanks for saying good night and we hope you have a great night nico samarino thanks for coming by and almost caught up with you guys i'm like chasing you down in the chat it's moving fast but dylan james thanks for coming by hope you're well barin vongi glad you came by as well and is it pronounced oh onan thanks for coming by a f katie thanks for coming by said when is avi coming back that's a great question no joke avi wants to debate kent hovind so we do hope to host kent hovind and avi next month and by that i mean may that would be epic i've just got to find a date that works for both of them so we really would like to do that and so brook chavis says don't forget twitch you're right brook thanks for your patience twitch fam glad to see you and riley good to see you and luz seal lucy lucy ill thank you for coming by i see you there in the twitch chat as well as brook sparrow and that reminds me of hope i don't know if you know if we have i don't know if you know that we have twitch we do and it we're live on twitch right now so i'll put that in the chat on youtube if you want to access it and you can see that as well dave langer good to see you and miz metal good to see you poor lucy thanks for coming by as well as azi and good to see you again and brook sparrow and who else is all in there it's like sneaking around you say lucy ill is it let me know if i'm pronouncing this right lucy ill lucy ill but thank you for your kind words and tapatzel good to see you since james is watching i am very voyeuristic of me but let's see here oh that our twitch right there all right i just put that in the youtube chat and so thank you for your patience if you dig good old twitch we are excited to be on there and i'm excited that it's been growing like fast which is just awesome like uh we are so encouraged that the twitch like most of our followers have come just from this year like the last few months and so that's cool and so yeah i'm just glad that people like find it useful so cool and then brandon grace of thanks for the debate heard about it too late we'll listen later it's cool to try to present the best argument of each side thank you for coming by we appreciate it and sigma any says good night all thanks james thank you sigma any for your support trillionaire says this is a good debate now remove the ability of moderators to post their opinions mid debate yeah you know trillionaire the tricky thing is i'm just like we we do have moderators that are across the spectrum you know christian atheist agnostic um politically last politically right and so i'm just like do we want to do this to moderators i like the moderators getting to be in the discussion you know as long as they're not insulting the guests we you know we've always said we don't want moderators to do that but if they want to critique arguments or something or give their own arguments i'm like i think that's okay i mean they're they're volunteering basically to the general rules we have in chat are pretty loose and easy going we only have like two firm rules one we're not gonna let what would conventionally be known as hate speech we're not gonna let that fly so we're gonna delete that without warning just gonna be deleted we also if people are attacking the guests if they're harassing the guests we know it's not hate speech but we also realize that it's not practical to allow people to trash or slander our guests in the chat that's not practical how does that a sustainable like why would any guests want to come back if people are just trashing them personally in the chat if you if you're not wanting to come back because someone trashed your arguments i'm kind of like well you know it's like the name of the game that's what we do here is like the debaters do it people in the chat do it what's the problem but uh so in that case we would say like you know that's allowed obviously but like i said we don't want any sort of like trashing or slandering people in the chat and so um but that's the only thing the moderators though are like because basically getting rid of so riley ask good to see you and rezzard wad of gore says hi james might any news on the 24 hour looping stream of your old debates i might this summer is when i would do it it would be in may so this has been a really uh busy semester and i'm working on a lot of things i think i told you guys i bought this over a year ago and i'm embarrassed it's so sad that i haven't set it up yet so this is like a quality camera this is a canon rebel i don't really know much about cameras but i do know that it is a like high quality dslr camera which i've had sitting in a box for a year because i've just been so busy and you guys are like oh it can't it can't be that busy is like it's really it's it's tough sometimes because it's like the phd by itself a lot of my other phd students like my my fellow phd students in the program are there they'll tell you how any phd person can tell you it's it's a it's a bone racking experience it is really seriously exhausting and so um that by itself i'm usually just like running running on fumes and so the channel it's like i'm trying to do new things but anyway long story short i love the idea reservoir of gore so thank you for that idea and louie pressiato good to see you thanks for saying hi true shoes 101 says i love the kent debates and charlie sama says good debate lads so glad you enjoyed it our guests are linked in the description as always one thing that i find i sometimes find is that sometimes wonder freeman says good audio quality that's the first time i've ever heard that thank you i appreciate that so much for a year it was like our first two years or our audio was terrible it made me want to cry but uh thank you for barin van jeez as if james is a flavor of ice cream he would be ice cream so true but yes i want to say you guys we are really excited about the future of this channel we always have i want to let you know if you're new to modern day debate it's always debates there are no videos that are like like let's say we hosted debates but then we're also putting out videos that are like hey capitalism or socialism or whatever you you want libertarianism like it's the it's for sure you know here are the best arguments for it and it's obviously you know the best way to go it'd be like don't get me wrong i'm not i don't think there's anything wrong with channels that do that but for us we were like we don't we're not going to do any of that uh the reason being it's like if we're really a debate channel we only do debates and occasionally we'll put out a video like a you know hey thank you everybody for your support and stuff because we do appreciate your support but other than those that's those are the only exception is we just host debates now dave langer had a question an email so thanks for your question dave i think i didn't do a great job of explaining this and one reason is because i remember explicitly um i said two different things and so that's why this is probably on it's not super clear when it comes to using people's preferred pronouns uh here's the trick one i even under youtube's rules i don't see it as hate speech and so what we want to do is immediately just let the person know just say hey uh you know this person that is debating on this channel doesn't want to be called that pronoun and so we're not going to say that you have to call them their preferred pronoun if you want to put their name in a sentence and you just use their name all the time so you know like you just say like you know brook said that brook is tired right now instead of saying brook said that she is tired right now or he is tired right now like we just asked that it's like if you want to just use her name in a redundant way like that's okay um the idea is we so we're not trying to force you to use any particular pronoun but we also realize that sometimes people will call a person a pronoun other than what they want to be called because they're trying to like get to them you know they're trying to get under their skin and it's like okay okay we don't need that like we we want our guests to come back and clearly you don't care about that because you're trying to like personally needle them by calling them a pronoun they don't want to be called and so my thought is we will instantly give them a warning and say hey uh gotta let you know like we consider that uh you know in the event that once in a while it might be the case that someone um it might be the case that someone makes an accident where they're like hey is james born male or female like or you know is like james and they use the pronoun she for me like it might be an accident whatever it is uh we that's why we're gonna give them a warning because it's like hey any other form of harassment i would say we're gonna say hey i want to give you a heads up like we're not gonna let you do that and so let's see we're gonna say hey you know we're giving you a warning and a time out as well i think that we talked about that so we'll give them a verbal warning to say hey you know seriously we don't want people trying to needle or harass people uh like that in the chat and so we're giving you a warning and we're timing you out uh verbal warning you could say and we're timing you out and if you do it again we are you're just gonna be banned so and i would just explain to them i think people will understand it that we're not like trying to enforce we're not trying to say like this is the proper definition of hate speech or this is the proper definition of this or that it's purely like hey if we if you look like a malicious actor in the live chat we're gonna you're you're not going to get away with it because we it doesn't make sense that we would let people you know these characters in the chat which is by the way it's like one percent of people it's a very very tiny percent but we're not going to let that one percent of people spoil the chance of us hosting someone again because they want to needle or harass somebody in the chat and so that's why we have the rule so hope that makes sense folks we are not what's the word i'm looking for um yeah like i and so long story short it's um we're not trying to take a uh because i frankly i'll be honest there are some people on twitter that blast modern day debate and they're like modern day debate you're immoral that's not far enough that's not firm enough or you're immoral james because modern day debate you host jf or you host this person or that person and blah blah blah and i'm like um i don't really care but i think that there are some people where it's like nah i just don't i'm not gonna cave to them like i all the stuff we get a lot of deplatforming critics and that's all right it motivates me more believe me folks there are some people that might get discouraged by that but i'm telling you like when people try to where they're like no no no we're gonna try to like you know oppose you or slow you down or whatever you know because we're excited our goal i think is a reasonable goal we have the vision of providing a neutral platform hosting debates on science religion and politics such that it's fair to everybody that's our goal and we think that's a great goal so we're not ashamed of it we're absolutely striving for it and if people oppose us we're like no no no like it doesn't discourage us it gets us more excited it's us against the world if it has to be and we're going to keep on pushing and i'm telling you guys this isn't like oh this is a fun hobby for a couple of years i'm telling you in 10 years this platform is going to be ginormous like it's going to be like remember i and don't get me wrong i'm excited and encouraged that right now we're at like i think it's 45 000 subscribers we just hit the other day which is super encouraging thank you so much everybody and that's awesome because we're having an impact and that's encouraging but at the same time someday believe me in like 10 years we'll look back and we'll be like you remember when we were a little channel and we were talking about you know how someday we'd be big and we had like what like 45 000 subscribers back then we were just a little guy out there like believe me so let's see Dave Langer says the example that came up the other night was someone was saying oh that is not female that is a guy why does he keep saying he is a she yeah that would be the same thing uh Dave Langer i would just say we're gonna uh what is it called we're gonna give them a time out and we're gonna say hey um we um what's the word on me for we're gonna say hey we don't want you to harass people so it doesn't we're not gonna let you harass somebody what no matter what weight is if you're trying to if you're clearly trying to be a malevolent actor if you're clearly trying to get under their skin by using pronouns they don't want to be called then it's that's what it is ultimately about is malevolent actors people who are malicious in their intent that's the kind of people were like a uh we're not going to play around much we're going to give you a time out and let you know to stop harassing and if you keep going boom you're banned then that's it like we're not pulling you out of the band box so which reminds me i've got to i gotta let Iran know how to pull somebody out of the band box but anyway um let's see yep Dave Langer you're right thanks for asking because i i think it was really unclear the other night now here's the thing i think that regarding the harassment of guests one thing that i think we should do is see this as a spectrum so if they call uh if they you know like last time we've seen somebody call called matt and NAZI and whatever you think of matt he's not that so we're not going to let people slander in the chat that's again i would say let's give him a time out and just say hey uh we're not going to let you slander people you've got one chance to clean up your act otherwise if you do it again you're gone for good and so now here's the thing the only time when i would be more easygoing is like let's say it's something stupid like let's say they're making fun of john maddox because of his flash hat the comic book hero flash which by the way i don't know why people would make fun of that but anyway in that case i would just say like let's not even time them out if it's something petty like that or it's like maybe it's somebody in like seventh grade who's watching and they're making fun of his hat i would just say hey uh you know like i don't know i don't even know if i'd say anything if they're making fun of somebody's like superhero hat i just don't like i don't know if i'd say that's harassment but what if they say it's like more serious what if it's they they say look at maddox is like bald head so you know pathetic uh what we would say is just kind of like ah come on you know like we don't want you to harassing people's appearance and stuff like that so i would just let them know just say hey um yeah that's not what we're looking for and you don't have to give them a time out or anything and then barn barn bun geese is are we going to be required to say the correct pronoun no you're not so if you are like um because there is a gray area and by gray i mean like there is a way in which you can be agnostic so you could be like listen i don't want to use their preferred pronoun and i'm like okay you don't have to like you can sit and watch and you can even address them so maybe you say like i said if you would normally say like hey that debater becca you know said that she or he doesn't like you know strawberries well i my question is blah blah blah blah you could just say becca says that becca doesn't like strawberries my question is blah blah blah blah so just use their name dur in the name of in the slot in which you would normally put a pronoun like not yeah just use their name so um you can always put a noun wherever there's a pronoun so natural prelude said no one said pronouns of speakers tonight they just referred to their screen names yeah that's the trick is and so it's like just i would just do that and that way it's just not an issue because then we don't have to take a stance on it i don't want to take a stance on like what is hate speech and not like that's not my goal the channel i think for us i i think it's a good enough reason to where i think it's frankly the reason that hopefully most people would understand which is one we have this goal of providing a fair and neutral platform on youtube fully fair fairly neutral we don't have any aftershows where we like take the side of any particular you know position or anything and that like i said it's okay if channels do that i don't think that's bad but for us like we were radical we're radical about our neutrality and so in pursuing that goal if people are harassing people in the chat no matter what way they do it you're slowing us down in pursuing that goal because if people aren't going to come back then um you know how are you supposed to have a debate channel if it's just me here debating myself every night you're not gonna like it people so thank you guys i'm gonna let you go but i hope everybody feels good about that hopefully it's clearer now because i know the other night it was kind of like we're thinking out loud and it wasn't that clear and so thanks for understanding though chat i appreciate that you guys sound like you're pretty on board and so that's encouraging um the trillionaire doesn't like that mods have their opinions we are willing like if you feel like and this has been the case before sometimes people are like man you have too many because we usually are flagship topic is like religion religion and atheism debates if you feel like oh james all you have is atheist or christian or republican or democrat moderators well let me know if you're a person with a different view who wants to be a moderator and i'll make you a mod like that's cool like so um because it's like and then you can share your opinion as a mod i don't really think it makes a big deal like i don't think people who come here to the channel for the first time are like oh well a moderator in chat says it so it's gotta be right forget what the debaters up there on screen are saying like i don't know if it works like that so i i don't think it's a big deal of moderators get to say you know express their views and so like they're you could say like partnering with us in the like we have different goals that like in our relationship with the moderators the goals to get rid of hate speech and to stop harassment of the gas and so um anyway thanks for kind words tough beatbox appreciate your kind words and adam elbilious says bye buddy i'm off thanks for the time and have a good night thanks adam appreciate it thanks for coming by a buddy and man i had a great night of sleep last night it was the first time in a long time you guys because i don't usually sleep super well but last night i slept really well it was great i had a really um memorable dream as well not something sexual you perverts but yeah it was i i actually felt great today i felt well rested which is encouraging so davlinger says as long as the mother following the rules there shouldn't be an issue plus mother held a higher standards yeah they are i mean you remember when we what was it i think it was stupid horror energy she um she went off on pagans one night she was making fun of the pagans the polytheists the people believe in more than one god she was just trashing on them we were like uh sorry we you can't be a mod anymore thanks brook chava said i'm glad we're able to talk about the rules and figure this out me too hannah anerson said make me a mod let's see i doubt you're like a libertarian or a conservative but okay i'll make you a mod if you want so um i was saying that more because i think i think and there's nothing wrong with this it doesn't bother me i think it's true that we have more politically left mods and i think we have more atheist mods and that doesn't bother me it's not always gonna be it's very rarely gonna be 50 right because there's sometimes mods drop off and some it's always gonna be like all there's maybe maybe a one group is like more strongly represented by another one and i know that some of you that would be enough to where you'd say there must be some sort of discrimination it's like no i'm i'm just like whoever wants to be a mod like and so um let's see so i know that correlation equals causation is that a lot of people like to think so like oh james if there's so many atheist mods uh or then it must be the case that you're discriminating against other people that want to be mods the old which really is that's that's an example of correlation equals causation type reasoning but i mean i don't know and then people tell me oh no james like i'll teach you about that and i was like yeah and what do i know about it but i'm being facetious um it really is it's an example of correlation equals causation when they try to use it to say it's as if there's like some sort of uh favoritism or discrimination but dave langer says let's see got that and then but it is nice to talk in here as a group and hear people's thoughts so it is nice to just kind of like hey i like your guys is nat main i already said man if you just tell me that you want to be a mod like i'm willing to have you be a mod that's the way you apply but yeah basically um sorry sorry nade didn't mean to be mean to you but yeah well at this point we've got like pretty much half the people in the chatter mods but that's alright but um hannah anderson says nope i'm a libertarian but i'm neutral in politics well guess i was wrong but yeah basically i am glad it's nice to get your feedback for where the channel is going and how you think things should be i do want you guys to have a say in that this is like a true community and so we do appreciate that and so thank you guys i agree apricot sloth who says a person's religion isn't indicative of their ability to moderate i agree i mean we've had a theist mods we've had religious mods and as long as they do it fairly once in a great while we have a speaker who's like that person's gonna moderate nope i'm not i don't i'm concerned i'm bothered about this and i'm like uh why like their moderation seems good to me seems fair and they're like but it's their views they hold these views x y and z and i'm like i don't care what views they hold or don't hold it's like if they're moderating is fair they're moderating is fair and that's just yeah that's the answer like so that's rare but once in a while i've seen that where i'm like good then you don't then there's no need for you to come on modern day debate if you're going to be basically saying you won't like let you won't participate because the moderators beliefs or lack of beliefs and like whatever dave langer says you should really set up a discord be a great place to get new viewers and also have room in the discord for mods we do have a discord dave langer it's linked in the description sj thomason says i'm an independent christian and then see good to see you by the way sj all right nate nate main i've added you as a moderator but yeah do me a favor yeah like feel free being you know saying to somebody like if you see it looks like they're like all right say good guess you know definitely just say hey just want to be sure you know want to give a friendly reminder to attack the argument rather than the person i think most people are pretty good about getting that feedback in my experience if i've like said anything to anybody they're like oh sorry about that and they're and then they are like totally cool so vault thanks for coming by i see you there in the chat thanks tus four sharing our discord link in the chat i'm rarely active on discord i honestly embarrassingly don't know how to use it but i can tell you that i am thankful for those who who do all the moderating and all the work in the discord so we hope it's a value to you we hope it's fun so thank you guys i hope you have a great rest of your night that's right they're contagious sj yawning and interestingly emotion the research on emotion you probably know this sj but positivity as an example is contagious so when you walk into a room and you're positive and pleasant uh i'm not saying you per se sj but i'm sure it works for you too when a person walks into a room and they're positive and pleasant it tends to be contagious so site show nav says oh yeah plus 200 likes keep them coming yes please do hit that like button we appreciate your support if you buy into the vision if you're like hey i like that i like this idea of modern day debate and their goal of creating fairly moderated debates if you're like yeah that sounds cool to me i like that i want to let you know i'm throwing that in the live chat as well and this is namely our link to our patreon if you want to join our patreon and we appreciate all of your support and so thank you for all of your support and i am going to pin that to the top of the chat as well thanks everybody love you guys hope you know that just by being here you make the channel more fun the more the merrier seriously it's really cool we do appreciate you we are thankful you're here we hope you have a great rest of your night we hope this is a fun community of different people from different walks of life that's a beautiful thing you guys it really is the idea is if you have a group of people who are all for example christian or all atheist or all liberal or all conservative or whatever it is and they're all talking together like the research is very clear there's a tendency for group think where people will you know kind of affirm each other to the point where something there you could say like less critical than maybe ought than would be good for the the growth of the growth of the group and so there is a good thing here in terms of our mix of people from different walks of life and so that's a very good thing a very beautiful thing and hats it can says take care james good showing thanks for your kind words and your encouragement that means a lot and so thanks for that hannah anderson who says james your interaction with the chat after the show is a game changer getting to know you better is everything thanks hannah that means a lot seriously that's really encouraging and so that's um i enjoy this too like this is fun for me a lot of times i'm like yeah it's like it's like so this it'll be an hour and i'm like oh it's like i gotta go to sleep soon but thanks for hanging out you guys do appreciate it love you let me know shoot me a mail mail at modernatabate at gmail.com if i can make your life better for real thanks we hope that this channel is of value to you we hope it's fun and enjoyable and a cool community and so thanks everybody thanks afk to you says have a good night y'all thanks everybody neuro says bye james still waiting for you to propose to me i don't know who neuro is neuro aren't you earl the postman from like alabama i'm flattered but i mean brook chava says don't forget the amazon link we do have an amazon link that's right thanks brook where is this thing i've got it in here somewhere there are ways that uh we share like in terms of how you can support modern day debate and so we do appreciate all of your support one thing that one thing that you can do is one i don't know if you know that we have a free twitch um um if you have amazon prime you have a free twitch subscription you can use on any twitch streamer that you want and that includes us and that helps us because that it's an extra two dollars and fifty cents toward the channel for the uh basically our funds is we want to do a lot of in-person debates this summer and so we are really excited to do some in-person debates this summer we think it'll be epic it's gonna be really fun and so we do really really want to say uh i mean you guys for real it's gonna be fun and it's gonna be epic so we do want to encourage you for that and um that's the kind of thing is what it those funds for example would go twitch we're basically um your subscription as i said two dollars and fifty cents a month and if let's say we have a hundred people do that that's two hundred and fifty dollars that would come in a month and what would that mean well that's like a round trip flight like a cheap round trip flight in the united states for us to do like to help basically make let's say a in-person debate happen so that it adds up you know if a hundred people do it that's a lot that actually helps a lot and we would love to do more in-person debates and so let me get that amazon link i think i just shared it in the chat so if you copy and paste that into your browser or you might even be able to click on it the way it works is like three percent of your purchase on modern amazon helps modern day debate in other words like three percent would go to modern day debate if you use the amazon link that i have put in the pinned chat and so that's like our modern day debate portal and so you'd pay the same price as normal but like three percent goes to modern day debate which helps so thank you guys we do really appreciate it we hope you have a great rest of your night thanks for all your love and support seriously appreciate it and like i said there's something i can do to make your day easier let me know i'm at moderndaydebatedgmail.com we love you guys appreciate you keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable