 Welcome to Modern Day Debates. Today we are debating socialism versus capitalism. So we're really excited to have all of our debaters here today. We have, actually I know everyone, I've dealt with everyone before in the past and they're all really really cool people. So I'm personally really excited to be modding this one. So if you really like debates, we are a channel who has tons of debates so definitely go and subscribe. Also we just we really want to thank everyone for being here. I'm gonna actually give everyone a chance to kind of introduce themselves and if you really like and you the speakers are all of them their links are in the description. So if you want to hear more from them definitely go and check that out. Brenton I'm gonna start with you. What would people be able to find at your link? Hey so I'm Brenton Lengel. I am a playwright, anarchist and Ringo nominated comic creator of Snow White Zombie Apocalypse. The Kickstarter for which by the way is up right now for issue number three. We just passed, oh yeah, $12,000 and like it's only been up for like three days. So guys if you want to get down on the ground floor in this series, check it out. You'll find it my YouTube channel. You're gonna find me vlogging about politics, the state, philosophy and Buddhism, as well as a lot of debates. So yeah, check that out. Amazing. All right, so non-compete, what could people find at your link? Yeah, hi, I'm EJ with non-compete. I do socialist anarcho-communist videos and live streams. I do also puppet shows in the same vein, which don't get a lot of views, but if you want to see a communist puppet show or an anarchist puppet show, come check them out. And also currently the most recent project is I'm working on a trilogy of books with my comrade Luna, who is a Marxist-Leninist here in Vietnam. She's doing a book on dialectical materialism and Nora, who is a actually not a content creator, but just an on-the-ground activist and organizer. She's doing a book on material conditions in the USA right now, and I'm working on a book on applying leftist theory. So that should be coming out within a couple of months, hopefully at least one of the three books. We're not sure which will come out first, but yeah. So look out for those and check out my channel if you want to see more stuff like that. Amazing. All right, splinters, what would people be able to find at your link? Yeah, so as far as my Twitch stream goes, that's where most of my news, politics, and primarily debate content live. I do these kinds of debates, as well as debate critiques, where we kind of examine other people's performances and talk about what we can learn from them. And then if you go to YouTube, you'll see that content there as well. But in addition to that, I have some more like media analysis focused stuff. So if you like me here today, or any of that sounds interesting, be sure to check that stuff out and come say hi. Amazing. All right. And finally, but not least Lehman. What can people find at your link? Yeah, so my name is Lehman on YouTube. I'm also on Twitter under that moniker. My content is, there's not really a specific aim to it necessarily. It's just kind of tools that I use in order to just sort of form my thoughts around different topics and I'll debate different topics, have discussions about different topics. Very, very sparsely. I'll make like a video essay on something. The whole point is really just for me to articulate my thoughts on things and try to, I guess, put that out there so it can be criticized or supported or whatever. And it just leaves an avenue for me to make better sense of the world overall, I guess. And just doing so, you know, sort of acknowledging that like I am a Lehman, I'm not an expert in any of the things that I talk about. And yeah. All right. Sounds great. So the structure of tonight's debate is going to be 10 minute openings for each of our speakers. Then we're going to go into about an hour of open discussion followed up by 30 minutes of question answer. So if you have a question and you want it to be guaranteed to be read, definitely fire it into this super chat and we will read it at the end. So without further ado, we're going to start with a socialist side, Brenton, if you want to start with your opening and then we'll end with splinters and Lehman. So the debate tonight is on capitalism versus socialism. And this is a topic that I am really invested in because as a red-blooded American male, I was raised to love capitalism and hate socialism. And after all, who wouldn't love capitalism? Just look around. One could easily say upon first glance that we in America are living at the absolute pinnacle of human civilization. We elect our leaders rather than having them imposed upon us. We choose our jobs rather than having them chosen for us. Our stores are bursting with more products and food than we can even fully imagine, let alone buy and consume. And it would seem that the only thing standing between us and the American dream is our own willingness or lack thereof to work hard and apply our intelligence and passion in this economic proving ground and make our fortune. And that's what our media tells us and our textbooks tell us and our universities tell us that we're all the scrappy hero fueled by desire and ambition and if we could just work hard enough and just be smart enough, everything will turn out wonderfully. But of course, a big part of growing up is learning that this isn't simply not the case. The fact is that despite having all the power and convenience seemingly at our fingertips, people are unfulfilled and alienated and many in the first world live in a state of extreme poverty and work themselves into an early grave for pennies on the dollar. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as of January 2019, there were at least 567,715 homeless individuals in the United States. And that was before COVID swallowed the nation and cursed us with the worst economy since the Great Depression and caused the worsening of this looming eviction crisis that we are all now facing. Before all of this, 40 million Americans struggled with hunger in the United States, no doubt significantly more now than in 2017 as our economy boomed around us. Still, 15 million Americans lived in food insecure households. It makes almost no difference whether it is a time of plenty or a time of famine as many as one in six children in America do not know where their next meal is coming from. And looming over all of this like the sort of Damocles is the seemingly impossible problem of global climate change, the effects of which we are already seeing, war, famine, pestilence and environmental devastation on a previously unheard of scale. And it's not like these aren't so there aren't solutions to all these problems. There are 1.5 million empty homes in the United States. That is more than enough for each of the 568,000 homeless people to live in more than one. In fact, we could give three or four homes to each of them and we'd still have homes left over. And that's just factoring in housing and that's just houses like factoring in apartments and other smaller living spaces. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there are well over 17 million vacant properties. Despite our prevalent problems with hunger, Americans waste 40 percent of the food we produce. We throw away 40 million tons of food a year and that is a literal metric ton of food per hungry person being wasted 2,204.62 pounds a year which factors out to be more than double the daily minimum that a healthy person needs to live comfortably. To return to COVID for a moment, as of yesterday, 253,000 American lives have been sacrificed to this dark God that we call economy. Unless you think that these deaths were unavoidable, I must remind you that in my partner EJ's current home, the country of Vietnam, they have suffered a grand total of 35 deaths to COVID. Not 35,035. As of today, only 35 Vietnamese have died of COVID and only 1,305 have contracted the disease. For comparison, 1,870,428 new cases of COVID were contracted just yesterday along with just 1500 deaths. Both numbers will increase tomorrow and the next day and the next day with no relief in sight for the foreseeable future. Now, while this comparison is not apples to apples as both countries are very different, it is impossible to overlook the fact that one major way in which we differ is that the Vietnam is one of the few countries in which profits are not in command of the economy, which then left the Vietnamese with the option of following sensible shutdown and distancing procedures without sacrificing their economy or losing access to necessary services. Let me say that again in case you didn't hear. While the United States and all of Vietnam's immediate neighbors have been crippled by COVID, Vietnam's economy did not suffer from the shutdown and in fact has grown in every quarter. This wasn't a win-lose situation. Vietnam's communism made their weathering of the COVID crisis win-win. Deaths in the low double digits along with an overall decrease in poverty and an increase in production. We have also failed to act on global climate change and now we can do nothing but mitigate the damage caused by rising global temperatures. But had the fossil fuel industry not purposefully suppressed the information in the 1970s and if they were not currently running multimillion-dollar propaganda campaigns to keep the scientific consensus obscured even as they spend billions shoring up their own infrastructure against climate-induced threats like rising sea levels. Because at the end of the day, even as Exxon spent 31 million on disinformation campaigns aimed at the public, they believed their own scientists who were in 100% agreement of the threat that human cause global warming threatened. They knew this decades ago and chose to maliciously lie about it and were exposed in a leaked memo in 2015. But of course they faced virtually no consequences for their actions and similarly no one is feeding those 40 million Americans and landlords and banks are actively kicking more people out and onto the streets during an unprecedented global panic. And so I got to thinking what even is capitalism? Why does everyone tell me it's so great and if it's so great why does it allow and perpetuate problems that include but are in no way limited to the four that I have quickly listed? And so I did some reading and some searching and some arguing and I talked to economists and activists and historians and I came to a definition that I think we can more or less agree upon. Capitalism is an economic and political system that was developed in England in the 17th and 18th centuries in which the vital industry and resources within a nation are owned by small groups of private individuals and operated for profit. It is characterized by speculative investment by moneyed individuals for the express purpose of turning a profit for those same individuals. This is the capitalist class a group of wealthy elites who by virtue of their ownership of land technology and resources earn their living not by the sweat of their brow but by reaping the benefits of profitable economic activity done by the entities that they own and control. No matter your feelings about capitalism if you work a job and earn a paycheck and this paycheck is your primary means of subsistence you are not a capitalist you are a worker. Capitalism drives production and innovation by this method of speculative investment. Money is invested new products are created and businesses are perpetuated only because the investment keeps coming. If the investors ever slow stop investing or withdraw their funds in large enough numbers the economy crashes, paychecks bounce, and people starve. This is why the United States could not bring itself to respond properly to COVID because this is what it means to work within an economy where profits are in command. So what has happened here is we have built a system where all of us are essentially beholden to the whims of a tiny overclass of individuals. Worse, this class is not entirely united. They do not act with a single mind or will and collectively do not have any regard for what they are doing to the world around them. How can they? All they do is take money, invest it, and watch the numbers go up. And when those numbers go down, well then they freak out and retreat to their bunkers and gated communities and hold on to the remaining dragon's horde of wealth to wait for a sunnier day and that is just how capitalism is supposed to work. This doesn't even begin to address corruption, bug exploits, and outright gaming of this system that clever and malicious individuals engage in for their own benefit at the expense of the rest of us. To say nothing of the fact that we have essentially built the financial equivalent of the bus from speed, except the bomb will go off not only if the bus drops below 50 miles per hour, but also if Keanu Reeves doesn't infinitely accelerate to avoid that exact same disaster. That is a wonderful premise for a movie, but a terrible and horrifying reality to live in. But there may still be those of you who are asking yourselves, well, why is this bad? Shouldn't the economy expand? Shouldn't people take a risk with their money and be rewarded? Don't we want that behavior? And in a certain very simplistic sense you're right, but the problem is you're missing the forest for the trees. If our economic and political system is reliant on these individuals to continue to foot the bill and provide the lifeblood that keeps the gears of our industry turning, how can we ever get them to stop or even slow when that is exactly what we need them to do in moments now, like COVID and global warming? How do we change the course when our own industrial growth turns cancerous and in and of itself becomes the very existential threat to human civilization? The answer is we can't. As I have said, except in rare cases, these investors don't actually see the whole picture. They don't care that Coca-Cola hired mercenaries to murder union leaders in Nicaragua. They didn't care that the British East India Company starved 10% of the entire Indian subcontinent to death within a single year. They didn't care when Leopold II murdered 40 million Congolese all to acquire a rather large stockpile of rubber and several tons of different kinds of rocks and minerals. They didn't feel bad about American chalice slavery and they don't feel bad when a clothing factory collapsed in Bangladesh killing thousands or a Foxconn factory in China drives its workers to suicide while they assemble the iPhones. They don't care that 253,000 of our countrymen have died, 253,000 grandmothers and grandfathers and parents and uncles and aunts and yes, even children have been taken before their time by COVID. Or if they do decide they care about this, they don't put two and two together and realize that all of this inhumanity is happening just to make the numbers in their computer database go up. Essentially what we have done, what capitalism does on the macro levels, is it places the levers of power into the hands of people who have nothing to do with the actual source of their income. As such, we must only depend on synergy to make sure that these activities, which make those numbers go up, are actually socially desirable activities. Now, sometimes they are because synergy is an important principle in nature and often we find that we are guided towards an end that none of us individually can envision but all collectively benefit from. But it is not the be-all and end-all of human activity and allowing people with no real skin in the game to drive the car that is human society is going to wind up running us right off a cliff. We desperately need to move beyond the system. We must break the power of the capitalist class and come together around a better, more sane and compassionate system if we are to survive the next few centuries. We urgently need to solve the riddle of a better way to live, for ourselves, for our children and ultimately our planet. Because if we do not, if human society cannot adapt to a changing world, we will drive ourselves to extinction and that will be no one's fault but our own. Now as I continue this debate, I believe that that system that transcends capitalism that gets us away from the tyranny of profit is socialism and can be found in these socialist traditions throughout the world and we will get into that. But right now, let's deal with the problem in front of us and transcend capitalism as quickly as possible. Thank you. Thank you so much, Brenton. You won't compete if you want to follow up. Sure. What's my time limit on the intro just so I can... Ten minutes. Okay, gotcha. All right, so yeah, Brenton went through a lot of the data and facts and figures that I would have started with so I won't bore you with a repeat but I do want to say that I myself am a former capitalist. I've run about five businesses. Two of them were failures and two of them succeeded and one of them kind of broke even at the end. So I feel like I've had a pretty broad experience. My biggest company, I had about 15 employees at any given time for most of the tenure of the time that the business was operational. And I'm very well aware looking back now of how I exploited my workers. I know exactly what my costs were, what my overhead was, what I charged my clients and what I paid my employees and my subcontractors. And I know that I pocketed the fruits of my workers' labor. Now, if I had a job where say I was charging a client $100, I paid a worker $20, I put in $20, $30 for the overhead of the business and I pocketed the rest. Sure, I did some work to contribute to landing the job, doing some of the sales, doing some of the management or coordination or whatever you want to call it. I did. And so I do feel I deserve some compensation for that. But I took well more than my fair share, especially when it comes to areas of my business, which I was running nominally as the capitalist, but which I knew nothing about whatsoever. So for instance, I had an advertising agency and we spun off a web development company. And I really didn't know much about web development at all. I could maybe do like a WordPress page if I had a week or two to fiddle around with it. But I hired a bunch of really sharp, young, recent college grad software developers and web developers and designers who really knew their shit. And they essentially ran that business for me. And that's what capitalists should do if you want to succeed. If you read any book on basic capitals and they'll say human resources are very important, hire people who are smarter than you, make sure that you are able to delegate and hire people that you can trust to delegate to. Okay, these are like basic principles of capitalism. If anybody, that's one of the things that's interesting about capitalists is that I say we, since I'm a former capitalist, talk out of both sides of our mouth. So when we're trying to make capitalism seem great, we talk about how we love to innovate. We talk about how we have these great ideas that drive the business forward. But when we write books of advice on how to run a business, it's always higher great people. People are what run your business. I did consulting for human resources for a couple of years. And I learned a lot about how capitalists talk about human resources behind the scenes and how much they do value their labor and how much they do value the ideas that they generate. I know that my web development company, I could never have run that by myself, but I reaped all of the profits from that. And there were times whenever I even made bad decisions and I was like, I'm the boss. I'm the owner. I do what I say and it backfired because I didn't really know what the hell I was talking about. But I had that arbitrary power and authority over the work lives of my employees. I had to decide basically how they spent their time for most of their waking lives. And it was a very autocratic arrangement. Sure, at the time I felt like I was a fair boss and I felt like I was treating them fairly. I felt like I wasn't very restrictive. But the fact of the matter is I had the power to fire them anytime, especially in South Carolina which was a right to work state as they say. So I feel like I'm pretty familiar with the power imbalances of capitalism since I've been on that side of it. I've also worked in corporate environments. I've worked as a freelancer. I've been an Uber driver and I've been a subcontractor for construction and electrical work with my dad. So I don't know everything, of course, but I've had experience in many areas. And I think my longest tenure of experience is about 10 years as a capitalist. So I do feel like I understand how I exploited my employees. So that said, I want to talk about, first, the voluntary arrangement of capitalism. I like to distinguish between capital logs and capital lists. The capitalist is a person who owns the means of production, who owns a factory or a business or something like that. A capital log is what I call somebody who just buys into and believes in the idea of capitalism, whether they're a worker or a capitalist. And capital logs often like to say that this is a voluntary arrangement. I was running my biggest business during the financial crisis of 2007, 2008, 2009. I was getting stacks of resumes every week and I was throwing them away because I couldn't hire anybody else. My employees had stopped paying, not my employees, my customers had stopped paying me. I had a lot of nonprofit and real estate clients at the time and a lot of them stopped paying me. So I had to kind of freeze my business. I couldn't grow it for about a year or two. And I was just throwing away stacks of resumes. There were people who were desperate to get a job with me and I knew that I had employees, specifically those web developers, who wanted to leave my company, but they couldn't find a job anywhere else. And they were basically forced to work for me and my company with frozen wages, even though they desperately deserved raises. But they couldn't because I wouldn't give them raises and they couldn't find another job because there was nowhere else to work. It's a very amazingly similar circumstance to what we have now with COVID-19 where we've had over 1,100 wildcat strikes since COVID began related to things like not getting personal protective equipment, not having paid sick leave, not having sufficient healthcare to cover somebody if they do get sick, being forced to work at frankly ridiculous jobs like at Hobby Lobby through the pandemic because their bosses wanted to make a profit. And this gets to the marrow of my disillusion with capitalism is the fact that capitalists do have arbitrary power over employees. Look at the economy right now and you realize that in most states about 50% of renters are facing eviction right now. Before COVID, one in seven Americans relied on food banks and were food insecure. More people died of malnutrition in the USA by far. 45 times more people died of malnutrition in the USA than Vietnam, twice as many as in Cuba. Those are based on numbers that come from the World Health Organization. So the fact of the matter is the USA does not provide workers with any sort of social and safety net whatsoever. Most of those numbers by the way were all pre-COVID. They're worse now. Food banks are completely overwhelmed right now. You could see miles long backed up lines on the way to food banks in many states and many cities across America. And so in that context where your choices are to work for a capitalist like Hobby Lobby, like Taco Bell, like whatever, any business that's making you come into work and risk your life for them. You have that choice to work for them and keep a roof over your head and have food, at least hopefully have food on your plate. Even though a lot of workers that are making minimum wage have starvation wages, but because I remember the one in seven figure for people that are food insecure, a lot of those people do work. They just also don't make enough money to actually put enough food on the table. Regardless, they can either work for this capitalist or they can go out and face eviction and starve or become even more at risk for starvation. So it's not a voluntary arrangement for the majority of workers and especially if you speak globally speaking and you look at all of the developing and imperialized nations out there where they really do have the choice of either work for a capitalist or starve. So it's not this voluntary arrangement. I know that as a former capitalist who coerced my workers into working for my company. And I want to also say there's this other big notion that capitalists deserve their profits because they take a risk. And this completely does not acknowledge the fact that workers take risks. When you get a job somewhere, there is a good chance you might get laid off. Lots of workers have been being laid off throughout this pandemic, as we see. There's also the chance that you could die for your employer, not just the fact that all these workers are not getting PPE or paid sick leave or proper protections during work. They're being forced to go out and engage with the public at large for capitalist profits and risking their lives in that way. But I mean, even before COVID, plenty of workers risk their lives. Pizza delivery drivers are more likely to die on the job than police officers. There are obviously lumberjacks and long line fishermen and those sorts of jobs. Those people definitely have risked their lives for a very long time. But beyond that, you always have the risk of getting laid off. And one last thing I'll say as a former capitalist, the number one rule of capitalism is you do not start a business being undercapitalized and you do not start a business without an exit strategy. Every capitalist will tell you this. You don't bet the farm. If you start a business, you better know how you're going to escape if it doesn't go well. And the majority of businesses in the world, even if they do fail, the people who own them are going to come out, okay, I did. And I had two of my five businesses fail and I came out just fine out of those because I planned it properly to know that if my business did fail, I wasn't going to lose my shirt. And that's what happened. However, most workers who live paycheck to paycheck have about $1,000 in their bank account at any given time, have $6,000 in credit card debt and make about $30,000 per year. They are not able to sustain a long period of unemployment. So most workers right now are terrified that they're going to lose their job even though they don't want to be working as the 1,100 strike since COVID started demonstrates. And there's no chance for them to start their own business, by the way, as well because the average startup business in the USA costs about $30,000 to get off the ground. And again, the number one reason that businesses fail in the USA is under capitalization. So it's a myth that anyone could just go out and start a business. Any capitalists will tell you, you have to be very well capitalized to have a good chance of having your business succeed. And it is not a voluntary arrangement. We advocate for democratic control of the workplace. We'll get into that throughout the rest of the debate, but that's the biggest distinction I want to leave this intro with is that we believe in a democratic workplace just as we believe in a democratic society. There's no reason for arbitrary power of capitalists over the working class. And I will stop there. Thank you so much, Nangan Pete. And then we're going to go on to the capitalist side. I think it's the Lehman. It's going to go next. If that's good with you. Yeah, certainly. So yeah, today we're here to debate socialism versus capitalism. It's a topic that I personally wrestled with for a very long time throughout my life, given my personal disdain towards materialistic philosophies. I still kind of hold those beliefs today. But when I was younger, of course, I was very, very predisposed, just temperamentally to not like hierarchies. Way back, I used to be a noisable, adjacent person a number of years ago. I held all manner of reprehensible philosophical, social, and economic views that I was incredibly incompetent in describing. And I, by and large, kept to myself in fear of looking like an awful person to the world around me because obviously noisables suck. I think we can all agree on that. I no longer hold to a great deal of the sort of anti-capitalist, anti-modernity views that I used to have. But this definitely reinforces my defensive capitalism now at the age of 24. I would consider myself a capitalist, but a reluctant capitalist. So it's important going into this debate knowing that I'm not a neoliberal, meaning that I'm not a law's eye fair, pro deregulation kind of guy, where I attribute some kind of like intrinsic value to the private ownership of the means of production because of, you know, well, freedom. Rather, I view capitalism as rather than an intrinsically good system, the best system that we have compared to what's alternative aims, whether it's been like, like I know that fascism, even though it's, I mean, whether or not this capitalist's up for debate. But I wouldn't consider it the same thing where private ownership sort of bleeds into the state to reinforce a sort of dictatorial ruling via forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society, via ultranationalism, or a return to some kind of, you know, monarchal society, which of course is really bad. We can all agree on that. It ended in absolutely catastrophic. It ended horribly. Most of the people, most of the world was starving to death and the material conditions were unfathomably wretched for the average person. And of course, whether or not it's the topic of this debate, socialism. So of course, I could use this opportunity to straw man my opponents and try to turn them all into Stalinists, Leninists, Maoists, by criticizing vanguard parties and the idea of a transitional state into socialism. But since this has been demonstrated historically to have wretched outcomes, but most socialists that I run to these days, they condemn those societies and their authoritarian aims. So while I'm totally fine with arguing against some, some tanky shit, for the purposes of this conversation, I'd like to focus specifically on steel manning my opponents. And what Shretton and I hope to do is to argue in favor of private ownership of the means of production where the economy is facilitated through private property rights, unless in case of an apparent market failure, I don't think anybody would agree, except for maybe Ann Capps, that the military should be privatized. And I think of course, we're also in favor of essential healthcare services, universal healthcare forms of social security, public options for education, et cetera, et cetera. I mostly want to focus on this, as opposed to worker ownership of the means of production in which the entire society is essentially run democratically by the workers and private ownership has been abolished, either by the state or a worker revolution. Socialist these days often point to the empirical data on worker co-ops that's presently available to argue for socialism. So this is what I'm interested in going after, because not once in any study on worker co-ops will a researcher say in their conclusions and therefore socialism. So when we actually look into the data in these studies as solid as it is, I don't think it's an argument for socialism. So my biggest reasons for this are as follows. So private ownership of the means of production is necessary in order to start a worker co-op and for a worker co-op to function in the manner that it does as per the data. So a meta analysis conducted by Professor Eric Olson at the University of Missouri in 2013 titled the relative survival of worker cooperatives and barriers to their creation finds that the consensus of the existing data is that once created worker co-ops have survival rates which meet or exceed that of successful traditional business firms. So the traditional like private business 49% success rate whereas co-ops can go from 60% to even 87%. So that's awesome. And a lot of socialists will use that as an argument for socialism because they think oh like worker zone, worker run versus privately run, amazing. But to quote the researcher the overwhelming majority of co-ops formed are started out of the pocket of employee owners no outside investors like a conventional firm. And because of that worker co-ops are only in areas of industry that are not capital intensive. So all the studies are only on low capital intensive industries. So capital intensive industries just for the audience are industries that are measured by how much capital is necessary to put into that given industry. And worker co-ops as per this meta analysis only yield these results for businesses with industries that are low in how capital intensive they are. So Olson points out in the study that with work quote with worker co-ops in general the best way a co-op survives the first three years is to have a conventional firm so a private privately run business transition into a co-op. So it's not a co-op from the beginning. Therefore private ownership is optimal for both industries that co-ops work well in so that be low intensive industries and for more capital intensive industries. So some examples of industries that are more capital intensive would be like automobile manufacturing, oil production and refining, steel production, telecommunications and transportation sectors like railways, airlines things like that. Some examples of industries that are less capital intensive would be things like financial services and software development. So from what I can tell there is no evidence that worker co-ops can adequately account for these industries in a manner that they'd be at least demonstrated or we can infer to be a net benefit to society. The second reason why I'm skeptical of the and therefore socialism claim is that every study, every study on worker co-ops was done in a society which contains private property rights where a business owner, where business owners have the voluntary option to pursue either a worker owned firm or a traditional firm. So that voluntary decision making greatly influences the data especially in regards to mental health and well-being because there are studies on this. As clearly a voluntary action is far different than an involuntary action as many papers in the field of psychology would affirm. A massive meta-analysis by professor Douglas Cruz titled research evidence on the prevalence and effects of employee ownership of over 70 studies on worker co-ops finds that worker co-ops tend to and this is a good thing have higher productivity, more stability, more growth and better performance and survival when compared to the traditional structure. But the samples for this are in the US primarily as well as other Western capitalist economies like Italy, the UK, places like that. So it seems like all the meta-analytic data that anybody brings up as it pertains to co-ops will always run into what I described. What I think my opponents need to do to convince me of a socialist position is to provide me with an experiment of which we can actually measure all of these effects provided in the data above in a socialist situation and not a capitalist situation where there is no private ownership of the means of production. And that's what I would need in order to be swayed onto socialism and I have not seen such an experiment as of yet. And with that, I kick it off to Trenton. All right, am I good to go? You're good to go. Excellent. I want to begin by talking a bit about how I think we should talk about and think about this debate going forward before pulling over and expanding upon some of the concepts introduced by my partner in their opening speech. I'll then end by addressing some of the arguments brought up by the affirmative. Firstly, when deciding which sort of economic model best suits our interests, we should understand exactly what those interests are. I contend that those interests are that which will reliably promote the greatest welfare and prosperity for the most people. That is to say, fundamentally, this debate is about what economic model will best make us happy. Given that there are two absolute truths that we should keep in mind throughout this debate, the first truth is that happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment are subjective, matters of perception. That said, the best way to ensure a person is prosperous is to let them pursue their own happiness to the greatest extent possible. My contention here is not that we may never restrict the liberty of others. Only that doing so is a significant act that ought to demand significant justification. The affirmative position explicitly directly prohibits certain modes of living. If your dream is to take some entrepreneurial vision of yours, realize it, and dictate its course in the world, the affirmative position prevents you from doing so. An explicitly socialist framework says that your vision is not your own and demands that control over that vision be diluted. We ought to set a high bar for that kind of restricting policy. The second truth is that despite its failings, especially in countries that refuse to control for market failures, capitalist systems have, without a doubt, delivered prosperity and welfare to hundreds of millions of people the world over. Perhaps the best iteration of capitalism can be seen in the Nordic model where strong and resilient private sectors have thrived, such that the state is able to readily tap into that wealth for the purposes of correcting market failures, maintaining strong welfare policies, and further enabling citizens to pursue their own happiness. These countries frequently top the charts of the human development indexes which seeks to measure progress in those areas most critical to prosperity. This truth is important because it shows us two things. One, many of the apparent flaws of capitalism are not inherent features. Two, the current systems can work rather well, yet the affirmative is asking us to nonetheless throw all of that away. To avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we again ought to demand significant justification from the affirmative. Moving on to some on-case stuff. In keeping with this theme of choice and its relevance in this conversation, I want to touch upon the Olsen 13 evidence cited in our first speech. Olsen mentions the following. Worker cooperatives in the US are almost always created as new enterprises using funds from worker members themselves. The liability of adolescents experienced by new worker co-ops makes this viable only withered where the initial capital requirements are low. The expected profit rate is high or both. Except in circumstances like these, workers are likely to choose conventional employment rather than the uncertain rewards of collective entrepreneurship. One of the as-yet-unmentioned key takeaways here is that the workers in the status quote choose conventional firms large in part due to the security they offer in many of these industries. Abolishing conventional firms does not do away with the insecurities faced by worker co-ops. It only removes the secure option for those workers who do not have the luxury or the privilege of risk. If we truly care about the working classes, we ought to offer them meaningful choice, not restrict them to courses of action that are want to leave them in financial ruin. Further on this point, it's important to remember that worker co-ops are ultimately an exercise in radical group collaboration and as such demand especially novel group incentive schemes to overcome those problems inherent to collective action. As highlighted in our cruise in Blasey 95 evidence, such incentive structures may need quote something akin to developing a corporate culture that emphasizes company spirit promotes group cooperation, encourages social enforcement mechanisms. These kinds of group incentive schemes demand individual buy-in on a level unique from conventional firms. We should be seriously skeptical as to how the affirmative expects to get this kind of buy-in from workers who are forced into these modes of collective action as opposed to being offered the choice to pursue a career with the conventional firm. Next, it is absolutely fundamental that when evaluating the positive effects of worker co-ops we understand how those positive impacts come about. Cruise in Blasey 95 tell us that the critical metric we should be looking at is perceived influence on the part of employees when workers believe they have a say they are more committed more productive and more satisfied. Interestingly, what's also made clear in these studies is that worker co-ops, while good at meeting this condition, do not create that perceived influence inherently. Cruise in Blasey find no inherent link between perceived influence and ownership stakes. Well, this seems counterintuitive at first. This actually makes sense due to what's referred as the one divided by N problem. As more employees are hired the stakeholder pool expands and individual influence within the corporation is diluted. Anyone who's voted in an especially populous district knows this problem. Besides showing us that worker co-ops don't de facto access their primary positive impact this tells us that those positive traits are not exclusive to worker co-ops. There's no reason conventional firms can't create perceived influence among their employees. Anyone who's worked in management knows that the best firms go out of their way to ensure that their employees feel as though their voice matters. In-house focus groups can be made surveys with transparent and prompt feedback open forum board meetings. There are a plethora of ways for conventional firms to access these same positive impacts we associate with worker co-ops by making sure their employees feel heard. Finally, my partner cited Olsen 13 as evidence for the utility conventional firms provide to worker co-ops as a means for mitigating the risks associated with the latter. I want to address any concerns regarding the likelihood of conventional firms willingly making that transition to a worker co-op because it does seem kind of hard to understand. Both Olsen 13 and Crews in Blazy 95 reference current tax incentives that in the status quo have led to a significant increase in companies that feature employee stock ownership plans. This shows us that through intelligent policymaking we have the tools to ensure some degree of an increased worker ownership in conventional firms. And there's no reason to believe that we can't hyper-target these same tax incentives to successfully encourage the transition of conventional firms to worker co-ops. This is important because it offers us a scenario where even if we believe worker co-ops are fundamentally preferable to conventional firms, the best way to ensure the creation and longevity of those co-ops is to maintain private firms and bend them to our interests. And this is not possible if we abolish private capital and move to a socialist economic model. Now I'm going to use the last like two and a half minutes I have hopefully won't take that long to just quickly do a line by line and address some of the concerns brought up by the socialist position so far. So with regard to Britain's speech a lot of the complaints that were brought up here are not complaints that are inherent to capitalism. The flaws and problems are real but if you can draw a clear cause of line between problem ABC and capitalism to the economic model that's really important that needs to be explicitly done. I would love to see a citation for that. And I think that we best kind of see where this might not be possible in something like COVID. Plenty of thoroughly capitalist nations absolutely killed it with their COVID response. So the idea that we can point at things like COVID or even things like unemployment and homelessness in a lot of these social problems we see today in America in say that these are causal inherent consequences of capitalism seems very strange to me especially considering that we can look at other capitalist countries that seem to have addressed these problems far better. It seems to me like a lot of the criticisms here are policy problems. There are consequences of poor governance in failing policymakers not any sort of problem inherent to the economic model that is capitalism. And I continue on the COVID point like to kind of illustrate even how this would manifest in America I think it is blatantly obvious to like most people I would hope that are anywhere you're like have been keeping up with like news cycles that if Trump and McConnell were not in power then the American COVID response would have been radically different. Right? We had the experts even the economists I know that it was mentioned that in America the profit motive means that oh well we're not going to take the steps necessary to deal with things like COVID but even economists were pretty unanimously saying you have to take these lockdown actions you have to start testing and doing contact tracing because in the long term if we don't take actions the consequences to our economy are going to be worse so this idea that the profit motive pollutes our ability to respond to crises doesn't seem to bear out. And the last thing I want to say is in response to America Johnson when we talk about the power dynamics between employers and employees we should remember that there are plenty of ways to mitigate that through things like ESOPs or through strong unions that are perfectly compatible with capitalist frameworks and I think that's all I have thank you. Thank you so much splinters and now we'll go ahead that's a good segue into our open discussion. All right there's a lot to dig into here I want to thank both of my opponents here I want to point a couple of things out first off and there was a bunch that I wanted to address but the capitalists that capitalists have done as well as Vietnam show me one capitalist country that has anything close to Vietnam's results. Vietnam. I yeah yeah he's right actually. Yeah no Vietnam is not capitalist they've had some capitalist reforms over the last however many years but Vietnam is still a socialist nation and EJ can go into that. Yeah so I live in Vietnam and I've actually lived through the COVID response here and I'll say any of the countries that did do well including capitalist nations which I would agree are capitalist like South well South Korea actually didn't do nearly as well as Vietnam but I would say that New Zealand and Taiwan pretty close you know actually I would throw Australia in there too yeah Australia did not do nearly as well as Vietnam but anyway the point I'm going to make is that the countries that did well in their responses are the countries that enacted socialistic policies that put human lives before capitalist profits. Okay so this is the deal that I think Brent is trying to explain when he when he says that it's socialism that aided the response in Vietnam it's that socialistic policies such as and I was living through this whole thing I can attest to the fact that they shut down every non-essential business and when I say non-essential in Da Nang I mean they shut down restaurants you couldn't even get food delivery from restaurants the only places that were open were markets and grocery stores you had to get a temperature scam when he came in they you had to they would only let people go to the traditional markets five times per family per week so they had very severe restrictions on capitalist profits and yes the tourism industry in Vietnam is dead right now as far as foreigners coming in the only tourism right now is domestic and it does of course hurt capitalist profits a lot however Vietnam has been able to weather the storm through socialistic policies they have provided absolutely free testing and healthcare to everybody during the crisis including foreigners they've provided free and mandatory quarantine to anybody who may have been exposed they've had great tracking and tracing programs it is in the same these same protocols these same styles of protocols were used in New Zealand and Taiwan and that's why they are still doing very well as well anywhere you see success against COVID it's because capitalist profits were not guiding the economy and they were not guiding the response in the political angle as well the doctors and the people who actually know how to fight a crisis like this were put in charge and allowed to put the interests of human life and saving human life ahead of capitalist profits and you see that in the even the wonderful Nordic model countries that you're talking about did much much much worse than Sweden tried to use what was it called herd immunity which doesn't even work because you can get COVID twice they had a bunch of people die for no good reason whatsoever now I will also point out that even in the case of Taiwan and New Zealand they had a better response but also and they saved lives but their economies tanked whereas the Vietnamese economy grew in all of the quarters again it's win-win because when you have an economy that is not that is not tied to profits that can still grow even if profits and speculative investment goes down you can weather crises like COVID you can do something about global warming the fact is Vietnam has long-standing socialist programs that predate COVID by far such as price control programs which make things like okay so one of the first things Vietnam did when COVID started was they shut down rice production big deal for Vietnam because one of Vietnam's biggest exports is rice they're I think the second largest rice exporter in the entire world it's a big deal for them to shut down rice exports that's the first thing they did they've always had price controls on food staples food prices were totally 100 stable there was never a shortage there were never run there was like one small running grocery stores for a couple of hours until the government started providing free food to anybody who was under quarantine and showed that they were going to support human life regardless of what happened that run in the grocery stores lasted about two or three hours until they saw that policy come out and that's ended immediately we never had any kinds of shortages as far as the whole time I've been here and that's because from before COVID these kinds of programs have been in place and healthcare has been available 90% of Vietnamese people are fully insured 90% of Vietnamese people own their own homes so they haven't had to worry about paying rent through the crisis which is huge we've got an eviction crisis because so many people rent plus a massive number of workers co-ops in Vietnam especially agricultural workers co-ops so the vast majority of agriculture in Vietnam is worker owned cooperatives and worker owned cooperatives are also one of the of the many many wonderful qualities we've been talking about of worker co-ops one of them is that during a crisis they're more likely to everybody agree to kind of reduce their wages instead of fire people and that's exactly what we saw in Vietnam so a lot fewer farm jobs were lost in Vietnam because of the resiliency of workers co-ops compared to other places in Southeast Asia which had a lot more layoffs and that sort of thing for farm labor so I do have to say that from my experience having lived through this crisis having studied it a lot in terms of what Vietnam's response has been it is socialistic policies even if you don't think that Vietnam itself is a socialist country or New Zealand and Taiwan obviously are not socialist countries in terms of having workers on the means of production they still had policies that did not allow capitalist profit motivations to guide society and the last sentence I'll make is this and a wider point is the one of the biggest problems I have with capitalism is simply that it allows all of human society to be harnessed to capitalist profit motivations it doesn't do great things for things like the environment even the best deal we've seen like the Green New Deal which has been signed off by some capitalists it doesn't go nearly far enough in terms of stopping global climate change in time to avoid complete climate catastrophe so we have to find better solutions to these problems that we're facing in the very near term future and jump in with a couple points real quick yeah go for it Trent go for it yeah so there's like there's like a lot there so I'm gonna go line by line just to put like something on each of them but we can like drill in on whatever we find the most interesting so one thing that keeps happening here that I do not understand is why is it that when we point to the reasons why countries like Vietnam handle this crisis better or more resilient through it when we actually look at the policies that allowed that to happen none of these policies are in any way like tied to a specific economic model we talk about the profit they are tied but they're they're incentivized by the economic model puts society at the behest of capitalist profit motives that's why the USA had like no shutdown because capitalists completely run society we're gonna let splinters just go ahead and finish okay sorry no go ahead and then sure so yeah I was gonna try and address that too so we can say that well the putting profits first is you know why these countries were incapable of like responding in the way they should have but the the I guess like the two or three issues I have with that are that like one we can go when we can look at major economic opinion like the economic discourse among economists that are cited and essentially should be turned to when it comes to dictating American policy and the pretty overwhelming consensus is that hey we need to take action now it's better to hurt ourselves in the short term with like lockdowns and whatnot rather than allow this virus to run rampant throughout our country for the next year and a half or and additionally you don't even have to talk about these lockdowns and our inability or unwillingness to do so if we had had adequate testing and contact tracing from the get go after borders were closed and that didn't happen 100% purely only because Donald Trump and Republicans in positions of power decided that they didn't want to do anything about it there's no profit involved there the government has the means it has the funding to go out and to get people at airports and at the border testing people and contact tracing those who test positive there's no profit motive that even comes into play here the only way I could see this these decisions being tied to back to the economic model is if in Brent and kind of lead to this is if there's something about the economic model of socialism that inherently just places more value on human life which some of you guys are importing but you need to you need to draw that distinction I don't have to demonstrate as you need to demonstrate that I don't see how that is inherent in socialism I see no reason why worker co-ops can't slash aren't in the now also driven by profit motives in their respective economies um yeah I but we can dive on that first no no that's good because I would like to drill into that and this was where I wanted to go anyway so thank you for for bringing that up okay so here's the issue there wasn't a profit motive directly and you're right in the sense that like economists were saying no we have to shut down now or it will be worse than the long run but that's the thing about capitalism it can't think long term like that what's happening is is that our our industry is being driven by this class of investors by the people who put their money into wall street and what happened was was that the people who had the uh incentive who had the ability to make those important policy decisions that would preserve human life and actually preserve the economy in the long run had no good incentive to do that especially since they knew they were coming up on an election and they knew they would get voted out if the economy was bad so what they wound up doing essentially was the worst of both worlds they crashed the economy and then they put us into a uniquely bad situation so yes our leadership in one country in the united states well no no not just in the united states we've seen this in just about every country in europe and the the fact is is that again the covid response has been garbage it's uniquely garbage in the united states but i would also argue that the leadership that we have in the united states is a direct result of capitalism and the profit motive specifically donald trump because donald trump made a lot of money while he was on television not for himself because he's a terrible businessman but he made a lot of money for the networks that they continuously covered him because he said a number of horrible things and as the media zoomed in on him and gave him billions and billions of dollars of free coverage he just got more and more popular and bam you have a freaking psychopath in the in the white house with holes in his brain well yeah but also biden is not is has already said that he's going to veto universal health care if it comes across his desk he's not going to have shut down he's not going to shut down the economy he's going to shut down the virus is what he says he hasn't given anything in his plan that indicates he's going to do anything that will meaningfully contain covid so i don't think this is just a Trump problem and i also don't think it's just a USA problem i think that the burden of evidence is really very much on the capitalist the pro-capitalist side here in terms of looking at the whole planet and seeing that the the overwhelming vast majority of countries with capitalist economies which is the overwhelmingly vast majority of countries have done a very very bad job and it's absurdly naive to me to say that oh capitalist profit motives and capitalist interests don't dominate the politics in these countries i mean if you just look at the USA alone the way that lobbying works the way that bills get written the way that all of our non-corporate advisors have been gutted back when newt gingrich defunded the senate and house so they got rid of all of the advisors and replaced them with lobbyists i mean if you know anything about how the system works in the USA you know that capitalist interests have dominating power over and you can look at it in the way that in the outcomes of legislation as well you know that wealthy people have much more impact on legislation and on politicians than working-class people so i really do think the burden of evidence here is on the opposing side to show that capitalism can't handle COVID because overwhelmingly it did not and in the cases where it did it was only where they had strong policies that did not allow capitalist interests because capitalists want to keep their businesses running okay they don't want to shut down their businesses they don't want to pay their employees extra money for they don't want to invest in PPE they proved that they demonstrated very very very soundly during the non-responsive and even if they're nice and they wanted to actually do that they're economically disincentivized to do it by the system that we have we punish them for helping their employees in much the same way and again all of this goes down to that problem of putting profits first economically it doesn't necessarily mean that our leaders are people who sit there and rub their hands together and say ha ha ha how many people can i kill today to to become wealthy very few people are like that i mean leopold the second of belgium was like that but you know besides that like that's that's rarely happens it's like capitalism it's like it's an algorithm that is set to select leaders within our society and the algorithm has been set to select the cleverest and most amoral people and to elevate them i need to correct one quick thing i want to get letting you go for it real quick because it's a talking point i hear all the time and it's super out of context not true the whole biden said he was going to veto health care that it's that entire quote he explicitly said he would veto health care if democrats put it across his desk without any funding attached to it that that is very different from biden was not going to advise universal health care okay i mean i mean he campaigned he campaigned against universal health care he's forgot that's certainly like when i just i think we should really just stick him let's just focus on the capitalism socialism or don't go yelling about biden okay there yeah yeah yeah by my whole point was just that i don't think biden would do a better job than trump uh meaningful i would agree in fact i might even say that if hillary had won in 2016 we might not have gotten the um now this speculation on my part but the actual bailout i think might not have happened i i would be very surprised to see the bailout that came to the american people come through anybody the only reason trump did it was he just does whatever and they thought it would be popular taking away a lemon yeah yeah yeah i just i just wanted to say like i just think we're there are so many points that were just said that i don't think i could possibly respond like yeah 90 gishgallow but yeah choose whatever you want to focus on i mean yeah i just i just yeah just okay so there was something that came up very very long time ago um where we point we're pointing to like vietnam is like a socialist society so first of all like i don't know how you measure whether or not a society is a socialist society outside of like the worker co-op model and the i i looked into this out of the like 500 thousand-ish businesses in vietnam only like 25k of them are worker co-ops it's less than 1% of businesses are worker co-ops doesn't seem like it doesn't really seem like much of a socialist society to me plus like from what i understand too like there's still like some kind of like private health insurance in vietnam like they cover the absolute poorest 100% and then like 80% for like the average like middle class person then 30% for like farmers and fishermen so it doesn't seem like it doesn't seem like uh like a socialist society to me so it's weird that this is an example the workers co-op numbers are off quite significantly there are millions of workers co-op workers that work for co-ops in vietnam i'll get the exact number in a second here but as far as the way the insurance is structured yeah i don't think it's ideal but it is it's a lot better than what they have in the usa at least which is a very very low bar but but my point is that it's not socialist 90% of vietnamese people are fully insured though is is i think it's important i mean it is socialism in the sense that you know for one thing what i've said is profits are not in command of the economy the economy is not structured around a way that the only way that it grows is through speculative investment for profit it feels but it feels like now we're changing the definition of socialism to something that we didn't agree upon i'll grant you the point okay that at least for me i can't speak for brenton but for me vietnam is not the ideal society and it's not the kind of society that i would want you know no i'd agree that's that's not it's it's it's it's perhaps the best we have right now in my experience it's the best place i've lived in terms of you know having more socialism versus more capitalism influencing society but no i think that you need to completely eliminate capital and build workers owned workers need to own the means of production within a socialist society which is why i think just just to go back to the point maybe this is a good thing for us to focus on for a bit because i think this gets it's like it's like banned it's like like you're like you're not allowed to have independent unions at vietnam to my knowledge there's like one state like one legal state led like trade union it's a well party socialist republic it doesn't seem like 90% of worker strikes in vietnam are done outside of the official union they're wildcat strikes and there's never been an instance of vietnam's government punishing people for having those wildcat strikes so in the usa all workers unions also need to be registered with the board of labor so i mean if you want to do a comparison it's pretty much a standard practice for unions to have to register with governments i'm an anarchist so i'm opposed to the state so i don't think that's great so i'm not going to sit here and say that's the best system but i will say that that fact that 90% of strikes in vietnam are wildcat strikes and that are not punished by the government i think that would say that there is some organization that this just doesn't seem like this just this is a paper but i'm looking at what's actually happening in practice so on paper yes all personal experience organization is argued it's not just personal experience like i don't know 90% you look it up 90% of strikes in vietnam are wildcat strikes that haven't that go outside of the official union structure yeah i mean there is what the organization here that is not affiliated with the state but regardless point but like my point though is that this doesn't seem like a socialist society with the definition that we agreed upon which is worker ownership of the means of production there's like okay well i'm not arguing that vietnam is the best society i'm arguing that i'm not saying i'm not saying it's the good give me a second let him finish his point i'm not i'm not saying it's the i'm not saying that you think it's the best society that's not the point that i'm making the point that i'm making is that it's just found out that last year by the way i just want to interject this last year vietnam passed a law that you can't have independence okay oh they did okay well that's cool um awesome regardless i mean the point is that my point is that it's not a society where the workers collectively own the means of production no like we agree society i'm arguing for i mean we could say okay so this is again when we're working with real world examples of like what is a socialist society and what is not and what can we judge to be more significantly socialist than others vietnam is the most socialist society that we can probably point to or among the most maybe cuba yeah i just want to say i don't like the framing here and i think it's unfair that we're sitting here having to say that defend vietnam when it's not the it's not as you're saying it's not a purely socialist society we're advocating for a purely socialist society and there's not this expectation that the capitalists have to you know like defend a purely america like the usa or norway norway has plenty of problems and norway by the way the the big uh norway and sweden these nordic model countries they uh export their suffering through international imperialist capitalism and if you just look at during the covid response there the sweden the swedens icaa factories had horrible atrocious working conditions look at the factory for icaa in russia it was one of the worst outbreaks at the beginning and icaa's corporate structure did absolutely nothing to help their migrant workers that lived there so the fact that these Nordic models might look great on paper it just means that they're exporting their suffering to factory nations and i'd love to see how well they do if they don't have those factory nations to produce everything for them if you only care about the workers in your own country and you don't care about the people that are suffering in the countries that make the shit that you buy and use then i find that to be i don't know not to be strong terrifyingly short-sighted this is actually like a really interesting point right because when we talk about like exporting like suffering as far as like having exporting the manufacturing of a lot of these goods to like other countries we like to when we have this conversation it often does come up at this point that you brought up where you know the conditions that these people are working out like terrible and whatnot so something i think that's important to remember as unfortunate as it is is that absent you know if for example if america practiced a much more protectionist trade policy then that manufacturing would be taking place here that does not mean that the workers like these children and like chinese sweatshops or something are now you know in these like beautiful like luxury jobs that just means that they're instead of working you know in a sweatshop they are working in a field for less pay in worse conditions right hang on so they won't say there's a second part to this there's a second part to this that i want to get to you right and then feel free tear it all apart so like i think it's important to remember that like these free trade deals like happen for a reason and that oftentimes the way this cycle works is it kind of passes the buck where less developed nations oftentimes act as the manufacturing basis for more developed nations and that leads to an increase in average wealth and income for those people and as people's income and wealth increases they are they get more negotiating power they're able to argue for better labor protections and then that makes the cost of labor there are you using the IMF steps and it kind of it goes around this is the Steven Pinker bullcrap are you using the international poverty line from the IMF for for those numbers the world bank I'm sorry the world bank international poverty lines that what you're basing that lifting people out of poverty stuff on are you asking for like like which numbers I guess am I I'm not I'm just because I don't believe I have I have data that conflicts with the fact the idea that capitalism lists people in imperialized or what as you say developing countries out of poverty I don't think that that's true at all and I sure yeah if you can like drop that and try something I love to look it over that the second part of that that I wanted to mention is that one of the other nice things trade deals that actually allows us to be in a position to negotiate for better labor protections for those people that's something that Obama in America was doing out of the TPP before everybody lost the mind and pulled out so like we kind of can use this interdependency do you think the USA is a great lift to those labor platform for enacting global change I mean what the traffic absolutely we have so much Germany we do have so much power and we have yeah but look at what we do with rights yeah we bomb hospitals we don't improve labor conditions for people that's a that's a certain labor conditions we're in government in Chile labor conditions we're in the TPP we negotiate the Paris climate of course we negotiate the Iran deal we use our hegemony for good things all the time I would say imperialism and when it gets undone it's not because of capitalism it's because bad people get put in office people capitalism puts those bad people in office because it rewards the exact kind of I don't I don't care I don't care I don't care about that okay go on is the argument here that is the response here that any time that I point to a a policymaker making a bad decision that is still evidence of capitalism failing because policymakers only get in office off the back of support from capitalism like no no the the issue the issue is is the capitalism capitalist businesses are treated as a proving ground they're treated as a way to select our leaders in ways to it's an intelligence system essentially that's how markets work the problem is a couple of things one markets are inherently biased towards previous actors within those markets which is why for instance swarm technology was able to outperform both experts and markets the markets being the biggest odds and properly predict the winner of the Kentucky Derby and you guys can look that up it's freaking fascinating because it's a way of aggregating human intelligence in such a way that the people become smarter than the in the sum of their parts and I actually think this could be really heavily used in a future socialist society but the point being is is that first of all you've got the snowball effect of power as you are successful within the market you gain more power and you gain a higher profile and eventually you get up to the point where you can run for office successfully and win usually now there are other ways to do this Alexander Escasio Cortez great example you know and I actually met her in New York City before she was famous she was my bartender and we talked about Occupy super smart but that's rare the point is is that overall the system will select for like as if it were an algorithm like you know how YouTube has the algorithm that selects the specific videos that are then delivered to people and similarly the capitalist algorithm selects specific people and puts them into positions of power and what it uses to select for those people is oftentimes a high degree of amorality and usually not always because Donald Trump is not a clever individual but usually they tend to be very clever and smart so basically it's like you took an algorithm and you said I want to give power to people that don't care about ethics and I want to give power to people that that are really really smart this is going to work out great and boom you run into situations where for instance psychopaths make up maybe 1% of the U.S. population but 10% of Wall Street and similarly Wall Street is not U.S. policy makers yes it is that's the point hold on I don't like this framing and the framing is that like we need to have like this imperialist relationship with other countries so the U.S. state hemogen hegemony can go out and I don't think we and influence labor but what but the the factories that are being owned by companies like Foxconn they're being commissioned by companies like Apple they're being owned by capitalists why if capitalism is so great why don't the capitalists improve the workers conditions I don't think people will be jumping off of buildings if they own their own labor and they don't collectively own those factories themselves so why is it like this complex do we have imperialist structure where we have to which never happens there's all these there's this whole NGO industrial complex that says that they're doing all this work but it doesn't happen people are not being lifted out of poverty they are jumping off of the rooftops of buildings that are tied directly to American capitalists that don't do anything to improve those workers conditions why don't like if capitalism is so great and it's so great for one person to own this massive or one small group of shareholders to own this massive massive corporation why don't they improve the working conditions for their own workers why do we need this big complicated imperialist machine why don't the capitalists just make good working conditions for their workers if that's the greatest structure for how to structure a business entity it's just it's a weird framing that makes it straight I don't think the issue with with Wall Street by the way I'm sorry I'm sorry yeah there is a question so I just want to give splinters and laymen a chance to respond to that all you laymen then we'll get right back to you yeah I just I just I don't I don't think it's fair to like sort of strawmen us to being like oh we're like pro this whole ruling elite that wants people that's like okay with people dying and stuff like I don't think Trenton and I so how do you have capitals without that without eight people owning 50 percent of the wealth like give me your vision for that 50 percent of the wealth I don't know taxes and then you put those taxes back into social programs how do you how do you how do you make that your policies that have been done in many countries when you are successful as a businessman yeah you may mean the problem here is that there and I think as Brent and like showed us that they seem to believe that like the private the private world like some algorithm in the private world selects for all us policymakers and not like us electoral it's not yes not not dude look at yeah no seriously the United States is not a democracy it's an oligarchy it's been rated as that as specifically and the interests of politicians and the wealthy are weighted far more than the interests of the voter okay but we're talking about but there's other capitalist countries that you can point to right like we're not like I don't think I like stands of the USA like sure but but all the other capitalist countries have the same problem in that they concentrate a great deal of power and control and the ability to rewrite the rules and to change policy in the hands of very few people and the more these people are removed from society and the more they are raised to the highest levels of power the more disconnected they become from the rest of society and even if they aren't evil they just don't understand and as a result horrible things happen and just yeah like I mean like great example do you think that everyone who invested in the British East India Company was a monster that if they had if they'd gone to India and they'd seen 10% of the subcontinent dying in a single year as a direct result do you think that they would have continued to support that no but they didn't they were removed from the situation yeah I just don't know anything about these in your company so I can't really do speak to that but yeah look it's called the age of it's called the age of heroic commerce there's a there's a great podcast if you don't want to read the book okay my problem is that like like we're attributing like all of these problems to capitalism right but I'm hearing a lot of capitalism is bad but I'm not hearing a lot of socialism is a good prescription and then if socialism solves all of these problems going back to what I said earlier like I need an experiment of a worker-owned society how can we make it that's a that's a that's not an argument I'm sorry but the fact of the matter is you're saying like a lot of your arguments against workers I wasn't trying to make an argument I was just asking for like an experiment that's all no no like you can because you can share all the numbers about workers cooperatives that show how great they are yes but as we but as we said before like these are these are co-ops that have to start privately owned and then that you're gonna capture society right yes right so but here's but that's what all the data is on now literally every every single socialist anarchist marxists they all say that socialism must grow out of capitalism you can't spring into socialism from nowhere but what we're saying is we expropriate these factories can I jump in for like two seconds yeah sure go for it so like Ryan Indonesia I totally understand how god damn infuriating it is where we're sitting here asking if I give us the experiment and we all know that like the perfect set the perfect social socialist like countries never existed right so this is like very very very difficult for you I like perfect country period hasn't existed right exactly the development on I don't want a perfect country but like I you do you have to understand and I try to get at this in my like framework argument in my opener that when we look at something and I suppose like we would disagree on this but at least for us capitalists right for us capitalists we look at the world and it seems like capitalism despite its failings especially in certain iterations like the American iteration it seems to have worked relatively well compared to alternatives that have been tried so if you are trying to tell us to like listen you need to abandon this we have a better option like man there's like a high bar to like convince capitalists of that change that I feel like has to be met existential threat to the human race I really have I have two points these are questions that I would like to have answered by the opposition so because I think we do we have talked a lot and I think it's fair but I have questions that I'd like answered so first of all these experiments that you want to exist to show that socialism works why isn't capitalism allow them to take place why when Vietnam decided they wanted to become socialist and the overwhelming number of Vietnamese people supported Ho Chi Minh why did the why did the Americans come in and support a puppet government that guillotine thousands of people had a very fascistic rule over South Vietnam why when Allende was legally and democratically elected into office in Chile did the USA install Pinochet to become a ruthless fascist dictator there why does the CIA countries around the world whenever they start to dabble in socialism why do we embargo put these severe embargo restrictions on places like Cuba and Vietnam why don't you just allow these experiments to flourish and the reason is because they're afraid that they might succeed and they're afraid that they like when Allende was in power he was succeeding in making Chile a much better country which Pinochet immediately rolled all that back with the Chicago boys and that neoliberal hegemony that came from liberals in the USA so that so why don't those experiments why aren't they allowed to flourish under capitalism with this capitalism we're in the world and my second question is my second question is can you show me a capitalist country that works can you show me a capitalist country that works for everybody in the supply chain okay so even in the Nordic country do they they severely oppress people in their factory nations so why don't I would like to see your experiment where capitalism benefits everybody in society everybody is taking care of everybody has their material needs met I just wanted I think that that same experiment if that's such an important yeah I just I just want to clarify like when I'm asking for an experiment I'm not asking for it to be like a perfect 100 percent every single thing is accounted for everybody I know but there hasn't even been a chance because of the way that no I know so well I mean I can only go off with the data presents me right like I don't like to make very vague inferences to like well it might be this it might be this when I'm looking at the data on worker co-ops the success rates from them come from not them starting as worker co-ops from the get go but from them transitioning into them after they register as a private traditional firm first and that's why I'm sort of skeptical of this and I think that might be why some for example like I hear a claim a lot from people like Richard Wolf where banks sort of have a sort of bias towards like a private ownership versus worker ownership for like like ideological investors too so like going back to the data I think that's because the data seems to suggest that it's better if they start off as that and then transition into it versus them starting off right away so if you want it to start a business you can start a business but then transition into a co-op later and I think that might as a capitalist well I think that might I thought you're finished yeah I'm just saying I think that might be a potential explanation why that's at least backed by data that's as much as I can know and I just want to clarify once again I don't intrinsically defend private ownership like obviously I'm in favor of some some forms of the decmodification here and there if we can demonstrate that it's good I'm not a researcher like I can't go in and implement these models I'm not a policy maker like I'm just an average guy so like I just I'd have to go off of this as well yeah go for it yeah yeah um so it's like answer question one in this is I don't want to take us down the electoral electoral electoral and rabbit hole but it's you ask you know why is this has the us engaged in all of these I would agree like pretty pretty bad for our interventions yeah like the on ironic answer to that is that us the us voting population is small and uniquely uninformed and apathetic towards foreign policy and we do not evaluate our policy makers and public office candidates based on their their their beliefs about foreign policy that that is the reason why this stuff happens is because it's because these people why are they like that and why are they like that for a myriad of reasons because most predominantly probably because the education system is like woefully underfunded in the united states and why is it woefully underfunded because because education but it's it's a it's a feedback cycle exactly right it's a negative feedback cycle right what you've got essentially here is you've got it the us is uniquely a garbage fire in this in this regard because the nitwits with wooden teeth who thought like you know bloodletting would cure them built our system and they were deeply afraid of people having real power these were a bunch of rich idiots who came from England the aristocrats that wanted to be the new nobility in the new world those are the people that created our hallowed constitution they created the state religion that we all have to live in called capitalism and you know I've been capitalism predated that but I'm talking specifically about like American society and how it relates to capitalism and economics and economics so you've got stuff like for instance people in the United States you know not voting very particularly well or being particularly intelligent or being particularly educated but that is by design because again the people that are actually hold the lovers of power don't want us to be educated they don't want us to be able to think critically Noam Chomsky talks about this if you watch manufacturing consent they actually view Americans taking democratic like like masses of Americans voting they view that as a crisis of democracy because they think we're all idiots and that they're the only ones that can run this I don't even necessarily disagree with that the problem is that you can't draw the these this disenfranchisement by design talking points you cannot connect these to the economic model of capitalism when we have capitalist nations so so out of their oh wait let them finish their voter their voting population right we can go look at mandated voting in Australia right we can look at capitalist nations that go out of their way to enfranchise their population that go out of their way to educate their population that top the charts in terms of certainly and again I'm saying the United States is in a uniquely garbage position here but these problems are still inherent in Australia they're still inherent in any of these capitalist nations because what they do is the the system winds up because markets are biased towards previous actors within markets it tends to bring the the power to a specific pinnacle of a few you know hundred well I I think I have a more simple I think I could cut closer to the quick here maybe because the economic model of capitalist owning production is is the model under which these workers are being treated like shit the capitalists are the one treating the workers like shit I don't understand like we don't have to build a big justification for the electoral problem blah blah blah the capitalists treat their workers like shit that's what's happening I mean there the people are jumping off to buildings because the capitalist who own the companies are treating them like shit so why do we have to go through and prove all this stuff about electoralism and all this stuff whenever quite frankly if the capitalists owning means of production is great then why don't they treat their employees well because there's the most direct evidence I can think of because because when we're because when we're prescribing problems to society we also have to be able to bring solutions to that and we have to be able to demonstrate solutions all right so I want to go back to the problem with this your experiment seems like hold on let let layman finish this point it there wasn't really much it's just like it just seems like we attribute like a lot of problems to capitalism but then there are solutions to that there's like a bunch of solutions to problems like like in community quality all this stuff that like you can solve through like policies and stuff like that I don't know why we have to completely infer causality there are easy solutions burden of evidence so there are easily solutions to all of these problems and you're right there's not the same burden of evidence going on here I actually talked about that we have plenty of food we could give it to the hungry people we have more than enough housing we could give it to all the homeless people but we won't because the economic system disincentivizes that it only incentivizes activity which is profitable any activity that is not profitable has to be either handled through charity which is never enough to actually support it it's a band-aid on a gushing wound or the people who engage in that activity have to take a major risk to their life and limb and the safety of themselves and those that they love to do something that is not profitable do you guys think do you guys sorry go on yeah it's more profitable to leave 40 percent of the food to rot than to give it to hungry people even though it is more socially desirable to give it to the hungry people and this is because the hungry people cannot pay for it and there is no other way that they have found as of yet to generate a profit by feeding those hungry people who can't pay it just sounds like we're kind of viewing this as though we can either like like private ownership societies that are capitalist aren't homogenous insofar as their market deregulation goes for these things like we have social security that spans across a spectrum across capitalist societies that have been able to deal with problems like homelessness and stuff like that like again like if you look at places like Finland Finland is a capitalist society and Finland is Finland has like nobody on their streets now almost yeah well the Nordic countries are very good at that and that's a big part of their their culture like if you look at Iceland in like year 1200 they had more aggressive welfare laws in Iceland in like the year 1200 than we have in the United States right now and it's because six months of darkness so they have a huge issue with depression as a result of how of that darkness and also it gets so cold you've got a bunch of homeless sickles on the street if you don't deal with that so they know the cost of leaving these people to die the Americans don't know the cost of leaving these people to die because it takes longer and we've got a larger country and they get shipped off to California but we're not just talking about capital but we're not just talking about America we're talking about capitalism yeah yeah but the the fact is that we have to the the so there are certain societies that have higher levels like the state can be used to mitigate the market failures of capitalism the problem is is that you have this inherent contradiction between the power that is vested in the capitalist class and the state and the state that goes out of its way to mitigate these problems so the people that have all the power have a disincentive to solve the problems unless those problems then impact their profits or their quality of life so again how do you think a policy maker wins slash keeps their seat wins slash keeps their seat yes as soon as a politician gets elected they start fundraising that's the answer right why do you that's what they know what they're talking about why do you think they're fundraising where do you what do you think that money is used because you have to buy your seat in office in most capitalist countries what do you mean by buy your seat well I used to work in campaign marketing essentially in campaign communications and it cost a shitload of money to get somebody elected and one of the biggest indicators of who will win like in a local election is who spends the most money on things like robo calls television advertising street signs that's what gets people elected under a capitalist right you have to build an institution to push yourself into power essentially you need and that's only getting worse things like superpacks the common thread here to keep in mind is that this money goes ultimately towards getting votes towards getting exposure towards getting people aware of the politicians and invested in their idea right so when we talk about whatever influence like corporations may play in getting like somebody elected and into office ultimately the power here is not residing with the corporation it's residing with the electorate because that money's being put towards getting votes but you just pointed out that the electorate is ignorant and purposefully kept ignorant and purposefully fooled by these advertising campaigns they're playing both sides so power is power and to deny that is to me absurd because I worked in marketing for so long and that was basically my bread and butter was applying soft power and propaganda to people to make them buy soap or what the fuck ever so to say that soft power is not a form of power to me is absurd and to say that money is not a form of soft power within the capitalist hegemony within the capitalist imperialist framework is to me absurd so and then that begs the question is it okay for capitalists to accumulate so much wealth that eight individuals own half of the world's wealth and if that's not okay how do you have a system of capitalism in which you can distribute things much much more equitably and at that point if you're redistributing wealth on such a massive scale why not have democracy in the workplace and what is your argument against democracy in the workplace if you want democracy to control who gets to own nuclear missiles or who gets to send soldiers off to die in a war you want democracy there with the state why don't you want democracy at the place where you spend eight hours of your working day we never said we don't want democracy in the workplace in the wrong position is that it is twofold it's that one what's this debate about again so it's that one worker co-ops like can absolutely work in certain industries but that they primarily they aren't really feasible in capital intensive industries and in all industries it is beneficial for worker co-ops to form out of a conventional firm transitioning right so the argument here this is such a weirdly specific thing but that we because that's how economists have to study these different things and how we have to measure all these different things this is how it works hold on hold on hold on all right let splinters finish his point yeah sorry ultimately it's just like worker co-ops work fine in certain areas they don't work fine in other areas such that ultimately it's not a good idea to abolish like private ownership of capital you need to have some level of private ownership of capital here you need to allow conventional firms to exist to some meaningful degree in order to deal with capital intensive industries and to help worker co-ops in non-capital intensive industries have the greatest chance of like succeeding in surviving okay i think i think okay i'm not an economist but i'm a former business person and i have run many businesses and i i know that the main reason businesses fail is under capitalization you don't have enough money to start your business you need at least enough money most people say to run your business for six months at a loss that's a shitload of money okay that's why the average small business that has any hope of succeeding the usa requires at least $30,000 in startup which is a significant amount of money for most workers now the fact that you're saying that these privately capitalized firms that then turn into co-ops work better in these capital and heavy industries that is like that's like saying like okay we have this greenhouse where we have potatoes and tomatoes and we're watering the potatoes but not the tomatoes therefore we know that potatoes grow better so potatoes are better like that doesn't make any sense we're not arguing just for cooperative owned businesses within capitalism because I know as a former business owner that most co-ops are not going to be able to start up with these capital intensive industries because you're not going to be able to find 50 workers that can raise enough capital to support a business that's going to support 50 workers in the first year under capitalism that's why we as communists and anarchists advocate for seizing the capital and seizing the means of production directly from capitalists and if you want to just rather regardless of whether or not you think that that's moral or whatever do you not agree that if we could somehow just transfer the billions and billions of dollars from those eight people that own 50% of the wealth into workers cooperatives would that not perhaps from an economic standpoint solve this problem of undercapitalization and if not why not my position is I don't know my position isn't yes or no because again this is why this is why I'm asking for like this is why like we're sort of feels like pushing yeah you want to I think we either have a concession or not I take your back to that question can I take your back to that question yeah go for it and go and then I have a so like it is absolutely I mean technically you're right yeah if we were to seize all this capital and like give it to any worker co-op the one to start that would solve the undercapitalization problem here the problem you're running to now is you're operating like your foregoing markets and operating under a command economy because the state now has to decide no you're talking to two anarchists neither of us are are suggesting we abolish private property in the state neither of us is going to do but then how are you deciding then which worker co-ops get these resources that you know the workers just seize their own workplace if you work at McDonald's you're a McDonald's owner now then and then you build and of how our new worker co-ops supposed to capitalize themselves because we're talking about we don't need to capitalize radically changing society a capitalist thing you're essentially asking what you're saying is is like show up show us how socialism grows out of capitalism exponentially by playing by the rules of capitalism that were written by capitalists capitalism will never abolish itself like that that's ridiculous now the thing is is that what I want you guys to look at and you've talked about an experiment that you want to see and there's a lot of really great things to see I would recommend looking into the history of the Spanish anarchist during the Spanish Civil War particularly the first three years where the entire city of Barcelona was collectivized and run on an anarcho-syndicalist model not only to were they responsible for the only civilian defeat of a modern mechanized military force in human history but again it resulted in a huge economic boom and continued until they were sadly betrayed by the Bolsheviks and then the Bolsheviks you know went around to promptly losing the war you can also take a look at there's a great documentary by Naomi Klein called The Take and this is one of the things that convinced me to be an anarchist and this is you can look into the recovered the recovered factories movement in Argentina where a crisis of capitalism and I won't get into it too much for this debate led to the government freezing all of their resources because capitalist owners are saying these factories these businesses are not profitable so we're going to shut them down put everybody out of work and we're going to sell them off for parts and what happened was the workers instead said we've got families to feed they broke into the factories they ran it themselves with no bosses and it worked great and the capitalists were unable to regain control of those factories again what we're talking about here when we talk about expropriation we're talking about getting into a position where the state will no longer defend Jeff Bezos' claim of ownership over Amazon what happens when the state doesn't defend that what happens when Jeff Bezos goes to Amazon and says hey Amazon give me my money since I since I own this and everybody at Amazon goes oh Jeff you know I think we've given you a lot of money and we don't really like you that much and you're not really doing a lot around here so screw off we're just going to do what we want with it and Jeff Bezos under our laws now Jeff Bezos could go oh I'm going to go get the police I'm going to throw these people out no let's imagine that the police for whatever reason aren't deployed either because they do not exist anarchist or because the the state decides that it's not going to enforce that ownership right there the property naturally falls directly into the hands of the people who already have it who already possess it you know that's what one of the ways that we can see this moving from capitalism to socialism there are a number of other ways and there's there's socially democratic ways to do it there's you know odd Mark's Leninist ways but the fact is is that what you're talking about where you need capitalism to build socialism is the basis of Mark's Leninist thinking like all of these the whole point was always to take the factories from the capitalists to make sure all of the actual wealth make sure to understand that you're essentially saying that you dodge this problem of worker co-ops potentially not working in capital intensive industries because every capital intensive industry you would just have the workers take control of that industry themselves right direct control that does not answer my question of how do new industries start afterwards so that would depend it could happen a number of ways you could have a form of market socialism where the workers themselves would crowd fund essentially new cool idea you know once again my comic book right now is being crowdfunded it's incredible like how much you can actually draw and that's from people who are just interested in this kind of thing so if you imagine we've got some really cool new industries and things that people want to happen you could see crowdfunding happen because again once these workers own their the means of production when they will have an ability to actually produce and control real wealth and that will translate into an ability to fund other ventures and that would be a kind of yeah well I just want to say a couple things too real quick uh first of all I think that again the framing of this is a little bit odd because it's like and this always happens with these debates is that the socialists have to brick by imaginary brick build an imaginary society that doesn't exist right now although there are like Brent was talking about socialist examples like spanish anarchy sorry not spanish anarchist Catalonia was a you know a great example um a long-dragged past but regardless it's kind of like a little bit unfair for us to build this imaginary example of how socialism could work flawlessly and build this big imaginary government system when capitalism currently right now is not functioning well for the vast majority of people on the planet earth so I just want to see your amount your thought experiments and I want to see your ideas about how we could imaginarily make capitalism function because the fact is it's not functioning right now like I want to correct something I said earlier I said something I said uh that the capitalist own 50 percent of the world's wealth I misspoke that was just me frankly just misspoking speaking uh they own the same amount as 50 percent of the world's workers which is still completely egregious in my mind and and evidence that capitalism is not currently working for the mass and for human beings I'm going to jump in here just really quick I want to give the capitalist side a little bit of time to respond to your question because there has been a lot of a lot of well yeah we have to build a whole imaginary society so it takes time to do that I get that so go ahead and go ahead and respond go first layman do you want me to what was the question again there was a lot feel it yeah there's so much I think my question would be what can you build the imaginary society where capitalism functions for the majority of people on earth like where most people are not suffering the way that they are right now well my well give me your thought experiment well well I don't really have an imaginary society built in my head and that's kind of my point why do we need one I just don't get well because because framing well because this side well because this society that you guys want hasn't I mean you said there was an experiment right so it's like okay what was it Barcelona or so Anarchist Catalonia Revolutionary Catalonia is one way that was in the 30s it's not really relevant to today's material conditions but okay it's impressive still I like it I just I just I just don't I just don't see what else we or the Soviet Union putting people like going from an agrarian society in 1917 to putting people in space first 30 years later I think that I mean I'm not even a Marxist Leninist but I think that's pretty I don't that yeah I just I just don't think we want to be in a position where we're defending the Soviet Union right they built well I don't think you guys would build industry without capital they I'm sorry if you don't like the Soviet Union I'm not a big fan of Soviet Union either since I'm an anarchist but you asked how can you build industry without capital they built a space program a bunch of farmers built a space program I'm sorry but I'm saying this that the Soviet Union built a space program they went from being farmers to having a space program faster than capitalists did and the capitals had a much better started we don't have to get together so you asked how that happened the whole of a wine it's like I I well okay because I would love to fight that because I don't think it's I mean do we do we want to go into it because then we don't we don't we don't have to use the USSR okay so hang on I had a couple of well I just specific examples you can look at one second I just put the industry you don't have to like them to say that it's I mean this is ridiculous this is like a taboo or something you that they did build industry without capital whether you like them or not whether you like the way they did it or not the question that the opponents asked was how do you build industry if you don't have capital and that's what they did now we could say whether that's a good way to do it or a bad way to do it or whatever by the way people built industries before capitals never existed if you really things they developed science they had technology is I just want to answer the last question before I get into this argument is really all I'm asking okay um oh god I have to remember what it was now all right you're asked um to to build like the imaginary like perfect capital society right I think was what it was yeah okay whatever you're asking us to do with the experiment I want to see you do the same thing I want you to meet your own standard yeah sure so it's to like be clear like I'm I'm trying I really am like trying not to make the the burner proof you're like too like counterweighted the problem is is that it's there's a fine line to walk here between asking you guys to participate in an argument where like the the absolute empirical experiment isn't there versus like capitalists having to defend capitalism which has existed in many forms for all this time and as many different flaws versus like this more theoretical socialism that kind of gets to get away with not having as much empirical stuff on it so we don't get to see all the nuanced real world world flaws that we otherwise would but I I mean the peasants medieval peasants could have had this exact same argument before the rise of capitalism I mean just it's biased well towards the point peasants you have a medieval peasants another resources for unexperiments and stuff but go on Trent no man well they had like one third of the year all so like yeah sure let's go on Trent I don't I don't think I need to build an imaginary capitalist to say because I think that I right now capitalism is serving the vast majority of people the world over very well okay so and one of the major one of the major I know yeah and Rick Justin said he has some data on this like if you want to like drop that and have me look over that be great I can one of the major minutes if somebody was looking excellent examples of this is that one trend one pattern that has held and is still holding to this day like globally for the most part we can look at individual exceptions is that as workers wages increase they their protections increase as well as time goes on especially when we see underdeveloped countries transitioning into more developed countries we see the increase in income get matched with an increase in labor protections and this is what has happened over the past like 30 40 years in a lot of eastern Asia and a lot of like northern and southern Africa now if we want to talk about maybe like right now there's like some blips in the trends or something I'm not super familiar right with that if you have those feel free but the pattern for the past over decades has been that the pattern is only there and we can see that these these like capitalist like trade deals in inter in interconnectivity that comes about from this like capitalist system what you call imperialism that this does have really good effects in addition of the TPP example I mentioned earlier when you brought up the the fact that trade unions were like legalized in the past year that was actually a consequence of the TPP that's what made that happen right so we can see that these these capitalist frameworks we can see this as a vehicle for exporting greater protections and greater welfare and prosperity in the I want to know where you're what where where you're getting this information from can I get this is from the diplomat yes why are we arguing about the TPP exactly because the TPP is a beautiful example of how countries operating under with capitalist interests and largely driven by capitalist leaders can craft policies that serve all all members including like underdeveloped countries you know another example that I will give you is the Zapatistas in Shepas who've been doing extremely well and again also like the Zapatistas the whole movement came about because of the monstrous conditions forced upon them by NAFTA the the TPP of the 90s so like I really like if we want to have a debate on the TPP we can do that but let me two things that I really want to get into here the question that I want to ask you guys to do is how do you solve the problem? You don't have to come up with a whole capitalist society take the capitalist society that we have right now take the TPP and give me a way that how do you solve the problem that success in the market means the the person rises both in terms of social clout and soft power and also money and hard power and how when you are successful in the market and when you attract more wealth and power to yourself you gain the ability to either lobby or to run for office where you get to rewrite the rules to your liking how do you solve that problem of those people who rise you know by their bootstraps or however you want to do that to the the highest levels of our society having different interests from the people who live in our society from the vast majority of us like and specifically with regard to workers protection because they don't want to give us workers protection they don't want anything other than the maximum return for the minimum investment so how do you solve that issue do you want to take that layman or do you want me to just let me jump in really fast I'm sorry I know I'm doing this a lot how do you guys feel about since socialists started off if everyone's okay with it the capitalist can finish can answer these questions and finish up and then we can get on to Q&A is that good yeah sure yeah that seems fair to me all right Trenton you go first yeah so my answer to that I guess is like twofold like one I think this happens to like some extent but I take issue with some of the specific framing here but and I don't because you are referring at least to me I'm misinterpreting you it sounds to me like you are taking the private sector and that private world and the public sector and public officials and politics in its entirety and you're acting as though these are the same market I just do not believe that's true I do not think that things selected for here are at all like that similar I think this is evident through the numerous like prominent businessmen that have taken a shot at the election at a public office especially in the last election that like theoretically like people like Bloomberg and Yang should have been selected for by the algorithm but once they entered this alternate market that is public politics that that other than did not serve them well the other as far as like the other thing I want to mention that Bloomberg was mayor of New York for freaking 12 years and rewrote the city right in that but that it has served him really really well he just didn't get president by your logic though as successful as he was in the private world he should have gone on even further right he did go on even further I mean he got like no votes in the democratic primary well yeah he did again yeah because he's got no charisma but at the same time capital was behind which says that he's been too different market that's select different things all right well anyways the second thing I wanted to talk about was that I think that the in in terms of solving this problem or what existed this problem I think the best way to do that is it has to be written in social movements and has been written in social movements namely like we need to address this these ridiculous levels of voter apathy in America that we don't even see reflected in most of their capitalist nations right and we've seen tangible progress on that in the past you know two four six years in America I think we need to keep that going forward if we get higher turnout if we get more educated voters if we get people interested and invested in politics by doing things like this right which is really cool then that's how we get people who are voting for politicians that aren't going to do some of the horrible things that you mentioned earlier in terms of like foreign policy and worker protections and whatnot and I think the summits that the democratic party has been that it's not as great as we'd like it to be but the democratic party has the summits and always been in favor of you know increasing you know worker protections and things like that so you layman all you yeah I just I don't really I just think that that last question was like very very loaded no disrespect Brenton but uh I just could have phrased it better no worries but it's just the only way that I know like how I can answer a question like that is just I don't understand why if we have problems with capitalism that we have to address it with replacing it with a worker ownership model and that's kind of my problem is like usually when I go into discussions about this stuff and if I'm trying to find like oh how can we make society better or something like that is just the average fucking dude living in society I I just try to see like okay well here can we measure this have people measured this let's see if this works let's see if this works and then if this can be passed through policy then let's do that and if you know there's some horrible thing that nobody is addressing and nobody's exploring then with we exercise our freedom of speech to let people know hey we don't fucking like the system as it exists let's do something about it and then perhaps that will influence how politicians respond to the public going forward and things like that so that's that I just don't know how you completely replace like a global economic system how that's more pragmatic and that's something like better that you could do when we don't even know if something like that could work then that and I can I can just close on that and we can go to Q and A I guess because yeah current environment though just point that out there global climate change about nine years left at best so that's just a big I really applaud particularly Trenton splinters on that I think you know I agree that a social movement that gets people involved in politics and gets them out you know in the streets and puts pressure is a great idea the problem is we tried that it was called Occupy Wall Street and Mayor Bloomberg released freaking helicopters to prevent coverage from the air and marched in as freaking troops broke my friend's skulls dragged them out of their beds in the middle of the night like when we try to do that they attack us and that's why like I I'm saying we have to do something about the state that's why I'm an anarchist but you can also say like but I could also point to another example where we've been able to positively you know express disdain towards something that perhaps we can attribute to profit motives that led to positive social change with that overthrowing capitalism like look at slavery like the transatlantic slave trade there was a civil there was a civil war which fucking sucked but you know like like a productive war in america well I mean I guess we could do that again no I don't want to do that again but what I'm saying is that like you know if something gets that bad the people tend to speak for themselves and then we do that but it doesn't seem like but wait but it doesn't seem like that's happening is what it's happening did you not see like the freaking street how many protests did you have any stuff that happened? 10 to 15 percent of americans were in the streets risking their lives during the covid pandemic and because of obviously really it was because of uh that was because of police state because of the capitalism wasn't just because it races in the capital you don't think that the police are inherently tied to each other yeah oh god I don't have time to go into that but yeah all right we're gonna have time it's another time I can't believe we have to leave off on that but go on Carissa let's go to Q&A all right yeah look episodes like two through 36 are on their way out because they're so tight I know I feel like you guys could just have like a podcast I feel like that might be fun I know jesus christ all right let's get to this question I'd be doubted I'd love to have you guys on the channel sometime you're both very I don't think anyone wants to talk to me though I love talking to you EJ and we need to do that among us stream soon I want to that's what we should do among us stream I want to on the record that when I was in high school I actually know it was college I actually reached out to EJ and he didn't answer me all right so I know it's not just you people do want shit I don't believe in the concept of an inbox send me another email though I'll check it you're fine I emailed EJ for like two years yeah emails are bourgeois construct that I don't believe I apologize I didn't mean to so are we going into the Q&A yes we are first one is from cider and port they say question for capitalist are you against the socialist program slash institutions in America right now or the new one such as healthcare healthcare is not a socialist policy the universal healthcare exists in many many capitalist countries to great effect so yeah and I'm in favor of universal healthcare like again as I said at the beginning I'm I don't intrinsically value profits and stuff like that only in so far as you know what positive effects can get from society and it seems like there's nothing intrinsic to it that leads to harmful outcomes that's all um yeah I largely agree with that as far as like the opposition to like whatever socialist you know groups organizations in America I wouldn't say I'm opposed to them what's what's nice about like talking about the socialism stuff is when it comes to socialism my disagreements to socialism are more like well this isn't the best way we could do it right it's not like I'm talking to alt-right people and socialists are gonna do some crazy demonstrable harm okay like when I'm arguing against socialism and against socialist it's more like I'm fighting with my brother or something it's a no I'm not opposed to the social organizations I think that America could use some overton window shifting I hope they continue to grow I'm opposed to the socialist organizations but I I just opposed in J-Actor we have to do this and quote socialist organizations it's like it's not they're not socialist organizations that's all right but but screw all socialists who aren't me next one is from Helian this with $5 thank you so much they say at Brenton are capitalist and worker mutually exclusive um no but one person can be one or the other at a given point in in time the way I draw the distinction between a capitalist and a worker is where does your primary income come from if it comes from investment from owning something like uh you know a rental property or a business or stock then you're a capitalist if your primary uh income comes from labor that you do like you sell your labor to someone else in exchange for money that means you're a worker gotcha all right next one is from Gabriel K he says Pfizer is a rotten capitalist company oh the irony I mean yeah like well that vaccine was developed in conjunction with five different entities one of which is Vietnamese if I'm not mistaken so if that was supposed to be an owned and go Vietnam Vietnam I mean oh Vietnam one party state yeah go on yeah I mean capitalist countries can um like or I'm sorry capitalist businesses can still do good things like I'm the workers not like workers developed that vaccine not the freaking shareholders not the capitalists the workers developed that vaccine so I don't I don't see that as a point all right next one is from Khan the stoner Lynn they say for all what do you think of mutualism or a left-wing market anarch anarchism and thinkers like Pierre Joseph about proud hun we're done I even know French I shouldn't I say it different every time so that way they cover all my basically literally I wrote a sketch I wrote a sketch where the mutualist like it's it's on my channel it's called um an arco about five anarchists trying to run a pizza shop in post-revolutionary Brooklyn and the the mutualist mispronounces prudona exactly the way you did oh no I'm a suburban lib dog I don't even know what mutualism means I'm sorry Bren and EJ can educate me on that sometimes they also ask about groups like C4SS I'm not sure what that is that's society for yeah a center for a stateless society um why don't we let layman go first because I think you had something I think I said that right I don't know much about that or what was his name Pierre Pierre Joseph Prudone okay first person to ever he was part of like the the french like parliament and like he was the first person to ever call himself a political anarchist okay yeah I don't know much about him um mutual aid though I I actually from a virtue ethics perspective really really love the idea of people just out of their own just have their own voluntary goodness their own voluntary altruistic virtue um providing people providing resources to people who otherwise don't have that I think it's a actually I'm it's probably my favorite leftist idea if I was to pick one is the mutual aid stuff so yeah for what little there are you want to yeah well okay I'll pick you back on that for me mutual aid is not just giving money for like charity where it's like morally good to give people things that they don't have because you feel sorry for them mutual aid to me means you're contributing to the society because you know that you might one day need that benefit yourself so if you're giving to a homeless shelter it's because you know there's a chance that one day you might be homeless if you're donating to people with disabilities you know that every human being will either die or become disabled at some point in their life so that to me is what distinguishes mutual aid from charity it's basically like contributing to a system so that we all collectively benefit and the lifting tide rises all the bits but as far as mutualism goes just my personal opinion I consider mutualists to be comrades even though I don't think that markets are the most efficient way to distribute things I would much rather live in a mutualist society than a capitalist society so and you know if there was like a big mutualist revolution I would support it but it's just not my you know favorite blend of tea you know but yeah I just want to I just want to clarify too I wasn't I wasn't I completely I wasn't trying to define your yeah I wasn't like attacking you I was just giving my that was like decoupled from what you said so I agree because I because I think because I think that the number one reason to give charity is with the with the assumption in mind that I ought to treat others as I expected to be treated right so if I'm giving to an organization that shelters the homeless the idea is that if I was homeless someday that that that would be reciprocated under me yeah yeah it makes the society better for everybody if they're not to be homeless people it's not just yeah to be honest like all yeah human societies ran on those kinds of systems before the rise of the state that's how we function for the vast majority of our of our history now mutualism like as an economic plan like you know you look at like the the work of Benjamin Tucker and like spooner with regard to stuff like I really do like the idea of like a commons where we can all go and like you know you need specific tools go get them from the commons like you've got like a library to lend tools or anything that you possibly could need there I think it's a good system I do consider them comrades and I usually try to help and caps realize that they're actually mutualists they're actually very confused mutualists or they're fascists but like I like it C4SS I really side-eye them hard they put out some good stuff but they like caucus with some awful people sometimes and I think some guy Spengler who was a big writer for them a number of years ago like wrote about like you know oh what if the child can sense and then wound up abusing his daughter so like like I side-eye C4SS but I don't hate them because again you know they're not Spengler it's just there's in the right Libertarian influence on them is a little to me I thought Egon Spengler was an and cap um that was a good been an and cap who wrote no that's the thing that they wrote they wrote he wrote for C4SS which there was a go buster sticks oh yeah I'm sorry that was not worth yeah that was that was funny moving on Ghostbusters is a Libertarian it's Libertarian propaganda it is next question is from Thomas Stoner Lynn again they say capitalists look into Robert Owen and new harmony cool so I can say to that sounds good I love reading stuff I've actually I've actually like my best friend since I was five years old as a socialist yeah I actually think he likes your channel non-compete so if he's jealous as fuck of me but uh um you know I actually read like a ton of fucking Karl Marx and Engels just so I could talk about it with him for a while so I'm always down to like read that shit it's interesting so yeah yeah that's funny you should read the conquest of bread because I think the only people on bread tube who've actually read it are like me and EJ is that where the name bread tube comes that is where most most people don't know that even the origin story that's incredible straight facts today Peter Capraken Conquest of Bread next one is from again from Conestoner they say New Harmony Indiana is your example you're welcome okay is that the is that the capitalist is that where a bunch of libertarians like try to start a city and it may have been I get all this stuff cross up people should also look into by the way or is that a utopian is the co-op wars there's a great episode of politics of a program is called the dollop yeah yeah sorry I think this was a utopian one of the American utopian communities yeah the American and by the way Marx destroyed American utopianism so if anybody's really interested in that Marx talked about American utopianism a lot and explained exactly why and Kropakken as well actually Kropakken also destroyed American utopianism it wasn't it was like a proto form of socialism but it was really not socialism at all but I guess that would be rabbit hole we don't want to go down to down right now don't yeah it's so weird next one is from spart 344 the kibbutz system failed miserably once they became capitalistic the lives of those people living on the kibbutz improved oh boy ej you want to take that with the I'm not sure I fault can can we get that read one more time yeah the kibbutz system failed miserably once they became capitalistic the lives of those people living on the kibbutz improved okay I mean it is real that's the is our I mean so so there that's not really like I could go and cherry pick any kind of I don't that's cherry picking I could go and find all kinds of situations where capitals industry like look at the way that Pinochet and the Chicago boys completely ruined and rolled back all of the progress that I and they made in Chile so I guess that's my response if you're going to show Pinochet constitution democratically they threw that off hard and it took a long time but I'm so happy about it I mean I could go on in Argentina is another example there's lots of examples where I mean you could say that the French Institute Capitalism under their colonial rule in Vietnam and certainly the lives of Vietnamese people have improved since that French capitalist colonialist rule ended there I mean I could cherry pick countless countless examples so I don't really feel that's a point to be made this was something I don't know anything about the kibbutz system but just even if that's true it's it's like maybe the kibbutz system sucked that's probably what happened I don't know I think they could yeah I mean the kibbutz system is not something that I've looked deeply into what I will say is there's plenty of of counter examples so if it is indeed as crappy as you said it was there's a number of reasons why it wouldn't necessarily be socialism what I'd also like to point out is like okay so oftentimes when we talk about like people doing better or people doing worse the we measure them by the values that are generated by capitalist society and this is one of the reasons why I inherently rejected what splinter had said about like things getting better for people around the world a good example might be Cambodia and this was before Pol Pot and before and it was actually worse like but Cambodia was a nation of peaceful Theravada Buddhists and Westerners came and they found that these Theravada Buddhists they worked six months out of the year and they rested six months out of the year and did whatever and they introduced new Western methods of to increase and double their crop yields and the people just went and worked three months out of the year because there are things that doubled and the Westerners got mad and were like no no you're supposed to go and earn this money and put this stuff out so they began to institute like systems of currency that weren't really used and put in impose this Western capitalistic model and this led to before Pol Pot huge like freaking riots where babies were torn in half like but with people's bare hands like it destabilized the country and destroyed their traditional way of life and yeah they were a little bit richer but you know torn up babies so you can always say that like oh people are doing better because they're making more money but money isn't real it's it is an intelligent system it's a measure of wealth what is actually real are resources plus labor plus intelligence that's what what what is actually going to measure like how a person is doing better or worse I think Trent wants to respond to that go for it buddy yeah no let's just let the questions go it's fine all right yeah I've wanted some other time all right all right next we match is actually for Brenton yes it's from Raisin Zero they say Brenton how is your socialist economy hold on how would your socialist economy help the common folk especially um the people that or example is the people I'm sorry it's it's worded very strangely I'm trying to figure out what they're trying to say example the people that work on Walmart and the people work as heart surgeon sure um well I can actually answer that because my father is a doctor and my uncle is a surgeon and uh I also you know know plenty of people that work hourly jobs the fact is is that socialism my socialism would free these people up to do the actual work that they want to do you know one of the worst things for doctors when they get involved with medicine is the business of medicine rather than actually serving the people because most doctors get into the field not to become ridiculously wealthy because trust me you if you want to be ridiculously wealthy don't be a doctor you'll get good money but like if you don't draw satisfaction from actually helping people you'll probably kill yourself because the doctors actually have very high suicide rates as well now as far as somebody working at Walmart hourly what will happen under my system of socialism is workers will control their workplace and how they do it so the heart surgeons will be the ones making the important decisions about surgery not hospital administrators and similarly when you're at Walmart the people that actually work at Walmart will have a stake and will have control over their workplace and how they do things when they stock the shelves how much everybody gets paid you know and the fact of the matter is is that when you actually have real tangible control over what you're doing when you you are one because you're the worker you're the one actually doing the work you know it better than anyone else could possibly know it and two you actually develop a lot more satisfaction from what you're doing because you're taking your unique skills and you're putting them to work in a way that makes the world tangibly better for everyone whether that means stocking the shelves at Walmart or doing heart surgery and saving somebody's life gotcha all right we actually only have one more question it's from daniexx he says the soviet government expropriated capital from the people no i would say at which point are you talking about because the soviet union is very very complicated and changed many many times into many different sorts of entities i mean you could say like are you talking about like the 70s and 80s when they started to open up and have all those market reforms was ultimately led to the downfall of the soviet union then i would say that's definitely true i mean it depends on where you're talking about are you talking about one of the satellite nations or are you talking about like the core of the ussr itself i mean that's a that's an oversimplification but i think there's truth to it so i would i would recognize the point but with nuance you know with the added point that you have to have nuance when talking about the ussr it's very complicated yeah i i said no because the ussr i mean prior to the ussr the like the the romanovs it was a was i feudal country and it took property from the nobility not from the people yeah i think like 1917 that was definitely not true yeah i also think that if you're a socialist it's probably within your best interest to not defend a totalitarian society just in general not speaking to you guys but just in just in general perhaps bring up the ussr is probably not a good idea as a dialectical materialist i don't essentialize things like that there are things that the ussr did that were horrific and there are things that they did that where they had success like going from an agrarian culture to a space fairing society and faster than capitalism and with when capitalism had a better starting point i'm not defending i'm not a statist i'm not marxist-leninist but i'm just saying like you could talk about the ussr i'm not i don't believe that the ussr is a taboo i think we can look at it we can talk about it we can examine it and we can find uh truth in in what works and what doesn't work yeah any in my only recommendation would be convert as many people as possible to that dialectical materialism before you bring up the ussr it's exactly what i try to do that's exactly what i try to do that's exactly what i try to do yeah but you we're talking about how more people need to learn to think critically and absolutely key like i mean you that's why i said do this critically thinking think i think that the working class is capable of learning how to analyze situations i'm not a totally agree talk about these like yeah i i would say i'm not you know i'm not a tank you're not a tank commander the what i what i would say is is that like you could just as easily make the argument that like oh how can you defend the imperialist fascist united states i don't defend that yeah but but it's the same thing we can talk sometimes some aspects of american democracy are really awesome and or sweden be how can you defend the imperialist sweden which has like left its workers in russia who are migrant workers from the middle east to doom under coveted like how can you defend those imperialist well sweden is still well sweden is still well sweden is still thriving right and we can disavow that there's room for nuance for sweden my point in saying that was my point in saying that though was that the ussr failed it collapsed there was because of market and i would say a lot of people tell you i mean and i was i just wanted to say i think a lot of the a lot of positive things with the ussr because from what i understand like lennon you know managed to like increase like wages and like universal healthcare and all that stuff something i hear a lot from tankies typically who defend these societies like in their totality and stuff is that like oh well there was universal healthcare there there was like wages there it's like it seems like there's other societies that we can do this with benefits from yeah so i find i when people start bringing up like the ussr and like these like one party like authoritarian places i just i'm just it just raises a ton of red flags ton of hairs on the back of my neck you know i mean i don't yeah but i mean like you just you're again i think that i don't want to get into this is probably a whole other debate and i don't want to get into the position where i'm seen as defending the ussr because i'm not but even the fact the idea that it's like totalitarian and one party rule and everything like that there are definitely accounts where an American went to the Soviet Union in the 30s and talked about how he as a worker in this little village was able to actually go and vote and go to these council meetings that are very democratic so and that was at one point in the history of the ussr and then later it became much more totalitarian and then later the khrushchev had reforms that made it more democratic i mean this was a long and and very kind of hegemonic i'm sorry heterogenous history where the ussr was constantly undergoing changes so he got back to just don't think that the ussr debate is on the horizon let's maybe oh Jesus no i'd rather argue against the ussr but i just don't want to essentialize her character mischaracterize a very complicated subject so sounds good there's a lot of propaganda out there like on both sides of the thing like the black book of communism is complete bull crap there's a lot of stuff when like you'll you'll hear and caps talk about like the various famines for instance in the soviet union and in china and then if you look into the history of that it goes down to like one jackass scientist named like senko who did not believe in he didn't believe an evolution he thought he didn't believe in the theory of evolution because he said the theory of evolution was like the bourgeois it's like it's like a bourgeois controlling no no he said it was fascist but like but but beyond that like here's the thing less senko was saying things that were convenient to people in power in much the same way Steven Pinker says things that are convenient to people in power and people in power like oh let's boost this guy up and they put him in charge of their agriculture program his his theories didn't work they lied about it then freaking china heard about it believed the propaganda and you have the the famines that happened during the great leap forward like it it came down to that one jackass being raised so i i think like a lot of the time is one of the things that we need to be careful about is we don't want to essentialize an entire country and and two we want to see exactly what these problems are and where they come from and maybe it's not a good idea to centralize power and a couple of hands because those spymanias all right just speaking from a last really quick point i live in vietnam and i've seen so much misinformation about vietnam that i just i my interest is always just to find the truth okay and like there are things that vietnam does really really well there's some things i have criticism of i just don't like to like pretend that it's all an all or nothing kind of game so that's why bristle and push back and i and i'm totally fine with acknowledging nuance you know i don't think that if somebody says like oh well there's one thing the ussr did that was like kind of good you know i don't think someone's like inherently like some crazy fucking like fucking like far left motherfucker who's just like totally off the deep end whatever i'm fine with doing that it's just the problem is i would prefer to look at societies that are continuing to thrive where they do but they're very violent societies those societies that you're say are thriving every society every society that has ever existed has been violent this is a great human nature great discussion but i think russus got something she wants to say i do i think that we should definitely have you all on again you guys are all thank you i'm down if anybody will tolerate me me thank you so much i'm not a like debater and i don't do a lot of these so i really am sorry i know i was like emotional and that's like if you're if you have feels then you lose the debate so i'm sorry and i'm sorry if i stepped on people i'm not really so used to this format so i'm sorry sjw cuck over here non-compete well we'll definitely can't compete with the facts have to have you all on again and thank you for taking the time out of all of your busy schedules i know it was kind of hard to to plan and coordinate so thank you thank you for that and to the audience thank you so much for watching don't forget that there is actually a debate tomorrow on theism so be sure to tune in to that and keep on sorting the reasonable from the unreasonable and have a wonderful night