Alex Blumberg joins me to talk about what socialism is and what it isn't, and why there is good socialism and bad socialism, and the difference between socialism and communism. We also talk about the dangers of abortion and Planned Parenthood.
00:02:04.900Like, it's fascinating to me that the modern Democratic Party has not only sort of allowed the S word into their vocabulary, but it's almost a litmus test now.
00:03:09.500And so it's a single, top-down, centralized, centrally planned, not just economy, but world where the smart people in power are going to redesign things, presumably in a fairer way.
00:03:37.140The best killing machine ever designed by man.
00:03:40.780And if you go back to Marx, and he has this sort of determinist arc of history where he talks about feudalism, late-stage capitalism, socialism, communism.
00:03:53.980And it's important to actually go back and read what Marx talked about because socialism is not the end.
00:04:00.520So when someone describes himself as a socialist today, I think Marx would be sort of mystified because the goal was not socialism.
00:04:08.440But the Marxist philosophy and comments by Engels and Marx and certainly Lenin and the first sort of practitioners of socialism, socialism was a very brutal, violent thing.
00:04:23.460It was where you took out all of the unfavored classes, you took out all the unbelievers, you murdered them.
00:04:32.720And they talked about it as a fundamentally violent thing.
00:04:35.620We're going to have to reset society away from late-stage capitalism where you have the division of labor and you have work for wages and all of these things that are really bad in the socialist ideology.
00:04:50.900But the problem is people are used to that sort of stuff.
00:04:53.940So if they're not going to get on the team, we take them out.
00:04:56.900And so there's a violence built into this theory of social change, starting with Marx.
00:05:05.340And, you know, eventually you get to this thing called communism that is, you know, there's no longer prices.
00:05:25.460Now he's the wealthiest man in Venezuela.
00:05:28.800And word is absconding with much of the gold.
00:05:34.500You know, if he's driven out, he'll take much of the gold, they believe.
00:05:37.800So there are they they may not start rich, but doesn't it always end with the rich people with new rich people lording over everybody else?
00:05:49.200They have this sort of romantic idea that we can somehow eliminate power structures if we can just get through this brutal phase of violent socialism.
00:06:00.240And, you know, one of the fundamental critiques of socialism, and I think democratic socialists are going to have a fundamental problem with this, is in order to redesign society that way, you have to centralize everything.
00:06:10.540You have to give somebody a lot of power.
00:06:13.640And Maduro is a great example of this.
00:06:15.960He he is sort of the caricature of Hugo Chavez in that in the same way that that you had Lenin and then you had Stalin.
00:06:26.180And it's not at all clear that that Stalin or Maduro are sort of ideologically motivated people.
00:06:33.700They're just power hungry, willing to do anything to keep power.
00:06:38.080And that that standard authoritarian stuff, you could call it socialism, you could call it fascism, you could call it whatever you like.
00:06:44.940But whenever you concentrate that much power, there's there is a rich guy.
00:07:47.380And so it was a democratic socialist nation.
00:07:51.600It always it it seems to always end in the same way to where they just suspend elections or they make them so dirty that it's not a real election.
00:08:03.720You look at look at the rise of Hugo Chavez and compare it to what's going on in the Democratic Party today.
00:08:10.200And it's it's chillingly similar because he was, you know, before he was a socialist ideologue, he was he was he was he was a populist.
00:08:17.420And he was appealing to the the campesinos, the the farming working poor class in Venezuela saying you're getting screwed.
00:08:25.480And frankly, they probably were because the the preceding regime was was hardly free market capitalism.
00:08:32.840It was it was insider cronyism, cronyism, quite typical.
00:08:36.800So they were raging against the right thing.
00:08:38.680But the but the alternative sort of populist democratic socialism, it it quickly devolved where where Chavez accumulated more and more power and eventually suspended the Constitution limits on himself and eventually nationalized the oil fields and the farmlands and all the things that that you look at it today.
00:09:03.400Venezuela was one of the richest countries, maybe even 20 years ago, richest country in Latin America, and they can't feed themselves now.
00:09:12.700And they're sitting on all these oil reserves.
00:09:27.600When you're looking at things like Venezuela and Hugo Chavez and you say it looks an awful lot like what's happening to the Democratic Party.
00:09:40.020How do you mean appealing to the populist urges of of of sort of tax the rich at 70 percent, break up, break up the media companies, break up the energy companies,
00:09:55.600hold gun companies, personally liable, all of that rhetoric sort of sort of at its core sort of anti capitalist anti I hate the fact that the means of production are in private hands because those guys will exploit us.
00:10:11.160Elizabeth Warren is talking about having the United States government make medicine.
00:10:15.340Yeah, I think that's the worst idea I've ever heard for multiple reasons.
00:10:19.700But one, I don't I don't understand how the people who are for this think that the government is so bad, so inefficient, and it is, and then want to give it more power.
00:10:31.740They think the government is so dangerous.
00:10:33.600Donald Trump or Barack Obama is so dangerous.
00:10:38.020It just doesn't even make any kind of logical sense.
00:10:41.200And it's not logic, and I think I sort of learned the hard way as an economist by training, and I always wanted people to sort of think through costs and benefits and perverse incentives and all that stuff.
00:10:55.500That's not how, I don't think that's even how people process information.
00:10:58.760I think we process information through our emotions and the emotional appeal of Medicare for all is that there's going to be health care for everybody.
00:11:47.240And I want to find the things that I'm passionate about that I can help.
00:11:50.820And some people won't do it, but a lot of people will.
00:11:55.000And we've, we've crushed the soul of people wanting to help, uh, and, and making it more and more impossible.
00:12:05.420You go back and watch, uh, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's first video, the one that made her a viable candidate.
00:12:13.960And a lot of her rhetoric, she talks about dignity.
00:12:17.260She talks about how the people in Washington, the insiders don't respect you.
00:12:22.560She talks about the collusion between big government and big business.
00:12:26.400And she talks about getting back to community and how we need to help each other, how we need a voice in the process, how we can come together and, and make things better from the bottom up.
00:12:40.420That's, that's precisely the opposite of that.
00:12:43.200So it's to the extent that it's socialism, it's social.
00:12:46.820And, and you, you said it earlier, and this is fundamental, like compassion doesn't work at the end of a gun.
00:12:53.740Can't force someone to care about their neighbors.
00:12:56.360And to the extent that you've outsourced that to a third party, a government, um, particularly a government that's far away, um, you know, people get, they start to get cynical.
00:13:06.940They start to get bitter and they're like, well, I, I pay so much in taxes.
00:13:14.380So I think, I think for, for people that are sort of attracted to that narrative, um, we should, we should spend a lot more time explaining how it is that, that freedom actually works.
00:13:25.760And how it is that free people do feel inability to cooperate and, and share their, their personal dreams and skills and knowledge and come together and create really beautiful things.
00:13:39.480So I happen to believe now I come from a different place cause I come from a God place and I know there's a ton of people that don't, and they don't think it's even necessary.
00:13:48.800And I know people like Penn Jillette, it's not, he just innately is this way.
00:13:53.100Um, but, uh, you know, I think Ayn Rand, I love Ayn Rand.
00:14:12.360And so it seems so cold and distant and really, I think in some ways it is when you talk to real people who are really diehard Ayn Randers.
00:14:26.080And, and I, I, I defend her and, and she was very influential when I was a, when I was a kid, I, I discovered Ayn Rand reading the liner notes on a rush album.
00:14:34.960So she, she, she was my first breadcrumb that led me to Adam Smith and the Austrian economists and all of that.
00:14:41.960And, and, you know, in context, it's important to remember that, that she, as a young Jewish girl fled the Bolshevik revolution and think about the guts that that took.
00:14:54.240Yeah. And, but also the, the, the permanent scars, like I had to leave my family and come to America and make it on my own.
00:15:01.780So a lot of her, when she talks about selfishness, see what she's, I think what she's saying is I want to be myself and I don't want some brutal government to tell me who I am.
00:15:12.960So if you try to screw you and, and, and, and a lot of her, her sort of, when she talks about selfishness and individualism and, and, and the rugged nature of, of people just taking care of themselves, it's, it's a reaction to really brutal socialist communist philosophy.
00:15:31.040And, and I agree with you, a lot of, a lot of Ren fans stop there.
00:15:37.300They focus on that and maybe they're not, and we had this conversation once, maybe they're not reading the books the way I did because I look at a lot of the heroes in both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as people that care extraordinarily about society.
00:15:57.040Like they're, they're bleeding a lot to try to save the thing that keeps the lights on, particularly in Atlas Shrugged.
00:16:04.140Like they're all, they're all just getting beat up every day and demonized by everyone.
00:16:08.980The threats, you know, the government comes in and confiscates their property and threatens them and yet they, they persevere.
00:16:15.200That's not selfishness in any narrow sense that I would understand it.
00:16:19.140That's, that's doing something bigger than yourself.
00:16:43.000Um, and it's, it's pulling away from the constitution and the rule of law and the independence and the gathering of power in Washington.
00:16:51.760That's causing so much, so many problems.
00:16:53.800Um, but as you really look at, um, some of these characters from Ayn Rand and, but, but also go back to Adam Smith and moral sentiments, capitalism is the most compassionate when it's at its best.
00:17:09.660It is the most compassionate and it is the, it's the best way to do charity because it, it, it, a good capitalist knows I can be a millionaire if I, if I design something that everybody needs once, but I can be a billionaire if I design something that everybody needs every day.
00:17:30.700How can I make people's lives better or easier if I can come up with that?
00:17:37.940Well, I get the richest, but it's, it's like hunger.
00:17:41.960We have done so much to pull people out of starvation, to pull people out of, um, uh, of, um, uh, poverty and, and you can't say that it, well, it was the big, um, you know, it was the big charities that did that.
00:17:59.660And it wasn't, it was the idea that you're an individual and that you should be able to keep what you make.
00:18:06.000And there's, there's a free market out there to exchange goods and services.
00:18:11.120You put the iPhone and connect it to the internet in the middle of the jungle.
00:18:30.800And I, you know, I hesitate to use the C word and, and, you know, reportedly it was Karl Marx that sort of set up this false choice between socialism and who could be against being social versus capitalism, which, which emphasizes one small part of, of what a free market economic process is, the accumulation of capital.
00:18:53.460That's, that is, that is a consequence and a useful tool by which people can create wealth and prosperity and, and, and lift people out of poverty.
00:19:03.360So I worry about the, except it's sort of like, I don't like the left versus right thing.
00:19:09.700Are we really choosing between Hitler and Pol Pot?
00:19:12.880I think, I think we have to rethink these things, but you know, I, I just, this week on my show,
00:19:18.560seamless, shameless plug for, for Kibbe on liberty.
00:19:20.980Uh, Maget Wade, who is a, a young entrepreneur from Senegal.
00:19:27.220Um, she, if she was here, she would tell you that all of this charity that has tried to help, help Africa all these years has been a disaster.
00:20:22.520But you know, I, I had a, uh, another progressive friend on the show and we were talking about the fact that capitalism is lifting all these people out of poverty.
00:20:31.420You know, the world bank says something like in the last 30 years, we've, we've halved the number of obscenely poor people in the world.
00:20:40.420And, and by any measure that has to be a good thing, but what progressives are obsessed about, but is it equal?
00:20:51.240Is it just that in the process of doing all of this, someone like Jeff Bezos is, I don't know how many billion he's worth these days, but he's, he's worth a lot of money.
00:21:03.940And, and I even look at the data, uh, to take it a bit further, that there isn't actually a trade-off between equality in terms of income equality and prosperity.
00:21:14.740Those things actually work and rise together in practice.
00:21:18.860But again, that's what we're making an economic argument.
00:21:23.180We do it through, through free enterprise and, and taking that burden off of, of production of food and everything else.
00:21:31.100And the other side is making an emotional argument that it just doesn't feel right.
00:21:36.020I don't, how do you argue against that doesn't feel good?
00:21:39.020I think one way that, that I want to do it is we're going to go to Senegal and we're going to talk to people and I want to, I want to, I want to sort of humanize the, the positive effects of what free market capitalism actually brings to that country, but also humanize the, the, the unintended consequences of, of charity and government regulation and all of these top down.
00:22:06.680All of these top down, good intentions never, ever work out.
00:22:11.860But if we're, if we're having an emotional conversation instead of an economic one, let's talk to people.
00:22:17.640Let's talk to a person that, that used to sell shoes and was devastated by a well-meaning shoe company that started giving shoes away for free.
00:22:26.540That person exists and he doesn't have a job anymore.
00:22:34.740And the person who gave the shoes away probably has no idea how much damage he did.
00:22:54.420Yeah, there's, there's no understanding of, of what Bastiat, you know, he talked about the seen and the unseen.
00:23:02.960The seen is, is making sure that, that kids in Africa and in that village are receiving a pair of shoes.
00:23:12.740The unseen is, the unseen is, the unseen is that you just disrupted the informal economy that, that creates all the jobs and, and all of the means by which the people themselves could lift themselves out of poverty without a handout.
00:23:27.700The handout is, is, is corrupting and it, it, it destroys the, the sort of institutional evolution that would allow people to help themselves.
00:24:49.660It's not what it, that's not what it ever lasts as.
00:24:52.340And this, this is sort of the Achilles heel, the fundamental, um, fatal flaw in, in the progressive dream, which I, I mean, just to, to be like sort of intellectually honest, I don't see a fundamental difference between progressivism as it was defined and, and socialism because the, the, it's all supposed to be top down.
00:25:14.860It's supposed to be autocratic, replacing the chaos of the market with the best people from
00:25:20.800the best universities and the best families, very elitist.
00:25:24.220Um, you, you know, this better than I do.
00:25:26.880Um, very racist that it's at its core.
00:25:29.880Um, but the thing that they have never been willing to accept and, and all planners, all
00:25:37.340good meaning do-gooder planners, they don't understand power and they don't understand how