 Welcome to The Rational Legalists. I'm your host, Michael Iboitz. One of the main purposes for this show is to promote freedom, to promote capitalism. And today's guest is here to talk to us all about capitalism and I could think of perhaps nobody better to do so. He's the chairman of the board at the Ayn Rand Institute where he served as executive director from 2000 to 2017. And he has also written several books, including Equal is Unfair and Free Market Revolution. Yaron Brooke, welcome to the show. Thanks Michael, thanks for having me on. So there's so many misconceptions out there about what capitalism is. The first thing I think we should do is tell me what is capitalism? Well, capitalism is a system of government or a social system in which individuals are free, free to live their lives. And what that means is it's a system of government where the sole purpose of government is the protection of individual rights, the protection of individuals' ability to live their lives based on their own judgment, their own rational mind in pursuit of their own values. And that requires that all property be privately owned. That requires that the government not never engage in coercion other in self-defense and defending individuals. That requires a complete separation of state from economics. That requires a pretty radical state of the world, something we don't have and probably, and really have never seen in the world. It's a capitalism really is a radical new idea. And but its essence is the sanctity of individual life. It's interesting because it is a new concept. And it's interesting to me because the people who defend capitalism are often called conservatives. And the people that call themselves conservatives, I wouldn't call defenders of capitalism. And if you're really defending capitalism, you're actually quite radical. No question. I mean, really those of us who defend capitalism are progressive, we believe in progress. In some ways, we're liberal because we believe in liberty and we are anything but conservative. Indeed, the opponents of capitalism in the era that was closest, where we got closest to capitalism, if you will, the 19th century, when the world was being freed, was being liberated, where people were getting richer, wealthier, living longer, gaining health. The biggest opponents of capitalism were the socialists. You'd expect that. And the conservatives. The conservatives were waiting during the 19th century. Uh-oh, we got these cities, people are moving to cities, we're losing this wonderful traditional family-oriented little village life where people died when they were 30 and nobody could read and the quality of life was horrible. But that's what they were pining for. And they still pine. You have today in America, people call themselves back porch conservatives or front porch conservatives. They just want a relaxing, simple and challenging life, just sitting on that front porch and walking in the chair. Who the hell wants to live like that? Life is too fascinating and interesting and exciting to want such a boring existence. But the conservatives, you know, they resist that. They resist change by the name. They're traditionalists, they're conservative. They want to conserve the past. And the past really is anti-capitalist. I might be that in the certain period in the 20th century, the past looked relatively capitalistic, but that couldn't last. And the conservatives, the more, the more time passes, the more statist conservatives become because they're not connected by any philosophical connection really to liberty and freedom and individual rights. No, it sounds like the description you gave is what they want is security. And I've said more times than I could count. You know, I spent 25 years in prison. I was relatively secure. I wasn't free. Yeah. Give me the risk. Give me freedom with the risk that comes with it any day over prison and security. It just seems like an absurd. No, you're absolutely right. You're the most secure when, you know, your choices are taken away from you. Now, that's not really true, right? Because I'm sure you were that secure in prison. And if you live a good, rational life in this world and you are free, not like you are here, but even more free, if you're really free, you're probably the most secure as well, really, right? Because you then control your life and you could choose how secure to be. And, you know, if you have a government that protects individual rights, it really does protect you, right? It protects you from the things that you fear most. So there isn't, at the end of the day, we really think long-term and deeply, there isn't a trade-off between security and freedom. But in a superficial way there is, in a shallow way there is. And what they really want, what they really want is that shallow sense of security. But they also, they want predictability, they want, they want not to be challenged. They want not to be challenged. They don't want their values challenged. They don't want their ideas challenged. And they don't want their, and they don't want their lives to be threatened. But they also don't think very deeply. I mean, I did a show on, what's his name? Knowles, I forget his name. Matt Knowles? Is his name Matt Knowles? No, it's not Matt. Anyway, he's a conservative on the daily wire. He said he wants social conservatism like they had it in the year 1220, right? That's what he wants, right? But he wants the internet. And he wants, you know, his automobile, and he wants electricity, he wants all that. But he wants the social conservative as a 1220 where we burn witches and where anybody who was innovative in any kind of way was killed and murdered, they think they can separate the things out. They think they can keep the stuff they want and discard the stuff they don't want. But it's all based ultimately on emotions. It's all based on dogma. So yes, conservatives bottom line is no friends, particularly modern conservatives are no friends of capitalism. It's interesting the analogy you just gave where they want to keep what they want and get rid of everything else. It reminds me of, I watched the debate that you had. I think the guy's name was Packman, but I'm not, I'm not positive. But David Packman, yeah, and he said, don't tell me about how the poorest today are better off than the people who are in the Roman Empire because today we, which is a misnomer, but he says we, you know, have far more stuff than they had back then. And to me it's like saying, well basically what he wasn't saying is that there's enough now to redistribute to everybody. But to me it's as if there's a golden goose and people love the golden eggs. And they say, okay, we no longer need the goose. Let's kill it because we don't like it and we'll just keep the eggs and spread them around. But then you're not gonna have any more eggs. And if you get rid of the capitalist system that produces the wealth so that you can redistribute it, pretty soon you're not gonna have the wealth at all. Well, they would deny that. They would basically say, and this is true, right? I think the clever ones wanna keep the goose just alive enough so it can lay the eggs and they can steal it. And of course they realize they might have to give up a few eggs because under freedom, the goose would lay a lot more eggs. But so by stealing them, you know, but they still want the golden goose alive. And that's why somebody like Elizabeth Warren will say, oh no, I'm a defender of capitalism. I believe in capitalism. I just wanna control it and regulate it and tax it and manipulate it. But they realize there's something there and that's why almost nobody will call themselves a communist and nobody almost nobody will call themselves an out-of-socialist. I'll call themselves a democratic socialist and they'll think that they want Denmark, right? And Denmark taxes people very highly just to keep them alive just enough so that they don't leave or they don't stop laying the golden eggs, some eggs at least, and then they do massive redistribution. But Denmark's not all the way socialism. It's not all the way communism. And they all pretend they don't want that because they realize that they need the entrepreneurs to keep on producing. And they also think that entrepreneurship would happen even with just a little bit of freedom. You know, most people out there pretty ignorant of history and pretty ignorant of, I mean very ignorant of history, pretty very ignorant of history, but also ignorant of how other political systems and how other cultures have evolved and produced. So you just mentioned history, which brings me to my next question. Now I know pure capitalism has never existed, but people in order to survive have always done some measure of producing and trading. When do we see the emergence of the closest that we've come to capitalism and, you know, where the freest markets were? When and where did that happen? Well, again, I don't think capitalism is markets, right? Markets are one aspect of capitalism. Capitalism is the protection of individual rights. And you don't really get that. You don't get it until there's an explicit recognition of rights, that rights exist, that there is such a thing as rights. And the first recognition of that really comes about probably in the works of John Locke, maybe a little before that and some of the thinkers and philosophers coming out of the Netherlands. And then, you know, so then there's a recognition but it isn't manifest itself politically. We're really the first manifestation politically of the concept of individual rights as in the Declaration of Dependence of the United States. So the closest we've ever come to capitalism fully, you know, fully implemented was in the intense of the founders. Now they didn't live up to that intention. The primary deficit there was slavery, but that was what the documents laid out. They laid out the principles of capitalism. They laid out a capitalist system. And then once it gets laid out in the U.S., you get some of those elements picked up in other places around the world, primarily in Western Europe, primarily in England to some extent in some of the other, some extents more or less in other countries. But really, once you get rid of slavery in the United States, let's say, you know, the closest we've come to capitalism is probably post-Civil War pre-Anti-Trust Laws or pre-Widrow Wilson, somewhere in that period. And in the 20th century, the country that comes closest is probably Hong Kong, where there is definitely protection of individual rights, protection against violence and theft, but also, you know, no government regulations, no government controls, protection of free speech. You can't vote in Hong Kong. But if all the rights, you know, a whole topic, but if all the rights, I think voting is probably not at the top of the list. It's a derivative rights. It's a derivative that the primary rights, a property and liberty, which is free speech, which includes free speech, those are the primary rights. And those are protected in Hong Kong and protected in the United States during these periods. So that's when we come closest to it as political systems are all encompassing. And the consequence of once you protect people's property rights is markets. Is, now we've always had markets, but markets have always been constrained and limited and innovation has been constrained and limited. Entrepreneurship has been constrained and limited to what's acceptable within a particular society, to what the authorities allow and permit. Capitalism is a permissionless society. Capitalism, you don't have to ask for permission. You do. And you only really get a permissionless society in that sense, in the US post-founding in the UK late 18th century, early 20th century, and then sprinkled here and there throughout Europe and then places like Hong Kong. One of the most powerful illustrations of the wealth producing effect of capitalism, I've ever seen, you had in your book Free Market Capitalism and you had a graph and it showed GDP growth. I think the entire history of the world, you had a flat line basically. And then with the advent of the free markets as hampered as they may have been, but they were freer, the GDP growth just skyrockets. I mean, it goes, it's like the hockey stick that we've heard so much about. It's just an incredible thing. But beyond the GDP, I mean, what was the effect of these relatively free markets in terms of poverty, standard of living, life expectancy, et cetera? Yeah, I mean, the challenge with the GDP is it dramatically underestimates how big the advance was. Cause you don't get in GDP as life expectancy, which more than doubles, right? At the beginning of the industrial revolution, life expectancy in the most advanced places on the planet is 39. And 50% of children die before the age of 10. Women die at childbirth is very, very prevalent. And suddenly within a hundred years, most of that disappears, life expectancy's doubled. And then another hundred years, we now live into our 80s pretty comfortably and arguably without all the regulations we have today, I think many people could, most of us could live well into our hundreds without all the constraints placed upon us. But daddy doesn't even really capture it. How much value do you put on running water, right? On faucets, on toilets. Now the Romans had running water to some extent, at least the wealthy Romans had it, but then running water, pipes and faucets disappeared for a thousand years, more than a thousand years, 1500 years. So how much do you value the fact that you go to tap open and drink the water out of a tap? Wash your hands or soap, have a shower every day. That's unprecedented in human history, the idea of washing yourself. How valuable is it to have toilets, flushing toilets, I mean, that's huge. In terms of quality of life and standard of living, that's a big step forward. Hundred years ago, even a hundred years ago, most Americans didn't have flushing toilets, right? You still had a pit in the ground and with all that that entails and the smell, everything that that entails. And then go on from there, electricity, how valuable is electricity? Now notice that none of this is captured in the GDP numbers. There's no measure of water, right? In GDP captures how much you spend on your water bill, but doesn't capture the value to you of water, which is massive, same with electricity, same with computers, cameras, iPhones. I mean, GDP captures the fact that you spend $1,000 on the iPhone, but the iPhone in terms of quality of life, standard of living is far, far exceeds the $1,000 that you spend on it in terms of the values that it provides to you. That's why you're willing to give, one of the reasons you're willing to give up $1,000. So if you actually calculated what some economists call consumer surplus, the actual value to us of all the stuff that's been created in a semi-free society, we are much wealthier than the GDP graph shows because of everything that's being produced and all the value that we capture from that production. So yeah, it's thousands of times greater in terms of standard of living, quality of life, in terms of the time we have. I mean, simple things that people don't realize, right? Nobody went on vacations a hundred years ago, certainly not 150 years ago. There's no such thing as vacation. You worked, and it wasn't even a five-day work day. You worked six, seven days. You worked 12-hour days. We worked so many fewer hours today. We go on vacations, like restaurants. The first restaurant ever was, I think in Paris, in 17-something that's pretty late, already at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And restaurants don't take off until the 20th century and going out to eat, and going out to eat maybe every night or every week. That's unheard of. I mean, how rich are we? Unbelievablely rich. And having celebrity chefs. So having not just going out to eat, but eating good food and quality food and delicious food. It's just, our standard of living is so high. And there's no way for us to fully, I mean, for most people, there's just no way to fully appreciate it unless you really study history and you think about, you actually internalize thinking about what was life like without all of this? I mean, maybe being in prison gives you a little bit of a context, right? In terms of how great life is when you're not, right? What options you have, what choices you have, what you can do in your life on a day-to-day basis, because you don't have that in prison, but imagine all of humanity being in prison in essence. And it's more than that. So 200 years ago, 250 years ago, you didn't choose who you married. Your family got together with another family and they made a contract. You didn't choose what work to go into, right? You went into the profession that your father was in, like you joined his guild, that was it. And if you're a woman, you certainly didn't choose your profession, you didn't have one. You were gonna be home and that was it. I mean, it's really rare in human history that women did more than take care of men and take care of the household. And one of the great innovations of 20th century is that women can go out and work and they can make their own living and have choices and do the stuff that they wanna do. So in every respect, our lives were constrained and limited to very, very few things that we had control over before the beginnings of capitalism. And again, we don't have an appreciation of that. So how much does that contribute to our standard of living and quality of life? That you can choose what profession. You can change professions midstream. You can have five professions. Nobody in careers, nobody limits you. Or romantic love. How valuable is romantic love to human life? But romantic love is a modern concept. It didn't really exist back then because you couldn't do anything with it. And you could go over value after value after value that human beings have and see how much better off we are as a consequence of freedom versus before that to be a conservative is a betrayal of human life. If you wanna, particularly if you wanna conserve things the way they were before, you know, before 1776 or before whatever date we wanna pick. It's just astounding the differences and how much we take it off for granted. So you define capitalism as the system that upholds rights. So now that implies the question, what is the proper theory of rights? Because people throw around rights all the time. You have a right to healthcare, a right to housing, a right to this, a right to that. Now, I believe and I think it's been clearly demonstrated that INRAND has developed or elucidated a proper theory of rights. Can you tell us a little about that? Yes, I mean, INRAND defines rights very clearly and rights are a, you know, essential concept in her philosophy. Rights are a concept that bridges morality and politics. Rights are fundamentally a moral concept, not a political one, but they are bridging concept between morality and politics. And this is a great innovation and this is what many people don't really get, particularly the libertarians out there, is that you can't have the concept of individual rights. It doesn't mean anything. And it doesn't relate to anything. You certainly can't defend it philosophically unless you have a specific view of morality. And you can't have a specific view of morality unless you have a specific view of human nature and of epistemology. You need philosophy, an entire philosophy in order to understand the concept of individual rights to defend it and to articulate it and to, and really to understand it fully. So, you know, why is this? Well, individual rights protect the individual's mind in order to, his ability to use his mind in order to live, to live for his own sake, for the sake of the pursuit of his own values, not somebody else's values, not the government's values, not the majority's values, not the tribe's values, but his values. Now, that has, you have to think about that as being legitimate, right? Me using my mind. Ooh, wait a second. I have a mind, that's cool. My mind's efficacious. Some philosophers don't think so. Plato didn't think so. He thought I was just living in a cave and seeing shadows and never really interacted with real reality. And the Catholic church certainly doesn't think I should have, I have a mind that I can use in order to discover real facts about the world and guide my life based on it. No, I have to read ancient books and listen to prophets and do what the Pope tells me. That's what I have a mind for, is to listen and obey. So, the very fact that we are a rational animal, the very fact that reason is efficacious, are deeply metaphysical and epistemological statements, that you have to be able to defend and not to defend rights. Because if you don't have a mind, if by nature you're just an obeying entity, an entity that just obeys or, as some would have it, you're just a feeling entity. And all that matters is how you feel. And you can do whatever the hell you want, just guided by feelings. Then, you know, it's unclear you should have rights. It's unclear that we wanna trust your judgment or you should trust your judgment, right? You have to have a clear view of the judgment matters. So, rights are the thing that in a social context facilitate you using your mind. But the fact that your mind is efficacious has to be established philosophically, in reality and philosophically. And then, use your mind for what? Because it's your mind, that already sounds a little selfish, because your mind, why not their minds? Why not somebody else's mind? Why are you just listening to you? And then, in pursuit of whose values, your values, well, that's certainly selfish. Wait a minute, is self-interest okay? Is it okay to pursue your own values? Is it okay to guide your life by your own mind? Well, but that's ethics, right? That's a whole theory of ethics. If you're an altruist and you believe that the purpose of life is other people's wellbeing, well, then why would I pursue my values? Shouldn't I be listening to other people and pursuing their values? Do I need rights in order to do that? Maybe the government is the best instrument to convey to me what other people need so that I can sacrifice for them. Maybe the group can do that somehow for me. Maybe there's a shortcut. If you believe that the proletarian or what's important in life, well, the proletarian needs to tell me where can I sacrifice, just point to me what the sacrifice is. So, you know, collectivism, altruism, and various forms of unreason from faith, the emotionalism, all of them basically undermine rights. There is no rights if you accept those theories. There is no purpose for rights, unnecessary, because human beings are not the kind of being that even John Locke, nevermind, Diane Rand thought they were. So for Rand, rights are recognition that individual human beings have a moral right to pursue their own happiness and they can only do so by using their reason. And that the enemy of reason is force, is coercion. So that when individuals enter into a social environment with their other people and really were born into such an environment, their concern is, well, what about other people trying to force me, coerce me to do things I don't want, taking my stuff, sticking a gun to my head. And we need an agreement that you can't do that. And that we need an agreement that recognizes that each one of us must live by his own judgment in pursuit of his own values and therefore we can't coerce force our own values onto somebody else, our own judgment, our own minds onto somebody else. And that agreement basically is we establish a government in order to do that. We establish a government in order to basically have the monopoly over the use of force in order to preserve that liberty, that freedom that we have. And it's a unique institution, it's a one of a kind but it's an institution that that's its own responsibility. And so you can't have a right to somebody else's stuff because that legitimizes coercion by its very essence. It means that you can go take that stuff or you can hire somebody to take that stuff, hire the government to go take your stuff, to give it to you. That can't be right if rights about your own freedom, your own liberty, his own freedom, his own liberty. How can I take his stuff if he's free, if he has liberty, if he has rights? So you can never have a right to stuff. I have a right to healthcare. My right to healthcare means that I have a right to go out and choose a doctor and if he's willing, if I can negotiate the right fair with him, the right payment that we can transact and I can get the treatment that the two of us agree upon and the FDA and the, I don't know, thousand other government regulatory agencies have no business interfering in the agreement I made with my doctor or my hospital or my whatever. And that's the sense in which I have a right to healthcare. And that's the sense in which socialized medicine and government intervention in healthcare, Medicaid and Medicaid and everything else is an interference and a negation of my right to healthcare. I love Rand's theory of rights because she ties it to reality. It goes to morality and her theory of morality is clearly, in my view, proven. And a lot of times when political theorists are making their arguments, they make moral arguments in midstream. What I mean is they just assume that their view of morality is correct. There's no justification for it. I watched this morning, you had a debate at Yale about the fairness of equality and your opponent was saying, well, we have moral implications to this, moral implications to that. And people do that frequently. A few months ago, I interviewed the editor from Mother Jones, Michael Mechanic, and we were talking about inherited wealth. And finally I asked him, I said, well, you're making a moral argument, correct? And he said, yes. I said, okay, well, please tell me by what standard of morality you're making this judgment. And he looked at me like I was crazy. And he said, well, that's what I like. And I said, well, if you're gonna talk about using force, I'm gonna need a hell of a lot more than Michael Mechanic happens to like something. But a lot of people do that. So there's been- They also assume we all share the same moral code because there's only one moral code out there in the world. It's the moral code kind of instituted by Christianity. It was instituted before that because Christianity really picked it up and made it. And that is the moral code of altruism. And nobody, I mean, there's a handful of people in all of history who've been willing to challenge that. I don't know, Ein Rand and Nietzsche to some extent, although he doesn't propose an alternative and maybe Spinoza, but other than that is just nobody has ever said, wait a minute, why should I sacrifice other people? Why is the standard society? Why is the standard the collective? Why is the standard the others? And so everybody assumes that we're all in the scam. We all get it. We all know understand what morality is. Nobody can challenge it because nobody ever has challenged it. So who are you to challenge it? That's why I looked at you funny because nobody ever questions. When I say morality, I know exactly what meant by that in the world out there. It means, okay, who do I sacrifice to? Who am I supposed to give up my values for? That's the whole purpose for them of morality. And Ein Rand just flips that on them, completely changes the very way in which we think about morality. So there's been other obviously advocates for capitalism other than Ein Rand. There was Adam Smith and more modern times there was Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman. Why is Rand's advocacy of capitalism superior to theirs? Well, I mean, you have to separate them somewhat. I mean, Adam Smith is a moral philosopher and also an economist who defends capitalism, but he very much defends capitalism from the perspective of its social utility. He's very, he does not want to embrace kind of the egoistic motivation of let's say the baker for breaking the bread, even though he recognizes that ultimately what motivates an entrepreneur and what motivates a consumer is their own well-being. He does not embrace that morally. He rejects the idea of that being moral. And he says, look, we know self-interest is a vice. But if you add these vices up, the baker's vice, the consumer's vice, the entrepreneur's vice in starting their business and pursuing their own self-interest, somehow society's better off. Call it the invisible hand. It somehow produces an outcome that is good for quote, society. Well, that is so full of holes. The status run all over that one, right? I mean, how can a bunch of vices produce a virtue? If you add a vices, don't you get a vice, a bigger vice? And what is this good for society? How do we measure? How can we tell? Who gets a decide? Okay, maybe some freedom is good for society, complete freedom. Even Adam Smith, after all, wanted there to be a central bank and what is certain regulations, we can't have complete laissez-faire because there's this social utility standard that can be, is completely subjective. There's no objective way to determine what social utility actually means. We don't walk around with utility functions that I had and I can say, okay, if I move that, then the utility moves that way and it can add them all up. It just doesn't exist. And that's the problem with most defenses of capitalism that are ultimately done by economists. They're almost always utilitarian and it almost always requires some hand-waving, right? It's good for society. Everybody's better off. Life is better, you know, stuff like that. And it's true, life is better. But is it right? Is it good? Is it moral? Is it just? Right? They can't answer that question. Is it virtuous? They can't answer that question. And is everybody better? Well, probably not. Maybe some people are worse off, right? I like to think that the wife being drunk is worse off under capitalism than they are under welfare state, right? Under welfare state. The state keeps them around so they can beat up their wife. In capitalism, nobody will give them a charity and they either change their ways or they die at the sight of the street, right? So be it. But they have to insist everybody's better off because they can't make moral judgments, right? Because there is no morality or they don't want to touch morality or the wife being drunk is a victim, really, right? Of his circumstances and we should really feel sorry for him. So there's no way out for them. And all the economic arguments, even the best von Mises, I think, has the best, right? Ultimately, fall and death is because people want moral arguments. They want to know that capitalism is not just good somehow materially, but they want to know or they want to have a sense that capitalism is also just and right. And as long as the morality is an altruistic morality, the morality of collectivism, it doesn't add up to them, right? Capitalism is about individualism. Capitalism is about people pursuing their own values, pursuing their own happiness, pursuing their own values, which means their own businesses, their own ideas. Yeah, maybe that's somehow increases GDP, but that sounds really selfish to me and I don't trust selfish people and therefore capitalism is not to be trusted. And what about the poor? Don't forget, what about the poor? What about him? That's true. So outside of objectivism, who do you think has made the best pro-capitalism argument? I mean, you mentioned Von Mises in the economic realm. I would agree, by the way, but did Von Mises make the best case outside of objectivism or is there somebody else? No, I think Mises makes the best case certainly from an economic perspective, but he has a certain understanding and respect and value for freedom, for liberty. You know, there are other thinkers throughout the ages that have contributed to our understanding of capitalism as a political system and economic system, going back to John Locke and through the ages who have emphasized the value of individual rights and then the value of, they didn't have a complete, the value of economic liberty. They didn't have a complete understanding of capitalism or a complete defense of capitalism, but people like Bastiat suddenly have done a lot to promote the ideas of liberty and of ideas of freedom in the economic realm, but also in the personal realm. But there's really, there are very few people today who actually make the argument for capitalism as a whole system. You know, so many libertarians refer to anarchy in order to defend markets. They think they have to be anarchists in order to defend liberty and freedom. And as a consequence, I think they completely undermine the defense of liberty and freedom. And so many of the defenders of capitalism defended on kind of subjectivist grounds, not subjectivism as Mises talked about in the economic transaction, but subjectivism morally, subjectivism in the way we were under Liv Ali, subjectivism in political values, subjectivism all over the place, and moral subjectivism in it. So I don't think there are very good defenders of capitalism today. And then you see the conservatives who undermine it, or Nikki Haley who's running for president wrote an op-ed in the Washington Journal about, you know, defending capitalism. But it's filled with uncapitalist kind of things and filled with statist statements and filled with the collectivism that undermines capitalism. Same thing is true of Hayek, unfortunately. And Hayek, who everybody thinks is, you know, within the free market world is treated as a God, is very mixed. And I and Rand was very critical of Hayek because of his compromises with statism and because of the implicit collectivism that some of his ideas had and his unwillingness to be, you know, consistent and uncompromising. The same with Milton Friedman. You know, Mises is the great virtue of Mises is he was not, he was consistent, he was uncompromising. And he was an anarchist in spite of people today using his name to sell anarchist ideas. In my view, people will tell me that I need to support conservatives because they're the lesser of two evil, but some even go so far as to say that they're pro-capitalist. I've had people tell me, well, Donald Trump is like an Iron Rand hero. I mean, that is just so absurd to me. And I actually think that the conservatives, when it comes to capitalism, are worse than liberals for the very reason that if I'm somebody that's coming up and I don't know anything about politics and I'm hearing that conservatives are the ones for capitalism, then I hear Donald Trump out there talking about immigration restrictions and trade restrictions. And he's gonna threaten this company and that company and we gotta keep the social safety net and all that thing. Then that to me, I mean, that's just socialism light, right? In your view, am I wrong or are conservatives really the bigger threat? I mean, I think the conservatives are the biggest threat. I think they do us more wrong, right? The left is the left. We know what they stand for. We know exactly what they are. The conservatives pretend to be pro-capitalist. They use the terminology. They use those names. And if I were young today and hadn't read Iron Rand and looked at the conservatives and they're pro-capitalists and they're also anti-abortion and they obsessed with homosexuality and trans issues and they're obsessed with all these social things, it wouldn't be crazy for me to lump that in with capitalism. And then of course the capitalism is filled with bringing, J.D. Vance is now sponsoring a lot of bills with Elizabeth Warren about penalizing businesses left and right and encouraging, in a sense encouraging cronyism. And I would say this is, so this is capitalism. It's cronyism and it's regulations and it's statism and it's hatred of the individual in his personal life, hatred of the individual's decision making in their personal life. I hate, I would hate conservatism and I would hate capitalism as a consequence because I would lump it all together. At least the left says, look, we hate capitalism. We think capitalism is wrong. Okay, what do they hate exactly? Let me study what capitalism is about. Maybe then I'd have a chance of discovering an alternative. Conservatives muddy the waters in a way that makes them more dangerous. And they also have, one of their gimmicks is and one of the things that rallies people around them is they also are very good at wrapping themselves around the flag and making themselves Americans, even though they have no concept of what America stands for and what the founders really meant. They wrap themselves in a flag and again make themselves appealing I think to people who then get bamboozled by the rest of their agenda. So yes, I think conservatism today is a mess. I don't think it's nice for anything. I mean, I ran in 19, when was this video made? I think maybe 70, 71, 72, maybe as early as 68. She writes this article, conservatism and obituary of an idea or does a video, a talk on it. Yeah, I mean, she thought conservatism was dead then. And when you look at conservatives today as compared to then, like they were unbelievably sane back then. They were, you know, they were fantastic. I would take any one of those conservatives over today's conservatives in a heartbeat. So I don't know what she would think. I mean, there's a sense in which I'm glad she's not alive to see how bad the right has turned out. I think, I mean, people tell me that Iron Man would have loved Donald Trump. I think she, I can't even imagine the fury she would have had at a Donald Trump-like character and him, given the reverence she had with the president of the United States and how important she thought that will was the way she would look at a Donald Trump. I, as much as I despise him and as much as a lot of people don't like him, I think that's nothing as much as Iron Man would have despised him. I think you're right. I mean, she didn't vote for Reagan. And when it comes to these ideas, Reagan is far superior to Trump. Yes, I mean, Reagan has his flaws, particularly religion, but he is better than any Republican, you know, in politics today, by far. And yeah, if I didn't vote for Reagan, there's no way she votes for Donald Trump. No, well, before I let you go, I gotta ask you, what are your thoughts on the future? Are you optimistic? Can we ever get to a capitalist society? If not an objectivist society, could we at least establish some semblance of what this country was intended to be? Well, I don't think you get one without the other. So I don't think you get capitalism without objectivism. You know, whether it's, at least it's significant influence of objectivism. It's not the case that everybody has to be an objectivist, but it certainly has to be the dominant intellectual movement in the culture. That's the only way you're actually gonna get full-fledged capitalism. Can we ever have that? Sure. As long as you're not putting me down on a date. Next Tuesday at three o'clock. Three o'clock on Tuesday. Look, it depends on the day you catch me. Generally I'm pretty pessimistic about the world these days. I don't see any way anything positive happens in the next decade or so. It's just, people are so, I mean, it seems to me right now that people are so mindless. People are so unthinking. And much more tribal than they used to be, at least in my lifetime. It seems like we're at peak tribalism right now and peak mindlessness right now. And this can't end well. I mean, this has to result in negative consequences. There's just no way around that. So I don't see how the next 10 years don't go really badly. But once you go out 20 years, who knows, things can turn around. We know human beings are capable of thinking. We know human beings are capable of doing good and producing and being responsible. We know all that is possible. And it is ultimately an issue of free will to get people to reverse and go in the right direction. So I do think it's possible, but it's a long-term project. It's 20 years before we see improvement, maybe 50 to 100 years before we actually, if you see a full-fledged capitalist society. Okay, is there anything I forgot to ask you or that I didn't let you get in? It's an important topic. I wanna make sure we cover it adequately. Well, I mean, yeah, there's a million questions that could be asked. So I have, nothing's gonna pop into my mind right now. I would encourage people to go subscribe to my channel on YouTube, I guess, you run Book Show. I would recommend it as well. And just for the audience to know, I've recently published my book, View from a Cage, My Transformation from Convict to Crusader for Liberty. It's available in e-book. In a week or so, it'll be available in print. I'm gonna attach a link so anybody that wants to can buy it. If you like this show, you'll love the book. For now, this is The Rational Legalist. I'm Michael Liebowitz signing out. 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