 My topic is 10 things you should know about socialism and it's basically based on My book the problem of socialism and a couple years ago Regnery publishing contacted me They contact the Tom Woods first, but he said he said Tom Woods incorporated is keeps him too busy So he he said called the Lorenzo so they called me and Asked me if I could you know because they've been reading these opinion polls one opinion poll said 69% People under 30 said they could they would vote for a socialist for president and And so that's kind of alarming Here that in America and so they asked me if I could put together a short book for the millennial generation About you know making the case against socialism and they asked if I could do it in five weeks And so and I did I did I just it was in this in this Off you know off season. I wasn't teaching so just all day every day four weeks I turned out the book and so and so anyways, that's the purpose of the book and so I thought I'd So I'm gonna summarize some of the some of the main points about Socialism things you ought to know about socialism. Maybe these are talking points It'll help you debate your your commie roommate back at school or So someone like that might even help you get kicked out of school who knows Which would be a good thing for some people So socialism defined, you know the the classic definition in the early 20th century was government ownership of the means of production So when you see countries becoming more and more socialist It means their governments have been taking over various means of production when when the British nationalized all the The commanding heights of their economy after World War two they became more and more socialist And so they didn't become totally Socialists in the central planning sense like the Soviet Union, but they moved they lurched in the direction of socialism and now in in Friedrich Hayek's famous book the road to serfdom in the 1976 edition He he argued that over the years, you know between the early 20th century and and then Mid-70s the definition of socialism had changed He said it he said that it changed to include the institutions of the welfare state and the progressive income tax Because in his words the the goal the ostensible goal was always egalitarianism or he caught the pursuit of equality through forceful governmental coercion and the means just changed He said the original means were a government ownership of the means means of production And that didn't work out too well And so they switched to a different means the welfare state and a progressive income tax and so that was Hayek's idea and now if you I would encourage you if you're interested in this read read at least some of Von Misi's book socialism. It's a great classic. It's online It's on it's for sale here at the Misi's Institute and in the latter chapter of social socialism Misi says that an important part of socialism is what he called destructionism and in the spirit of Patrick's Trying to deciphering of Murray Rothbard's bad handwriting. I wrote it down Patrick Newman's bad handwriting I wrote down one of the just a minute ago one of the things that Misi said in the in the book About destructionism said destruction is the essence of socialism It produced socialism produces nothing It only consumes what the social order based on private ownership and the means of production has created And so when you see politicians today who call themselves socialists advocating reparations for slavery Guaranteed annual income free healthcare for everybody free education free this free that that's basically what they're doing they're saying we want to loot and plunder the fruits of past efforts of production under private property and Give it away in order to prop us up ourselves up as with political power and be sort of Uber Santa Claus, you know, just giving every giving everything away government is Santa Claus is how how I Think of it And so that's what destructionism is and that by the way the group of socialists who came to America in the 1940s who are known as cultural Marxists their theory was that The reason why the Europeans did not voluntarily embrace socialism was that they were too Wetted to the institutions and ideas of Western civilization including the ideas of capitalism in particular in private property and so forth and Christianity they were too wedded to to Christianity Therefore the ideas and institutions of Western civilization and the ideas of Christianity must be destroyed In order to have socialist utopia and that in my view is why you see all these attacks on the traditional family always on capitalism for sure and just You know the tearing down of monuments and the painting over murals and things like that These are all attacks on the institutions of Western civilization And it's all part of the game plan of destruction ism Okay, so that's socialism Point number two is the socialism will destroy your economic future. I got a laugh last week when the chief of staff of this Cortez woman the The bartender from Westchester County who got elected to Congress by pretending she's from the Bronx And the author of the Green New Deal which Bob Murphy is going to talk about later on today He admitted he came out a minute. He says there's nothing to do with the climate. It's all about socialism. It's all about socialism Okay, and so and I'm the reason I got a chuckle It's sort of I'm not on whether to laugh or cry is that all the young people all the Millennials who are on board with this Yeah, the Green New Deal. It's all about destroying very economic future with socialism that's what it's all about and and at the same time granting tremendous amounts of power to two creatures like this guy the the chief of staff of This woman the Cortez woman and that's that's what it's all about and so just study history a little bit You know that the Soviet Union Our friend Yuri Maltsev who was an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev who's lectured here many times When he when he defected from the Soviet Union He started telling our government the US government that the size of the US economy was the Soviet economy was no more than 5% of the US economy at the time the CIA was telling everybody it was 65% and also at the time in the 1989 edition of Paul Samuelson's famous textbook the principles of economics textbook Which was the biggest-selling textbook in the world from the 1940s until the 1980s He predicted that this was 1989 He predicted that by night by 2000 the Soviet economy would be bigger than the US economy That's that's what mainstream economics was teaching as college students in 1989 On the on the verge of the total collapse of the Soviet Union, but Yuri was right Yuri's right. It was more like 5% the CIA was wrong. It wasn't 65% country after country Africa after after independence They adopted Soviet socialism and central planning Their logo was quote only socialism can save Africa 40 years later the after these African countries were poorer than they were under colonialism Venezuela today need I say more There's there's gonna be a presentation about the disaster that socialism has created in Venezuela On Saturday, and I encourage everybody to go and listen to it England after World War two adopted their version of socialism Fabian socialism They nationalized many of the major industries by the 1970s the whole world was talking about the British disease because they had ruined their economy and they and they and That's what got that's what led to the the election of Margaret Thatcher who promised Who was a student of Hayek and a lot of formal student, but she read she read Hayek and and she Turned things around quite a bit She wasn't she wasn't exactly a Ron Paul, but but they did move in the other direction Argentina adopted its version of socialism in the 1940s and 50s under Perone and then and he of course quickly ruined the Argentine economy and was replaced with a coup And Argentina like all these other countries once they destroyed their the productive capacity of their country They tried to bail out bail themselves out by printing money and Argentina by the 1980s had 12,000% price inflation Okay, Chile the same thing the country of Chile adopted socialism in the 1970s they ended up with 746% inflation and an economy that simply stood still just just destroyed it and then they were That government was overthrown by a sort of a repressive regime After that so not a not a happy history of country after country and you might have noticed that a lot of these countries are democracies Friedrich Bastiat wrote in his famous essay the law That there's really no difference if the government imposes a uniform policy on the whole country a dictator can do it and a Legislature can do it so there's really no difference You know you can impose socialism with a legislature like Venezuela did you don't you don't need dictatorship to have socialism You don't need the Soviet Union to ruin your economy Okay point number three is you cannot fix socialism After after Bill Clinton left office, there was one of his one of his top economic advisors Pinned an article in the New York Times Arguing that socialism is not such a bad idea. It just needs to be Administrered by smart people like us and and that's that's always been The argument by the left that well the people just the wrong people have managed Socialism well that ignores economics that ignores economics. You cannot fix it the original Explanation for why socialism is economically poisonous was the incentive problem and You know I joke with my principles of economics classes on the first day I tell them here's what we're going to do where I'm going to give Seven exams during the course of the 14-week semester I'm going to add up and then when I get all the grades Those of you who get the low grades I'm going to take points away from the good students who got the high grades and give that give you some of their points so that everybody gets a C and I tell them well, that's academic socialism that's sort of an example of the incentive problem and That's not really Enough of an explanation though. You've all learned about the calculation problem You need private property and market prices in order to have a rational economic calculation And so that's another cause for the ruination caused by socialism Hayek is famous for what he called the knowledge problem the fact that it's Unthinkable that a human mind or even a hundred human minds working with the most powerful computer in the world Could possibly possess and utilize all of the information that the millions of workers and consumers and business managers and investors and And on and on have that they use in their daily lives It's it's a pretense his he called it the pretense of knowledge And then there's also something called you'd call I would call the public choice problem involved with socialism the way Hayek put it was Under socialism the only power worth having is political power. That is the way to acquire Things to make yourself better off is through politics and political connection bribery and and just plain old politics You can't advance by educating yourself being a producer being an entrepreneur Serving your fellow man by providing him or her with valued goods and services. That's illegal That's the government is control. You're not in control. You're not allowed to do that And so the way to succeed is through politics and so so and of course the more and more people's time spend people spend on politics By definition the less time they spend producing things and so that that Extracts even more in terms of time and resources used for production in the direction of Transferring what little wealth there is left into your pocket you being the rent seeker You know the rent seeking Involved in politics so you cannot fix socialism once you have it Also under socialism. There's a famous chapter in Hayek's book the road to serfdom called the worst why the worst rise to the top and And it made me think of something That I call the sleaz-o-meter Where you might put people like Stalin on one end over here Maybe Chuck Schumer over here And then you know some of the nicer ones some of the modders like like this this woman in England She seems kind of she doesn't seem too horrible Teresa May But so that's that's sort of like the the sleaz-o-meter with us You know the fault the extreme sleaze on on the left side on this side over here And then people who are there's still sort of a coercive thugs, but they're not as bad as Stalin So that's not as bad as Stalin and so and but Hayek's article is you know under socialism Collectivism he was actually just talking about collectivism in general it's based on Using the coercive force of government to compel people to take your orders You know the Mises Institute has a new t-shirt and what it was it says as Every socialist is a secret dictator that is certainly true I think that's a quote from von Mises and so when it's all a matter of degree You know you had some of the socialist dictators like Stalin who are willing to murder tens of millions of people for merely dissenting Okay, and Teresa may as far as I know hasn't done anything like at all like like that, but she still has inherited the accumulated vehicles of coercion That are the state that have accumulated over hundreds of years in England and the same thing in our government You know when Donald Trump was elected he was he inherited the accumulated coercive powers of two hundred and some years of US government and then the next person will do the same whoever he gets elected next time will do the same and so And so and so that's always a danger even if you have relatively nice sounding people and in power They've got these horrible weapons at their disposal. And so the worst, you know the absolute worst In history is something you should know about I had some students at my my university once it was like this college Republican club and On the day when the students all put little tables out on the on the campus and they were handing out flyers about them they took a couple of them were taking one of my classes and they had these statistics of Mass murders by socialist governments and they're handing out and they told me that none of their Massmates had ever heard anything about this. They never knew that a single person died under so because of socialism anywhere And this is from a book called the black book of communism There's a sociologist from the University of Hawaii Rudy Rommel who wrote a book called demo side demo And what this is is is not death by war? This is mass killing of people because they dissented from socialism. They did not want their property taken They did not want to live under a tyranny and as a result they were murdered in mass And this is these were of seven French scholars who published this book about some 20 years ago Maybe more than 20 years ago now, but also Rudolph Rommel's book What a career he had isn't it, you know cat cataloging mass killing you spend his whole life Working with statistics on mass death is holy. He must have been pretty depressed Wouldn't be the kind of guy you want to go out and have party with What would you talk about? Anyway, it's Soviet Union 20 million Our friend Yuri thinks that's it's a low ball estimate China 60 million North Korea 2 million Eastern Europe 1 million Africa 1.7 million So when Hayek said the worst rise to the top, that's the sort of thing he was talking about in his day This is in the 1940s. He was he was he was mentioning this And so you should familiarize yourself with that and this is not to say that Teresa May is the same as Stalin But there's always there's always it's all a matter of degree of coercion, isn't it? Okay, the next point is that The most people don't know that fascism is a form of socialism Fascism socialism communism, it's all the same gang as far as I'm concerned. They're all collectivists after all the You know when I wrote this book and I did lots of radio interviews regularly publishing had me do 65 radio And radio talk shows in a month and so I was busy, you know, one o'clock in the morning I'm on on a radio with a California radio station They and they own several hundred radio stations the same companies Salem Communication communications in a question. I've always asked as people would ask me well This is isn't communism different than socialism and the answer is no you know the Soviets the name of their country was the union of Soviet socialist republics They didn't call themselves the union of Soviet communist republics Communism was the utopian ideal that they hope to achieve in 500 years But in the meantime, they're all socialists. They call themselves so it's the same thing So don't fall for that and and of course Hayek and the road to serfdom point out that all the fascists of the 20th century Mussolini's Stalin and the rest they were all start they all started out as socialist and of course Nazi the word Nazi is national socialism So the Russians call themselves International socialists the German socialists call themselves national socialist, but they were all socialists It's just a different variety of socialism You know, it's like, you know, I'm a murderer here likes to use guns and he likes to use knives You know, we're but we're the same thing. We're both murderers guns knives. What's what's the difference? And so In the of course another thing they had in common was the literature of the fascists All attacked liberalism classical liberalism and these are you know Von Misi's book liberalism, which is online also and also for sale at the Misi Institute. You should should all read it And these you know the main points, you know, what is liberalism? What are the main bullet points of classical liberalism? Private property freedom peace equality under the law inequality of income in a free market Limited government and tolerance. These are the basic ideas that Misi's lists there. These are the ideas that were attacked Very voraciously by Mussolini himself and Hitler and the Nazis because they understood who the enemy was These were the ideas and the ideas that that laid the groundwork for the acceptance of Markets and capitalism and private property You can't have capitalism and private property in markets if people don't understand the virtues of them I guess you can have it, but it's a lot. It's tough. It makes it a lot a lot tougher and so Here's a few quotes about from the horse's mouth about fascism here's Well Hayek again Hayek noted in the road in the road to serfdom. He said this the dominant feature of Nazi Germany's referring to Nazi Germany Was a fierce hatred of anything? Capitalistic individual profit-seeking large-scale enterprise banks joint-stop companies department stores international finance and loan capital and the system of what they called interest slavery They've equated charging a bank charging you interest for a loan as slavery in general he says quote the Nazis was The common characteristic of the Nazis was their anti-liberal and anti-capitalist trend They even adopted the slogan quote the end of capitalism as their accepted dogma So that was the that was the slogan of the Nazi Ideologues they wrote about that Mussolini Is that much of the same thing? I read Mussolini's autobiography once When I'm doing some of my research. It's kind of funny You know if you assigned to say you signed a class of third graders and said Right a one-page Autobiography I could see the third-grader writing the title my autobiography. That was the title of Mussolini's autobiography my autobiography I always thought it sounded sort of elementary schoolish But he also wrote a book called fascism doctrine and institutions He said this the fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the state and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with the state It is opposed to classical liberalism which denied the state in the name of the individual So that it doesn't get any more clear than that that there was an attack on classical liberalism these ideas But you had to destroy these ideas first before you could have fascism in the in the words of Bonito Mussolini he also complained about and it is a quote the selfish pursuit of material prosperity They declared fascism to be a reaction against the flaccid materialistic conception of happiness and Employed his audiences to quote reject the Economistic literature of the 18th century So don't read Adam Smith Okay, don't read it sounds like the kind of thing they tell in American college campuses today You know don't read this stuff, you know, it's a racist. It's sexist Adam Smith was a white guy after all why should we pay attention to him? That's you know, that's some of the about the level of intellect intellectual discourse and and some of the more politically correct universities and so fascism was basically was a variety of socialism and the Nazis You know and the and Mussolini's Italy were basically socialist countries the Hayek pointed out in the road to serfdom then in Germany They nationalized about the Nazis did about half of all industry And then the other half was so heavily regimented and controlled and regulated that it was de facto nationalized and That's probably the big difference between Soviet socialism and the German and the Nazi Socialism is that fascism allowed a degree of private ownership, but it was heavily Controlled and dictated, you know, what it would do would be dictated by the government by the state So so ownership was not really private ownership Since the state controlled everything and that is why our old friend Bob Higgs author of the great book crisis in Leviathan Calls the American economy today Participatory fascism he says but he says businesses are so heavily regulated and controlled that it's like fascism was But at least they let us vote once in a while and so it's participatory But Mussolini was a dictator, of course and Hitler was a dictator So he couldn't vote but our I guess our fascism Bob Higgs would say is slightly better than the Nazis in Mussolini because it's participatory and so That's a trick politicians always play isn't it they want they want us to think that they're legitimate because after all We voted which is why I never vote I'm one of my old essays on Lou Rockwell comm is entitled be patriotic don't vote Okay, so that's that's point number five I guess point number six is that inequality? Historically is far worse under socialism than under capitalism If you read about Venezuela today, for example, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal That said Hugo Chavez's daughter who's in her thirties has a net worth of about four billion dollars And as far as I know she never started a business I don't think she's one of the original founders of Microsoft or anything like that and Forbidden in the Wall Street Journal also said that the former finance minister of Venezuela Who I think they said he now lives in Switzerland had a net worth of eleven billion dollars Okay, and and of course even to this day you can read articles in the in the American news media about the political Elites in Venezuela still living high on the hog They have their country clubs and they have the food and you also read about people killing dogs and cats to feed their children You know the normal the ordinary people in Venezuela And it's always been like that the right the people who ran the Soviet Union had multiple Vacation homes all over all over the place and in accumulated great wealth and the masses were equally indigent In country after country you see that the the African potentates who adopted socialist Socialism and became Dictators after independence in the 1960s they all lived like kings and queens and while the people Starved and so the whole business of so we need socialism to create more equality Is is fraudulent? It's it's never it's never been true never been true like that Not that equality is even a desirable thing because of course we're all different We're all different in in thousands of different ways And the only way you can move in the direction of trying to force equality is with a totalitarian society And of course you can never do that you can never have equality because human beings are not equal as Rabbi Daniel Lappin who gave a talk here some years ago On this point he said that you made the point that you know God made all human beings This is a Jewish rabbi. He said God made all human beings unique Just like he made all stones unique stones are all different every stone is different Not you can't find two stones that are the same But humans can make bricks identical you we can manufacture bricks you know like the bricks in a house or a building you can make those identical and He posed a question. Do you want to think of yourself more as a stone or a brick and that's that's what egalitarianism is about Is making us all into identical bricks? If even if it kills us and the where's my list of mass murder there that's that's always been the The idea even if it kills us Okay point number seven the income tax is The essence of socialism The income especially the progressive income tax. This is why in the communist manifesto There's a ten ten point Planks ten plank of the communist manifested ten points point number one says abolition of private property Point number number two is a heavy progressive income tax Okay, now of course economists the Austrians and others have studied the income tax You know it increases the rate of time preference and and destroys the work efforts and has all these bad effects But it has another effect as well, and I want to read a short quote about that from Frank Chaturroff One of the great books ever written on the income tax is the income tax root of all evil by Frank Chaturroff Which is for sale downstairs at the bookstore. I noticed this morning and here's something he said He said when the when the progressive income tax was adopted in 1913 is in the United States the absolute right of private property in the United States was violated That of course is the essence of socialism Whatever else socialism is or is claimed to be its first tenet is the denial of private property Well, it's in the communists manifesto. This is why all socialists beginning with Karl Marx have advocated income taxation the heavier the better and so that's certainly very true and also To have socialism so you know the socialists of the world always want to centralize governmental power They can't allow divided sovereignty or federalism or states rights, whatever you want to call it Devolution of power they want centralized power and nothing in the United States history anyway, so nothing gave us centralized governmental bureaucracy more than the income tax and the Fed and So and they both happened in the same year in 1913 and so the socialists of the world knew what they were doing and they know what they're doing when the when they They're so worshipful about the income tax because it centralizes power And it basically tells you that you don't own the income that you earn the government owns all of your income You are a slave to the government and the government will tell you how much of your income You are allowed to keep by setting the tax rates, you know, it's our income And we will tell you how much you get to keep and so charter off I think was right on the money when it when he wrote that and the only reason they don't of course Make their rates even higher They always try to maximize the rates is they do understand that we will cheat on our taxes and we will we will stop working And we might even have an armed revolution if they if they steal, you know If they make us destitute by confiscating too much of our income So so even the people who are on my sleaz-o-meter Have to be careful about that because as Rothbard wrote in quite a few places and reminded us That any state in a in the world is Greatly outnumbered by millions and millions of people and so any state is always just a relatively small group of people And so they always run the risk of a revolution or a violent revolution That's why they spend so many resources on propaganda and indoctrination It's sort of a way to quell Revolutionary impulses on the cheap they don't always use violence to put down revolutions that Indoctrination and propaganda is also a tool that that is very essential there. Okay point number eight The Scandinavian countries are about as socialist as the United States is One of the myths out there that crazy Bernie Has been spreading is that we need to be more like Sweden. We need to be like Denmark. He's sent Scandinavian countries They're more socialists, you know democratic socialism He says there's a huge difference between socialism and democratic socialism and he usually spells huge with about 15 or 20 When you see him on television doing that, but take a look at this This is there's something called the index of economic freedom It's published. It's published by several different groups the Fraser Institute in Canada publishes one Fraser or FR a CR or the Heritage Foundation publishes one. This is one from the Heritage Foundation They put together an index of economic freedom basically the more Every country in the world is ranked and if the more in their opinion that you safeguard private property the rule of law Minimal government minimal regulations lower taxes you get a higher rating And so they come up with an index number for every country and these are this is the latest Rankings here. The US ranking is I think I think the United States is 12 And the the number of the index number is 76.8. Denmark is 76.7 so we're about as socialists as Denmark Sweden and Finland pretty close pretty pretty much the same So we're pretty much, you know, they're they're hardly Can be can be said to be more socialists in the United States the top ranking goes to Hong Kong 90 point 2 Just to get if you an idea of how far away The US and the Scandinavian countries are a Singapore 89 point 2 I Think what crazy Bernie is referring to is he is Sweden in the 1950s in the 1940s The Swedes started became sort of infatuated with fascist planning and then fascism kind of got a bad name after the Hitler thing And so they ditch that But they made sort of adopting up of their own version of socialism and nationalized a lot of industries very heavy taxes big welfare state And according to the Swedish Academy of Economics Sweden did not create a single net new job from 1950 until 2005 so for 55 years there was zero job growth in Sweden and in Sweden Produced let me get the statistic here They did the same thing these other countries did they had all they had they tried to inflate their way out of the product the mess they had created and in the 1980s they had 500 percent interest rates in In Sweden and so and that's when Sweden the Swedish government began to retrench the privatized lot of their industries including a big part of health care and And moved in the other direction so that that's why today they're pretty close to the United States in terms of their their ranking But they pretty much destroy they did exactly what Mises did said about destructionism They they lived off the past efforts and investments and sacrifices of the great Swedish capitalists of the late 19th and early 20th century that produced a lot of great things for the for the world and then And then ruined it basically Okay, so the Sweden Denmark Finland they have private enterprises These are these are still primarily capitalist countries with with a big welfare state Just like the United States. We we are still a primarily a capitalist country. We have private enterprises But we have a much bigger welfare state than the Scandinavian countries do and so doesn't make sense to say We need to be more like them more socialistic. We already are we already are Point number nine running out of time here Socialism has caused the worst pollution problems in the history of the world At least the modern history of the world after the collapse of Communism in the late 80s and early 90s all of a sudden all of these closed to talent totalitarian societies Opened up and people could look around and learn a lot of things including the state of the environment over there Now at the time any any student had studied economics was taught that the root cause of pollution is unregulated free market competition The story that you're all told is that Industrialists will take into consideration the private cost to them They have to pay wages and they have to pay for raw materials But they won't take into consideration the external cost in terms of the Pollution and the damage it might cause to your health or to your property or something like that And therefore they will produce too much and government needs to step in and regulate and control Production to do that. Well, if that's theory is true Then what would you expect the environment to look like in countries that outlawed the pursuit of profit for 50 60 70 years? If the pursuit of profit is the root cause of pollution And then you have a society that outlaws the pursuit of profit the legal pursuit of profit for half a century What would you expect the environment to look like in those countries? Expected to be pristine After all if that's the root cause well the exact opposite turned out to be the truth And we've there are even books published with titles like ecocide and the USSR and and this is true not just in In the country the Soviet Union and in the communism But Venezuela you Venezuela today make Lake Maraca Maracaibo. I'm not sure that's how you pronounce it You know hundreds of tons of untreated sues flow into it every day When when British petroleum had that awful accident in the Gulf of Mexico an oil platform caught on fire people died They immediately set aside 20 billion dollars to pay compensation because they knew they were gonna have to pay compensation Well, Mexico the government of Mexico that their oil platforms catch on fire all the time and this is the government run Business and whenever that happens They deny any liability. They even denied that there was an oil slick. There was one about Seven or eight years ago and they denied that there was any kind of oil slick or environmental damage and then Greenpeace Took a satellite image of the oil slick that was created by the the Mexican government's oil platform And so under under so you have a situation there as the capitalists took Responsibility for the horrible accident and then when the Mexican government has an almost identical horrible accident I don't think anybody, you know, one of the certainly nobody wanted this to happen They deny being liable at all and and and so if you look at the history of what happened in the socialist countries They ruin their their environments far more than anything. We've seen the United States In Russia the the Volga River the steamboats had signs on them saying don't throw cigarettes overboard the river may catch on fire They almost wiped out the sturgeon population in Poland people people would With lung disease were sent to underground uranium mines for as health clinics Fire trucks would have to go through the streets several times a day in the industrial part of Poland Knocking the lead dust out of the air from the factories. I have an old friend who grew up in the former Yugoslavia and He had he worked for the government. So he was a government lawyer Ivan Pongrasek some of you the old-timers here know who he was his son It was an Austrian school economist and they both were but anyway came this country But he told me once he lived in a 30th floor apartment in Zagreb And I asked him why 30th floor and he said there's no elevator in the building And I said what are you a mountain climber or what's you know? I want a physical fitness fanatic What is it? He said no the pollution is so bad that You can't see if you're but if you're below the 20th floor You can't open your windows because you'll die from the lead and cadmium and zinc dust that comes in your house all day long Can't do that. And so it was it was pretty awful and and Under socialism and so and I have a whole chapter on that so you can read the book I guess The final thing I'll say is Welfare harms the poor and I'm running out of time So, you know socialist welfare harms the poor. So I'm going to read you one thing about And there's a lot of literature about how with the welfare destroys work incentives causes family breakup and so forth and I'm going to read one thing about what the an extreme welfare state in Sweden has done to the Swedish people and This is from our friend pair byland who is an Austrian school economist. He's lectured here many times He's a friend of ours. He's a Swedish. He's a sweet, but he works. I think he's at Oklahoma State University now He said this I'm quoting pair when handling out benefits and therefore taking away the individual's Responsibility for his or her own life a new kind of individual is created the immature Irresponsible and dependent the welfare state has created a population of Psychological and moral children the children and grandchildren of the welfare state are Indoctrinated at an early age in the government schools that they have a supposed right to free education Healthcare and income and anything else They might desire and of course, you know when you say that I mean somebody else has the obligation to be your slave to work for you and My old friend Walter Williams when it when he gives his one of his canned speeches I've had him in my university several times He kind of shocked some of the students by asking them this question He says what would you call a system in which one person is forced with the threats of imprisonment? Kidnapping an imprisonment to work for the benefit of another person And it usually takes about five Four seconds for someone to say what what would you say? Slavery yeah, and then of course he describes the welfare state And and and you know, what else would you call that when the average American works until May now? To pay income pay taxes for them mostly for the benefit of other people you know, what would you call that and that's what the welfare state has done and I think I have about one minute left if we have a question or two or or any brilliant declarations or like that Well, there wasn't they went along with it Hayek Criticized the cap the German capitalists who went a little themselves went along with this And they kept their property, but they they were happy to keep their property But then they were regimented and regulated by the government, but that's not real private property That's not real, but you know, you know, are you a free man? If if everything you do Your schedule every day is determined by me, you know, I have tell you where to go What job you're gonna have how long you have to stay at work? And so forth and how to do your job, you're not a free man if in that sense And so if you have a slave master called the state, you're not you're not a free man And if you have a slave master as a business person, you're not a genuinely private enterprise either And that's basically what fascism was One more question I guess we're almost out of time here Because these are mostly economic arguments Yes And for some lack of America, there isn't so much talk about economic social because we have in this world as an example But there are a lot of movements what we do to promote what's so called a cultural Marxism Yeah, yeah, that's well, that's the that's the brand of Marxism that infects the United States today too But we do have Still have people who are making the case for economic socialism and still, you know, they're you can't separate the two really The history of this I have I wrote a little essay it's on lurockwell.com called Missessian Destructionism Then and Now And and I summarize some of this but the cultural Marxist these were European immigrants came to America and and became extremely influential their ideas totally dominate American universities now and Probably in your country as well And what they said was that these were all people who tried to bring Marxism Marxian socialism to Europe and they failed the people did not go for Marxian socialism in Europe. It was imposed on Eastern Europe after the war But but the people themselves did not want that and they decided the reason for that Was the institutions of western civilization like I said earlier had Free market economics the ideas of liberalism constitutionalism democracy All these things The people did not want to give that up and also Christianity You know if god is your sovereign then some politician cannot be your sovereign god is your sovereign They didn't want that they wanted themselves to be your sovereign and to order you around and and that's how Oscar they achieved socialist utopia. And so they said very clearly In their in their writings that their their objective would be to destroy Christianity and to destroy the institutions of western civilization And that's what political correctness is all about. That's what cultural Marxism is all about That's what's what's going on all the attacks on the traditional family Especially the traditional family, you know one of these one of these characters was a Hungarian Lukac and when He his party got into control in Hungary. This is the early 20th century He was some sort of I think they made him a minister of culture and he started advocating all sorts of You know wife swapping and all sorts of you know anything to destroy The traditional family and they were kicked out They you know, you know, they were the Hungarians said get out of here. They didn't want that And so and this is one of the people now who is like one of the Leading lights leading intellectual lights of cultural Marxism and even though he's long dead And so and see these are the people that whose ideas have been embraced by the American left in academia And they totally have taken over like like in your country But it's but it's connected to economic socialism because their objective is they want some essentially planned totalitarian society Uh, but uh, they have to get rid of these institutions first That keep the existing society together Destructionism so it's all about destructionism that I open my talk with that's what cultural Marxism is It's about destroying these existing institutions And Marxists have always been like they've always been about destructionism even if they have no idea What will come next they just want to destroy what is and then We'll worry about that later. It's kind of like when Nancy Pelosi said pass the Obama law and we'll figure out what it says later That's a classic example of how the Marxists have always thought about these things And I guess my time is up in uh coffee break time