 But it's fascinating. You read Ray Dalio's long essay, which appears on LinkedIn, but it appears in a bunch of other places and is no mention of property rights. When he describes successful countries versus unsuccessful countries, no mention of property rights. When he describes what capitalism is, he doesn't mention property rights. Here's his description of what capitalism is. Let me find it. One second. This is capitalism. The ability to make money, save it, and put it into capitalism. That's it. The ability to make money, save it, and put it into capital. Now that's certainly an aspect of capitalism, but that's exactly thinking in non-essentials. What capitalism is, is the freedom to make, save or consume, put into capital if one wishes. Capitalism is a system where that freedom is protected. And one of the ways in which it's protected, maybe the primary way it's which is protected, is the recognition of the idea that you have an inalienable right to your property. It's the idea of property rights, which what makes the protection of that freedom possible, real. It's something that people can hold. Something that people, the government, can then defend. The government is the defender of our property rights. It's the protector of those property rights. We need that definition, but without it, that ability to make money, save it, and put it into capital. I mean, you could, cronyism somewhat fits that, although it's not exactly making money, but part of it maybe is making, part of it is redistributing. You can save it. And you can see why if you hold such a undefined, floating, weird definition of capitalism that you don't know that we don't have capitalism today, that you don't live in a capitalist place because, hey, I can make money. I can save it and put it into capital. But is that the essential characteristic? No. No, it's not. The essential characteristic is the protection of property rights. The essential characteristic is the protection of individual rights. The essential characteristic is freedom, freedom, individual, liberty, individual, freedom. That is the essential characteristic of capitalism. And if one doesn't understand that that's what capitalism is about, then one can't defend it. One can't argue against it. One can't attack it because one doesn't even understand what it is. And Ray Dalio has no concept what capitalism actually is. I want to go back to the pie because as I said, he says most capitalists don't know how to divide the economic pie. Well, they kind of do. They know how to divide the economic pie that they created, their economic pie. Right? And he says most socialists don't know how to grow it well. So here's the thing about Dalio's solution, right, implied in the statement. It's implied directly in the statement. Why don't we divvy up responsibilities? Why don't we let capitalists grow the pie because they're good at that? And let socialists divide the pie because they're good at that. So why don't we just, God, here's the solution. All our problems are gone. Ray Dalio tells us. Why can't we just re-engineer the system, he says, so that the pie is both divided and grown well? And to do that, he says, what we need is to get a bipartisan committee together of socialists and capitalists together to just solve these problems, to re-engineer the system, to figure out how to grow the pie. That is, you greedy productive people out there, to give you enough incentive so you don't stop working, to make sure that Dagny keeps on running those trains, to make sure the trains get to where they're going on time and effectively. And she can make enough money so that it's worth her while to keep the trains running. And then to tax the hell out of you for the rest of it and redistribute the taxed money to other people. That's kind of divvying up the pie, right, dividing the pie. So we want to give you enough incentive to grow it, again, to help with individuals, to help with property. We want to give you enough incentive with central planners, and we'll see central planning is a big deal for Ray Dalio. We want to do enough central planning so that we want to central plan it in such a way that the capitalists have the incentive and then we redistribute their wealth massively. And we want to do this through bipartisanship. We want to get Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez together with, oh shit, we don't have any capitalists. I guess capitalists, you know, Ray Dalio type of capitalists, will have Ocasio-Cortez sit down with Mitch McConnell maybe with Ray Dalio himself or maybe with, I don't know, somebody, right, fill in the blank. And I think the product of that marriage is Elizabeth Wong. Right, that's what he wants. Okay, say here we are, he's lucky, he views the world in this completely utterly collectivistic way, and it's all about the pie. It's all about allocating the pie, getting the allocation right. And of course we know, we know, we know that socialists are very good at allocating the pie right. They're very good at that. How do they allocate the pie? What's the principle by which, what's the principle by which socialists allocate the pie? Well, Ray Dalio tells us in the essay, he says, from each according to his ability to each according to his need. From each according to his ability to each according to his needs. Now what is Dalio's critique of a statement like that? He says, well it turns out to be naive, it's naive. It's morally, this is my addition, right, it's morally beautiful. It's an idea we all wish we could actually practice, right, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. I mean, it's beautiful, right, that is our truest heaven. And he says, no, it's naive. Why? For the same reason libertarians and conservatives always say communists, communists are no good, it doesn't work. Why? Because it destroys people's incentives to work. It doesn't motivate them to work hard. Because they don't get a commensurable reward. And therefore prosperity suffers. That's what he says, he says prosperity suffers. He doesn't say people die of starvation by the tens of millions of people. No, prosperity suffers. They become a little less rich. He's describing communism here. I mean this is the kind of moral cowardice that these people have. And of course a sympathy, a deep, deep, deep sympathy for communism's philosophy. It just doesn't work. I mean it's beautiful. It's morally an idea. But you know it just doesn't work because it doesn't motivate people enough. So if only we can tinker with it, if only we can tinker with it a little bit. So that we provide people with enough motivation to work hard and then we take their stuff away, we can win. He writes capitalism which connects pain to productivity and creates efficient capital markets that facilitate saving and the ability of buying power to fuel people's productivity. It worked much better. Talk about pragmatism. It worked much better. So we should do capitalism because again, no mention of death and destruction. And no mention about is from each according to his ability, each according to his needs. Is that good? Is that bad? Is that moral? Is that just? I mean he doesn't want to talk about that, right? He doesn't even talk about that. Alright so let's look at some of his actual critiques. What is the problem with capitalism? So you know he calls this where he's coming from, right? And he says, just to end this, he says he studied the world. He's looked at all the economic systems. And he says ideally the best results come when you have equal opportunity in education and in work, good families and a civilized behavior within the system. Right? So equal opportunity in education and we'll see that plays a big role in what he does. Good families and high school years, all equal opportunity in all these things as if that is even possible, as if that is even conceivable. And civilized behavior within a system that most people believe is fair, defined fair, right? And then he says, and then you need free and well-regulated markets, free and well-regulated. Wait, free and well-regulated? I thought regulation was the opposite of freedom. That freedom in markets meant free markets meant free of regulation. Is regulation the application of force to the participants of the market? So how do you have free and well-regulated? He wants a balance. I mean let's not be radical. He argues against being radical throughout the thing. All right, now the rest of the essay he goes, he basically has two claims. One is that inequality is really, really awful and that, you know, it's a disaster and that inequality is the source of our problems today. It's an indication of a problem. He equivocates, like everybody who talks about inequality equivocates between inequality and economic mobility, between inequality and poverty because he knows, like many others, that there's actually no problem economically at least with the gap between poor people and rich people. And again, you can listen to my lecture on inequality to go over this stuff. But there are a few things that are just astounding about just, he cites a lot of studies that he has conducted. But then he cites studies that other people have conducted and he just, he cites them without thinking and without actually reading the studies. And here's a data point that I've seen all over the web. Everywhere you go, you find this data point. And it is truly scary that nobody, nobody, and this is again the power of stories and the power of telling a story, lying about it, but reinforcing the lie over and over and over again by retelling it over and over and over again. And this is where again, the free market side is not doing enough to debunk this crap. So there is a story about, I'll just quote Dalio, he says, according to a recent Federal Reserve study, 40% of all Americans would struggle to raise $400 in the event of an emergency. 40% of Americans would struggle to raise $400 in an event of an emergency. Now that's simply untrue. It's not what the survey shows. It's not what the survey even purports the show. It's true that 40% of Americans say that to raise $400, many of them, a big proportion of the 40% say that they would put it on their credit card. But almost all the people who say they would put it on their credit card say that they would pay off the credit card immediately. That is, they wouldn't take on interest-bearing debts over the long run. It's just a choice of how to pay for it. Hey, if I needed $400 right now, I'm less likely to write a check. I'm less likely to go to an ATM than to give somebody my credit card. So 40% of Americans would either use debt, credit card debt, or a loan from a friend, or some kind of other form of debt, or they would have to sell something, or they don't know where the money would come from. But when you actually look at the people who would have to sell something, or who would have to, for $400, right, or don't know where it would come from, really struggling, or they'd have to, you know, there's a question that's more revealing. If you had to pay the $400, would you cut, would you not be able to pay other bills, right? And the answer is only about, I think it was, and I don't have the number yet, I think it's either 9% or 12%. That's a lot smaller than 40%. I mean, it's sloppiness like this, just sloppiness. Or alternatively, just plain old dishonesty, which I think is the way most people use it. Now, again, it's hard to blame value, although when you write an essay, you would think you would go to original sources and actually read the study. But, I mean, it just doesn't make any sense to me that 40% of Americans can't pay a $400 bill if it came from an emergency, you know. And doesn't that happen all the time? Doesn't your car break down? Or, I don't know, some utility bill is hiding expected, or you go on a vacation or something and you spend $400. I mean, doesn't $400 expenses above and beyond your normal state of expenditure happen all the time? And yet Americans are not struggling in this kind of way, even the 60% who are at the bottom. It's just not true. It's just a lie.