Welcome to Keith Knight. Don't tread on anyone in the
Libertarian Institute. Here is my latest article at the
Libertarian Institute. Dumbest Venn diagram of all
time. I believe that every argument
should begin with commonly understood definitions.
Capitalism is a social system based on the explicit
recognition of private property and voluntary contracts.
Communism is the abolition of private property altogether, and
socialism is the institutionalized aggression
against private property and contracts between consenting
adults. Every shortcoming of capitalism
applies many times over to socialism, since the latter does
not legally recognize people's right to voluntarily defund or
disassociate with unproductive actors in society.
Under capitalism, no one can take a penny out of your pocket
or get a second of your time unless you voluntarily give it
to them. But under socialism, the state
or council or committee has the monopolistic privilege to
coercively fund certain activities via taxation, which
means the right to threaten people with prison if they don't
chip in. What makes capitalism unique is
the right to engage in the original appropriation using
unclaimed scarce resources and contracting with others
employees and employers. The Venn diagram above literally
blames all shortcomings of the human race on the right of
adults to engage in mutually beneficial contracts.
Let's go 1 by 1. Is everyone equal under
socialism? Senator Bernie Sanders, Hugo
Chavez, Joseph Stalin, Kim Jong Un, Congresswoman Alexandria
Ocasio Cortez, and Jim Jones. All of these people are very
unequal in social power and monetary wealth to others.
Even if all wealth were equally distributed tonight, within one
minute, some people would save, others would invest, other would
spend on prostitutes, others would buy concert tickets,
others would buy food, and we'd be unequal after one minute.
All humans are unique, meaning that whenever we try to achieve
a certain goal, some people are better organizers and
communicators than others. A hierarchy is immediately
established whenever human beings exist in isolation or
when they cooperate. Capitalism allows us to trade
with people who specialize in what they are good at, making
everyone better off than they otherwise would be.
Socialists promote egalitarianism since it's
unachievable, making it the perfect excuse to grow the
state. Oh, not everyone is equal.
Still guess the government needs more money and power.
There was a correlation between clean environments and
capitalist economies for a reason.
More freedom leads to more investment and social
cooperation, leading to more innovation, leading to cleaner
alternatives available to the masses.
The profit incentive encourages organizations to economize on
the resources they consume, which is why cell phones,
televisions, computers, and thumb drives have increased in
quality while falling in price, while using less and less
resources. Consider a cell phone,
television, or computer in 1980 and compare it to what is
available to the average person in a capitalist country today.
They all use fewer resources, are almost completely
privatized, and have increased in quality and decreased in
price. Socialists claim the right to
confiscate between 40 and 100% of your income are property and
fear others might acquire property unjustly under
capitalism. The very nature of socialism is
rejecting private property rights.
The very nature of colonialism is taking that which you did not
acquire via voluntary exchange or original appropriation.
Being the first user of an unclaimed resource.
I guess it's super immoral for tyrants far away to oppose their
will on you a little. But when socialists claim the
right to control all aspects of your commercial and social life,
then domestic imperialism is totally different.
Socialists are imperialists coercively imposing their will
on you while forcing you to fund inadequate schools, then denying
you school choice. The fact that they live in your
country and are not a foreign imperialist country is
equivalent to saying it's wrong to sexually harass people if
they don't live near you. But if someone lives near you,
rape is justifiable if it's done via the democratic process.
George Wallace was a famous racist in America some time ago.
He claimed that coercive state segregation was a necessary
regulation for the betterment of the country.
Sound familiar? He rejected people's right to
voluntarily associate, claiming that in segregated Alabama they
don't have the horrible, dangerous riots that
desegregated areas suffer from. And he said that black suffered
from desegregation since they could not get easily exploited
by a higher IQ population if they mixed.
The very same reason socialists give for why employees,
consumers and companies shouldn't be able to freely
trade in an unregulated market. Governor Wallace went on to make
the case in the 57 minute mark of his 1964 UCLA address that
blacks can't compete with whites for their own good.
They should be separated. His proof was that there were 15
black college presidents in Alabama and he couldn't name one
in desegregated California. There was nothing racist about
voluntary exchanges, and socialism gives racists a state
apparatus to coerce racial enemies unjustly.
Under capitalism, if I'm racist and I don't sell to blacks, I
lose their business. Under socialism, I can get the
state to tax them and redistribute their money to
myself without having to create value in exchange.
Prejudice can exist under any system, but capitalism makes
racism less profitable, less potential customers and smaller
employee pool and allows us to freely disassociate from bigots,
while socialism gives bigots a police force to unilaterally
impose their will on the rest of us.
Have you ever seen wall to wall coverage from the corporate
press discussing the police murdering white man Tony Tempah
on camera? How about Kelly Thomas?
Far from being a white supremacist nation, the West
today uses the racism conspiracy theory to get the feeble minded
masses to demand bigger and bigger government programs.
The mass white death currently occurring in Ukraine is eagerly
encouraged by the establishment. The mass white death of the
American Civil War is celebrated.
The mass white death of the First World War is hardly seen
as a tragedy, and the most widely recognized evil in
history is the German National Socialists, leading to the
common justification that bombing white German civilians
was morally justifiable. To get an idea of the scale of
German civilian deaths, the National World War 2 Museum
estimates 8.8 million German military and civilian deaths in
the Second World War, While the ethnic cleansing and mass murder
operation in Gaza today by the Israeli regime is estimated at
43,000 civilians and military combatants combined.
I believe since I've published this, that number is closer to
118,000. Regarding the claim that income
disparities prove racism, Asians have higher incomes than whites
in America, as do Nigerian immigrants.
If employer racism explains the white black gap, the socialists
must explain why employers pay Asians and Nigerian immigrants
more money than whites on average.
Could it be that they have different skills, different
jobs, different work ethics, and create different amounts of
value for employers? How do socialists explain the
straight white male wage gap? Some straight white men are
rich, others are homeless. When it comes to violence,
blacks commit violent crimes against whites far more often
than the other way around. According to Doctor Michael
Humor at the University of Colorado, homicides committed by
blacks against whites are more than twice as common as
homicides by whites against blacks in the US.
Despite that, there are more than 5.6 times more white people
than black people in the United States.
A randomly chosen black person is thus 13 times more likely to
kill a white person than a random white person is to kill a
black person. None of this is to encourage
bigotry. Men are far more violent than
women statistically. But I do not advocate
discriminating or negatively generalizing any group based on
arbitrary demographics. The point stands that the white
supremacy conspiracy theory has been debunked.
Which of these sounds more selfish and individualist?
I can only get your money if you trade with me voluntarily.
If I hire you for mutually agreed upon benefits, you can
quit at any time. Give me 40% of your income to
fund a welfare state which never achieved its stated goals, or
I'll have the police put you in jail and shoot you if you
resist. Which sounds more selfish or
individualistic? If socialists really cared about
the community, they would look into how Singapore went from
rags to riches by adopting more free market policies, How
billions of people in China and India, China since 1979, India
since 1991 have been lifted from absolute poverty by adopting
more free trade and more rights to voluntarily contract with
corporations who train people in backwards areas to be
productive. Advocates of democracy associate
democratic governments with the will of the people.
Therefore, it is the government that represents people's
preferences. Of course, this is backwards.
The voluntary sector, where people compete and are free to
contract, represents us better than a state which has the right
to impose unilateral obligations on hundreds of millions of
strangers by legal Fiat. What does this have to do with
destroying nature? Since government is the
socialist entity in society because it's democratic, not
private, socialists must logically take blame for all the
destruction of government wars from Oliver Cromwell to the
American Civil War to the First World War and the Second World
War, along with mass murder campaigns being waged today in
the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
All societies use natural resources.
Capitalism rewards people who plant trees in the present and
conserve them in hopes of increasing the asset value for
future selling. Notice how socialists switch
between seeing private property as a parasitic construct and
also the very thing that needs protecting.
When Black Lives Matter riots, destroy neighborhoods which
people live in, loot stores where people shop food, and
destroy investment which took a century to erect, the socialist
tells us it's just property, get over it.
But when it comes to the need for the state to tax or regulate
property, those trillions of dollars property are very
valuable and the state must seize them for the well-being of
the masses. When socialists say we want
trillions for schools, healthcare, housing,
infrastructure, abortion clinics, are they talking about
trillions of humans or the importance of property?
Consider the contempt socialists have for the masses.
First they take their income by threat of force via taxation,
then tax the property people own, then deny working parents
school choice, then complain that the world uses too many
resources, even when these very resources allow the average
person today to live a life of luxury most kings and Queens of
the past never could have imagined.
The chart below from Human Progress shows that resources
become more abundant over time because capitalists invest in
looking for new alternatives of how to achieve people's desire
to ends. Between 1980 and 2017, the time
price, amount of time one person has to work to acquire access to
a certain product or service has drastically decreased thanks to
capitalism. It's amazing how a society that
proudly boasts never hit a woman and has only enslaved men in
military conscription to die in wars based on lies could be
accused of misogyny. Since socialists believe
disparities between groups are proof of discrimination, here
are a few statistics from Progressive myths by Doctor
Michael Humor. Males make up only 50% of the
population, but 95.5% of police shooting victims.
The gender pay gap statistics do not control for occupation or
other relevant factors. In other words, they are not in
fact about the same work or equal work.
Rather, almost all the gap is due to men and women doing
different work. The men and women have different
jobs. Of course there's going to be a
disparity in the income. Men suffer over 90% of all
workplace deaths in America each year.
If socialists want to empower the average person, that is only
done by decriminalizing all economic activity between
consenting adults and increasing each person's capacity to make
the most of their talents in a social setting.
Thanks to everyone for watching Keith Knight, Don't Tread on
Anyone, and the Libertarian Institute.