 Everybody, today we are debating whether or not capitalism is the root of police brutality and we are starting right now. Ladies and gentlemen, thrilled to have you here for another epic debate. This is going to be a lot of fun, folks. Just want to let you know, if it's your first time here, consider hitting that subscribe button as we have a lot more debates coming up that we are very excited about. And we're also a nonpartisan channel, so we don't have any sort of aftershows in which we take a position on who won or anything like that. It's fully up to you as the audience to decide who you found most persuasive in these discussions. So it's going to be a lot of fun. Want to let you know, as you're listening, I have put the links of our guests down in the description box so that way if you're listening and you're like, hmm, I like that. I want to hear more. You can hear more. That's why I put them down there for you. And so we are going to get rolling into this pretty quick. It's going to be kind of an informal kind of style today. And it's going with roughly 5 to 10 minute opening statements followed by open conversation and then Q&A. So if you happen to have a question fired into the old live chat, if you tag me with at modern day debate, that makes it easier for me to get every question in the list. Super Chat is also an option in which case you'd be able to make a comment as well during the question and answer toward one of the speakers that they of course would get a chance to respond to and it'll push your question or comment to the top of the list for the Q&A. So with that, this is a lot of fun. We really appreciate these guys coming here. Really busy guys. And these guys, I'm sure you've probably seen them here before. You've had each of these guys on before. Very articulate guys. So guys, this is just a pleasure to have you. Just want to let you know. We really appreciate you hanging out with us. Always happy to join you, James. Sure. Glad to be here as always. Radical. And with that, we usually start with the affirmative. So Caleb, if you're up for taking that first opening and then we can kick it over to Adam, thanks again for being here. And the floor is all yours. Sure. Well, I'm a reporter and in the last four or five years, I've been traveling all over this country, red states, blue states, white communities, black communities. You know, everywhere I go in this country, I hear the same story. I hear people saying that the government is not working for average Americans. It's working for a small group of rich people. I hear people say that the government is taking our rights away. It's taking our right to own firearms away. It's taking our right to free speech away. It's violating our right to privacy. The police are kicking down doors. They're violating our rights everywhere in the United States. There's a big awareness, number one, that the government works for somebody other than the domestic population. And number two, that the freedoms that have long been touted as the example of how great the U.S. society is. Those freedoms are gradually being rolled back and eroded. Now why is this happening? That's where the disagreement comes in. In red states, blue states, libertarians, socialists, anarchists, they'll all give you different explanations. Well, I would give an explanation that is rooted in the revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism, which is this. Capitalism is a system in which production is organized for profit, right? Their capitalism, the means of production, the major centers of economic power are organized not to serve public good, but to make profits for their owners. And the capitalist is constantly driving to make production as efficient as possible. And that means advancing technology. So you can hire fewer workers, the workers that you do have. You can make them easier to replace by de-skilling the jobs. And that when there is a great leap in technology, that results in a lot fewer workers being hired. You'll notice that World War I and World War II both came after a huge leap in technology. And that was because when you eliminate workers from the assembly line, you have a little bit of a problem because workers are also consumers. And if you start eliminating workers from the assembly line, you remove workers from production, pretty soon people don't have the income to buy your products. And this is the built-in problem of capitalism. And it's called overproduction. And when there is a huge leap in technology, you have a prolonged crisis of overproduction where the living standards of the workers dramatically decrease, the ability of the capitalists to sell their products decreases, the rate of profit the capitalists make from selling those products also decreases, and you have an economic problem. And when society becomes economically less stable, there is a need to lock it down as people become hungry and unhappy, as there is more of a fight over resources. There becomes a need on the part of the capitalists and the rulers of the society to lock it down. They also fight amongst each other. They want to resolve the crisis at the expense of other capitalists. So one section of the ruling class will try to beat down another section. And it's also important to note that the reason throughout the 20th century there were revolutions happening in Asia and in Russia and in Africa and all these other countries. But the West was very stable is because for a long time we had a layer in the Western countries of well-paid industrial workers that in the United States we had this big prosperous middle class that was very, very, very prosperous. And they got some of the crumbs, basically. The capitalists of the United States went around the world plundering, the developing world beating down countries. And they made so much money, so many super profits that they could afford to buy off some steel workers and some auto workers and give them a comfortable middle class life. And that would stabilize US society. But now because of the computer revolution once again and also because of offshoring and all of that, we're seeing the demolition of this labor aristocracy that stabilized the Western capitalist countries. So we're seeing the demolition of the American middle class. We're seeing a capitalist crisis. All of this is driving toward a situation where society is becoming increasingly unstable and sections of the ruling class are fighting with each other. And there's a need to lock society down and try and control the masses as we all transition to lower pay and lower living conditions. I'm saying basically the capitalists are setting up a low wage police state. But there's another aspect to this as well, because we know the African American community has suffered police brutality since the time they got here as slaves. And if you look at some of the vicious policing that we see in the United States and all of that, that's really rooted in the British colonial tradition, right? If you look at what the British did in India, you look at what the British did in places like South Africa and places like that. Whenever the colonizers came in, the colonial policing systems that were set up in the countries that the British Empire forced to adopt free trade and free markets at the point of the gun, in those societies, you tended to see a very vicious police force that saw the population overall as an enemy. And what's interesting is at this point here in the United States, we're seeing this huge problem with police brutality, with police who see the communities they serve as their enemy. But what's interesting is a lot of our policing agencies are actually trained in Israel. And what is Israel? Israel is a settler colonial state. It was originally set up, the Balfour Declaration, as a British colonial settler state, eventually it became Israel. And so that system of police who see the masses of people as a horde, they're trying to hold back what the Palestinians endure at the hands of Israeli police. Now our police in the United States are being trained by them. So I see all of this as essentially a product of capitalism. We see the colonial attitude. We know that the police forces in the United States, a lot of the way they began was the history of slave catchers and the patty rollers, et cetera. We know about the capitalist crisis this is going on. And I see this crisis of police brutality and racism we're seeing in the United States as a symptom of capitalism and decay necessitating that we move toward a system where the economy is organized to serve the people. And we have an economy that's organized to serve public good and not profits. And the police and the community are once again not enemies. The police don't see the population as a foreign group they're trying to control, but rather the police and the state serve the people in a new society organized to serve public good and not the profits of a few capitalist owners. Thank you very much, Caleb. We will kick it over to Adam Kokesh for his opening as well now. Hey, thanks so much for having us, James. I really appreciate the opportunity here. Now, Caleb, in your opener there, you described capitalism as a system organized for profit. It seemed that was the closest you came to definition. Did you actually define it? Are you asking me or do you want to continue? No, I want to make sure I'm responding to the right thing, but I didn't hear like, I mean, there were a lot of descriptives, but I didn't hear like a real concrete definition. Capitalism is a system in which production is organized for profit and profits are in command of the economic system. Mao Tse-Tung defined capitalism as profits in command. Frederick Engels said that under capitalism, the means of production only function as preliminary transformation into capital, and that basically that's capitalism. Okay, yeah, a lot of the debate about capitalism today comes down to a matter of definitions. I think Caleb and I would generally really agree on a lot of the problems with police brutality. And I love the attitude of a debate like this when I can come into with someone who, I believe is coming in with the right spirit and attitude and intellectual honesty and we can actually see what the actual differences are without just trading talking points. So with that in mind, you know, I was Caleb, I was a little disappointed that, you know, your opener had a lot of descriptives more than definitions both in its arguments and in the definition of capitalism itself. But what we're talking about here in the definition of capitalism, I don't get from Mao Tse-Tung, I get from the dictionary. And it's generally commonly defined as some version of an economic system based on ownership of the means of production. And this gets into the big misunderstanding where people look at what we have today and say that's capitalism, which I think is a certain deliberate propaganda, a misunderstanding that is being promulgated by people who want to continue as I will make the case that Caleb does, centralized systems based on coercion. And with the definition means of production. This is where we have been led down a very deliberately confusing path in looking at economics as based on things that are counted and measured in dollars. I think Caleb would agree that we both want to see a world of universal non-violence of cooperation and harmony among the global human family. And I don't think that's possible. Like by definition, if respect for self ownership is not respected. If I don't respect that you own yourself, that all my relationships with you Caleb must be by consent or they are unethical. They are coercive, they are not in respect for your property rights, your means of production. Because the ultimate means of production is the individual human mind, the individual human body. And if you don't own yourself, somebody else owns you. And that slavery, we decided a long time ago and I think Caleb would agree that slavery is fundamentally wrong. We're not trying to debate that point. So the question might just be, where do we go from here? And what I see people of Caleb's perspective advocating is not radical. It's more of the same, more centralized, coercive planning, even the terms that he uses to justify economic interventions in his opening statement there aren't in line with these basic ethical standards of libertarianism of self ownership, the non-aggression principle. You check a box when you join the Libertarian Party, LP.org and it says, I oppose the initiation of force to achieve political or social goals. That's what makes libertarians different. We don't want to force our will on anybody else. So if Caleb wants to create a... I think there's a bit of a lag. I think oftentimes Adam's on the road so it might be that his connection where he is is might ebb and flow just a bit. Let me just check. He seems to be frozen. I'm not seeing him. Absolutely, unless he's just standing really still. But I think that what we usually have is he'll kind of bounce back in. So in the meantime, want to mention folks, those links of each of our guests are down in the description box so that you can hear plenty more where that came from. Oh, I think we did lose, we lost Adam. But don't worry, I have a feeling he'll be back in just a moment. So as I had mentioned last time, I think he was on the road and so we had a kind of a similar deal. I'm, yeah, so do want to let you know though, folks, this is going to be a fun one. I'm already enjoying it. This is, as Adam said, I appreciate that both of these guests are kind of like, hey, you know, let's go for the kind of the new ideas. Like what kind of new ideas or perspectives can we kind of talk about here today and that's something we really appreciate. Also, want to let you know, we are excited as I'm not exaggerating, folks, in the next couple of weeks, and I'm gonna peek in on my email just to be sure that Adam can get back in, is that in the next couple of weeks, we are very excited. We will be having one week from today, Dr. Richard Carrier will be debating with none other than Jonathan Sheffield on whether or not the resurrection of Jesus happened and we are excited as we're putting together a couple of other debates that, I'm not as, people, you think I'm exaggerating. You're like, oh, James, no, come on, seriously. Be serious. I'm not joking when I say I think that these debates will, the ones that we are working on putting together will shake the foundations of the YouTube debate world for real, so you'll see. Just let me know, by the end of this month, I'm pretty sure we'll have those debates have happened, but they're not official yet, so I don't wanna announce it and no word yet from Adam, but don't worry. We had planned for this. I'm actually going to sing a song that I've been working on, so I hope you guys are ready for this. It's impromptu, but I don't really have a song, but I will say this. We wanna say thanks so much to Caleb. As the last time Caleb was on, it was quite the zoo, if you guys remember, and so we really do appreciate his flexibility, his willingness to come back as we're working on having increased moderating and control. Today's debate is going smooth because these are different circumstances than the last time, but we always like your feedback, folks, and so I wanna let you know yesterday I put out on our community tab on YouTube basically a request for anybody's debate topics that they would like to see on modern day debate. As we are looking for new topics, we've got a lot of great suggestions such as whether or not, believe it or not, whether or not ghost hunting or ghost hunters are legit or whether or not this is all baloney, so that's one that we are looking for. If anybody knows of a ghost hunter that might be open to defending the trade, you might say, that could be a fun one. We also have some unfree speech as a lot of people have said that they really enjoy, I think this was maybe the most popular topic recommended, a lot of people said they would love to see either a debate on free speech or on cancel culture, let us know if you happen to love debating topics like that, let us know and we will try to set you up. All right, we've got Adam just requested to come back in, perfect. But we're at modern day debate at gmail.com folks in case you would like to email us and let us know if you would enjoy any of those topics. Awesome, glad to have you back, Adam. Hey, I apologize for that. I've been here in very sunny Arizona, my phone overheated and I had to restart it to reconnect but yeah, would you like me to just continue right where we were? Not a problem. All right, thank you for bearing with me on that. You betcha. All part of the fun of our new digital world. All right, so the origins of the police and police brutality, what does this come from? A lot of people on the left will criticize the origins in the police force in America as being about runaway slaves and breaking strikes and that's very historically accurate. What were they doing? Violating individual property rights, violating individual sovereignty, violating individual personhood, using extreme brutality to enforce runaway slave laws, to keep the rich and powerful in power so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and that's what all of these centralized systems are set up to maintain. Now it's the drug war as the excuse for police brutality. This is not the cause of capitalism unless you wanted to find it as something else. I think we can look at the dynamics and say, yeah, the outlaw of outline of cannabis in over 100 years ago now, we can look at all of the issues that we face in police brutality today and we would agree on a lot of the origins. The difference is that where Caleb wants to go with this is a different version of what we have now, a centralized coercive system that doesn't respect individual rights or self-ownership. All right, are we ready to jump on into it then? Sound good? Okay, well, the thing is, you said that capitalism is ownership of the means of production. My understanding is it's private ownership of the means of production because somebody's got their own means of production. It's just a question of- But you have to own yourself. Right, right. Well, the thing is though, if you look at the world as it exists today, there is not a single product that anyone can point to and say, I made that all by myself. I mean, you might think of like an individual craftsman, like a woodcarver, but even he is gonna use tools that were manufactured in an factory by hundreds of other people. And today, human beings are cooperating more effectively than ever before. I mean, this iPhone I have, this is dirt, rocks, plastic, oil, and we human beings turned it into something that can go all over the world and broadcast videos into space and do all kinds of wild things. And that's the brilliance of collective human activity. The problem is all of this collective human activity goes to make profits for individual owners because an individual owner has a slip of paper. It says, I own it, I'm the capitalist. They get the products of so much, the profits from so much collective human labor. And we human beings, that's how we've always been from the time of hundred gatherers in the woods up until, I mean, you go through the ancient empires of Mesopotamia and Greece and Rome. You can go up to the age of capitalism. And now we're seeing socialism rising around the world. Human beings are collective in their nature. Every great thing human beings have done has been done collectively. And I would like to see a world where there is no coercion of any kind. That would be ideal. And that is the ultimate goal of Marxists. But that's only possible if there is vast material abundance. When there is no scarcity in society, there won't be no need ultimately for a state. I think that's many hundreds or thousands of years in the future. But I do think we can eventually get to a world free of coercion. But the road to that is human beings doing what we do best, working together, cooperating to advance the economy. And that means organizing the economy to reach that goal, that goal of mass prosperity, not the goal of making profits for a group of owners. So that's where I would differ with you. I wanted to mention, you mentioned the drug war. And it's unbelievable, the drug war, I mean, it's got two sides to it. On the one hand, the capitalists love drugs. I mean, opium was a central aspect of British free trade, Adam Smith capitalism. I mean, they used opium all over the world getting people addicted. They had the opium wars, or they forced Britain, Britain forced China at the point of the gun to accept the importation of narcotics and accept all kinds of British and American corporations coming in there and just demolishing their economy. It led to hundreds of thousands and probably millions of deaths in China as a result of their economy being just destroyed in the late 1800s. But at the same time, now we have the war on drugs where the capitalists make money by locking people in prison, private prisons, prisons for profit, right? And I would like to see a society where people that have a drug problem get treatment and are taken care of and are not treated like criminals but treated like they have a problem. But I would also like to see the big drug importers and gangs that are responsible for mass death and profit from destroying human life and getting people addicted and are closely tied in with the CIA and Central America and all over the world. I'd like to see the big drug cartels smashed, honestly. And I would like to see a strong state that wasn't in bed with the drug cartels like the CIA is all over the world, but rather a state that goes in and smashes those drug cartels, breaks them apart and ends their victimization of people for profit. So on the one hand, I think, you know, we do need to stop treating addicts like criminals and people that become addicted like criminals. But I think the big cartels, they should be smashed. So you said private ownership and it's like, well, what is public ownership? I mean, do you own yourself or does the public own you? You can say like, you didn't make yourself your parents made you. I don't think that's an argument to deny you as an individual human being self ownership and the right to own yourself, the right to own property. You talk about the cooperation, right? There's a lot of cooperation that's essential and to human progress to where we are now with technology. And, you know, you talk about collectives. You know, I'm not against collectives. The question is, what is the nature of the relationships in these collectives? Are they ethical? Are they voluntary? Or are they coerced? Is there a threat of force behind that? I think we lost him once again. Well, folks, it could be, as I mentioned, it might be that Adam's on the road, I'm not sure. Okay, if you think I'm coming back. I think the world today can largely lead me into this. Adam, I don't know if you can hear me. The power of intervening in markets, intervening in individuals trying to self or to trade. Adam, I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but just, we totally can't hear you. It's almost like there's a ghost. Let's see if... He's coming across. I'm hearing him very slowed down kind of. That's how I was hearing it. Yeah, let's see. We have lost Adam once again. Must be, I have no idea. We hope that we get him back in the next moment or two. And I think what we'll do is we'll take down Adam's video once he comes back, just in case his connection is, maybe we can that way just get his audio. I can pull a picture in here of Adam in the meantime, and then we can just kind of keep going with the debate once he gets back. So thanks for your patience on that, folks. Always keeping it on your toes. And also, I think what I was talking about last time was that we are looking for all sorts of alternative topics. So feel free, folks. If you would enjoy some of those topics like cancel culture, free speech, ghost hunters, whether or not alien abductions have occurred, it's important that it's not just whether or not aliens occur. That's not juicy enough. We want whether or not people have been abducted by aliens. Okay, excellent. Hey, hey, got you. My phone cooled off enough. Let's see. What was it? My phone cooled off enough. Oh, okay, that's good. It's not a connection issue, eh? Well, no, it's when the phone overheats, it shuts down the connection. All right, but I hope you guys should be having fun without me and our technical interludes here. I don't doubt it. So I'll just wrap up the point here about the drug war. You, as a free independent human being, have the right to decide what you put in your own body. And it is criminal for anybody to interfere with that fundamental human right. The drug war is fundamentally unethical because it doesn't respect self-ownership. And it's funny, these are like, the capitalists love drugs. And you know what, in a sense, well, I mean, I'm a capitalist, I like drugs, but obviously we're making a bigger point here. And it's that drugs have been used as a tool of manipulation economically by the rich and powerful throughout human history. And they are still being used that way today. And the drug war is how they do it. And the way you end that is by saying, let's respect self-ownership. This statement though, the capitalists love drugs. It seems intellectually, like a very weak statement based on a false stereotype and... Now you guys are frozen, can you hear me? Sorry folks, I had myself on mute in Streamlabs. And so yes, we basically, I think we lost Adam again. So yeah, sorry about that, folks. I, at this point, I'm kind of like, maybe I hate to say it. Caleb, depending on what you're preferring, we could reschedule if we needed to. And I don't know if it's, let's see. I mean, I'm not in a rush to get any place. I mean, we can keep going or we can reschedule if necessary. Whatever needs to be done, whatever needs to be done, you know? I mean, it's not really a debate if you can't hear the other person. Yeah, you know, we'll kind of see here. I mean, is there a way he could like call you possibly and we could just have his audio like over the phone or something? We can have him call into the Skype chat. That's a good idea. We've never done it, but it's worth a shot and there's no reason why it shouldn't work. So let me see here. But I guess if it's on his phone, I don't know if his phone, unless he could use someone else's. How's it going? Glad to have you back. We, that's not gonna kick me out of the room. No problem. Okay, we're ready to roll if you are. Yeah, all right. So James, you're gonna have a lot of fun editing this. And I hope that what I'm saying is really, really good to make it worth you guys being so patient with my technical difficulties today. So the primary difference I see, and I think Caleb is gonna wanna substantiate or sort of backpedal defend what he's saying about a coercive economic system now with collective ownership that's public versus private is in. Some mythology of the collective is able to violate your individual rights. And I don't buy that argument at all. I think it's an excuse that's been used throughout time. Well, it's in the public good and that's why we can violate your individual rights. Nothing gives you an excuse to do something unethical. The ends do not justify the means. And as you heard Caleb say, that once we get to an off abundance, once we get to a certain state, then we can have a voluntary society. It's like, we're just gonna keep doing what we're doing. We're gonna keep this sensually planned controlled system going until some arbitrary point. And then you can have peace. Then you can have your individual rights respected. No, the road to, oh, okay. Yeah, I said the host has stopped your video, but not my audio. I just stopped the video just in case I figured if I only keep your audio on, pardon me for doing it without asking, but I figured this way we might be able to keep you in because it might be less of a kind of a work. Oh no, it's not the data issue, but that's fine. No, if you don't need the visual, it's totally cool. So the road to a voluntary society does not require anything but a direct route. If your goal is peace, if your goal is harmony, if your goal is an ethical world where nobody's rights are violated, where there are no violent or coercive relationships, you don't get to justify some other course on the way there. Well, we're just going to increase the control or the violence of the planning for a while. No, I don't buy it, not at all. Okay, well, you know, what you're saying is actually similar to Thomas Jefferson's vision of the yeoman, right? Thomas Jefferson wrote that he had this idea that America would be a great country where there'd be yeoman or small farmers who each had their own land and didn't bother each other and just did their own thing on their own land. And the problem with that economic vision that Thomas Jefferson put forward is eventually there's going to be a drought and some farmers are not going to have their crops and they're going to lose out and they're going to starve and they're going to end up having their farms bought out by bigger farmers. And pretty soon the wealth is going to concentrate in the hands of a few people and then those few people are going to try and manipulate the government to serve their own ends. And in this anarcho-capitalist libertarian model, I don't see how does the wealth not concentrate in the hands of a few people? And then how does those few people that have the wealth concentrate in their hands not then start manipulating the government to serve their own ends and we're back at the beginning to begin with? I think that when you have a system where there is a vast amounts of inequality, the result is going to be some people having more and then using the state to protect themselves and manipulate things to make sure that they keep what they have. So how is it that in your anarcho-capitalist utopia, how is it that we make sure that the government stays true to these libertarian principles? Well, I don't identify as an anarcho-capitalist. I identify as a voluntarist and it's very similar. I can forgive the mislabeling, but I'm definitely not Jeffersonian. Like when you first started saying, hey, you're saying you sound very Jeffersonian, I thought you were going to mean it in a good way. And then you go, no, about the simplistic economic model that is, I think you are falsely, I think that's kind of a strawman that you're raising to argue with because I'm not making the case for a agrarian society or a simplistic society. I think we can have wonderful collectives of economic natures, of political natures, communities, civilizations even that have to be voluntary in order to be ethical. That's the difference. So you don't need, the premise of your argument when you say that I'm making the Jeffersonian case is that in order to have those complex systems, in order to have that cooperation, you need some kind of central planning that is forced on people. And the libertarian proposition is, no, you don't. You can do it peacefully and you can go directly to a peaceful world. You don't need to increase coercion, political, economic or individual in any way in order to get there. That's why, like I said in my opener, to write there in that pledge as a moral commitment that we make. Well, I guess let me repeat my question though. When, in this totally voluntary society, there becomes a huge amount of inequality. What is to stop those who have more from then scrapping these voluntary principles and setting up coercion to make sure they stay keeping having more than everyone else? Well, it's funny. I thought your answer was baked into your question when you said the rich use government to get, the people who have more use government to get way more. And I would agree. So you take away the government and it's a natural fact of life that some people will have more than others that there will be economic disparity. That's just, you're not going to eliminate that as part of the natural human existence. And that reality does not justify violating individual rights in order to make things more fair by your vision. The best thing that we can do to ensure greater fairness and a natural distribution of resources to meet human needs is respect the non-aggression principle. Don't let those who have more use government to get even more. And what you get, as you know, with central banks is what you would have in a free market. You have maybe a texture to the landscape of wealth. There are people who are higher than others and lower than others. And that's sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by choice, sometimes by natural talent. And we can say, look, this is a problem. We want to alleviate this by voluntary ethical means, by charity, by cooperation, by community-based solutions, not coercive centralized solutions. So I don't trust your system that gives any central authority the false authority to violate individual rights. That that's not going to be abused. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely. If you give a government the power to violate your individual rights, to violate what is fundamentally founded in your self-ownership, there's nothing to stop them from ultimately taking complete ownership of you. And that's what I see a lot more coming from communism is this collective ownership run amok. Well, let me repeat my question though. How do you keep this voluntary society? How do you keep it intact when there's going to be vast inequality as a result of it? And some people are going to have more wealth than others. What is to stop them from using that wealth to influence the government and then start violating these voluntary principles once again? Well, yeah, first of all, no, it's fine. I don't mind another angle on it at all here. The premise though, I would disagree with because the vast inequalities of wealth today are caused clearly by governments. Without government fiat currency systems, without corporatism, without central banks, you wouldn't have, without corporatism underpinned by intellectual property, which is another racket that violates individual property rights, then you wouldn't have what we have today. What you would have in a voluntary society without, what the effect of government and that kind of power has on wealth inequality is that it makes it worse. It always exacerbates it, it exaggerates it. So it's going to be at a sort of natural level where it's not a problem because when individual rights are respected, we're able to come together cooperatively and meet human needs way better than with any kind of central planning or with any system that doesn't respect individual human rights and that self-ownership. I mean, that's the ultimate human need. So does that answer your question? Not exactly, but I would say, I would say one other thing. No, and there are a couple of things, this might help you understand because there are a couple of things that are not often presented as part of libertarianism that do address these challenges of collectivism, of collectively owned property, of public property, of the commons of unknown property and being able to get natural resources localized into the hands of communities, that the people who are most affected by how those resources are used is a critical part of this. Getting to a more ownership-based society where as a independent human being on this earth, you have a right to homestead, you have a right to equitable access to natural resources, there are ways that we can solve all of these problems voluntarily. And I welcome, if you wanna raise more challenges, what do we do about the Grand Canyon or the Mississippi, as we transition to a voluntary society where ownership and self-ownership and individual rights are respected, then absolutely we could do that. I'm sorry, there was one other point I didn't address that you raised in your question there, but it slipped my mind. I get so excited talking about all these voluntary possibilities, all these ways that we can eliminate coercion in society directly and build a world based on ethics and respect for self-ownership. Okay, well, in response to your critique of the Marxist goal of a stateless, classless world based on vast material abundance, it's not simply that we think that would be better or something like that. It's the understanding that it is only possible in a huge state of abundance because, you know, when they're- I don't disagree with the goal, I- Yeah, please, thank you. Sure. Yeah, is that scarcity is the basis for the state, right? I mean, people take from other people and there is a need to protect property and keep other people from having, I mean, the basis of the need for coercion is a lack of material abundance. I mean, that's the argument and that it's with a planned economy that we can develop and get beyond a society full of scarcity and eventually get to a world where coercion can fade. But I wanna raise a couple other points, which is that, you know, like, you know, when a child is born, an infant, right? That infant is dependent on its parents. It cannot survive on its own. We don't say to that infant child, you know what, you own yourself and you're on your own. In fact, if a parent doesn't feed their child, they go to jail. It's called neglect. You know, human beings from our birth depend on other human beings. And I also wanted to raise the question. You know, you talked about, you know, communities having control of natural resources. Well, if communities have control of natural resources, not individuals, that's socialism. I mean, it was public control of oil that enabled Gaddafi to make Africa, attempt to make Africa, to make Libya the most prosperous country on the African continent because the Libyan people, they kicked out BP. They kicked out the American companies. They nationalized their oil. And with public ownership of oil, they planned out their economy. They built the largest irrigation system in the world, the Great Manmade River. They provided universal education to the population. Cynthia McKinney, who was someone that is a fan of yours. I mean, she went there and she saw what happened before Obama and NATO bombed it into smithereens with public and community ownership of oil based on these popular committees. If you read Gaddafi's Green Book, they built a very prosperous socialist society in Libya through public control of natural resources. But my understanding of libertarianism is that the feeling is that these natural resources should be owned by private companies that use them to make profits, not by the community. But you're telling me libertarianism would be okay with community control over natural resources. Am I understanding you correctly? All right, wow. So there's a lot in there if I may. And I'm taking notes. I really want to respond to everything here. I think, first of all, I was interrupting to say, I think it's a little disingenuous to say that I disagree with the goal of a voluntary, stateless world of abundance. I would just add a little caveat to that to say that I'm okay with voluntary states, voluntary governments, based on cooperation. But eventually, yes, that even in that might become unnecessary, sure. And one of the things you said was that lack is what drives coercion or need, right? Depravity or deprivation leads to coercion. But I think that's kind of a self-defeating argument in this context because you have clearly, repeatedly made the case that the coercion of the state is being conducted by the rich, by people who already have a personal abundance. You raised the issue of a child and self-ownership and infancy before it's able to assert itself as an adult. Well, just because you own yourself doesn't mean that you can't take custodial status of another human being, that you can't be a guardian for a child or for someone who's elderly and losing their faculties or for someone who's drunk and passed out or in a coma. There are ways that we already have ethical frameworks of dealing with the situation where you have a human being and you can say, I respect your self-ownership. Right now someone is taking some guardianship status of you because you're not capable of fully asserting that. That's a normal thing that happens. Now about communities and individuals, when you say libertarianism or libertarians are about this, there's a lot of misrepresentation of libertarianism out there. And if you just look at the core principles and really make an attempt to apply that ethical premise consistently, you'll see that it applies to all of these solutions and addresses all of these issues. So in terms of my political orientation as a libertarian policy-wise, I'm a localist. I believe in localization. That was the premise of our presidential campaign, which by the way, Cynthia McKinney endorsed, funny that you mentioned her. Yes, she's not just a fan and a friend of mine, but someone who has made the transition from being a leftist to being a anarcho-capitalist type anarchist now. And I would really encourage everybody to go back and watch the interview of mine with her from, wow, geez, when was it, 2013, seven years ago? And it was from talking to me then and to her son who became an anarchist in law school that she made that transition. So when you have this ethical premise of how you look at the world, what is the corporation? You said libertarians believe corporations should own natural resources. That in and of itself is contradictory. And I don't judge communists by the dumbest slogans at the chas right now, which by the way, we were supposed to get to in this debate, in its core, I totally support it in terms of declaring your independence, succeeding and creating an autonomous zone. And that's a community. You said, I thought you were against community ownership. Well, a community is made up of individuals. And if those individuals come together in a community by choice, as in by consent, then they can pool their property rights. They can take charge of larger natural resources. They can manage infrastructure on behalf of people in that voluntary community. And one of the talking points I had in my campaign was, I'm Jewish by ancestry. And when I see Jews will not replace us in Tiki torches, it's viscerally disturbing. But as an ethicist, I can still say, look, if you want an ethno state, if you want to come together, and I think it's dumb and wrong, and I will never live there, but I will not forcibly interfere with you doing something that you have a right to do to come together to associate with people who you choose to associate with. And I go to the opposite side of the spectrum on this too, to make the point, you're a gun grabbing socialist. Do you want to live in a nudist commune in the woods? I'll take my entertainment value from a distance. Thank you very much. But I want you to have that right too. And that's what's really possible when you embrace these ethical premises is that humanity is free in a non-violent, non-coercive world to create whatever systems best serve our needs. I would respond to the last part by pointing out, in 1917 in Russia, they had a revolution. They created the Soviet Union. At first it was Soviet Russia, then it became the Soviet Union. And the capitalists of the world didn't just look at Russia and say, okay, if they want to try that communism thing, that's their business. 15 countries invaded. And at that point, millions of people died in a civil war. There was a blockade installed after the civil war that prevented medicine from getting in. And everything was done to try and crush it. Winston Churchill said he was going to, they wanted to strangle the Bolshevik baby in the cradle. Cuba, right? They seized control of their island. They began building socialism there. And the result of the United States has been hundreds of attempts to murder Fidel Castro, huge economic sanctions that have prevented people from getting medicine that they need and getting supplies that they need. And just all kinds of, there was the Bay of Pigs invasion, all kinds of subversion and attacks. And we hear that. I know Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand. It ends with the capitalists going off to the unsettled territory and building their new utopia and saying, if you want to be communist over here, we'll let you and we'll be capitalist and pure capitalist over here and we'll let you. I don't see that. And the reason I don't see it is because capitalism in our time, you would probably disagree with me about it being capitalism. But the way, you know, the system of profits that we have involves big corporations that want to control the entire world and dominate world markets. And whenever any country breaks free from their control, whether they do it in a socialist way or whether they just wanna be independent capitalists who aren't under the domination of the Western bankers and corporations, the response is to rain down violence, death and destruction on it. And I mean, we see that. I mean, these young people that are doing the chas, I mean, I'm all over the internet and I'm seeing calls from Trump supporters for them to be bombed and murdered and killed. You know, and you wanna ask them, why are these people in Seattle, you know, in six blocks, why are they a threat to you? You know, I mean, why is it, why is a Trump supporter in Tennessee, you know, calling for bikers to go to the chas and tear it up and kill everyone there? I don't understand this. And it seems like, you know, from ardent defenders of capitalism, there is this desire to destroy any socialism that exists anywhere in the world. And that doesn't make sense to me and that doesn't seem consistent with what you're saying. What I also wanna mention is, you know, Adam, you've been doing this a long time. You've been one of the primary voices of libertarianism in the United States. And I mean, I'm not inside your head. I don't know how you feel about things, but as I was looking over your career and your life, you must be really angry because a lot of the people that were your biggest fans and biggest supporters seemed to have abandoned you and become Trump supporters and jumped on board with the alt-right. You know, they saw you as a convenient ally during the Obama years to talk about Obama being the gun grabbing socialist who's gonna take all our guns away and all of that. And but now it seems like so many of the people that were your allies are more interested in fighting for some white ethno-state or fighting against immigrants or beating up leftists and they've kind of abandoned you. I mean, the libertarian movement has been largely usurped and taken over by elements that are more concerned about racial issues and more concerned with doctrinaire anti-communism than they are about liberty. And that the libertarian movement, in a lot of ways, it's been stripped of thousands of people because the hard right wing, the economic nationalist right wing of Steve Bannon has really kind of absorbed so many of the people that were hanging out in libertarian circles. Am I correct in that assessment? I'll take my time to thoroughly challenge your premise, but you're not out of touch with reality or anything. Okay. Yeah, I mean, why has that happened? I mean, and I must say that you're very sincere and wanting a purely voluntary society, but in libertarian circles, the old John Birch society elements were very widely present. You read Ron Paul's newsletters, going back decades, they were quite racist and quite vicious. Even look at the signs of the people protesting against the civil rights movement and opposing Martin Luther King, Jr., it was very libertarian. Race mixing is communism, they would say. What else would we hear? I mean, it was the Civil Rights Act as a violation of the right of small business owners and that there was always a libertarian edge to the right wing and the far right in the United States. And the enemy is always the communists, anyone who wants more equality is a communist who's trying to get rid of the sacred American right of private property. And it seems like behind a lot of what passes for libertarianism in the United States is just doctrinaire, far right extremism, trying to protect the property of the ultra-rich from mass popular movements like labor unions, like the civil rights movement that might try to bring some justice. Yeah, so you're going back in that series of remarks. Man, that was rich, wow, there was a lot, that was, ooh. You laid out a lot of bait for me there, didn't you? Don't worry, I'm not angry. I don't believe in anger that way. I don't believe in staying angry beyond our reactions. But you talked about the wars and saying that they were conducted by the capitalists. Well, you know, if I put on a wig and a dress and tucked it between my legs and then go, you know, I don't know, start a war, you don't say, oh, look, women are starting wars now. You know, ah, let's blame women. Yes, it's definitely women's fault that we have war. See, there's this woman who started a war. No, and again, it gets to the matter of the terminology and the definition. So if you look at the countries, the governments behind a lot of these major armed conflicts, I mean, really all of them, they're some kind of democracy, even Hitler, you know, everything he did was legal under the German government. So why not blame democracy instead of capitalism and say democracy corrupts capitalism? Because even by your definition, which I don't think really qualifies as a definition when you say it's something that's an economic system organized for profit, you know, that it doesn't give a clear definition that shows, you know, what is and what is not capitalism because war is definitely not profitable except for the few, you know, it doesn't generate wealth, it just destroys value. You know, so I, but that, you know, you go in turn to, I think to fundamentally, you know, a distant, a genuine arguments in what you're saying here. One is this collectivization and, you know, judging the whole by an individual or someone claiming to be a part of a group. You know, when I see co-intel pro agents infiltrating black cloth operations, I don't say, look, liberals want to, you know, throw Molotov cocktails at Starbucks. No, those are provocative tours. So those are not people who are aligned with, you know, the cause of the genuine left that I think you represent. So the other really, I think bad fallacy, intellectual fallacy that you introduced there is the appeal to authority or attacking the messenger, like reverse appeal to authority when you talk about, you know, Ron Paul and racist newsletters. I'm not here just to say, Ron Paul is God and everything he ever did was perfect. That's not what we're debating. And, you know, I actually, I do appreciate you making the conversation a little broader talking about, you know, how people have been, you know, duped in some ways as it would appear away from libertarianism. But I don't think that's accurate. If you look at, you know, how many people we've had engaged with the libertarian party, how many candidates we've had, the at least continuous, you know, trend and vote totals. And you gave me the best ammo here mentioning Cynthia McKinney, you know, we're waiting people over from the left who say, you know, what we have all these values of the left, you know, and we really want to see them embodied in some practical way, if we can get it voluntarily and respect other communities. And this is the fundamental difference here is that libertarianism says, if you want to organize in your community, you don't have a right to force it on anybody else, you have to respect that different individuals and different people are going to organize differently in different situations to meet their needs. And you have to let them know political ideology as a justification for violating their right to self-determination. Now you said, you know, am I angry? Yeah, you know, I'm not angry because I don't agree with the premise of what I would have to be angry about. But I suppose, you know, there is something that, you know, I, when I see it, I do have a bit of a response of anger, which is that how people use logical fallacies to justify coercion, to justify statism, to justify the system that we live in today. And I want to see a higher standard of intellectual integrity in our political discourse in order to make sure that we can actually discuss these things based on first principles, you know, do you own yourself? Is it wrong to violate someone's self-ownership? Well, then let's take it from there and see how we apply that to current events to take that direct road to a voluntary society without some, you know, hypothetical, never-ending, scary, communist, totalitarian transition state in between today and a fantasy world that would never exist on the other side of that. Okay. Well, you know, I guess I'll respond to a few things you said. Well, first of all, when you say, you know, war destroys value, I mean, you regarded, you know, I mean, I'm sure you were referring to the military industrial complex that some capitalists enrich themselves through war, but for the most part, war destroys value. That's true, but we're in a period where capitalism is primarily generating profit through destroying value. That's the wild thing. We're in a situation where you look at what the United States has done around the world, right? Iraq was a major oil producing country. It was blown to shreds and everyone who was having to buy their oil from Iraq, all of a sudden had to buy it from U.S. corporations or from Saudi Arabia, which is tied in with U.S. corporations. Libya, a major oil producing state, loaned to bits. Now people who were buying oil from Libya are buying it from them. More sanctions put on Russia, a major oil exporting state. Now people buy from us. The goal of the White House is energy dominance. And mainly the way that the capitalists of the Western world, the way that they maintain their hegemony is not through creating value, but by blowing other people off the market and forcing it. And we see this within our own country, for example. I mean, the prison industrial complex, the fact that opioid manufacturers made money off of the fact that people were becoming more addicted and they pushed doctors to over prescribe opioid medications. Right now we're in a period where the capitalists are making profits, the owners of means of production. I guess you wouldn't call them capitalists, and I'll get to that in a second. But with those who own big corporations, the major shareholders and stock owners, the billionaires and bankers that control the United States, the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, the way that they make their profits is through destroying value. And that's the wild thing. It used to be that when things got better on Main Street, things got better on Wall Street, when things got better on Wall Street, they got better on Main Street. But what we're seeing now is a situation where Main Street and your street keep getting poorer and poorer and poorer. People in your neighborhood go to prison, people in your neighborhood get addicted to opioids, people in your neighborhood can't even drive down the road because the roads are crumbling, and the billionaires who run our country just keep getting wealthier and wealthier and wealthier. And they have rigged the system so that they don't produce any value, and they actually destroy value and continue to enrich themselves. And this is capitalism in a state of decay. And I think in this period of accumulation through destruction really points to the fact of why we need to rationally organize the economy. Now, your definition of capitalism is very narrow. I mean, you basically restrict capitalism to being your ideal utopia of a world in which people quote unquote, own themselves and there is no coercion. Well, that's never existed anywhere in the world. And that's the only thing that you will consider to be capitalist. My definition of capitalism is different. And the United States, yes, the government's highly involved, but the government facilitates big corporations and private owners of means of production making profits, right? On the same, you know, Saudi Arabia has a huge amount of government involvement, but the government simply facilitates the Saudi royal family making profits. But if you go to China, you go to Cuba, if you go to Venezuela, there are states that have a different relationship with the economy where they own major centers of economic power and operate them for the benefit of the population. And there are private companies that have an oppositional relationship with the state where the state forces them to work in the interests of the community overall. And that's what we need. I've often said that socialism in the United States would be a government of action that fought for working families. I've tried to popularize that slogan. We need a government of action that fights for working families. A state that instead of, you know, doing the bidding, doing the bidding of big corporations stood up to big corporations and controlled them. I've said that the transition to socialism in the United States would involve four big steps. The first would be hiring millions of people, unemployed people, scientists, professionals, you know, skilled people, putting them to work completely rebuilding the country. Kind of like what Roosevelt did during the Works Progress Administration, but amped up even higher, you know, new universities, new high-speed railways, just a mass construction program. Second, it would mean public control of our natural resources. America's oil, America's natural gas, America's coal, America's timber should be controlled and owned by the American people, not big corporations. And the profits from it should go into the public budget to build more schools and hospitals and railways. Third would be, you know, public control of banking. You know, every major religion, you know, the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, they all forbid the lending of money at interest because it leads to a creditor class and it leads to, you know, the creation of wealth without the creation of any physical economy, with any value. And if we had the lending of money and credit in the hands of the state, with the state controlling the lending of money, we could rationally organize the economy and we wouldn't have a creditor class. And the fourth and final step would be guaranteeing everyone the right to healthcare, the right to education, the right to jobs and acting Roosevelt's economic bill of rights. And if we took those four steps, the economy of the United States would be rationally organized and we could have growth on an unprecedented scale. It would be like an American Renaissance. We would be once again, churning out the greatest engineers and the greatest scientists in the United States. We would once again, you know, have a country where people could look forward to the next day and think that tomorrow might be better. And where, you know, people wouldn't be looking back to the good old days of the 50s and thinking, oh my gosh, this country's falling apart. But instead, they would be optimistic where every person would be part of a mission to build a better country. And we would have a relationship with other countries around the world that wouldn't be predatory, but would be based on win-win cooperation where we would trade with them and they'd get wealthier and they would trade with us and we got wealthier. It would be a completely different. It would be an economic overhaul. When you talk about coercion and poverty and you don't see the link, you know, the thing is no one in the world talked about human rights and the rights of man really until like the 1400s in Europe. And why is that? Were people just evil until then? Were human beings just evil? And then in the 1400s, they just woke up and realized people have natural rights? Of course not. Try, try. You know, if you were a hunter-gatherer tribe, 30 people in the woods, you know, hunting and gathering all day, try to let every person in that tribe just do whatever the hell they feel like doing. You'd be starving pretty quick. Try to organize subsistence farming like they had in the Middle Ages on the basis of everyone being able to do whatever they want and think whatever they want. That, you know, society became less authoritarian as the mode of production and the economy necessitated that. And even in capitalist societies today, you'll notice that. We have a lot of freedom here in the United States because we're more abundant than most countries in the developing world. Countries in the developing world tend to have, you know, much, much more authoritarian systems because they're much more unstable and there's a higher level of poverty. And you'll notice that as the United States starts to decline and we see a lot more poverty and instability, our rights are also being taken away. The height of freedom in the United States, it was the Warren Court of the 1960s. And that was at a point where the USA's economy was the best in the world, a huge level of economic prosperity. And in that moment, there was a feeling that we could open up and have more civil liberties than ever before. If you look at the Warren Court rulings, I mean, it was a high level of civil liberties based on a high level of stability in society and based on also a vast level of material abundance. When societies are unstable and poor, they become very authoritarian. When societies are prosperous and stable, they become more free. And I think the road to a prosperous, stable society is organizing the economy rationally. And ultimately, I do believe that if we had a very, very prosperous society in which no one was hungry and which no one was suffering, in which there was no want and which wasn't even necessary for people to hoard goods because there was so much abundance, that yes, at that point, there would be really no need for coercion and that we could achieve that. But as long as there's scarcity, as long as there's inequality, there's gonna be a need for a state on some level. I mean, the state exists to protect property. I mean, the origin of the state is the origin of private property. I mean, many people have pointed that out. And as long as there is differences in terms of property and vast inequality and some people being hungry and desperate and some people having huge amounts, you're gonna have to have a state to keep the people that are poor and desperate from taking from the people that are not. And I think the state should organize the economy. And I think the history of human civilization, you wanna talk about the bad things that were done. And sure, I mean, there's brutal repression, there's all kinds of horrors in human history, but the brilliance of human beings also comes out in the history of civilization. It wasn't the free market and private profits that created the music of Bach. It wasn't the free market and private profits that painted the Sistine Chapel. And that really throughout human history, the state leading people has really led to some real beauties and some real amazing things. I held up my iPhone before. No other species can do anything like this, right? I mean, and it's through working together, organizing together, cooperating that human beings have been able to achieve so much. And I think that the big turning point in human history was really, you look at the Treaty of Westphalia. The Treaty of Westphalia talks about nation states, but it talks about how the government has an obligation to serve the people. And that was a big game changer because throughout feudalism, there was a notion that people existed to serve their quote unquote natural superiors. Serfs existed to serve the landowner, commoners existed to serve the king. Human beings existed to serve people above them. But when the Treaty of Westphalia came out and when that was signed, there started to be a shift in Europe. The Renaissance came with a shift when there started to be a recognition that leaders and states have an obligation to serve the people. And the greatest leaders in human history have been the leaders who have done the most to serve their population, to educate their population, to build infrastructure, to make life better, to improve things, right? I mean, the greatest leaders, you can talk about Alexander the Great, you can talk about Julius Caesar, you can talk about some of the leaders that we've seen more recently. The reason that they were great is because they didn't say the government is best that governs least, the government has no obligation to take care of people. They did the opposite. They said, I am going to lead on behalf of the population. Go to Louisiana, Huey Long is loved. Still, decades later, Huey Long, the governor there. Why? He built bridges. He wiped out illiteracy in the state. He used government power to improve the lives of millions of working people. Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party, his parents were so enthusiastic in their support for Huey Long, they actually named Huey Newton after Huey Long. He's so loved because he used the state to improve people's lives. And the journalist Greg Palast wrote about how Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was basically a 21st century version of Huey Long. He took control of the oil. He used the oil profits to build infrastructure, to organize the economy, to care for people. And I think that's what we need in the United States. I think that Trump, he likes to tell you he's a tough guy, but I think Trump is a weakling. Trump is pathetic. When he says he's not gonna launch foreign wars and then he goes and he murders Qasem Soleimani, the top general of Iran. When he says that, when he says he's gonna stand up for working families and then you see him stripping away regulations and letting profits do whatever they want, Trump is a weakling in my view. He's afraid of big corporations. He turns to Sheldon Adelson. He turns to Bernie Marcus, the owner of Home Depot. He turns to Betsy DeVos. And he says, please give me money, please reelect me. What do I have to do? What do I have to do to get reelected? I'm scared the Democrats are gonna impeach me. He's beholden to a group of wealthy capitalist donors that he's trying to keep happy. Trump is a weak president. We need a strong leader. We need popular power. We need a government that understands that the government is best when it serves the people, when it improves people's living conditions. We need to revive this populist understanding that built civilization as we know it. All right. There is a lot of awesome back and forth here. I hope you're enjoying it as much as I am. And if James wants to keep going with this for a few more rounds, I am happy to. I couldn't, I've been taking notes and I ran out of paper trying to write down all the things you said that were wrong that I need to correct here. If I may at least do an overview response here, James. Yeah, we definitely have time. And I would say as long as we've got a minimal amount of questions folks, or a minimal amount of questions for the Q&A. So I would say folks, if you get your questions, if you happen to have any, maybe within the next five to 10 minutes and that way we can probably around, I would say maybe like within nine minutes from now we can jump into Q&A that'll last about 20 minutes. And at the very most 25 minutes. So we'll wrap up with just less than two hours. So the floor is yours gentlemen. Thank you. So it became clear to me in Caleb's latest response there exactly how he's using the term capitalism in a very deceptive way. His definition of a system organized for profit includes military contractors. And this is basically theft through government. So when you say that like if your goal is profit and you're willing to murder innocent people on the other side of the world to get your profit, you're not just an economic actor engaging in some kind of system. You're a murderer, you're profiting from murder. Or if you're profiting from money stolen from the American people, you're a thief. This is just, if your definition of capitalism includes theft through government, well, guess what? I'm against that too. I agree, theft is bad. The difference between you and I on this point is that I'm saying and all the thievery now, you're saying, well, we need a system to keep going like this for a while before some arbitrary point, then we get to this. Now, one of the things that I think is not presented enough or front and center enough with libertarianism that I think actually would appeal to you is the understanding of what is justly acquired property. And if we wanted to really get into the weeds on homesteading and appropriate land use and all the ways that these are better managed through voluntary systems than violent or coercive systems, I'd love to get into this. This is the kind of stuff I like to geek out about on my show, Adam versus the man, there's my shameless plug. But when we talk about it, you can only justly acquire property either by homesteading it or by trading for it. That means that if you got it from some kind of theft, that it's not justly acquired, it should be returned to its rightful owner, the American people. And there's a way that we can achieve even this voluntarily without perpetuating the system that got us here in the first place. And I mean, really, I think that's the fundamental case against this here. And it's funny, we haven't talked about police brutality at all. But one of the reasons is that we don't use accurate language consistently in what we're talking about. And Kayla was talking about rights and the right to healthcare and all these other positive rights which are not natural rights. You don't have a right to someone else's labor. And that framing of rights has always been used to justify violent coercive ideologies like socialism, communism, or even democracy itself, which is fundamentally, and I'm all for you can have a voluntary democracy, but as we know it under governments today, it's the majority forcing its will on the minority. And this idea of public control that is undermining this communist concept of a transition itself is a myth. Control by the public really means control by the people who pull the strings on the system. And if you give people power without accountability, which is what you're saying when you give them the right to violate self-ownership, to violate the non-aggression principle, they will be corrupted by that power. So calling something public is a dangerous framework and the way that you describe it, you say, we're gonna put all these things under public control. That really means under politicians control. Well, how's that working out for you? Now, another criticism I heard there was, that what I'm describing here has never existed. Well, there was a time when we never knew a world without slavery. And the people who stood up and were against slavery said, it doesn't matter if you can't imagine who would pick the cotton. It doesn't matter if you can't imagine what a world without slavery would be like, it is wrong and needs to be ended. And nobody could have imagined at the time what we would have been able to accomplish, what we have been able to accomplish in voluntary cooperation since slavery. But that you would imagine, as Stefan Malinu calls them, a giant metal machine running on dinosaur juice, picking the cotton and spitting out t-shirts. That we would get to that level of development is obviously something that you cannot centrally plan. And anytime you introduce central planning or violence into the system, you hold humanity back from that potential. You talked about a rational society, I would say coercion is always irrational. Violating another human being's consent is always irrational. And you also use the term need for coercion. You know, it's like the necessary evil. No, evil is not necessary. Now, if I may just one minute to wrap up. You got it. So you use the Sistine Chapel as an example and said, look, it was government-sponsored art, you know, and all these other examples. You know, I hadn't really thought of it in the time period that your examples came from, but thinking about it today, people look at NASA, right? And it's funny how much Elon Musk has proved wrong about people's assumptions about NASA. But people would say, look, NASA, we put a man on the moon. Look how amazing that is. That wouldn't have been possible without government money. Well, yeah, it's not really true that it wouldn't have been possible. It might not have happened then. We might not have been able to pool the resources sooner. But why does that justify that? Why does that justify stealing from people to pay for what you and your central planning vision, what you want to see? So yeah, it's awesome. I love NASA. I'm a fan of NASA. The Sistine Chapel is beautiful. It is historically significant as a piece of human progress. But I would rather not steal from people in a way that puts them into greater poverty. I would rather rise everybody up and allow people to pool the resources when they want to see a Sistine Chapel to say, well, look, we're only gonna have these kinds of projects of cooperation when we can bring the resources together without stealing them from people. You also use the Appeal 1240 again, really, yes? I hate to interrupt, but just if we have maybe just a bit of time to where just a heads up that if we have maybe this last 10 minutes be tying together the threads back into the idea of capitalism and the root of police brutality. Police brutality. Okay, I'll try to wrap it up then on that. So the appeal to authority of popularity, Hitler was popular, Pol Pot was popular, Stalin was popular, Trump is popular. All the greatest evil dictators in human history have been popular at some point. And you use this justification of leadership. And this is another fundamental difference. Libertarianism says the greatest leader is you. And you can deal with people in ways that they can specialize in understanding this or organizing that or helping with this or leading an organization, but ultimately as a free human being who owns yourself, you are the ultimate leader. No one can lead you for you. And so the issue of police brutality, it's because we don't respect that. And it's something that has held up very recently, obviously as a racially charged issue. And it certainly is one where minorities are disadvantaged. And that's always the case when you have a system that says people in power can violate the rights of individuals that power is gonna corrupt. The richer gonna get richer, the poorer gonna get poorer. No justification for that system makes it worth violating basic ethical principles. The ends do not justify the means. And consequences like police brutality are not a result of capitalism, which in a sense as you've said has never existed, but a result of what we have had so far, which is if you wanna call it capitalism, obviously you're working with a different definition. And by that definition, yeah, government that causes police brutality. And I would see the debate by Caleb's term, but by mine, absolutely not, peace, non-violence, respect for individual rights can't be responsible for a phenomena of violating individual rights. Suppose we, if your responses are, let's see, tied into, we could do, if we have maybe short responses regarding more directly tied to the topic, because we've wandered, but don't get me wrong, it's been interesting to listen to. Like I said, we're all in this together now. My libertarians and socialists ranting on ideology instead of more immediate topics, never, wouldn't ever, I'm shocked. Right, do we wanna go to the Q&A? Or, I mean, can I respond to like just two things first? Sure. You wanna just, okay. Well, I'm gonna tell you the same thing I said in my debate with Stefan Malinu, which is that the majority of human history did not have slavery. You said there's never been a society without slavery, but the overwhelming majority of human history, there was no property. We were hunter-gatherers. We were in tribes of 20 to 30 that were going around hunting and gathering. There was some level of hierarchy and coercion within those tribes, I'm sure, but nobody owned anybody else. Slavery is property. It's somebody owning somebody else. And the origin of private property did not come until the domestication of animals. So the overwhelming majority of human history did not involve slavery. Yeah, no, I misspoke on that, excuse me. I was speaking in someone else's voice as objecting to slavery or something like that. But no, I totally recognize it's a historical reality. Yeah, yeah. And the other thing is that I don't think socialism leads to greater poverty. I mean, it's with socialism that Russia and China became economic global superpowers. I mean, China is one of the greatest examples of a country turning itself around. I talked about Libya's huge economic achievements. I would say compare Cuba to the Dominican Republic or Haiti or Jamaica or Guatemala or Honduras or any of the countries in that region where Western corporations come in there. I mean, socialism has had very big economic achievements in eradicating poverty, but you would never hear that in American media. They cover that up. It's like, you're not allowed to say it. I've heard my whole life. Oh, communism has never worked anywhere. It just leads to vast poverty. No, communism invented space travel. Communism electrified the entire Soviet Union. Communism had the biggest steel industry in the world. You know, I mean, huge economic achievements have happened with state-central planning. So on that note, do we want to move on to the Q&A? We can definitely do that. And want to say thanks so much for your questions, folks. It has been an interesting one and we've gotten to explore a lot of topics which I think makes it fun. That's why we try to be pretty easy going hands off in terms of getting to explore the issue. So this has been a lot of fun and we're going to start getting into these questions right now. Spart344, thanks for your Patreon question said, For Caleb, claiming a rigged system seems to be a way of blaming others for a lack of personal success and a desire to penalize those that have gone from rags to riches. Well, I would say, you know, in the year of 2018, another person became a millionaire in China every single day and that unleashing people's creativity and finding the Einstein's and the Leonardo da Vinci's and the geniuses within your civilization is something that I think is an absolute priority of socialist states. And that if you look at Nicaragua, for example, part of the way they've built socialism in Nicaragua under the Sandinista government is by enabling people to become what they call micro entrepreneurs. And I think enabling people to be successful and enabling a prosperous market sector to exist as part of a centrally planned state economy or the industries and banking and the economy overall is controlled by the state is absolutely necessary. I think a big part of socialism will be unleashing people to become successful and enabling more people to do it, giving them the tools and facilitating it. And actually, you know, Adam did a shameless plug. So I'm gonna do a shameless plug. I actually wrote a book, Getting Rich Without Capitalism, America's Way Out. And this is a book I wrote a couple years ago and I even have the fastest train in the world, which is the high speed railway, you know, the bullet trains of China and they were built, they were built in government controlled steel and railway corporations. So I just wanted to put that out there. That's my response very quickly to the question. Gotcha, thanks so much. And Spart344, thanks for your other questions. I said, do you mind asking, okay, we got that one. Kat Er, thanks for your question said, for Caleb, can you think of any non quote capitalist unquote countries that have better police? Well, I think a great example is the fact that, you know, Vietnam, which is a socialist country, it has 96.4 million people in it. But as of today, this year, the police of Vietnam have only fired their guns five times in the entire year of 2020, up to now. Furthermore, not a single person has been killed at the hands of Vietnam's police because there is more of a feeling that the police are trusted members of the community. And actually, you know, in the Soviet Union, they had the opposite problem with their police force that we have here. You know, here we have police that are over the top, that are arresting people, you know, choking people, killing people, you know, just out to get people. In the Soviet Union, one of the big problems they had was the police were lazy. They didn't enforce the rules and they were afraid to arrest somebody because there was like a community stigma that if you arrested somebody in the community, people might not talk to you. And so the problem that we have in the United States largely, I think it's been exacerbated by the fact that increasingly the police are being trained to think of the communities that they serve as their enemies. There's a wall between the police and the communities that they are supposed to serve. The policing industry. I mean, we talk about militarized police, military corporations selling them weapons. There's a distance between the police and the communities that they serve. In socialist countries, we see the opposite. I mean, you can talk about Venezuela with their Bolivarian militias that are like people from the neighborhood, volunteers that police the area. And I can point to many examples of socialist societies that have done a better job of having police in the neighborhoods and be accountable and not have this barrier between them. That's not to say that bad things haven't happened. I'm sure people can point to many examples of human rights violations and police doing bad things in socialist countries too. But I think that the problem we have here with the way the police are acting, the way that they view the communities they serve, the way there's a barrier, the way they're militarized, they're amped up to fight. They go out there with these big, big weapons. They've been sold by a big corporation to make lots of profits for that big corporation. I don't see that problem happening in socialist societies. Gotcha. Excuse me, James, if I may just with a quick response there, there's a funny contradiction in this case where you cite millionaires in China as a great example of a communist system that's resulting in profit. And you go, well, wait a second, I thought like there's no pride in baseball. There's no millionaires in communism, but yet you are using this as an example where wealth is being taken from the people to be put in the hands of a few, which would mean that by your definition of government, every government in the world is capitalist and that your citation of China as an example of a communist government actually puts it in the broader category. You are defining the way you are describing China as praiseworthy as a communist government. It's actually a subset of the category of capitalist governments by your definition. Nope, no, it's not because the state controls the economy. There are private capitalists within it, but the Chinese government, it's about 51% state ownership. The government owns the banks and controls banking. There is- Like in the United States. There's huge- Like in the United States, the banking- The banking is private in the United States. The government's involved in facilitating it, but it's private. The Federal Reserve is a private for-profit corporation. Who is she? Okay, so a private partnership. Yeah, in China, there are corporations, but the corporations don't control the government. The government controls the corporations and forces- So is it a good thing that your communist government creates millionaires? Yes, I think seeing a lot of people- And their capitalists is great. I would like to see millions of Americans become millionaires. That's actually what wrote a book, Getting Rich Without Capitalism. The goal of socialism is to eliminate poverty, not to eliminate wealth. But you're saying that this example of millionaires in China is okay, that they're capitalists. You called them capitalists under a communist government. So you're saying that a communist government would allow capitalism? It would facilitate a market sector, but it would force it to work in the interests of society. It would control the economy. But yeah, I think we've learned from the fall of the Soviet Union, the government can't run hotels. The government can't run restaurants. The government shouldn't be making children's toys. You need market mechanisms for things like consumer goods, right? Oil, heavy industries, the lending of money, these things, obviously, that are the lightblood of the economy should be planned out by the state, but you've got to let a market sector flourish. You've got to let people start their own business. And the strength of the 21st century has been its ability to enable people to do that, to unleash people. Gotcha. Just trust government with the important things. Appreciate your question from Amy Newman, who says, for both debaters, have either of you been arrested and how and or how has your experience been with the police? And Kiwis are the best people in the world. Must be very nice. Thank you for that. Why doesn't Adam go ahead? I think he's got a little more experience than I do. I've been in New Zealand. Kiwis are awesome people. And I went on a college rugby tour and I got to play in Rotorua and smell the sulfur and as a college team, lose to a high school boys team of Maori's. It was a wonderful experience and a great broadening of the horizons. I have been arrested more times than I can count. I got asked in a debate recently how many times have you been arrested? And I said, yeah, that's a really good question. I got somewhere over 50 and the vast majority in civil disobedience. But I've had, and I made a name for myself in part as a civil disobedience activist. A lot of people who don't know my name have heard of the guy who was dancing at the Jefferson Monument or loaded a shotgun in DC or swore at cops when they made it illegal in Massachusetts. But I've been arrested enough by accident as well that it's not just an experiment to understand state power in a sort of controlled way in civil disobedience. And no, I know it's not controlled. Anytime you come into contact with a cop you're odds of dying skyrocket. But I see the benefit of civil disobedience certainly justifies any risk that we might take on as individuals and I do everything I can to encourage people to be disobedient, to assert their self ownership, their individual rights. I think that's absolutely critical. And one of the things, you know, one of the things we don't, you know, to bring it back to police brutality and the issues of Black Lives Matter right now is the, well, one, qualified immunity, right? You know, we talk about responsibility, property rights. Well, cops have to be accountable for damages. But one of the stats we hear is that something like, do you guys know, is it one third or one half of African American men are on paper at any given time like either on probation or incarcerated or parole or something like that. A negative legal state as a result of an arrest. And it's not just the punishment of the incarceration or the brutality of the arrest. It's the imposition of uncertainty on your life. And that's what central planning does to bring it back. This is why central planning, not capitalism, causes police brutality because that coercion and that introduced is a certain amount of uncertainty. Can I apply for this job? Well, I might have to be in court on Wednesday. I guess I can't sign up for that meeting. Well, I can't do that because they're not hiring felons over there. And, you know, I think that my experience with state coercion in my own life has really reaffirmed my commitment to ethics and the non-aggression principle. Well, I'll be brief. I've got a few arrests under my belt for my activist days. I'm no longer an activist. I'm a journalist. But when I was part of Occupy Wall Street, I got arrested and such. And what I will say beyond that, which is far more relevant to this conversation, I will say that the most rewarding activism that I ever got to take part in was when I was in Cleveland, Ohio, 2009, 2010, when I would go to court with victims of police brutality. And I was, you know, able to work alongside a group in Cleveland called Black on Black Crime Incorporated, led by Art McCoy, who's the owner of the Superfly Barbershop in Cleveland. And I remember I went to court with the family of Rebecca Whitby, who was a victim of police brutality. And I saw how not only did the police brutalize her, but her family, her whole family, spent the next two years of her life, you know, going to court every few weeks. And, you know, having threats. And it was just an awful case. You can probably Google the details about the Rebecca Whitby case. It was awful, awful. I mean, just watching what was done to that family. But there's so many families that have dealt with this. It was, you know, we started talking about police brutality. You know, there was, you know, there was the, you know, the situation in Ferguson. There was the situation in Baltimore. And now it's a widely discussed issue. But for years, the only people who talked about it were the far left. We're communists and we're radicals. We send the black community itself and black nationalists and black community organizers. But for a long time, police were murdering people, you know, the same way, oh, I thought he had a gun and they murder Amadou Diallo in New York City or they murder somebody. And all of society kind of just looked the other way and said, well, we trust our police. They must have been doing something. But it was, it was communist activists alongside the black community who beat this drum of the police are out of control. The police don't value black life. They've been beating this drum for a long time. I'm proud to say that I had that experience for two years, you know, being active in Cleveland around the issue of police brutality. And I learned a lot. Actually, you know, one of the wildest things that happened to me was in 2010, I saw on Facebook, there were a group of students at Collinwood High School in Cleveland, Ohio who were having a walk out against teacher layoffs. So randomly, me and my college roommate went to the protest. And thank goodness we were there because only 10 students got out of the door before the police chained the door shut. And then there was a violent arrest of Destiny Bruno and Deasia Bruno, two young African-American women who were just violently beaten by the police. But luckily I filmed it with my camera and we were able to go to court. And, you know, one of the young women was acquitted in juvenile court because my video showed that she was not guilty of an assault on an officer. That's what happens, you know, when the police beat you up, they then charge you with assault to cover themselves. So the issue of police brutality is one that has been raised by activists for a long time. And I'm glad to see that society overall is finally coming to terms with what's been going on and happening to African-Americans for decades and decades and decades. Gotcha. And last one for the day, thanks, Spark 344, response to Caleb said, I appreciate your response, but would not agree that a communist slash socialist form is necessarily the best form of government to ensure successful endeavors. So kind of a agree to disagree, I suppose, but thanks so much. And it's been a true pleasure, folks. I want to remind you both of our guests are linked in the description. So that way, if you're like, hmm, I want to hear more, you can hear more. You can hear plenty more by clicking on those links and I highly recommend it. So thanks so much to our guests. We really appreciate these guys being with us. Thanks so much, Caleb and Adam. Thank you. Hey, do we get a closer here? If you guys would like a short several minute closer, I'm open to it. No, no, well, I'll make it more of a sign-off than a closing to the debate. I think we've beat some horses pretty close to death here, but I want to say this has been a lot of fun first. Thank you for making this possible, James and Caleb, and for everybody who's joining us and is going to watch this later and bearing with me with my technical difficulties. I wonder if I sound smarter when you don't have to see me on camera. I'm going to say something really important, nice, about my opponents in this debate. You know, you said you're not an activist because you're a journalist now, and I really disagree. And again, perhaps a matter of definitions, I think you're still an activist. An activist, by my definition, is someone who was motivated by a deep-seated sense of injustice. And what you are doing as a journalist with pure intent, I think is absolutely critical to improving the human conversation. And I will make one final, like an argumentative summary here. I will say that I did point out some really critical logical fallacies in the case here, made by Caleb and Caleb. I hope you would really consider those and see if you have contradictions in those, but I will tell people, buy his book. And that's because you can't buy mine because mine's available for free in every digital format possible. And we sell it on paper as cheap as we can get away with. But yeah, I'm a capitalist giving away free stuff. Imagine that. So it's a sample, though. It's kind of like a drug dealer giving you a little taste of some dope because they know you're going to be back for more. That's kind of what freedom is, right? It's very, very addictive. And once you really embrace these core principles, you can't help but grounding that sense of injustice. And I will say, James, you too, and what you are doing in hosting these debates, you are an activist who is trying to improve the conversation. And I want to encourage everybody who's listening to share this and support independent media, whether it's mine with Adam versus the man, you can find all my stuff through thefreedomline.com, whether it's James with the debate series or Caleb with his work and his book. Put your money where your eyes and your ears are. We do not have corporate sponsorship. We need active and engaged supportive audiences to realize the potential of this technology for independent media. And that's all I got. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Well, I'll just briefly say that I don't necessarily agree with everything that Adam's ever said, obviously. But the fact that he has gone out and tried to ensure that our civil liberties stay intact and challenged what he sees as unjust laws, there's a very admirable tradition of that in this country. You go back to the free speech fights of the Wobblies where some town would pass to city ordinance against socialist speakers. So every Wobbly, every IWW member in the whole country would pile into the town and get arrested and violate the law until the city's jails were full and they had to rescind it and allow socialists to speak. And so there's a long tradition in this country of people getting arrested for political reasons and making a statement. And Adam has done his fair share of that and a lot of that is very admirable. I guess I'll just say that I have emphasized that I do think we need state power to fight for average people in this country. And what I find the most amusing about this debate is that usually it's the communists that are declared to be the extreme utopians. Usually it's the far left. Those of us who want socialism, we're the ones that are accused of being radicals and utopians who want some impossible dream. But in this debate I feel like I've been the one advocating solid policies and it's been my opponent who's been putting forward kind of an idealistic vision. So maybe that's how discourse is changing. Maybe that's the shift that's coming in the future. Maybe it will be the libertarian folks that are the idealists and it'll be the Marxists and communists and socialists that are the hard realists. Maybe this is the shape of things to come. I don't know, but it's certainly been a pleasurable discussion. I'm glad I was able to participate. And let me add that that book I showed you before is not my latest book. My latest book is called City Builders and Vandals in Our Age. It's much longer and it gets into my thesis which is that I view socialism and Marxism as a continuation of the city building tendency in human history. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, up into the great projects that transformed China into an industrial superpower that raised Russia up from poverty and made it a modern industrial country. And that I view socialists as part of a bigger trend in human history, the city building tendency that advances human progress and then tries to march ahead with human civilization. And I think we need a progressive and optimistic view and that much of leftism that we see nowadays is very pessimistic, dark and destructive. And I think we need positivism and hope on the left and a vision for building a new world. Thank you. Thank you for everyone on that last note. Yep. For all of humanity. Yep, yep, very good. Absolutely, we really appreciate you guys. This has been a truly good time. I'm excited it's Friday so what a great way to start the weekend folks. We hope you enjoyed it. Really love the positive feedback that we got in the live chat and we hope everybody out there has a great weekend. It's an exciting time. We will be, I'm trying to think of, I think I've got to check on upcoming debates but I do know, we know for sure we have one this Sunday. A tag team on whether or not Christianity is true so that should be an interesting one and so I wanna say hope you guys have a great weekend. Thanks folks for stopping by and keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable, take care. Yep, yep, thank you.