 Ευχαριστώ για έναν άλλο πρόεδρο της Ευρώπης Ευρώπης. Σήμερα, η Ευρώπη δεν είναι ακόμα πρόεδρο της Ευρώπης, αλλά είναι πρόεδρος σε ένα πολύ εντελεκτικό πρόεδρο. Έτσι, εμείς έχουμε Ματ Μακμανούς. Ματ είναι πρόεδρος της πολιτικής. Είναι σχέσης στην Ευρωπαϊκή Ευρώπης. Και έχει ρίξει σε πολλές πρόεδρος, που πιστεύει το Άρεο Μάγαζιν, το Ζάκομπιν, το Κιλέτ. Και είναι ενδιαφέρτητος σε πολιτικές ιδέες. Έχει κρυτείσει το φαινόματο που έχει σκέψει τον Ποστο-Μόδερνο Κωνσευατισμ, που είναι πολύ ενδιαφέρτητο. Έχω χρησιμοποιήσει τον δρόμο και σε έναν Κρυτικό Φραντιο-Κριβαλισμ. Είναι ένας άνθρωπος μες που θα συγκρήσουμε, αλλά είναι ένας πολύ ενδιαφέρτητο άνθρωπος, και είμαστε πολύ γλώσεις να είχε. Επίσης, δεύτερα, έχουμε κάποιες πρόεδρος που μπορούν να συγκρήσουν για την συμφωνία που είχαμε σήμερα. Έχει συμφωνήσει ένας πρόεδρος, είναι η Μηθ και η Μαίχεμ, ένας κρίτης της Γεωργίας Τζόρδας Πιτερσόν, και την αρχή του ίδιου Λιππεραλισμού και Λιππεραλισμού, ένας κρίτης ελληνικής αρχήτητας. Λοιπόν, Ματ, ευχαριστούμε πολύ για να είμαστε μαζί μας. Μετά από εσένας, πιστεύω πιστεύω Γιαρόν. Θα τοiques και χαιο της γεωργίας Τζόρδας. Από να ενεργήσουμε την Πάτε στη Γεωργία Τζόρδας, και όνειρα, είναι η σύνοτη του γέρονου κομμάτις. Κι από εσένας, ειδείτε τον ίδιο του Γεωργίας Τζόρδας. Μετά από εσένας, πιστεύω τον ίδιο του γέρονου κομμάτις. Ματ, ευχαριστούμε πολύ για να είχαμε στ cows. Εχω μόνο να γίνει ο μόνος πίσω του Γεωργείου. Ευχαριστούμε πολύ για να μου sle. Νομίζω να σας πω να εξηγήσω ότι ελπίζω ότι όλοι είναι καλύτερα και κοβερνά. Βέβαια, κάποιοι μας είχαν πάρει χρόνο με αυτό τώρα και ελπίζω να εξηγήσω ότι το τέλος είναι στο τέλος. Έτσι, ένα από τα πράγματα που θέλω να ξεκινήσω είναι ότι εξηγήσω ως οικονομικός κοβερνάς, που δηλαδή θέλω να πω ότι εξηγήσω 9 out of 10 λιβερνές. Το ένα που δεν εξηγήσω εξηγήσω πραγματικά, όπως εξηγήσω, είναι το πρόσφυρο ή η πρόσφυρα της εξηγήσης εξηγήσης. Στην παράδειγμα, θα πω γιατί εγώ νομίζω αυτό το τέλος, γιατί τελώς, εξηγήσω, ότι εξηγήσω το τέλος της εξηγήσης, το τέλος της εξηγήσης, το νομίζω, και το λιβερνό κοβερνάς. Αν εγώ εξηγήσω πρόσφυρος, πω να σας εξηγήσω να εξηγήσω. Η μου γυναίκα γνωρίζει ότι μπορώ να πω πράγματα για εξηγήσω και είναι κάτι που έχω δει. Υπάρχει ένα τέτοιο γυναίκειο, ένα θεσμό για τα ακόμη που μας δείψω. So, please, you know, cut me off of Nebe. So, what are the defining features of antiquarian and religious conceptions of property rights, at least in the Western canon, is how they're conceived as flowing from some account of dessert. What this really just means is the technical terms for the idea that some people are considered more morally deserving than others and consequently, they're entitled to more, right. And in some certain respects, this could seem so commonsensical that to this day, We tend to just believe that this is the right way to think of things when it comes to things like property rights and deserve, right. If you deserve more, you should get more. But there are big, even fatal problems with this conception that we now recognize. Some of these are actually pretty uncontroversial, right. So for instance Aristotle's conception of who was more deserving included distinctions between so-called natural slaves and their masters. And he did very little to examine the violent basis of this relationship. The conservative justified the caste system by appealing to a sense of karmic dessert, right. You were where you are on the social pecking order and you had what you had because of the cycle of samsara and what you've done in some previous life. Scholastics through the Middle Ages wrote very elaborate defenses of feudal hierarchies by contending they had been ordained by God were necessarily part of nature or really some combination of the two. So these systems very, very widely in their details. But each one is based on this idea that nature or God or teleomellurgical metaphysics indicated that some people were more worthy and therefore deserving of more. And of course oftentimes the people who found these arguments most expedient were those who happened to be in power and who benefited from the system. And what I like about liberalism is that with the shift into the liberal modern era, we saw a gigantic transformation in our way of thinking. So early liberals and proto liberals radicalized a lot of ideas that have been gestured to by the stoics and some Christian thinkers, which emphasized the importance of human equality, at least moral equality. Consequently, they came to make the argument well known to anyone who's a fan of Thomas Jefferson, that at very least all people are created as moral equals. And hops and walks vision of the states of nature, for example, opens with the world being held in common, and a vision of humanity where everything from our physical to mental abilities are more or less equivalent. Right. And moreover, they said if you don't believe in God, and you don't believe that God stipulates that some people are more important than others. There's no reason to really hold on to these kind of super hierarchical ideas any longer. So what we get in these early liberal accounts isn't an argument for moral equality. There was always imperfectly implemented by a lot of liberals, and you can think of slavery in the United States, resistance of patriarchy and homophobia. But nonetheless, you know this kind of liberal information was a lot more radical than what they came before. But these early liberal thinkers, in my argument at least, we're still unwilling to entirely let go of the notion that goes back to antiquity that some people are more deserving than others. So whether they wanted to develop a sense of property rights as they existed in their society, and they often did so by locating the source of property rights back in the state of nature. Right. And probably the most prominent example of this is John Locke, who was once said in the second treatise on government. In the beginning, all the world was America, which meant like Terra Nullius or common land, but gradually the argument went at least through our labor we transform the matter of the world into our property. And when society was provided by the social contract or by other means, we carry it over our so called natural rights to this property, which was the state's job to intervene to defend. And if the state contravenes this right to property, we can even have a revolution to change things. And in this way, stark inequalities and property became readjustified again, even in the liberal system. Now this is obviously a very influential idea and you can still see a lot of flavors of this articulated in the broader culture. You summarize this was called the workmanship ideal. But I would argue it's not actually a very plausible argument, which is why most contemporary liberal philosophers and I would like to point out not just contemporary liberal philosophers on the left, reject this idea that there are either property rights in nature, or that the workmanship ideal or some kind of conception of hard work creates an entitlement to property. And there are a lot of different reasons for this we can get into some of them. One of the simplest and I think most elegant was raised by a good Canadian political theorist called CB McPherson, and his influential book on possessive individualism from the 1960s. And what McPherson argues is that property, of course, is not a natural idea. In a state of nature, I may possess something, you know, it might actually physically be with me. But that doesn't necessarily make it mine. In fact, it's very possible that I might have taken what I have in my possession from someone else through force, which is what Hobbes argue. The idea of not just possessing something but actually owning it as property, which I'll define as having an exclusive entitlement to it, can only come into existence with the legal architecture of a state, which recognizes certain kinds of possession as property and not others. So McPherson points out that Locke and Hobbes and all these others essentially read back into a pre legal settings, ideas that can only emerge in the state, or in this context where we have a state. But a more devastating observation came later and was articulated by people like Marx and McPherson. And this was the argument that if you actually hold to the idea that labor creates a property entitlement, which is what Locke argued initially at least, right, mixing my labor with matters, what makes it mine, then a lot of capitalist society and property rights don't work, or at least they're fundamentally unjust. And this is because industry as a whole is dependent on capitalist being able to live off the physical and now mental products, their workers create. To live off their alienated labor was the classical term. To keep this kind of state effectively going, it needed to enforce a conception of a property rights that entitled some people to live off the alienated labor of others to effectively be coerced us to accepting regime that many of us might choose to reject in favor of one which is a lot more egalitarian. And the argument put forward by McPherson and Marx and others. So is that this Locke an idea ultimately doesn't work on its own terms. In the end, what you get is this argument that starts off by saying we're entitled to what we create our labor creates this entitlement. But it ends up supporting a system where actually a whole mass of people are able to live off the alienated labor of others. Now, coincidentally, this is why a lot of contemporary the classical liberal and libertarian philosophers like Hayek and no good. So is it argue we should simply drop any emphasis to the workmanship ideal. And many respects they argue we should drop this emphasis on the idea that labor creates a source of property entitlement, because they say it's really open to the Marxist objection. They argue that there are different reasons why we should still endorse a robust conception of property rights so Hayek and the Constitution of Liberty says that it's true that many deserving people will work hard and capitalism and fall behind. And there are other peoples like the L'Oreal family or the Walton family who won't work at all, but we'll inherit their wealth and stay ahead, but we can accept this accorded hand because that's the consequence of a free society and what's necessary to generate wealth. Now, Hayek and the L'Oreal family say that we need to recognize how liberty is going to disrupt patterns. So if you leave people free to do what they want, it's always going to trouble any effort to create a scheme that gives people what we think that they deserve. Right, but I would go further than either of these two contemporary classical liberal and libertarian thinkers and say, it's time we simply dropped any notion that a complex social system can ever give people what they deserve. But there's just too much more arbitrariness in life to ever design, or you can just accept a system that, you know, it entails this. I also think it's well past time we tried to define everything in terms of a singular ultimate principle or idea, whether that be God, the end of class conflict, or the freedom to do whatever it is that you want. Instead, we should ask ourselves what principles of justice most of us would rationally choose to govern the distribution of freedoms and goods in society, with the ultimate aim of securing the best possible life for all of us as morally equal human beings. And that's where I think a liberal social society like the one John Stuart Mill called for, the one John, John Rawls called for, is the one that best satisfy these conditions. It would be a society where personal property still exists, as would distinct corporations and institutions which would compete with one another to innovate and provide for our needs. But these would be democratically managed to the extent possible, and they would operate to ensure that everyone who contributed to the form firm shared in the risk and reward. And consequently, the corporate structure would look very different than now, where very few people at the top get to dictate how most of the rest of us will send the vast majority of our lives. I'll just end there. I'm happy to take more questions on that. Thanks a lot, Matt. Thank you very much. So, Yaron, the floor is yours now. Thank you. Thank you, Matt, for agreeing to do this. I really appreciate that. Thank you, Nikos and Razzi, for organizing it. I think when talking about property rights, when talking about all rights, it's important for us to consider what all rights and why do they even exist. Because I think my view, my man's view, is quite different than the conventional views, many of which you've heard a hint of in Matt's argument. Rights indeed do not exist in nature. They are not given to us by God and they're not given to us by government. Rights are a moral concept. They're a concept that provides a transition between morality and politics. They're the requirement for human life once we enter into a social environment. And yes, rights necessitate a government to make them real within a society. Rights are not just there. They're not just given. They are, in a sense, an achievement. But they require that we recognize a proper morality. A morality that is focused on the individual's ability to survive and the individual's ability to thrive. The individual's ability to flourish or achieve eudaimonea in Aristotelian terms. So what is it that's required for human beings to thrive and to be successful? Well, it's the ability to use their mind, their judgment, in order to make value choices for themselves in pursuit of their own success, their own flourishing, their own happiness. Those values, the need to come up with your own values, the need to be able to act in order to achieve those values, necessitate once we come into a social environment. They necessitate freedom. They necessitate the ability to think free of coercion. They necessitate the ability to choose free of authority. They necessitate to act free of force being imposed on us, whether that force is from our neighbors or whether that force is imposed on us by the state. The concept that captures this idea is the concept of individual rights. Rights are freedoms. They're freedoms of action. The freedom of action to pursue your judgment, to pursue your values in pursuit of your life. Indeed, rights are what are the concept that brings in moral law into a social environment, into politics. In that sense, I think there's a little bit of confusion there about equality. I don't think the Enlightenment viewed humans as morally equal, certainly not adults. They viewed humans as politically equal, politically equal. That is, possessing equal rights, no matter skin color, no matter what wealth you're born to, no matter what status you're born to. You possess equal rights for the law. You're equally free to pursue your values, you're equally free to use your mind in that pursuit. And that means you're equally free of coercion, you're equally free of force, you're equally free of an authority that imposes their view on you. Now, given that we have this right, and there really is only one fundamental right and that is the right to life, given that we have a right to live our lives based on our judgment in pursuit of our values for the sake of our happiness, given that we have that right, given that that is a right derived from a morality that says that your moral purpose is the achievement of your happiness, the achievement of your success. One needs to be able to act, one needs to be able to act in order to achieve the material needs that are necessary for my survival, my thriving, my flourishing, my happiness. And that requires that I be able to maintain, be able to protect from coercion, from force, from people taking the things that I produce, the things that I create. The problem that I find with most critics of the idea of individual rights or the idea of capitalism really is that they take the world of material things as a given. There's stuff out there. There's stuff being produced. There's just iPhones. And now the question that we have to deal with morally and even economically is how do we distribute those iPhones? Who gets what? But the question is not we have iPhones therefore who should we distribute it to? The question is how do iPhones get produced? Who produces those iPhones? And what are the conditions under which we get to produce more iPhones? So distribution is not a rights question. So property needs to be produced. Property needs to be created. And that's the sense in which the question of dessert comes in. The question of dessert is not given that we have iPhones. How many iPhones should Matt get? How many iPhones should you Ron get? The question of dessert get you on five. I'll send you some. I've got some old ones sitting in a closet. The real question is whether the person who creates the iPhone, the person who produces the iPhone should be able to determine what gets done with the thing that he created. So the question of dessert is a question of producer. The question of the person who creates the world, the person who tells the land is, and this goes back to Locke, right? The person who tells the land is the product of that land and his or isn't it? So the question of dessert is deserving of the thing that one produces, the thing that one creates. And what cannot achieve life, there is no meaning to the idea of a right to life. There is no meaning to the idea of your life belongs to you, your life, you should be able to pursue your life free of coercion, free of force. If you don't get to keep the product of your own labor, if you don't get to keep the stuff that you produce, that you create, that you bring into this world. Again, all property really is in the end a product. It's something that people have to bring into the world. It doesn't just exist out there. So in that sense, property right for tact, the ability of producers to keep what they produce. Now, I know it seems like every leftist, all the leftists share a common kind of verbiage around this idea that labor is being exploited. I mean, the exploitation of labor is one of the most bizarre ideas I've ever heard. Given again that labor doesn't exist and avoid, labor is created. There is no labor before there is a business, before there is a project, before there is an entrepreneur, before there is an idea. It is not true that the capitalist is not providing labor. The capitalist is providing the most important of all forms of labor, with that is the idea, that is the product that ultimately labor contributes to producing. But indeed, labor contributes the least. Any particular labor contributes very little to the production of the ultimate product. And that's why every labor, every particular labor, gains a relatively small portion of the actual productive value of that labor. So they get exactly what they deserve. They get in proportion to how much they've contributed to the creation of the product that exists. So the whole idea of the labor theory of value, which has been, you know, rejected over and over again. And here I agree with the criticism of Locke and Marx with regard to the labor theory of value. The labor theory of value is wrong. It diminishes the role of the mind. It diminishes the role of ideas. It diminishes the role of organization. It diminishes the role of the real productive ability in organizing production. And it views material, physical labor as a source of all value. That is just, that is wrong, it's always been wrong. And it needs to be moved on from. The idea that we have to bring to the table when we form a society, when we in a sense become civilized. It is a recognition of the fact that property is created. It is not just found as is in nature. And it is a recognition that those who create the labor should be able to keep it because that is an essential to their freedom in pursuit of their own happiness and in their pursuit of their own life. I would add that, of course, the consequences of a world that rejects property rights are very horrific. Every way that it is tried, it is destructive to human life. It is destructive to wealth and ultimately is a catastrophe for the people living under the regime. And indeed, the property rights project, to the extent that property rights are respected, to the extent that property rights are defended, to that respect, human prosperity increases, human ability to pursue happiness increases, and human wealth and flourishing increase. And indeed, property rights are consistent and run together with freedom. And I consider freedoms crucially important. You know, the idea of coming at it from the perspective of a kind of a collectivistic perspective of some principles of justice that are somehow removed from the individual. I think John Rawls' project is an incredibly unjust project, put it that way, because it rejects what individuals are actually achieving life, what individual actually doing life. And in this sense, again, I don't think human beings are morally equal. Again, in the sense that as adults, they make choices, some people make bad choices, some people make good choices, some people clearly make immoral choices. I don't think Matt would say that a murderer, serial killer is morally equal to another human being who is a productive, you know, friendly person in society. So clearly, we make choices that do not make us equally moral ultimately. And therefore, while we might be born morally equal, morality doesn't apply to a newborn in a sense that they're tablo rasa in a moral sense. The choices we make change the level at which we deserve. We're not, and as a consequence, that's what property rights really deal with, not the state in which we are born, but the state in which we as individuals create for ourselves. All right, I mean, there's a huge amount to say about this, but let's get into a little bit of a discussion. Thank you. So I think instead of me micromanaging the discussion, I let both of you having a rebutal and let's say something like a dialogue. Before that, let me mention a couple of super chats. So Jonathan, thanks so much. Jonathan raises figurative glass in honor of Yaron with a super chat. So thanks so much Jonathan. And also many thanks to Mario Lin, a lot of discussion in the comments about the labor theory of value. But let's hear Matt's thoughts on Yaron's reply to him. And then let's have a bit of inter-panel discussion. And then I'm going to intervene again for more super chats. Comments. Okay, just before we begin, I'm willing to make a gentleman's agreement of saying that if you are willing not to interrupt me, unless I go over for too long, I will play you exactly the same courtesy. Okay, it doesn't matter how angry I get, how frustrated I get, how much I'm seething and thinking of that capitalist dog. You know, I will remain silent in my time. Okay, so just very briefly. I agree with a lot of what Yaron has said. I myself am a firm believer in the importance of individual rights. If anything, you know, my liberal socialism in some ways would be considerably more liberal than what we have today. And I suspect that Yaron would agree with a lot of what I have to say. So for instance, I lived in Portugal for a long time, beautiful country, fantastic food, far sunnier than Canada, fortunately. And I think they have one of the most sane drug policies in the world right now. Imperfect, but far more sane than what we've seen in the United States or Mexico or any number of other countries where there's extremely draconian moralistic approach to things like drug issues. And I think a good liberal society would wean it off itself off this idea that things like drugs should be dealt with as a matter of more worth and be dealt with purely as a health issue. You get addicted, you should seek help for that. If not, you should be able to do what you want with your own life. I often have a very expansive conception of what's important for things like freedom of expression. I got involved in politics because it was part of Amnesty International 14 years old. I hate any government interfering with what people have to say. I hate any corporation using its corporate power to try to hedge what people are going to say. So I think it's extremely important to engage in dialogue in a robust marketplace of idea. And again, I'm sure that Yaron would agree. What I disagree with fundamentally though, and this is where my dirty Rawlsianism comes in and I'm sure Yaron will have a lot to say with this, I'm just not really interested in the whole Marxism versus Lockeanism versus Ayn Rand kind of debate. Since I see all of them as fixating on this idea of trying to determine what it is that someone deserves materially. Now, I think that to invoke Yaron's comment about a murder, there are instances where we can talk about what someone deserves. I don't believe in the death penalty, but if I was at Nuremberg in 1946 and Herman Göring was sitting in the docket and they said, you're going to die, I'd probably say, well, good riddance, you know, let's have a toast to that, you know, Nazis get what they deserve, right. But when it comes to a social system or an economic system, allocating to people what it is that they deserve, I just don't think it's possible to even conceive of such a system. And I think that Marxist and libertarians and classical liberals have been going back and forth on this for such a long time with classical liberals and libertarians saying it's capital that produces most of the value so capital should get most of the reward. Marxist kind of vulgar Marxist, I should say inverting that saying no, it's actually labor that's produced everything so labor should get all the reward. I'm really just not interested in that kind of question, right. I think that where people wind up in life has a lot to do with morally arbitrary factors, right, not always, but oftentimes. And so I think we should ask ourselves questions that are much more in line with the kind of benthamite approach, you know, a la liberalism, right. What is it that we can give people that will label them to live a life of flourishing. What is it that we can do to secure the best possibilities for like people to exercise the freedom in a meaningful way. What kind of society is respectful of our status as moral equals, while also recognizing that if we choose to pursue different paths in life, they're going to be different outcomes, but we should still be empowered to pursue those paths, wherever possible. And I think that liberal socialism just does a better job of that, then it's competitors now that's not to say that liberal socialist society would be some kind of utopia because I think utopia is impossible, right. There will still be personal problems they'll be still be inequities that emerge from people making different life choices, but they won't be nearly as stark as what we see right now. And I think it will also be one where we hopefully finally remove ourself from this idea that there can ever be a social system that's not divinely ordained that gives the people what they deserve, whether that be come out of Marxist status system, or capitalist system. So really, we're arguing kind of at a prosper cross purposes here so I suspect you'll just fundamentally disagree with that but I'll let you have before. Yeah, absolutely, because I, as I mentioned, I think you start from the wrong premise, and that wrong promises. We have to allocate to people stuff. I mean, yeah, I'm against allocating to people anything. I don't believe in taking from someone giving to others. I don't believe in in in a system allocating or in a central planner allocating or in Matthew deciding who gets what or for that matter in democracy and a majority deciding which minority, they should favor today or maybe they should favor the majority at the expensive the minority. I think all of those entail the use of something that we agree shouldn't be used when it comes to drugs. We agree shouldn't be used when it comes to free expression. But for some reason we don't agree that it shouldn't be used when it comes to allocation, and that is force. We agree that nobody should be cursed to be silent. We agree that nobody should be cursed should be forced to be used against them in punishment because they take a drug, or because they sell a drug. Somehow it's okay to take from some. I was going to stay steel and I really mean steel from some in order to give to others. Wealth is not just there. Wealth is created. And the measure of who deserves what is not determined by me. I mean, it could be that in some fields, labor creates more than capital. But the beauty of that is that in a field like that labor would get more than capital in a free society. That is what I want is people to be free to negotiate the terms under which they interact with one another when it comes to drugs. When it comes to speech you know there might be terms under which I say Matthew, I don't want you in my house because I don't like your ideas. In my house, I don't want to hear social, and you know, I think I'd like Matthew and I don't think I kick him out of the house, but I can imagine people. Norm Chomsky, I don't want him in my house, right. I do not want to kick him out, right. You know, so there's certainly places where we don't want, we limit expression, right, and because because there's a certain relationship that we've come to right in the public sphere. We don't want the government coming in and dictating what's appropriate and what's inappropriate. I think that's true in a social sphere, in the economic sphere as well. We don't want the government coming in and saying what economic activity is appropriate and inappropriate. And we want to recognize the fact that individuals are adults, just like they're adults with regard to drugs. They're adults in terms of their labor, they're adults in terms of their capacity to interact with one another and to negotiate the terms. Under which they are compensated for work that they do. And a CEO is an adult in terms of his ability to, it's interesting that he's a worker because he negotiates that with, with the board of directors or the owners of the company, and so are employees. So, so other employees. So dessert. So first I think I have a much more expansive view of dessert. Again, I don't like this idea of allocating. I like the idea of leaving people free to create what they create. Some people create a little, right? I mean, in any world, some people create a little. Even smart people would create a little. I suspect that intellectuals, some intellectuals will not be highly rewarded in almost any society. And some people will create a lot because they create a lot of material wealth. So what, life is not just about money. You know, my fear is the ones we start talking about inequality of wealth. Well, the next thing about inequality of other things, right? Just like, just like the Kamerouche did under Pope Pot, right? What about inequality of education inequality of IQ inequality of lots of things. And we start trying to leveling everybody which is the ultimate ultimate place to which egalitarian egalitarianism goes. Economic activity is just one form of human activity. Let's leave it free and let people keep what they produce, keep what they create, keep what they are best at negotiating for. Just like we do in any or should do in any other sphere of human activity. What we need to extract again is coercion and force and the authority of somebody to allocate. Which I think is the again the use of coercion, the use of force over people. We have a relevant super chat on that. So first of all, huge thank you to William, to Jonathan, to Jeff. Very generous contributions. Thank you so much. We really appreciate this. So Marilyn, thanks again for your super chat. So Marilyn asks about the difference between economic and political power. So actually let's do it this way. We start with Matt. So Matt, would you recognize that there's a difference between. Let's say Amazon is providing me a big survey, a good service. Therefore, I keep clicking buying stuff from Amazon. Therefore, Amazon becomes Bezos becomes rich versus the state using their coercion. Let's say to extract taxes that I haven't consented. And maybe me and you would agree that even if you don't believe that taxation is theft, it goes to causes that we wouldn't approve of. Let's say the war in Iraq. So wouldn't you recognize that there is a difference between political power and economic power and that the one includes the issue of coercion and how would you view this topic? Sure. Well, I should start out by saying I think it really depends on the context. Right. My kind of response to that question is the zhekian one, which is economical power being located in the hands of big corporations, political power being located in the hands of a big state. No, thank you to both. And I think there are different historical instances where we can see one more power becoming more domineering and more coercive than others. So for instance, if I were in India during the period preceding the British Raj, where the East India Company was a hegemonic force, particularly in the south of the country, I would probably be talking a lot about the dangers that nascent capital is imposed to the independence of a colonized people. Right. Now, if I was in the Soviet Union 19, let's say 36, just around the time of the great purges, I would be saying that the fundamental thing that we need to challenge is statism and Stalinist interpretations of statism in particular, because that's the biggest barrier to human liberty at this point. But look, I just want to pick up on something that you're on has said about cooperation, then I'll stop. So I think this gets at my issue with power. I'm a great believer in democracy. I think that it has its limitations and it can't be imposed everywhere, as you on said, if you came into my house, it's my rules, because I believe in personal property if not expansive private property, right. But when it comes to things like what regime of property rights should we have. I think that one that's coercively enforced by the state as bad. People don't have a say, and what kind of conception of property rights that they want to be implemented. And this is at the root of CB McPherson's critique of possessive individualism as well where it points out, a lot of people if you went to 16th or 17th century England ask them, do you want a capitalist conception of property rights, they would have said no. And then the state said well too bad we're going to coercively enforce that irregardless right. So I think at the political level more democratization is good. Again it has its limitations, but it enables us to cooperate to determine the kind of regime of property rights we want to be enforced by the state. And I also think democracy is valuable in the workplace in the same manner, right. I tend to work like things like many leftists like workers cooperatives. I like co determination in Germany. I like the idea of unionization and higher levels of labor involvement and industry. Again, I don't think one of these is the magic bullet to the problems that we have right now, but I think they're all good things that we can experiment with. And I should also say, I don't think it's a coincidence that when we saw the highest levels of unionization in the United States, between 25 to 35% in the 1950s and 60s depending upon where you look. We also saw higher returns to labor, higher levels of equality, and greater levels of material while being. And then we saw in the 1980s when wages started to stagnant and fall from many people. And when there was this general sense of animosity that emerged. So I'll just leave it there. I'm sure that they'll have more to say about that but that's kind of my two cents on it. Yeah, let me just say, just quickly in democracy, I find it curious. Again, it's a common theme that all for democracy, when it gets to allocating my wealth, you know, let the majority limited majority vote to take my money and give it to somebody else. But when it comes to allocating speech, we're not so much for democracy. We don't want to silence our quities, even if it's democratically. We don't limit, you know, Europe has passed hate speech laws, which I think are horrific and offensive. But they did it democratically. So it should be legit if you believe in democracy. I oppose democracy when democracy infringes on rights, on all rights, not on selective rights of my choosing. Right. I don't like democracy when it fridges on my property rights. I don't like democracy when it fridges on free speech. I don't like democracy when it, I mean, drug laws in most of the world are dictated by majorities. The majority of Americans believe that there should be that heroin should be outlawed. It's still wrong. The majority is usually wrong. It's not surprising the majority is wrong. It shouldn't be so. Government should not be democratic. It should be. It should be democratically chosen, but it should be very, very limited in its scope of what kind of power and what kind of influence you can have. And the reason for that is a government is forced and this is the fundamental difference between political power and economic power. Political power is the power to cause. Political power is the power of authority over somebody else's lives. When I pass a law, it's not optional for everybody. When a government passes a law, there's no options. You either do the law or physical force falls on you. The law should only be passed in protection of rights, not in violation of rights, not in trying to allocate what is already mine. Economic power, on the other hand, is voluntary power. It is the power of choice. We can easily choose not to deal with Amazon. We can easily choose not to deal with Microsoft. We can easily choose not to deal with our local grocery store because I don't know. We don't like the way they do their business or we don't like how their employees treat people or whatever reason. It's a fundamental difference between coercion and choice. To me, that is the fundamental difference in politics. That is, the government deals in the gun. It deals in force. And that is what needs to be extracted from voluntary human association. Human association should be based on choices. Not everybody's going to have the same choices. Not all choices are going to be equally good. Some people face alternatives are not as good as other people. All granted, but there are choices and they're not being caused. So I think that's a fundamental difference. I would like to see it applied the antagonism towards coercion uniformly across all realms, not just selectively around the so-called freedoms that the way happen to like and not the freedoms we don't like. We can talk about workers' co-ops. I'm all for workers' co-ops. Let them compete in the marketplace. One of the things I always say is the beauty is that under capitalism, under my conception of capitalism, a true liberal free capitalism, you can start a co-op. You can go live in a commune to eat according to his needs, from each according to his ability and live that life and nobody will stop you from doing it as long as you don't curse other people to live that life. The difference is that socialists want to curse me to live their form of life. They want to force me to associate with other people the way they think I should associate with other people. And they want to force me to produce some things and not others and to share my labor when I don't want to share it. So it's a corrosive system from beginning to end, even though it's put in a guise of kind of a liberal democratic framework. Matt, feel free to comment on whatever you want from this, but let me add on the table one more super chat. Thank you, Maria Lin. So the question is so much you seem to have accepted the idea of, let's say, some personal property. But then where do you put the limit between this personal property, which let's say no one can violate it. No one can come in your house and start picking stuff up. So where do you put the line between this which is, let's say, is to be respected. And let's say the game, the capital gains of someone or the factory of someone or the way someone runs a factory which from that point is not anymore to be respected and someone can democratically or in any other way interfere with this. So how do you see the difference between let's say personal property and private property. Sure. Thank you. I think that's a great question. It's something that I'm still sorting out for myself, as many of us are on the political left. But very briefly, I think that there are some issues, like some instances where something should very clearly be considered personal property, other areas that are plenumbral and then somewhere clearly they should be democratized because they impact us all. Right. So in terms of personal property, I think that we can all agree with the classical liberal conception that I own my body. Right. This is I think is very fundamental and any efforts to actually contravene my ownership of my body have been responsible for some of the worst forms of tyranny known to humankind thus far. I think many people on the political left would accept this perspective if you think about the very strong emphasis many of us place on things like abortion rights, for example, or for that matter to go back to the early example I brought up, you know, drug use, right. It might not be the best thing for me, you know, to inject heroin into my veins every day, but my feeling is that's a God given right that you have if you wish to do so, you should be free to do so. Just be aware that it's probably not going to end well. Right. Beyond that, I think something like having a home. Obviously that's your personal property. Right. I don't want anybody just barging into my apartment saying, you know, Matt, you know, I'm going to grab a beer sit down on the couch and watch the football game because my wife won't let me do that there. Sorry. Right. I think that having a home is a very fundamentally important thing to many of us. And in fact, one of the big problems I have as a millennial is the fact that I don't ever actually intend to own a home, because I don't think I'll ever be able to afford to, at least not an adjunct professor salary, right. But beyond these kind of clear instances where I think personal property is relatively uncontroversial, I think we get into a number of cases, right. A very good one is this distinction between small and large businesses, right. Most liberal socialists like myself have no problem with a little girl running a lemonade stand, right on the side of the street, making a little bit of money so that she can go buy a doll or whatever it happens to be. In fact, I think that's cute and I endorse it. Most of us have no problem with mom and pop shops selling antiques or selling shawarma or whatever it happens to be, right, or food trucks like the ones that populate Toronto, right. You know, my father-in-law is a small business owner. You know, he sells pieces of furniture that he makes. I wholeheartedly encourage anyone if they go to Mexico City to buy some and you'll get a great piece of furniture, right. But after a certain threshold, where a small business becomes sufficiently large to be able to hedge its market power to impact the lives of those who might not even be its employees, right, or even its consumers, but broader swaths of the society in which it's embedded, that becomes problematic and we need to have a conversation about that, right. And when we reach the threshold of an Amazon and Apple and Microsoft back in the day, something like US Steel, then we have to have a very serious conversation about whether we can allow these kind of entities to continue operating in our society without them transitioning to becoming essentially politically powerful and able to implement a coercive system that favors them and that doesn't benefit the rest of us, right. One of the things that I often point out is, it's a very typical Leninist refrain to say, look, you know, we haven't actually tried real Marxist Leninism. Every attempt so far has been a failure. One day we're going to get it right. And my response, which level, by the way, is to say, no, if you try to implement that, this is just what you're going to wind up with, right. This is Marxist Leninism at the very least. I'm a lot more favorable to Marxist humanism. My response to people who will say things like, well, crony capitalism is a deviation from capitalism, the way it should be, is no, this is just the way that market capitalism looks when it actually is implemented in practice. And this isn't controversial, I think. Adam Smith, back in the 18th century, spent the latter half of the wealth of nations railing against big corporations in the British Empire, hedging their market power to implement policies that favored them, including mercantilist policies. It's worth noticing. And he said, we should do what we need to in order to break these up, right. So again, really depends on context, history, a lot of gray areas in there. But I do definitely think that there is a line, it's crossed, and when it's crossed, we should be having a serious discussion about trying to democratize these institutions, so that they work to the benefit of all, rather than just the benefit of their shareholders. Okay, so people, we're going to finish slightly earlier today. So if you have a question for a super chat, we're going to accept them only for three more minutes, because then I'll let the speakers do their outro. So, Jaron, before you reply to Matt, there's a relevant question. Thank you, Daniel, for your super chat. What is the relationship between cronism and property ownership? So Jaron, if you can address this, and also then you can address the things that Matt has put on the table. Yeah, I mean, what is cronyism? Crosonism is the idea that business and labor, I play cronyism to labor as well, that any kind of forces in the marketplace apply political pressure on politicians and ultimately get favorable laws passed that favor them. And obviously that has existed throughout the history of whatever capitalism we have had, certainly in the time of Adam Smith in the pre-capitalist era, it existed where powerful pressure groups applied pressure. Mercadilism existed in England until the corn laws, which were what 1860s or 1870s. So it's not like Adam Smith that went like this and suddenly we get capitalism in the UK. So cronyism is a feature of a mixed economy, of what I call a mixed economy, of where the government and a mixed economy is any economy, where the government has the power to intervene in the economy, but it isn't a totalitarian, it doesn't own the means of production, it isn't fascist, it isn't communist in that sense. So there's some semblance of free commerce, but that the government has the power to intervene in the economy. I advocate for a system where the government doesn't have that power, does not have the power to intervene in the economy in any way, and therefore cronyism is impossible under such a system. And this is the difference between the argument that says we've never had pure communism, therefore we don't know what it would be, and the argument that I will make, we've never had pure capitalism, so don't judge. Then this is the different. I'm willing for you to judge, that is, in this sense. The closer we get to this ideal of socialism, or even in the middle, or even a quarter of the way, things get worse. Things get worse in terms of the quality of life standard of living, things get worse in terms of wealth creation, and things get worse in terms of other protections in terms of individual rights. And as somebody who grew up in a relatively free but socialist country, I can tell you that that's exactly the case. When the labor unions own the means of production, as they did in Israel until the 1980s, Israel remained poor, and life kind of sucked from a material perspective. On the other hand, as we approach capitalism, and we've never achieved it, but as we approach it, things get better. Generally, people are freer, generally people are wealthier, generally people have more, and both spiritually and materially. While I don't blame socialists for saying, oh, we've never done it right, look at all the different variations. They've all been crappy, and look at all the different variations of capitalism, even with the cronyism. It's about the only system that's ever really promoted human life and brought us out of the misery of a pre-capitalist world. So not bad, not bad for a system that is so rejected. Let me just quickly say that I find Matthew's distinction of personal property and private property as completely arbitrary. What is personal property in my apartment? Well, if it's a big apartment, does that count? Like, I have a much bigger apartment than you do, much, much bigger, much, much nicer, the view of the ocean. Is that not my personal property? Is it a standard apartment? Like everybody in Kibbutz having the same apartment? Is that personal property? But anything above that now becomes private property and should be regulated and controlled by the state and reallocated? It has to be, because the only way to attain a bigger apartment, a nicer apartment, is to produce wealth. And the only way to produce wealth is to create a business that actually, that now is a borderline. And then Matthew says, well, small business, if you make lemonade, that's cute, I support it. Well, who said it's cute? You know, who decides what's cute and what's not? Again, the central planner, the philosopher King, kicks in. I'm going to tell you what's cute and what's not. I'm going to tell you what's appropriate, what's not appropriate. I'm going to tell you what size business is good and what size business is not good. I find it, again, interesting that the companies that have had the most impact on our lives for overwhelmingly positive, for the positive, they're the ones that are most, that Matthew finds most offensive, right? Whether it's Amazon that has changed our lives and has made this lock, these horrible lockdowns tolerable. Apple, all of these big companies and successful companies. How do you become successful? You become successful by producing values for people, people willing to pay you because you're producing something of value to them. So it is success that is being penalized. And yes, that success influences lots of people around the world overwhelmingly for the positive. I'm not going to say 100% because yes, there is cronyism in the world today. And yes, they do apply stuff to government that is, that is, that can be harmful, but overwhelmingly the rest of the positive, even you are steel. If one actually studies the history, you're still as a massive net positive to the world, to the United States, to workers, to wages, to productivity, to have aspect of human life. It is not an accident, by the way, that the labor unions have shrunk since their peak in the 1960s. As soon as the United States faced any kind of competition, as soon as American businesses started to actually face competition, it turned out that labor unions were hoarding productiveness, were hoarding the ability of the best employees to earn higher wage. What unions do is they divorce productivity from wages. So it is employees, it is workers who rejected unions from the 1960s to today. And the reason unions are so unpopular today in the United States is primarily because they hoard workers. They're not good for workers. Workers want to be able to be compensated based on how productive they are. So when they're more productive, they want to get more. Unions prevent them from doing that. And we could go on for hours with the stories and how that's done. But we're running out of time. Yeah, I interrupt because we have one more question. We'll use that to wrap up. I just wanted to interject very quickly and say that typically I would say an apartment should never be divided or expropriated, your own. But if you did have a seaside apartment that was particularly beautiful, I might say it's a sign to expropriate the expropriators. And let me use that balcony at some point. And that's exactly the case in my case. So I do have a seaside, an oceanside apartment. Okay, so one last difficult question to both of you. And then we wrap up. We have a hard stop in five minutes. So Matt, the question to you is why not achieve these aims by a voluntary cooperation and not coercive means? The workers' movement has a tradition of mutual aid, particularly late 19th century, co-ops, all that stuff. Why not achieve these goals by voluntary means? And Yaron, the final, let's say, difficult question to you. It's actually a super task from Super K-Pill. Are there any real failures or flaws in capitalism the way Yaron views it? So can you think of any possible injustice that could happen in a completely free system? Two minutes, both, two minutes, it's maximum. Matt. Okay, sure. Well, I wanted to say that I generally believe that social systems should be as uncoercive as possible. And this is actually one of the reasons why I hardly believe in the ideal of democracy. Because I think that while democracy isn't perfect and invariably will be imperfect, since, as Kant said, out of the cricket timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made, I think it's proven now to be the best system for actually managing social life in a way that allows us the maximal dignity possible, and allows us to have a fundamental say in the laws that govern us. And so I think that's where me and Yaron differ very fundamentally. And I think that democratic decision-making should extend to the kind of regime of property rights that is implemented and coercively imposed upon the rest of us. I don't think that's been the case through the history of capitalism, which I think was often brutally imposed from above, often on colonial people, so not always. And that's one of the reasons why democracy and the Workers' Union played a fundamental role in actually deeply improving the quality of human life for many. So, for instance, Yaron has this very positive vision of capitalism as being at the forefront of progress for human life. And I think there's some truth to that. And I think that somebody like Karl Marx would agree with that, for example. Marx emphatically endorsed the idea that capitalism was improving the means of production. It was creating affluence like never before. And he saw it as a necessary and vital stage in human history. But I also think that the Workers' Movement, for example, played a fundamental role in securing higher qualities of life for many of us. If you think about things like shortening the working week from 60 to 70 hours down to 40, securing things like the holidays, sorry, the weekend, limiting the opportunities for things like exploitative child labor. And I also think that democracy and democratization played a fundamental role in improving human life as well. One of my major theoretical influences is the economist Marcia Sen. And in his famous work on famines, he points out that the reason why famines were eradicated from human life wasn't actually a capitalist production when it came to the food market. It was actually the spread of democracy to developing states, which made governments accountable to their citizens and necessitated that they not, you know, let millions of them starve in the event that markets weren't actually able to provide for those people. So that's just what I'm going to say. I'm happy to take further questions. And if people are interested in liberal socialism, I have an article out today for liberal currents. You can take a look at that. And I'm sure you'll have many more questions that follow, but at least that will be the start of your journey towards what I think is the right point of view. So at the end, Matt, which the end is two minutes from now, I'm going to direct people to where they can find your work. So Yaron, within two minutes, Max, can there be injustice in the free market that you envision? Sure. Again, thanks, Matt, for doing this and appreciate the polite debate. This is a pleasure relative to some others. A Canadian. There you go. That explains everything. Can there be injustices under capitalism? Sure. I mean, injustices are called by human beings, and human beings can be unjust and injustices can happen. There's no injustices that are part of the system. The system is a fundamentally just system, because it is a system based on individual rights. It's a system based on individual freedom. Individuals will then still be free to be unjust. In certain cases, that would be prosecuted by law, if the injustice involves violating somebody else's rights. In some cases, injustices do not get prosecuted because they don't rise to the level of violating somebody else's. Let me just say something about democracy. I'll repeat. In my view, democracy's majority rule, democracy, is fundamentally coercive. Again, this idea of protecting abortion, for example, in Texas, right now, democratically, they're going to vote abortion out. I think that's a travesty, and I think that's a violation of individual rights. We should be able to vote on anything that does not violate other people's rights. We don't have a right to vote to use coercion on other people. I'll just note that things like the East India Company were not exactly capitalism. It was a monopoly granted by a king. So it wasn't exactly a free market where the government doesn't intervene in their involvement. Finally, this has come up before, but I just encourage people to go read about child labour and how it really went away. I think the role labour unions played in the late 19th century, early 20th century improving workers' conditions, they did. I'm not against unions when they serve and when they don't get special protection from the government. Just like I don't believe in cronyism for business, I don't believe in cronyism for labour unions. If they're voluntary and they don't have the course of power of government behind them, unions can certainly serve a positive function. I think by the 1960s, they'd served their function. They were no longer necessary and that's why they kind of disappeared from the United States at least. Okay, gentlemen, it was a pleasure to share this. You were both very, very good. So you probably already know where you can find Yaron on Twitter. You can check the Yaron Brukso with Matt. Check him out on Twitter at mattwtpolprof. And this guy has a lot of publications. So perhaps the easiest way to find them all in one is if you go to his Whitman College page. He has a list with all his publications. Again, some of these are very interesting and we'll be interested even to the objectivist audience, particularly in my opinion, his critiques of current conservatism. So thank you very much to both of you. Many thanks again to our superchatters, to the audience for sticking out for an hour and hope you enjoyed this discussion. Big thank you to the Andron Institute for supporting this series. Thanks so much, everyone. Thanks, Matt. Thank you, Yaron. Bye, everyone. Thanks, guys. Bye.