Please make your opening arguments, including what
socialism and capitalism mean to you and why you believe
capitalism is better. The floor is yours and you have
4 minutes for your opening remarks.
To clarify, when I say communism, I'm referring to the
abolition of private property and voluntary contracts.
Socialism is most accurately described as the
institutionalized aggression against private property and
voluntary exchanges. Capitalism is a social system
based on the explicit right of private property and voluntary
contracts between consenting adults.
In advocating capitalism, I'm simply affirming the truism that
human beings are self interested.
This is why we are devastated when someone close to us dies,
but have trouble getting worked up over the 100,000 deaths that
took place during the Franco Prussian War.
Human beings do not stop being self interested just because
they are elected to public office or because they enter a
voting booth. The key difference between
capitalism and socialism is the constraints faced by self
interested actors. Under a system of private
property and voluntary exchange, no one can get a penny out of
your pocket or a second of your time unless you voluntarily
agree to it. This freedom of association and
disassociation is the ultimate check and balance against the
inevitable self-interest and greed all human societies
operate within. Politicians and state employees
are not unpaid volunteers or people who only demand to be
paid the bare minimum in order to survive.
They too are self interested. Socialism allows greedy people
to take property without consent or without creating any value in
exchange through taxing the money other people have acquired
voluntarily. This vitally important check and
balance, the freedom of association, is also critical to
raising living standards. If you don't value a product or
service that I create, you have no legal obligation to allocate
your scarce time or money to my endeavor.
If you want a society where the least well off have the most
opportunities, you would want a system which gives those very
people the most amount of opportunities to trade and
contract with other people in order to raise their living
standards. Far from just being theoretical,
capitalist enterprises such as Amazon and Walmart have given
more people access to low cost products and services than our
ancestors ever could have imagined.
Companies like Apple have succeeded not because they make
products only billionaires can afford, but because they make
computers the average person can afford.
Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but in channelling
his self-interest to meet consumer demand, he made the
Model T car affordable to the average worker.
Cornelius Vanderbilt lowered the cost of steamship travel from 7
dollars to six cents primarily through capital investment
because he wanted to profit by creating something many people
valued. Andrew Carnegie lowered the cost
of steel from $56 a ton to $11.50 a ton in 27 years by
experimenting and investing in efficient production methods
which everyone else in society benefited from by having an
increased access to goods, which deal was used to make Grok
Twitter's artificial intelligence, Wikipedia, Zoom,
YouTube, the Khan Academy Internet Archive all provide
more free access to education than any socialist program any
government has ever produced. On a larger scale, we see the
same result in dividing up the Korean Peninsula.
We see that the Koreans with more freedom to exchange have
higher living standards for the average person, just as we saw W
Germans have a higher living standard than E Germans, just as
we saw the drastic increase in the growth of China when Deng
Xiaoping allowed more people to voluntarily trade and contract
in the late 1970s. Capitalism harmonizes the
self-interest among human beings, not only resulting in
higher living standards, but is the only moral system since it
rejects the socialist double standard where some people have
a right to initiate violence and others do not.
Convince our young skeptics out there, and there's plenty of
them that are skeptical of capitalism in this audience.
How is capitalism going to deliver the goods for them?
You have two minutes. We can look at the free
education that capitalism provides when it comes to
websites online, as I mentioned in my opening statement, YouTube
Odyssey, Internet Archive, the Khan Academy using Grok.
Thanks to people like Elon Musk, we can access more education
than we ever could have. If you advocate something like
the need for college to be coercively funded by the state,
that is an admission that the last 12 years that the kids
spent learning absolute nonsense is created.
People who are in such dire need of education that they
absolutely need 4 years and we need to stay to coercively
funded. I would think that you'd want to
brag a little more about public education considering it's five
days a week, six hours a day for 12 years.
You'd think that these kids were so brilliant that no politician
could ever trick them with propaganda, that they would be
immune to falling for logical fallacies and the such.
But the reality is that the teachers do not have the
incentive to create a very good product or service.
So after 12 years, kids know so little that the socialist is
demanding, gosh, we really need four more years of this.
This because the last 12 years was such an unequivocal waste.
In the case of healthcare, look at the most regulated verse,
least regulated things. Something like cosmetics is much
less regulated and the cost has gone down.
More people are able to access it than previously before
because there was market competition, because there was
innovation. If you go to Walgreens, you
could look at the stuff that the state does not require a
prescription for versus what the state does require a
prescription to get. Less regulation, more options,
and lower costs as a causal result of competition.
And with housing, as I mentioned earlier, people like Elvis,
Summers, Jay Austin, it's not that these those are two people
who were building tiny houses for the cost of between $1200
and $5000. This would have come about just
as smartphones. Gordon Gekkos brick phone in
Wall Street was impressive 40 years ago and now no one would
be caught dead with that. That's the innovation that
capitalism can yield us. Or you could say, well, actually
it's not the profit incentive, it's people just wanting better
things for the future. That's totally fine.
Then just fund those voluntarily.
Just let us opt out of what frankly we think are just
disasters as such as, you know, state schooling.
Think it's a complete waste of time and it's unpaid child labor
and I would much rather kids have jobs when they were much
younger getting their foot in the door and getting on the job
experience so they could gain skills in the workplace.
Just let us opt out. That's the only capitalism
response that I have. Our final topic in this round
will be an elevator pitch to the next generation.
Imagine you're speaking directly to a 22 year old who's watching
this debate and feeling frustrated and cynical about
their economic future. They're asking what does your
side have to offer me personally?
Why should I believe in capitalism or socialism, Keith?
What hope can capitalism give to that young person who's worried
about inequality, climate and living standards?
You have two minutes to sell your case before the elevator
arrives at your executive suite on the top floor.
For the same reason we should have religious freedom, we
should have economic freedom. People should be free to make
voluntary exchanges with their friends, their coworkers, their
employers, with potential customers in the absence of a
third party coercively intervening and attempting to
exploit both consenting parties. I'm very happy that the Me Too
movement has brought consent front and center in the
discussion. Consent is what differentiates
slavery from work, rape from lovemaking, theft from trade,
and kidnapping from spending time at a friend's house.
Consent is the root of morality. We should extend the principle
of consent to the economic sphere, allowing the average
person to have the most amount of job opportunities, the most
amount of access to products and services that they could have.
Embracing consent is not only the moral approach, it gives
people a higher standard of living because you have
entrepreneurs competing for the dollars in your pocket.
Don't make it easy for them. Don't give them a big state that
they could just tax the money away from you.
Make them work for it. When you look at the great
crimes of. Let's just stick with American
history, it's commonly recognized that there were
atrocities against the Native Americans.
Some people initiated violence against other people, and we had
an unjustifiable double standard.
Well, it's not our fault. They were just savages, and we
improved on the land, so initiating violence wasn't that
big of a deal. Yeah, it's OK that we coerce
some people into performing labor against their will,
whether it's because they're less intelligent because they
come from less primitive societies.
There was another blatant double standard that we are still
paying for to this day. What capitalism's advocating is
US dropping this double standard and not allowing some people to
initiate aggression at the expense of others.
Regardless of what your theory of property rights is, it's
still inconsistent. If there's a socialist state
where one group has a unique right to initiate taxes against
the rest of the population, that's what makes this an
inconsistent theory. Even if you said, well, it's
just about making sure there's enough for everyone, well then
why is it that the state has a unique monopolistic right to
initiate taxes? If it's something totally
legitimate, allow everyone to initiate taxes.
This was the great disagreement between George Fitzhugh in his
book The Sociology of the South and Abraham Lincoln.
Mr. Fitzhugh wrote in his book that slavery is a great, great
paternal institution. Instead of the slave being free
and then having to compete in the dog eat dog profit seeking
voluntary sector, the slave is taken care of.
He's given a home for free, he's given a place where he can have
a shower, he's given healthcare. He is under the ownership of the
slave owner. This this concept of
volunteerism we should ignore and focus about really caring
for people to the point of enslaving them.
This is what I refer to as domestic imperialism.
The progressive will rightfully say that America should not be
using the government to enforce laws on people in Haiti.
The government of Britain should not be forcing itself upon
people in South Africa, yet they say that that same government
has the right to initiate coercion against its domestic
population. It's the very principle of
imperialism that they reject in a distant geographical area.
They embrace it when it comes to people who happen to live in a
closer geographical area. This is today's double standard
that we need to reject. This is the double standard
which allows people to fund mass murder campaigns in Gaza, in
Ukraine, in Iraq, in Libya, in Yemen, in Afghanistan, because
we haven't taken this principle of voluntary exchange and
extended it to members of the state.
I'll end with a story out of Kansas City, MO.
The health department is speaking out after it poured
bleach on food intended to be given to the homeless.
Nellie Mccool, who helps run Free Hot Soup Kansas City, has
been helping the homeless for years until Sunday.
Quote officers and health inspectors demanded we destroy
our food and we were violating the health code violations by
sharing meals with our friends, said Mccool.
The department said the group wasn't following the law about
serving the homeless, quoting Dr. Rex Archer, the director for
public health in Kansas City, MO.
They were notified back in a meeting in September that they
needed to get a permit, and they just outright said they refused
to do that. Mccool disputes that, claiming
someone in their group got upset and threw food on the ground.
Inspectors then poured bleach on the food to make sure no one ate
it. That is the domestic imperialism
you get with the state when some people literally believe they
have a better claim to the property you've justly acquired
and your time and your body, and they separate themselves in an
apartheid state where they have rights to do things to you, you
don't have rights to do to them. That is the nature of our
problem in society. We keep embracing double
standards. It's time to embrace free market
capitalism and reject double standards.
Zero Hedge and Mr. Burgess, thank you guys for your time.