Welcome to Keith Knight, Don't Tread on Anyone.
In the Libertarian Institute Today I am joined by the author
of Progressive Myths, Doctor Michael Humor, a professor of
philosophy at the University of Colorado.
Dr. Humor Where is the best place for people to go find this
book? Yeah, so it's on Amazon and it's
also on Barnes and Noble. I took the precaution of putting
it on two platforms in case it gets cancelled off one of them.
Nope. Good, good thinking.
Definitely. I don't want to have all your
eggs in one basket. Yeah.
So it's good to see you. You look a little different from
the last time I saw you. No.
Thank you I I appreciate that. I actually did the carnivore
diet which is just meat and cheese.
I cut out carbs and lost 110 lbs.
So my question for you, author of Ethical Veganism or Ethical
vegetarianism, I am totally open to switching diets.
What is an alternative diet I can use that will help me not
gain the weight back and have another 25 years of getting no
woman's attention? Well, I'm not, so I'm, I'm not a
nutrition or health expert, but you know, like what everything
that I've heard indicates that a lot of fresh fruits and
vegetables is good for you. I mean, I know that Jordan
Peterson is like doing this meat based thing, but he's not, he's
not a nutritionist. And like, and all the health
experts seem to seem to think, you know, fruit, fruits and
vegetables are good, you know, sort of like low glycemic load
foods, right. And, you know, like a, a lot of
fiber, you know, like I, I think like if you eat a lot of less,
let eat a lot of lettuce, you know, kind of like lowers the
glycemic load of your meal. And yeah, good, good for heart
health. You know, there there's some
research on this, that it looks like vegetarian and and vegan
diets give you lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a
little bit lower cancer risk. Got it.
All right, I will absolutely check those out.
All right, on to progressive myths.
Mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns were necessary to
society in order to save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.
How can we falsify that claim to determine its validity?
Well, I mean, so you know, in the book I have a chapter about
the masks and there have been a number of studies about masking.
Now most of them were done before COVID-19.
So they were, they were studying other kinds of influenza like
illnesses, right? And and it just, it just
basically turns out that there was either a tiny effect or no
effect or possibly even a negative effect from wearing
masks, right? So they've done multiple studies
and some of them find significant benefits, but some
of them find harms and some of them find no effect.
OK, so like it's common for the mask enthusiasts to quote, but
there was a study in Bangladesh, which is the most popular thing
for the pro mask people, right? But that's one of many studies
that have been done. So it found a positive effect,
but there have been other studies that found negative
effects. And you might wonder like, wait,
how? How could masks actually
actually have a negative effect? How could it actually harm, you
know? And then, and there was one
where there was one study where wearing cloth masks increased
your risk of disease by something like sevenfold, OK,
which is like, that's a way bigger difference than the
alleged benefits, right? And the alleged benefit from
masks appears to be like a 5% risk reduction, which is tiny
and could be nothing, right? If it's that small, it might be
nothing, but OK, OK, But you know, but it could be a huge
increase. And cloth masks in particular,
because basically the germs survive in the cloth.
And so it becomes like a breeding ground for germs,
right? And like, because you're
exhaling and you're exhaling saliva into it, so then that
creates material for the viruses and bacteria to live in, right?
So OK. And there's the cost of being
uncomfortable 8 hours a day when you're at work and there's
either a government or employer mask mandate and you can't hear
people and you can't see facial expressions.
So the reason that I want to harp on the mask mandate before
getting into the other two of lockdowns and vaccine mandates
is they had no problem really increasing, really
inconveniencing millions amount of the working class people they
claim to be, you know, fighting on the behalf of with little or
no reason to do so. So as far as what else about
masks, as far as how we can verify whether or not the
mandates were effective and whether or not they actually
achieved the goal they claimed they were achieving?
Yeah. I mean, you know, basically just
look, you know, look at the medical studies, right?
The the same people who are saying, you know, all all of
these things, like they're the people who say, oh, you have to
trust science, right. But the people who say you have
to trust science almost never look at it, right?
What? So what they actually mean by
trust science is trust what political activists tell you
about science, right. But what the political activists
tell you is usually bogus. So anyway, so and you know,
generally you want to look at a meta analysis.
So there have been many studies. So you want to look at some
paper that reviews the studies, right?
Which is what I did for that chapter.
That was the basis of the stuff that I was saying.
So you know, it probably, you know, overall the mask mandates,
they probably either made no difference or actually made
things worse. And the reason I say that is
partly because a lot of people were wearing cloth masks, which
are probably harmful. And so it's it's plausible that
that would have actually outweighed the benefit of the
surgical mask, which are relatively better.
What Tom Woods did in his book Diary of a Psychosis is he
compared geographical areas within the Lower 48 and some
Asian countries, areas that had mask mandates, and compare them
to areas that did not have mask mandates.
Is that a scientifically sound way to approach whether or not
these mandates achieve their alleged goal?
Yeah, I mean that. So that's a legitimate kind of
evidence. It's uncertain because it's not,
it's not randomized and and controlled, right.
So, so in other words, like it might be that there are other
differences between the places that had mask mandates and the
ones that didn't besides just the mask mandate.
Like maybe they were more, they were probably more left wing,
which means they might be more urban, which that could make a
difference to the spread of the disease.
So you know, but like, if that, you know that if that's all the
evidence you have and that that's what you look at, right?
You never really get perfect evidence.
Could we also look at the rise in cases before, during and
after the implementation of a mask mandate in order because it
was sold to us? Here's where the the cases of
death and illness are drastically increasing.
What you got to do is you got to get this mandate.
Once you get that in, you'll see a drastic decrease.
Now if you lift the mandate because people want us to, well,
then we're going to see that line go straight back up.
I could not find that in any graph.
Tony Fauci was not able to ever present this empirical data in
any long term form. Is that a sound way to approach
this? Yeah, yeah.
So you know, as I, as I call it, there's time series data and
there's cross-sectional data. So yeah, you can look at the
time series and yeah, see if the infection rate went up or down.
And and so I haven't myself actually looked at that, but I
would expect that there's no detectable difference and you
know, partly because they would have told us if there was.
I certainly think that would have made the headlines.
Anything about vaccine mandates or mandatory lockdowns that you
think people should be aware of? Yeah, so, you know, like, I
mean, unlike some of the, I don't know, right wing figures,
I'm not an anti vaxxer. Like I think I think vaccines
are helpful. They're usually helpful.
There could be side effects. They probably underplay the side
effects and they overplay the effectiveness.
But that doesn't mean that it's not good, right?
It wasn't as good as people were initially saying, but it still
significantly reduces your risk a lot more than the mask does,
by the way. So I think the risk ratio, yeah.
So the risk ratio was like your probability of getting the
disease if you take a certain measure divided by the
probability if you don't take that measure.
OK, So the risk ratio for masks is maybe .95, right?
Like risk ratio of one means it does absolutely nothing.
Risk ratio of .95 means it does a little bit.
I think for the vaccine, the risk ratio might be like .3.
So that like that's a lot that that's right.
It's not 100% right, but anyway, but should you, should you
mandate it? Well, I wouldn't mandate it just
because I think people own themselves.
You own your body. It is it is good for you.
But you can like you can risk your life if you want to,
because it's your life. Now there is of course the
problem that, well, you might infect other people, but The
thing is like, well, the other people can also choose whether
to get the vaccine. Like the vaccine mainly protects
the people who take it. So like, if you take the
vaccine, you should be mostly protected from the people who
didn't take it. So you you don't, you shouldn't
really be complaining about them, right?
So my reasoning for not getting the vaccine was one the
companies did not have any liability.
You couldn't sue them if you got vaccine injured 2.
The people promoting the vaccine had horrible reputations with
regard to mask mandates and lockdowns regarding the data
that I mentioned earlier. And three, there was a blatant
disregard for obvious alternatives.
Hey, we're working on a vaccine, but in the meantime, obesity is
killing people with COVID, so we want to embrace low carb diets
and go outside a lot and exercise.
You want to look at alternative treatments?
None of that. It was literally stay inside and
wear a mask until Pfizer tells us they're ready.
Was that irrational on my end to not get the vaccine for those
reasons? I don't, I don't know.
I mean, so like, I understand why people don't trust public
health officials, right? Because like, they proved that
they can't be trusted. Like, so, you know, on the mask
thing, like they obviously lied, right?
They said one thing and then like several weeks later they
said the opposite, right? Like, you know, like Anthony
Fauci started by saying there's no reason for people to be going
around with a mask. And then like a couple months
later, he's like, everybody needs to wear these.
OK, So like, which time were you lying?
OK, but anyway, and then and I I think they kind of said, well,
we were lying because we wanted to preserve the masks for the
public, for the healthcare workers.
But like, if you're lying for that reason, then how do I know
you're not lying? You know, the rest, the rest of
the time, if you're like, why would I think you only lie about
masks and that you wouldn't lie about vaccines.
Why wouldn't you lie about vaccines too?
So anyway, now, but I don't think that they were lying about
the well, they were maybe they were exaggerating about the
vaccines, but they weren't totally lying.
OK, but but you know, like like you were probably at low risk.
Like the people who really needed it were old people and
the old people mostly got it. There weren't a whole lot of
anti vaxxers because like their doctors told them or whatever.
Got it. All right, racism against blacks
is a very big problem in America today.
How can I go about falsifying this concept?
Yeah, I mean, you have to say it's like, you know, it's like
some some of the progressive claims are just so broad that
you can't test it just like that.
Like, OK, because like what counts as racism?
That's a little bit subjective. Like people disagree about
whether things are racist and like, you know, is this joke
racist or not? Or like, is this word offensive
or not? OK.
But you know, like, you can look for specific testable claims
made in this vicinity. So like you could look at, well,
OK, so is it true that there's a racial bias in police use of
force? And then, OK, well, you could
look at studies of that or So, you know, are police more likely
to shoot you if you're black than if you're white?
And in fact, we have data on that.
And the answer is no. They're more likely to shoot you
if you're white, actually, you know, which if anything,
indicates racism against whites, Although I don't think that's
exactly the explanation. I don't, I don't think it's
really because they're racist. So what?
This was research out of Washington State University that
found that in the simulations, your cops are more likely to
shoot a white person than a black person.
What do you think explains that? Yeah.
I mean, what? So you know, just to describe
the study a little bit. So they do these simulations in
which somebody they, they have actors who act out a scenario
that a cop might run into. And then the cop goes into the
simulator where the scenario is on the screen in front of them.
And then and he has a gun that shoots infrared light and not
bullets so that they can track where he shot.
And then the cop has to decide whether to shoot or not.
And sometimes the suspect like pulls out a gun and then
sometimes he pulls out a wallet or something like that.
And then you got, you got to decide what to do.
And, you know, they're doing different things, they're
yelling, whatever. OK.
And so they do a version of a scenario with a black actor,
then a version of the same scenario with a white actor to
see if the cops are more likely to shoot the black guy.
And it turns out that they are more likely to wrongly shoot a
white person. And also they take longer to
shoot the black people, a little bit longer, like .2 seconds
longer. OK.
And if it took longer to shoot the white people, then you know
that people would be saying, oh, that's racism, OK.
But it takes them longer to shoot the black people.
Why? Why is that now?
And I think the best explanation is, well, they know that they're
going to be massively scrutinized in the media and by
political activists if they shoot a black person, but
they're not going to be scrutinized at all if they shoot
a white person, right, Almost at all.
So like, if they kill a white person, they'll make the local
news that will not make national news.
Like, you never hear national news stories.
Even though there are more white people being shot by cops, you
never hear national news stories about them.
And so it just makes sense that you you got to be more careful
about the about the black suspects.
Yeah, but we even have a case on camera of, well, Daniel Schaefer
was one along with Dylan Noble. But Ashley Babbitt was literally
shot in the head by a black officer and there was not even a
trial. There was like an ABC interview
where he said he's so proud that he defended Congress on January
6th even though she was unarmed. There was never even a
discussion. Well it it the white supremacist
society, black person kills an unarmed white person, you'd
think he'd get like 1000 years in jail for this.
Nope, not not, not, not even a trial.
Yeah, I mean, you know, as as you're perhaps suggesting if the
racist had been reversed, it was a white person and a black, you
know, black suspect and a white cop then.
But, well, if it had been at some of that other than a Trump,
if the victim wasn't a Trump supporter and they were black,
then, you know, there would be all kinds of media attention.
So I love Part 1 of this book. You go through myths about
individuals. Why is it that the corporate
press will focus on stories about individuals as opposed to
statistics? We're a country of 330 million
people, and they want us to focus on Jacob Blake or Trayvon
Martin or Amy Cooper. Why do they focus on anecdotes
instead of statistics? Yeah, I mean, they're, well,
basically 2 reasons. One is entertainment value.
So vivid story about one person is a lot more entertaining than
a bunch of statistics. You know, You know, Stalin's
famous, possibly apocryphal quote, a single death is a
tragedy. 1,000,000 deaths is a statistic.
So anyway, and the the news media is not in the business of
keeping people informed. They're not in the business of
making sure democracy works, blah blah, blah.
None of that. They're in the entertainment
business, that is, they're in the they're in the business of
capturing people's attention so that they can sell it to
advertisers. So what they want to put is the
thing that captures most attention.
OK. And then the other possible
reason is if you are like, politically motivated, it's a
lot easier to sell a narrative if you can pick anecdotes.
Because in a country full of 300 million people, there's always
going to be some stories that support the narrative you want
to tell, but the statistics will not necessarily support that,
right? So like, if you want to portray
that there's all these racist cops murdering black people just
for being black, you can tell that story by giving anecdotes
because there's always going to be some black people being
killed by white cops. But if you give the actual
statistics, and it's not going to support that, right?
Because it's not true. Did you find any disparities in
the genders that are killed by police or the age of people who
are killed by police? I'm not sure.
I'm not sure about the age distribution.
I would bet that it's a bunch of young people.
I bet, I bet there's not a bunch of 80 year olds getting shot.
But OK. But I did look up the statistics
on, on the sex of shooting victims and it's shocking.
You're going to be amazed by the amount of sexism in American
police. OK, because like, they're men
are only 50% of the population, but there are 95.5% of the of
the police shooting victims, meaning that the cops are 21
times more likely to kill you if you're a man than if you're a
woman. So obviously the cops are
incredibly sexist. What is an alternative
explanation? If I don't buy that I don't
believe massive disparities are in it of itself proof of
discrimination. What is an alternative thesis as
to why we see such a disparity in male and female police
shootings? I guess it could be that there's
more violent behavior by male suspects is that could be, I
guess it could have something to do with the fact that 88% of
murders are committed by men. And and so that could be like an
indicator of more violent behavior by men than women.
And almost all cop killers are men, right?
If you want to sort of like focus on the threat that they
pose to police specifically, which could explain why the
police are shooting them. Like, you know, in one year that
I looked at, I think there were like 60 cop killers.
By the way, there's not a lot of cop killing going on.
OK. So that, you know, the cops
might be more afraid than they need to be.
But anyway, there's something like 60 male cop killers and
there was one woman who assisted her husband in killing a cop.
It wasn't even her idea. It was the husband's idea.
OK, so all right. So anyway, that could be why the
cops are more likely to kill a man than women.
And you're like, if, if you want I, I guess we could try applying
similar logic to racial differences like OK, so.
Black people are 13% of the population, but they're around
25% during according to the year of the police shooting victims
or the police homicide victims. OK, but they're 40% of the
murderers and something like 43% of the cop killers.
So actually the rate at which the police are killing black
people is disproportionately low compared to the rate at which
black people kill cops, right? That is so like, it appears that
the threat that black people pose is sort of greater.
It's like out of proportion to the rate at which the police are
killing them. The reason that I mentioned the
male disparity first is because the explanation as to why men,
young men in particular, are more likely to get killed by
police's higher testosterone levels lead to less impulse
control. Men tend to be more violent.
And I have no intention of vilifying men as a group, but
it's an important explanation for us to have.
So we're not raising little boys and telling them you're
oppressed because of your gender.
There's nothing you can do about it short of electing
politicians. It's good to know.
I think the same thing for blacks.
I was shocked to read the disparity when it came to
violence between the races on this.
On page 32 you said majority of homicides are interracial, that
is people killing other members of their own race.
Homicides committed by blacks against whites are more than
twice as common as homicides by whites against blacks in the
USA. 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.
So if the Michael Humors of the world do not explain this
through a proper context, only the National Socialists will
have this statistic and they will get positive attention for
it. I don't want that.
I want people like you, people like Brian Kaplan talking about
this. How can someone look at that and
not be completely enraged and turn into more or less a white
nationalist and say I thought I was the oppressor this whole
time? Please walk us through a proper
way to productively analyze such a reality.
Yeah, the, the white, the white supremacists are going to be
disappointed that they don't get to be the oppressors.
They're probably disappointed that there aren't more white
murders of black people now. Well, I mean, you know, it's
worth keeping in mind that the overwhelming majority of people
are law abiding. There are very few murderers, no
matter what your race or your sex is, Right.
So when I say 88% of murderers are men, it's not an attack on
men. There are very few men who
commit murder. But among the tiny number of
people in our country who are murderers, you know, the vast
majority are men, OK? So also the vast majority of
black people are not criminals, and they're not going to do
anything to you, so, you know, relax.
However, among the criminals, there's a disproportionate
number who are black, right? Something like 40%.
OK. But you know, that, like, that
doesn't mean that you should be suspicious of or like, you know,
punished or whatever, just ordinary black people, right?
You know. So Thomas Sowell basically says
this is as a causal result of he actually kind of does say that
it's from slavery because blacks were kidnapped and heavily
concentrated in the South where they embraced the culture around
them, which was the redneck culture of low impulse control,
being quick to violence whenever someone insults you, low caring,
very low amounts of caring for schooling and education and lack
of economic initiative. Do you think it's a cultural
reason that there's this disparity, or do you believe
it's biological? Yes, Sir.
I don't know what the cause is except that I don't think it's
racism. Like the only, the only
explanation that the left wants is, oh, it must be due to
racism. Oh, if black people are
committing more crimes, it must be because of white racism.
Like, you know, when black people do something, if it's
good, then they get credit for it.
But if it's bad, then we have to blame the white people for it.
But, you know, then does that mean, you know, why can't the
white people blame somebody else for the things that we're doing?
But anyway, you know, it's like only white people have agency
anyway. Like, yeah, what?
What does it cost? So, you know, there's that.
There's the thing that you you said that Thomas Owell said,
right. Some people actually think that
government policy has contributed to the problem,
right? And that that's because so it
used to be that to get welfare, you kind of, so you're a mother
with kids. To qualify for welfare payments,
you have to be below a certain income.
And if there's a man in the household, then they would count
his income. And so you have to kick the man
out of the household to get to get welfare payments.
So then there are more single parent households.
It used to be that in the African American community, they
had higher rates of marriage, but now they have drastically
lower and drastically higher rates of out of wedlock
pregnancy. So in it, and you're like, I'm
not a sociologist, so I don't know exactly why it was, but it
could be partly because of government policy, because
because of left wing people trying to help them, right?
That's just like, you know, you know, when, when somebody says
I'm from the government, I'm here to help, you know, and you
should run. Absolutely.
Well, that's also what Seoul says.
He says black incomes were increasing at a faster rate in
the 20s, thirties, 40s and 50s along with their them getting
into a high paying positions faster than after the Civil
Rights Act. So I I completely agree with
that. What explains the Asian white
income gap? You know, I don't know that
either. I didn't exactly research it.
There are higher Iqs among Asians.
I think it's something like seven or eight points higher on
average. So, you know, 108 IQ instead of
100 IQ. Also, there's a culture of
appreciation for scholarship, appreciation for education.
And like you're, if, if you're in the Asian community and
you're like not studying and you're not, not going to school,
then you're considered bad and you will, you will be
disrespected for that. You'll get lower respect and
lower status. And if you're doing well in
school, you'll get higher status.
And so then you succeed, right? And it's kind of the opposite in
the black community, or so I've read like I haven't, you know, I
haven't been in that community, but so I've heard there's a lot
lower value placed on education. Well, I mean, you're not going
to succeed in this society like in a modern advanced society if
you don't value knowledge. Chapter 11 is titled The Myth of
the Gender Wage Gap. What is the gender wage gap
myth? Well, so it's said that women
get paid a lot less than men do for the same work.
And you hear different statistics quoted.
That used to be the, the original statistic was that
women got paid $0.59 for every dollar that men earn, Right.
And then it went out from there. So, you know, then you hear
$0.70 and then $0.77 and then finally it got up to 82 cents,
$0.82 for every dollar. And it's occasionally said and
more often just assumed by the audience that that means for the
same work. But it just turns out, actually,
no, it doesn't mean for the same work.
It actually means for different work.
What the statistic actually represents is that men tend to
take higher paying jobs or, you know, within a given job, they
tend to do the stuff that you need to do to get paid more.
OK, like work longer hours, work on weekends, you know, more
seniority. So like work more years in the
same company or in the same industry, might get more
training. Just all the stuff that you have
to do and like, and yet like, you have to make sacrifices,
right? So you have to do stuff that you
don't really want to do. We're like, the company wants
you to move to another city and men are more likely to do it.
So they get more money, right? They would do it for the money.
So OK. And so like that's, that's what
the gap actually represents. So how can we explain the
straight white male wage gap? Some straight white males get a
lot of money and some straight white males are homeless.
What explains the difference between people who get high
wages and people who get low wages when they're the same
race, same sexuality? I mean, most of the difference
in your earnings is probably due to what you're doing to make
money or not doing. Like in other words, it's due to
your choices. Well, if you decide to go into a
high paying profession, then you're going to get more money
right now. OK, Now you can't always
necessarily decide to go into the profession that you want.
OK, but you can try. And then if you decide to not
not work or not even try to work, then you're not going to
get any money. Like why are why are some people
homeless? I don't know, because they don't
want to work. That's probably OK.
Some of them are homeless because they're they have
schizophrenia or something like that.
But a bunch of them are people who could totally work, but they
don't want to. Brian Kaplan would tell us it's
because of housing regulation, and I think he makes a very good
case in his book Build Baby, Build OK, Even the same work.
I don't even want to concede that the same work should yield
the same monetary compensation. If Mila Kunis and I start an
Only Fans account, she has her own and I have my own.
We both put five hours of content every day.
I suspect there would be a very big gap if Chris Rock and I both
did one hour on stage. I'm assuming me because I'm the
male and men just get paid more. If Chris Rock and I both stand
on stage and talk for one hour, I am guessing there would be a
huge disparity in favor of me again because I'm white and he's
black. I don't even concede that the
same work creates the same value, so the same work should
never assume that we get the same result.
Is that even? Yeah, of course it depends on
what you mean by the same work. Right, exactly.
So yeah, if you mean the same number of hours, no, no, like
working for the same. Number, but they always mean the
same number of hours when they're doing.
It Yeah, I mean, you know, presumably you got to control
for the profession, right, But, you know, there are various
other things that affect how much you get paid, right.
And like, well, like, what if I'm just a better worker, OK.
Like you and I, you know, we're both, we're both writing
libertarian essays, you know, but my essays are just better
than yes, I'm going to get, I'm going to get name 1 you.
You got that PhD next to your name.
I I I need a fraudulent certificate, just like I had
with that vaccine passport. Yeah, one of you.
Do some diploma mills. Yes, if you could get me an
honorary doctorate, I'd, I'd appreciate it.
All right, in speaking to progressives, I will commonly
say the government already spends $6.27 trillion a year,
and you think taxes should be increased.
You want more taxes. You already say the government's
corrupt. How do you square the circle?
And they say, well, here's what we need to do.
We need to mobilize and inform voters on a very large scale.
On page 165, you are quite skeptical about the our
capabilities to mobilize and inform voters to a significant
degree. Why is this?
Well, I mean, you can't really inform people if they don't want
to be informed. And majority of people.
So like it requires time, significant time to be
knowledgeable about political issues.
And it also requires effort. And like, one thing you have to
do is try to overcome your prejudices, which isn't that
much fun. So, you know, like, I don't
know, there could be a politician that you like and
then there could be evidence that he did bad things.
And then like, if you're trying to know the truth and you have
to experience this, you know, negative of this negative
experience of trying to accept that the guy you like did bad
things or vice versa, the guy you hate might have done
something good. OK.
So, you know, it's just it's not fun and it's time consuming and
there's no incentive to do it. Why would voters do it?
Because, like, every voter knows that their vote is not going to
make a difference. And, you know, every, every time
I say that, like, some people freak out, like every vote
matters. OK.
But what I mean is like, estimate the probability that
your vote is going to change the outcome of the election, right?
Like the election would have gone this way if you hadn't
voted, but because you voted, it'll go this other way.
What's the probability of that happening?
One in a million, one in 10 million, you know, something
like that, OK. And everybody fucking knows
that, including the people who say every vote matters.
They know it, right? So that's, that's why I like
half the people don't even bother to go, OK, so but you
know, even the people who go like they're not going to,
you're not going to spend 10 hours trying to learn about all
the issues. And that's not even enough time
to learn about all the issues, right?
If you wanted to actually learn about them it would be a full
time job but like people are not even going to spend like a few
hours for A1 in 10 million chance of making any difference.
I've spent 30 hours on the Cuban Missile Crisis alone for the
upcoming book. I don't know how long
agricultural subsidies would take me, how long healthcare and
education and minimum wage. So one of the narratives that
progressives have is under capitalism, doggy dog
competition, everyone seeking profit, the poorer get poorer
and the rich get richer. Is this true?
And how can I go about finding whether or not it's true?
How can we measure it? Yeah.
So no, I mean, the poor get richer and the rich get richer.
Now recently, in the last, I don't know, a couple decades,
the inequality has been increasing, which is, you know,
freaking out the leftist. OK.
But nevertheless, like, man, you know, you want to go back and
live in 1950, you know, like, no, nobody wants that.
Just like, you know, everybody is much better off.
And OK, so, you know, how could we check that?
I don't know, like, we could look up statistics on income
from 50 years ago. OK.
And by the way, like when, you know, when people do this, like
frequently people do this at a time when like, maybe we're in a
recession and then they'll look at two years ago before the
recession started and they'll say, see, everything's going
downhill, OK. But so to avoid that because
there are random fluctuations in the economy.
So to avoid that, look a long time ago, OK?
So look, 50 years ago, we're vastly better off, right?
And by the way, like the statistics don't even fully
capture how much better off we are, right?
Like, you're going to get that we have higher monetary income.
But like when they do the inflation statistics, they don't
necessarily count increases in quality, right?
So like they'll they'll get, oh, so you can buy more bread, but
they won't count. Like in addition to the fact
that you can buy more bread with your paycheck, the bread is
better than it used to be and that, you know, most products
are better than they used to be. So.
So we can look at the quality of products because it's common for
progressives to say, adjusted for inflation, the middle class
has seen no increase in their income.
The middle class hasn't gotten a raise since Ronald Reagan is a
common claim that they make. So how can I measure whether or
not I am wealthier than my dad was when he was 28?
Yeah, I mean, I guess you could look at, you know, since since
it's your dad, you can just ask him about, like, what stuff he
had. Hey, Dad, did you have a
microwave? Bet he didn't you.
Didn't have this computer I'm looking at.
Yeah, it didn't even have any computer at all, not even a
crappy one, but OK. Yeah, OK, fine.
You know, did you have a car? Was it a good car?
Like all the cars were worse than.
But you know the number? I bet the number of people who
had cars at all was less. I bet.
I haven't looked that up but. Just one of the things I like to
do was look at the time price, so the number of hours you have
to work in order to access a phone, a microphone, you know, a
pound of chicken, a book. Do you think time price is a
good way to measure a, a better way than like GDP to measure
actual economic growth? Because we're not even talking
on the same terms as progressive so often.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's pretty good where
I like, how many hours of Labor do you have to do to get and
then, you know, some product that they had that everybody
would want. How many hours of Labor did you
need to buy a loaf of bread? You could look at that from 50
years ago versus today. I mean, it's going to be less.
I don't know what the numbers are, but now you know that
again, that doesn't necessarily count increases in quality,
quality of the product and may not count increases in sort of
quality of the job, right, Because you're the jobs might
have gotten less unpleasant like I'm I'm pretty sure they've
gotten less unpleasant. Yeah, but men still have 90% of
the workplace death, so they must not be pleasant at all.
I'm kidding, of course, on the inequality plans.
That's a good thing to mention there that, you know, 'cause
when you know, when the people are talking about, oh, men have
all the high men dominate the high paying jobs.
Yeah, they also dominate the worst jobs, like if you, if you
look up, you know, like a listing of what are the worst
jobs in America. And like almost all of them are
male dominated, usually massively male dominated, like
like being a lumberjack, which has the highest chance of
killing you, like the highest rate of workplace fatalities,
Like it's almost all men, you know?
Not to mention all the conscripts in Russia and
Ukraine. I cannot find any female
conscripts. There are female volunteers but
I can't find any female conscripts.
On the topic of inequality, I don't know why they throw so
many stones living in the glassy houses they live in.
I don't see equality between any progressive country or the
citizenry in general. Whether it's Hugo Chavez not
being equal to anyone else in Venezuela, whether it's Kim Jong
Un is not equal to anyone. Even AOC is far is very, very
unequal to her average supporter.
What is it about inequality that the left gets wrong?
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, you know, yeah, you hear a lot of people complaining
about inequality, but nobody, maybe I can't say that I was
going to say nobody actually wants to have equality, but
maybe there are some people who are that crazy anyway, just
like, let's say no serious person thinks that we should
actually have equality, OK? But you know, the left wing, the
smart left wing people are complaining that, yeah, OK, we
have to have some inequality, but we got too much, OK?
And you know, the reason why we need to have some inequality as
well. Look, if everybody's equal and I
guess we're talking about wealth, OK?
Or income. So if you get the same income,
well, if everyone has the same income, that means that I will
get the same income no matter what I do.
So then why would I do anything difficult or like, why would I
make the effort to be more productive?
I hope because you're an altruist who serves the good of
society. Great.
You know, build your society on that assumption.
Let's see how that works out. Oh, no, we tried that.
It was it was a disaster. I've retried that many times and
then the economy collapse. Oh, it turns out that people
don't like to work for nothing. And, and it really is working
for nothing, right? Because like, if, if we really
have equality, that means I, I get the same amount of money
even if I don't work. And because right, there are
people who don't work, they've got to have the same amount as
the people who do work. So then I'm just going to sit
around. I get it.
It's like it every second a progressive watches Netflix,
YouTube, or relaxes and is not building homes for homeless
people, they're just proving that.
They're just proving the point that they prefer leisure to
helping others at no monetary benefit to themselves.
Could this position that people don't want to work without
monetary compensation, could that be refuted by large amounts
of volunteer work that is found? Cause Wikipedia is free to
access and that takes a lot of work.
Libertarian institute.org is free to access and we put a hell
of a lot of effort into libertarianinstitute.org.
There's a lot of volunteer firefighters.
Do any of these refute this idea?
Well, you know, it depends on how you interpret the idea,
right? Like, yeah, some people will,
people will do some, some people will do some kinds of work for
free, right? But you will not get enough
people doing all of the kinds of work that we need, right?
So like is, are people going to volunteer to clean out toilets
and like, and you know, not for like a homeless shelter, but
like volunteer to clean out toilets.
Like in this building doesn't look like I'm in a building.
But anyway, you know, like whatever, whatever building
you're in, just like some random building, somebody just going to
come in off the street and volunteer to, well, they need to
be clean. So how's that going to happen?
Just like, OK, there are some things that people would
volunteer for because it's rewarding.
It's like they feel like it's spiritually meaningful or
something like that. Or like they're, they're
committed to A cause. Like, you know, like maybe the
Libertarian Institute might have volunteers because they believe
in the cause, but not every job is tied to an ideology.
And like, we can't, we can't have an ideology based economy.
So how are we going to get people to do the other jobs,
right? Or, you know, like, oh, maybe
people feel sorry for the homeless, so they'll volunteer
to work at the homeless shelter. OK, fine.
But like, what about all the other jobs?
Because you can't have an economy where it's just people
working in homeless shelters and think tanks.
I want to talk about the experts.
Have you ever talked to an economics expert that says it
doesn't matter if the price of something increases, it will
continue to be consumed at its regular rate?
No. Well.
Then how can progressives advocate the minimum wage with a
straight face? Raise the cost of employment and
there's not going to be downsides for people with no
skills and no experience. Yeah, yeah.
So you're like, well, should I attempt to steal?
Man it like like what would this what would the smartest
progressive say? Well, you know, OK, like
pretend, pretend I'm a smart progressive.
I'd be like, OK, no, you can't raise it too much.
I just like, but we if we raise it a little bit, you know, like
they're people are being paid underpaid a little bit.
If we raise it a little bit, then they'll get paid more if we
raise it too much and they'll get laid off.
OK, There's a theory so that like there was a economic like
famous economics paper, maybe this is Card and Kruger, which
which said that, you know, like they oh, they they looked at a
particular case in which somebody raised the minimum wage
and it looked like there wasn't unemployment.
And then the way it just went up.
OK. And then and they have a theory
as to how this happened. And the theory was that
consumers believed that the workers in this whatever in some
industry were being underpaid. And then after the minimum wage
was raised, maybe that caused consumers to think of the
workers are not being underpaid and that made the consumers want
the product more. OK.
So that is like a theory that's consistent with, you know,
standard economics about how that could work.
It's not going to always work. And you know it's not going to
work no matter how high the wage goes, obviously.
Assume my position is crime. Poverty causes crime.
How could I go about falsifying that?
Yeah, I mean, well, you know, it looks like we could look at
statistics. I mean, you know, you need a
social scientist to do a study, right?
Like, look at when poverty goes up, does the crime go up?
Poverty goes down, does the crime go down?
You can also look at what, like, who's committing the crimes?
Are the people committing the crimes mostly poor people?
Well, kind of, yes, they are, right.
You could do, maybe you could do an intervention, like give a
bunch of poor people some money and then see if they stop
committing crimes. OK, so now and I think, you
know, it's going to turn out, and I just say this because this
appears to be widely accepted, that, yeah, there is some link
between poverty and crime. Some of the crime is caused by
poverty. It's not all caused by poverty.
There's also kind of like a philosophical issue, like you
might say, well, I don't know, like people have free will.
So like, it's not, yes, poverty, like, you know, if there's more
poverty, there's going to be more crime.
And there's a causal link there. But you know, if you're a
criminal, you can't blame your poverty.
Like, you know, it was your choice to commit the crime, so
it's your fault, right? It's just sort of like, I don't
know, from the standpoint of blame, I don't think that gets
you off the hook. Is it even true?
Considering all the mass murder campaigns that very wealthy
government officials are provoking and engaging in,
couldn't it be? I mean, Dick Cheney is far from
poverty, as is Rumsfeld, as is Bush Junior, and they engaged in
quite a bit of criminality. So isn't it more of a character
issue than a we just need to funnel more money at these poor
people and then they'll stop being violent?
Yeah, Yeah, good point. Right.
I mean, so, you know, like I was assuming we were talking about
crime by citizens, not crime by the government.
But yeah, yeah, I know. Of course the government is, you
know, they kill a bunch of people or whatever, they steal a
bunch of money. And that's not caused by crime.
That's caused by power. They have, they have the power
to do it. So they're going to do it, you
know, like, Oh yeah. And so, you know, your, your
other suggestion, no, maybe it's caused by poor character.
Well, yes, but so, you know, like there's a, there's a
significant portion of criminals and it's, it's like around 1/4
of people in the prisons who are actually literally psychopaths,
right. The psychopaths are something
like 1 to 3% of the population, but 1/4 of the people in prison.
And so what's wrong with them is not that they're poor and it's
not that they were oppressed and they're lashing out because of
the oppression. What's wrong with them is that
like they're psychopaths, like they're incapable of empathy,
which means they never learn morality.
They literally do not understand what terms like right and wrong
mean. When they hear other people
saying that they have no idea what they're talking about, but
they don't admit that. They won't admit that.
So they'll try to use the words because they know that other
people are using them. OK.
So couldn't the best approach to just be have as much of A free
market as possible because that makes it so evil?
People can't get a penny out of my pocket unless they create
value and I voluntarily give it to them.
Wouldn't strong property rights be the best hurdle to
psychopathy? Yeah, so, you know, and just
about human selfishness in general, because like, all of us
are mostly selfish, right? The psychopaths are more selfish
than most of us, but most of us are pretty selfish anyway.
So. So like a good, well, how do we
stop people from taking advantage of each other?
Well, yeah. Like a good thing is like, a
transaction only happens if both people agree to it.
And then because both people are selfish, that means that usually
a transaction doesn't occur unless it benefits both people.
That's what we want right now. You know, that's not perfect
because, like, well, they're just going to be some people
breaking the rules anyway. So like, we do need enforcers,
right? We do need somebody going around
like looking for the people who are breaking the rules and doing
something to them. There was a meme that got quite
a bit of circulation on Twitter. It is a man for the audio
audience. This guy is sitting around
looking in at a laptop and he says to his wife, walking away
reluctantly. Married to this scumbag.
Honey, come look, I found some information all the world's top
scientists and doctors missed. Can you walk us through what, if
anything, is either wrong with the logic this is trying to
convey, or how it is that so many experts can be wrong, yet
the truth can be available to the masses through things like
the Internet? Yeah, yeah.
Go. Well, I mean, so first, like,
OK, yeah, it's really unlikely that you found some information
that all the world's top scientists and doctors missed,
you know, about something that's in their area, obviously.
So, so, you know, just as a side point, like academics, usually
they have like, a lot of knowledge about a super narrow
area, the thing that they work on, and they tend to know almost
nothing about the rest of the world like the rest of us, like
how the rest of us know almost nothing about most of the world.
But anyway, OK. Like, yeah.
So it's unlikely you found something that they all missed.
Like, so if you think that, you know, you've reviewed the theory
of evolution and, like, all these biologists didn't notice
these amazing arguments that you came up with, you're probably
wrong. They probably know that.
Now, is it possible? Is it possible for, like, the
consensus of the experts to be wrong?
Well, yes, that has happened. That has happened many times in
the history of science. Like, you can even like, even
mainstream scientists now will tell you that that happened.
Like, they know about times that that happened when most of the
scientists were wrong. OK, now you know, how could that
happen? And so look, one thing is
sometimes people are lying, OK? So like, if, like if all the
experts are telling you, hey, you need to wear masks, like,
like actually happened. It wasn't that all the
scientists were wrong. It was that a bunch of public
health officials were lying. Like they it wasn't that they
didn't know about the studies. It was that they were lying
because it was partly for political reasons.
OK. So like if well, like if there's
a particular claim that supports a particular political viewpoint
and like most academics support that viewpoint, which you know,
which would mean it's a left wing viewpoint, then you can get
a bunch of people saying that thing, right.
OK. And then another thing that
happens is, well, like you really need to have you need to
have the right kind of culture in the particular discipline.
OK. So I think, and this is not
scientists, but I think like in most of the humanities, and I
would not say philosophy, but in like literary theory or
something or ethnic studies or something like that, they don't
have a culture of truth seeking. They have a culture of
supporting ideology. And so you can get a whole bunch
of people agreeing on something that's not true because they're
not really trying to get to the truth, right?
It's not that they're stupid and like, it's not that they don't
have knowledge. The subject is just that they,
they don't care that much about the truth, right?
And then, you know, another thing that happened, like
there's a chapter about global warming and the scientific
consensus value where, you know, I just described some other
things that could happen. So like, well, because global
warming is tied to a political issue, and like, the scientists
think that there is overall pretty good evidence that we're
contributing to go global warming and we'll have
significant costs, OK. And, you know, most of them are
on a certain political side. They're on the left.
Then you start to get to this. You get this culture where
people think like it's bad, like it's morally and politically bad
to go against the consensus because you could be, you're
undermining the political 'cause that most of us believe in.
So you get this culture where people don't want to speak up if
they have any doubts. Like and like, you know, it
could be that you generally agree with the consensus, but
you've got a few doubts here and there, but you suppress them,
right? Or, you know, like, or somebody
likes expresses some doubts and then they get shouted down by
the other scientists or they get ostracized or something like
that. OK.
And so you can understand how this would happen.
And like, they're not, they're not bad people, right?
Like they think that they're doing what's good for society.
But then if this is the way the culture is, then it's no longer
reliable. Like you could have, they could
be wrong, and like you could see how the incorrect opinion could
continue over time. Is this the reason that if I
were to say I want to understand theology, so I go to
theologians, if I want to know about what wars we should get
into, I go to Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and the CIA.
And if I want to know about Scientology, I go to the head of
Scientology, David Miscavige. Don't you have any criticisms of
these things? You're not an expert.
What is the flaw in that thinking?
If I want expertise in that area, I go to the people who are
currently experts in it. Yeah, yeah, OK.
Yeah. So it would be true that those
people have a lot of knowledge about the subject, but it's also
true that they have a lot of bias.
Like, yeah, you go to the defense contractors, yeah, they
probably know a lot about war, I guess.
But they're also going to have like a pro war bias because they
get a reward, like they get paid if there's a war, right?
Or, you know, you go to the head of Scientology, you know, like,
well, like obviously they're just going to say Scientology is
great because they're trying to get more people to come in and
give them money, right? So OK.
And you know, you might, you might think, oh, OK, so like,
you know, maybe there's a similar thing about similar
thing about drugs. Like, OK, well, the drug
companies are just going to say that the drugs are great, like,
and in so far as they're legally allowed, right?
Because like there are there are limits.
Like you get in trouble if they lie too much.
When it comes to, I want to talk about the principal difference
between two things. Imagine in one case I send a
woman an unsolicited naked picture, and in another case I
send her an unsolicited picture of what I think is a nice
building she'll enjoy. What is the moral difference
between these two unsolicited pictures I sent?
Well, is it a moral difference? I don't know.
There's certainly an etiquette difference, right?
Like, you know, you know, in one of them you're being rude and
whatever, you know, a jerk or something, and then the other
one you're not in. What's the difference?
Well, just like the anticipatable reaction.
Anticipatable reaction. OK, Because you have a topic
here on transgenderism, which I think frankly is very sickening
and I don't want to see it anywhere, ever.
I always scroll past it whenever I see it on social media.
So when it comes to what people like me can do without violating
the non aggression principle, without ushering in Augusto
Pinochet, those of us who do not like transgenderism, what do you
think is a proper response for us to have?
Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I think that
maybe you need to, you need to see a conservative transverse.
OK, so go go. Blair White still counts.
Yeah, Blair White. So you still don't like you
don't even like Blair White? I, I just hate the concept.
Every time I see it, I just see it's like, oh, look, another
destruction on the family. The one hurdle to complete state
power. Oh yeah, let let me fall for
that real quick. So one, it's sickening.
And two, it just evokes this emotion in me.
So just as literally the reason I think it's wrong to send an
unsolicited naked picture is frankly, it's gross.
I don't want to see it, and that's fine, even though that
might offend me as the person who it's the image of.
That's how I feel about this transgender agenda.
When I see these double mastectomies that women brag
about where they expose their chest, that to me is how it must
feel when a woman gets an unsolicited picture like that.
It is just so sickening. I'm looking for productive ways
we could go about decreasing the likelihood that something like
this will continue to flourish or be encouraged.
Well, I don't know. I mean, like, you know, usually
like if you're on social media or on YouTube or whatever, it
will select things to show you based upon what you've watched
in the past. So don't watch any of that
content and then they will stop showing it to you right now.
You know, if you if you're running into people in person,
we're like, there's hardly any transgender people in the
country, OK. Or at least there used to be
hardly any. There's been like an explosion
in the last several years or something, OK.
But you know, like, you know, it used to be one in 10,000, maybe
one in 100,000. So, you know, don't worry about
it. And like, and also they used to
not say anything about it now. And you know, like, I don't
know, stay away from the LGBT parades, I guess, just on the
letter. OK, when it comes to the climate
change consensus, this is one, I know we touched upon it earlier.
Is there anything about the specific research you found that
was faulty or actively misleading when it came to the
claim that 97% of climate scientists agree it's a big deal
and humans are the primary cause?
Yeah. So it turned out that that
wasn't really true, right? Like, that's a claim that's
repeated many times. It's based upon there's an
article that somebody published in a journal, but they didn't
actually survey climate scientists.
They looked at articles and they looked at the abstracts of
articles. OK.
And that's different because like it could be that, you know,
maybe maybe people who believe in climate change are more
likely to publish on the subject.
And so it's not it's not necessarily representative of
all the scientists, but also like actually the great majority
of the abstracts that they looked at did not apparently
take any position on man made climate change.
So when they say 97%, what they mean is of the ones that clearly
took some position on whether there is anthropogenic climate
change, 97% of those were for it rather than against it.
OK, but OK. But also, and then, you know,
like, and one of the authors who worked on that paper later
characterized the result. As, you know, 97% of scientists
agree that humans are the main cause.
But that's not what the original paper said, right?
It said 97% of the people who took a stand or of the abstracts
that took a stand thought that humans played at least some
role, not that they were the main cause, right.
And and actually, like, according to that paper, they,
they said that they did collect data on how many said that it
was the main cause, but to simplify the analysis, they're
not presenting that day. OK.
And well, right. Is it was it to simplify the
analysis or was it because if you gave the data then it
wouldn't make as good of a statistic?
So is it climate change or global warming if a certain
geographical area goes from an Ice Age in one period to non Ice
Age in another? Is that what they're referring
to as climate change? Or are they specifically talking
about what human beings have engaged in since the industrial
revolution? Well, yeah, so there's, I mean,
you know, the term that people like is AGW anthropogenic global
warming, right? Which which set because there's
other global warming, there's natural climate change.
But then there's anthropogenic meaning man made climate change,
right, which is whether people are complaining about now and
they're not complaining about the the natural ones.
Although, you know, natural climate change has happened for
a long time and it has often been good, you know, sometimes
good, sometimes bad, right. But you know why civilization
started? Like human beings were around
for like 200,000 years or 2 million years depending on what
you count. And then only in the past,
whatever, like 6000 years or something has there been
civilization. You know why that was just
because of the Ice Age ended. It was because of global
warming, right? Like global warming enabled
civilization to start because it became more viable to be a
farmer. Anyway, you know, that doesn't
necessarily mean that all global warming is good, but it means
that it could be good. You can't just assume that it's
bad just because there's a change.
So what are the economic lessons we can take from that?
For 200,000 years up until like 1800?
You add what would be referred to as like almost planetary
absolute poverty. And then we saw a drastic
decrease in absolute poverty in many countries after 18119
hundred, even after 1950 in the case of India and China.
What are some economic lessons we can extract extract from
having a much longer view of history?
Yeah, I mean, like everything has costs and benefits, right?
But overall human society tends to get better, particularly in
the last couple of 100 years, right.
And I think like a lot of people just totally under appreciate
this. They, you know, they're, they're
all these people like living in America and other Western
industrialized nations who are basically living in paradise,
OK? They're living in what earlier
generations would have called a paradise.
They couldn't even dream of the fabulous wealth that we're
surrounded with. And that's not an exaggeration.
That the average person is surrounded with, not just the
aristocrats. Yeah, just like an ordinary
American is like better off than a king in previous centuries,
and they totally don't appreciate that.
But anyway, so there's some costs, OK.
So like, global warming is one of the costs of
industrialization, but obviously the benefit vastly outweighs it
by, you know, orders of magnitude, baby, right?
So how would you explain to a progressive the the reason
behind the poverty difference in North Korea and South Korea and
East Germany and West Germany? Is there a causal connection
between more voluntary exchanges, more freedom and
wealth? Or is that more or less
happenstance, which Richard Wolff actually says it's more or
less coincidence? Coincidence.
Yeah. Yeah.
OK, Well, I don't know. You know, there's this thing
called communism, right? The people in the communist
countries called it socialist. You know, we in America called
it communism. OK, so there's this thing called
communism that took over a large portion of the world in the 20th
century, and they tried it in multiple different countries on
different continents, you know, Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin
America, OK. They tried many different and
they tried different variations on it and they tried that
different parts of the 20th century, OK.
And every time the same thing happened, like every time was a
total failure. Every time it reduced the
population to poverty. And, you know, you mentioned
Korea and Germany because those are kind of close to controlled
experiments. The closest that you can get to
a controlled experiment in social science.
Like the same society gets divided into a capitalist half
and a communist half. And then, you know, 50 years
later, the capitalist half is rich, communist half is poor and
like millions of people starved, OK.
And, you know, And then so just like poverty, but then also like
oppression, like, you know, in, in the worst case is 10s of
millions of people were killed. And like that, just like there
was mass murder in multiple, not, not every time, but
multiple different communist countries.
They were just like these mass murderers.
And then there's this political oppression, people can't speak
their minds and so on. So I don't know, you know, is it
coincidence or maybe this whole communism thing is a bad idea?
Yeah well comparing government atrocities to even private
atrocities, I think it took like the clan 100 years to have 3000
murders according to the Tuskegee Institute and the
Japanese Empire was killing like 3000 people a day in China.
Hiroshima by the American government killed like 100,000
people in a day. So even the atrocities of more
free governments are just completely inexcusable when it
comes to the concept of of results or principles.
Historically it seems like the progressives will say Jim Crow
laws and segregation were inherently immoral.
Don't bug me with the costs or benefits, those should have been
abolished immediately. Slavery should have been
abolished. The sooner the better.
There's no downside to having 3.9 million people go from
enslavement to freedom. National Socialism inherently
immoral, but when it comes to all these other things, they're
weighing the costs and benefits in the modern day.
What do you think is more important to focus on or how
could we bridge the two? Yeah.
I mean, I don't really think that those are opposing
concerns, right? Like what what's inherently
immoral and what's impractical. I think the, the inherently
immoral things are impractical. And like, I don't know, I don't
know if that's 100%, but that's like it's close to all the time,
right? So like, OK, you know, Nazi
Germany, that's that's it's inherently immoral.
I know genocide inherently immoral.
It's also like super harmful. I think just, you know, if
you're a utilitarian, like, you know, utilitarians are not going
to disagree with the ontologist about that one, right?
Or, you know, slavery. Well, you know, like, yeah, so
it's a massive rights violation. And it's also like a huge
utility sink, right? Like the North was doing much
better than the South. And so it looks like, it looks
like slavery held back the economic development of the
South, Right. And, you know, like, why?
Well, like you've got a whole bunch of people who you're not,
like, maximizing their potential.
They're just like they're working as slaves on a farm and
like they don't get to use their talents because there's not a
free market for those people. So they don't get to do the
thing that they're best at doing or whatever.
Right. OK, So, and, you know, like, I
don't know, just other example, OK, like, you know, Jim Crow
laws, like just obviously harmful.
So, you know, unfair, you know, like punishing people because of
the color of their skin, but also like obviously harmful.
And like just in economic terms, like, again, just like not
making the use, not making full use of your population.
That's obviously foolish. And, you know, like, if you're
an employer, like deciding not to hire good workers because
their skin is the color that you don't like, like that's
obviously shooting yourself in the foot.
Well, because two things come to mind today.
Progressives who want to empower the working class actively would
like the working class's voice to be suppressed on social
media, maybe by the companies, but especially by the
government. They certainly want laws that
stop Elon Musk for making it an anarchic free for all on X.
And in the case of Jim Crow, George Wallace famously said
that we see more riots which end up hurting black neighborhoods
in these desegregated communities.
And in Alabama, where it's segregated, we have 15 Negro
college presidents of colleges in California desegregated.
You don't have any because when low IQ people compete with
everyone else it doesn't really benefit them.
It what is missing in that analysis in the We have to
suppress free speech, and even the oppressed can benefit from
the oppression if their overlords are smarter.
Yeah, well, yeah. Like I, I don't, I don't trust
George Wallace. Like George Wallace.
Like. Trying to steal man.
One of the famous racist of Alabama.
So, so I, I don't know what empirical evidence he, he was
looking at, but like, it just seems like, well, the, yeah, the
way, the way to succeed as best you can is to participate in
the, in the wider society, participate in the culture.
And like it looks. So there's a casual observation.
I'm not like a social scientist, but my casual observation is it
looks like it's bad for black communities to be segregated.
They like, those don't look to me like thriving communities,
right? Like the neighborhoods where
it's like almost all black and like, you know, they, they're
separated off from the wider society and just, you know, just
theoretically that looks like that's a bad thing.
It looks like it's super unwise, you know, like people with
different abilities, different talents or different desires or
whatever it might be. They can benefit by trading.
It's like like you don't. It's not that you benefit by
trading with people who are like you.
No, because like, why? Why do I want to trade with
someone who's just like me? Like they're going to have the
same stuff that I have, right? I benefit by trading with
someone who's different from me. And then just like my, if my
distribution of talents are different from your distribution
of talents, that means that I can do the stuff that I'm
relatively better at. You can do the stuff that you're
relatively better AT. And then we have a profitable
trades. In your research on
progressivism, did did you come across any literature which like
really bragged about the effects of a government program on the
poor? Because at the Libertarian
Institute, we love saying Amazon and Walmart have increased the
number of products and services that the poor have access to
because of competition and free exchange.
Do progressives have any of the go to government programs that
they are really, really happy with and brag about?
I don't know of any. Thanks.
So there is a, there's like some argument about whether welfare
is beneficial to the poor, right?
Because like Charles Murray says that it's not beneficial to the
poor. But, and I think, and, you know,
not that this is a left wing person, but Tyler Cohen has
said, no, it's, it's a little bit beneficial to them.
I think, you know, like they're a little better off than they
would have been without the welfare.
And, you know, you, you know, once you account for whatever,
like medical assistance, like Medicare or something, and you
know, like that kind of makes sense.
But of course there's also a cost.
So did this small benefit for the poor outweigh the cost?
So, you know, like it's, it's not obvious, right?
Like, OK, there's, there's a bunch of people who are poor.
Let's give them a bunch of money.
They're going to be better off because money is good.
Like, so that's kind of true. But like the Charles Murray
argument is, well, you're creating a cycle of dependency.
So you're going to make it easier for them to not get a job
or you know, like not trying to improve themselves, like
finishing high school or fishing college or whatever.
You're going to make it easier for them to continue in like low
productivity life approaches or whatever.
So like in the short term you benefit them, but maybe in the
long term they're worse off. And that's plausible.
Like, I don't know that that's true, but it's plausible that
that might be true. It certainly seems like it
creates donors without love and recipients without gratitude.
As Antonin Scalia said, I've still never been thanked by a
welfare recipient for all the taxes I've paid.
Three more questions. Thank you so much for your time.
The book is Progressive Myths by Doctor Michael Humor.
Cannot recommend this book highly enough.
Part 1 especially is just mind blowing.
What is it about regulation that progressives need to appreciate?
Yeah, I mean, they, well, they, the theory, like the progressive
theory is, oh, so you know, regulation protects consumers
from rapacious businesses. You know, we need like, probably
most of the regulations are beneficial because that's why we
made them, because the government is good and they
serve the people's interests. And like, one thing that you
have to understand just in general is, well, OK, so like
most people are selfish. And that's that, by the way, is
the reason why you want the regulations, because the people
in these businesses are selfish. But you have to understand is
like the people making the regulations are also selfish.
So let's think about how this is going to work out, right?
And So what was going to happen is so there's some Regulatory
agency that's responsible for regulating a particular
industry. And who is going to control that
agency? Well, it turns out that it's
frequently controlled by members of the industry.
Frequently people who either are going to work in the industry or
have worked in the industry will be staffing the regulatory
agencies. Why would that happen?
Well, because those people are the experts on the industry.
They're the ones who know the industry.
And they're, that's one reason. And the other reason is they're
the ones with the incentive to control that agency.
Like, I'm not going to go and try and get in the FAA and
control the regulations because, you know, I don't fly that much
and like, it's not going to make that much difference to me.
But if I was like an airline executive, it could make a huge
difference to me. So then I'm going to exert
effort, right? Like, you know, rich people who
control large corporations, they have the money and they have the
incentive to do what it takes to control the organization.
So OK. And so, you know, like, there's
a bunch of regulations that, you know, like, the main thing you
want to do if you're one of these businesses trying to
influence regulations is you want to make things harder for
your competitors. You want to raise prices and
make it harder for competitors to compete.
And a lot of regulations do this kind of thing where, like, they
favor one business over another. They won't say that in the text,
but it'll be like, you know, they're requiring you to do a
particular process. And as a matter of fact, some
particular large company was already doing that process, but
some of their competitors are going to have to spend some
money in order to do it. Walmart and two Walmart CEO's,
Doug McMullen and H Lee Scott, came out and said we at Walmart
support increasing the minimum wage because workers deserve it.
Amazon has come out explicitly endorsing a $15.00 an hour
minimum wage. This happens all the time.
Yeah, yeah. So if you're already paying over
$15.00 an hour, but you have some competitors who are paying
less, and maybe you have like smaller competitors and maybe
they're able to pay less because workers like the small company
better than they like the big company, OK?
And because they're able to pay less, that's how they're able to
compete with you. So what you would like to do is
outlaw that. Make it so that they have to pay
the same amount as you and then they can't compete with you.
Two questions on philosophy in general.
Again the book is progressive Myths.
Cannot recommend this highly enough.
This is a classic book where I go Oh my God I wish I would have
read this 15 years ago. It would have saved me so many
headaches. When you have two people, one of
them thinks they're smart and the other person's stupid.
The other person thinks vice versa.
Can we come up with a litmus test to differentiate smart
people from stupid people? Well, I mean, they're IQ tests.
You could do that. You could take an IQ test.
But you know, like when, when people are talking about
politics, like intelligence isn't usually the problem.
Usually the main problem is bias and just rationality.
So like, is it, you know, you could ask, is there a test of
bias? I don't know.
There's like, well, do you spend any time trying not to be
biased? Because if you spend no time on
that, then you're probably biased.
You expend no effort, right? Or you know.
The amount of So first we can determine the amount of effort
they've put into seeing the other sides of the argument and
not confirming their bias. What else can we do?
Yeah. And, you know, just sort of
like, yeah. Do you ever try to check on
whether the thing you believe is true?
Like, so, OK, you heard something that confirmed your
political beliefs, and do you check up on it, whether it's
really true? Because if you never check up on
it, then that suggests that you don't really care whether it's
true. You just want to believe the
thing that supports your side. Right.
And incidentally, by the way, I think this is a test of whether
you really care about benefiting society because, well, if you
want to benefit society, then you have to make sure your
beliefs are true. But if you just want to make
yourself feel good, then you don't have to do that.
If you just want to feel good and self-righteous, then you
just need strong beliefs. But they don't have to be the
truth, so no need to check that. So if you find if you find a
bunch of political activists who are not trying to check up on
whether their beliefs are true, it's probably that they're just
trying to make themselves feel good and not really trying to
help society. I love that metric.
The other day, Howard Stern was interviewing Vice President
Harris and he goes, how could people vote for this guy, Trump?
I mean, he wants to end democracy.
I just can't get it through to them.
What is it? What is it that we can do?
Vice President Harris and I go, you don't know how someone can
support. There's 80 million Trump voters
minimum. There's tons of Trump supporters
in other countries who just see him as a savior of the West.
And you, Mr. Stern, haven't opened up the phone lines.
You haven't googled the steel man for Donald Trump, Why I
should vote for Trump, why you shouldn't vote against.
It's like they literally put no effort in when it's so readily
available. Yeah, I mean, did they put no
effort in or did they listen and they didn't understand, right.
You know, because it could be like, well, they they talked to
some Trump supporters, but they didn't understand what the Trump
supporters were talking about. Like, so I don't.
Yeah. What did Trump supporters say
about why they like him? I know he loves America like
that one I've heard. He's patriotic, he's standing up
to the deep state is the second thing.
Yeah. OK.
So, you know, like, is it that the Democrats don't know that or
they don't know why you think that he cares about America?
Because it's because it seems to the Democrats like he doesn't
care about America. Like I don't myself think that
he cares about America. Like I think he cares about
Trump. Trump cares about Trump.
Of course, he got out of the Open Skies Treaty with Russia,
which is a great escalation and potential nuclear exchange.
He's a piece of shit. OK, awesome.
So how often do they seek out alternatives that challenge
their viewpoint and challenge their bias?
Very, very good metric. Final question for the
philosopher Michael Humor at University of Colorado.
Assuming there is no afterlife, how can humans make the most of
their scarce time on Earth? Oh, wow, it's, I don't know,
very, very broad. And, you know, that would be
hard to answer now. And that also tempts me to go
talk about whether there is an afterlife or not.
That would be the greatest news ever.
Almost as good as refuting progressivism.
Is there an afterlife? Well, you could look at I have a
paper about reincarnation which which proves that proves that
there's reincarnation right you. Know of human beings.
You know, probably all conscious beings.
Yeah, all. Conscious.
Beings. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing right
here. OK, well, this is the shortest
version of the argument. OK, I I assume that time is
infinite in both directions. Future in the past are infinite.
So if time is infinite, then if persons could live only once,
then what would be the probability that you would be
alive specifically now? It would be 0.
OK, so but you are alive now, right?
So either time is not infinite or you could live more than
once. All right, So all right.
So that's a short version of the argument.
It could be more discussion of that.
But if I die, couldn't that be just as I didn't exist before I
was born, I won't exist after I die.
And couldn't we verify that by looking at if a brain?
If consciousness is completely correlated with the brain muscle
being active, couldn't it be that when you die, you're just
gone? Well, is that logically
possible? Yes, but the probability of that
being true is 0. Good to hear, Very good to hear.
And yeah, you did exist before you were born, you just don't
remember it. You know you had infinitely many
lifetimes before before this because the universe goes back
forever, right? You know another way of thinking
this is, well, you know, time is just going to continue forever,
literally forever. So anything that has a non 0
probability will eventually happen if you have infinite
time. So if there's a non 0
probability of you being created per unit time then it will
eventually happen So. Well thank you, it's just been
heavy on my mind. My mom passed away when she was
57 years old. So I always ask philosophers
what I can do to make the most out of what I thought up until 2
minutes ago with my scarce time on earth.
But now I don't even face opportunity costs anymore.
I'm living forever, baby. Right.
Yeah, but you know, I don't know when the next lifetime is, so it
might be in a Google years on another planet, you know?
I I think Joe Biden will still be alive and at, at at that
time. Yeah, yeah, Joe Biden goes back
forever. The book is Progressive Myths by
Doctor Michael Humor at University of Colorado.
This book is phenomenal. Like I said, tons of empirical
and principled approaches to refuting what I consider to be,
since the days of Woodrow Wilson, the great hurdle to
human beings engaging in free social exchanges, social
cooperation, and achieving the Great Society that is possible.
Thanks to everyone for watching Keith and I Don't Tread on
Anyone and the Libertarian Institute Doctor humor.
Thank you for your time all. Right, thanks.
Thanks for having me.