 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is James Addison, executive director and teaching professor in the School of Business at Wake Forest University and research professor in the Department of Philosophy and in the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona. Your latest book is The End of Socialism. It's a fairly comprehensive refutation of socialism. But we can start with just having you tell us what socialism is. The socialism, you're right, that's probably the place to start is defining the term socialism. That word means different things to different people. That does capitalism. But the way I define it, the traditional definition of socialism is the public ownership of the means of production. But what I argue in the book is that that's not so appropriate anymore in the digital age, the way production has been transferred. When that definition of the public ownership of the means of production, when that definition was used, that's the time when the means of production were basically just two things, land and factories. But now we have production that's being engaged in in so many different ways that were unimaginable in the 19th century when that phrase was used. What I prefer instead is to think about what I call socialist inclined policy and capitalist inclined policy. And the difference really comes down to who's making the decisions. So what I call socialist inclined policy is policy that is motivated to serve certain kinds of moral ends, principally fairness, equality, and community. But the means they use or that are proposed to use to achieve those ends are typically asking some group of centralized experts or authorities to make decisions about how to allocate resources in the service of those ends. So what that enables me to do is to say that on the other end of the spectrum, that's a continuum, of course, you can have more relatively, more relatively fewer decisions made centrally. But then on the other side of it, what we could call capitalist inclined policy is policy that tends to favor, at least at the margins, having decentralized decision making. So letting individuals or private groups make decisions about how to allocate their resources decentralized and privately. So the definition of socialism that I use is that envisions using centralized mechanisms to try to achieve a proper allocation of resources and holdings in the service of its moral ends. So would that make policies like Obamacare, for example, to take, I guess, the biggest state increase in the last five years or so? Would that be socialist or socialist inclined on that scale? Yes, I wouldn't. I'd hesitate to call it socialist and people argue about whether President Obama himself is a socialist or not. And if by that you mean is he a devotee expressly of Marxism or something, that's probably not the case. But Obamacare as a policy, I think, is socialist inclined on that definition, meaning that what it envisions is a much greater expansion, a much greater expansion of the range of decisions regarding healthcare that will be made either directly made or indirectly made by policy or regulatory limitations but effectuated by centralized experts. So on that criterion, yeah, it would be socialist inclined. Are you distinguishing then socialism from corporatism? Oh, that's a good question. And again, corporatism is another word that people have many different definitions about. But if we think of what we mean by corporatism is something like cronyism where you have at least nominally privately owned firms but they are either protected by or are seeking subsidies, regulations, et cetera, through the government to protect their market or protect their industry or to subsidize losses or to pay for losses or subsidize particular lines of research or investigation or whatever, then that would also count at least on my criterion as socialist inclined policy in the sense that it's not allowing decentralized decisions to be made and then people to bear the consequences good or bad of those decisions themselves. Now, in your book, which is very good, it's a very good short, a lot of information there of people that hadn't heard these arguments before so I commend it to our listeners and you make two general arguments against socialism kind of almost split down the middle. One of them is the feasibility argument, the practical argument and one of them is the principled argument. Now, the first question is does it really matter as a moral question whether or not socialism is feasible? I mean we prohibit murder, for example, and we think murder should not be a thing but we probably can't eradicate murder so even if you can't instill socialism, does it really matter to the question of whether or not we should strive for it? Yeah, that's a good question. It's a more deeply philosophical question and I think you can even use other more plausible examples. Many moral ideals are difficult or maybe impossible to instantiate or fully realize in our lives. I mean that's true for everything from Kant's categorical imperative to people who, I don't know if you remember a decade or so or maybe more ago when people were wearing bracelets that said WWJD, do you remember that? What would Jesus do? Yeah, what would Jesus do, yes. What would Jesus do? Okay, well if you're a Christian and you believe that Jesus is God, well then part of your belief is that whatever would Jesus, you're not going to actually be able to do all the things that Jesus was able to do unless you're God yourself. So many moral ideals have built into them the idea that we won't ever fully or perfectly be able to realize them but that doesn't necessarily defeat them as an ideal, so your point's well taken. But the strategy of my book is to say, because many people think, as you know, many people think and claim that well socialism in itself and its moral ideals is morally superior to capitalism but maybe it's difficult to realize and that could be owing to failures that we have or institutional or personal failures. So the first part of my book that addresses the feasibility, the reason for that is to say, well, if we're going to endure some moral ideal and if that ideal is going to involve various kinds of difficulties or challenges or costs in practice, then before we come to the decision that we should endorse the ideal anyway, we have to have a pretty good sense of what those challenges and costs are. And so the first part of the book is to explore what actually are the difficulties, the feasibility difficulties with socialism, where do they come from and what kinds of costs do they issue in. And my argument in the book is that those costs and difficulties are much greater than many proponents of socialism or socialist inclined policy tend to think. They're fairly substantial. And the historical fact that most communities, maybe all communities, maybe not quite all, but most communities that have tried to organize themselves around quasi socialist principles haven't been able to succeed or at least not been able to succeed in the long term. And that's not an accident. It's because the costs really are quite substantial. The challenges are very great. So if we want to say, well, but the moral ideal is worth it anyway, we need to know what the anyway is. And so my argument is that you have to, if you're going to make a recommendation about any system of political economy, capitalism, socialism, corporatism, anything else, you have to know what the challenges and costs really are. And only then are you in a good position to have the argument or have the discussion about whether we should have it anyway. How fatal to the cause of socialism is this question of feasibility? Because even if the costs of, say, getting to the socialist utopia are very high or the difficulty in getting there, the problems that we have to solve are very high, couldn't we still say it's going to be worth it? In the same way that a socialist might say, look, you free market people say that we look at all the wonderful effects of large scale free markets today. But in order to get there, you had to push through, say, the industrial revolution with all of its bad stuff. It was very damaging to a lot of people and a lot of people were not necessarily immediately better off. But you wouldn't say, well, we shouldn't have tried to get to wide scale free markets or capitalism because of the hardships of the industrial revolution. Couldn't we say the same thing about socialism? Yeah, you know, I think that's a good point. And I am willing, I mean, unlike maybe some other people who are critics of socialism, I'm willing to concede that argument to the socialist and say, yeah, let's not let that take that as by itself the definitive refutation of socialism. So let's just, once we have a pretty clear sense of the costs and challenges involved, which are very substantial, but maybe they're worth making in the service of moral ends that we think are the ones we should have as guiding our policies. So I'm willing to concede that argument. I mean, there is still the practical issue that sometimes is glossed over that the industrial revolution had its horrors and nightmares. But it turns out that for a lot of people their lives started getting better fairly quickly. Life expectancies, even in the 19th century, started going up pretty dramatically. And if your life expectancy is going up, that means a lot of good things are happening for you. To live a long life, you have to have a lot of things go well for you, which includes things like nutrition and clean water, maybe health care, education, things like that. So I'm willing to concede, at least for the sake of argument, that sometimes sacrifice is involved or is necessary during the growing pains of trying to adapt to a new set of institutions. So I'm willing to allow that. But that then brings up the central question, which is the second half of my book, which is, well, what are the moral values that we think or that we're proposing all of these sacrifices and costs and difficulties? What are these moral values and do they actually justify it? And on that score, I don't think that the moral values that socialism proposes, which are principally equality, fairness, and community, I think those are moral values. I endorse them, or at least a version of them. But the particular instantiation that you get of those moral values under socialist inclined policy, I think turns out not to be so attractive as you might have thought, especially if you just stuck at the level, you stayed at the level of generality of equality, fairness, and community. So before we get to the moral stuff, let's give a little bit deeper into some of the practical problems that socialists and socialist inclined policies face. So early in the book, you discussed the problem of knowledge and planning. What is that problem? This cluster of problems is not new to me, of course. Hayek talked about this, Mises, many other people had talked about it. But what hasn't been appreciated by a lot of moral philosophers, political philosophers, and political economists is the extent of the problem with knowledge. And what I mean by that is the kinds of things that would actually count as being helpful to a person. So if somebody needs help, what that person needs or requires for help is very difficult to determine and almost impossible to determine from afar. You have to know an awful lot about a person's particular circumstances, the opportunities available to that person, the person's schedule of values and preferences and hierarchy of purpose. All of those things have to be known before we can know whether helping the person or what we think would help the person would actually help a person. And what that means is that centralized authorities, however expert they might be in general, face a very steep challenge in trying to determine what kinds of reallocations or regulatory limitations would actually constitute helping other people. How big of a problem is that? I mean in a lot of cases the kinds of things where people look to the government and say we ought to help these people are things that seem kind of obvious. Like the people don't have enough food to eat or they don't have a home or they don't have enough money to support themselves or they're not educated enough to get a high paying or even decently paying job. And those sorts of things seem not, I mean you don't need to know a lot about the person's value system to say well okay let's give the guy food or let's give the guy money or let's give him a house or let's allow him to get an education. I agree although I'll just note that even at the level of the particular things you're talking about, food, education, housing, that's still at the 30,000 foot level. What we haven't yet determined or talked about is what this particular person needs with respect to housing. And it's not always going to be the same sort of thing or food. I'll give you an example. So suppose the mayor of your city is worried about obesity and decides that well drinking too big of sodas is causing it. It sounds like a really, really extreme hypothetical here. I don't know if this is realistic at all. It's very far-fed. But suppose he decides to ban sodas over 16 ounces. You can't get a soda over 16 ounces. Well now we can concede that obesity is rising in incidents or more and more people becoming obese. I mean that's just a fact. We can concede that it has all sorts of other kinds of health related problems that that can cause. But here's what we can't know. What we can't know is whether any individual person, whether you would be made better off or worse off if there's a ban on sodas over 16 ounces. And the reason we can't know that is because we don't know what the right amount of soda for you is. We don't know how much soda you should have. You shouldn't have what all the other things are that are going on in your life that affect your health in various ways. We can't know that. And that's not even addressing the issues of opportunity cause. I mean if you suppose that in my community people are on average 20 pounds overweight and so we think that the soda ban will address that. Well the most we can show is that the soda ban could conceivably address that. What we can't show is that it would probably address it. So there's a big difference between possibility and probability. And what we end up doing, we know that there would be costs involved. So there would be costs involved to delis. They'd have to retrofit their soda machines or change the way they give soda to customers. Maybe some customers will decide to go to other places. They'll change their mind about where they go. So people will react dynamically to these kinds of changes. We can't know the ways in which they'll react. So what we're doing is we're trading certain costs. We know there will be costs but in the favor of completely uncertain benefits. We don't know whether it will actually benefit even a single person because if it's the case that people in your community are on average 20 pounds overweight, it might be the case that there isn't any single person who's 20 pounds overweight. You could have a lot of people who are underweight and a few who are massively overweight. I mean that's the problem with averages like that. We don't know anything about any of the particular people. So when I say that the problem is a problem of knowledge, what it is is individualized and localized knowledge. We just can't possess that. And that also applies I think to very general programs about food and housing. I mean if you look at the federal government's programs on food and housing, you'd be hard pressed to say, well we're doing some good in there aren't we? It's not clear that we are and part of the reason that we aren't. I mean we don't have to assume bad faith on anybody's part. We're just assuming that the people who are distributing these benefits don't really know whether these things are and will actually and in fact benefit the intended recipients. And that's another great little turn of phrase which I had never thought of this analogy, which you can bring up with the Smith's three points, Adam Smith's three points on this. The herding cats problem, which I thought was a great way of analogizing what it means to try and plan these things. And Adam Smith actually did a pretty good amount of work. It was before Hayek he talked about these problems of local knowledge and what you call the economizer argument and the invisible hand argument. Can you elaborate a little bit more on those? Sure, yeah. A lot of that we today we credit to people like Hayek, but Smith had an awful lot of that right at the beginning. So Smith's general argument in favor of by our standards anyway a pretty limited government, limited to protecting what he called justice, which was just protecting persons. So from theft, sorry, from assault, from killing, from slavery. So protecting your person, protecting your property and also against fraud and then protecting voluntary contracts. So Smith's government was essentially that now he was willing to allow for there to be some potential public works as well. And you quote a great line I had never heard from his like in Smith society, you could be just by something like sitting in a chair and doing nothing or something along those lines. Right, he says we can fulfill the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing. And what he means by that is if you're sitting still and doing nothing, then you're not killing, assaulting or defrauding anybody. And for him it's a thin conception of justice, but that's fulfilling the rules of justice. But yeah, so a lot of the argument, so the more general argument that he gives in favor of that conception of a limited government relies on those arguments you mentioned just a minute ago. The local knowledge argument, which we've been talking about, the economizer argument and the invisible hand argument. The economizer argument is just a sort of claim about human nature. We tend to want to get the most we can out of the energies we invest in anything. So a less charitable way of putting that is that we're lazy, but more charitable ways that we're economizers. We tend not to want to invest any more energy than we have to to achieve whatever our goals are. And if you accept both of those, so the local knowledge argument meaning that our knowledge is limited to the kinds of things we actually ourselves experience and know about. The economizer argument that we tend to want to economize on our energies. And the third part is that invisible hand argument that if you have a set of institutions that allows people to strive to better their own condition, what they'll do is they will find ways to better their own condition that inadvertently or unwittingly or as if by an invisible hand also benefit other people. So it's an ingenious argument, but a lot of it was given a much more sophisticated and technical apparatus by later thinkers, including Hayek. Right around that part of the book, you bring up the luck egalitarian argument, which is interesting. It sort of fits in this entire thing of what you know about people and how much you can plan this stuff out. Can you explain exactly what that is? We actually had Elizabeth Anderson on the podcast a while back, so some of our listeners may be familiar. What the luck egalitarian argument and why you think that's also infeasible from this knowledge and planning standpoint. Yeah, it's another argument that I think has good intentions and sounds good in the abstract. But when you start to translate it into practice, it runs into all sorts of difficulties. So the general claim is that there is an element of luck in everybody's life. So we have good luck and we have bad luck. And some people seem to have some element of the success they achieve in life is due to factors outside of themselves. So they just got lucky. And on the other side, there are people who haven't done as well in life. And at least part of that is due to receiving bad luck. So the lucky egalitarian argument is that, well, even if we are willing to say that people should enjoy the benefits or suffer the consequences of choices they themselves make, what about all the things that affect their lives that they had nothing to do with? And might we not be justified in transferring some of the portion of the success of people who were successful, who achieved success because of things outside of their control? Good luck in transferring some of that success in terms of redistribution of wealth to people whose relatively lower levels of success were due to factors outside of their control as well. And so the argument I make is that it's certainly true. And it's effectively to concede an awful lot of that. It's certainly true that luck plays a role in everybody's life, good and bad luck. There's no life that's been only good luck. There's no life that's been only bad luck, but everybody has had luck. The problem comes in when we see somebody who appears to us to need help. What we don't know is exactly what role luck played in any of that, in any of that particular person's life. So we can say in general, there might be good reasons to support redistributing wealth from relatively lucky, successful people to relatively unlucky, unsuccessful people. But the devil is always in the details. How do we know who actually was lucky and who wasn't? How do we know what proportion of any person's success or failure was due to factors outside of their control? It's very difficult to know that from afar. It's very difficult to know that about people that you know intimately. Even your best friends or your siblings or your family, you may have much more knowledge of their situation, but you don't know and nobody knows exactly what role luck or good or bad played. But don't we know that in one of the biggest factors contributing to different outcomes in terms of wealth or educational attainment or whatever else we would care to measure when we're talking about say inequality, that one of the biggest factors is the accident or luck of birth, right? Like that if you're born into a top income bracket, your chances of staying in that bracket or remaining in that bracket are much higher than if you were born into a lower one, people don't tend to move around a huge amount. And that if there's anything that we can kind of comfortably say is luck and not based on your own merits or your own choices, it's who you were born to and where you were born and how much money they happen to have. So couldn't we at least see redistribution or socialism as justified in trying to correct that amount of money? I mean, isn't that part of what the public school system is about to some extent? Try to equalize, you know, getting them out of the family. Isn't that a good idea? A good idea in idea, yes, or at least arguably, yes, in practice it's much more difficult. And I think the public school system is a great case to look at. Public schools, there are a lot of really horrific public schools. And where do the horrific public schools tend to exist? They exist in exactly the communities that we're trying to help. The good public schools exist in the kinds of communities that we think don't need to help. And so it's not clear that public schools, I mean, I'm speaking very broadly, of course, but it's not clear that we're actually achieving the kind of help that we would like to achieve. But that's not refuting in any way the point about the accident of birth and the luck of getting good parents or being in a good school district or happening to get good genes in one way or another from your parents. All that seems to be pure luck and I think it's unarguable that people can't claim personal responsibility. I can't claim responsibility for who my parents were or what school district I went to. We all have heard stories about people, and these are true stories, about people who rose out of not very pleasant sounding circumstances and did very well. And on the contrary, people who had everything going for them, had all the privileges and advantages you could imagine and then ended up having not very especially successful lives. So what does that show? Well, it just shows that it's very difficult to talk about these things in general. So the abstract view or the abstract impulse that, well, some people need help, I think that's true. And to the degree that the socialist impulse or the socialist instinct is addressing that, then I'm all for it. I'm 100% behind it. But as a political economist, and we can't just rely at the level of abstractions or generalities or aggregate statistics, we have to look at how the kinds of policies we're capable of actually implementing, what effects do they actually have? And philosophers tend not to either want to talk about that or for whatever reason they don't talk about those things, but I think if we're talking about actually implementing a system of political economy or a system of policies that will affect real human lives, live human beings, then we have to ask that question. We have to ask what are the actual effects, not what are the intended or hoped for or aspirational effects of policy, but what are the actual effects? And there we have quite a bit of empirical evidence to look at. And I think on balance it's very difficult to argue that centralized attempts to relieve misery or to heighten people's chances of success. It's very difficult to argue that we've been very good at that despite enormous resources being put to those causes and despite very earnest and well-meaning people at the heads of them. It's just extremely difficult and I think the argument, I mean, the reason for it is because we just don't have the particularized, localized knowledge that we would need to know what any individual person, even what any individual community, really needs. You mentioned that we need to look at the actual world and the actual effects and that reminds me of something that we've discussed in past episodes of this podcast, A Hampler Times, which is the idea of comparing real to real or ideal to ideal and the mistake of often comes up of comparing one ideal version of a theory to the real world version of a competing theory. And so you've told this story so far about that there's these problems of knowledge and that local knowledge is good and leads to better decision making, that the invisible hand will people acting in their own interest or for their own purposes will have these positive externalities for the rest of us. But we also know, I mean, behavioral economics has become kind of popular lately and things that it appears to have shown us is that people are in their everyday decisions and their economic decisions often rather irrational. People make bad choices all the time. The market can lead to odd or suboptimal outcomes and so even, you know, capitalism free markets aren't perfect even with these stories of how they might work better. I mean, even with the problems of socialism, at least in that case, we might have really smart people, the people who lucked out in terms of the education that they were able to have making decisions that might even with all these other problems still be better than the ones that some people make for themselves. They might be. I mean, that's certainly true. But even in cases like those, I mean, I still think that our tendency is to underestimate just how complex and difficult, how complex human beings are and how difficult it is to affect or change human behavior, especially across a country of about 330 million people in the directions we want. So let me give you an example from Development Economics. So the UN Millennium Project, which is this idea that we're going to solve poverty in developing countries if we have enough resources and if we have the right comprehensive plan to deploy those resources in the right way. Well, it has 449 different iterations. So there are 449 different variables that their plan recognizes. Now, if you start thinking about that, well, what's the probability that each of the... So for the whole plan to work, all of those variables have to go in the right direction. And by the way, 449 is already as big a number as that sounds. That's actually a small... That underestimates the total because each of those has various components and subcomponents as well. Can you give an example of what those variables might look like? Yeah, so the variables are things like potable water in Kenya and reading materials in Ghana, in a particular part of Ghana. So you have 449 of those, things like that. And these are the things they believe are needed to help raise the Millennium communities out of poverty, correct? Right. That we'll get them over the hump as it were so that they're no longer developing but what we call developing economies but are becoming developed. But if you just stay at the level of math for a second, probabilities are a funny thing. If you flip a coin twice, and the coin is 50% either heads or tails, well, the chance that you'll get heads twice, you have to multiply those two probabilities. So it comes out to 25% chance that you'll get heads twice. But if you multiply probabilities, that means if you take 449 iterations, that means that the chance that the entire thing will work is the sum of the multiplied probabilities of each of those iterations. And that's assuming that you were correctly identifying the 449 things. You weren't giving some out, yes. So not 450, not 448, you got the right number and you got the right kind. But even conceding all of that, and I'll even make the case stronger, suppose you have a 99% chance that every single one of those 449 will turn out to exactly the way you hope or want it to turn out. The probability then with 99% chance multiplied 449 times, the probability that the whole plan will work out is only 1%. Just 1%. So the vast amount of knowledge and uncertainty and probability that has to somehow be achieved in order to have a plan for a society that will get even what seem like very good, and they are, good goals of housing, education, etc. It's just orders of magnitude beyond what human beings can actually comprehend. Now, another great little term you come up with, because a lot of these, when you bring up concepts that I've been familiar with in other contexts, you have really good names for them. So you have another one called the day two problem, which I'd like if you could explain exactly what that is. Yeah, the day two problem is just that if we're able to effectuate a distribution of our resources and allocation of holdings in the way that we want to. So putting aside for a second whatever challenges or difficulties there were that led up to that. But if we're finally able to get a distribution of resources that looks like the one we want. We'll give you a magic button. You can just push it and make it. Yeah, we'll wave the magic wand and everything today is exactly the way we think it should be. Whatever way that is, if it's exactly equal or whatever distribution it is, we have it today. The problem is that immediately, and by day two as I put it, things start changing. And the reason for that goes back to what you mentioned a minute ago, which is the herding cats problem. Human beings begin behaving in ways that you can't predict. They start trading, exchanging, innovating. Their preferences change. Their preferences change dynamically based on what other people's changes are and other people's preferences. So immediately you have a new distribution signature of resources and wealth and whatever it was that we were distributing the first time around. Which means we're faced with another problem. So on day two as it were, we have to decide, well, are we going to let things just continue on in the way that they would with letting people continue to make decentralized, localized decisions about how to spend their time, talent and treasure? Or do we need to have another redistribution? And what you typically see is that people say, no, no, we have to do it all over again. And this is now faced with two more difficulties. One, you're going to have to start restricting people's behaviors in lots of ways, including in many cases in ways that we think would conflict with people's individual rights, their rights to their property, their rights to liberty, et cetera. But there's also a resources cost. And that is that you're now dedicating, you're now getting a large and increasing number of people whose job it is to get information about what the new distribution looks like. They're gathering, there's a mechanism for taking resources from one place and then another mechanism to distribute it to another. You're monitoring people's behavior. And this itself causes an enormous amount of cost. It's usually seen as opportunity cost. So these people could have been engaging in other productive activity. They're not doing that now. And you also have the problem that we shouldn't discount, which is that at the margins, people's incentive to continue producing things and changing, exchanging, cooperating as they would like, their incentive to do so decreases ever so slightly. So at each iteration, so the day two problem means you're faced with again having to make yet another distribution. And there's a good chance that either you'll have less to redistribute the second time or at least that the rate of growth won't be as high as it otherwise would have been. And you mean less to distribute because of the combination of A, administrative overhead and leakage and B, the diminished productive capacity because the incentives have changed? Right, exactly. Exactly. And so each iteration you have, so the day two problem, I mean that phrase is a metaphor. It doesn't have to be a day. It could be a week or a month or a year. But even if you extend out the time, the longer time you have between these iterations, the more difficult it becomes because the actual signature of resources and innovation, cooperation and society changes dynamically and continuously. So it's going to get further and further away from whatever your plan was on day one. So the longer you wait, the more difficulties you'll have and if you're going to try to reset things again a second time to where you would like them to be, the costs involved are just that much greater. The day two problem is that you can't, is that even if you assume that everything was exactly the way it should be, say morally ought to be on day one, you're faced with exactly the same problem again on day two and then on day three, et cetera. And that problem will never go away. Well, the problem is that our, basically our tastes and interests as human beings and the way we behave, our propensity to truck and barter leads to upsetting patterned distributions. Then, I mean, you've given us reasons why trying to fix the day two problem on day three, four and five isn't going to work very well or is going to have consequences we don't like, but couldn't the alternative be to address the day two problem on say day minus one or day minus two? I'm thinking of, you know, like the notion of what we need as a socialist man or in Plato's Republic his elaborate system for educating the rulers and making sure that they have precisely the right kinds of interests and the right behaviors to sustain the state that maybe we don't need to deal with those problems if we can, you know, have an educational system that makes it so that people aren't constantly wanting the new thing, you know, don't want to upgrade their iPhone every year but are content with the one that they've got and then we won't have to worry about upsetting patterns. Yeah, good luck with that. I mean, imagine what you would have to do, you know, so you mentioned Plato's Republic, so you're right. So Plato has a very elaborate system of education that he envisions for the people who will eventually become the philosopher kings but there's a very substantial trade-off that's involved, not just with liberty but also with prosperity. So all of the people in Plato's Republic with not even accepting the philosopher kings themselves who also have to be forced to assume their role on his view, every one of them is assigned a place in society notwithstanding whatever it is they themselves would like to do. So the philosopher king determines what the ideal role for every single person and every single class of people in society is in the service of the overall good society that the philosopher king is imagining. So you have a very substantial limitation of liberty. So effectively no one has the liberty to order their own lives the way they would like and I think that's very deeply inconsistent with any kind of liberal conception of government, certainly the classical liberal conception of government that I endorse. But there's also the very substantial cost with productivity. You're not going to be getting cooperative innovation and that's a cost that you have to take, you have to think long and hard about whether that's a trade-off you're worth making. I mean, is it really the case that people don't want the next iPhone, that they don't, and not just iPhones, but do they really not want the next kind of pharmaceutical drug or medical procedure? Do they not want to have whatever the innovations would be that would allow people to do research into Alzheimer's or breast cancer, et cetera? I mean, what you're doing if on the date minus one, as you said, on the date minus two, what you're doing is effectively locking the society in at that stage and not allowing it to evolve or change or progress past that. So that's certainly not a society that I would want to live in and I think most people wouldn't. The way to think about it is, well, suppose people had decided to do this in, let's say, 1950. Well, would you still want to live and give up all the things that we've been able to creatively and creatively and destructively generate in a market economy since 1950? That would include things like the internet. How many people would be willing to give up things like the internet? But I wouldn't know it was going to exist, so I wouldn't be missing anything. So we could just lock us all into 1950. I mean, didn't England and their socialist planning in the 50s? Yeah, exactly, Cuba. And we all drive cool cars. Cool cars. Yeah, go try living in Cuba. It's not a Netsoul. It's okay. I mean, it's just a thing. I'm being flippant about it, but I think it's easy for us now. So we live now. We in America today. You and I talking on this or anybody who's listening to this podcast, we have to remember that we have at our fingertips resources that previous generations couldn't have imagined. So by any historical standard, we are fabulously wealthy. So even those of us who think, well, I'm not in the 99th, I'm not in the 1%, I'm in the 2% or the 5%, historically speaking, we are all in the 99.99th percentile of human history. So it's easy for us to say, well, sure, wouldn't it be fine to give up a little bit here at the margins or there at the margins? But the people who really get, who feel the bite of that, and because we're as wealthy as we are, we perhaps can absorb some of those costs. The people who really feel the bite of that are the people who are lower down on the economic spectrum. They're the ones who really suffer from not having the opportunity to raise themselves up or to create more prosperity in their lives. They're the ones who really suffer from it. And I think one of the chief central and indeed moral goals of political economy is not so that we can flatter the moral sensibilities of those of us who are lucky enough to be at the very highest in human history of human wealth and prosperity. But rather we got to focus on what are the effects that that's going to have on the rest of the people, including the bottom billion who are alive today. What effects are those kinds of policies going to have on them? And if we want to have any kind of chance of enabling them to ascend out of poverty, ascend out of all the miseries of poverty, the centralizing the effects, the negative unintended consequences of attempting to centralize economies are going to redound especially hard on them. And that's actually a good segue into the second part of your book where you say if this wasn't bad enough in terms of instantiating socialism and the intractable problems that it presents to anyone trying to do that, it's also immoral. It also has extreme moral failings. And one of the first things you take up in that part of the book is redressing the argument that economics itself is immoral, that economics is the dismal science, or as I think you mentioned Robert Skidelsky, who's written all this book about how much is enough, I think is the name of that book or something like that. It's like you're earning too much money, but you actually think about growth and what we're gaining by having this economic wealth. It's very important. And I think one of the mistakes, thanks for bringing that up, one of the mistakes that I think anyway, a lot of people make, yes, they view economic reasoning as this sort of cold and lifeless, inhuman calculation of efficiency. But what I think we have to remember is that all of the capital that exists in the world that is able to be redistributed or allocated in any way whatsoever, 100% of that capital is the result of labor of actual human beings. So it's created by human beings. So now how are they creating it? Well, they're creating it on the basis of their own schedules of value and the things that matter to them. So economic calculation, we think, well, efficiency doesn't seem to quite rise, it doesn't meet moral muster, it doesn't rise to the level of concern that a philosopher should give it any attention. But I think that's a mistake because all of that reasoning, all of the capital that we're talking about was created by human beings. So when we undertake to reallocate it or to change it, what we're really doing is undertaking to reallocate or change human beings. And there, I think, you're right square in the middle of a moral conversation. Interesting, and that's a big part of the second half of the book is valuing individuals, qua individuals, which it's quite clear that I think is one of the most morally important things about capitalism over socialism. Yeah, I mean, one of the great moral successes of the second millennium and then coming into the 19th, 20th, and 21st century is the idea that human beings are unique. And because they are every single one of them, not just this class or that class, but even within, we talk about socioeconomic classes. But every single member of those classes is a unique center of human moral agency. And because of that, I argue anyway, is special and deserves dignity. It has dignity and deserves our respect as being a dignified moral agent. That's a great moral leap forward, if you'll allow me a phrase like that. It's a great leap forward to see people not as groups, so not as this race or that race or this ethnicity or that ethnicity or this religion or that religion, but instead seeing them as valuable, precious individuals. And one of the problems, I mean, I think this connects with the question of equality. So one of the main moral values that socialism endorses is equality. But it's a different kind of equality from the one that say Adam Smith endorsed. So Adam Smith also endorsed a kind of equality. But the equality he was interested in was the equality of moral agency. It was the idea that no single person should mandate to another person how he should live his life. His life was yours. You are a full, complete moral agent and as such you are rightfully the captain of your own journey. And it's not the... And if we assume, if I assume that I can mandate or command you to behave or exchange or labor in the way that I want as opposed to the way you want, then what I'm doing is assuming a moral superiority over you. I'm assuming that the scope of your moral agency is narrower than mine. And that I think is an extremely problematic conception of inequality. So the moral equality that I argue matters is the one that sees human beings as equally precious and equally entitled to be the authors of their own lives. I can see that socialists though listening to what you've just said and saying, well, yeah. And that's why I'm a socialist in the market systems that you prefer what ends up happening as people get seen as just a source of labor. Their inputs into this economic model, their cogs in the machine, they're at the mercy of the bosses, the corporate owners who direct their lives, tell them what they can do when they have to show up for work, what sorts of medical procedures they're allowed to get, whereas at least in the government in a free market system is responsive to that. Its number one job is to look out for property, for profits, for money, and make sure that people get to keep that stuff, whereas the socialist government says absolutely every person is special, absolutely every person is autonomous, and so what we're going to do is put the government entirely at the mercy of the needs of the people. We're going to task it by making sure not that property is protected as the corporations have what they need, but that every person has the food and shelter and resources to live that kind of autonomous life to have those choices not just in theory but in practice in a positive right standpoint in addition to a negative right standpoint. Well, that may be what they say but let's look at what they do. One of the things about the kind of Adam Smithian economy is that every single person has the right and authority to say no thank you and go elsewhere. So if I don't like the deal you're offering I can say no thank you and go elsewhere. If I don't like the price, if I don't like the contract you're offering me to work there I can quit, I can leave, I can go somewhere else. Now that doesn't mean I'm going to get everything I want, that's certainly not the case, but no system of political economy can ever guarantee everybody to get whatever they want. That's not possible in a community of human beings who are imperfect and have all the various biases and prejudices and limitations on knowledge etc that we have. So what we have to do is compare actually possible alternatives and what you've seen and when we do that then I think the contrast becomes much sharper because in those communities in which you try to adopt what I call the socialist inclined set of policies you often do not get the option to say no thank you. You will get what you're assigned or allotted and you'll be happy with it. Whereas under the market economy that I'm talking about you might not get everything you want but nothing that you do is anything that you didn't yourself consent to. You have to say yes I'm going to do that and if you don't want to do it you don't and that's a really important aspect of moral agency that I think does I mean whatever the intentions are behind socialist inclined policy if I can't say no thanks so just think about we've mentioned Obamacare before it is an enormous list of restrictions on what people can do you don't get to get certain kinds of insurance policies insurance companies don't get to offer certain kinds of insurance policies you don't get to do certain kinds of services except under pre-approved circumstances etc and then the list goes on and on now that's not to say that maybe with some of those outcomes be good with some of those outcomes be bad sure and it's hard to know in advance exactly what the balance will be between good and bad but what you can know just from the moral standpoint what you can know is that you're dramatically reducing narrowing the scope of individual human beings agency but isn't the case that the guy who goes to goes to work at McDonald's or work on the factory floor isn't it just kind of a farce to say that this guy has a voluntary choice that he's actually he can say no thanks and that's what makes capitalism respect him because they give him the illusion of being able to say no thanks well I mean what are we comparing this to are we comparing it to so what is the system of economy that we can imagine that actually would work that we've actually seen where that person would have more freedom than he does now if you say if he had more wealth could he have more opportunities that's certainly true but that just brings us back to the question of how do we generate wealth or how do we generate prosperity on the other hand if that's not what we're talking about if we're talking about say restrictive or coercive employment practices you know are there such things of course there are have there been such yes but what you see in market based economies is a fairly steady and regular progression away from contracts like that so we don't have very many people in America for example who are trying to raise thank goodness who are trying to raise a family or lead their entire lives only working at McDonald's if you spend time if you start at McDonald's at the minimum wage or I guess now they're thinking about raising to the minimum wage for some people whatever the wages you start there in six months you're making a little bit more and in a year you're making even more and so the range of opportunities that are available to you and continue to increase but you know let's think about the person at McDonald's the person at McDonald's if he doesn't like what's going on there thankfully there isn't just McDonald's in the world in America there are hundreds of thousands of businesses indeed millions of businesses that where a person can take is where somewhere else so I think I mean this is not to solve all problems so it's certainly the case for any individual I mean I even I'm a cushy professor and being a professor is the easiest job in the world we like to complain about but even in a job like this I often feel like people are I'm being forced to do things that I don't want to have to do I have to there are aspects of my job that I don't enjoy but at the margins I can always say I can and so retain the right always to say no thanks and go elsewhere now maybe the other options are not ones I would like in an ideal world but having options never makes a person worse off and having options makes a person look better off and that's a in terms of respect there one of the lines you have respect for the individual in those situations which I think has been a huge part of the debate in the social the socialist thought since the time of Marx was sort of taking individuals and thinking of them especially on the lower part of society as lesser quality people in a weird way not being able to make the same kind of choices that upper quality people can make and trying to rectify that through top down government policies which is kind of paternalistic you write the institutions of capitalism do not second guess the decisions you make and they do not presume to know better than you what the right decisions are for you and what decisions you would have made had circumstances around you been different which I think is a very important point yeah and I think there is an element and we can assume again I want to assume good faith on the part of everybody who's joining this debate we assume that the intentions are good some people have less in the world than other people and some people have so much less that they're in difficult circumstances so the question is not whether that's good or bad it's what kinds of institutions will actually benefit those people and this is part of the knowledge problem we talked about before it's very difficult to know but what you can get in a market economy is the freedom to tailor your life under the circumstances and constraints that you find yourself in you can tailor your life to your own lights to your own so that you choose the metaphor I used before you become the captain of your own journey I think one of the mistakes we often make is to think that there's this sort of metaphor that life is a race and some people are better equipped for the race when they start I sometimes say to my students well I think suppose that the grade you get at the end of class is going to be determined by a race we're going to run right now we're all going to go out and run a mile and you have to go right now dressed exactly as you are with whatever preparation or lack of preparation you have we're going to go race and that's going to determine the grades in the class well everybody would complain about that I mean they do especially if I'm able to get them to think that I'm actually considering that they nearly revolt but I think that's exactly the wrong metaphor to use when thinking about life life is not a race and your life is a journey and it's a journey of exploration and discovery to find out what really is the kind of life that as Aristotle said will lead to eudaimonia or true human flourishing and happiness that is not going to be the kind of life for every person in fact I would say that it's going to be uniquely uniquely indexed to each individual person so if we start thinking about life like that then the policy implication is that we should stop considering that we have to have policies regulations, redistribution etc that will give things to people instead what it will do is allow people to create the kind of life that they would think is worth living so it's about creating opportunities for people rather than treating them as patients in a hospital that we have to keep healthy or something isn't in our present political climate our present debate socialism as something people are actually striving for an actual political ideal that we're aiming at kind of off the table I mean you don't hear a lot of people going around today shouting workers of the world unite markets seem to have won out in most people's minds so why write a book against socialism now it's a good question you don't hear many people saying workers of the world unite you're right on the other hand you do still hear that I mean you remember the occupy movement in New York it wasn't that long ago that the occupy movement took place you remember that and there were people who were saying things like that but fair enough I think very few people today call themselves or consider themselves socialists and by the same very few people will call themselves capitalists either because that term has all sorts of negative connotations as well so those two terms as terms I think you're right maybe the time has passed for the terms although moral philosophers still use those terms but I think what is still relevant today is the continuum between on the one hand wanting more and more of the economic decisions in a community in a country to be made centrally as opposed to de-centrally and that brings us back right to where we started in our discussion I think the key practical difference between what I call socialist incline policy and capitalist incline policy it is this question of who's making the decisions are we allowing individuals to make them for themselves in their own cases or are we marginally and maybe progressively limiting the decisions people can make on the basis of centralized judgments about value or about the kinds of behaviors people ought to engage in and that is a very live debate and I think that actually in some ways captures very much of the current political day do we see these individuals as being capable and competent of leading their own lives if they're allowed the opportunity and the responsibility to do so or do we think that we need to help them along and maybe progressively help them in more and more ways and I think that in some ways is the crux of the current political economic debate and that's what my book is attempting to address Thank you for listening if you have any questions you can find us on twitter at Free Thoughts Pod that's Free Thoughts P.O.D Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks to learn more find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org