Transcription
I would argue that governments have actually lifted the most people out of poverty. If you look historically, we look at China for instance, had the most significant poverty reduction in all of human history. They poured eight, they pulled 800 million people out of poverty.
This is the government receding. That is not the government made China rich. That is the government enslaved the Chinese people. And then when it finally started to back off, human nature, creativity, and capitalism unleashed actual prosperity.
Hey there friends, fans, and foes of Dad Saves America. John Papola here, and I wanted to take this Friday to talk about communism and specifically, uh, explore it through the lens of the young adults that debated Patrick B. David at Jubilee. This sort of surrounded series where you, uh, frankly, get a particular approach to discourse, the efficacy of which is up for debate itself, but I think serves as a really great way to explore these ideas and some of the problems with them. But, uh, let's start off with definitions because one of the most difficult parts of this kind of debate is that everyone seems to have a different definition of socialism and communism. Let's hear what the, uh, the surrounded circle has to say.
"I think we are just trying to advocate for basic rights for our people in this country and across the world, of course. But I don't think it's necessarily about equal wealth disparity around around the world for most people that are anti-capitalist. I think it's more about just standard rights that are provided by the government."
"Standard rights that are provided by the government."
"Yeah."
"Okay, great. Socialism is a big part of it is going to be workers owning the means of production."
"Okay. So to you, that's the definition of socialism."
"That is a core tenant of it."
"What else would you define as socialism? I'm curious."
"Um, there's a lot of different things. It's like Zeno was touching on as well. Uh, moneyless, stateless, classless society. But I think more important than not, workers owning production more socialist."
"They're the same term, man. Marx used them interchangeably."
"And real quick on that. This, this notion that Marx used the term socialism and communism interchangeably is not exactly right. Uh, but I do think, uh, I certainly look at it as, um, if you believe we should abolish private property and have, um, collective ownership of the means of production, you're basically in communism land. And whether you're in communism or socialism, as it's defined by our favorite bearded weirdo, our favorite moocher, um, charitable right from the start. I'm sorry, I can't help it. Uh, well, that is often a little more like semantics, but let's keep going."
"Socialism is social or collective ownership by the workers or a community of the means of production, right? So, we're talking about like city-run grocery stores, or we're talking about worker cooperatives, or even in some cases, credit unions where a local community owns the bank that they take part in, right? That's what socialism is. Socialism is not when the government does stuff for you. It's not when they build roads. It happens under capitalist economies. It happens under socialist economies."
"So, this is an interesting definition. He's, uh, I think that's got some nuance and accuracy. The problem is, um, under a capitalist society, you can have, and we do have, uh, worker-owned enterprises. That's not, um, an ism. We have REI. It's a, it's a cooperative. That's just free enterprise. That's just capitalist acts between consenting adults. I don't think this definition is fair. This definition treats socialism like just a business model when in fact, it is a worldview about how a society should be structured. So, I, I think this, this guy is a little off the mark here. But at least he doesn't, uh, you know, think that just because you have a fire department run by your city government that that that is sort of mini socialism and why not go the whole way. He's, he's sophisticated in that way, more so than say Michael Moore in his movie, Capitalism: A Love Story."
"When you said capitalism is the best form of economic organization the world has ever seen, it made me think of a very particular picture from history. So, I don't know if you know this. This is a little history lesson. In 1900, uh, King Leopold II of Belgian, uh, Belgium determined that the entire land of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was his personal property. And within 10 years, um, capitalists came, uh, out. They exploited all the land, extracted trillions of dollars of resources. 15 million, uh, Congolese died. Uh, for reference, the Holocaust killed six million people. And the most famous picture from that time in history is, uh, a rubber worker, uh, staring at the disembodied hands of his 8-year-old daughter because he didn't hit his rubber quota. I'm willing to bet that man worked harder to hit that rubber quota than anything you've ever worked for in your entire life. And I think when you say this is the best system that's ever been created, to me, that's the result."
"I, I've encountered this type of argument too. Uh, I interviewed Richard Wolff, uh, sort of Marxian economist at the New School, um, years and years ago, and he plays this game, which is to say, anything that's not communism is capitalism. So the king doing stuff can be capitalism. If the king is doing it, isn't the king government? This is where we get into again, uh, you know, this no true Scotsman type fallacy. If it isn't perfect communism, um, which has never been tried, then it's capitalism. And anything that has private property at all, it's capitalism. Um, including kings."
"But here comes probably, uh, this is a recurrent person on, um, Jubilee, and she offers, I think, a pretty pointed vision of this that I, I think is the most Marxist and the most accurate to the where this stuff goes. I think it's super important here for all leftists alike, but for the audience in general, to define what these terms are. And I think the best way to do it would be to look at the theorists, right? Over history, we've seen communism and socialism talked about by governments and by, I guess, um, programs, but not, we, we never actually read the actual theory. And what theorists, um, all agree on is that, um, socialism would be a transitionary state between capitalism and communism where the means of production are specifically owned by workers, not privately. The idea that any country now, um, is, is, is anywhere near socialist, let alone communist, would, would simply be ridiculous and just, it wouldn't reflect theory whatsoever."
"What is the, what is the definition of communism to you?"
"Stateless, moneyless, classless society."
"And you, you prefer that?"
"Yeah. So I think that we should be moving towards, you know..."
"Communism."
"Yeah. Yeah. Stateless, moneyless, classless society."
"Stateless, moneyless, classless society. Uh, this is, you know, in the fully realized Marx, you know, the Communist Manifesto is not his complete works. He's, he wrote a lot, including Das Kapital. But basically, what he's fundamentally arguing for, and, and what all of the other sort of truly socialist thinkers ultimately point towards, and it's only a question of the speed and the strategy, is a world in which there is no private property. Uh, there is just collective ownership. But that means we all own it, which also means we, no, no one owns it. But they believe you can achieve a utopia in which there is no class, which is to say there is no inequality of any kind. Um, there's no money, so there's no medium of exchange or the mechanisms that allow what is currently like a modern society to function. And, and we're all somehow sort of in utopia. It is, it is, that what she is describing here is the utopian vision of socialism/communism. It's, we can achieve post-scarcity, post-humanism. And Marx actually talks about this. He describes a path by which we will escape our sort of materialist, our means that we are in a sense a product of our economic conditions. That is what Marx believed. That our psychology, our nature is a product of our economic environment. And that if we shed ourselves of this private property thing that makes us greedy and makes us selfish and makes us status-seeking, we will create a new socialist man. That, just because communism, as it has been executed, seems incompatible with human nature as it exists, he, he would put forward if he was sitting here, well, that's because we haven't gotten to the place in this march of history where humanity will have evolved. And we, it's like, it's like Star Trek: The Next Generation. Like, we don't need money anymore. We, we have evolved our sensibilities. We, we have the replicator and we can now be like the Borg, even though, of course, the Borg was an enemy. But of course, in this case, the Borg is the ultimate end. We are all one. We are all the collective. There, we have a hive mind, and we don't need money. We don't need anything. We don't need status. We're all the same. Of course, you know, even in the Borg, there's the Borg queen. But leave that aside. Um, all right. Let's keep going."
"You don't think a person like me should exist with the amount of wealth that I have?"
"Yeah. Because I think that we're getting to this point where we're creating, um, fake scarcity for people like you to accumulate the wealth that you have on the basis of private ownership."
"Okay. So, you're not even, you're not even not capitalist. You're definitely not capitalist. You're not socialist. You want to go full communism."
"So, what do you think that looks like though, as a thing, right? So, what, what Marx actually wanted was for us to reach a point where we no longer have the scarcity of resources that has kind of predicted, you know, history as it looks like now. It wouldn't happen now. It would happen as we automate. At this point in time, we can decommodify housing and food, um, and education for around 5% of the government budget. That's, um, a little bit over 1/5th of what we spend on the military already."
"So, uh, a couple quick things on this that are that are important to pay attention to. This notion of decommodifying essentially all the means of living, food, housing, and education, is already functionally controlled by the government, um, and healthcare. So, all the stuff, all the stuff of life..."
"All the things, all the things, all the things will decommodify it, which is to say, turn it into, um, government-run utilities. This is the language of Zoran Mandani and this rising class of politicians on the radical left who are essentially the only people with any juice or energy in the Democratic Party. That's why I believe he is a communist, not a democratic socialist. These are all again, like means to an end. And one of the things that is great about Jubilee is they do these little fact checks. And her claim that we could feed everyone for 5% of the current government revenues is ridiculous. As it notes, there's $2.7 trillion in consumer spending on food alone. And you know, we spend $6.5 trillion a year, but we only take in like a little under five. So you're talking about more than half of all government revenues would have to go to food. I don't know where she's coming up with this 5%. She thinks we're closer to the post-scarcity society than we actually are. But maybe that's why she thinks we can go head towards communism."
"We don't because we were living in this state where we, we, it almost seems utopian. That things like, the first time you thought you wanted to be a communist, how old were you?"
"Is that, is that a response to statistics? PBD tends to take these conversations to the personal, and I want to come back to that because I think it's actually pretty interesting, and it's why you should watch this because the way he handles it, I think, is pretty unique. And, um, it's not always all that sort of economically oriented, but I think psychologically he's on to a lot of important stuff. One other piece of the puzzle is the representations in this room of what capitalism is are, are much more incoherent, I think, than their somewhat shared view of socialism/communism. And one guy really like, sort of laid it out in the most simplistic, uh, form and got sort of fact-checked for it."
"Capitalism is a, is a system in which all businesses are funded by millionaires and billionaires investor classes. So, did you get that? Let's just, just one, one more time."
"Capitalism is a, is a system in which all businesses are funded by millionaires and billionaires investor classes."
"So, capitalism is a system in which all businesses are funded by millionaires and billionaires. So, the fact checker noted that 99.9% of businesses in the US qualify as a small business, like, like we are here. And that the median net worth of self-employed families was $380,000. That's net worth. So, what that means is that right in the middle, not the average, but the middle small business owner, entrepreneur in America, his family, his or her family is worth, after if you liquidated everything, including their home, $380,000. Now, I've seen stats that that, um, suggest that the annual incomes of most small business owners are below the median income of DC bureaucrats. So, the notion that we live in an oligarchy, we have big companies, we have problems, we have monopolistic components, most of which are driven by government policy, not free enterprise. But the notion that like capitalism, which is to say private free enterprise based on private property, ownership and contracts, and people voluntarily exchanging with each other, that's my definition, is the product of millionaires and billionaires, um, you know, investing in things, and that there's this like expensive and inaccessible means of production that need to be seized. Uh, that's, that's like this specter living in the minds of of young people fresh out of college, taught by people that have never created anything in their entire life other than stacks of paper. They are maleducated when it comes to what these systems actually are. But they're closer on communism, and that's understandable because all the schools basically teach communism."
"One of the assumptions at the heart of this, and you heard it a little bit there, is that poverty and scarcity are somehow being imposed on on the human race. That it is an imposition. It is artificial. And I think when you pay attention to that assumption, it's very telling. Uh, we, we do live in a modern wealthy society. There is a lot of wealth in our society, but there's an assertion of rights and of scarcity being imposed, and then the need to work being essentially like forced upon people by capitalism. That I think is important to pay attention to and think about."
"History is a march of progress, right? So, there are going to be advancements that we make, or there's going to be solutions that we make to previous ailments. I'm not saying that capitalism hasn't brought in better things than systems like feudalism or monarchy, but that does not mean that we're at the end of history. I think incentives are exactly the fundamental problem with capitalism. Is that you say incentives are what make it work? And I think that's the whole issue is that the primary incentives are either, are either greed, a mass of of as much personal wealth as you possibly can."
"Do you think that's the problem? It's greed."
"Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And, and like..."
"If you're not greedy at all..."
"And, and like you said, survival, right? That the person, you know, working five jobs, you know, that they're they're doing that to, they wouldn't have, they wouldn't want to do that if they didn't need to survive. But that's such a horrible dystopian world to live in. If someone has to work five jobs just to survive. It doesn't matter how much onus is on the individual. We want to create a world."
"No, no, no. See, we want to create a world in which people don't have to earn their right to live."
"We want to create a world in which people don't have to earn their right to exist. This is an ideology. So, let's just look at some basic facts. Human beings are an are. So, we are born and have no capabilities. We are helpless for a really long time. But in a very real sense, we are not born with rights. This is a metaphysical and a philosophical assertion. And it's important to note this because this guy is a materialist. He absolutely despised religion. He, his favorite phrase was from Faust, that all that exists deserves to perish. He, it can be argued that he is a Satanist. But one thing he is definitely not is a god-fearing man. And so the notion that we have inalienable rights, or that we have rights at all by virtue of being born, is not materialistic at all. So why should one assume, if you are a materialist and an atheist in particular, that we're born into a world where we shouldn't have to work to live? We shouldn't have to exert calories in order to acquire calories like every other animal in the natural world forever. That's not materialism. That's not scientific. It's not biological. It is essentially a metaphysical assertion. It is, it is a philosophy. Now, you could say, well, this is, this is the moral philosophy of communism, that we shouldn't have to work to live. That is what is being asserted here. It is the right to live on others. That is the fundamental claim of socialism, communism, all this stuff. Frederick Bastiat said, you know, the state, and therefore socialism, and all functional practices outside of utopia, is the fiction by which each of us gets to live at the expense of all of us. And that is the fiction that everyone here is fundamentally living in."
"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Right? Those are the inalienable rights. We shouldn't have to earn those rights. We shouldn't have to earn the right to healthcare, earn the right..."
"No, I..."
"These are, this is just, we just want to live, just exist. We can't work our, our, our blood, sweat, and tears just to just to survive. That's a horrible dystopian world that we live in right now."
"No. Then what do you think we're here for? To just sit around and play video games?"
"He's answering a good question now. Okay. To give the devil his due, maybe literally. It certainly doesn't feel right or comfortable or fair to work hard. Many of the people in this, uh, in this show bring up these heart-wrenching examples, these sort of, uh, stereotypes like, 'Oh, what about the single mother with five jobs? You know, what about her? She's working hard. She doesn't need an incentive to work.' The kind-hearted, open-hearted version of this is that, hey, you know, we're not all fortunate enough to be in a position where our capabilities, our backgrounds, um, set us up to succeed and sustain us ourselves and the opportunities that we're presented with, um, put us in a bind. And that doesn't feel fair, especially in a world where there's millionaires and billionaires and people that make way more money and accumulate way more assets and wealth than they would need from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. I mean, it frankly sounds downright Christian, much to the disdain of this guy. Um, of course, you know, from a Christian perspective, you don't get to point guns at people to do that. You have to be charitable voluntarily, otherwise, it's not a moral choice at all. The assumption though, the assumption that we are in a post-scarcity world or can live in it, is part of where these folks go wrong. We don't, we don't live in a post-scarcity world. We live in a world of actual scarcity. This is an instance in which it is true that there is scarcity imposed, and this is housing. Housing is a great example of where we could have a lot more housing than we have, and our houses would therefore cost less because of supply and demand. We don't have as much housing as we could have because of busybody government rules and regulations. That's a fact. The kind of path towards bigger and bigger government, the kind of gigantic government that these folks want and advocate for, actually gives rise to more scarcity than we need to have. And it's the mechanism that they understand the least. In fact, to some extent, you could say that Marx had some degree of appreciation for the scarcity-busting elements of capitalism, uh, in that he actually believed that capitalism would be the thing that gives rise to the post-scarcity world. That, that is an element of Marx that's kind of interesting and also kind of weirdly contradictory, because if you have this system that unleashes all this prosperity and produces a post-scarcity world, why exactly would you want to trash it in favor of some Borg utopia? That part's a little less, less clear, but it's his Hegelian march of history, metaphysical stuff that's going on there. I think one of the reasons why this ideology and this view on the part of these young people in this debate, if you can call it a debate, um, is the way it is, is because they reject the idea that we are adaptable. They, they wouldn't see it that way, but that's how I see it. They consider the human animal to have essentially immovable intrinsic motivation, and therefore the sort of carrots and sticks of trucking and bartering in a free enterprise system where, oh, if I, if I get a bonus, if I work harder, if I am more diligent and put my nose to the grindstone, I will make more money. And in fact, the prospect of making more money, if, if I do that, leads me to do it. Incentive. They just reject that. They think we don't need material incentives. They think incentives don't matter that much. The very same people will say we should tax the oil companies and tax the vices of our society and use taxation to reduce behaviors we don't like, which means incentives actually matter. So the incentives only matter when it's disincentivizing bad things through taxation. When, um, when we tax things like, I don't know, income and savings and investment, that won't reduce work and entrepreneurship and productivity."
"Yeah. So, I, I think that humans inherently want to be meaningful. They, they want to contribute to their communities. They want to contribute to society. When you look at depression rates, often times it's people who aren't able to do anything besides live laying in their bed and and basically barely taking care of themselves."
"He's making a very interesting point, and one that he doesn't realize deeply undermines his worldview because programs like Social Security disability produce learned helplessness and misery by disincentivizing work."
"So, I think that it's just a human intrinsic value to want to bring value to their community or grander society. So, I don't think that it has to be through scarcity alone that scares people into working."
"Okay. Um, so I think the issue is the framing of incentive here. Incentive doesn't disappear in a socialist or a communist society. It just changes and evolves. So, we see in capitalism the incentive is obviously monetary gain, maybe even collecting capital itself, um, through, uh, land ownership. In a communist or a socialist country, you would see incentive would just evolve into, I know it's a vague term, but the common good. Uh, you have an incentive to do your chores around your house because you don't want to live in a filthy house, right? That makes sense. It doesn't have to be just monetary."
"Have your dreams become free. But that's why I'm anti-capitalism. Maybe you are anti-capitalist. Removes that choice. There is no real incentive of capitalism because the incentive is survival. Into communism, the incentive is for the common good."
"I love that."
"The common good. The incentive is the common good. That is lovely. But in your daily life, you face a lot of choices. And those choices involve trade-offs between this or that. How am I going to spend my time? Which kind of career am I going to pursue? Which way am I going to do the thing to achieve my goal? And the incentive towards the common good offers no information about how to make any of these choices. One of the things that, um, PBD didn't talk about at all, and that is fundamental to the mistake being made by the anti-capitalists, and all anti-capitalists, is that the incentives of markets, namely the differences in the cost and the price between doing X and Y, the price system is an incentive. It is also information. This is, I've talked about this before, but this is the most deep and profound reason why capitalism works. And I'm using capitalism here, but free enterprise, free exchange, private property, rule of law, contracts, trade, these things work and they unleash people's potential and productivity in part because they transmit information. Price goes up, oh, there is more demand for that. Wage goes up, wow, that is a skill that is in demand. Wage goes down, hmm, I probably shouldn't do that because not as many people want it. Or there's a lot of people already trying to do that and willing to take lower and lower wages to do it. The price system is an information system. And one of the ways to break this down is to think about the small decisions you make in your life that involve differences in prices. That is the price system at work. And the incentive disincentive here is not about some high-flying moral choice like the common good. It is just about trying to understand what to do in a complex world. A complex world that is the world all of these people love. The world of modern technological health innovations that keep people alive. The world that enables this video to happen and fly across the internet in 4K. That world is built on trillions of decisions that cannot be motivated by the common good. And this is why the Soviet Union struggled so profoundly to function that without a price system that they ended up importing Sears Roebuck catalogs in the 1940s and '50s just to try to guess at like, well, how much should stuff cost because we don't know how to do anything. That's why it was doomed to collapse. This is all high-flying moral gobbledegook, and it's secular, materialist, atheist moral gobbledegook at that. So, it doesn't even have a metaphysical underpinning. Why should I even believe that all men are created equal if you don't believe they're created in the first place? But, but that's for another time. This part is also where this kind of conversation goes off the rails because this is the most common rhetorical tactic that breaks our understanding of things. And it's this idea that, you know, profit incentive is the only thing that can make humans do things."
"Nobody's claiming that. No economist claims that. Nobody thinks that profit and prices is the only way to get people to do things. Intrinsic motivation is of course real. We all know that. We all know that when we love what we're doing, we do more of it, better, faster, and more joyfully. So believing in free enterprise is not the belief that we are all homo economicus and that we rationally calculate on the basis of marginal prices every single decision we make. It's that at the margin, we need a way to understand how to do more with less. An entire structure of decision-making is informed by the price system. But do you want to be a nurse, or or a psychologist, or a teacher, or work in the Lego design factory in Denmark, or build software, or build homes, or lay concrete? Some of that is just intrinsic interest and desire and passion and all the things of humanity that are not the price system. This is straw-manning what she's doing right here."
"Which has never been the case historically. It's not the case psychologically."
"Historically, it's never been the case. No."
"What has been the case? So, we've seen..."
"What's been the incentive?"
"The incentive is intrinsic motivation."
"Intrinsic motivation."
"Of course. Have you ever heard of intrinsic motivation?"
"Of course I have. So you think people are going to go just do anything for no incentives?"
"The incentive is intrinsic meaning, passion, interest, and honing your skills."
"Whether you get paid or not."
"Motivation is what, what causes things like, um, technological development. Um, some of the greatest breakthroughs have been from people who are devoted and honing their skill."
"So, should they get paid for it? I think that we shouldn't live in a system that, um, privately owns, like, owns means of production."
"At the end of the day, um, the fundamental economic arguments against this worldview is that we don't know how to coordinate in a complex society without an information system that responds in real time to our, our capacity, our needs, and our resources. We live in a world of scarcity. That's the facts. You cannot have a post-scarcity world in material reality. And if your philosophy is fundamentally materialist, the second you claim we can have a post-scarcity society, you're talking gobbledygook nonsense. You are just in a world of incoherence. And if we have scarcity, which we all do, we need ways to know what is the right choice to make at any given time in an ever-changing world. That is the information system of prices, profits, and losses. It is guideposts. It is a circulatory system that helps us navigate the world of scarcity. I can go on like this for hours, but at the end of the day, that is the fundamental functional argument for why capitalism, free enterprise works, delivers the kinds of results that are an empirical fact on the spectrum. As you get towards the freer market economies, which includes all of the West, including Scandinavia, including Denmark, including Sweden, um, they are mostly capitalist societies with private property, private businesses, stock markets, investment, etc. High incomes for the bottom tenth of the of the population. The poor do better in freer market societies. That is an empirical fact. And the closer you get to these people's vision, you get into hell. You don't even have to go all the way to true communism. You can just start to replace some of the key building blocks of a free enterprise system, and society collapses. This is Argentina. This is Venezuela. This is, of course, North Korea, the Soviet Union, Cuba, etc., etc. Pulp pot, Maoist China. These are murderous nightmare hellholes because when you don't have the profit system and you have centralized power, you get a horrible ratchet effect combination of collapse and failure, and then scapegoating, and then strongman government. It happens every single time. It's been tried on every continent, in every creed, with multiple races, multiple time periods. Every time it's the same. The fact that semi-educated people still think this is worth pursuing means our education systems in the West are a laughingstock and a disaster. We can sit here in 2025, having watched murder in the 20th century on a mass scale by people like Mao Zedong, and be told on YouTube videos that, uh, China's real success was because of communism."
"I would argue that governments have actually lifted the most people out of poverty. If you look historically, we look at China, for instance, had the most significant poverty reduction in all of human history. They poured eight, they pulled 800 million people out of poverty using state-owned enterprises and state centralized planning. They did work with the capitalist system, but they did it, um, most of it was done through state-funded infrastructure, education, and contributing to strong literacy programs, redistributing the wealth. I think that my other argument would be that there hasn't been an opportunity for alternative systems like socialism to pull enough people out of poverty. So, we look at examples..."
"There hasn't been..."
"There hasn't been enough opportunities for them to succeed. And so when we say..."
"I think that is because partly because of the US, and I think because capitalist forces and global market insecurities have sabotaged these attempts to do socialism. And this is the problem that I have with so many capitalists is they can't exit their worldview and try to see a world where socialism, um, could be in place because they don't understand the untapped potential of socialism. And I'm, I'm a democratic socialist. I think that we need to build forward to towards that, um, with reforms, and I think we need to work with the government. I don't think that we should abandon the state. I also don't think that we should give state elites the complete control over society. I do think that we should work with the state to instill these reforms and then eventually erode capitalism."
"And then eventually erode capitalism. This is why I call these people communists because they're all communists. Democratic socialists. I think, you know, you can, if you are in the socialist camp, democratic or otherwise, you, you will find most of them are ultimately just communists. They want to abolish, uh, private property and and eliminate free enterprise. She said it herself. She's not alone. This is typical. Zoran Mandani said, 'We want to ultimately seize the means of production,' and the only difference is tactics. It's all strategy and tactics. The Fabians wanted to march through the institutions, uh, and go slowly. They thought that would be more effective to usher in communism as opposed to Marx, who thought, well, you know, workers will be emiserated, and then there will ultimately be a revolution of the proletariat, and the army of the proletariat will bring about the communist revolution. He was wrong about all of that because workers ended up doing better under free market societies. Uh, they weren't emiserated, and that's why we got wokeism. Because of course, when it turned out, say in the 1950s and '60s, that the American working class was seeing their lives improve, um, rather than abandoning Marxism, people like Herbert Marcuse and the intersectionalists just said, well, we should just shift our target because obviously the revolution is all that really matters, and forget about this worker stuff, let's just go after blacks and gays and disaffected college students. That was literally what they believed. We should just create a new proletariat of intersectional angry people. That's what they did. That's what they believed. That is this group sitting in the room. Their lives are great, relatively speaking, by human standards. Individually, there's a lot of struggle in that room. But I want to come back to China. She starts her thing off with China. And I think there is no better story to explode the philosophy of these people than an article about a very real event in China in 1978 that I'm going to read to you in part because it is so potent and so visceral that I don't see how you can't consider it the slam dunk end to this debate. And we'll put a link to the story in our show notes over at dadsavesamerica.com. It is called The Secret Document That Transformed China. In 1978, the farmers in a small Chinese village called Xiaogang, and I'm going to probably mispronounce most of this, I'm sorry, gathered in a mud hut to sign a secret contract. They thought it might get them executed. Instead, it wound up transforming China's economy in ways that are still reverberating today. And this was reported in 2013. And in the subsequent 12 years, um, Xi Jinping has been turning the state screws on the Chinese people, making it go in reverse, let's say, from its more free market outcomes. But let's keep going. The contract was so risky and such a big deal because it was created at the height of communism in China. Everyone worked on the village's collective farm. There was no personal property. Back then, even one straw belonged to the group, says Yang Jingchang, who was a farmer in Xiaogang in 1978. No one owned anything. Communism, the abolition of private property. At one meeting with Communist Party officials, a farmer asked, 'What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those?' Answer: No. Your teeth belong to the collective. In theory, the government would take what the collective grew and would also distribute food to each family. There was no incentive to work hard, to go out into the fields early, to put in extra effort. Yang Jingchang says, 'Work hard, don't work hard. Everyone gets the same.' He says, 'So people don't want to work.' In Xiaogang, there was never enough food, and the farmers often had to go to other villages to beg. Their children were going hungry. They were desperate. So in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea. Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest. This is an old idea, of course, but in communist China of 1978, it was so dangerous that the farmers had to gather in secret to discuss it. This group of farmers reinvented capitalism under the threat of death because they faced starvation if they didn't. So for anyone claiming that capitalism is imposed on people as opposed to emerging naturally out of reality and human nature, I present this secret document in China that transformed the country and actually lifted 500 million people out of poverty. One evening, they snuck in one by one to a farmer's home. Like all of the houses in the village, it had dirt floors, mud walls, and a straw roof. No plumbing, no electricity. This is 1978, folks. Most people said, 'Yes, we want to do it,' says Yan Hongchang, another farmer who was there. But there were others who said, 'I don't think this will work. This is like high voltage wire.' Back then, farmers had never seen electricity, but they'd heard about it. They knew if they touched it, you would die. Despite the risks, they decided they had to try this experiment. And to write it down as a formal contract, so everyone would be bound to it. By the light of an oil lamp, Yan Hongchang wrote out the contract. And this is right here, the central mediating institution of free enterprise agreement and trust. Capitalism is contract. It's voluntary agreement, and contracts are fundamentally about human trust. These people, under threat of horrendous murder by Mao's Chinese communist overlords, trusted each other to obey a black market creation of capitalism to save their families. The farmers agreed to divide up the land among the families. Each family agreed to turn over some of what they grew to the government and to the collective. And crucially, the farmers agreed that families that grew enough food would would get to keep some for themselves. The contract also recognized the risks the farmers were taking. If any of the farmers were sent to prison or executed, it said the others in the group would care for their children until age 18. Here is another exhibit of the emergent human nature of a free enterprise system, voluntary civil society and support. So right here, you not only have the invention of capitalism under Maoist China, you also have the invention of private social insurance by the group by contract with specificity, not some vague claim about the common good, but a specific promise to specific people on specific terms. And that's the difference between what these people and all the clowns in academia think they're saying when they say, 'We have a social contract.' This was an actual contract. And it worked. The farmers tried to keep the contract secret. Yang Hongchang hid it inside a piece of bamboo in the roof of his house. But when they returned to the fields, everything was different. Before the contract, the farmers would drag themselves into the field only when the village whistle blew, marking the start of the workday. After the contract, the families went out before dawn. 'We all secretly competed,' says Yan Jingchang. 'Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person.' It was the same land, the same tools, and the same people. In other words, it was the same means of production. Yet, just by changing the economic rules from communism to capitalism, by saying you get to keep some of what you grow, everything changed. At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest. More, Yan Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined. That huge harvest gave them away. Local officials figured out that the the farmers had divided up the land, and the word of what had happened in Xiaogang made its way to the Communist Party chain of command. And this is where, if this had happened only a few years prior, they all would have been put against the wall and shot. At one point, Yin Hongchang was hauled into the local Communist Party office. The officials swore at him, treated him like he was on death row. But fortunately for Mr. Yen and the other farmers, at this moment in history, there were powerful people in the Communist Party who wanted to change China's economy. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who would go on to create China's modern economy, was just coming to power. So instead of executing the Xiaogang farmers, the Chinese leaders ultimately decided to hold them up as a model. Now, this young woman thinks that this is the government lifting people out of poverty. This is the government taking its boot off the neck of the public. This is the government receding. It is not credit to the government and its boot that when it steps away and things get better. That is not the government made China rich. That is the government enslaved the Chinese people. And then when it finally started to back off, human nature, creativity, and capitalism unleashed actual prosperity. Within a few years, farms all over China adopted the principles in that secret document. People could own what they grew. The government launched other economic reforms, and China's economy started to grow like crazy. Since 1978, something like 500 million people have risen out of poverty in China. And again, that number is much higher as of today. And even though China has backslid in recent years under Xi Jinping, uh, the fact remains that this transformation was a miracle brought about by the human reasserting our natural capabilities under free enterprise, under private property, the rule of law and contract. That's capitalism. That's what lifted billions of people out of poverty. You can go a lot deeper on this. There's a book by economist Ronald Coase and, um, Ning Wang called How China Became Capitalist, that highlights this and how actually it was overwhelmingly a bottom-up phenomenon, like this single private meeting in this small farm village. And this is the ultimate refutation of all these people and and this growing group of of young people who are deciding to re-engage humanity's most monstrous, demonic, murderous idea. But I do think there is actually a deeper, non-economic thing going on, and that is mental health and capability collapse. And you see this on display, uh, in this Jubilee debate with Patrick Bet David."
"What do we do to basically ensure that people like myself who are currently, thank you to the United States, thank you to the state of California for giving me medical insurance to get blood work, for giving me food stamps so I can have food. I've applied to I don't know how many hundreds of jobs. I can show you the receipts. I can show you the email confirmations. Like, I am trying my best to use my values with the freedom that we have. So, if I gave you a job, you would work 40 hours a week."
"If the job is in alignment with something that's noble and good, I think I could. The issue is, and again, you, you may say that this is a personal weakness, but like right now, substitute teaching, tutoring, trying to help in that way is making it so that I'm able to scratch by, but without the supplemental income and the help from the society of people who make more money, I'm going to not have enough. I'm in a position where I have options. Like you said, I do have some options, but they seem to be somewhat destructive and exploitative of me, of my peers. So, I'm trying..."
"I think you're too selective for jobs right now. You don't, you don't have the ability to be selective at this stage."
"But the thing is, because I'm instilled with a freedom that is maybe God, universe-given, and I don't actually have to, because of the system, like you said, I don't have to play along with some corrupt game. So, I gave up."
"I think California is perfect for someone like you. I think California is perfect for someone like you. Now, my heart, in a way, goes breaks for this guy because he's not a violent, murderous guy. He's not, he's not a Maoist in in in spirit. He's a, he's sort of a gentle heart. Um, he is literally pathetic, and that is tragic. I mean that both in the sense of being sort of a tragedy and sort of the, the pathos of it all. Uh, he is a product of a wealthy society. He is spoiled. Oh, I don't need to work because I get all these handouts and benefits, and so I can float along, lie dah, and wait for something that adheres to some values that are not fully explained, but are probably fairly utopian. This is a collapse in human potential in the name of woo-woo spiritualism or something, but ultimately subsidized by all the rest of the working stiffs in California and across America who are paying for this guy to figure out what he wants to do with the rest of his life. I don't think anyone in that Chinese village would watch this video and laugh."
They would grind their teeth or cry or um become enraged. And I've met folks like that, folks from Cambodia and Mauis, China, and Eastern Europe, who are far less tolerant of this gentleman, and far less charitable than than I'm being right now. The even bigger tragedy is this woman that I think has um probably gotten clipped out more than a couple times since this video went live.
>> In 24, I voted for the socialist candidate.
>> Who was that?
>> Claudia de la Cruz, I believe.
>> Who did you vote for in 2020?
>> Um, I was actually not able to vote. I was in a hospital.
>> Oh, I'm so sorry.
>> Because of results of capitalism.
>> Tell me more.
>> Yeah. So, I didn't have access to proper health care or even access to a proper job that would sustain me as a disabled person.
>> Are you comfortable being specific on what happened?
>> Uh, I guess you're not. I mean, I'm also mentally ill, so that was something I had to deal with, but um I'm mainly mentally ill because I am disabled in a capitalist country. She's mentally ill because she's disabled in a capitalist country. She probably doesn't want to look too deep into what Stalin did with the mentally ill or Mao or Pulpot. In fact, Pulp Pot wouldn't really appreciate very much about any of this group or Chewa or any of these people, any of the people in the places that get close to their values in practice. But um she is sort of a tragic character and I I don't feel like piling on to her too hard.
>> My trouble is in many cases somebody you and I look up to will say something to us that we choose to believe for the rest of our lives. Unfortunately, it could be something where you have ADHD, you're mentally ill, you're poor, you're this, you're that. We get to choose to buy into that or not. And if you do
>> So you're saying I'm not mentally ill or I'm not disabled. you are or you're not. I would challenge it to go a little bit deeper to see if there's anything you can do about it.
>> This is one of the aspects of what Patrick did in this that I think is actually really powerful is he kept bringing it back to each of these individuals, frankly, having more hope for them and more belief in them than it seemed like any of them had in themselves, this young woman included. And um it might be off-putting to question someone's self- assessment of their mental health, but we but as you'll see um I think that's pretty well warranted. We have we have a crisis of something like socially contagious mental disorders and embracing it as a victimhood identity so that you can round out your ideology and justify it is not making matters better. It's a that is a death spiral. That is a psychological death spiral.
>> Would you be okay if I pay for a specialist for you to go see?
>> Yeah.
>> Would you take money from a capitalist to help you go see specialist?
>> I mean, yeah, sure. Why not?
>> I'm going to have you go see two Where do you Do you live in California?
>> Yeah.
>> I'm going to have you go see two specialists. But would you also be open to seeing somebody else I choose as a psychologist? That may
>> No, you're not.
>> No. You choose as a psychologist. You're choosing who gets to determine what my mental health looks like.
>> No. No.
>> Okay. Then I wish you nothing but the best. I think a big part of what's going on right now in this room and and more broadly uh is a combination of these two things. Luxury beliefs about utopia and actual mental health collapse that is causing people to be incapable of um taking control of their lives, having an internal locus of control, and setting themselves up for success. Again, I can't help but think about those poor 1978 farmers in that village. All of whom life were worse. All of whom were in a much worse pace than these people are. And they found the strength in themselves to do something unimaginable under the threat of death. And yet this room can't tolerate the idea that they have to go out and take a job that they might not like to help build themselves up, build up their skills, overcome some of their anxieties and and disordered behavior so that they could be self-sufficient and be independent adults. That is what's going on. And there was a recent article highlighting a very large-scale study that has shaken me as a father and as an American. And that is that there is a breakdown in the basic psychological personality building blocks of success namely conscientiousness. This is the article. We'll put a again put a link to it. You know what are the what are the key attributes that shape the length and quality of our careers, relationships and lives more broadly. The socioeconomic environment we grow up in certainly has a substantial influence with parental prosperity acting as a propellant or a key to unlock crucial doors. Cognitive abilities are another obvious one. They they enable better decision-making in all aspects of life. This is IQ. But another factor often gets less credit despite being just as important. Personality. In fact, studies consistently find that traits such as conscientiousness, the quality of being dependable and disciplined, emotional stability or agreeableness have a stronger link with professional success, relationship durability and longevity than the links between those outcomes and someone's intelligence or socio socioeconomic background, our personalities and how we behave. And this is a theme throughout the video through and that Patrick Bet David actually comes back to again and again and he is fundamentally correct of our personality types. Conscientious people tend to fare best on a number of key measures. They live longest, have the most career success, and are less likely to go through divorce. They even manage to hold down a job during recessions. And this is where things get scary. Conscientiousness has absolutely collapsed for our young and upand cominging future generation. People currently age 16 to 39. Look at these graphs. Conscientiousness among 16 to 39 year olds total collapse. Neuroticism, which is to say the flip side of emotional stability and is and and is associated with anxiety and depression through the roof. Agreeableness. So, how much do you get along with people? How how much do you find common ground and consensus and and are likable? Down big time. And extraversion has actually gone down across the board. So, we've all become more shut in in the past 10 years. That is not good. But as you dig deeper, it gets worse. So, what are we talking about when we talk about conscientiousness? Well, there's these four examples that are really important, and they are all going in the wrong direction for our young people especially. These are self-reported on a on a strong agree to one disagree. Do I make plans and follow through? That is collapsing for young people. Do I persevere until finished? Collapsing. Am I easily distracted? Rising for everybody, but especially young for obvious reasons. All these screens, the phones, the notifications, the the digital watches, all that stuff. I feel the same thing. This is going up for all of us, but our kids are getting hit hardest. Can be careless. Am I careless? Going up. That one has all also gone up strongly for the young cohort. This is the stuff you need to live an adult life. This is the stuff you need to thrive in a free society and want to keep it a free society. And when this starts to happen, you're not going to thrive and you're not going to want a free society because free societies expect you to to some extent carry your own weight and to help others and to create value for other people. But if I am a wreck that can't make plans and follow through and keep from getting distracted and finish what I start, I'm not going to have anything of value to offer to anybody. And I'm going to feel horrible and isolated and atomized and alone and prone towards victimhood and then propagandized by bad actors that want to turn me into a fist in their army for permanent revolution. One last piece of the puzzle is the the collapse of extraversion is bringing with it a collapse in trust. And it's not just trust in our institutions, which I talk about here all the time. It's trust in each other. Building trust requires interaction. Business breeds interaction. Going to work helps you interact. I met my wife at work. I have the life I have because of work. I met my friends at work. I have a team here that I love and that support what we do. They are like an extended family. They're not exactly a family. It is still a business, but they are part of my community and I trust them. Uh, and this is what earning your way gives you. And as that declines, everything falls apart. The people reporting in these surveys aren't the same kind of people that we used to be. And I think that that is very scary and it has me deeply worried about the future of the country. It is what fundamentally motivates this channel. It is why I talk about issues like socialism and communism because I fundamentally think that we are seeing a multiaceted unraveling. I want to do what I can to fight it and to stop it at every single turn all the time because I'm an American, because I'm a dad. Because I want my kids to live in a country that still values the fundamental human dignity that underpins a free society and a free capitalist economy so that they can benefit from it and be made better by it. Capitalism makes us better people because all capitalism is is people creating value for other people. That's the system. It is not we all have rights for you to make something for me because that's my right because I was born and so you're now my slave. That's communism. That's socialism. That doesn't make you a better person. That's gimme gimme gimme. And it turns out that even when you when the worst of luck befalls you, you are born with something that's debilitating and genetic. You run into trouble in your life partly out of your own decisions or partly out of accident. You have family breakdown and collapse. You get into a horrible accident. You get fired from a job because you were doing great, but the industry is shrinking like most of entertainment. Actually, a capitalist society has the surplus to help you out. It has the trust and the community to be a true safety net. And if you look across the West, all of these government safety nets are on a ticking time bomb towards collapse. And there's more to talk about that in future videos. There's a saying from Margaret Thatcher that socialism eventually runs out of other people's money. And those days are coming faster than people realize. And so we are either going to fix ourselves up and write the ship of our psychology, of our mentalities, um of our conscientiousness, and of our ideology. Or it's going to be forced upon us one way or another. And I hope we can do it by choice instead of by necessity. What do you think? I hope this was helpful. This was a lot of stuff. I hit you with a lot. Um, please dive into the comments. Head over to dadsavesamerica.com. Check out the stuff we've got there, including the links to some of the books and articles that I've referenced here. And of course, have a great weekend. [Applause]