First African-Americans and into the English colonies.
Came to Point Comfort. Virginia in 1619.
They were slaves. They've been captured against
their will, but they landed in colonies that didn't have
slavery. There were no laws about slavery
in the colonies at that time. The United States, didn't
inherit slavery from anybody, we created it, it got created by
the Virginia General Assembly and the legislators of other
states. It got created by the court
systems in colonial, America and sense that in force.
First fugitive slave laws. It was we created it.
The real quick. Sorry, my camera isn't working.
Oh, sir, by the way, it's so funny that you mentioned the
book arguing about slavery. You gave me a copy of that book
on a student's for Liberty conference like five years ago.
So that that was just so funny to hear.
I'm curious if I look at like the origins of slavery and coded
in law, it you can find the code of your namu from 2100 BC.
So it's like, slavery is everywhere since the beginning
of time. However, They pin this uniquely
on America saying capitalism, is the extension of slavery and
nothing's really changed. Their still exploit a Ting, our
Surplus value. What do you think?
Is the reasoning or justification?
Why people uniquely associate slavery and This Racist
colonialism with American ideals.
Well, so first of all, let's say let me repeat the the
recommendation of arguing about slavery.
It's the only book that I've ever read that literally brought
me to tears while reading it. So I cannot recommend it
strongly enough. But as far as you're absolutely
right slavery is perhaps the oldest human social institution.
It is vastly older than such Concepts as monogamy or
literacy. Its it is universal.
And it of course, goes on today and it's a very it's very
revealing that people who today are also eloquent and moving
about how deplorable slavery was in the 1860s remain silent about
slavery, as practiced throughout the world today.
Particularly in China, where every individual is a slave of
the state reason. Why slavery is tarred with this
or why capitalism is tarred with this brush, is because enemies
of capitalism will find any way to Tar.
Ilysm with what, with whatever brush they can.
There's absolutely no foundation for it and Douglas himself was
quite quite clear about that himself.
As I talk about in the book, late in life, when Douglas was
asked about socialism. His response was that socialism
was in all of its essential respects, the same as slavery,
and he was right about that. But the, the, the, the Deep
answer to your question, is that capitalism is civilization.
It's, as simple as that. People who Proposed truly
opposed to capitalism are opposed to civilization.
And so, when they look around them at the civilization, we
have, they see all these things that are plausibly linkable to
capitalism because they are part of our civilization, rudeness.
For example, I could make as strong an argument is they do
about slavery, I could make the argument.
That rudeness is caused by capitalism or over politeness.
I Could make the are over, politeness is caused by
capitalism. I could make the argument that
the overuse, the of X, the exploitation of Natural
Resources is caused by capitalism, and I could make the
equally plausible argument that the failure to use our
resources. Efficiently is caused by
capitalism because capitalism is a stand-in for civilization
generally. And so it becomes easy to pin
anything you want on capitalism. My, favorite example of this is
to say, Misery is caused by capitalism.
People are unhappy because of capitalism and we know this
because you can measure unhappiness in various different
ways. And look at all of these happy
people. And you didn't have that many
unhappy people, you know, 200 years. 300 years ago before
capitalism really golf, got off the ground.
And in fact, that is true. There is a sense in which
capitalism does cause unhappiness.
And that is this 200 years ago. If a farmer was was killing his
fields, and it failed to rein, you.
We have this terrible drought. This it has, it seems like it's
first time it's rained here in Arizona in like 50 years this
week. Well, if you had a terrible
drought 200 years ago and your crops failed, you were likely
starve to death and die. If you stubbed your toe on a
sharp rock, you would get tetanus and you would die.
If you opened a can of food, you get ptomaine poisoning and die
and once you died, you would not be unhappy anymore.
People live twice as long, they recover from diseases.
They survived injuries. There are alternatives for them.
And so they live twice or three times as long as they ever did
and naturally enough. They have twice or three times
as much unhappiness in their lives.
So they are twice or three times as unhappy as people were
Generations ago. And the reason for that is
capitalism. So the answer is that capitalism
causes unhappiness, right? The answer that question why
slavery is is used as a tool against capitalism is well,
people bought and sold slaves there.
For slavery, must be capitalism because we have this notion that
somehow or another, you could survive in the world without
buying and selling goods and services or something like that.
You know, it's really essentially a religious
prejudice against the idea of economic exchange, which is to
say against civilization itself. So that's why you find, it's a
handy rhetorical tool. Sort of a plausible connection
because you can plausibly argue that anything in our
civilization is the fault of capitalism.
You can even argue that socialism is the fault of
capitalism because socialism wouldn't exist and wouldn't be
propagated. If booksellers didn't want to
sell books, and it's very controversial and makes a lot of
money for you to promote capitalism and advertise books.
I mean pero socialism advertise books advocating, socials and so
forth and so on, right? So that's the bottom line.
Is that people who argue against capitalism are really arguing
instead. Civilization.
Well,