 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again. It's time for Mises Weekends and we are joined by a voice that I'm sure many of you know, our friend and compatriot, Yuri Maltsev. Yuri, how are you? I'm doing very well. And you? I'm excellent. Just a bit of background. For those of you who aren't familiar with Dr. Maltsev, he was born and raised a former USSR where he obtained his PhD in economics and actually worked on some of the Gorbachev era perestroika programs in economics before defecting to the United States. More importantly for us, he's a senior fellow at the Mises Institute and also going to be speaking at our event in Dallas, Fort Worth next week on Saturday, June 2nd. So if you're in Texas or driving distance of Texas Beecher and join us next Saturday morning, you can go to mises.org slash events to find out about that. But Yuri, I want to start. Do you ever get sick of people asking you about socialism and communism just because you grew up in the Soviet Union? Do you ever feel like you're repeating yourself? Well, I would say that unfortunately this ugly creature socialism is kind of raising its head here. I mean, it's unbelievable what is going on right now in our press. You know that in Washington Post, which I lovingly called Washington Compost, they just hired certain Elizabeth Bering. She's writing almost every week that we should try socialism. Why we don't try socialism? And every, every week, Washington Post is publishing this communist propaganda. My answer is why not to try cancer less deadly? Yeah. Well, you noticed that Maduro won his sham election the other night. We seem to hear this repeated over and over by our friends on the left that people like Maduro and much less Stalin or Lenin or Mao, they don't represent real socialism or real communism that they're dictators. So what would be your response to that? Yes. And now they declare that that Canada is a socialist country that Sweden and Finland and Norway and Mr. Sanders or Comrade Sanders even declared Denmark a socialist country. To the point even that Prime Minister of Denmark kind of was saying don't badmouth Denmark please because we are a free market economy. And that's what they do. They want to disown the bad kind of the dictators and declare that socialism is when you have a free dental care then this is socialism already. No, this is not socialism. Socialism is abolition of private property. And Mr. Maduro or Mr. Kim Jong-un together with Stalin and Mao Zedong, they are true socialists or murderous Castro brothers. And so you can see that at first they were so excited. If you remember NPR or PBS, they were praising Cajuga Chavez, that social dictator who began to dismantle this beautiful country even as well. So right now there are millions of people running away in horror. It really is something. You knew Murray Rothbard, didn't you, when both of you were younger? Oh yes, I was so blessed to meet him. Meeting Murray would be one good single reason to defect from anywhere. But we don't hear this term much anymore, mixed economy. It used to be used in political science courses I believe. But Murray talked about how even partial diminutions in control and ownership represent semi-socialism. Meaning even taxes and regulations are a form of socialism. You don't have to have outright public or state ownership of property. Would you agree with that or do you think that gets us into trouble because we sound too radical? I do agree absolutely that there is no middle way between socialism and the free market. Not at all. And Murray, he pointed at this several times and I would say extremely persuasively. But for Mises himself, he planned cows, he was talking about that. Any movement out of free market, it's already movement towards slavery. Then Hayek wrote to serve them that any kind of social planning would end up in serve them. So this is absolutely right because these two systems cannot be merged. You cannot have a little bit of freedom, a little bit of slavery mixed. That doesn't work at all. But I think that the litmus test of ownership of private properties today we still can enjoy private property in the United States. But our enjoyment is limited because of the myriad of different regulations, taxes, all other kind of government attempts to turn us into public slaves. But from another hand I would say that this process fortunately is not finished. I mean in the sense that we still live better than most people on this planet because we still have maybe not a full control of private property, but maybe higher level of control than people in other countries. So it's a spectrum, it's a continuum of sorts from markets to socialism. Yes, yes of course. But third way I think was Likwan Yu, Prime Minister of Singapore. He used to say that the third way leads to the third world. And he was absolutely right. There's no such thing. Lenin, amazingly enough Lenin understood that. His point was that mixing socialism and capitalism would be like mixing water and oil. That they just do not mix. And his point is that that's why they wanted to immediately abolish private property, immediately kill people who own private property. I just came back from Washington. I had an interesting discussion with one social scientist. And he was just, I couldn't believe that social scientists today are talking about it. And his point was that we can have kind of democratic socialism, which would be kind of all right. And he believes that socialism is free healthcare for all or other things like that. And today just don't know anything. And they don't know why people would be killed under socialism. They would be killed under socialism because socialism does not have any incentives to do anything. And I told him that I think that the greatest promoter of equality was Stalin. He killed all rich people. So everybody became equal. But isn't it interesting how guys like him, they're absolutely convinced that socialism would reduce inequality and that there would be either no or a smaller elite class in society. Of course, history shows that that's completely the opposite. Yes, this elite class, that's who is promoting socialism. That's what Hayek wrote in Why Intellectuals Love Socialism, that because socialism is giving intellectuals claim to power that they know better, they can see farther. And there are gray masses who should be liberated, but there are still gray masses who should be led. So that's the whole idea is that there will be professional revolutionaries. And I think that the United States academia, like 85% think they are part of this revolutionary vanguard. Speaking of Hayek, if democracy leads to social, democracy leads to socialism, given our benefit of hindsight, the second half of the 20th century, the beginning of the 21st, it's a serious question where Hayek and Mises wrong about democracy. If Rothbard's right that any amount of state regulation tax zoning equals a diminution in value or diminution in ownership and control and thus semi-socialism, does that mean Mises and Hayek were wrong about democracy? It's kind of an open question. That's right, yes, that's right. And I discussed it with Murray many times because I think Murray is radical, very radical and rightly so. From another hand, there are different, I would say probably different tints of gray in between black and white, in a sense that still it's better to live here than in North Korea. So from that point of view, I think that infringement on private property. I mean, there are certain things with private property in the United States which are completely egregious. For example, the wetlands, the whole idea when you have a title for wetlands, which has a great negative value. No, no, no, like that. But from another hand, I think that still we are not associated with country, definitely. Yeah, and the difference in degree is huge. Yes. I mean, that can be the difference between a happy life and a miserable life. So we shouldn't discount it in that sense. Exactly, exactly. It's the same thing. Yes, I was last couple of days in District of Columbia, had a seminar there. And many people would say, well, look, I mean this, for example, speaking about our President Trump, that he's not a libertarian. Of course, he's not a libertarian. But from another hand, he's more libertarian than most other presidents, especially in the 20th century and 21st century. In a sense that it looks like he does not attack private property. Derogation, I think, is spectacular. I mean, in one year, he achieved quite a lot. He dismantled maybe six or seven years of building all these regulations. I kind of also, all this global warming for ago went down the drain. So I kind of think, and I agree that the best would be not to have any president at all, that we can govern ourselves much better than the people in Washington, D.C. But it's again the matter of degree. I mean, it's like to talk in absolute terms. Then, basically, any president is just a product of adverse selection in politics. But from another hand, if we'll just look practically, I think that there's definitely a sea of difference between Mr. Trump and the previous president who was just Marxist-Leninist. But here's what galls me, is that socialism and communism, even when we're talking about them here in the ostensibly capitalist west, they're always portrayed as well-intentioned. Their failures are always excuse. It's just it didn't work out, but they were well-intentioned. Therefore, it's okay or even cool to display a sickling hammer or a Shea Guevara t-shirt. Whereas capitalism is dog-eat-dog, but it just works better. And from that, we get this muddled support for what's currently called neoliberalism. But this idea that socialism and communism are well-intentioned, but just went awry in history. I mean, how do you respond to that? Well, the first thing I respond to, I never use the word communism because communism was never practiced. It's just a slogan, it's utopia. Marx even was asked, when does he think communism would occur? He said, I think for 500 years from now. So we're still on a waitlist for another 250 years. Because what is communism? Communism is utopia. I mean, it's kind of like paradise on earth that the people would be working for free and working very hard and consuming very little because there will be such angels. There will be no government. It's kind of like some libertarians even thought that maybe it is a libertarian kind of utopia. In a sense that there will be no government. Government would wither away. You don't need government because people would be angels. They would self-govern themselves. But to make these wonderful angels, you need to turn people into these angels. And that's why they all the time, all socialists from Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, they all talked about a new man of tomorrow, a new man of tomorrow. Lenin, I'm working in the archives in the Library of Congress. And I'm reading through Lenin's handwriting. And Lenin wrote that we inherited from Tsars in Russia. We inherited very poor human material. He doesn't even call humans humans, very poor human material, which can be enhanced only by mass shootings and forced labor. And that's what they did. I kind of see my one of my responsibilities before I die is to tell as many people as I can about the mass atrocities which happened everywhere in all socialist countries with no exceptions. And according to Rudolf Rammel, a great American demographer, about 200 million people were exterminated were considered to be to be a part of test control. According to Lenin's words, during the course of the last century, including 60 million in Soviet Union, 78 million in China, and a lot of others, people were killed 10, 15% of the population. And to tell you, there is many people discussing whether it's, for example, Russia was 43 million or 61 million. I don't even care because both numbers are completely outside of my comprehension. The amount of this evil is, and Stalin realized that he used to say, death of one person is a tragedy, death of a million, just statistic. And I think it's million tragedies. And if you look what communism is, I just have a communist manifest on my table to get myself angry all the time. And I'm quoting from there, in communist society nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes. To hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rare cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, thurdsman or critic. So you can see what is called communism is just a carrot, and the stick is socialism. And there because socialism is the first stage of communism. And many of my colleagues in academia would say, well, actually socialism is good. If fascism is not good, and communism is not good, but they don't know what communism is, and they don't realize that fashion is just another form of the same socialism. Yuri, a lot of our critics, of course, will claim that X, Y and Z is not real socialism. And then they'll throw back in our faces that things like rent seeking and regulatory capture and lobbyists, that those are inherent features of capitalism, that those are part and parcel of capitalism. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, I don't see any kind of signs of capitalism. That's why I call it socialist cronyism. Because these are the signs of the same deadly disease which destroyed the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. It is not capitalism. It is socialism corruption. Socialist corruption, because if you don't have private property, can you imagine what kind of corrupt society you are creating? That means that those people who are in charge are effectively our slave owners or fathers, and they can do whatever they like to do with these people. And that's why they were killing them, because as bad even as private slavery is, the socialist slavery, public slavery is much deadlier, because you can destroy people who are whom you can consider not as assets, but as liability. And so that's what they were doing. That's why 200 million people perished in this revolutionary Holocaust. Interestingly now that Karl Marx used this word first, he was talking about the revolutionary Holocaust in which he was thinking of burning not only capitalist, but also so-called racial trash of Europe, and that would be Basques, and that would be Slavs, and that would be Scottish Islanders for some reason, and Serbs. So that was, this ideology, Marxist ideology, any left ideology is deadly. It promotes violence and only classical liberals and libertarians, they promote peace among people and among countries. So you're a final question for you. We understand left and right and fascism, socialism, etc. But talk about the media in this country, in America and in the West. Here we've got a socialist mayor of one of the largest cities in the world, New York. We have an outright socialist Bernie Sanders who was almost the Democratic Party's nominee for president. We have outright socialist teaching at public universities, at taxpayer expense, all over the country. But if you read the Washington Post in the New York Times, you think that the rising problem in the United States is the alt-right, a few thousand disgruntled social media guys, or some Ku Klux Klaners running around in the woods in Mississippi. So talk about this, how the media makes it sound like the Trump phenomenon represents a right fascist threat, when in fact, from our perspective, the threat is left socialist. Exactly, yes. And it kind of, they made my job much easier because say, 25 to 30 years ago when I just came to the United States, media was pretty bad, socialist media, but not as bad as today. Today you can, if people would ask how was propaganda in the Soviet Union, I would say not even as effective as here today. It's just amazing what's happening. It's CNN or MSNBC or Washington Post or New York Times, almost everything else. I cannot even, and moreover, it became not only socialist, not only promoting communism, but it became so tedious. It's just impossible to watch it. Look, I mean, if you will look at what especially NPR and PBS were doing with, they praised all dictators. I remember how they were praising Castro, they were praising Gorbachev, they were praising Hugo Chavez all the time. And CNN and MSNBC, at least they're lying on their own expense. I mean, if you have Jeff Zucker at the helm of the CNN, he's just destroying CNN. CNN is losing its viewership. It's already, it became completely, I mean, nobody respects it anymore, even people who are watching it. What I'm kind of trying to at least raise awareness about is the National Public Radio. It's called National Propaganda Radio or PBS, because the taxpayer funded. And I remember Paul Ryan is my congressman, and I invited him to talk in my classes. And he, he's spoken in my classes saying that as a libertarian, I'm quoting him as a libertarian, I'm very much against government funding for public radio, public television, for national endowments for the arts, national endowments for humanities. And instead of that, he is increasing funding for the president wanted to defund NPR and PBS. No, the speaker of the House, well, fortunately not for too long, he increased funding for NPR and PBS. And this is, this is a shame that we are paying, we are paying our taxes to a very cynical thing also. And they are brainwashing us for this. And I think that especially in NPR, you know, the Supreme Court ruling about workers' rights, that workers should be treated as individuals instead of being just the herds driven by the shepherds from unions. They, in all NPR stations, all over the United States, there's a huge blow to workers' rights and on and on and on like that. So they, they're serving union leadership, they're serving the left of the Democratic Party. Well, ladies and gentlemen, when a Soviet expat is telling you that American media is propaganda, you know we have a problem, I hope Speaker Ryan pays attention to that. Uri Malsev, thanks so much for your time, ladies and gentlemen. If you're interested in Uri or what the Mises Institute does and you're in Texas or the Dallas, Fort Worth area, come see him and come meet us a week from now on Saturday, June 2nd. You can go to Mises.org slash events to find out more about that. And Uri, thanks a million for your time. I look forward to seeing you in a week. Very good.