 Hey everybody, tonight we're debating whether or not socialism can innovate and we're starting right now. Ladies and gentlemen, thrilled to have you here for another epic debate. Want to let you know it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate, we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion and politics. We want to let you know, no matter what walk of life you are from, no matter what way of thinking or what you share here or debate here at Modern Day Debate, we hope you feel welcome. And with that, what we're going to do is, want to give you a couple of housekeeping type things for the channel first, if it is your first time here and you have not subscribed, well consider hitting that subscribe button as we are thrilled for many upcoming juicy debates in the future, including Matt DeLahunty will be back to debate whether or not Jesus fulfilled prophecy, so that should be a blast that's coming up this month with Samuel Nassan and you don't want to miss it. So very excited folks, what we're going to do is introduce our guests, we're thrilled to have them, we're really thankful they're here, this is going to be a lot of fun. Want to let you know folks, their links are in the top of the description. So if you're listening, you're like, I like that. And you want to hear more, you can hear more by clicking on those links in the description box. In fact, what we're going to do is for our speakers, we're thrilled to have them here, we're going to give them a chance to share. We want to hear what you basically what we could expect to find at your links, gentlemen. So we'll start with Ben, glad to have you back, Ben, what can people expect to find at your link in the description? Yeah, so they can, they can find the YouTube channel and podcasts that I host, give them an argument. And if you've got the benburgers.com there, you can also find the Jacobin articles and a bunch of other stuff. You got it. Thanks so much. We'll be back as well. What can people expect to find at your link? Sure. So my name is Brenton Lengel. I am a playwright, political commentator, and the author of Snow White Zombie Apocalypse, the comic series, Ringo nominated. At my link, you're going to find my channel where we talk about arts, philosophy, radical politics, and Buddhism. And also for those of you who are interested in the comic series of Snow White Zombie, we are just about to go into final Kickstarter fulfillment for issue number three. So if you want to jump on there, there's a link for hosted pre-orders you can find on my website, BrentonLengel.com, and also check my YouTube channel. And you can grab one of the issues before they go to print. So that's really exciting. Absolutely. Well, thank you very much, Brenton. And with that, we'll kick it over to the team that is arguing that socialism cannot innovate. So we'll start with Keith. Glad to have you. Keith, what can people expect to find at your link? There's a website that I'm the chief editor of called AttackTheSystem.com. And it's a general news and commentary site that presents ideas from what might be called a heterodox anarchist perspective. And I'm also the co-host of a podcast called Kick the Buffy. You got it. We're thrilled to have you here, Keith. And Todd, glad to have you with us. What can people expect to find at your link? You can find me at the, I'm searching on the YouTube search engine, Praise the Folly podcast. And you can expect to hear talks about religion, history, politics, philosophy, and economics. You got it. Well, thank you very much, gentlemen. And what we're going to do for today's format, just want to let you know, folks, it's going to be interweaved in terms of the opening statements. And so we'll start with Ben. And then we will kick it over to the opposite team. Where Todd will have roughly seven minutes as well. And then we'll go to Brenton for about seven minutes as well. And then finally, Keith for about seven minutes. So we will jump into that shortly, but want to let you know, following those openings, we'll have open conversation and then Q&A. So if you happen to have a question, feel free to tag me in the live chat with at modern day debate. That way I can be sure to see your question and get it into that Q&A list for that Q&A part. It'll be about 30 minutes or so. And with that, we are ready to start the opening statement. So Ben, the floor is all yours. We've got the timer set for you. Thanks for being here. All right. Thank you, James. So if you can ask whether socialism can innovate, the obvious first question is what do you mean by socialism? So I think broadly speaking, what we mean by socialism is no longer having society being divided into a class of people who own businesses, a capitalist class, and a class of people who work for the first class, the working class, that instead of that, there's some important sense in which the means of production, distribution, exchange, finance, all that good stuff are the economic resources the society are socially owned. So if the claim that the other side wants to make is there are some versions of socialism, or there are some things that having that be socially owned mean that might be bad for technological innovation, then yeah, sure, I have no problem with that. Of course, there are some ways that capitalism could work that would be bad for technological innovation. Arguably, for example, if you did what a lot of anarcho-capitalists want and abolished all intellectual property protections, then the incentives that companies have for certain kinds of innovations to increase market share might go away. Would things work out that way? I don't know. It's speculative. And now you see the problem. So let's talk about what we mean when we talk about socialism. And the first thing to make clear is that certainly what I mean when I talk about socialism is not primarily the sort of experiments and authoritarian state planning that existed in the in the 20th century in places like the Soviet Union and Mao's China. If you want to talk about the actual technological record of those societies, it's a mixed bag. Soviet Union did beat us to space. But I'm not primarily interested in exploring the question of whether innovation, to what extent it was happening in those societies. Because whereas it's a fascinating question for historians of those societies, that's not the model that I advocate. So on the other end of the spectrum, you could talk about the optimistic projection, most optimistic possible projection of how socialism could work. What the kids call fully automated luxury communism, where the idea there is that as if as even many libertarian futurists believe technological progress is eventually going to get us to the point where most of the work that's currently done by humans can be done by machines. Well, if you think that prediction is right, and of course, there's lots of room for debate about that. But if those machines are still privately owned, the results could be a disaster for most of the human race. The best we could hope for is like Yang Bucks as a 21st century equivalent of an ancient Roman bread ration. But if the machines are collectively owned, then we could all make a collective democratic decision to just work fewer hours with no loss in standard of living. And maybe the idea is this is an idea that goes back to like Karl Marx and his fragment on machines from Gundrisa, that at the end point of that process, so little work still has to be done by humans that you don't need to link work to income in order for it to be done. Some people will choose to spend their free time playing video games and spending time with their family. Some people will write really bad poetry and some people will pursue their passion for computer engineering. And that will be enough to get what work still needs to be done by humans done just as a hobbyist passion. Now, that's extremely optimistic. Will that actually happen? I have no idea. I think it's a useful horizon either if we never completely get there. Would technological progress grind to a halt once we got there? If we did, I doubt it because you have so many people who are potential technological innovators who currently have to spend their lives in working in fields or in Jeff Bezos' sweatshops who would be freed up to make their contributions to society. But I will freely acknowledge that it's hard to make predictions with any great degree of certainty about how a society so unlike our own would work if it came into existence. And I think it's a little bit more interesting to try to do something grounded, which is instead of just speculating about what a really advanced form of socialism might look like to think about the kind of socialism we could have right now, five minutes after capitalism. So don't make any assumption about a bunch of technological progress having to happen first or any sort of cultural progress having to happen first, just only assume massive, massive political progress. That's it. Assume a political tectonic shift that would allow for the complete expropriation of the current owners of the means of production, but don't assume anything else. What could that look like? Well, the sort of model that I've talked about, I have an article in Jack a bit about this called capitalism isn't working, so what would effective socialism look like or something like that? Working on a book about this. You could read Bhaskar Sankara's Socialist Manifesto, the first chapter where it gets into this. But basically, if you want to know how you can have a functioning society without a capitalist class, without this separate class of people owning but not working in the means of production, then you could just take elements that already exist in real life. So we already have plenty of successful examples of advanced Western democracies nationalizing certain industries and running them as public utilities in a completely decommodified way. Think, for example, the NHS in Britain, which is so wildly successful that even conservatives have to pretend to support it or they never win another election again. And we already have successful private sector worker cooperatives. So most strikingly, for example, the Mondragon Corporation in Spain. And so if you had a society where you no longer had a capitalist class, you no longer had a separate class of people owning but not working in the farms, the factories, the offices, the stores, et cetera, because that had been gobbled up on the one hand by an expanded state sector for what are sometimes called the commanding heights of the economy for things we really want to be decommodified completely. In other words, we don't want to be treated as commodities to be bought and sold, such as healthcare. And on the other hand, if you did still need to have a private sector to solve any sort of calculation problems, it could at least be a private sector or quasi private sector if it was renting the physical means of production for the state of competing internally democratic worker cooperatives. So finally, the question is, would such a society be able to innovate? Well, here's the problem. If you want to say no, we'd have two sectors here, a cooperative sector and a state sector. And both of those in the real world do innovate like crazy. So the Mondragon Corporation has, you know, does lots of technological development. In fact, companies like Microsoft and General Motors have partnered with them because they're so good at it. And the state sector does tons of innovation. Look at how much technological development happened, how quickly, you know, during World War II. You know, we basically got atomic weapons and radar, you know, over the course of just a few years. The fact that we're doing this right now on the internet, which was an invention of the state sector, you know, from DARPAnet, the fact that all of our phones, we have GPS, you know, which is again, was originally developed, you know, by the state sector, strongly indicates that yes, yes it can. So if by innovation, we mean technological innovation, technological progress, then yeah, the record's pretty clear. You know, if we have a broader, somewhat looser definition of innovation that's about like just entrepreneurial creativity, then if you want to argue that the society being described could not have that, then I want you to explain what about market incentives is different in a market sector of worker cooperatives or market sector of regular capitalist businesses and good luck to you. Thank you very much. Ben, for that opening statement, we will kick it over to Todd. So kicking it over to the opposite team now for about seven minutes, roughly as well. And so Todd, the floor is all yours. All right. The labor theory of value essential to the economic analysis of socialism, especially with regards to the theory of exploitation, but does the LTV provide a solid basis for a comprehensive analysis of political economy? The main problem I see is that it cannot adequately account for intellectual products such as art and technological innovation. A central component of the LTV is socially necessary labor time, which can be defined as the amount of labor time informed by a worker of average skill and productivity, working with tools of the average productive potential to produce a given commodity. This is an average unit labor cost measured in working hours. Whatever can be said for the SNLT with regards to mass produced goods, it becomes very difficult to envision how the SNLT could account for singular works, such as technological innovation and artistic creativity or broadly speaking, intellectual works. Such a work is a breakthrough and breakthroughs by their nature do not have average cost of production. As such, this means intellectual products are outside of the valuation process of the LTV. If one cannot calculate the value of intellectual goods via the SNLT, then how in a socialist economy is such a good to be appraised? It would seem that any such appraisal would have to come from some other method of analysis, but therein lies the problem. Socialist claims that the LTV to be an exhaustive explanation of the political economy, which it is in fact not under the principle that that which is not valued or not properly valued will not be produced. I predict that under a social system which is governed by the LTV such technological goods, it's such intellectual goods as technological innovation and artistic creations will either go under produced or not produced at all. It would see here produced in all as the means of production is not an intellectual good. Sorry. If socialism is to be understood, the socialist claims the LTV to be an exhaustive explanation of the political economy, which in fact is not under the principle that which is not valued or not properly valued should not be produced. I predict that under a social system which is governed by the LTV such intellectual goods as technological innovation, artistic creation will go under produced and not produced at all. This critique is also applicable in a broader sense. If socialism is to be understood as the democratization, then we have the problem of diseconomies of scale. In a diseconomy of scale, for instance, each increase in production, there is an increased unit cost. For our purposes and opportunity cost. Let's say you want to tell a story in two hours, all well and good, but what if two, three or four in the same amount of time? You will have less time to devote to each story making them all weaker than just one, two-hour story. This leads to a scope problem. In a traditional society, you really will have one interest to consider in the context of creating art. Tiny aristocratic elite that more or less shares the same values across time and between nations think ancient Greece and medieval Europe. This allows for the specialization and focus. You only have to keep a small cohesive group satisfied which allows for clear norms of method and message. If you have a democratic art scene, then you have two problems, the problem of genres and the problem of ideologies. In order to cast the widest possible net, you will have to include as many genres and ideologies as possible to get as many people as possible to take notice of your work. The problem being is that genres and ideologies are contradictory. Imagine a brooding psychological action film mashup or a thriller romantic comedy, it just won't work. If you leave out people's ideologies and they complain, why have you left me out? This wide casting of the net prevents people from having a prescribed method, form and message, reducing the content to an incoherent mess with no message or structure. Thus we see that the mission creep of democratic taste leads to a diseconomy of scale in the arts. Which will internally to an under production at best of quality art. If by democratizing the workplace to enfranchise those who own the means of production, what about those sectors of the economy where the producer need not only means of production? For example, a theoretical mathematician, his job is discover mathematical breakthroughs, but that job does not require ownership of capital. Since there is no SNLT account of a breakthrough, how could a theoretical mathematician and principal even be properly valued? If he cannot be compensated by some LTV calculation, how is he be compensated? Will he be compensated at all? What if he is compensated at a higher rate than workers or at a lower rate than workers? Who decides? This is not clear. History bears out what these theoretical predictions describe. We see historically in three test cases of the USA versus USSR, West Germany versus East Germany, North Korea versus South Korea, the socialist economies generally severely lagged behind the capitalist competitors. For example, during the Cold War, nearly all cases, the USSR was one or two steps behind the US military and armaments innovation and two or three steps behind the consumer goods innovation. We can also see that in arguably proto-socialist society, Sparta, innovation was stifled and it was capitalist Athens that gave birth to the Western mind. Why is it that reactionaries are Russia and its twilight had a galaxy of musicians, novelists, and philosophers, such as Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, and the USSR and its twilight had nothing to compare with them. Shakespeare was produced in a budding capitalist society, Tolstoy and a decaying feudal society. I would offer that since these societies were not so narrowly circumscribed by the LTV, they could indeed give appropriate value to these theories, the one with the greater to these artistic work. Under the assumption that a theory must have explanatory power and between any two theories, the one with the greater explanatory power has to be referred, I argue the theoretical critique I offer of the LTV provides the greater explanatory power of these historical patterns and is on these grounds to be preferred. If the socialist would concede the point and say that the LTV does not explain intellectual works, then he must abandon his claim that the LTV has competence to explain all relevant facets of the political economy and the intellectuals can be exploited in any meaningful sense. Or he must use external theory to bootstrap the problem. This creates another issue, is socialism enough? If the core economic assumption of socialism is not enough, then the socialist must appear to something outside of socialism to fix it. How is that then different than the neoliberals bootstrapping the problem of income and equality by post hoc taxation and redistribution? I would argue not at all. Socialists seem to have a dilemma. He must either accept the limitations of the LTV and abandon the idea that intellectuals can be exploited for their work or the socialist must submit the LTV is not enough and fall into the neoliberal trap of post hoc bootstrapping. That's it. You got it. Thank you very much, Todd, for that opening statement. And we will kick it over to Brenton for his as well. The floor is all yours, Brenton. Thank you. So the topic tonight is can socialism innovate? Which is just about the easiest slam dunk of a topic I can imagine. Because socialism is an economic and political system created by humans. And humans not only can innovate, but I would put forth the proposal that not innovating is actually harder for people than simply going with the flow and not coming up with the next new thing. For proof, you only have to look at human history and consider the wonders of arts, creativity, mechanics, science and culture that had been produced by every group of humans performing every type of labor under the sun. I mean, the ancient Romans quite nearly invented the steam engine. In 50 CE, a mere 50 years after the birth of Christ, the aptly named hero of Alexandria designed and built a machine that functioned as a rotary engine. He used it to open doors and pump water and even had plans sketched out for another contraption that used a design almost identical to modern steam turbine blades. He only had to put two and two together and the ancient Romans could have been cruising around the Aegean in literal steamships. And that's just the Romans. Vikings and Polynesian sailors were crossing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans respectively and discovering the very continent that we now find ourselves on 500 and 800 years before Europeans ever made the journey. The Chinese invented gunpowder in the year 900 and nearly a full 2000 years ago, the Sub-Saharan Africans were smelting metal tools and weapons and furnaces that were 752 degrees hotter than those produced by contemporary Romans. They had also already invented a rudimentary form of aspirin. The point is, if we are to appeal to something as spurious as human nature and anyone who's ever read Emma Goldman knows that human nature is an extremely spurious thing to appeal to, it would seem that within human nature lies a propensity for creativity and innovation that crosses physical, cultural and chronological borders with astounding regularity. And one can argue that man is at his most human when he or she is engaged in the act of creation. This type of behavior was even known and studied and remarked upon by Karl Marx himself who wrote of this tendency as part of man's gutting, Swiss or species essence in estranged labor. He writes, it is true that animals also produce, they build nests and dwellings like the bee and the beaver but animals only produce for their own immediate needs and those of their young and only when immediate need compels them to do so. While man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need and also in accordance with the laws of beauty which is to say that all of those who scoff at a possible socialist society and claim without the carrot and the stick of hypothetical wealth and all too real poverty without this wholly necessary system of rewards and punishments administered by those in the pay of our own social elites, police, bureaucrats managers and jailers who are empowered to act as gadfly to the great mass of men. We wouldn't without these people we would inevitably stagnate and return either to living hand to mouth like the other species on this planet or become so consumed by sloth that our whole civilization would soon collapse back into stupid savagery or worse fall prey to another civilization who weren't so keen to spare the rod nor so compassionate as to fail to empower an army of taskmaskers to whip their own people into shape. This is certainly a compelling if entirely self-serving fiction that our popular propaganda has advanced since at least the 18th century and well before in fact, don't forget it was the Catholic church that made sloth a mortal sin as if an order of priests were necessary to preach the virtues of labor into the peasantry which you have to admit by the way is a really funny thought a priest decked out investments sent by a man who spends his days making proclamations from a giant golden throne preaching hellfire and damnation to all those who fail to appreciate the virtue of a hard day's labor as if a priest or politician or CEO knows anything at all about hard work compared to a farmer or factory worker or Amazon employee. The point is we as Westerners are laboring under a very pernicious delusion and that delusion is that innovators are rare and that the task of civilization is to find these magical people and elevate them to an insane heights of privilege and power that they might continue to innovate. It's as if our society is on the lookout for geese that lay golden eggs and when we can't find these geese we just declare that the particular goose who happens to already be sitting on a giant pile of gold must have laid it themselves. And that's how we get people like Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. All people who are renowned for possessing near supernatural reserves of brilliance know how and work ethic and yet in reality, none of these people are true innovators. Thomas Edison arguably the best of the three didn't even really invent the light bulb and was more like a CEO who bought a building and filled it with other better inventors and then just told them innovate. And when these inventors did, he is their boss and the owner of the franchise took credit for their work. Steve Jobs pulled the same scam. When he unveiled the first iPhone in 2007 it didn't even work. The phone itself was primarily a product of taxpayer subsidized government research and his entire staff spent the whole day drunk and terrified that the non-working phone might crash and Jobs would ruin their careers over it. And let's not forget that Jobs himself was never a great genius just a man lucky enough to have access to the labs at Xerox and all the technology contained within. And then we have Elon Musk, heralded as the real world Tony Stark whose most important and brilliant career move was to be born the son of a man who owned a literal emerald mind. And it was those emeralds and not any particular genius nor amount of hard work nor great reserve of discipline that put Musk into the position he is in today. You see, we have this idea that genius and creativity are exceptionally rare characteristics and this is simply not the case. Rather, human creativity is broadly distributed among the species, but the opportunity to express and realize that creativity is not. This is born out by the data in a paper published by Professor Raj Chetty of Stanford University which analyzed the backgrounds of patent holders in the United States. It was determined that the single greatest predictor of whether or not a child might go on to be an innovator was not the presence of talents ingenuity or drive but how much money their parents made. The problem here is so bad that students with exceptional scores in childhood mathematics were no more likely to invent anything at all than the students with poor scores. That is, if only their parents were not among the highest income earners in the country. This data confirms exactly what paleontologist Stephen Gould famously wrote in 1980, I am somewhat less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. That this is to say that we humans are positively awash in geniuses yet our society cannot recognize them because our current intelligence system relies on financial indicators of success in order to decide precisely which individuals shall have the privilege of making their will manifest and throws roadblock after roadblock in the way of anyone who exists outside of this paradigm. What socialism will do which can be broadly understood as an economic democratization of vital industries and resources, i.e. worker ownership within the context of an economy that is not beholden to the demands of profit and loss which in simpler words, the whims of a tiny class of elites who earn their money not by the sweat of their brow but by speculative monetary investments. Socialism will free millions if not billions of humans from this economic bondage and with their liberation an ocean of creativity will be unleashed in the forms of artistic, cultural and scientific achievements the full extent of which even in our current age of rapidly increasing technological wonders will likely be unfathomable to us. The fact is is that democracy unlike monarchy and dictatorship is grounded firmly in the principles of evolution and as such the more democratic and participatory we can make our intelligence system the more each member of society will have the opportunity to bring their unique skills, talents and perspective to the great collective social work of human society. The more fully we all benefit from their contributions. In short, socialism as our next major economic and political system will ensure that we won't have a single Albert Einstein but instead thousands if not millions of Einstein's who are no longer constrained by the drudgery that is the current reality of being forced to work for the capitalists. And if this all seems too utopian for you and you are perhaps still in the thrall that nasty propaganda that I mentioned earlier that equates our current lower classes with animals and beasts of burden and fear that without the carrot and the lash these people will simply choose to do nothing with their time. Let me remind you that psychologically speaking what you are alleging is a fever dream. We have known for a long time that when the basics are taking care of for humans they don't sit back and stagnate but instead seek new heights and new masteries and new challenges to overcome. This basic principle that was touched upon by Marx was proven later by Abraham Maslow and expressed in the popular imagination via his hierarchy of needs. It's not the socialists who's staring at humanity through rose tinted glasses and imagining an impossible future that is a threat to innovation. Rather it is those whose imagination has been stunted by this popular propaganda who tether humanity to the past. The fact is that we've been ready to run for a while now. Our species is in fact chomping at the bit to do so but without a new liberatory way of doing things we will forever remain lash to the cart. And so what's most important here with all of the problems that we face in the 21st century is that we as a society find a way to get out of our own way. And the first step towards doing that is to transition to a socialist economy. Thank you. Thank you very much. Brenton we will now kick it over to for our last closing statement. Thanks everybody we're gonna move into open discussion after this. This is from Keith. Thanks so much Keith. The floor is all yours. Well when I was preparing my opening statement I thought I would start by explaining what my actual views are. And I after listening to the other opening statements I think I was right to approach it in that direction because while I don't really disagree with a whole lot I've heard so far but I do think we probably have some disagreements on what socialism and capitalism actually are. And I also just for the sake of interest I want the listeners to know that they're not that Brenton Ben are not debating Ben Shapiro here. So I do wanna differentiate my views from those of say a free market conservative or a right libertarian or somebody like that. So I'll just I'll provide just a general overview of what my actual approach to political economy is. First of all, I reject any kind of singular determinism but if I had to be some kind of determinist I would be a political determinist because I think the distribution of political power and military power and the power to engage in coercive violence generally precedes most other forms of social organization and most other features of social organization. Before you can have an economic system you have to have a distribution of power in the wider society. And that's determined by a variety of factors. Another feature of economic life are the natural features like geography and topography and client climate. There's also human capital, things like the level of health and education and things like that that are found in a particular society. There's also the cultural values and the social norms of a society which interact with economic actions and shape economic outcomes. Now in terms of my wider view of human beings or what human society is I generally with some qualifications agree with Hobbes or perhaps Machiavelli that society is largely a collection of conflicting groups and individuals that are pursuing their own interests and that rent seeking is an inevitable feature of social life. Now that's not to say that humans don't have a cooperative side as well but that's hardly the sum total of what human beings are what human beings do. I'm also a moral skeptic. My perspective is not about who is most moral but I'm just simply interested in how do things work? For example, the idea of total equality may sound moral in theory but does it work? Is it possible? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I also hold to power elite theory. I'm not a Marxist, I'm not a Keynesian or those are the two dominant paradigms among liberal and left opinion and then I'm not an Austrian economist or a neoclassical economist either. Those are the two dominant paradigms on the right. So I'm none of that. As I said, you're not debating Ben Shapiro here. What I do believe though is that the state, the ruling class, whatever you wanna call it are the full range of power elite institutions, not just the political government. The analogy I would make would be to the middle ages. In the middle ages, the ruling class was the church, the aristocracy, the royal dynasties and all of that, the military and it's the same way in our modern societies instead of the royal families, we've got these political dynasties, the Bushes, the Clintons, the Trumps, whatever. Instead of feudal manners, we've got these mass corporations instead of the church, we've got the media and the universities and we've still got the military. So not a whole lot has really changed in that regard. As far as major economic paradigms, I'm probably closer to the institutional economist which is the idea that economic life is made up of individuals, firms, political institutions, social organizations, social norms, culture, all of these things interact with each other to make economic life what it is. And I think if you leave out any of those, you're running into problems. I also agree with the anarchist critique of the state and of concentrated power generally. My influence is there would be historians and anthropologists like James Scott, Errol Barclay, David Graber, Franz Abenheimer who pointed out that the historic role of the state and societies is to centralize control over wealth and property. So I hold to a somewhat similar critique of the relations kept between state and capital that you find among individualist anarchists like Sage Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, maybe Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, maybe Henry George, figures similar to that within that tradition. I'll also concede that socialism broadly defined and I think socialism is a really broad concept and I appreciate the efforts earlier to define it. I think there are some problems with the definition that was provided. But I would agree that socialism is not inherently statist in theory. That's a common argument that say conservatives and right libertarians make. But for example, there was an interesting essay written by Larry Gamboan, a Canadian anarchist about 15 years ago where he described the different traditions within socialism and talked about how a lot of the classical 19th century socialists did not view their idea of socialism as some sort of state-run economy. Instead, they were more into communes and cooperatives and worker collectives and anarcho-syndicalist unions and things like that. Now I do have a criticism of anarcho-communism. I think it's a product of time and place. I think it is derived from societies that were feudal, agrarian economies that were based on subsistence production and peasant communal traditions. But before any anarcho-communists feel slighted, I also have the same problem with the deification of John Locke that you see in a lot of right libertarian and anarcho-capitalist thinking. I also think the Lockean approach to political economy is rooted in a specific time period. It's rooted in this early modern, early bourgeois, during the early phases of the market revolution and reflects that kind of limited historical framework. I'll also acknowledge that communes can exist on a functional level. There's a place not far from where I live called Twin Oaks. Some friends of mine have lived there. Monasteries are certainly a matter, a type of commune that has existed for centuries in many different cultures. There's a place in Spain called Marina Lita. It's a kind of socialist leftist commune that seems to function very well. There's some sort of spiritualist commune in India called Auroraville. That's been there for decades. It seems to work pretty well. I have a lot of anarchist friends that are fans of a novel called Bolo that kind of outlines this futuristic anarcho-communist society based on all these communes with all these strange identities that engage in exchange with each other. And I don't know that something like that is impossible in real life, but I do think scale is problematic. If we look at the work of Robin Dunbar, for example, we see the idea that once you start getting into a group that's say larger than 150 people, you start running into problems when it comes into cooperation because people are more cooperative with people they know. And we all know that from our personal lives. We tend to approach people we know and interact with on a person-to-person basis in a way that's much different than say when we're arguing with people on Facebook. So I do think scale is a serious issue when it comes to things like communes and cooperatives and things of that nature. Now, I am probably the last person on earth who's gonna be defending capitalism or at least what is commonly called capitalism. There's a whole lot of problems with capitalism. The issues, first of all, are concentrated economic power, centralization of control over wealth and resources. I don't think capitalism as at least as commonly understood could exist without the state. I think that most conservatives and libertarians are not nearly thorough enough in their economic critique of the relationship between capitalism and the state. As I said earlier, I think corporations of the new modern, they're the modern feudal-minorial system. The corporations play the same role in our society that the feudal-minorial system did in the Middle Ages. I'm also not one of these property rights fundamentalists. Property rights to me is a social construct. It's like table manners. It's like different styles of dress, different styles of music. It's relative to time and place. I would also agree that non-state economies do not necessarily have to be market per se and that economies generally do not have to be market-based. For example, the Incas had a non-market economy based on a system of exchange between productive units. And I think something like that could even be replicated in an anarchistic sense like as a federation of monasteries or communes or something like that. But I do see some serious problems with quote-unquote socialism as conventionally understood. Most people that I know who claim to be socialist, I think holds one of four basic ideas. One is utopianism, the idea of full communism from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. I don't frankly just don't see that working. There's always gonna be rent-sakers, as I said. There's also what's commonly called communism, Stalinism, Maoism, totalitarianism, the command economy. I don't think anyone on this panel is in favor of that, so I'll leave that aside. Then there's social democracy, which to me is just capitalism plus the welfare state. And I, calling that socialism, I think is problematic. And then there's democratic socialism. And based on what I know Ben's work, I think this is probably his viewpoint, which is an expanded public sector with nationalized industries, managed democratically by and run by unions. I would submit the inner system like we have in the United States today, we have a system like that. We have a, there is an industry that is owned by the state, run on a nonprofit basis, and which is essentially controlled by unions. And that industry is called the police. And I'll just leave it at that for now. Oops, I was on mute. So folks, what I was saying there was, thank you so much to our guests for their opening statements. We're going to jump into the open conversation right now. And so as mentioned, if you happen to have any questions, feel free to fire them into the live chat, tagging me with at modern day debate. And with that, thanks gentlemen, the floor is all yours. Yeah, so I did just want to real quick make one general comment. And then I was hoping we could go back to a couple of things that Tyler said. The general comment is now really think I heard any explanation of why socialism can't innovate in either of those opening statements. And I heard some general thoughts about capitalism and socialism, but that seems to be slightly different. Then the specific thing is, so Todd made some historical claims that I thought were kind of odd. So I mean, I don't think Sparta, there was certainly nothing socialist about Sparta. And there was also nothing capitalist about Athens. They were both slave societies. So I don't understand that part at all. And when it comes to these parallels about West Germany and East Germany and the US and the USSR and North Korea and South Korea, all of those seem to be relevant to a way of using the word socialism that I don't think either of us are using it in, as was mentioned earlier, but I also don't see what it has to do with any of the stuff about the labor theory of value. Because as far as I could tell, and please Todd correct me if I'm wrong, if I'm getting you wrong, the claim is that somehow these societies were less successful because they were trying to compensate people for the amount of value that they created, understood in terms of labor theory of value and socially necessary labor time. And that just didn't work as well. And I think that's just historically just flatly not true that the Soviet Union or North Korea or East Germany ever claimed to be doing that. And it's also interesting to note that Karl Marx very explicitly didn't advocate that. It is true that he believed in the labor theory of value just like lots of capitalist, pro-capitalist economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo believed in the labor theory of value. By the way, there are plenty of Marxists who are heterodox and reject that part of Marx. So G.A. Cohen, for example, has a paper, you can find it on the Verso website called labor theory of value in the concept of exploitation where he argues, I think very convincingly to me that the Marxist claim that workers are exploited is logically independent of whether you're a marginalist about value or you believe the labor theory of value or anything like that, that's just a separate issue. And regardless of what you think makes it the case that goods have the value that do, that's a separate question from who has a right to distribute the surplus value that's created. And the objection is basically, to put it in all American terms is the private sector version of taxation without representation in capitalist firms. But it's also just not the case that Karl Marx said that we should be compensating everybody for exactly as much labor as they put in understood in terms of socially necessary labor time. There was a faction of the German socialist movement that sort of said that, the Los Allianz, but if you read Marxist critique in the Gotha program, he criticizes them for saying just that, right? He says that in the early stages of the socialist society it might be necessary to tie compensation to how much people are putting in with a whole bunch of caveats because in order but his reason for saying that is because it would be necessary for the sake of incentivizing labor. But he also says there's a strong sense in which this would be unjust because some people are smarter than other people. Some people are stronger than other people. So he said, if you're ultimately, if you're rewarding people for how much they put in it might be a necessary evil at some stage but it's not, but you're just recreated a natural aristocracy because you're depriving some people based on things they can't control like how smart they are and how strong they are. And final thought about this before, you know Brenton gets in or the other team, you know could respond is just that, look, I certainly don't advocate, you know I mean Brenton can speak for himself but I certainly don't advocate that we make some sort of attempt to compensate people by calculating exact socially necessary labor hours or anything like that. I certainly don't think that I'm out of step with the socials tradition in that. I think Mark says in particularly the Gotha program that the Salians are wrong to be obsessed with the question of how payment is distributed because he says that's not the point of the socials project the point of the socials project, the essence of it the wildly unjust and unequal distribution we have under capitalism is just a system the essential question is who controls the pizza production because they're the ones who decide how it's being distributed. So what I would say about how to distribute it is look, I think we can have a fairly egalitarian state sector and worker cooperatives that actually exist that don't have totally egalitarian pay scales but they're way more egalitarian than regular capitalist firms and that sounds good to me and I just don't see how all the LTV stuff is relevant. Let's give a good amount of time to Todd just to respond to as many points as possible. Yeah, so let me first ask a question to make sure that we're on the same page and not talk about each other. I was watching a video of yours a couple of days ago to sort of prepare for this debate where you were discussing the theory of exploitation and it sounded to me what you were saying was this once we calculate the total cost of the product from the capital inputs in and then the amount of cost of the labor of the worker that's the total cost of the product and then the capitalist then sort of dips into the value that the worker produced and then adds that to his value to turn a profit which is then what would be called exploitation. Is that a fair description of your thought on that? It's not how I describe it but as it's just pointed out I was just talking for a long time so if you wanna respond to other points before we go back to me, go right ahead. Sure, sure. So when we talk about the idea of the cost of the unit production of something the SNLT says that we look at the average cost of these things by the average worker by the average machine tool and then we can get a rough estimate of what that should be valued at or what that should be cost at any given time T in the economy based on these given factors. And so we could have a rough idea within a socialist system of what we ought to be valuing these things that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to say this is a one to one correlation we might have other reasons to raise it or lower it but that sort of puts it in a ballpark figure. And what I'm saying is if that's where value is derived from works that do not have average costs where you can't look at a sector and see the average cost of it it's only gonna happen once it's not clear how that can easily be accounted for in that theory. So for the record, not what I think I think that you could have any theory of value it could be a marginal list of value and the exploitation claim still stands that workers are certainly creating the products that have value and we could just bracket the question of where those products get their value the workers create the products that have value and therefore have a default right to control how that value is distributed how much of it they take home how much of it's spent on new production, et cetera and I'm not convinced that capitalists taking their cuts is legitimate but that's a normative argument it has nothing to do with average labor costs or anything like that. Yeah, I'll tail on that really quickly by the way, Todd, because I was surprised to hear this about the LTV but I hear this from capitalists a lot and I think it's because they get really excited about supposedly LTV disproving exploitation with looking into the marginalist revolution because of these older critiques that some socialists are still kind of obsessed with because they're nerds or because they lived at the time of, you know Mark Sinatum Smith but the fact is that LTV versus subjective theory of value I don't think it in any way gets to the heart of what people are complaining about because it let's say I'm not so much concerned of like what percentage of the workers labor is being unfairly and unjustly appropriated by the capitalist as I am that the inherent relationship of being an employer and an employee is an inherently exploitative relationship that can never ever under a capitalist thing be equitable because you have two parties bargaining from systems from unequal positions of power and to a certain extent to say to what Keith had said you won't ever have perfect equality but that doesn't stop you from trying to make things as equal and as even and as fair as possible within the realm of what we can do in an average day as people in a flawed world. So the problem is more when you sign an employment contract with an employer you are already being exploited because you and the employer stand while you both stand to gain from that contract the worker stands to gain far less from the contract than the employer does and the employer risks far less by not signing that worker because there's always another worker to sign. So and the worst thing that can really happen to an employer is to lose their capital and become a worker. So when you have that kind of position where one party holds almost all the cards unless workers do something like unionize or engage in direct action to increase their power against the employer you will always have a contract that comes down unfairly and exploitatively on one of the parties. So I don't think even if you did defeat LTV and I'm not 100% sure that LTV has been completely defeated because it's mainly a philosophical point I don't think that defeats socialism and it definitely doesn't defeat exploitation theory but what I and again I don't think that this means that we can't innovate. Again, people can innovate in any society as I pointed out the Romans nearly invented the steam engine and then just really quickly on what you said there's more of a personal thing that you mentioned that a... So one of the problems that I noticed in your criticism of entertainment was that the tacit assumption that an entertainer and artist like myself has to appeal to the largest audience possible and that this creates tension like within the work and it does when the work is for profit in a capitalist economy when art is not art but art is a product. But the fact is is that an artist like myself doesn't have to appeal to everyone in the world. My work, I would love it if a lot of people really liked my work but ultimately I just need enough people to locate my work, identify with it and help to support me so that I can continue to do it. That's really all I need. I don't need everything that I produce to be the next Marvel movie, for instance. It is the will to efficiency and the drive to use art for profit. That's what creates the tension. So these tensions would not be present in a socialist society. And even if you look at socialist and there's been incredible socialist art that's been coming out over the centuries but even in the Soviet Union you did have some incredible innovations. I'm not going to defend the Soviet Union because I think that there's a lot that's wrong with that model. But just even with that model which I think is probably one of the worst attempts at socialism that we've had you've got incredible artists like Shostakovich coming out and granted Shostakovich did bristle against the Soviet government and some of his most beautiful work was done after he was forced to join the Communist Party. But at the same time that's sort of the artist's job we're supposed to bristle at the society around us because we are supposed to stand outside of society and to provide an insight that may not be visible to those who are in the pale. That's why we are beyond the pale. So I mean, you've got Shostakovich you also have Soviet cinema which was, I mean, they pioneered the jump cut. There are a number of it really incredible innovations that came even from this what I would argue again, poor example of socialism that just really is mind blowing the whole fact that we went to the moon like the Americans never would have gone to the moon without the Russians shooting a dog into space and why did the Russian shoot a dog into space because they weren't concerned about profit because they were looking to do something to advance science and to make their mark in a way that did not directly lead to making profits for an investor class. And then of course the Americans we just had to outdo them at it because we're jerks. But the point being is that without that first part of the dialectic without the Soviet space program the American space program would have never happened until there was a market incentive to do it. And there's still not a market incentive to go to space today. And I was just to put a little bow on something Brad just said. I mean, if you're worried about excessive artistic populism about artists having to appeal too much to the majority of the population which is a problem you might still have under certain forms of socialism but it's damn sure a problem you have under capitalism. And if you want to avoid that then what you want is to find ways to delink compensation for artists from market forces. And I would suggest that even within the United States some new deal programs did that quite effectively certainly in the Soviet case and certainly in principle you could have as part of a society with a vastly beefed up public sector you could have a vastly beefed up level of state support for the arts. We could argue about whether socialism is necessary or sufficient to get that but it's certainly not something that's like it's certainly not obvious how the transition from capitalism to socialism is supposed to increase the problem of artistic populism rather than decrease it. Jackson real quick because I want to make this point before I forget. Let's not forget that Jackson Pollock one of those famous American painters. I think this is just to be fair that I think it might have been Brenton and then Ben and then Brenton and so like just to be sure that they have plenty of time to respond. Sure, sure, can I just get this out real quick just to put this on here? As long as you get the same amount of time back to them. That's fine, we can give it back to him but what I really want to make sure clear here is that Jackson Pollock one of those famous American painters his work was directly supported by the CIA as a weapon against the Soviets. Like there were freaking suits coming in there. They didn't care about Jackson Pollock's art. What they wanted to do is they wanted to use his art as propaganda to show look how free and innovative the West is. So they threw thousands and thousands of dollars at him and other artists which ironically the same people that were paranoid about the Soviets and hated also hated Jackson Pollock and hated his art and didn't want the government spending money on it and they had to go back and spend it in secret. All right, so first of all neither Keith nor I are advocating for the current state of capitalism or that the current state of capitalism would necessarily make any one of these things better or worse. So we can just dispense with that because neither one of us are arguing for that. Now with regards to the artistic angle and this is definitely gonna be more of a discussion more towards Brent's way. When you look at a democratic decision-making process when you then have to divvy up the resources in order to so there's at least two reasons why I think theoretically you would see a more popular shift in art under a socialist society. One is when you have to appeal to whatever body is organized to distribute the resources amongst the community where you get your cut for those people who are producing tangible physical goods it's gonna be a lot easier for them to justify the cut. I'm growing your fruit, I'm baking your bread I'm making your clothes. You don't have to try as hard to sell the fact that you're gonna need that cut of the public stock to do your job. If you wanna do art it's not as immediately intuitive to people that doesn't mean you can't make your case but in order to make your case in order to get an access to the public fund one of the things you're going to have to do is in any democratic society you're going to have to appeal to as many people as possible in order to support your agenda on this. And I think what that is gonna lead to over time is a populist pull which will lead to as I think a diseconomy of scale where you have to make too many people happy to get the resources you need to make the product. Now that's getting the resources for you to make the product and then depending on how popular you want it to be because artists, some artists like Tolkien don't care if they're popular or not. That's true, but there are those that do and for those that do I think they're gonna be not only incentivized to be more such that way they're gonna be selected for because they're gonna have a way of thinking that it's more consistent with a democratic process. If somebody's very brooding and isolated like a Tolkien he might be viewed as someone who's not sufficiently participatory in the democracy it might not be popular and it might be hard for him to swing a vote for resources to be allocated to him to do socialistic art. Whereas if somebody is more interested in being popular with other people there's also that pressure to then put as much in there to make these people happy. And I think that is with that and because you have to have all these different factors all these different elements of the society at least a 51% majority on your side to get the resources transferred over at least on a reliable basis. There's gonna be a trend and a pull in that direction whereas if you have one class to worry about and it doesn't have to be a capitalist class it is many different classes throughout history it makes that easier in the sense that you only have to worry about one group of people and you can refine your work to that group of people and over time you can have a deeper tradition. So as I mentioned in the ancient world we had the Iliad, the United and the Odyssey all of which were written for basically the same class interest. And we do see that because it's the same class interest we have a coherence and a tightness and these are classic works that are still studied today. We don't, one could argue hypothetically the socialist democratic experiment hasn't been around long enough to try maybe but Reformation England within 70 years produced Shakespeare. So I mean, I also don't know how long we're supposed to wait but I don't wanna make a historical argument per se I'd prefer to make a theoretical one. And the theoretical argument that I'm making is that the pressures of a democratic society would tend to pull the creators. So the idea that the creator wants to just do what they wanna do and then there's these external pressures that pull them away under capitalism, sure I will concede that point. But what I will say though is I do think there's a tension that isn't maybe fully aware maybe fully cognizant in many socialists that there would be another tension pulling people away from just the pure act of creativity that they would have to worry about these other interest groups that wanna have a stake in what they're producing because in part they're subsidizing it by the total value they're producing in a socialist economy. And I think that, yeah, Keith unless you have anything to say I'd like to cost it back to Brent. Well, I would like to respond to something that Ben said in response to us which is that we really didn't get into this question of innovation like how is socialism incompatible with innovation? A problem I have with a lot of what I'm hearing so far is it doesn't really sound like anyone's talking about socialism at least not as I would understand socialism. I hear a lot of discussion of either modified capitalism or social democracy or anarchism being discussed but I don't know that that's really what socialism is viewed in a proper historical context. You know, I would concede that certainly as I said before real life cooperatives can exist. Androgyn is a good example. I'd say an even better example is the Emilia Ramagna which is in Italy and I'm not in favor of giant hierarchical organizations or narrow concentrations of power or narrow concentration over investment decisions like we have in our current system. You know, I like the idea of say stakeholder partnerships and decentralization and diversification of participation and investment decision making processes but the problem I see is that capital markets are still necessary for innovation because innovation requires investment which means that resources have to be transferred from elsewhere to invest in new products, new technologies, labor costs, et cetera. An example would be healthcare. Healthcare is capital intensive because of the cost of the advanced technology that's involved. It's also labor intensive because it requires lots of workers and lots of highly skilled workers. And it's also got a very high level of consumer demand because everyone needs healthcare and that's one of the primary reasons why healthcare is so expensive. It's not the only reason by any means but it is a major contributing factor. Socialism as I have always understood in the 35 years I've been studying is based on the idea that we're eliminating the market instead what we're doing is we're engaged in subsistence production for the meeting of human needs rather than the production of profit. The idea is we have a subsistence-based land economy. We determine- And there's socialists for all adult life and I've never met anybody who advocates subsistence level production. Let me finish my point. Let me finish my point. It's still a democracy because you wouldn't have a capitalist class. Well, let's, all right. Just to hear plenty from Keith and Todd. Okay. Well, the idea behind socialism as I understand it is that we produce to meet human needs. It's not just to make profit. Capitalism is the idea that you produce things to sell on the market to generate profit and then you use your profit to invest in a new production to produce more profit. That's capitalism. Socialism is, okay, we want to rationalize production. We want to rationalize it where, okay, we need housing for everyone. We need healthcare for everyone. We need food for everyone. And how are we going to get that? So we want to allocate resources in this kind of rationalistic land economy. The problem, when I say subsistence, I'm not talking about subsistence of what we're just going to produce enough to keep starting from starting to death. And that's all. I've never met a Marxist defense and I've never met a Marxist people like that, all right? But it's still subsistence production in the sense of you're producing to meet need rather than to produce for profit. I think that's what I mean by subsistence. The problem with that though is that you don't necessarily have a surplus to invest in innovation. And I think even more seriously, you don't really have mechanisms for exchange that result in the division of labor, which makes the specialization that's necessary for innovation possible. Now it's possible to certainly change the definition of same property rights. For example, use of fructulary rights instead of the homesteading principle or Henry George's land tenure theory or whatever. Or you could also change the structure of production. You could have cooperatives, communes, electives, clubs, unions, workers, councils, whatever. You could have those instead of conventional capitalist companies or even petty bourgeois firms. Or you could shift control of production from capitalist corporations directly to the state. But I don't think that eliminates any of these problems. Now another issue is socialism, as I understand it, is about trying to eliminate the law of value. And that gets back to the issue that I was talking about earlier about subsistence production as opposed to production profit. Right now, some years ago, I heard a lecture by Mike Brenny, a leading Marxist scholar. He's probably fairly old by now, about the 80s something, 97. But he observed that all modern socialist regimes had more or less the same model of society. It was the one-party state, the command economy, the planned economy mentioned not only the quote unquote communist countries or like that, but most socialist countries were like that. Robert Mugabe's involved ways like that. So a lot of economies that didn't identify specifically that the Marxist-Leninist paradigm still had a similar political and economic model. And currently, I suggested that there was a reason for this and that is it's what's most workable in that kind of contextual sense because in order to have an economy- Just to, pardon my interruption, because we'll pretty quick we'll go into the Q and A and so what we might need to do is once we hear from the no-position team in terms of wrapping this portion up, we might have to go to kind of our last kind of little responses before we go into the Q and A. So just wanted to give you a heads up just because we had a little bit of a late start and we don't want to go too far over our time. I don't have about one more sentence. In order to have an economy where the law of value is eliminated, you end up with a rationing system like what they had in the Soviet system. And to have a system like that, you have to have a maximum amount of social and labor discipline and that's how you get a military model of labor organization and production like you do when having these kinds of Marxist-Leninist command economies. So I'll leave it at that for now. Yeah, I'll point something out very, very obviously. There's a reason why a lot of states that were supported financially and militarily by the USSR took on aspects of the political structure of the USSR. And that's because the USSR was arming them. I'd also say this idea that Robert Mugabe, if there's anything socialist by any definition about Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe is extremely odd. It's not only, you know, it's not like there's no boost. You know, people in that country work for regular capitalist employers. I mean, you certainly can't say social democracy isn't socialism without saying that's not socialism. And again, what's being advocated here, there's a very clear definition that we started with at the beginning of the debate of socialism. And what's being advocated is not social democracy. Even if you have, and there are several decades at this point of branches of socialist theory that advocate some form of market socialism, I think you'd have to at least start out with some form of market socialism. But what makes it socialism and not just social democracy is that you don't still have a separate capitalist class owning the means of production. Two really quick things I wanted to say are, one, just to go back to think about artistic creativity, Todd gave us a sort of a priori specular reason to think that you'd have more artistic populism under socialism. If you look at actually existed state support for the arts as conservatives are constantly complaining about, it goes in the opposite direction, that that's what enables art that often offends mass taste is de-linking it from the market and having something like the national endowment for the arts that has its own procedures for giving it out that don't depend on popularity. I think under socialism, you'd have much more of that. I also want to go back to an important claim that Keith made at the end of his opening statement, which is that like police abuses say something negative about democratic socialism because the police are publicly owned and because it's unionized. And I'd say that of course, surely we could pick out the police, we could also pick out Medicare. We could pick out lots of other actually existed publicly owned things staffed by unionized workers that the left is rightly big fans of. But the problem with the police is that the communities they please have too little control over them, not too much. And so the one thing that's worse than publicly owned police is privately owned police who are accountable, not even in the codely inadequate way that existing police are to the communities that they police, but not at all to those communities. They're accountable to the people who signed their paychecks. And the last point I make is I still haven't heard a reason that socialism can innovate. Yeah, as much as I want to really jump down the theoretical artist whole, that's my jam and Todd maybe you and I can have a conversation about that. I think what I wanted to point out about the first off, the way in which resources are distributed within a socialist society does not have to be, there could be any number of ways to distribute those resources, whether you're using market socialism or you're using a GA model, which by the way, you don't need a 51% ruling majority to make decisions within a GA model. It's actually a very diverse way of handling problems which where you can even have a very small but very vocal minority that is still able to get its way within a consensus based system. So I think that's what's happening here is socialism is being very narrowly defined and it's being very narrowly defined in a way that I don't see reflected in modern socialist movements. I don't hear a lot of arguments about LTV for instance, being correct coming from socialists. So you just don't hear that. Similarly again, like with the Robert Mugabe that I'd never ever heard like even the worst tanky I've never heard anyone defend Mugabe. Like you've got some weird people clustered around you. But like, so I think overall what's important here to understand is like the type of socialism that Ben and I are arguing for is more about one who controls economic production? Who actually controls it and how does it function? There's been a lot has been said about not having profit but it's very important to understand like in an economic context not having profit does not mean that you don't have a surplus. It means that you are a lack of profit in an economic sense is a lack of money that is in that surplus that has been earmarked to be sent to a class of investors. Non-profits can make a ton of money and I'm not saying we build a thing of non-profits. Non-profits can make way more money that they put out than they take in. The difference between a non-profit and a for-profit corporation within the United States right now is that the non-profit does not hand that profit over to a board of directors. Rather they take that money and they one give it to their employees and two use it to invest and continue in the work that they are doing. So in a non-profit driven economy you can still have organizations assuming we're still using money that take in a huge, huge surplus because what they're doing is something people really identify with and want to see more of and they can then take that money and roll it over into more of their work and into more innovation. So a lack of profit does not stifle innovation. And in fact, I would go as far as to say that profit seeking behavior itself stifles innovation because good is always going to get about the same rewards is great. And at the same time, it's going to cost a lot less. There's only such so good of a sandwich someone can make. So a mind blowing sandwich will probably cost about the same as a eh, okay sandwich. So I'm gonna say overall, I don't think a lack of profit is going to be what's going to stifle innovation within a socialist society. So Keith and Todd, we can give you each a quick response back and then what we'll do is go into the Q&A. So Keith and Todd, the floor is yours. Okay, Keith, why don't you go first? Okay, well, I could say a lot of things in response to what's been said. And once again, I think a lot of it comes down to terminology because we seem to have different conceptions of what socialism is. But I think I would go a bit further though and start and offer some other social science and science because the problem that I see with any kind of system, whether you call it socialist or capitalist or whatever is first of all, the idea behind democratic socialism, as I understand it, you've got mass democracy, it's the people's state, it's the people's economy and all of these kinds of things, the workplaces of democratic, something like, I suppose something like Walmart would be nationalized and put under workers' control with some sort of democratic council or something like that. I mean, I'm familiar with some of these theories, but I think that some other issues come into play that I don't really hear being addressed by most socialists and that is one of them is the 80 for 20 principle. The social scientist, Roberto Pareto had the idea that in any kind of organization, about 20% of the people in the organization do about 80% of the work necessary to sustain the organization and that 20% of the members of an organization tend to dominate the organization. There's also Michael's insight about the iron law of oligarchy that organizations tend to become oligarchies the larger they become and the bigger your organization, the more oligarchical it's going to be. There's also my Moscow's insights about the circulation of elites that in institutions, you see people who are elites in one institution circulating it as elites in other institutions. There's also the role of culture, social norms, ideological superstructure and the ways in which those shape economic life. I mean, Marx recognized that. Sorrell, some other socialists recognize that. There's also the question of regulatory capture. That's a major problem when you start talking about state-run industries and things like that. There are critiques of that. They go all the way back to the progressive era like Charles Beard and things like that. There's also the question of the role of the state in society. I mean, to me, I agree with Weber's definition of state. State is an institution that exists to have a monopoly on violence and the state as a bureaucracy that takes on institutional life of its own that has its own institutional interests aside from that of whatever its official purpose may be. There's also the insights of public choice theory which indicate that democracy is a oligopoly of special interest groups and we certainly see that in our public democracy today. And even the most perfectly conceived democracy is still a tyranny of the majority as John Stuart Mill pointed out. The idea of mass democracy is something that I would say I would approach with reservations because I don't know that mob rule is any better than elite rule. We're getting into some other issues that are beyond the question of social... I would say elite rule is considerably worse than mob rule. What's very interesting about like the tyranny... We might be able to do this might be an opportunity because we did want to go into the Q and A pretty quick here. And so Todd hasn't gotten a chance to respond. Todd, if you have anything, this may be a great opportunity. Yeah. And then we'll jump into the Q and A. Yeah, sure. So again, we don't have a lot of time left but as far as the broader democratic decision-making issues any kind of innovation of this kind needs is going to entail a great amount of risk and groups are generally risk averse in part because it's not clear necessarily who is the one taking the risk and then who is the one that is going to bear the cost of the risk should the risk fail and also who is going to benefit from making the decision if the risk were to be successful. Which is why again with venture capitalists these are very small groups and were very clearly defined who's risking what who's at fault if the risk fails. Now, does that mean there isn't some other way you could do it possibly? There's possibly some other way but it's not clear how through it these more robust democratic decision-making process you would see that. And the other problem is at least as I see with socialists on the internet a lot of times they'll sound like they all sort of have an underlying agreement on what socialists means at least when they're talking to non-socialists but then in private they get into all these debates about what socialism actually is. And so then when they make these decisions they're thinking oh everybody is agreeing with my definition of socialism but then what we see is that no they actually don't and when it enters into a revolutionary phase you get into all of the circular fine squad it's been like the restaurant revolution or the Mensheviks and the leftist stars and the Bolsheviks say in 1916 they're like oh yeah we all have the same definition of socialism but then as they gain more and more power and they're not to find themselves against some other group then it becomes clear what they all thought with socialism was different and that they were actually in fact incompatible with one another and so a lot of these problems converge and so then we have a difficulty of taking risky ventures. Now if it turns out that it is the case such that these works are risky and groups are risk averse unless some intentional method is that I've not seen divided is produced then we're not likely going to see such innovation. And with regards to maybe the final credit or more point okay well then with regards to the artistic creativity if we let's compare like with like so the end of Tsarist Russia I mean it's cook what right right before the revolution there's not much left but from like 1980 to like 1913 we have a galaxy of musicians authors novelist playwrights we still read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy who do we read from a Soviet Russia from 1970 and 80 there does seem to be a disconnect between the artistic creativity of even a late stage feudal society or maybe a proto-capitalist society and then a late stage socialist one. Thank you very much we are going to jump into the questions and so want to remind you folks by the way if you did not know what modern day debate is on podcast we're really excited about that so pull out your phone see if you can find us on your favorite podcast app and want to let you know as well if you're listening via podcast we also put the speakers links in the description box for the podcast so you can reach the speakers either in the description box of the podcast app or here on YouTube where you can also find their links at the very top of the description folks so with that we are going to jump into these questions want to say thanks everybody for your questions we're going to move relatively quickly as you want to start a bit late so we're going to try to move fast just to respect the speaker's time so Sunflower says Brenton when basics are taken care of people seek new heights and masteries not true for the majority of welfare recipients can we get a citation? What do you mean not true for the majority of welfare there again this is like established psychological fact that if somebody within who is like receiving welfare is not reaching new heights the only way how are you even calculating that what do you know that they're doing with their time they may not be functioning within the market because they've been disincentivized too but at the same time they may be writing the next great novel they may be the next toll story we just haven't noticed it yet or they may already be the next toll story but we'll never see their work because they were not within a class that is economically privileged enough to get themselves into a position to publish their novel. Gotcha thank you very much and thank you for your question from Sphinter of Doom says the question should not be whether socialism can innovate the question should be whether capitalism or socialism fosters more innovation. That'd be an interesting debate because it wasn't the one we had tonight but a juicy one indeed and thanks so much for your super chat coming in from Will Stewart right now we'll ask Dr. Ben if let's see hold on a second there it is okay thanks for your patience said if socialism is anti-coercion slash anti-exploitation how do you establish it if even one person refuses without using coercion? Well if the idea is that it's opposed to all coercion then yeah that would be a big problem that you can't have any social or economic system where there's no coercion whatsoever you would have what Matt Bruned calls the grab what you can world where you wouldn't have any property rights and everybody could just use everything at any time that somebody could who wanted to would be allowed to come into my home and use my toothbrush at will like without because if you're not gonna have some coercion about distribution of resources then you probably couldn't have an equity of functioning society at all I don't have any sort of absolutist anti-coercion position I don't know when I advocated that I think that I would however like the decisions about the uses of resources that we coercively enforce as you would have to in any possible society even in our co-capitalist one I would however like those decisions to be democratically decided if you'll remember what I was talking about exploitation earlier the analogy I made was to taxation without representation which isn't a complaint about the existence of taxation it's a complaint about the lack of representation anti-coercion tends to be like more an end cap in a right libertarian way of speaking left anarchists will also talk about it like left libertarians but I would say overall Ben is 100% right even if you are coming from an anti-coercive thing it's not about a perfect solution it's about building the least coercive society that is reasonably possible right now gotcha and Andrew Olson thanks for your question said if I'm a worker cog in a socialist my only goal is cog an abbreviation for something no no I think he's just a little piece of a machine oh I see oh gotcha so if I'm a worker cog in a socialist I think they mean like country or society my only goal is to produce a quota and I'll quote get paid why then would anyone do extra work and endanger themselves in experiments for no gain enjoying the convo well I mean I think this gets back to something that I have to say I found a little bit frustrating this discussion which is that alright broadly speaking socialism refers to any sort of proposal for social ownership of the means of production but we started out by giving a very specific model of what a social society could look like and asking given that all of the elements of this model have been beta tested in the real world and all the elements of this model do in fact involve innovation in the real world why is it that putting them together in this way wouldn't involve innovation and I haven't I haven't heard that instead what I keep hearing is going back to the question of of so you know of the Soviet model which which nobody here advocates of this reference to quota seems to be you know seems to be a reference to that and and all I could say is that you know you got the wrong address got to deliver that package elsewhere I would say to this one this is yet another case of capitalist attacking socialism by describing capitalism again like you basically described living in a capitalist society and working within like a low wage job within a corporation where you have no motivation to do extra you just need the paycheck so I don't think this has anything to do with capitalism or innovation I just think it's a rhetorical point that people love to trot out Gotcha and big thing Bruce Wayne thanks for your question said Alaskan Americans own the rights to the minerals beneath their feet they get a form of UBI and have four decades why not expand this to the rest of America I think that would be for you Keith and Todd well I don't know that I would be opposed to expanding that to the rest of America in fact I know it was when Sarah Palin was running for whatever she ran for vice president or whatever I remember joking with someone a Republican friend who was talking about you know what he hoped the Obama didn't win because he was a socialist and I said oh no Sarah Palin is probably more socialist than Obama so you've got nothing to worry about but no I don't I don't have a problem with something like that per se I don't know that I call that socialist it's not some but I find it inherently ejection it would add up to socialism by itself but public ownership of the oil industry would be a nice start they did that in Norway actually and their entire oil industry is is nationalized and then they weren't attacked by the United States because they're white and what wound up happening was that now everyone in Norway has the equivalent of like a $200,000 trust fund through their public ownership of the oil and as a result they have one of the best standards of living in the world so that's not necessarily socialism but it's definitely a step in the right direction gotcha and Colorado biker prepper says for the panel so I think for each side what about the conflation between communism and socialism I mean I think both of those terms have been used in lots of different ways historically that what you know what somebody like you know you know Carl Marx or Frederick Ingalls or for that matter anarchists like Anna Goldman meant by socialism meant by communism is pretty close to a lot of ways to what I think bread to die mean by democratic socialism and of course you know lots of societies that had models that I wouldn't agree with at all have used the word socialism or use them interchangeably or whatever so now I wouldn't get too hung up on labels the question is what do those labels signify and if what's being signified is the Soviet model of a undemocratic command economy then then all I could say is that's not what it you know that's that's not what I advocate if what's being signaled is some form of workers control the means of production then yeah that's that that's what I advocate I don't really care what we call it you know workers control by any other game is just a sweet I love that you quoted Shakespeare there alright so it's like I would consider myself a small sea anarcho communist or at least that's what I'm most interested in I'm also interested in aspects of democratic socialism I the distinction between socialism and communism to me is that socialism is worker ownership over the means of production within an economy that is decoupled from the laws of profit and loss that it's an economy that's not functioning so primarily to bring profits to a investor class communism is a classless stateless moneyless society in which the the the means of existence are collectively owned by everyone within that society and operated and controlled by the workers who physically possess them communism is an end stage ideal goal which may or may not be possible although I do think it's important to shoot for the moon land in the stars whereas socialism is a means of organizing the economy neither of these you'll notice have anything to do with what has been called I will call it capital C communism which is the sort of you know authoritarian Marx Leninist really Stalinist version that we saw at the USSR or in North Korea and you know heck I'd I'd call North Korea not communist but an absolute monarchy I'd also just real quickly say that the that before I forget about this that the division between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks had nothing to do with how to define socialism it's that the Mensheviks thought that Russia needed a two stage revolution and all it was ready for was a capitalist democratic one at that point you know not a socialist one and you know and the Bolsheviks ultimately you know had a different position not really relevant to anything I'm just going to neurotically got you think so much and then white neat says the idea that we wouldn't work slash innovate unless it's for wealth is true in this political economy because of alienation why treat alienation like an objective feature of human nature I know what he's talking about but I want to give other people a chance to I think that's a question for Keith and I um well certainly in the case of alienation you could argue that that that is the case now but I don't think one would have to assume what I would object to is the idea that you have to assume alienation is the only reason why people wouldn't perform in this particular way we're talking about if they weren't paid in money. One Keith and I aren't arguing that they have to be paid in money they could be compensated some other way. So for example, the Austrian Catholic monk Gregor Mendel and then in modern genetics, I don't think he was paid to do that. But he had other motivations that were sufficient to motivate them to experiment with peace. But I do think we can, I would again what I would object to is that if you say that the only reason why people wouldn't work if they had everything taken care of was because they were alienated in the capitalist economy. I don't think that's the only condition under which they wouldn't do these things if they were if they had other material needs taken care of. For example, we can think of the spoiled aristocratic child who never has worked with anything in his life, but because of that, he just has this sort of hedonistic, careless attitude towards life, because he's never had to work. So, and in his case it's not because he's alienated from his labor by capitalism, one could argue is precisely because he's been privileged in that way that he's the spoiled aristocratic kid. Is there anything like to add to that Keith? Well, the problem I have with that question is that I think it's rooted in a problem that I pointed out in my introduction, which is economic determinant. I think that when it comes to the question of whether somebody is motivated to work for deans or innovate or whatever. There's also the issue of the individual's personality structure and all of the different things that make that what it is and economic conditions are only one of many aspects of that. I know people that I have no doubt that if you gave them say a UBI of, you know, $50,000 a year, they would do absolutely nothing. They sit in front of the TV and smoke pot for the rest of their life. I know other people that you could give them a million dollars a year as a UBI and they would still be out busting ass working doing something, inventing this or being an entrepreneur or whatever, or some kind of work. Maybe it wouldn't even be profit generating work, civic work or something like that. They would be doing that. The issue there I think gets more into the issue of personality structure and psychological makeup as much as economic systems. I don't have to say that economic systems don't intersect with individual personalities, but it's a lot more complicated than what the question would suggest. You got it. Thanks so much. Will Stewart, thanks for your question. Forgive me, guys. I didn't get a great night of sleep last night. I already asked this one that Dr. Ben, what is your definition of democracy in a pure democracy? How do you safeguard the majority from exploiting the minority? Yes, I think my definition of democracy would be the same as everybody else's, you know, rule by the majority. Now, if you're worried about having the minority rights being trampled on in a pure democracy that might give you a reason to want an impure democracy with some constitutional protection for minority rights, but I don't see how it gives you a reason to not want democracy or crucially how it gives you a reason to not want democracy extended into the sphere where most adults have to spend the best eight hours of every five days a week. That's only eight hours because the results are passport or struggles. You got it. If I could just add a little PS under this because I was starting to talk about this earlier. I find oftentimes in critiques of democracy they'll say stuff like, you know, democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting about what's for dinner and they'll put these huge fears of like mob rule. The fact is, is that when you are making a decision democratically, you can have a tiny group of people make that decision and you can have a large group of people make that decision. And maybe it'll be a great decision. Maybe people will get screwed over by it. But if it's a large group of people making that decision, you have a much better chance of being part of that large group and not getting screwed over. Essentially, to favor elite democracy over direct democracy or more universal forms of democracy is essentially just the wish for a benevolent dictatorship to be extended. It's inherently anti-democratic. So I think what people really need to realize when someone's stoking those fears is why are they soaking those fears and the fact is they're doing it to make you afraid of your own power. It's so visual and every individual is part of a collective. There isn't actually a battle to be waged there. You got it. And thanks, Christopher Hatch. Appreciate your question. And also your spelling of subsidies. That's really clever. So they asked, are wage subsidies like food stamps socialist? No. Yeah, no. Gotcha. Everybody's on the same page. So I was like, and then thanks for your question. This one coming in from, I think we had asked, yep, we got that. Brad Moerberg, thanks for your question said, I like the idea of central planning. But how can we make sure social liberties are protected under a government that has the power of central planning? We came. I mean, again, that just sounds like the democracy question worded slightly differently. And even if you do have, you know, so I think that I think that the idea that the, that having the economy be in the hands of private owners is some sort of safeguard against trampling of liberties is just kind of historically illiterate because whereas it's true that there are authoritarian countries that have had centrally planned economies that trampled over those. It's also true there have been authoritarian countries that have had regular capitalist economies that have had just as much trampling of those of those liberties or much more so. You know, when you talk about like Hitler and Suharto and people like that, you know, which, which again happened in societies that where most of the economy was in the hands of regular capitalist companies. So I'd say that if that's your plan for safeguarding, you know, social liberties is to keep the economy private. I think you need a better plan. Yeah, I'd say that there is something of a, there is some sort of a steel man and I can pull out of this in that it is generally a bad idea to centralize power and control of like over the entire economy, and lots of factors of society in the hands of just a few people, because it's easier to get a idiot in that position, it's easier to get a tyrant in that position and it's easier to just make a mistake and cause more problems we want power to be diffused as much as possible because then there's more fail to prevent those kinds of problems. And we see in countries with more democracy they tend to be a little bit more robust and able to handle economic crises and also political crises, because of that state of diffused power. What I'm going to say is that with regard to capitalism and socialism I think socialism will diffuse the power more, rather than more greatly concentrated in the form of the state. Got it, and this one fresh in from Will Stewart, appreciate it, said, Brenton is six million years of human evolution, not empirical evidence of that fear. Of what fear. Yeah, I was wondering that I was hoping you'd know. He might be referring to something I said in my opening statement where I talked about, like the fear that people will. If we're, if we're not whipped into shape if we're not forced to produce will either be conquered or will stagnate. And I would say human evolution is the reason why that won't happen. So let's talk all the time about us having infinite wants and infinite needs and the Buddhists know this that desire is something that you, you can't conquer by gaining things either by accomplishments, or by physical acts or or pulling things out as soon as you have what you want you want something else. So, the, the fact is that human psychology does not allow us to stagnate and it's one of the things that separates us from the animals that the problem here is that people that he's thinking of humans as if we are animals, because large, I'm guessing that the propaganda he's ingested has told him that the lower classes are animals and will behave as animals as opposed to thinking rational humans. But just as a, as a quick addendum, I won't go off the big thing about this because I know we have limited, fairly little time left, but the seems like a lot of the questions are asking some sort of like, are we sort of orbiting around human nature objections to socialism which is the interesting enough topic that we should do a different debate just about that. Gosh, and last one for the night. Thanks Farron. Say last, who says, watch me dip, watch me nae nae, watch me dip, dip James. Is that the new like cool song, Brenton? Is that okay? I'm nearly 40, so I don't know, but I know dip is cool now and with the nae nae is an older song that was cool, like what, 10 years ago? Thank you for teaching me that. But they said thanks for all you do. So I couldn't thank the speakers more. It's been a true pleasure. So we really do appreciate them folks. They're linked in the description so that you can hear plenty more from our guests or read plenty more either as you really do appreciate them. And so we want to say one last final thank you to our guests. And I will be back with a post credit scene in just a moment to let you know about upcoming debates folks. We are excited about those and so one last thank you though everybody for your questions and also to our speakers. It's been a true pleasure to have you, Ben, Brenton, Keith and Todd. Thanks James. Absolutely. Thanks everybody. I'll be back in just a moment with that post credit scene. Stick around. Ladies and gentlemen, that was a fun one to our guests. We love them. We appreciate them. They are linked in the top of the description so you can hear plenty more. And good to see you guys. I love hanging out with you guys though. Thanks for your kind words and your encouragement and best top. Thanks for your question friend. The question was who song is that the answer is and it's in the description as well. Let me I'm going to pull it up and put it in the chat for you. But in case you ever need it in the future, it's always in the description and it's actually the title is above Envy and it's by, or I'm sorry, title is World Goes Wild and it's a by above Envy. And so we, yeah I love that song. It never gets old for me. We hear in the chat sometimes people say in the chat sometimes it's like oh it changes the song. It's been at least a year but I love it. I still haven't gotten sick of it. Andrew Krull. Good to see you buddy. Thanks for being with us. And then let me know if I pronounce it right. Ardly Robbie Habibi. Thank you for being with us. We're glad you're here. Devin Embelton. Thanks for hanging out with us. And Ophir, good to see you again. Darth Revan, good to see you again. Big thank, Bruce Wayne. Glad you are back. That was a lot of gore. Good to see you again. Devin Embelton and Christopher Hatch. Thanks for your kind words. Thanks for being here. We're glad you're with us. Tioga. Oh, she's a classic. We always, we're always happy to see our little buddy Tioga. But I might tease her like she's my little sister and call her little Tioga but nothing but positive things to say. You nerd. And Eric Nelson. Glad you're here. As well as Dave Gar. Good to see you again. And let's see what good to see you. And let's see here. Keeping up here. Human girl. Glad you're with us. And Canite. Glad to see you again, my friend. And then Tessa says I will unsubscribe if you change that intro. I agree. And that reminds me, folks, hey, if you want to reminder this debate, the one I'm pointing to right here, see that poster? It's going to be epic. And so if you have not yet hit that subscribe button and hit that notification button as well, folks, you don't want to miss this one. It's going to be epic. We're really excited about it. Samuel is a fun guy and a class act. And we've always loved Matt. Matt's been a huge help to the channel. So that's going to be a fun debate. So we love both our guests for that. And it's going to be a really fun one. So do make sure you've got your notification bell clicked so that it's showing like the ringing, you know, so it'll have like the little like ringing. It's got the little little ring lines like on the outside of the bell. You know what I'm looking at? So you guys, it's going to be epic. And watching it live is always more fun. I tell so sometimes when I'm talking to like at the beginning of classes or something and I'm like, we're talking about all of my classes that I take right now. All of the I think all the grad classes period. Yeah, I think like every single grad class on campus is online. And I get to teach in person. So I teach general psych and I love it, especially because it's in person. I always tell people it's like music. It's like sports. It's like anything. It's always better live. It's way more engaging. And so I think the same is true of classes. I think the same is true of these debates. It's fun to watch it afterward and a lot of, you know, when I can't be here, sometimes somebody else is moderating and I like getting to listen to it afterwards, but it is in my ideal. I do love it when it's live. And so, but yeah, stripper liquor. Good to see you again. And Andrew. Let's see. Silver Harlow. Good to see you again. Thanks for coming by. And let's see here is some smack talk in the old chat. I love it. You guys are fun. You guys have got energy and but yeah, let's see who else will store it. Good to see us as the fear I was referring to was associated with my question on democracy. Oh, gotcha. Okay, so sorry about that. My memory shot. It's just been a long day. I went to sleep early last night, but I laid in bed for like two and a half hours and in sleep. It's that usually doesn't happen anymore. But last night, it sure did. That's for sure. And so I'm like, I don't know if you can notice there are some days where like when I'm best top said, are you willing to do business debate? It depends. It really depends on what the specific topic or title would be. So I'm not sure if you let's see, you're open to email me at modern a debate at gmail.com. And we always ask folks if you want to come on a debate. Let's see right now political debates. The audience is like, frankly, it's like, we're seeing the audience more excited for debates on religion, frankly, also maybe even science. I think that sometimes the political, I think like the, the, the election in the US, usually afterwards people are a little pooped out. But I mean, like, yeah, we'll still have political debates, kind of be scattered. It kind of be mixed in terms of science, religion and politics. And then let's see here. But yeah, oh, I think I was saying that when I'm sleep deprived, you can tell sometimes because I will not be as clear in my enunciation, for example, and I, you can notice at the beginning of this debate that I wasn't well slept. You could hear that I was, for example, sometimes only pronouncing like half of a word and like, and then just moving forward. But Eric Nelson, glad you're here as well. Colin Lorenz, good to see you again. Human girl, or human beta, as she prefers to be called. We're glad you're here, human girl. You look so familiar for some reason. And then big thing Bruce Wayne says dumpster fire debate, Bible is self evident, twist Atheist versus Christian versus Muslim. That would be really fun. And that would be an epic debate topic. I'm trying to think of, I'm open to it. It would be juicy. Best top says modern day debate so in your opinion, socialism or democracy. Oh, I see what you're saying. I'm confused. Can't you have theoretically couldn't you have both like a socialist society and also it be democratic, unless you're maybe I will concede my area of expertise is more like psychology or philosophy. Political philosophy though, even that is still outside of my, I've never really gone very deep on it. So it's like, you guys can probably tell sometimes when like words come up, I'm like, what is it? What does that mean? What is a capitalist? Brian F. Thanks for your said so many. Oh, he said so many people scared to touch the like button. Betas. You guys don't be a beta hit that like button if you enjoyed this debate. That always encourages us. We appreciate your support folks and also want to let you know though. Yeah, I'm pumped. I forgot to mention it up front to the start of the debate. You guys, I am so excited and I appreciate you so much for your support of the channel. Andrew Olson. Thanks for your super chat. Really do appreciate it. Oh, Andrew. I am so sorry. I don't know if you're watching Andrew. You might be watching this like I don't know if you pause the debate at some point. And so you might still think that the Q&A is ongoing, but so sorry I can't ask the question because they're gone. I'm really sorry, man. But I do appreciate your question. And let's see, Will Stewart says it's probably my fault. Oh, no, man, I'm honestly I had a feeling that's why I read the super chat and I was like Brenton will probably know what I mean. But the questions move so fast that it's hard. It's all me, man. Darth Revan says I recommend Vlad Jaffe for the socialism debates. Hey, I'm open to it. That's one thing folks. I got to let you know. If you have people on YouTube that you love watching and you know they're articulate, that's the trick folks. And oftentimes, so people sometimes asked like, Well, James, will you have me on if I'm not a huge YouTuber? And I'm like, Yeah, we're actually open to that. Now it's true that being articulate tends to have being articulate, I think correlates with having like, you know, a larger following online. But it's not like, you know, it isn't necessarily, you know, there's not a one to one correspondence. Okay. And so what I would say is if you know of like YouTubers or people out there that you're like, I love this, you know, this person they're articulate and they love to debate. And you ask them if you're like, Hey, would you ever do like a debate online? Like, and they're like, Oh, yeah. If they say yes, let me know. I mean, we'd love to like reach out to them. But sometimes, I mean, a lot of times we get names of people where they're like, Here's a person's name and then like, but I always try to ask like, Do you know if they actually like to debate though? Because if you've never seen a debate with that person, I usually say they probably don't like to debate or they probably don't want to. Because especially if they've been on YouTube for a long time and they've got like a lot of followers, like, they've probably been asked before to do a debate. Now, maybe they didn't like the context. That's possible. But I could tell you folks, I will tell you, if you have somebody out there, you're like, Man, I love this YouTuber. They are awesome. Then yeah, feel free like ask them say, Hey, do you like you want to go on a debate channel? Are you open to that? And if they say yes, like definitely let me know and we can try to reach out to them because that's, you could say the best predictor of whether or not they'll come on and do a debate here. And human girl says beta. Big thing Bruce Wayne says, topic ghosts are real. We might do that. That could be fun. I would love to get Zach. What's his name? McMuffin? I can't remember. Zach Baggins? Is that his name? The guy on ghost adventures. That would be epic. My girlfriend, she watches him and I'm like, it's like, okay, we could maybe do that. But hardly Robbie Habibi says, Ciao, y'all. Thanks friend for coming by. We hope you take care. Object to object says, how are you James? I'm doing well. Thanks for asking. I appreciate that. I'm a little sleep deprived. So I got to get to sleep pretty soon here. But Farron and Salah says, James said juicy yellow. Well, that's like my, let me show this to you guys. I'm so proud of this. Where is it? So you guys, this is like one of my favorite things ever. Someone sent this to me and I was like, thank you so much. I loved it. Two seconds. I'm going to find it here guys. Someone sent this to me. They mailed it to me. I'm trying to remember. Oh man. Is it Max? I'm so sorry brother. No, no, no. Mr. Nelson. I'm only saying his last name. Sent this shirt to me. I'm so excited. And then on the back you guys, this is like maybe my favorite shirt. Do you see where it says, there it is. MDD. So yes, juicy. We love juicy debates. We're excited about the future guys. And I would say, hey, if you love listening to juicy debates, you guys have to let you know about this. We've been super excited. Well, let me know. Let me tell you about a couple of things. One, if you prefer Twitch over YouTube, well, I've got cool news. We are on Twitch, my dear friends. And so let me just throw that link for our Twitch into. Oh, let's see. Did I miss any questions in the Twitch chat? So sorry you guys. Thanks Brooks Barrow for your positive feedback on the intro song, by the way. And yeah, we are on, basically, we're on Twitch. And I'm going to show you guys that link in case you have never seen it before, because we are so proud of our Twitch. It's a tremendous Twitch. People are saying it's the best. And thank you so much. Let's see. Twitch is giving me announcement. It says, stripper liquor account created December 14, 2020, following since December 14. Thank you stripper liquor for being one of our followers. And the fact that you apparently you you actually like started your Twitch account for the purpose of modern day debate, we really do appreciate that. We want to let you know folks, you may not know about this. However, how did I lose the word? It's like weird. I lost the YouTube chat. Wait, what is going on here? It's like two seconds, folks. It's like boomer, boomer problems. Okay. But basically, I, we do have Twitch. And now I am putting it in the, the old live chat, our Twitch. And so you guys check that out. If you like Twitch more than YouTube. Oh, thanks. Let's see. That's right. Thanks. Tuss beatbox. You beat me to it. And yeah, you can follow us there and then you'll get notifications when we go live. And then Will Stewart says, as an ENTP with diagnosed hyperthymesia, I definitely tend to leave things out. My poor wife. That's appreciate you being so honest friend. No, I, you're, you're on track. It's like I said, when I'm sleep deprived, I'm like barely hanging in there. But human girl says you should get Lance from the serfs. We might, I think he wanted to debate JF. So that is a possibility. But I know that I think it was JF is actually doing less controversial topics. So whether or not that happens, I do not know for sure. But let's see. Where is this two seconds, folks? I'm catching up with the chat. Some people that would bring interesting topics. Darth Revan. Yeah. I mean, if you know that they'd actually be willing to debate, if you've actually asked them before, that's like a big predictor of whether or not they'd come on. And then reservoir of gore says, would a juicy meter graphic on screen be possible when the debate gets heated? That is actually a funny idea. That would seriously be funny. Squatch Talk says, yeah, more science. Let's talk Bigfoot. I'm open to it, man. I just told you like, I got your email and I'm open to it. The only thing is it's like, we're big on like, people, if they're going to see us, a person try to defend Bigfoot, they're going to want somebody that brings like a lot of stuff to like look at. Okay. So like, footcasts, footprint cast, or a video or photos, like that, people get a kick out of that. That's way more interesting, engaging compared to if it was like, purely, you could say the case was made purely with words and no pictures or video or anything. Like that. And let's see. Darth Revan. Let's see. Oh, got that. Thanks for that. And then Andrew Kroll says, neutral platform even betas are welcome. That's true. We are fully neutral. We are glad you're here no matter what walk of life you're from folks. Thanks for being with us. It's always fun. And then big thing Bruce Wayne says, science topic, it's harder to reach the bottom of the ocean than go to the moon. Oh, that's actually pretty interesting. And then, let's see. Spingard Doom says a girlfriend. What was all that one in a million talk? That's right. I do adore her. She's got a big heart. She's very kind. Her name is Frankie. No joke. And she's a real girl. This is Frankie. This is a picture of her. So that's her and I around Christmas time. I was so burnt out over Christmas time. She was a saint for being patient with me because I was just so moody. The semester in the fall was honestly unlike no other. So my, yeah. Let's see. Yeah, we want to let you know though, if you want to support the channel, if you're like, Hey, man, I love the channel. And you're like, is there a way that I can like support it? Cause we do get that, like we get that question. And so we do appreciate that. If you rate us on the podcast app. So if you haven't listened to us via podcast, you can rate us on most podcast apps, I think. But also if you're not listening to us via podcast, want to remind you folks. If you want, you know, there are some things that's like for, you know, if it's like a short podcast, don't get me wrong, there's value in that too. Like some of them are like 20 minutes or five minutes maybe. But if you want long form content that you can turn on and just let it play during your drive to work in the morning or during like an exercise routine, you just want to keep your mind on like something that you're listening to. Modern day debate is great for that you guys. And so I would say, Hey, find us in your favorite podcast app. We're on. See, you see all these apps over here on the far right side of the screen past Matt. So you can see in the far right side of the screen. Let's see. Let me see if I could like point to it myself by expanding my picture. Basically you guys. Two seconds. Okay. Yes. Okay, it's closer. So you can see right here, guys. Here I am. So if you see like right here, this is where it says subscribe, you know, if you're sick like us and you want more controversial debates. And then right below this, you can see it says we're also on every podcast. See where my fingers pointing. We're on all those podcasts, Spotify, Apple podcasts. I think we're on iTunes, Pandora, even audible. Google podcast, podcast addict. I mean, you name it folks. We're, we're there and we're excited about that is that has been just super encouraging to see tons of people download it and apparently it's been useful. So I would say folks, it's perfect for your drive to work. It's perfect for when, you know, if you clean in the house, maybe you're sweeping or whatever and you're doing a bunch of chores. And it's like, hey, modern day debate is on, you could say the best podcast apps that there are. Oh, let me change my size again. This is embarrassing. Two seconds. So let's see. Squatch Talk says it's called bumper music. It's a great song. Thank you for that. Brian Stevens says amazing Atheist. I don't think we're going to get amazing Atheist. I actually, one thing. So stat, stuff in X hammer or sticks and hammer. I'm open to that. That would be cool. Human girl. I've got to find out how to contact him. I don't think I have his contact info because some of these people I've already emailed. So I have been in touch with like amazing Atheist and stuff trying to set up debates, but Vosh and bread tube. Let's see. I just emailed Vosh the other day about a possible debate, but we'll see if he's interested. And then Sphincter of Doom says has anyone in it intimated they want to debate nuclear power? No, nobody has yet. It depends. That one. I'm not sure about. I'm like trying to think. I'm trying to like frankly, like heavily review our topics and see like what debates are the ones that the modern day debate audiences enjoyed the most. That one. I'm like, I don't know. Frankly, I'll be completely real. I'm a little bit nervous about doing it as a new one. Let's see. Brian Stevens says, ha ha. Best three minutes ever. Yeah. Darth is a character for sure. And then Squash Chalk. No. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be mean man, but it's like, can you email me whatever you want to share? It's just hard for me to like, it's like, let's see. Will Stewart says you have had Jesse Lee Peterson on too many times. Amazing. That's right. I'm Jesse in spirit. But yeah, we really do appreciate you guys. Stripper Lickers says sadly YouTube commercials are out of control. Are they really? What do you mean? Tell me more. Let's see. But yes, let's see. Andrew Kroll's right. Don't be a bait on it. Hit that like button. Brian Stevens says James Seption debating himself. That would be fun. I do. At some point, I would like to debate. It'd be fun. But and let's see. Amazing. Brian Stevens says Vosh is his neighbor. That's pretty hip. Huh. And thanks for kind words, Jim. Appreciate that, buddy. That means a lot. Seriously. It's a lot of fun to be here. Thank you guys for making it fun. And then big thing. Bruce Wayne says I need left women to debate these neckbeards. Well, human girl, maybe your girl, she may be up for it. I don't know. You got to ask her. But we're excited about the future. Thank you everybody for all your support and love. I seriously, you guys make it fun. So you guys just put me in a great mood. I love you guys. I appreciate you guys. I hope you're doing well. I'm thankful for you. And so, hey, let me know if there's anything I can do to make your day easier. I appreciate you guys. And I just, I love being here. So thanks for making it fun. And we will be back tomorrow night, you guys. So if you have not seen, Skyler Fiction is going to be debating CJ. And that is going to be on a juicy topic from the Old Testament. So you don't want to miss that, folks. It's going to be epic. And so, thanks so much. We appreciate you. Reservoir of Gore. Thanks for your idea. That's an interesting one on valid comedy topics. And N-O-X-D says favorite debate on your channel. Oh, that's a good question. I, maybe it is the debate that we had with Matt Dillahunty and inspiring philosophy in the atheist experience studio was really fun. So that was a blast. I just, I enjoyed it. That was a fun time traveling and all that. Oh yeah, Brooke. Thanks for your reminder. I want to let you know, folks, also, we are really excited. So in the chat, I just put this link, which I copy and pasted it from Tuss. So I got to give credit to Tuss. But basically, you guys, if you have Amazon Prime, that means you actually have access to use a free Twitch subscription. Because so on Twitch, it's like you basically like normally you'd pay like five bucks or so to subscribe to a Twitch streamer. We're on Twitch. And what you can do is if you have Amazon Prime, you actually can use the link that I just pinned to the top of the chat. You can use that link to activate your free Twitch subscription because Twitch is owned by Amazon. So if you have an Amazon Prime account, you can actually use your Amazon Prime account for a free Twitch subscription. And so you won't pay anything more than you normally do for your Amazon Prime. Like that stays the same. But you could be helping out modern day debate because basically it's like $2.50. And so $2.50, because it's like $5 in total, like that's how much a subscription is worth. Modern day debate gets half of that subscription. And so remember, it's like no extra cost to you. But it does help support the channel. And you might be thinking like, Ah, James, it's not going to make a difference. But here's how it could. Brian Stevens made a great point. He said this. So far, I think we've got about 20 people who have subscribed using their Amazon Prime free Twitch membership. Some of them might be natural like subscriptions without Amazon Prime, but I think most are Amazon Prime ones, which is like, Hey, it's great. I mean, it's no extra cost. And if we have 100 people doing that each month, that's $250. You guys, that's enough. If we do our in-person debates again this summer, which we absolutely are planning to, I'm determined. That's easily a one way flight or even potentially that's a potentially depending on where you're flying. Like let's say it's like Denver to Minneapolis or Denver to Dallas. That's pretty easily a round trip flight. So like, let's say we fly back to the atheist experience studio or something like that. So you guys like it adds up. It really like if we have, I mean, think of all the people that probably have Amazon Prime and are not using their free Twitch subscription that are subscribers at modern day debate. We have what is it like 43,000 subscribers. So I mean, there's got to be a thousand in there. I mean, that could really help fund, especially like I said, we want to do a lot more in-person debates. And so, you know, not too much for flights, but we think it's worth it. I mean, those debates are a lot of fun and they do really well on YouTube. The audience really enjoys them. So that's something that I'm like, Hey, it really can help. Brian Steven says, I gave my prime. Thanks for your Twitch subscription to your Amazon Prime account. Brian, seriously, it really does help seriously. Brooke Chavis, am I pronouncing it right? Brooke Chavis Chavis says, I don't have the modern day debate Amazon link, but if you use the link, MDD gets a percentage. It helps out guys. Oh, that's a good point too. So folks, okay, last thing. So we also in our description box, I'm going to see if I can, if it's still in there, we have an Amazon portal link. So in other words, if you use our Amazon portal link, that means that anything you buy after going through that Amazon portal link, basically anything you buy, it's about 3% Amazon kicks back to modern day debate. And so that helps as well, folks. And again, no extra cost to you. So there's a couple of ways that you can help modern day debate and it will be no extra cost to you. It's just like I said, purely, it's just a way of helping out modern day debate. And we have big plans for the future, you guys, we're pumped about the future in terms of Epic stuff we want to do, including I want to go on tour this summer to do some Epic in person debates. So we're excited about that. But want to say thank you everybody for all of your support. Thanks for your love, your support. Thank you guys for everything. I just appreciate you guys, you make it fun here. And so we're excited about the future, though, you guys. And yeah, thank you guys for all your support. Thanks for being here, no matter what walk of life you're from. You name it, folks, Christian, atheist, capitalist, socialist, no matter who you are, folks. We really do appreciate you being with us. Black, white, gay, straight, Republican, Democrat, you name it. We are about true tolerance, folks. We really want everybody here. And so we absolutely do appreciate you. And so Tuss Beat Pucks, thanks for your help. Put the Amazon, Tuss just put the, by the way. Tuss, appreciate you've been like a huge supporter and I appreciate that so much Tuss, seriously. And I'm pinning Tuss is Tuss put the link to the Amazon portal. Where, like I said, like 3% of it would go to a modern debate that is linked at the top of the chat right now. Thanks for doing that Tuss. And so if you guys want to use that, like I said, it's another way you can help the channel. Chuck Pike, glad you're here with us. Hope you're doing well. And so we are glad you were here, my friend. And so Brian Stevens, thanks, appreciate it. Brian Stevens have 110 likes, 113 now too. Awesome, you guys. Thank you guys so much for that support. Brian Stevens says, why do we support the Sith? That's right, Jedi and even Sith. We're open to everybody, you guys. Hey, Sith, I mean, like we're like, we're like radicals about this tolerance thing. So we even welcome the Sith in addition to the Jedi. So yeah, we do appreciate you guys. Thanks everybody. We appreciate you. Love you guys. I hope you have a great rest of your night. And like I said, we'll be back tomorrow night. It's going to be a lot of fun. And so thanks for everything. Appreciate you guys. Love you guys. I hope it was fun. And Brooke Chavis, thanks for letting me know that it's pronounced Chavis. So thank you very much. And yeah, I appreciate you guys. Thanks so much.