On Capitalism: Against "The Amazing Atheist".

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if you work at a coffee shop with say six other people then the profit generated by that shop needs to be split seven ways it may seem like a completely one-sided benefit to reduce the function of the coffee shop to redistributing the income to all the participants equally but there's something lost there and it's profoundly worth understanding whether you're left-wing or right-wing or indifferent whether you're christian or atheist it's worth really reflecting on this because it leads us to question in an even more meaningful way how can we help the poor the labels used to describe my beliefs do not in and of themselves encompass my beliefs i can tell you this though capitalism should perish from this earth it turns everything into a commodity this is a brief observation but i beg you to take it seriously if you are a left winger who is accustomed to pinning blame on capitalism this abstract concept when you do this pause and ask yourself how different would this particular problem be under feudalism under the system that existed before capitalism what was it what was it that was said just here capitalism turns everything into a commodity before capitalism was rice a commodity was gold what are we talking about what is it precisely that capitalism can be blamed for i also have my frustrations with this society i struggle with on a daily basis how terrible the education system is in canada i struggle with on a daily basis just the reality of living in a society that has massive levels of drug addiction all around me on the streets every day okay and yet i never let myself slip into that lazy habit of mine of pinning the blame on this abstraction capitalism oh oh was education better under feudals oh overly what so why is it capitalism oh gee were there no alcoholics were there no drug addicts of the drugs available in that day under fuels what really is the connection between the things we complain about and capitalism i'm not going to tell you that in all cases the left wing will be wrong or that no cases tj the amazing atheist would be wrong force yourself to think more deeply and to come up with complaints and allegations that are more precise because we've had more than a century of this kind of lazy blaming of capitalism and i'm tremendously frustrated that nobody is interested in identifying particular problems or working through particular solutions socialism to me is the idea that the value generated by your labor should belong to you not to your boss i read a quotation from confucius just recently this is confucius as he is remembered in the sunze there's nothing more contemptible nothing more pathetic than to neglect learning when you are a young man and then have nothing to teach others when you grow old now i know i know many of us are accustomed to regarding tj kirk the amazing atheist as if he's peter pan as if he is forever the teenager who started recording youtube videos in his parents garage when he was still in high school a lot of us hold him to these juvenile standards and i think one of the tragedies of social media success is that people tend to hold themselves to such low standards this is maybe stereotypically or more overtly true with good-looking females on the internet that they become successful and popular at an early age when they're good-looking and they just never really make the effort to develop themselves intellectually i think it happens just as often with men they maybe are just uh a little bit more evasive they're maybe a little bit better at wearing the mask of concealing how juvenile they've they've really remained would it be unreasonable for tj kirk the amazing atheist after all this time to look up the history and definition of the word socialism before making this video would it be unreasonable for him to even know the etymology the first coinage first usage and how the tournament changed over time maybe at this stage of his career having for decades lectured on politics on the internet having gone from being a young man to becoming an old man would it be unreasonable for us to look to him and really really expect him to have something much more meaningful to offer here now lee said that my video was the economics equivalent of creationism that me talking about economics is like some dumbass fundy [ __ ] uh talking about evolution because i don't really understand economics in fact i have such a poor understanding of economics that it can be compared to a creationist understanding of evolution that's how horrible my grasp of economics is and i've heard that sentiment echoed over and over and over again the amazing atheist has been both a positive and a negative influence on me in my channel if you look way back to the beginning of this channel there's one video that is discussing apotheosis the history of buddhism christianity comparative religion from an atheist perspective by the way i could have taken this whole channel in that direction of having a disembodied impersonal voice presenting you with text charts illustrations powerpoint presentations having kind of pseudo-academic objective style of presenting information on youtube and yes you know for better or for worse i looked at the kind of raw emotionally honest immediacy of what the amazing atheist was doing on youtube and i thought deeply about all of the disadvantages of giving a presentation at an academic conference writing a formal peer-reviewed paper you know even a footnoted essay you know within the university system i thought what is the point of reproducing all the disadvantages of that more academic approach here on the internet on this new thing on youtube i'm reaching out to an audience this way and i looked at people like tj kirk the amazing atheist i thought there's something they're doing right that the university system is doing wrong there's something there i can learn from and for that i am frankly forever grateful to the amazing atheist with that having been said if you're a regular viewer of my channel you will be aware that the question of what is socialism what is capitalism and what is feudalism what is another social system comes down to the question of ownership socialism is the doctrine the theory and the practice of public ownership of the means of production if you don't want to save the means of production which is dripping with marxist connotations you could just say stuff all right if the government now decides that in response to the challenges of global warming they're going to eliminate the free market they're going to eliminate capitalism from the generation of electricity that they're going to make all power plants government owned government operated right that would be the socialization of the generation of electricity there would be advantages and there would be disadvantages in the short term many people might applaud this effort right in the short term even it might mean better pay or wages for some of the lowest paid staff who are currently working at you know nuclear power plants coal burning power plants whatever type of power plants you got where it could improve workers there would be advantages in terms of the government being able to disregard what the whims of captains of industry corporate leaders and just command that part of the economy to transform itself from using one type of power generation to another and there are disadvantages over the long term one of the most important is the disappearance of innovation itself what you're going to have is a government department that operates the generation of electricity in much the same way that government departments operate the military and let me just note the military has its own healthcare sector the military has its own old folks homes retirement homes often enough you're going to find the military has day care centers you know for the children of people on active duty military has to generate electricity too right with the united states military you actually have a miniature socialist society or socialist economy existing within the united states of america if you want to get a good pragmatic sense of what the advantages and disadvantages living in a socialist economy are living in a command economy you can just stop and visit a military base it's very very rare to hear someone say to you i wish i hope when i get older that i'm going to be able to stay in the old folks home provided for veterans by the military it's very rare to hear someone say the best hospital the best doctors you can get in this town the military military base the military hospital right it's very rare to hear anyone say the best haircut they ever had in their life was at the barber shop on the military base it's very rare to hear anyone say that the food is any good on the military base all right socialism is not impossible it's not the bogeyman it's not something to be afraid of it's something we need to start thinking about in a much more nuanced way because people are presenting it as an incredibly simplistic solution to some incredibly complicated problems with terrible long-term implications i think in some instances it is fairly unambiguous if you work at a coffee shop with say six other people then the profit generated by that shop needs to be split seven ways broadly speaking in terms of both morality and aesthetics what i tend to have in common with left wingers is just a sincere concern for the plight of the poor even a kind of bias where i tend to judge how well society works in terms of how well it works for the poorest of the poor but there's nothing distinctively left-wing above us you can meet right-wingers you can meet conservative christians who have decades of experience doing charity work working with the homeless working with the poor working with the downtrodden oppressive society or helping people who've just gotten out of prison you can meet conservatives and right-wingers who actually share this kind of priority placed on the plight of the poor concern for how well society works for the poor and i i may not even have that in common with the majority of people on the left when i went to a country like thailand my whole concern my whole evaluation of thai society was how well is this country working for the poorest 10 percent and it would seem to me laughable it would seem to be ridiculous to say oh well the majority of people are happy here we're the wealthiest 10 of people are happy here and whether we're looking at communist china present day your 2020 or we're looking at vladimir putin's russia or if we're looking at the peculiar hybrid democracy of japan it just seems to me outrageously laughable to say how can you complain can't you see that the social system is working great for the people at the top can't you see that the wealthiest 10 and let's admit it the health care system you have in the united states of america it works really well for the wealthiest 10 percent i've seen estimates putting it up to like 70 like 70 of people in america are happy with their health care system and yeah that's a little bit shocking and a little bit hard to handle but then you have to challenge yourself you have to ask to what extent am i biased to what extent am i only considering the plight of the poor how well does america's education system work for anybody or everybody right again i'm biased i'm mostly thinking about the people who can't afford to pay tuition right and and really in our assessment and our evaluation we have to think also about how well it works or how poorly it works for those who can i knew a young man who was born a very poor family they were some combination of abusive alcoholic and religious maniacs i didn't press for details he finished high school he went straight into the workforce didn't go to college he got safety training that allowed him to get a job uh as a janitor on a military base and then he later he took that safety training and upgraded i think he he got a job working on the working on the floor of a sawmill all these jobs in canada it's like you have to be able to do cpr and respond this very short career he saved up his money and then he bought an airplane ticket to asia where i met him and he went from country to country living as an english teacher he started in india he went over land from india to china lived in each of these places sometimes for a year sometimes for a number of months he went down into laos and cambodia he got a girl pregnant in japan i recall yeah he promised he promised the girl he'd settle down with her but she just had to have an abortion this guy this guy saw the world he never owned a car all right everywhere he went he had no health care he paid in cash when i was with him i remember he had some health problems he was talking to doctors and everything was paid for in cash i think in most of these countries he never had a bank account you know living a very meager existence right i'm not going to claim to you that this is a normal or typical representative of how capitalism works but neither is the amazing atheist example of a set of employees at a coffee shop there is no typical example right we have to think about what's possible right what options people have that same young man could have buckled down and become a dentist and had a steady income for the rest of his life and instead what can i say he inherited the world right he saw the world he lived his english teacher he lived in this strange way he probably returned to canada with only a dime in his pocket and went back to working a similar job to what he had before right i know that people take this concept of economic freedom and risk and personal responsibility and they kind of weaponize it just to support donald trump to support whatever the political cause of the moment is right but it's actually really important that we think about this you know in a nuanced way there are thousands of nuances that we don't have the time to explore here the devil after all is in the details what if some workers are part-time and some are full uh full-time you know what if some employees have more highly specialized skills than others that they worked hard to acquire these questions and more need to be addressed in a way that can be generally perceived by all as equitable and is fair our analysis of these seven employees working together in a coffee shop can no more be scaled up to represent what's good for society as a whole than the analysis of this one young man who ran away to become an english teacher travel the world in southeast asia the analysis of the employees in the coffee shop is just as difficult to generalize about as the career of a successful stock broker a middle man whose whole life consists of buying high and selling low or conformist kid who just decides to buckle down and become a dentist so we can have that regular paycheck for the rest of his life one of my grandmothers was a dentist and hated it he did it every day resented it regretted it for the rest of her life wishing something more meaningful the rest of her life really even as an old woman after retirement she was bitter about it she felt she'd ruined her life by becoming a dentist you know she lived in a condo with a swimming pool she would have given it all up she would have rather lived a life like that reckless young man who ran away for real she said that all right the coffee shop who pays the rent have you ever taken one moment to look tj at just how expensive the rent is for a commercial space on the ground floor that can house a coffee shop who bought the equipment who paid for the renovations who put the sign up over the window have you ever stopped to look at how much that investment cost and how many years the coffee shop would have to be successful while paying everyone a fair wage to just save up the money to pay back that initial investment it is not possible to divide the earnings of the coffee shop seven ways it is also not possible to divide the risk seven ways because whoever put that money down whoever is paying thousands and thousands of dollars a month for the rent and the electricity and the water and whoever went into debt hundreds of thousands of dollars to do the initial renovation and buy the espresso machine and the furniture and deal with all the government paperwork by the way to whoever did all the licensing whoever invested in that job and is paying the taxes they're unbelievable in canada you would not believe how much property tax you you pay on a coffee shop looked to do at one point because you were thinking about opening up small vegan bakery it's mind-blowing okay whoever is paying all that money is genuinely genuinely taking the risk that they will never earn it back that they will themselves go bankrupt that they will not be able to pay back their creditors they are putting their neck on the line and you know what the other problem is looking to the future innovation right who who is going to save up money from the profit at that coffee shop to invest even in something as simple as advertising to invest in some new equipment for a new product right oh gee we make espresso we have a blender what if we get ice cream and we start making a milkshake with espresso and ice cream going into the blender oh and now that we have this new product maybe we have to pay to advertise it who is going to make that investment who's going to engage in that innovation who is going to take on that risk all right it may seem like um a completely one-sided benefit to reduce the function of the coffee shop to redistributing the income to all the participants equally but there's something lost there and it's profoundly worth understanding whether you're left-wing or right-wing or indifferent whether you're christian or atheist it's worth really reflecting on this because it leads us to question in an even more meaningful way how can we help the poor i think the most fundamental delusion tj has been burdened with since his teenage years is the idea that you help the poor by beating up on private enterprise by doing something to harm the profit-making part of the economy and the truth is you help the poor by actually helping the poor as much as i may despise right-wing christian conservatives i think that they have a very different sense of what progress means precisely because they have more hands-on experience with at least trying to get out and help the poor and let me ask at this point tj i made an earlier video talking about the fact that you are a fantastically wealthy individual youtube has certainly been very kind to you in this calculus system do you have any of that experience tj did you ever get interested in the reality of what it would be like in a hands-on way to try to build a better society in the simplest sense to get out and start helping the poor now do i believe that everyone in the society should be completely equal with equal access to all resources no i believe that all human beings are deserving of food clothing shelter health care basic necessities i think that beyond that a person's will use the word wealth for lack of a better word a person's wealth should be determined by the value that they create how that value is determined and who gets to determine it are valid questions now i want to talk about value if i could because i think that a lot of the problem that people have with the argument that i made has to do with value another major problem with the free market argument and this is the main one is that it ignores objective values let's say it's a locket and it is generally perceived by everyone to be worth about 30 dollars but it has immense subjective value to me because it used to belong to my father who is now passed away uh and i desperately want this locket and i would be willing to pay so much money for it is it fair for him to come and sell it to me for 200 because he knows he can get that out of me is it fair for him to exploit me is it fair for him to use my grief and my desire for this item in order to rip me off of my money so let's take that situation out of the microcosm and apply it to the macrocosm there is a huge population of people who all perceive uh some particular item as being worth a hundred dollars uh and there is a giant corporation who owns the rights to all of this item and they're willing to sell it to these people for 100 even though the objective value the baseline value is far less than that so if lee doran is an extortionist for ripping me off for a locket that had sentimental value to me then why is that giant corporation not an extortionist and not a defrauder by charging these people more for this item than it's objectively worth a person's wealth should be determined by the value that they create how that value is determined and who gets to determine it are valid questions however the general principle i believe is sound and that is why i call myself a leftist now you may choose to say that i am not a leftist i don't care my beliefs are the same regardless of the label being applied to them i'm not interested in being part of anyone's club i'm interested in advancing ideas that create a more just equitable and free society