 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brook Show. Great people. I apologize. There was a disaster there. Basically not my fault this time. All the technical problems I've had. This time it's not me. It was the service that I used called Restream and they are just, I don't know, their service has gone nuts. And I couldn't get the video to work. Couldn't get the video to work on YouTube. Couldn't get it to work on Facebook. It kind of worked. But it's working now. And anyway, Restream is working on a solution. And basically next time we won't have to go through all this. So I apologize. And I apologize for all that noise in the beginning. Didn't have something muted. It was not heavy construction in my living room. And of course I'm not in my living room so it wouldn't be heavy construction in my living room anyway. So let's see. I think we've got, let me just clean up the windows here because I've opened up like 50,000 windows to try to deal with all this crap. I think I can close now. I think I need that open. I need this open. If you want to ask any questions today, Super Chat is available. So Super Chat is online. Let's see. I've also got, I can see the comments on Facebook kind of barely. All right. And those of you on the podcast, I apologize for all this. I will, maybe we can have it cleaned up before it goes up. All right. There we go. I think we're now all set. Good. Yes. Somebody mentioned that if we had capitalism, these technical problems wouldn't happen because, you know, you'd all be seeing a live hologram of me in real time. And we would be, you know what, 50, 100 years more advanced than we are right now in terms of the kind of technology that we would have available to us. So again, my apologies. Hopefully, hopefully none of you sat by the computers just waiting for this. But hoping you have a great weekend. And I am going to plunge right into it. I mean, the topic today is really the defense is the defense of capitalism. And, you know, I mentioned this yesterday on the show, but I'm seeing more and more and more attacks on capitalism. And I'm not talking about the attacks on capitalism come from the typical left, you know, Occupy Wall Street and everything like that. Those have always existed. Although I will say this about Occupy Wall Street, when Occupy Wall Street was at its peak, the media was not particularly friendly to them. And there was a lot, there was a lot of criticism of Occupy Wall Street from many people. Oh, I have my, there you go. Thanks. Thanks for telling me about my headphones. A lot of people criticized it. And it was a lot of people made fun of it. And it wasn't mainstream. It was considered this crazy radical left wing kind of movement that even the left did not take full ownership over. But I think what's happened since then is that those ideas, the ideas of Occupy Wall Street have become mainstream. And that the positions that Occupy Wall Street has had is now standard positions within the Democratic Party and within the candidates for president, among the candidates for president of the Democratic Party. My view is that Democratic Party has moved significantly, significantly to the left, significantly to the left since Donald Trump has been elected. And I think that the American people are accepting of the left moving significant to the left because of what the right today represents and because of where Donald Trump has positioned us. But what I'm seeing today, what I'm seeing today more than anything else is that people, I won't call people in business, people who have traditionally made an effort in defining capitalism, people who've obviously benefited enormously from whatever capitalism we might still have or, you know, some of them might have benefited from the cronyism that exists today. But people in business, people in finance are coming out not to defend capitalism, although they pretend they are. And they're not coming out kind of to say, you know, we're not getting involved, which I think in the past, they just stayed silent. They just stayed out of it. They just stayed away from the debate. What we're seeing today is them coming out and talking about the problems of capitalism, the issues related to capitalism, how capitalism needs to be reformed, how capitalism needs to be adjusted, how capitalism is failing America. And Ray Dalio, the CEO, the owner of the largest hedge fund in the world, the richest hedge fund guy in the world has led the pack here, but everybody's jumping on the bandwagon. And again, I think what's happened is that the Occupy Wall Street, the 1%, the whole inequality debate, Thomas Piketty have not only shifted the left, leftwards, dramatically leftwards, but they have also caused many in the business elite, if you will, of America to question the system as it is and to accept something that I don't think they accepted in the past, except that things like inequality are real problems, real problems, not fake problems like I think it's a fake problem, but that it's a real problem. And to see the election of Donald Trump as the first signs of an uprising, a revolution against them, against the business elite, against those people, against the 1%, against the people. So not so much at Occupy Wall Street was the uprising against business. But it's the frustration of the working class, the frustration of the lower middle class and the middle class, the frustration of Trump voters with the economic system as it exists today that they see as a real threat. I mean Ray Dalio constantly talks about class, a real class war, a real revolution, a real revolution. And I think that that is shared by more and more and more of the business leadership in this country, the producers, the wealth generators, because they have seen now that they are being demonized not only by the Occupy Wall Street left, but now by Trump, who criticized and made fun of Wall Street throughout his campaign, by much of kind of Trump's base, which viewed them as part of the problem, which view what they consider, it isn't, but what they consider modern capitalism as much as the problem. They view the current mixed economy as the problem, but they don't view it in terms of mixed economy. Donald Trump's base views capitalism as the problem. Free trade, not good. Companies deciding where to put their factories, which factories to close, which factories to open and where to open them, not good. Capitalism, the central features of capitalism, CEOs making those kind of decisions, not good. So you're seeing more and more CEOs of America's most successful companies, primarily in finance. Not ignore the issue anymore, but actually come out and re-dial your side and say, we need to fix the system. We need to alter the system. We need to fix and alter capitalism. We should not adopt socialism, they say, because socialism can't deliver the goods. But what we need to do is modify the current system so the goods are better. Okay, so basically all these businessmen are coming out now and they are positioning themselves as there's a real problem with capitalism. There's a real issue here and the problem is capitalism itself and we need to reform it. We need to adjust it. We need to change it. Ray Dalio was at this last week, he was at the Milken conference. I don't know if you know about the Milken conference, but the Milken named after Mike Milken, one of my personal heroes. Mike Milken has something called the Milken Institute, which is kind of a middle-of-the-road stand-for-nothing institute. It's called the Milken Institute for Global Conferences, the name of the conference that was held. You basically get the top people from the business world and a lot of government people at this conference. This is the other than Davos, this is the schmoozing conference of the year for the people who run companies, people who have money, people who are at Wall Street. This is the most important conference of the year. So Ray Dalio was at this conference and this is a quote from Ray Dalio. He says, every system needs to be renovated, needs to be improved. Can we agree that we need to do that? He said, right? And he says, if you agree, you'll have some, we'll have some form. No, he says, if you don't agree, we'll have some form of revolution. And he views, by the way, Trump's election as the first shot in the beginning of this revolution. That could be to abandon capitalism or to go on to another extreme. So he wants us not to abandon capitalism. He wants us to preserve capitalism. And we need to preserve capitalism. He says, otherwise we're going to have a revolution that would destroy everything that we cherish, that would destroy the system as it exists today that has benefited all of us so much. So he's making kind of a self-interested appeal to them to stand up and work to renovate capitalism. And when he asked them, do you agree that it needs to be renovated? Almost every hand in the ballroom went up. Now you could argue that, yeah, I believe it should be renovated, the system we have today. I don't believe it's capitalism, the system we have today. It needs massive renovation. It means massive changes. It needs to be freed up. The government has to get out of the way. We need massive deregulation. We need massive freeing up of the entrepreneurial spirits. Massive freeing up of American business. What we need is to eliminate the socialism. What we need is to eliminate the statism from our system so that we can move towards a real capitalist system, real capitalism. But that's not what any of these people mean. I mean, what Ray Dalio says is, we need to get together. We need to get some experts together. Look, he says, this is an engineering problem. We need to fix, you know, capitalism is just, it's economics. It's just, you know, poles and levers and dials and we need to dial it in or dial it out. In other words, the essence of capitalism for Ray Dalio and for many of these people is central planning. And what we need to do is get better at central planning. What we need to do is get better at engineering the economy. What we need to do is get better at changing the levers. So we need to get together in a bipartisan way, have a committee, have a commission that will restructure the US economy along the lines of better outcomes for those people who've had bad outcomes in the past, right? In other words, let's see socialism. In other words, statism or fascism, however you want to call it. But what he's calling for and Alan Schwartz, the executive chairman of the Guggenheim Partners, who are also, you know, big financiers, former chief executive officer of Bear Stearns, he suggested a bipartisan commission that would tackle issues like reducing occupational licensing. You don't need a bipartisan commission to do that. You just need to do it. But that's a minor issue. You need government out of the economy completely. Ivanka Trump was there. Ivanka Trump representing the Trump administration, I assume. And she highlighted, we need the government to get more involved in workforce training and more certification, more certification. What we need is less certification, less government certificates, not more. Now somebody on the chat earlier asked, do I think Trump makes us worse? Yes, I think Trump makes us a lot worse because what Trump does is he presents himself as a capitalist and acts like a statist. So it makes it more and more difficult to present capitalist ideas, to present real free market ideas, to present what capitalism really means. When everybody, everybody, from the president to all these CEOs, everybody who is viewed in the culture and by the world as a capitalist, misrepresent what capitalism is, misrepresent what the solutions to the problems we have today are, and misrepresent what the problems are. Well, almost every speaker at this conference talked about the dangers of continuing the system as it is and that we needed to solve issues like inequality. How do we solve all these issues by more government controls or by changing the controls? One Heads Fun Guy was riffing on car marks and the whole conference, by the way, the whole conference was titled Driving Shared Prosperity because the argument is that the left makes and that the right has no argument against, which is not true even on the numbers level. It's not even true, quite economics, but the idea is that all the prosperity that's been created over the last 30 to 40 years has gone to the super rich and everybody else is actually worse off. Now I've talked about this in the past and I talk about this in great length in my book Equal is Unfair, which I highly recommend to all of you. But that is blatantly false. It is blatantly false that the average American's life has not improved, that purchasing power has not increased, that the availability of a higher standard of living is not there. It is. We live at a much higher standard of living today than we did 30, 40 years ago and I include here the lower middle class. But we're told constantly that we haven't. And one of the things, one of the problems is that people conflate things like inflation as measured by the government, CPI, and purchasing power, which are not the same. Standard of living with wages, not the same. And people just do bad work when they study inequality. They look at wrong numbers, they extrapolate from correlations that don't imply causation, and they have a collectivistic view of the whole area of economics. The whole idea of shared prosperity is collectivism writ large. There is no shared prosperity any more than this shared wealth. I mean, to a large extent, the view of economics today is that economics is the science that figures out how to distribute wealth. Who gets what piece of the pie? But there is no pie. There is no wealth to distribute. There's no wealth each of us creates, even in the mixed economy today. That is the case and the government steals some of that wealth and distributes it, redistributes it. So Dalio says, for example, capitalism is very good at creating wealth. Socialism is good at redistributing wealth. We need more of a mixture between capitalism and socialism to get it just right. Because the socialism part can help with the redistribution and the capitalism part can help with the growing the pie, and we can grow the pie. And this brings me to I think the most important point here. Iron Man makes the point in capitalism not known that deal, that the real reason why capitalism is in decline, the real reason why everybody is anti-capitalist, that nobody understands capitalism and nobody cares about capitalism, is the defenders of capitalism. The people who so supposedly stand up for capitalism have betrayed what capitalism really is. In other words, they have done it, they have defended capitalism on the basis of altruism, on the basis of collectivism, on the basis of maximizing the growth of the pie. And that as long as that is how we defend capitalism, it helps the poor, it grows the pie, it's good for society. As long as we conceive of that as the moral defense of capitalism, we will lose, we will always lose, we will continue to lose. Because what that legitimizes is that frame of mind, that way of thinking, what matters is society, what matters is the poor, what matters is other people. And capitalism is a system of individualism and egoism and everybody knows that. And it is not, will not be tolerated, and is not tolerated by society that thinks that those ideas, individualism, egoism and evil, and that what really matters is society, and we'll just feed capitalists, we'll keep the capitalists going so they can create a big pie so we can then redistribute it. That's exactly how you get the mixed economy, it's exactly how you get statism, it's exactly how you get the disastrous economic policies that we've had over the last hundred years and getting worse and worse with every decade. The problem is not stupidity. The problem is the moral perspective that these people have. Ray Dalio and all these other millionaires and billionaires believe that their moral responsibility is to society, their moral responsibility is to others. And it's not, they realize just giving away their wealth won't solve anybody's problem, that what they need is a structural change in the system. And they're smart enough to recognize that capitalism produces the goods, but their altruism causes them to think but they need to be better redistributed. And their altruism also causes them to think, but we can't trust capitalism, one of them says, you know, we can't have too much capitalism, we can't have too much freedom, we need a bunch of regulation. Because if you don't have regulation, the shit hits the fan. Bad stuff happens. Why? Because we don't trust, he doesn't say this, I'm saying this, because we don't trust those egoists, those capitalists, the profit motive. You can't trust any of that. If you let capitalists free, if you let human beings be free, if you just leave human beings to their own nature, to their own minds, to their own designers, to their own... Decisions to their own choice of values, bad stuff will happen. This is why this is a philosophical struggle, it's not a struggle about economics. They all get that economics, economically capitalism or freedom works. But they also think that it causes really, really bad behavior because it causes selfishness and they all think that it's not good enough for society because we need mechanisms, force, coercion to redistribute the wealth to those who do not have it. Now, I want to show you a clip, hopefully this will work, right? Technology, today's not working, hopefully this will work. I want to show you a clip of somebody trying to defend capitalism, right? Somebody who is considered by many conservatives and libertarians, like a really, really good defender of capitalism. I was told many times when I was fundraising for the Iron Man Institute, you're on, you can really learn from this guy. This guy really defends capitalism. Well, all I was told, he's an ally of Yos-Yoran. He also believes in a moral defense of capitalism. You guys are on the same page. So I want to show you a clip of what this great defense of capitalism is. No, and I don't even bed ship hero. I mean, Arthur Brooks, and I don't know if you guys know Arthur Brooks, but Arthur Brooks was the, for many, many years was CEO of the American Enterprise Institute, probably one of the most influential intellectuals on the right. Not so much a YouTube celebrity, not so much a Facebook maybe celebrity, but in Washington DC, the guy everybody listens to. The guy everybody, his books were best sellers. Everybody took this guy seriously, and everybody told me this is the guy to learn from. This is the guy who really defends capitalism properly. So I want you, I want you to listen to how we defense capitalism, right? I want you to listen to how he defends capitalism, and we'll talk about it as he does it. So here he's being introduced. Of the pursuit and president of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks joins me now. Arthur, I want to start with making something clear. You are not defending capitalism as it stands. You are saying this is a system, the spirit of the system works, maybe it needs to be updated and improved. But what I loved, you travel across. Again, notice the theme that Dalios said that is now everywhere, that everybody's talking about, how to take the capitalist system that exists today and improve it, right? Now, I don't believe we have capitalism today. We have statism today. We have some capitalism and a lot of statism. We have a mixed economy. And I believe the mixed economy could be improved by making a capitalist. But note how he views it, how he talks about it. It's a world. Mumbai, a small town in Kentucky. You went to a Himalayan Buddhist monastery, and you saw... So he went, she's talking about a documentary that Arthur Brooks is doing about capitalism, a moral defense of capitalism. And note that he went to all these poor places. He went to a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas in an effort to defend capitalism. Michael says, it's nauseating. It really is nauseating. It's disgusting. It is truly disgusting. But this is what you have to do. If you're an altruist, in order to defend capitalism, you have to go and find the people in the worst shape in the world who might have benefited a little bit from a little bit of freedom and show that that is what the essence of capitalism is. Don't go to Wall Street, God forbid. Don't go to Silicon Valley, God forbid. Don't go to where real wealth has been created. You have to go to a monastery somewhere. Similarities in these places that one would think have nothing in common. Yeah, no, it's true. When you find people that are earning their success, they're serving others, they're part of the community, they're being lifted up through entrepreneurship. So they're earning their success, they're serving others, and they're part of the community, and they're lifting others. That's the essence of capitalism for him. Serving others, being part of a community. Yeah, you're lifting yourself up. But that's not the main issue. It's society. It's the community. It's the altruism that is everything here. Incredibly inspirational. You know, the truth of the matter is, since I was a kid, two billion people have been pulled out of poverty, largely because of the American Free Enterprise system spreading around the world. But it does not mean we don't need regulation. So note, the key statistic, the most important statistic is the people who've been brought out of poverty. Now I like that statistic. I use it all the time. But that's the whole theme. That's the whole justification. And of course, immediately he has to say, it doesn't mean we don't need regulation. Not mean that we don't need basic human morality. It doesn't mean we don't need morality because we know capitalism doesn't have morality. So we need to overlay morality onto capitalism. We know capitalism is not really a moral system. So remembering how we can improve the system from generation to generation without throwing it out is the only way we can increase opportunity and alleviate poverty around the world today. Then why do you see so many millennials and young Americans simply rejecting the idea of capitalism? Well, they're actually not. I mean, what they're doing is they're going to, you know, some anti-capitalist rally in an Uber. Now notice, I've noticed this, a lot of people are doing this. They are saying that the young people aren't actually socialists because they use iPhone. They're not actually socialists because they use Uber. I mean, this would be like saying, Karl Marx was not a socialist because I don't know what was the latest technology at the time. He used a printing press or Karl Marx was not a socialist because he was living in London benefiting from a capitalist economy. And I mean, this is so anti-intellectual, so anti-ideological. Of course, socialists use technology. They're not against technology. They just want the state to run it. They want the state to own it and they want massive redistribution of wealth. Somebody says Karl Marx was rich. No, Karl Marx was actually very poor. It was Engels who was rich. Engels actually, family was a rich family that had benefited from capitalism. And Engels is the person who financed Karl Marx. Karl Marx didn't work. He just wrote and that was financed by Engels who came from a rich family. But it's mind-boggling to me that the idea that, oh no, no, no, the millennials are not real socialists because ideas don't matter. What really matters is that they're using the iPhone. I mean, that is such a concrete-bound anti-intellectual mentality. Now again, author books is the best the right has to offer. It's the best conservatives have to offer. And this is exactly what I, in van, told us. The conservatives are the real enemies of capitalism. The conservatives, it's a conservative default that makes the disappearance of capitalism almost inevitable. And I get it, they're actually very, they're part of the capitalist system. What they don't like are the predations that they see, the extreme inequality of opportunity. The extreme inequality of opportunity. What? That's what's upsetting the millennials who are going to hovered and are going to, really? And that's a big opportunity for us to have this conversation. Look, what we need is presidential candidates and politicians today that are not saying throw out capitalism, we need socialism. We don't, we need to balance the ideas of an economy where we have a great safety net that's really reliable and have people argue about how big it should be and what it should do. There we go. So the way to defend capitalism is to argue for the welfare state. You know, yeah, we should argue maybe conservatives think the welfare state should be smaller and other people might think the welfare state should be bigger, the socialism. But we need a balance. We need both. And like Dalio and these other people at the Milken Conference, what is Arthur Brooks telling us? We need a conversation. We need to get together. We need to have a dialogue. We need, we need to sit in a room and those of us who want more capitalism or more freedom will argue for that. And those of us who want more socialism will argue for that. And we'll come up with some kind of balance. I mean, it is pathetic. And it's the way you lose. Where's the passion? Where's the commitment to freedom? Where's the commitment to individual values, the individual pursuit of values? Where's the commitment to entrepreneurship and the freedom that entrepreneurship requires? Where's the understanding of what wealth comes from? All the discussion is, all the discussion is how to distribute it. Where's the discussion on how to create it, how to create more of it? Not from Arthur. And the only way you can pay for it is with the free enterprise system that lifts people up and gives them opportunity. There we go. So what's good is the welfare system. And you have to pay for the welfare system. So how are we going to pay for the welfare system? We can only pay for the welfare system if we give people enough freedom so we can then steal their money so we can then milk them for, you know, for the funds to fund the welfare system. So the standard, what makes it good, what makes capitalism good in these people's mind is that it is a system that creates wealth so that we can steal it. Because what makes it good is not the creating the wealth. What makes the system good is that we create enough wealth so we can redistribute it. It's the redistribution that is moral. The wealth creation, that's egoistic. That's not moral. That's not right. That's not just, that just is. It truly is stunning, right? That this is the way capitalism is being defended. Not just today. You know, go read, you know, what is capitalism? Capitalism is not an ideal buying man. And she talks about this as being the way conservatives defend capitalism in the 1950s, in the 1960s. Nothing has changed. It's only worse because there are fewer conservatives who are any good. More and more of them are this. And then most of them are just non-intellectual at all. Then the answer is somewhere in the middle. Earlier we were speaking about Democratic candidates who are railing against Wall Street. We have to remind our audience. It's not just Democrats. When President Trump was running in 2016, he was railing against Wall Street, against Hillary Clinton and the Goldman Sachs speeches. He was then elected and then fl- Why is Goldman, why is Wall Street associated with Hillary Clinton? Because of cronyism. But is cronyism just Hillary Clinton and is cronyism just Wall Street? I mean, if cronyism is the problem, then cronyism is the problem. Not, not Wall Street. It's cronyism. But are Democrats making a mistake or a wrong calculation in just going against Wall Street? Wall Street isn't just a bunch of bankers and hedge fund managers. When you think about the rise in stock prices. Wall Street isn't just bankers and hedge fund managers. What does she mean by that? She means Wall Street isn't just the bad guys, those evil bastards, the bankers and hedge fund guys who don't do anything productive. Wall Street is also, she says, some of the greatest beneficiaries, pension plans. Wall Street is good. Wall Street is good. Not because it allocates capital efficiently across the economy. Not because it is the fundamental engine of wealth creation. Not because it has created the most efficient way to allocate capital and thus to create real wealth and to raise the standard of living of all of us. Wall Street is good because the stock market goes up and pension plans benefit. The common person benefits. Pension plans. Who are those people? Hardworking nurses. They're making money. That's good. Bankers. We don't want them to make money. Do we understand who that is? We don't. And it's just a boogeyman. It's just an easy thing to do. And look, the right and the left, they do that because we're so polarized. We're so locked down. And one of the things I'm trying to do in this... All right, so one of the problems, this is what they always do, right? The real problem in America today is we're polarized. We don't get along. We haven't got together. We're not seeing kumbaya. Polarization, that's the problem. It's not bad ideas. It's not bad politicians. It's not bad universities. It's not bad philosophies, ideologies. No, we just don't get along. If only we just turned out the cheek and loved our enemy. Here we go. Here we go. Movie is to relax some of these things. You know, in point of fact, it's a complicated situation in our economy. All of us could be better. All of us should love our neighbors and even love our enemies. There we go. Christianity rearing its ugly head. Christianity, this is why they can't defend capitalism. This is why they cannot defend capitalism. It's all about loving our neighbors and even loving our enemies. And capitalism is not about loving your neighbor and loving your enemy. Capitalism is about going out there and creating wealth and figuring out what is the value? What is really valuable? Being an entrepreneur and figuring out what were people actually value? What is going to enhance other people's lives? What is going to make their life better? And they'll be willing to pay for it. That's what capitalism is about. It's about entrepreneurs figuring out what's really a value for human being and what's not. What promotes human life and what doesn't. What people are willing to pay for and what they're not. Not because. Not because they're turning the other cheek. Not because they love their neighbor. Not even because they love their customers like themselves. But because they're trying to make money and because they love the challenge and because changing the world is a beautiful thing. But changing the world for their own egoistic reasons. Profit is a beautiful thing because profit cannot be attained unless you create value for someone. And the more profit, the more value you've created. But even that is not discussed here. No. We just need to all get together. We need to love our neighbor. We need to love our enemies. And we need to sit down and find the middle ground. And the middle ground should be more capitalism, he thinks he would say. But this milk toast offensive capitalism is what conservatives act upon. What I'm hoping is we go into a new election season. There'll be a few people out there who say, yeah, I'm in favor of capitalism. I'm also in favor of a strong safety net. There we go. I'm in favor of a mixed economy. Everybody's in favor of a mixed economy. Actually, that is exactly what Elizabeth Warren says. She says she's in favor of capitalism and she wants a strong safety net. And education reform. And I'm not going to pretend that just pouring more money into the public education system is going to fix it. We need people who want a new view of these things and understand that Wall Street is not evil. On the contrary, this is basically the reason that people all over the world... Portions of it are or individuals can be or acts can be. People are very imperfect, absolutely. But if you go look a generation ago, who would think CEOs? Hold on. It's more than people. There are business practices that you could say are evil without a doubt. There are business practices that we absolutely need to change. There's regulations that we need to change. This is great. This is an opportunity for us... Note that at best he could say, we need to change regulations. I mean... To do it, but remember, the American Free Enterprise System is our gift to the world. And it's actually making all of this wealth possible so we can have this conversation in the first place. It's also not unique to the United States. In Spain's election on Sunday, the Socialist Party there picked up 123 seats. Now that is a bit shy of the majority. All right. That's enough, I think. That's enough of... Of Arthur Brooks. But that's just an indication. That's just a, you know, a tiny flavor of what is going on in the world today. Nobody is defending capitalism. Nobody can define capitalism. Did he define capitalism? Did he talk about what capitalism is? There's just... The conservatives are pathetic. I think that's the best one can say about them. Right? I mean, she was... There was no difference between her and him. They all want a mixed economy. They all want the benefits of capitalism so they can suck, like parasites, suck the wealth out, suck the wealth that's created by the few entrepreneurs that are out there and hand it over to people who don't deserve it, who haven't earned it, who haven't made it. And nobody, nobody challenges that. Nobody stands up for that. Now, I strongly, strongly encourage you all to read capitalism not known ideal, to read Ayn Rand, to read what a proper defense of capitalism has to be. And a proper defense of capitalism has to start with understanding the nature of man, understanding the nature of man as a rational being and understanding that every human being has the capacity to take care of themselves and the few that don't rely on the people who do and there are two ways to rely on the people to do. Stealing from them or their charity. And stealing is never right no matter how many people vote for it. No matter how many people get together and say it's okay. Stealing is never right. So those who cannot take care of themselves will rely on the charity of others. There's just no other way, no other way. By the way, other books ran the most, you know, the biggest conservative organization, not the second biggest after heritage, the American Enterprise Institute. He is considered a real conservative and the representative of conservative ideas out there. That is what conservatism is about. That is what Ayn Rand showed conservatives was about 50 years ago. It hasn't changed 60 years ago. It hasn't changed. So you have to first start with the mind, human nature. What are human beings? The man as a rational being, as a rational being, capable of taking care of himself and as a thinking being, needing freedom in order to take care of himself, in order to survive and to thrive, the human mind needs to be free, free of coercion, free of authority, free of force. And therefore capitalism, the only political system that frees the human mind, human action, is the only moral system. Because it allows human beings to be free to pursue their values using their rational mind by creating values, trading them in win-win relationships with others. That is a system that doesn't need to be improved. It doesn't need to be tinkered. It needs to be rediscovered. And until we can talk in those terms, until we can talk in terms of the philosophical moral foundations of capitalism, until we have representatives doing that. And in that sense, this goes to part of my concern about yesterday. We have no allies. We are alone. Well, I am alone. I don't know how many of you are on my side. Because there's almost nobody who takes that position on capitalism. That capitalism needs to be practiced purely. And that its moral justification is not what it does for the poor. Its moral justification is not what it does for your neighbor. Its moral justification is that it leaves creative, productive, working individuals free to pursue their values, to use their mind to think and to act in their own self-interest. That is the moral defense of capitalism. Now, that needs to be fleshed out. And I do that in some of my talks. And of course, you can find that in the best fleshing out ever in capitalism than an ideal. What is capitalism? Really, the whole book is basically a moral defense of capitalism. And we've got to accept the fact that we don't have allies among conservatives. We don't have allies. We have very few allies among libertarians unfortunately. Because once you reject the mind, once you reject reason, once you reject objectivity, you reject the foundations of what capitalism really rests upon. Alright, let's see. I'll just do a few of these. So we've got Super Chat. Please don't ask any more Super Chat questions because we have to end in about 15, 20 minutes and I've got a few questions already lined up. If I don't have the finer details of history or statistics at my intellectual disposal, should I get into discussions about capitalism with those who challenge it? Yes, the defense of capitalism is not primarily a historical statistical one now. I think it's important to know the history. But you don't need to know the details necessarily. Or you can refer people to books or to my videos to get the details. But the fundamental here is that the moral defense of capitalism rests on the idea of self-interest, on morality, on the need of individuals to pursue their own life by using their own mind, by acting on their own values and their own decisions using their reason. That does not require statistics. And you can start there. And then when they bring up statistics, you say, look, I don't believe a lot of that stuff. But if you're interested in somebody who has to count the statistics, go and read capitalism, not an ideal. Go and read equal as unfair. Go and read or watch your books, videos, talks on morality of capitalism or talks on inequality. And all of those have the statistics and the history to back it up. Now, I do think you need to know some broad strokes in history. Like what life was like before the Industrial Revolution. What life was like after the Industrial Revolution. What life was like during the Industrial Revolution. The liberty, the freedom, the innovation, the technology, the advancement mankind made during that period. You don't need to know any great detail, but you need to know the basics of it. And indeed, every human being on the planet should know this. I mean, one of the things that are so devastating is that the people who should be teaching us history, who should be teaching us the statistics are all committed to the destruction of capitalism. That there's almost nobody out there presenting what the 19th century really was like. There's nobody out there presenting the dramatic changes in quality of standard of life, life longevity that resulted from capitalism. And even those who do present, like Pinka and others who show all the benefits, materially, of what's happened over the last 250 years, refused to fully acknowledge that it was capitalism. And that the pure the capitalist system is, the greater it enhances human life. And while socialism has killed hundreds, tens of millions of people, capitalism has only improved human life, has only made human life better in pretty much every single realm. So they kind of say things like Stephen Pinka says this and sort of Matt Ridley and others. Yeah, capitalism is good, but it needs to be regulated, it needs to be controlled, just like all the books need to be controlled. And when you get the right mixture, just the right mixture of safety net and regulations and some capitalism, then it works the best. And no, that's actually not the truth. And the reason they can't say, they can see the truth is because the people who constantly teach about history, teach about statistics, distort them, pervert them, lie about them, evade the truth, because they are motivated not by bettering humankind, they are motivated by human destruction. They are motivated for you not to discover the true nature of capitalism. People don't want you to discover the true nature of capitalism. People don't want you to know the history, the intellectuals. They don't want you to know history. They don't want you to know economics. They don't want you to know what capitalism is really does, because they hate you. They hate you as an individual. They hate individual life. They want mediocrity. They want destruction. They want you to disappear as an individual. They want you to just become one of the Borg, one of the group, one of the collective, indistinguishable. What motivates them is the hatred of individualism. What motivates them is the hatred of individuals distinguishing themselves. It is the mediocrities, the professors at the universities, the intellectuals who hate mankind, who hate progress, who hate achievement, who hate individuals standing up. They're the ones who are going to every extreme of lying in order to prevent you from knowing the truth about history. It's not a conspiracy in a sense that it's the consequence of altruism and collectivism, a consequence, because altruism and collectivism must inevitably ultimately lead to nihilism. And that's what drives us at the end of the day, is nihilism. Alright, one more question. Got anything to say about the fact, about something about the scatter on Facebook entering the cryptocurrency game? No, I don't know anything about Facebook entering the cryptocurrency game, but it doesn't surprise me. I mean, a lot of these tech companies are going to play around with this until the whole cryptocurrency thing is worked out and figured out by the market. Alright, could we argue that individualism leads to self-esteem, which is better for every individual's well-being? Well, but that's a circular argument, right? So you should care about yourself, be individualistic, because it's good for yourself. Yeah, what we need to argue is that the standard of morality is your own life. Standard of morality is your own life, is your own that you must live, survive as a human being, and that if you follow specific actions, if you follow the virtues, the appropriate virtues, then one of the things you gain is self-esteem. And the self-esteem is necessary to live a successful life. It is a necessary value for your survival as a human being, for your life as a fully fleshed out human being. So individualism is just kind of a political recognition of the sanctity of the individual, the moral necessity of an individual to pursue his life, and to pursue self-esteem as a value necessary for his life, as a value necessary for your success on this earth, a value necessary for human flourishing, for individual human flourishing. So individualism is just a political recognition of a morality of rational self-interest, of a morality of self-esteem. So there's a sense in which you're saying is correct. What's important is to allow people the freedom to achieve their self-esteem. Allow people the freedom to achieve their rational values, self-esteem being one of the three cardinal values. Reason, purpose and self-esteem are the three cardinal values in objectivism, the three most important values that at the top of your hierarchy of values that shape how you define the rest of your values. So reason, purpose, self-esteem. And I encourage you to read the virtue of selfishness by Ayn Rand to get more in-depth analysis of that. And to read Leonard Peacoff's Objectivism to Philosophy of Ayn Rand where he really chews on these cardinal values and chews on the virtues and the whole moral framework that Ayn Rand introduces. And it's a moral framework that is essential for the moral defense of capitalism because you cannot defend capitalism. I don't believe on any other moral foundation. The moral foundation has to be a morality of individualism. I don't know of any morality of individualism other than Ayn Rand's morality of individualism. Alright, final super chat question. Should you be able to choose what programs get your tax money? That your tax money goes as an individual taxpayer? No, I don't think so. I think that you shouldn't have to pay taxes. I mean, taxes should not be something that is cursed. I think taxes in a truly free society are voluntary. And in that sense, you would be deciding whether you wanted to support the government or not. Now, you could imagine, and maybe this would happen, that in free society you could assign some of your money to defense and some of your money to police and some of your money to the court system. But I fear that that's too democratic in a sense that what you should really be doing with your tax money in a free society is expressing your support for the government or not. That if the government can't raise enough revenue to execute on its priorities, then it should fold. So, it presents you with the priorities. Now, those priorities should only be the protection of individual rights, but how it's going to do it and so on. And you then choose how much tax money to send in. And because if we start voting on the priorities, direct democracy is a disaster. And I think if you basically can assign your money to only a particular activity of the government, we're starting to vote on what the government, the particulars of the government should do. And that's not what I don't think it's a functioning government. I think we need experts. We need somebody who knows, well, how much do we really need to spend on defense? Somebody who really focuses on this and thinks about it and then has a whole program and a strategy of that relative to police enforcement and judiciary and present a whole strategy to the public and then we vote. We vote with our dollars. I mean, we vote to elect the people into place, but then we vote with our dollars in terms of how much we provide them. All right. All right. So, you know, we talked a little bit about capitalism today. I mean, there's a lot more, a lot more we could be talking about and we will in shows to come about how to defend capitalism properly. What you do in shows like this to defend it and how you go about doing it rather than the kind of wishy-washy, Christian, apologetic, conservative approach that is actually destroying capitalism, moving us away from capitalism. And I'm worried. I'm worried more than I've ever been. I've said this for the last couple of years. I've been worried since Donald Trump got elected. I see the government moving in all the wrong directions, both on the left and on the right. I don't see any path out there in the mainstream that is leading towards more capitalism, more economic freedom. And I see the people trying to defend capitalism getting worse, getting worse. And it really is. It really, really, really worries me, the state of this country, the state of the world. I see the same thing happening in Europe. The death of the mixed economy, the recognition that the mixed economy has failed us, and a desperate cry by the wealthy elite to say, no, no, but we need to keep it. And the people saying, no, we don't. We don't need to keep a mixed economy. We could centralize everything. We could control everything. We could run the country. We could put experts in charge. We could get this right, whether it's socialist or whether it's status of the right. Statism is on the rise all over the world. And the rebellion that we're seeing, whether it's the yellow vests, whether it's the election of the socialists in Spain, whether it's Donald Trump's election, or whether it's the excitement and the passion and the energy around the radical left in the Democratic Party. What we're seeing is people going towards the status extremes. What we're seeing is people moving away from freedom, away from individual rights, away from limited government. On both left and on the right. And the only way to get them back. I don't know if we can get them back. The reality is I don't know if we can get them back. But the only way to fight for the future is to fight for what's right. It's to fight for freedom. It's to fight for capitalism. It's to fight for individual rights. It's to fight for egoism. It's to fight for reason. And it's only that fight that can be won. It's only those ideas that could save us. You know, thank you all for those of you who helped me fight for these ideas, who are supporting the show. So thank you for the supporters of the show. Hopefully we'll gain new supporters and maybe even from the show today. Some of you will choose to become supporters of the show. Those of you who do not subscribe to the show on YouTube, please do so. Even if you watch it on Facebook or if you watch it on Periscope on Twitter, please go and subscribe to the show on YouTube. I'd really appreciate that. And those of you who can and who are motivated to do so, please support the show on your own book show dot com slash support. You can also go to PayPal dot me slash your own book show. You can go to subscribe star dot com slash your own book show. And I still have an account on Patreon because there's about 190 people who won't leave. And I am afraid that if I shut it down, I'll lose them. So theoretically you can even support the show on Patreon. So we will continue to defend capitalism here. Those of you who support the show are supporting the radical, principled, philosophical, moral defense of capitalism based on Ayn Rand's ideas, based on objectivism. Thank you all. Have a great weekend. I'll actually see you here assuming there are no technical problems. I'll see you here again on Sunday tomorrow at about 3 p.m.