 So it's the military. Firefighters, protesters, socialists. There has to be some kind of governmental control. There has to be some kind of government, yeah. But the problem is this, that if we have to view democratic socialism as a moment in the larger movement of democracy, my dear brother Jeff Stout, who's one of the great philosophers and thinkers of democracy, calls them egalitarian freedom traditions. Now notice, notice what he's doing here. And this is something true of the left generally. Again, the more intellectual left is what they really, what they really push is democracy. Is the will of the majority, the will of the people. They're majoritarians. They are for democracy. And democracy is always pure democracy, democracy that rejects the idea of individual rights and you'll never hear these guys talking about real individual rights. They'll talk about rights when it's convenient, civil rights in particular. And they will talk about, they somehow reject democracy when it violates the rights that they hold dear. For example, equal political rights because democracy is equal political rights. That's the absolute. So they'll fight for equal political rights. But they don't care about economic rights. Those don't matter. So voting is the most important thing to them. Voting is the most important thing to them. Production, creation is completely unimportant. And if voting is the most important, then democracy is what it's all about. And democracy is elevated above all. And of course we know that what democracy is going to lead to. Democracy is going to lead to what he calls socialist democracy. Because democracy is just, well, how do we vote to take his stuff and redistribute it? How do I vote? How do I get my gang together? How do I get a big enough gang together to vote to fight your gang? Democracy is just gang warfare. Now again, I'm not against voting. But voting within a context of the protection of the individual. Voting in a context of the protection of minority protection. I'm for minorities. But the smallest minority, of course, is the individual. So voting in a context of protecting the individual, sure. But once you abandon the protection of individualism, of the individual's right to his life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness, then what you get is some form of socialism. Because it's just too easy for my gang to get together. And if I can get 51% of my gang or cut deals with other gangs to get 51%. So I can get my stuff and they can get their stuff at the expense of the minority. Call the minority businessman, call the minority the individual, call the minority people with wealth, call the minority, whatever. People who have stuff that I can take from them. Then democracy will always turn into socialism. And he knows that. And he's celebrating it by celebrating democracy, an area nobody disagrees with. And that's simply a way of saying that if you look at the world through the lens of the masses of people who are poor and working people. The masses of people who are poor and working people. Are the masses of people today in America poor? By what standard of poverty? It's just not true. The masses of people are not poor. The majority of Americans are not poor by any definition. In terms of absolute poverty, almost nobody is poor in America today. Because of the wealth created by entrepreneurs, by capitalists, by capitalism. There's almost no absolute poverty in America. And relative poverty, well, yeah, there's always going to be somebody who's relatively poor. But the fact is that a majority of Americans, the majority of the so-called masses are not poor. And working Americans. Again, the assumption, the implicit assumption. And every word that these people talk, say. The implicit assumptions in how they approach the world. The implicit assumption is people with money don't work. They don't work. Entrepreneurs don't work. Bankers don't work. It's only the working class. Working class. We're not working class. I'm not working class. If I don't work, I'm a class that's not working. That's what it's implied by everybody who's not working class. David, I mean, this is the problem with doing these kind of videos where you analyze somebody else's talking. It's behind every sentence, every word they say there is an agenda, there is meaning. It's not that they're thinking about the meaning because it's just implicit already in everything that they do. And everything that they say there is meaning. And they're capitalizing on the fact that much of that meaning is already part of the culture. Whereas I cannot do that. One of the big barriers that objectivists have in reaching the culture is that we're not using terms in the way the culture understands them. We're not just, we can't just throw out there things like profit before people. And we can't even talk about profit because in people's minds, people are thinking profit before people. So every time I mention profit, you have to say profit means done because people have no clue what it means. Or their understanding of it is so perverted, so distorted that they're hearing something completely different than what you're saying. They're hearing that you're placing profits before people that you want to screw people. That's what they're hearing when you talk about profits. The biggest challenge, one of, I think the biggest challenge we face is that people are not used to having terms defined. People are not used to, and they're not open to having the terms that they, they don't think enough about the terms that they use for you to redefine them for them and for them to accept that and to think about that. Too few people are willing to have the conception, not even definition, conception of terms challenged. What are the conditions under which they can have security from domination? Security from domination. Now notice that for him, capitalism is domination. Capitalism is exploitation. Capitalism is the domination of a few, the capitalists, over the masses of poor people. Where are they exactly? The masses of poor people. What are the conditions under which they can have dignity by holding forms of oppression at arm's length? Capitalism is oppression. Capitalism denies people. Dignity. And for me, it's not an ism. You see, if capitalism vis-a-vis feudalism can generate liberties and freedoms, I'm for it. You hear that? This is exactly Marx's argument. Yeah, capitalism is an improvement over feudalism. Capitalism is an improvement over feudalism because it knocks down the aristocrats. It knocks down, you know, people who have money, who have stuff, because they stole it or just because they were born into it. Not born into just inheriting, but born into a status. And you think capitalism is good if it does that, but... And that's precisely what the middle classes did when they broke from feudalism in Europe, or broke from feudalism in other parts of the world, right? You had to overthrow kings and queens in the name of personal liberties. But those personal liberties were confined too often to white brothers with property. Now, this is true. And this is the legitimate... Whatever legitimacy they have for their arguments, this is some of the legitimacy, right? That the liberties were too often confined. Now, what they don't talk about is that capitalism created the conditions and the ideas that made liberty possible for everybody. Ultimately, the eradication of slavery, the equal rights for women that made all of that possible. But it's true that the beginning of capitalism, only some people were free. Only some people were free. And that's the one thing they have to latch onto. But that's not capitalism. That is true of the very beginnings. And this is what gives their arguments some aura of credibility. Still wrong. Because the only way to liberate everybody else is to adopting those personal liberties for everybody. And that's the system of true capitalism. So when everybody has personal liberties, and those personal liberties are protected by governments, and that's the only thing government does. But everybody has personal liberties, including the capitalist, including the middle class, including those who have. And that force is the only thing that goes up against, that only thing can violate those personal liberties. And that's what the government needs to extract from society. But that's not where they're going to go with this. And the white brothers with no property, they either try to hold on to their whiteness, or they become like the white brothers with property, or they make more choices and said, I want to be a person of integrity. I want to fight with the folk who are being excluded. Now, this is what I said before. You know, most leftists would say, yeah, capitalism brought about, you know, slavery was on the backs of slavery, and all these whites, they benefited from it. And Connell West is much more subtle than that. He's saying, there were white people who had the liberty because they were property owners. This was Marxism. But then there were white people who didn't have all those liberties and weren't property owners, and they were screwed by the system too. And then they had two options. They could become property owners, or they could just put their head down and pretend nothing was going on, or they could fight for liberty, for everybody. He doesn't generalize a wrong race in the way so many leftists do, and I give him a huge amount of credit for that because the temptation is so much there. So, you know, you can see this attitude towards capitalism. Notice how little he spent about criticizing communism and that at the end of the day, he is not going to criticize. He is not going to criticize Marx and relate the relationship between Marx and communism, which he says he rejects. And that so much of the narrative, so much of the storytelling, so much of the argument that the left has is based on these just blatant lies about how the world works, how profit works, how wealth creation works, how people get wealth. Just lies that they never get into, but they're just implicit. They're just under the surface. And nobody ever challenges them on it because the only people who can challenge them on it are people who have a philosophy grounded in reality, grounded in an understanding of not just markets, but the morality of markets. And that's objective, it's nobody else. Nobody else can really challenge these guys on this. Here's more Connell West's question. The lens that we should look at something like democratic socialism through. Not that it can't work, but that it hasn't been implemented correctly before. Notice Joe Rogan feeding him this line. That's exactly what we've got to get beyond the ism. You're absolutely right. What makes not just the United States has been democratic experiments all around the world in various circumstances. We become central stage because we become a world power that understands itself as a democracy. With all the contradictions, they go hand in hand with that. Notice that in socialism we go straight to democracy, straight to democracy. That's slavery, patriarchy. Workers don't have the right to engage in collective bargaining in the United States until the 1930s. Now, notice how important this is to these guys. Workers don't have the right to engage in collective bargaining. Why is that so important? Well, if you believe that the fundamental relationship between a worker and an employer and a capitalist is exploitation, then the only way a worker can protect himself from being exploited, because that's a fundamental relationship, that is the essential nature of that relationship, is to form a gang, to form a group and fight. And have the law protecting them. Now, also notice that this is just untruely saying, because you could do collective bargaining well before the 1930s. There were unions in the 19th century. The only thing is they didn't get any governmental protection. They didn't get protection of a force. So if you form the union, your employer could fire you. Okay? So what? You have a right to form a union, the employer has a right to fire you. If you went and strike the employer has a right to fire you, now they didn't always fire you, but they have that ability to do it, because it's all voluntary. What the 1930s brought is an involuntary adoption of labor unions, as granting them special power, special force, the ability now to impose their will on management. When management couldn't act, couldn't fire them, couldn't defend itself, but had to accept them. Had to accept their ability to use violence, for example, against replacement workers. And that the government would protect the unions. That's the change. It's not that there were no labor unions before that. It's the labor unions that didn't have any special rights. But if you think, if you're an intellectual and you think that the relationship is a relationship of exploitation between the employer and the employee, then yeah, labor unions become the central part of your thinking. Because it's the only way for the employee to defend himself. Argentina had it in the 1830s, Argentina had labor unions in the 1830s. They had active labor unions earlier than the United States. Guess what? Where would you rather be a working person? In America, Argentina. I've only been on the cutting edge for social justice. Love you down there in Argentina. But they know that. But they had collective bargaining. Why? Because our robber barons and our power elites. Robber barons and power elites. Robber barons. And you got to repeat, if you're a leftist, if you're an anti-capitalist, repeat. Robber barons, robber barons, robber barons, robber barons. Because that institutionalized it, it gets into our minds this idea of exploitation, of grabbing stuff. Not of creation, not of building, not of making, not of trading, not of making the world a better place. Not of values, not of improving people's lives, but of thieves, of stealing, of taking robber and why baron? Well, because they want to associate it with aristocrats. So he's being disingenuous when he complements capitalism for getting rid of feudalism. He wants to bring the same terminology of feudalism onto capitalism. Which is the robber baron. Robber barons were aristocrats. Now, one of the great, great, and I've talked about this often in the past, one of the great tragedies of American history is the way we treat the great industrialists of the 19th century and call them robber barons. These are the people who actually created America, not politicians, not generals, the people who actually made America, beyond the founding fathers, who set it in motion. Other entrepreneurs, the business leaders, the great industrialists of the 19th century who built this country, the railroads, the bridges, the industries, created the jobs, the great, you know, and the injustice of it. It's just horrific. It was so powerful. They became so powerful. You see, Rockefeller Company had private militias that were... Now this is just, he's lying here. This is just untrue. Rockefeller had militias bigger than armies. They did a lot of public armies. Just not true. Now some of the industrialists hired Pinkerton's, hired, in a sense, private security in order to protect themselves against the rampages of the unions, and sometimes they went too far. No question about that. In the early parts of capitalism, sometimes they went too far in violating the rights of their workers, in violating their individual rights. But this is just lying, as presenting them, again, as robber barons. Barons with armies who steal stuff. To make sure workers were not able to engage in collective bargaining. I was in San Francisco just yesterday at the Commonwealth Club, which is now lodged in the Longshoreman Association, which is fascinating. The Commonwealth was well-to-do, ruling class. Harry Bridges, Longshoreman, strong union. Jack London, another great socialist there. Great socialist. And what were they trying to do? They were just trying to ensure that ordinary people gain access to jobs with a living wage. That ordinary people have access to jobs with a living wage. We've had, America's had, you know, a mixed economy, but periods that have been quite free for 250 years. Has there been a shortage of jobs with a living wage in America? I mean, people came from all over the world. They still do. It's cross over the border. Why? Mostly to get jobs that are living wages. They might not be paid as much as Cornel West is at Harvard, but they're being paid so well that they're willing to risk their lives to come into this country. Now, I know some of you think Cornel West is a clown. No, Cornel West is one of the leading intellectuals of the left. If you just dismiss people like this as clowns, you will lose. He's not a moron. He's not a clown. He is emblematic of the intellectual world in which we live. And unless you're willing to confront him in intellectual terms, present with the facts, but deeper presented with the philosophy that counters what he's saying, you will lose and we are losing. All of us are losing because of course the socialist rhetoric is on the right as well. It's not like the right is poor markets. Capitalism is losing. Capitalism is losing because we're not challenging him. We're not challenging him directly. Oh, he's a clown. He's an idiot. He's stupid. Ignore him. Ignore him at your own peril. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broods.