Debunking left-wing memes: profit, capitalism & slavery.

the most meaningful questions in life
are always questions that you answered before especially when you've got over 1,000 videos on your YouTube channel I got a question for the audience and it was a question and address before but the answer was buried somewhere in the middle of a 40-minute long video where it wasn't in the title of the channel I couldn't find it easily a bunch of my other fans we're looking right oh yes somewhere you address that question the question was this if you have left-wing friends if you have communist friends if you have socialist friends if you have friends who confront you with the ultimatum that profit is evil asked you in various ways to justify how you can have a society built on profit because from their perspective profit is theft that's a rhetorical claim that's actually older than communism think older than the formal definition of socialism - all right they say property is theft how can a society built on this concept of a for-profit corporation for profit company etc etc be anything other than evil how to respond to this question we are assuming here that you're talking to somebody you care about we're assuming this is not some kind of knock-down drag-out internet debate this isn't someone you have contempt for you're just trying to pawn in the parlance of our times just imagine if people are watching this video decades in the future and they have no idea what this slang term pone meant but here I am Here I am dating myself I use alright how do you address this question treating it as a meaningful and sincere question answer it in a meaningful way not behaving as if you're just debunking a left-wing meme about profit capitalism the idea that property is theft and that everything goes on in capitalism any form of employment as long as it's for profit is slavery all right the first approach which I would use again if I care about someone I'm trying to field in the human being I normally do not like to start from abstract reasoning but from very palpable bottom-up reasoning more appealing to real-world experiences they've had for example I recently looked at the listing of all of the colleges in this part of Canada in Canada that will give you a degree in early childhood education so this is different from being a full-fledged schoolteacher lets you do something like run a kindergarten other kinds of children's programs and the lists provided by the government was divided into private for-profit institutions nonprofit institutions right just a few different categories like that and you would be surprised if you look at the colleges especially say low-level training colleges that prepare people for technical hands-on jobs you might really be surprised that some of them are for-profit when you assumed they were nonprofit and vice versa and if you actually go and visit these colleges and talk to this students and talk to the teachers and look at how they operate there might be remarkably little difference in your state in your city where you're living between a for-profit Technical College and a not-for-profit techni college you know if the person you're talking to you if you can talk to them on that level if you can actually appeal to something they have real-world experience with where they can contrast a for-profit and not-for-profit project institution business that you want to put this then this will start to get the wheels turning because what you're really a sailing here is an overly abstract idea of what profit is linked to an overly abstract idea about what capitalism itself is now in an earlier video I spoke through in great detail where depending where you live you may not have this experience how subtle the difference is between going to a corporate for-profit grocery store and a small co-op locally owned not-for-profit grocery store and you can start to list off what the differences are right but if you have this experience in the real world certainly most major cities in Canada throughout all of Europe depending on where you're on the United States you may or may not have co-op grocery stores met I don't think that popular in America but a co-op grocery store your experience as a customer is 98 percent the same and the differences although subtle it's worth talking about a little bit here you'll find the coop grocery store because they don't have a profit margin they have to be much more conservative about adopting new products putting new products on the shelf whereas the for-profit grocery store will take risks and say oh okay we think this is gonna be the hot new product in the year 2020 and though get that product in the Shelf they'll do more promotions they'll do more sales one of the reasons to have sales is that you overstock something you didn't sell as many as you thought you would and you lower the price there is more risk taking there's more innovation in the for-profit grocery store but hey let's not kid ourselves here this is not the kind of innovation that's gonna put a man on the moon oh this is the type of small innovation that's ongoing all the time with the restlessness of Commerce in the for-profit sector and it is true the non profit store lags behind that a little bit you may find that the non profit grocery store pays its employees slightly better would you actually look into it you'd be amazed at just how slight the difference is and indeed just because the for-profit grocery store may be more successful you may well be surprised the other way around that actually the for-profit shop is paying it's paying better salaries providing better benefits so on and so forth so these are this is if someone is your friend if they respect you and you respect them they should be willing to listen to this and it may be really important to address psychologically the defense mechanisms they have because what they want to cling to is really no different than a Muslim who's refusing to listen to the particular historical details of the life of the Prophet like look this guy was just a human being hey do you know how many people he married do you know about his sex life you know about the political conditions do you know about his record on slavery you know with their refusing to let you talk about the profit and the founding of Islam's way they only want to cling to an abstract i can't even say a summary of their religion they're extrapolating abstract virtues about their religion and refusing to hear these kinds of you know tangible real-world details that make them think about it with a human face and with dirt under the fingernails with all the details of real world real lived experience right you're trying to get them to think from the ground up in terms of empirical methods instead of from the sky down with ideological preaching I suppose for lack of a better word right so you your friend may refuse here this they may even stand up out of their seat and say forget it I'm not gonna let you describe to me what profit actually Israel well then why are you talking about profit if you're if you're ideology is based on this if your ideology is based on the idea that one grocery store is engaged in theft and slavery and exploitation because they have profit and then you cross the street you can literally cross the street and go to a co-op grocery store that doesn't have profit and yet there is neither more nor less evidence of theft slavery or exploitation the explore the exploitation of man by man to borrow phrase you know where is this dramatic difference when we remove profit from the equation now depending the particular person they might have experience with the military having large-scale nonprofit operations have you ever been to a barber shop on a military base you know it's a lot like a barbershop what which is great about the profit motive but it's not I mean it's it's it's the finances the economics of how that barbershop operates is very different you can talk to scientists who've been in research labs some of them are in the for-profit and corporate side of the world some of them are run by the military with again it's not a profit motive it's just a command coming from a commander so if profit is so important if it has this profound ethical significance why is it that we look in vain for the evidence of that everywhere empirically in the real world all right now there is a more abstract way to to reason through this this problem and it is to say this if you were a military commander and you said hey I want you to build this bridge so you're giving orders to the military corps of engineers or maybe it's a war situation where it's just ordinary soldiers not okay the here are the number of resources we have here's how much money we have here's how much time we have I want you to build this this bridge you know as quickly as possible as cheaply as possible and your soldiers go out and build that bridge and they come back to say hey guess what we managed to build the bridge in less time with less resources using less money and less manpower we brought it in under budget would you as a military commander say that's terrible you turned a profit if you were the director of a university or college Training Institute that's a nonprofit Institute it's completely let's just say it's not merely public sector let's say it's a charity training center right and you give orders for them to take on some project like this you want them to go into a grass field and set up a tent and then teach a series of training courses so that a bunch of homeless people can learn how to be metal welders let's just say this is a situation we've got some homeless people want to be trained to go into welding because there's some new jobs hiring for welders okay so you got to set up the equipment you gotta set then you say ok I have so much money it's so much resort so much manpower in so much time and the people you give the orders to a bunch of teachers and helpers and what-have-you who go out to do this task they finish it under budget ahead of schedule they don't use all the resources that don't use all the money that is the moment would you say to them that's terrible you turned a profit okay what is profit why would anyone in those situations describe profit as theft profit as slavery or it and the irony is of course if you know if you've been in the military just read if you've read books of military history very often military orders can be far more tyrannical and inflexible than the private sector for-profit side of the business you know they in the in the private sector you may have a flex blast okay this could go over budget this could go under budget we have different options and what happened in the Soviet Union really was the militarization of civilian life that's why technically communism is referred to as a command economy in contrast to a free market economy or free enterprise economy it's a command economy because you've removed the price mechanism you've removed the profit mechanism but instead you just have tyrannical people giving tyrannical orders like your military superior who's put there by the government's like your military superior and who's paid a salary and they are trying to get people to work as hard as possible to produce as much as possible to exact as much profit as possible out of them but nobody's allowed to call it profit any more because you're working under a military dictatorship that happens to call itself communist socialist or left-wing okay so the short answer is you answer the question of profit is theft you answer the vilification of profit and the broader vilification capitalism by really in a meaningful way addressing the question of what is profit and illustrating it for them both in a tangible empirical way and I think through through a little bit of abstract reasoning I close this video with my usual warning what we describe as capitalism is not a system it's not a philosophy it's not an ideal it's just the way of getting things done that emerged air SATs piece-by-piece pell-mell ad hoc in an unplanned morass in an in a in a spontaneous way what we call capitalism now emerged from the demolition of feudalism in Europe that's all it is there are sets of standards and practices and expectations we have but capitalism just like say the Industrial Revolution the Industrial Revolution has no manifesto we can call it a revolution right you could talk about the capitalist revolution okay but it's completely false to look at say the English revolution the English Civil War as being for or about or establishing capitalism or even having an etiology or utopian plan for capitalism and many communists would deny this but it's just as false to talk about say the French Revolution or I would say the Indian independence struggle there are many many revolutions that you can say looking back at history established capitalism could look at Japan and going through its series of modernizing revolutions but they were not for capitalism because capitalism wasn't enunciated as an ideal or utopia to be attained it's just one emerge from the disintegration of the tearing down of feudalism in Europe