Against the "Tax the Rich" & "Blame the Rich" Discourse.

it's easy
to blame the rich for everything that's wrong in your culture it's easy to blame the rich for everything that's wrong in your economy it's easy to blame because it seems like they are the people who have a choice whereas the vast majority of society in large part lives their life scrambling around from one ledge to the next clinging to the the cliff of downward mobility for dear life scrambling to survive from hand to mouth and it seems as if the rich whether or not they are making good use of their intellectual and political potential they are the ones who have the power to change the world not just to change their own lives but to change everyone else's lives as well it seems so easy to blame the rich for anything that's wrong but let me ask you something do you actually think our society would be better off without them however low however mean of you you have of the millionaires of this world now the united states of america is in a uniquely powerful position in terms of attracting and retaining a population of multi-millionaires if you think the world would be a better place if for example america kept raising its tax rates until they reached such a point that millionaires were fleeing the country to live elsewhere you might instead produce a situation more like what russia has today you will meet ethnically russian millionaires in athens greece you will meet russian millionaires in cyprus you will meet them in london england you will meet them in cambodia there's a remarkable pattern i'm not talking about i'm not talking about communism talk about russia as it exists today vladimir putin's russia where it seems like anybody who has enough money to get out flees just as soon as they can do you think russia is better off today because the most successful people and the wealthiest people all tend to flee and the people who don't run away the people who stay in russia who have millions of dollars a very large percentage of those people stay because their money their fortune their social status is somehow tied up with the political establishment within russia and that may or may not be black market that may or may not be mafia-like organized crime but they are the people who can't get out because they are too closely bound to you know the power structure that defines russian society guys if you're a multi-millionaire you know you can be an investor in the russian oil and gas industry without living in russia you can get yourself a passport on the island of malta you can get yourself a passport for cyprus you can get yourself a passport for canada london england phnom penh cambodia and you can you can continue to be a russian multi-millionaire deeply involved in the uh oil importing and exporting business any part of the russian company pardon me any part of the russian uh economy uh you prefer russia is an example of a country today that has a great deal of difficulty retaining its multi-millionaires retaining its investor and entrepreneur class and instead the ruling class that they do retain the people with money who stay in the country are culturally politically and ethically somewhat terrifying now situation is not yet that extreme in china but i have lived in many different parts of the world or i am surrounded by the multi-millionaires who are fleeing communist china i've mentioned this on my channel before so i'll just say very briefly we do have one book here dealing with it one of the problems broadly speaking with communist china over the last 30 years let's say um was that almost everybody who became wealthy to some extent participated in corruption and that corruption may have been acceptable in the government's eyes at that time like there were certain types of crimes where the government may be actively colluding with you the government may be encouraging you the whole crime may consist of government collusion but you could have gone through a period of time where people in the chinese government were warmly appreciative towards your way of doing business and your way of doing business with them and then you know 10 years go by and the people in charge and the communist party change obviously that can be at an elite level it can be at a local level you know etc etc and there's a new crackdown on corruption and that crackdown it may be sincere it may be sincerely trying to get rid of corrupt business practices banking practices corrupt collusion between industry government or it may be insincere in the sense that they are just eliminating people who are attached to the earlier regime and in order to have their places taken by people attached to the new regime so for example xi jinping begins his period in power he may want to sweep away people no matter how um earnestly communist uh no matter how corrupt or incorruptible he may want to sweep away people who were attached to the regime before him obviously this is just contrasting one communist regime to another but nevertheless they have their own cliques they have their own uh they have their own connections you know etc um i have seen whole communities of wealthy chinese flea in china in northern thailand i have seen them in laos third world country that has a land border with with china i have seen them in cambodia but the sheer scale of the chinese expatriate communities in this way the people who are fleeing china with money fleeing china with a huge percentage of china's wealth frankly the communities you see today in the suburbs of los angeles california the whole city of vancouver canada and indeed large parts of toronto the city i grew up in okay yeah yeah if you want to blame the rich for your problems it's understandable it's an impulse you know we could at least as children we could all relate to if you want to blame the rich for your problems please stop to consider what it would be like to live in a society where the rich are made uncomfortable and have every reason to flee where generation after generation people are becoming millionaires because it happens spontaneously for all kinds of reasons people people become millionaires but then as soon as they have money they leave your country behind you can never get them back would that be good for your country would that be zero now you have to think that through all the way to its utmost limit okay and by the way china is not the most extreme example okay russia under vladimir putin is not the most extreme example you can take a look at france during the french revolution okay you can take a look at haiti in the same period haitian revolution french revolution you can have societies where everybody with money packs up and leaves without exception leaving just us beggars behind and you can ask yourself how good or how bad that is for you personally how good or how bad that is for citizens there are drastic examples where everybody with any money whatsoever flees you know the rest of society more or less collapses it goes back to medieval uh quality of living because believe it or not rich people actually do provide they're they're an important part of our economy they're an important part of our society that we have an unequal society but it's not the case that rich people contribute nothing and poor people contribute everything rich people actually contribute a great deal to our society i know don't may sound ridiculous try to be making a case for let's appreciate the aristocrats let's appreciate what the aristocrats do for us [Music] so you can reason that all the way through to its extremes you can think about having a society that the rich run away from a society the rich are not comfortable living in or staying in for one reason or another okay and then you can think about the opposite extreme what about living in a country where seemingly all the government cares about all that the government ever does is pander to the rich is make their lives better where all of society just and you know the political elite you have whether it's called a democracy or not is basically a society governed by the rich and for the rich instead of by the people for the people right for a lot of you that kind of society is not very difficult to imagine and whether or not you feel you're living in a society like that right now you may have been on vacation visiting a society of that case where government is of the rich by the rich for the rich or it seems that everything the government does is really just concerned with making life better for a tiny elite that is at the pinnacle of society economically politically educationally so and so forth and there's there's very little concern for the suffering strife and fate of the poor let's say the poor 40 percent uh of society right yeah that's that's also bad that's also bad but i think there's not a lot of discourse about how it is we're supposed to have a society that in a productive way incorporates the rich and poor into one democracy into one republic rich people and poor people can't contribute to democracy in the same way and let's be fair even if on a chalkboard hypothetically even if they can contribute to society in the same way they don't all right rich people and poor people have something different to contribute to study but it is just as false and myopic and stupid to pretend that the rich have nothing good to contribute to our society as it is to pretend that the poor have nothing good and again some of you may have lived in a society like this some of you may have only read about it in uh you know fiction or you know historical novels from the past but you don't have to look too too far to find examples of people expressing the opinion that the poor don't know anything about politics they don't care anything about politics they really have nothing positive to contribute well we are living through a period of time where very understandably you know the main light motif coming out of the left i would say everything left of center you know it's it's a political culture that's really been redefined and cultivated by bernie sanders alexandria ocasio-cortez and a new generation of you know activists voters participants every every kind of person um people have really been conditioned to get into this mindset of blaming the rich vilifying the rich and and justifying their fantasies of how they're going to achieve a better society simply through this slogan tax the rich that they can massively increase taxes so hey guys um people from the audience are saying things uh i'm happy to answer questions from the audience i kind of am uh i kind of am replying to questions that were already asked in response to uh an earlier video i uploaded maybe about a week ago uh so i can just reply to that question and just speak on this topic that's the title of this video if you guys want to participate in the conversation you gotta you know you gotta say something relevant to the conversation so it's fine someone asked does eizel ever read the read the live chats or something yeah so you haven't watched many of my live streams i respond all the time sometimes people say really amusing really intelligent really interesting things but if you design completely irrelevant i'm unlikely to digress to deal with it because there's just no point so someone here in the audience uh comments they haven't seen my channel uh since my commentary on joe vegan from four years ago so yeah i hate to tell you but we've probably had more than four million views on this channel since that time we're well past five million views and creeping up towards six million views in total at this point so now i've been i've been broadcasting almost daily or something once every couple days i've been i've been uploading and uh i don't know i've learned a lot my audience has learned a lot we've had a lot of fun we've shared our sorrows and we've shared our joys over the last four years what can i tell you so yeah i'm happy to see you here but yeah oh someone else says just checking in you're a legend isil okay great oh good we have some right wingers in the in the crowd too okay you can decide for yourself uh by the end of this video how uh how left-wing or how right-wing i may be or to what extent i'm an unholy uh conglomeration of of of irreconcilable contrary bits and pieces of of the left and right ends of the political chair by the way melissa is here off camera melissa if you want to if you want to ask a question i mean i think i think broadly speaking you're familiar with the topic i'm going to speak on here but you also feel free to derail um oh well yeah yeah yeah so someone's writing in saying that he's a a house cleaner and a chef in spain and his his whole life revolves around caring for the rich you know what i mean catering to the rich literally and figuratively and you know he feels this tension very much that the pay is very is very poor well look you know my my heart goes out to you and you know he says otherwise he has he has no job okay but within the terms of this video i can give you a very simple question would you rather work for poor people like it's so easy to think it's so easy for us to convince ourselves to think that being rich is a vice that being rich in and of itself is a moral failing well if you were doing this kind of job being a housekeeper a cleaner and a chef if you were doing it for poor people would they pay you more would they treat you better would they be more polite would they be more caring you know what i mean no you know i'm not i'm not i'm not insisting that your life would be worse if you only had poor clients but yeah yes no i completely understand the situation um you know many years ago so what 20 years ago more when i was a yout much younger man i was teaching english as a second language and i only wanted to help poor people you know i had this very castigating attitude and it's understandable i could i could humanize it a bit but it's like look i've i've crossed the ocean i've flown away to these exotic places thailand laos cambodia you know and why would i want to spend my time helping the people who least need the help and the people who are already the most westernized and the most highly educated like i want to get out here i want to have some kind of charitable and educational role in relation to the poor and the downtrodden that's what i was there for now there were other reasons for that too uh culturally what i wanted to learn and what i want to expose to i wanted to live amongst the poor and getting my hands dirty and so on there were different reasons but obviously you know this is even though well-intentioned this is obviously incredibly naive in in many ways uh you know who can afford to pay someone to teach them english you know they're two types of people either you're going to work with the wealthy or you're going to work with people of some kind of institution supporting them so normally in some other country i might mention the military like people who are learning the language because they're part of a military training program or some kind of government training program of this but where i was the other the other real source of patronage for education was the church right so i was offered a job i refused it i was offered a job to be an english teacher for the catholic church i i needed the money too i was i was poor i was poor and desperate and i didn't know i was going to earn my next wedding and i remember just saying the guy look you know i'm i don't know what you think of me how can i possibly you know it's like do you think i came here to participate in like the cultural genocide against these people and the destruction of their you know language and history and culture and religion like do you think i came here to help the catholic church destroy countries like laos and cambodia and the only redeeming things about them you know what i mean so you know that's like what you know what am i supposed to say um yeah so look life involves these hard choices and you know obviously we're not gonna get into just uh we're not gonna get into just providing this guy with advice for what he can do in his particular situation although i i sympathize you know it's it's very easy to feel oh well my life is bad because i work for rich people as if that meant your life would be better if you worked for the poor so part of this guy's job is being a chef so i assume this is that role this is quite popular in california where wealthy people pay a chef to come into their kitchen bringing all the materials and then to cook a series of meals that go into the fridge and that they eat themselves like they don't eat not to serve like a restaurant necessarily maybe they set out one one meal on the table but there's some you know they do quite a bit of cooking for a couple of hours on one day and then leave and then kind of stocked up the fridge with a bunch of healthy meals so in california specifically that's that's become popular so instead you know it's a visiting chef not a live-in chef they give this guy the keys to their house they trust him enough to come in and do this so you can imagine especially with uh wealthy uh elderly people or or something all kinds of people now pay for this this kind of service well you know i mean again it's easy when you're living with that and all the tensions and you know the relationship between you and your clients it'd be easy to think oh well what's wrong with these people is that they're rich they have bad attitudes and they're exploiting me and and and and so on and so forth well you know do you want to provide food for the poor and you you have a job no you know do you think the poor are such angels you know whether you do it on a humanitarian basis like an actual charity providing food for the poor or you try to do it on a for-profit break-even basis you're trying to compete with uh mcdonald's providing food for the poor okay okay you know you you think that's better you know and then you get to you get to have the same tensions you get to experience you know in the same sense of being exploited uh by people who themselves may resent that they feel exploited you know silica i just say it's it's very easy to slip into a mindset of uh polarizing the issue and blaming one side of the other and treating wealth as if it's an intrinsic character trait as if it's a foreign people you know i you know again i kind of sympathize with all sides um you know i just mentioned i think my first job one of my first jobs i did i did actually have a couple jobs with us but one of my first jobs in life was working at a starbucks in a wealthy neighborhood and so this this particular starbucks the only customers who came in who were not wealthy were construction workers which we got quite a lot of so guys working construction then those guys they were poor and they had dropped at a high school they had very low levels of literacy and education and you know so i just say this you really felt this on the job so i dealt with rich people i dealt with extremely rich people and then you dealt with these construction workers um you know and of course you do that kind of job you get to learn all the ways in which kind of rich people are horrible clients to have whatever okay would you rather would you rather work in a coffee shop where it's all construction workers where it's all poor people there's all people with no no education you know i just say it's very easy to very easy to get uh to get them intelligent okay i got some other interesting questions here and i'll come back to them i see your questions but i'll i want to get back to the title of this video then we'll turn to chit chatting with you guys in the audience okay so look um if you are rich or if you place yourself hypothetically in the position of a rich person you think through what your life would be like if you were rich one of the most fundamental things about rich people is that they can live anywhere in the world okay if taxes in the united states are just one percent higher than for a rich person to relocate to barbados for a rich person to relocate to the south of france for the rich person to relocate to thailand for a rich person to relocate to switzerland luxembourg monaco okay one percent may not be decisive it may not matter if they are just making that decision for themselves okay what about when it's five percent what about when it's 15 what about when it's 20 all right you can only push it so far because the rich have feet and they have the means to buy themselves an airplane ticket and to relocate anywhere else in the world now this may seem obvious within the hot house of left-of-center political views apparently it's not obvious to anyone at all the blame the rich punish the rich tanks the rich discourse seems to be premised on the assumption that you can impose punitively high taxes on the rich forever and that they won't fight back or they won't just flee they won't just get up and leave in response to unjust taxation now that phrase unjust taxation if you're an american it might bring back memories of grade six for you didn't we didn't we learned some chapter of history some huge momentous political event that was 100 percent motivated by this this concept of of unjust taxation oh right the american revolution oh oh right right an incredibly trivial tax on tea tea imported at boston the boston tea party an incredibly trivial tax on t they had it taxed on the rope used to make uh the rigging for sailing ships incredibly reasonable incredibly low taxes imposed by the british empire taxes that were much lower than the taxes the american government imposed upon itself were imposed upon its own people after the revolution had been completed yes that's a real fact yes i've really done the research yes recently yes it's fresh in my mind yes it's discussed in my book no more manifestos soon to be published on uh kindle soon published on amazon's website anyway okay yeah so i've read about that stuff recently you know um in response to really incredibly slight incredibly reasonable taxation imposed by the british empire and taxation that the americans received tremendous benefits in exchange for like they were being taxed but they were receiving the protection of the british navy the british army and so on and so forth that was enough to foment one of the most decisive and influential political events in the history of the world so if you think unjust taxation doesn't matter i wonder what page of introduction to american history you're now on because historically it has mattered tremendously if you are taxing people so sorry come back to my original point if you're taxing someone just one percent or two percent more than b they'd be taxed elsewhere that may not be decisive for them making it on their decision as an individual right once it's five percent 10 20 all of a sudden relocating to the south of france seems more and more interesting and rich people have their choice of living absolutely anywhere in the world okay they can get a new passport they can become they can become a permanent resident they can move their money they can move the west but here's the other thing most rich people are not just making a decision for themselves only they're making a decision for a large number of other people now the easiest example is if somebody owns a factory but even if they just own an office they just have an office of people taking care of their wealth and taking care of their investments if they are relocating themselves and they're relocating their employees then actually the way all of those taxes they impact their extended family they impact how much wealth their children and grandchildren are going to inherit the way it impacts all their employees the way it impacts their business not just looking at themselves only you may be surprised to find that just a 1 2 5 difference that can be decisive and the american public should be familiar with this because practically every business that could get out of the united states of america and relocate to mexico already has done so and the horizons now go much much further than mexico american businessmen american multi-millionaires can relocate anywhere in the world at any time most american millionaires are really quite emotionally attached to living in the united states of america frankly i think it's because they like participating in american democracy the main thing they would leave by becoming an expatriate partner the main thing they would lose by becoming an expatriate the main thing they would lose in their lives is that they would then have to lobby government as a foreigner and many of them are i think quite sentimentally attached to lobbying government as an american citizen and uh and participating that way in this respect america has an advantage over many other countries i tell you where i live canada anyone with money anyone with ambition anyone with success leaves immediately and one of the main places they leave for is precisely to depart and relocate permanently to the united states of america okay guys gonna turn uh gonna turn to the comments uh again and i'll return to the top of the video you want to see that gentlemen sure do you remember that documentary that we watched about the extremely wealthy family in uh florida i think yeah i think it was had versailles yes yes the title is just the queen of versailles yes yeah yeah i thought that was an interesting look into an actual and actually wealthy family seeing the dynamics and also getting back to the person who was writing into you who works for a wealthy you know it was kind of sad like she was separated from her own children and she was raising these wealthy children yeah in this excessive disgusting household yeah cut to the chase but yeah um so yeah i mean it's it's uh but would she rather be working for a poor person yes yes and look so you know i have a lot of complaints about my own childhood uh melissa was mentioning a film that we saw it's a documentary film you can still see it quite easily if you just google it it's called the queen of versailles but it is not about versailles france it is about a family of multi-millionaires living in southern florida and but one of the interesting things with the film is it shows their relationship with their filipina nannies so these are poor people from the philippines employed to live and work in their own house so there are many interesting things with the film it's not the only interesting thing but that's that's one aspect of it um and melissa has raised the question well if you think this is bad if you think being a servant for rich people is bad would it be better to be a servant for for poor people so look my own family was in that position so when i was a kid to be blunt my family was poor and they got money kind of year by year as i was growing up now i just this is just full disclosure one of the main reasons my family was poor is that my father had nine children okay so like in terms of the actual amount he was earning probably like if you had only two kids i presume we wouldn't have ever been poor at all when you had nine children i'm the youngest right so he was paying for older kids to be going to college when i was a child you know i mean he was paying all this child support and university tuition and these things for those of the kids so the the poverty is partly kind of contrived but in case i can remember where my parents and they employed a filipina nanny you know and philippine and annie came to live in our horrible windowless basement you know sorry i could talk about the house i lived in but you know we were not rich people we did not have a mansion uh it wasn't even a standalone house it was one of those houses where multiple families you know have multiple doors in the building you know what i'm i'm wrong sorry i was remembering it as if it was attached to the house next door but actually actually i think they were freezing there were just two houses that were close to each other sorry this is distant childhood memory now that i think about it no anyway um not sure i'm not sure if it was attached uh funny what you remember what you don't uh in any case um you know sure we were in the position absurdly of being a family that wasn't wealthy and we they really didn't have the money for it but my parents didn't want to raise me that's the reality but they were absentee parents they had no positive interest in knowing engagement with raising their kids and in my father's case the fact that he had seven other kids before me makes that less surprising when you're talking about kid number eight and number nine my mother does not have this excuse um because that was only her second child and so on but no i've i've seen the the reality of that and yeah i just i think that's a classical example of what's called a false dichotomy where you you see one thing as bad and then kind of assume the opposite would be good if you think the problem here is being employed by wealthy people take a minute to think about what it's like having the same scenario but you're you're employed by poor people or just not wealthy people or what have you yeah um okay sure i'm happy to talk about it any which way but yeah it's just further expanding on this this question from the audience uh turn vol from the audience turnbull is a long time viewer and uh i do not know why it has a lock icon next to his comment i wonder if that's because i don't know i just wonder if that's that other people can't see his comment or something i've never seen that before a little block icon next to that comment in the live stream anyway uh he asks quote why do you think the introvert equals shyness video became so heavily downvoted he suggests i think your meaning of the word diverged too much from the common consensus so turn off i think that's a very simple question answer it is something like um astrological signs in our culture people make up these identities the same way they think of themselves as an aries or a virgo or a some other astrological like cancer or a capricorn i'm gonna sneeze and then this identity they've adopted becomes an excuse for their their bad behaviors their sins of omission and sins of commission you know people cheat on their boyfriends and attribute it to the fact that they're a capricorn aries or something or that their boyfriend is a capricorn aries um in the same way you know this is a identity of convenience for people and people are very very uncomfortable to have it challenged uh morally and even just pragmatically you know uh what does it really mean that you live with this excuse that you live with this uh invented identity you know so another comment on that uh fchtvh says quote i thought he was spot on with the introvert video some people don't like hearing reality well my hope for that video is that over the years to come gradually it'll it'll build up uh it'll build up thousands of views you know that every so often people are gonna search for that or will share the link with a friend and say look look bro if you have a friend who's been making the excuse that they're an introvert look bro i think you should really hear this you know i think you think you have this uh you think you have this uh you know this condition that justifies all your uh all your worst character draws or even just justifies your laziness not to mention your character flaws and so on your lack of ambition well you should think about it from a uh from from another perspective so by the way the the guy who wrote in a man or woman i don't actually know but anyway the person who wrote in confirms melissa that this is relevant to his or her situation they are actually raising two kids that are not theirs he's paid paid to raise children also wow gee you're great off off topic questions quote how do you know the difference between a good translation of xenophon and aristotle from a bad translation without doing greek great question slightly off topic for this video anyway so it's a it's a female viewers writing in a better better situation okay um where were we uh look one of the things i dislike most about this tax tax the rich uh punish the rich discourse is um it's being proposed as if it hasn't already been done and as if the united states hasn't already come up to its maximum limit of what's possible this way so let's just put this in a kind of comparative perspective you guys may or may not have heard about the rise and fall of this so-called uh new oh jesus christ now i'm going to forgive him new monetary theory mmt that's it mmt uh so-called modern monetary theory i'll just put that if you guys want to google it i do have videos already about this and it's [ __ ] and i've made youtube videos about it in the past but in case you guys know what i'm talking about so the appeal of modern monetary theory is simply to argue that the government united states of america could spend far more money could go far deeper into debt and then could accomplish wonderful things like let's just say building universities just to give an example build a whole bunch of new uh educational institutions now one of the telltale signs that this is [ __ ] is that they never calibrate this with real world examples i think we have someone in the audience from brazil welcome so nobody ever says shout out to my brazilian viewers uh oh well you know america could go so deep into debt and print so much more money that they can then have their currency collapse and devastate the economy for like 20 years the way brazil now that's true in terms of both economic theory and yes america could do that it would be a very very bad idea for you know the federal sector to overspend and bring on the kind of crisis that that brazil endured now decades ago and they had to dig themselves out of and they had to issue a whole new currency and all these terrible things happened and it created massive levels of criminal and black market activity through the whole economy because the listed economy collapsed blah blah blah it held back brazil's economic development for for something like 20 years it's a huge disaster oh right so we could then calibrate how much debt and deficit the american government is coping with and then we could compare it to brazil and then we could kind of calibrate when are we coming up to the limit we're spending so much money the government's spending so much money that it can't spend anymore without disaster and so you know you never hear proponents of the government spending more money who say calibrate america compared to japan it's a great comparison a japan is a tremendously productive economy i mean the strength of japanese exports and manufacturing and even their investment sector you know there are a lot of ways in which japan has a quality of university education and so on and so forth incredible impressive advanced economy but guess what japan's single biggest political problem now and for at least 20 years has been government debt that the government spent too much money and they're mired in an endless cycle of debt and deficit that they can't dig their way out of and it massively limits what they can do economically and politically they really have terrible terrible problems so you never hear an advocate of government spending more money whether under the mmt heading or just under the bernie sanders aoc saying oh well we can spend twice as much money and then be in a situation even worse than japan within 10 years where you know then then we have like 20 years 30 years 50 years of being stuck in this kind of perpetual you know crisis now how about greece does anyone else remember the greek debt crisis how about spain like you know this is this is not ancient history most of us have some memory you know of of these kinds of crises you will never see these claims calibrated and expressed in relative terms looking at what other countries now are doing in terms of government spending debt and deficit nor in terms of historical examples where it reached its limit or went too far and started having really negative consequences now this this whole discourse about blame the rich punish the rich tax the rich it's the same pattern right it's the same pattern of self-serving reasoning where people don't want to be honest about it like oh okay you know hypothetically there may be some country somewhere in the world let's say monaco where monaco really could be taxing rich people more than they are i think another example would be luxembourg luxembourg generally holds the record for being the wealthiest society in the world partly because they have the least poverty another example might be singapore you could try to put together a case where you say look in some of these countries rich people are just not being taxed enough like there's a lot of money just going to waste because the taxes are too damn low on rich people there is no effort made whatsoever to try to argue that this is currently the problem in the united states of america the taxes are just too late there's just a massive amount of potential uh in tax revenue that's going to waste because the rich you know income tax wealth tax nurse that it's just dramatically lower than other you know modern western democracies and then again you know even if you're going to make that claim you're going to make that argument so look because fair enough you can see look there's a little bit of wiggle room you know we could raise taxes a little bit and be okay why aren't you honest about just how little that is before you got into the situation where you are taxing rich people enough to get them to relocate elsewhere again this is not the only type of blowback you're gonna get it's not the only type of negative side effect you're going to get from raising taxes on the rich but where either individual multi-millionaires start fleeing your country or they start relocating their businesses they start relocating their their investment concerns now again it's very easy to blame the rich for everything that's wrong with your country right so melissa is from the greater detroit area detroit michigan you can stand around and look at michigan it's true of all mission okay let's just say detroit you can stand around and look at detroit and say wow this town is a disaster this town is a ruin this is an economic failure and this is a political failure you can say you know whose fault it is rich people it's the fault of the multi-millionaires now when you say that what really is your assumption your assumption is that you live in a country that's closer to aristocracy than democracy that it's rich people that control the government that has rich people who make the influential decisions that government is of the rich by the rich for the rich okay well you know interesting theory and like i would understand anyone would kind of relate to that response just because in the united states of america so many political decisions are made by lawyers the government is to such a large extent comprised of people who went to law school and became lawyers almost all lawyers either are born rich or become rich before they start becoming powerful people government it's very easy to see the government as a conspiracy of the rich against the poor okay and it's very easy to see the incompetence of government or the bad decisions made by government as being the fault of the rich being engaged in a kind of war against the poor and you know what detroit is a really great example because if you start doing the research if you start reading the history to destroy if you just look at a list of who was the mayor of detroit when these decisions were made there's actually a really strong argument that the problems with detroit are because of the poor all right it was because of populist political leaders predominantly african-american political leaders who were not born rich who were not the stereotypical you know white multi-millionaire elite leader of of government you had a series of of mayors including uh kwame kilpatrick you know most notoriously you know the the so-called hip-hop mayor of detroit who's the guy yes sir what was your name coleman coleman that's right that's why it's hard for me to remember sorry so the the other really important mayor for many many years was coleman young so coleman young was a black and in his youth black socialist he was a in his youth he was far left as he got older he became more of a mainstream leftist center politician like you can't really look at what's wrong with detroit without looking at what's wrong with coleman young and kwame kilpatrick and all the people who supported them and you know what detroit huh you know actually a lot of power has been in the hands of poor people and demagogues you know democratic political leaders who were put into power because of support and you know what the poor people [ __ ] up the poor people [ __ ] up detroit and you know what you know rich people have a lot of drug problems i've i've known rich people a significant percentage of rich people are drug addicts but you know when you when you look around detroit you look at who is it that's dealing these drugs who is it that's getting addicted to these drugs and and committing crimes and making the city so you know you know what it's it's not the rich people at all i'm sorry i'm starting to feel like what's wrong with detroit has a lot to do with poor people i'm using just these couple of examples you know i'm only half joking but it's half very serious politically you know it's half joking upstairs but you know it's just as stupid to blame the poor as to blame the rich what is society like what is a politic you know it's how the rich and the poor live together it's how they work together it's how they participate to form one democracy one republic or if you have a monarchy how the rich and the poor live together work together to form one monarchy even yeah right no so that's hashtag spoilers right so you know whatever the decade was when you were in detroit whether you were in detroit in the 1950s 1960s 1970s 1990s if you really thought that what's wrong with detroit you're like you know what this town is going to crap it's getting worse and worse and people were already saying that in 1950s interesting that discourse was already there in the 1950s 1970s 80s you know what this town is being driven into the ground everything's getting worse and worse you know what the problem is it's those pesky rich people the problem is the millionaires they're running this town of the ground well you got your wish you got your dream because the millionaires left all the rich people left in the end virtually every wealthy person ran away from detroit some of them just went to new york city or chicago or los angeles some of them probably moved to other countries but guess what you got to experience the presumed utopia of what happens when all the rich people abandon a city they decide they don't want their kids to go to school there so on and so forth and then of course the economy and just general sense of hope and hopelessness in detroit utterly collapsed everything god got far worse i mean you feel me but yeah you you anticipated when i was uh for sure no no it only adds it only adds every second but yeah that's right um anyway so guys just just to restate the point i was making about mmt uh modern monetary theory you know it really is important that people make these claims in an absolute sense so this is a bit of a 19th century philosophical uh sense of the term absolute the point is that uh that it's not relative to things in the real world you know all kinds of things are like that you know like a lot of people grow up being told that they're beautiful and that they're talented and they think of these things absolutely you know i really caution parents against this and i don't ever talk this way to my own daughter you know i don't tell my own daughter that she is some uniquely talented uniquely beautiful person what i tell my daughter again and again is not that you're special and you're different from other children i tell her you're the same as other children you know yes you know like like if she sings i say you know you you sing well just like other children your own age if you want to be really good at singing you have to work hard and practice for years just like all the other children and when you meet other children who can sing better than you that's because they for several years of practicing we have that kind of dynamic where you're not talking about uniqueness and specials my point is it's very easy for people to think of these kinds of adjectives as an absolute value as if some people are beautiful and some people are not some people are talented and some people are not some people are special and some people are not people tend to think of this in a self-serving way sometimes in a self-hating way but it's like oh okay yeah well you know maybe you grew up in saskatchewan and people always told you you were beautiful and you were talented or maybe they also told you you were funny you know okay and then you move to los angeles and you start going to auditions and guess what how beautiful you are is relative it's relative to competition to other things you compete with how talented you are as well okay my point is in a in a much more subtle way that we're unaware of we can think about wealth and poverty advantages and disadvantages government spending you know the limits of government different kinds of government policies without calibrating them you know and i i admit it's very hard to visualize amounts of money when they're in the billions and the trillions you know now one of the stupidest things bernie sanders has done is that he has encouraged americans to think that the solution to their education problem is just to have the government enable people going into much more debt pardon me so you have a country where the system of education is bad and the discourse now which is partly bernie sanders himself and it's partly his successors the new generation of politicians who had their expectations and frame of reference modified and normalized by bernie sanders so it's partly his fault it's partly all the people who've come in after him to fill the the power vacuum you have a system of education that's bad and the response is not to say we'll make it better and the response is not to say we'll make it cheaper the response from the democrat party in the united states of america in 2021 say we will help you go into more debt to pay for that you know we'll reduce or eliminate interest payments on the debt we'll let you go down now this is this is a remarkably strong recurring pattern in american politics okay so so you have a health care system that's bad everyone can admit this okay it's bad especially if you're poor in the united states america if you're in the richest 10 20 even 30 percent of americans probably your health care is pretty good okay you have your healthcare system that doesn't work very well for 60 of the population at least oh okay okay so it's bad okay you don't want to make it better you don't want to make it cheaper you want to enable americans to go into more debt and also to have more insurance okay improving the insurance system is not improving the health care system like are you [ __ ] stupid like what you can't see the difference between health insurance and health you know what you can't say there was being health insurance and the actual hospital or the actual retirement home like what the actual you know education system that produces doctors and nurses like no like that's just mind-blowing to me but these these things they you know the the people become so accustomed to them they cease to question them if they ever did right and in this same way these things are not calibrated so again one of the one of the very few ways that the left wing talks about improving health care i criticized bernie sanders this already in a separate video is paying doctors a lower salary okay so united states of america in order to become a medical doctor it is quite likely you spent 100 000 per year on university costs so university tuition plus cost of living it's quite likely you you you may even have half a million dollars in debt to become a dollar half a million dollars in total cost you could be 500 000 now there are some exceptions okay you met some honest poor hard-working doctor who managed to go all through community colleges took the cheapest possible route to the greatest that okay you know but you know whether they were paying fifty thousand dollars a year or hundred thousand dollars a year huge investment huge amount of debt huge amount of risk they become medical doctors then you elect bernie sanders or alexandria cortez says hey we're going to pay all of you medical doctors half as much they can go to barbados they can go to the south of france they can go to russia they can go anywhere okay there are a lot of places around the world that would be happy to have american educated doctors they can go to dubai okay they can get up and leave and they will and this gets talked about in the left with no sense of calibration there's no sense of how much less do you think you can pay medical doctors that they're being you know how much more do you think government can subsidize that how much more can government spend how much more can government tax the rich right because as soon as we get into calibrating the claim as soon as we start explaining it in relative terms instead of absolute terms it's revealed what [ __ ] it is and it won't solve any of our problems right so again if you just say tax the rich that's an absolute claim right if you say i think we can raise taxes on the rich by two percent you know i think we can raise taxes on the rich so that they are comparable to what's currently being paid in the south of france and you can figure out exactly how much of a difference that is like it's probably in some states it's going to be a little bit higher and some might be a little bit lower looking look at all the details you you could you could just openly say we want to frankify the tax system we want to catch up with france in terms of levels of taxation you know okay but then people are going to be able to actually crunch the numbers they're going to be able to see how small and reasonable how little difference this claim is going to make whereas when you make absolute claims bernie sanders okay so currently it's alexandria cosa cortez who has this the slogan tax the ranch okay bernie sanders defund the military right he was going to reduce the military budget by hundreds of billions of dollars per year allegedly right that was his that was wrong okay again you do you want to actually work with the deals you want to state this as an absolute all of america in 2020 quote unquote defund the police it's an absolute claim right you don't say oh we want our police system to be more like what they already have in switzerland or denmark or something or oh we think we should be more like singapore or japan no no we think funding the police the model for funding the police should be more like japan no no these are made as absolute dogmatic ethical claims and they lead people to have a fundamentally surreal view of economics so guys i'm going to answer your questions going to read your questions just one second but just to restate something from an earlier video i had someone writing into me to ask why given that i sympathize with the left wing and many of their kind of values and goals given that for example i like gay people i support gay rights or any number of miscellaneous things given that i'm concerned about the quality of education the poor have i'm kind of a pro poor person etc etc given that i have various things in common with the left wing why would i make a video saying that the left wing is lying about economics that the left wing is lying about poverty in america that the left wing is lying about wage growth that the left-wing uh economic and political agenda is based on lies and my answer to that question was the question that came in from the audience was i'm saying they're lying about economics because they're lying about economics and i have proven that i've made videos where we put up the charts and we talk it through step by step all right even if i sympathize with some kind of social or cultural value you've got like i'm an atheist it'd be very hard for me to be a member of the republican party which is dominated by conservative christians all right i could move to utah and it's dominated by mormons it's you know yeah culturally ethically i'm going to have more in common with people in the far left just because i'm an atheist for no other reason i'm an atheist and i like gay people i like gay rights you know whatever things are coming but even if i sympathize with some of the goals you're pursuing like i think we should have a better education system i think we should have a better health care system right i am not willing to conflate fact and fiction i am not willing to conflate myth with math you know i'm not willing to live a lie that's part of why i reject religion right i'm not willing to let politics if you like slip into the domain of religion where we're all demanding that one another believe in things we know are not true for the quote-unquote greater good of our political movement i think that's a tremendously dangerous tendency which is very much alive and well now in this unique transitional period when we're moving from the bernie sanders paradigm to whatever it is that comes next whatever it is that replaces it nobody knows that okay so babe you can jump i'm going to read the comments if you want to jump in go go but explaining economics and understanding economics is a lot easier to just say these very broad uh catchphrases exactly the right people are getting poorer the better you're getting right this is a catchy slogan right has become popular but it's not true right so yeah i i'm with you like i'm in the same frame as you but the masses don't want to understand economics okay okay so totally good point uh raised by melissa but you know um [Music] you know whether you're talking about the rich or the poor you know do the masses want to be involved in politics at all yeah yeah yeah i know i know all the politics yeah i know i know yeah so you know i i just say i think that's the most the most fundamental evil people want to believe in their own moral superiority over others you know but there's i mean rich people are people they're just people too rich people are not inherently more interested in politics and poor people you hang around some rich people and you'll you'll find out you know what i mean but uh yeah okay so by the way this comes back to some fundamentals uh yes so interesting going shout out to dj jens dj jen has been watching the channel for years and has been promoting the channel here so thanks sir thanks for sticking with me uh jens um the name is probably known as jens isn't it i'm pronouncing it jen's but it'll be jens uh anyway dj against um he says you know people like bernie sanders telling these lies about how the poor are getting poor they are basically disregarding the victories of the left in the past which has always felt kind of strange to me close quote yeah yeah that is also that is also a strange one of it but i mean jens you don't live in the united states of america that's even more true with the race-baiting that the left does they want to talk about the status of black people in america as if it still was as bad as it was in the 1950s or 1940s where you know the fundamental victories in improving the status of african-americans in our society where those are kind of disregarded in the same way so yeah there's a sort of strange radicalizing tendency as you see to disregard the victories of the left to try to make it you know there's more to fight for more more to win and more i'll lose uh natasha says quote taking all the money of the richest americans won't put a drop in the bucket of national debt so natasha that's where you're wrong so i could have said this before i was talking about mmt and so on uh the reality is that the government just needs to have enough money coming in to service the debt and keep the annual deficit manageable as over the long term inflation erodes the the debt away the national debt away so that that kind of equilibrium point or that kind of uh sustainability point be a good way to put that is that is that is attainable and it's you know the amount of money the government is spending versus the amount of tax come in that's not an impossible or unattainable goal and i mean very briefly you know bill clinton achieved it bill clinton was not a genius you know bill bill clinton did incredibly briefly uh balance the budget unfortunately he also set up what are called entitlements that made it completely inevitable that that that economic balance wouldn't last but no it's i just say it is it is attainable um for the united states of america and america has a tremendously powerful economy canada does not you know i'm not optimistic about canada that way at all um but the united states of america is still in a very very powerful position economically they can uh dig their way out of you know the the situation they're in and by the way i remember the last time i really crunched the numbers uh was when donald trump was making his tax reforms was lowering taxes and you know a lot of people on the left said like oh this is the end of america this will destroy the country and i remember writing the numbers and even though donald trump's tax reforms they were bad um you could see it still wasn't that bad it wasn't this wasn't gonna end uh the history of the union or something you know um oh so ron sims mentions that uh his own father was a former general motors worker in the detroit area so his family also is part of this remarkable transformation and devastation of the the detroit area great question unrelated uh so eugene casales perhaps you pronounce the name eugene uh eugene asks quote do you think it would be better for geopolitics long term if we had a global democracy i.e a bigger united nations will we vote in representatives in a sort of worldwide confederation so eugene that's the great question and my honest answer is no and i'll tell you why i don't think this connects the topic of this video but if it does we'll come up with a way to connect it um maybe you know look you know anyone who's seriously interested in the politics of california and even the economics of california will very soon come to the conclusion that part of california's problem is that it is too big too many people too much land is just it's not the right size demographically or geographically to be governed well now you could make the opposite argument for some of the really tiny states in the united states america look at delaware and say delaware is too small it's possible but within canada we have a very very small principality called prince edward island very small province within the union you can make the argument look this doesn't really work in terms of the democracy can be too small but for the most part what we're dealing with in these situations is democracy that is too big so i am both pragmatically and morally opposed to for example the current european union now if you look at the map of europe it's very easy to maybe draw a circle around four countries here or there i mean depending on where on the map you are it's okay this group of countries they could cluster together and have some kind of european union-like relationship that could become one country and that would work but uh to have one you know form a very indirect democracy for the whole of the european union uh to me this is a kind of flagrant disaster or flagrant failure and really a misunderstanding of what democracy is and how it works now i have to add to this so so i'm a skeptic in this sense in the old days people don't say this anymore um there used to be a political movement called the smallest beautiful movement i don't even know that's really pre-internet but small is beautiful it's an example of a political movement that's completely self-explanatory now i i am not i'm not a member of the smallest beautiful movement um my position is a much more skeptical statement that something can be too small and it can be uh too big i do think for example you can have a democracy that has 100 million people that's that's big you know i think it's possible it's not easy but you know the difference between having a country with 5 million people 10 million people 30 million people 100 million people this really matters i would not say the ideal size for a country is 100 million people i'm not i'm just saying i think it's possible um okay you know how optimistic are you eugene about the future of india what do you think about the quality of government or democracy in india it's more than one billion people with one system of democracy okay i've you know look at what india is today and now think about the future of the european union you know think about quote-unquote democracy on this scale and this you know india is 100 the british parliamentary system a very indirect democracy this is not greco-roman democracy this is not athenian democracy it never has been now of course india is one example another one is communist china one billion people more than one billion people in both cases and their idea of democracy is even more indirect shall we say it is you know china's claims to being a democracy at all are are frankly laughable you know so no and now what you are proposing eugene is to combine china and india and saudi arabia in one even larger democracy this is a this is a look it's a bad idea partly because the critique of already advanced which isn't really small is beautiful it's really medium sized is beautiful then we can talk a lot about what what size medium is but the other one of course is language you know it's so fundamental and nobody wants to talk about this the only people who want to talk about nationalism or always racists or something well i'm not racist i'm someone who's lived in a lot of different countries a lot of different cultures and if you think it doesn't matter to be interrogated by a police officer who speaks exactly the same language and exactly the same dialogue as you a police officer who can look in your eyes and correctly pick up on your mood and intonation and innuendo you know when you have those interactions with the police have you done that with the language barrier you've done that with a police officer who doesn't really speak the same language didn't really grow up in the same culture as you and like the police officer interprets you as being dishonest or something where you you've got a and melissa's even seen me fighting with uh university administrators this way and these people speak the same language as me but they're incredibly stupid people you know you've seen me dealing with the border guards well to some extent sometimes that you saw it canadian borders okay you know if you you know so these are these are low-level examples of the conflict between powerful and powerless people uh you know hierarchical um authoritarian conflicts okay now you're talking about having this kind of language mismatch going up and up and up uh the chain i feel that can never work and it's based on a very fundamental misunderstanding of of democracy and i'll be honest the language issue matters to me so much you know i think that's one of the great disadvantages switzerland has it's why switzerland doesn't work as one country it really works as a cluster of several small countries it's a whole bunch of different small tiny democracies bound up into one so someone's got a lot of things right but i think it's very very hard even when you're just talking about italian-speaking people within switzerland it's not easy now italian and german are quite close as languages compared to the other language gaps so no um i think i think that's based on quite a fundamental misunderstanding of of what democracy is and and how it works uh if someone is is optimistic about that and you know now by the way so eugene just to argue against my own position which i like to do by contrast what if you had said to me that everyone in the world can use literally the same dollar bill the same currency okay well that's not democracy and that's not the police and that's not the mayor and that's not the university administrator that's totally different by congress it'd be incredibly simple to have the whole world use the same physical currency the same actual piece of paper you know that's politically that's that's that's very simple now of course people can then get into talking about the advantages disadvantages of that but you know if you had made an economic proposal of that kind that's totally different by the way something else have targeted with this channel what if everyone in the world had the same minimum wage well a minimum wage isn't something you interact with like the police officer or the mayor and so on so yeah this this kind of thing all right so natasha says uh go on jump in i would just say one thing that you and i have talked about together is that some people in the united states feel disconnected from the capital of the country yes absolutely i mean but they are so just in case you can hear melissa saying some people in america feel disconnected from the capital committee they feel disconnected from washington dc but is it yeah and they are they really are gone yes and the people who live in new mexico yes feel that they have no connection to politicians who live in washington dc for example so this is an issue with a country just you know as large as the united states okay so let's let's take it back to america's favorite uh example okay if you were a black person living in georgia in 1955 do you think you would have even felt that the government of georgia represents you works for you represents your interest like my point is the alienation within one state like the state of georgia even the city of atlanta was divided between white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods and everyone knew white people controlled the government white people were representing the government not black was that's a distance that's not geographic we could say well my constituency is not representing the government is not participating government not just no i'm not just saying they weren't participating as equals i really mean they it was effectively not their government was effectively a foreign government they were under the occupation of a foreign government that didn't work for them you know now some people may still feel that way today i mean i think it's much much less extreme but sure if you're in alaska if you're in hawaii you know it's much more than just geography but that distance um so i'll just say again to be selfish if you want to see more you can't be german but you know um you know i have tried repeatedly to talk to my government about the problems of education at the university and what the government says in effect is they don't represent students now university students are not the most poor and downtrodden and powerless people in the world you know we're all people who are wealthy enough to pay tuition to go to university one way or another right and we're not the least educated we're not the least organized but university students have no constituency no representation in government so government can very easily represent any number of special interests the government may only care about the professors not the students they may only care about the medical doctors not the patients they may only care about the pharmaceutical companies not what's in the best interests of poor and powerless people who you know take these medications so the the type of the technical term and economic regulatory capture is one way to put it but the type of distance that exists between the government and the people whose interest it pretends to represent it's not always geographic but sure the mirror geography and the mere size this is a huge issue yeah sure right which is if you're talking about making this an actual democracy yes so right even in a country like mexico which borders the united states many different states border right there are a number of states that border on the country of mexico but so few people in america know anything about the politics of mexico they just don't care so it's a lot to ask to expect that in this global democracy that if an american doesn't even care about mexican politics if they really don't even care about canadian politics yes why would they care about okay malaysia or something totally totally good examples uh and it's true america is an internally divided country of these problems but india is if you follow indian politics and china has to be like it gets worse you know and i mean to some extent even japan because japan is so spread out north to south and people in tokyo don't know or care about what's happening you know in the southern islands and vice versa there's a real mutual estrangement they don't speak the same language they don't they have linguistic differences within japan and so on there are some of these some of these conflicts exist um you know i just want to point out athens had to be internally divided to have the marks that's one city that's a democracy in the scale of one city but in order for democracy to work in athens they had to divide it into deems they had to divide it into deems and tribes to have smaller and smaller units than the democracy that could meet and have dinner together these were these are big dinner parties but they had dinner together and they had uh kind of religious rituals together you could call them really they're like civic rituals they're civic religious rituals and that was really how you participated in democracy that's also how you participate in the military did your military service to this much smaller unit so that's that's one city why did they have such a vibrant democracy and they had no radio and they had no television so how and by the way they didn't really have paper um this is a slight exaggeration of simplification but you know they mostly wrote using wax tablets in athens so i just get in the actual scarcity of paper i'm not saying paper didn't exist absolutely but they you know as a technology they didn't have a lot of paper to throw around either these things were scarce and expensive i believe they relied along writing on vellum which is leather uh yeah no that's that's egypt yeah um sorry melissa mentioned clay tablets yeah you gotta go it's not it's it's not dry enough yeah no no no that's uh you've been a grease it rains yeah i don't know if you there are other cultures there in the mediterranean where was mostly clay tablets yeah it's got to be hot and dry enough for it to dry fast and stay stage right um sorry i mentioned i know about this because i've studied a variety of ancient cultures you know in sri lanka the writing was done on literal leaves leave green leaves from a trees different cultures at different technologies this way but i just say greece um even like it's not like they had a newspaper they didn't have paper in that sense and that level you know to have a disposable newspaper never you know parchment was very expensive and scraped down and used repeatedly and all these things they were just saying parchment vellum these things were expensive how did people even know what was happening they went to these dinner parties they went to the dean they went to these civic rituals and so on and they participated in debates and discussions which were partly just learning what was going on and then going to the panics and debating which so i'm just pointing even on that scale it gets uh it gets divided internally in order to work as a real participatory democracy so yeah that's a word you didn't use in your example but i mean participation so i'm going to give one example that's easy for everyone to relate to and i think right away it becomes very tangible okay who suffers most because of our current liberal drug policies the poor there are people living in poor neighborhoods whose lives are made hell every single day because we've basically legalized heroin legalized you know all these hard drugs fentanyl uh various opiates methamphetamine and so on okay well rich people who live in a gated community behind huge stone walls their lives aren't really impacted by it very much you know what i mean it doesn't affect them but people who actually have to walk out of their apartment building door the door of their apartment has drug dealers as drug addicts there's people sleeping you know slumped over you know like poor people this really impacts their lives every day and anyway we are not poor but you know i can say we're pedestrians we don't own a car i've never owned a car i've never driven a car in my life we are really impacted by this every day in this way well you know who is being represented in the government who is being heard who is you know the distance between rich and poor and who is really participating in government in this way too you know this this could be tremendously it can be fatal to democracy you know do you actually have enough poor people and enough poor people from every neighborhood now i know may sound ridiculous but you know it's very easy i'm sorry so the capital california is uh sacramento i would say santiago anyway so sacramento well you know how much do people in sacramento care about what's wrong in venice beach california it's very easy to dismiss it well that's just one neighborhood that well to us it's everything to the people so you know we'll know if you've had a much smaller state i mean probably california could be divided into three states or five states if you had a much smaller state that really regarded venice b which is a tremendously important part of that that state or that's that city you're just that area oh you know this is a problem we have to solve this should be our top our top priority so yeah the so okay there's been a good digression it's a it's it's a it's a nice question it also shows it relates back to the question of rich and poor and how they work together or don't uh work together in uh in any given system of government so natasha says quote i think you give these people too much credit isil they're ignorant and often insane so natasha i have made videos talking about this but you know i really feel this is part of the difference between season season one isil mazard and season two as i was saying you know this channel of allah this is officially season two that we're now in but you know no uh um you know one of the changes i've had to undergo in my own life is really deeply accepting um how stupid how malevolent and how crazy people are the vast majority of people so it is it's hard to accept but you know i think that's one of the changes you you see in me as a person and maybe it's implicit in this uh this conversation with them today but you know um yeah no i i don't uh i do not think human beings are angels nor they uh products of evolution that could easily be confused with angels um [Music] we got a comment but i don't know what was responsible saying quote melissa is spot on yeah natasha says the bigger the government the more distant from the individual well okay let me just ask have you ever heard someone even once in your life question the ratio of voters to elected officials in the house i mean it should be the most crucial factor in every democratic political system in the world everyone should say hey you know the number of people we have in the house of parliament or the senate or whatever your system is you know it's either stayed the same while the population has doubled and doubled again or it has actually decreased in many american states it's actually declined they have fewer people in their in their senates and their their uh houses of congress you know but you know for for the united states federally it stayed static for a tremendously long time during which the population doubled and quadrupled and so on the population continued to increase and increase so why is it have you ever once heard people debating this that if we're supposed to have representation and participation in government shouldn't we have a a stated ratio where like for every one of everyone for every 10 000 voters there's one person representing them what is it going to be it's going to be 10 000 is it going to be 50 000 is it going to be 500 000 at what point does this idea of representation and participation and government and accountability at what point has just become a a hollow ritual of fiction because in reality millions of people are voting for one man and you know they they only had a there's a choice between two men etc etc you know um at what point do we do we regard you know democracy just as a uh as a clown suit loosely fitting over what is underneath a kind of aristocracy yeah so ron sims says uh by the way ron ronald simmons is african-american he says quote i can say that the status of african-americans his own people has improved greatly even economically still bad but not as bad as before and now we have more opportunity but people are still traveling past okay so ron so my own neighborhood in toronto which melissa has visited it it was like predominantly black in one direction over here and predominantly portuguese over here but i did grow up around a lot of uh black people um but i would say this whether you were talking about black or white people whether urban or rural um you know we talk about a small town or you're talking about the the big city where i grew up you know whether it's my neighborhood or not you know what changed is when i was a boy there were alcoholics on the street there were men who stank like rum and sometimes they vomited on themselves and sometimes they'd urinated on themselves you know and today what we have both you know again black people and white people urban rural instead today what we have on a massive scale is methamphetamine addiction cocaine addiction opiate addiction you know heroin and it's it's close analogs and so you know um you know obviously in some ways the status of african-americans uh has improved but you know the the demoralizing effect of drug addiction and the drug culture uh i just think it's impossible to exaggerate it and it's again it's not i've said it again again it's not just african-americans i think if you hang out with rednecks in the american south i think if you hang out with guys who are into monster truck where are you saying like seriously like you know white rednecks um who live in those communities it's just as scary or scarier you know what i mean um you know it's may not be reflected as directly in hip-hop music you know what i mean like the the the like the white trailer park experience the white monster truck experience or whatever the redneck american experience but i think in the same way so i mean you know i'm sorry if that sounds like political monomania on my part but okay let's just say one more you know in terms of the status of the the poor and the downtrodden whether they're whether black or white you know it used to be that um you know mental hospitals were were noisy places where people were in chains and people were screaming you know people were ranting and raving and now they're quiet because everyone's on prescription medication you know the shift in now we've medicalized uh problems now so again i've known all kinds of black people in my life um you know they are on prescription drugs the same way white people are you know i mean especially about urban black people they're they're basically getting handed out antidepressants and everything else uh psychiatric medication whether they're institutionalized or not they're being handed these drugs at at least the same rate white people are i did read one study i'm not going to get into it that was talking about the extent to which black people are getting more uh medicated the hypothesis being that it's because the actual psychiatrists have less sympathy for black people when they're their their clients like like the the psychiatrists are more likely to just include okay you're crazy you should be put on drugs and get them on these drugs but with their interesting hypothesis i just say i i do not know if you really look at the numbers is that is that true um but you know in these ways you know if you're talking about the the status of of african americans um i i think it's impossible to exaggerate in these in these particular ways how much worse things have gotten how much hope more hopeless things go and people don't have a simple political solution to point to for that there's nothing they can reach out for for for a better future now okay with no rose-colored glasses let's compare this to the mix of hope and hopelessness that existed amongst african-americans in the year 1968 in the year 1968 black people were worse off in so many ways but of course there was tremendous political optimism and even educational optimism and you know sense of awkward upward mobility in in every way and people were using drugs and they said the rate of drug addiction and alcoholism was also incredibly high but they they were they were different drugs and indeed i think if you look at the music that was in pop culture in 1968 there were songs about marijuana and lsd and and of course alcohol and and what have you um but uh you know obviously i grew up i mean so i grew up with rap music period and up to a certain stage in my life a lot of the rap music was very vaguely and obliquely uh alluding to drug dealing and i remember the first song that was really so blunt and direct about it that was on the radio 50 cent the rapper 50 cent came out with the chorus quote i love to pump crack and uh the rhyme for which is that he loves to squeeze gats by the way you know and i just wow okay now we're at the point where the they're they're referring to crack as crack it's directly about hustling you know on the street corners and so on you know what this is this is no longer something being obliquely alluded to um this is the chorus in a song on the radio so you know now as i say i mean you know um i've seen studies of particular places in the american midwest where drug drug addiction among white people is at epidemic levels and so on here where i'm living i think all of the drug addicts okay anyway the drug addicts here are not black they're not african-canadian they are predominantly white people um so you know anyway i'm sorry but this is my really sincere response uh to this this short comment from ron sims and i'm also being sincere when i say when you look ahead to the next 10 years or the next 20 years i think this is the single biggest issue you know i.e inclusive of um prescribed psychiatric medication you know so that's it's terrifying and there is none of the optimism or hope that you know perhaps in 1968 there was too much optimus hope you know that we could all have a better society but i mean definitely i mean african-americans were unbelievably optimistic in 1968 here we are in 2021 obama came and went didn't change a goddamn thing for anyone i'm sorry but obama you know his his election promises were incredibly vague but i mean nothing got better for black people or white people or anyone under under obama and there's there's natural there's no hope there's no hope at all and um you know so yeah i i in that sense i think it's a tremendously bleak situation looking forward and you know look again i i feel this myself whether we're talking about black people white people or or hispanic people what are their hopes supposed to be pinned on like what's the hook you're supposed to hang this up on learning latin studying latin and greek in the universities like higher education it's not just that it's too expensive it's it's too worthless there is no fine ideal represented by the universities or higher education there's nothing positive about upward mobility that way you know i really do understand you know the the emphasis on realness um that comes out of african-american culture and i i don't think white america is so different people want to be real people want to be tough you want to represent something authentic and there is no uh ideal of being a more educated person a more refined person a more intellectual an intellectually sophisticated person you know that their ideals revolve around fantasies of their own uh power social status consumer self-indulgence uh so on and so forth and again i mean redneck culture and you know white american culture and whatever yankee uh white culture instead it's either you embrace the fact that they're all the same or each one is kind of five percent different from the others or two percent they're very fundamentally similar this way um yeah so no i i in this in this sentence i see this is a tremendously bleak and hopeless period of time and let me just say to you i'm a little bit influenced in that i used to be a member of the buddhist religion and i met black people converting to buddhism i meant black americans i didn't i didn't talk to africans the people who were actually from africa and africa but you know in terms of uh african americans i met them and i also read articles they'd written and stuff and you can imagine a lot of them are really openly saying that they were trying to escape from the hopelessness of all this they wanted to have a more meaningful life and and so on and so forth you know and um you know they ended up signing up for for buddhism that way now again i'm not involved let's just say buddhism is not the only religion and anyway that's a tiny tiny tiny minority of people who will who will say that or feel that way or respond that way but yeah there were a lot of people who are trying to escape from this culture and they don't they don't know where to escape to and there's there's uh you know for those of us who aren't who aren't satisfied with the same kind of vulgar fantasies that dominated 50 cents uh imagination you know for those of us who don't just want a more expensive car you know there's got to be more to life and there's got to be more to politics there's got to be more to economics too um it's it's very hard for anyone to find it or find the word find the way forward just catching up with your comments guys yeah so ron sims again comments that he's just thinking about cleveland's elections and how low the the turnout was well the problem is what happens in between elections too what's the role of uh the polity in uh government when you're not having elections uh electioneering and governing are two very different things yeah so will mcgeehan is actually mentioning something we looked up ourselves uh recently william again says look up kensington in philadelphia so yes believe it or not it's not worth saying why but someone suggested to me that i should consider living in philadelphia permanently that i should move there and um was looking at philadelphia on youtube and we've got a whole bunch of different videos showing how terrible the drug addiction epidemic is yes and you know again i am not glorifying the year 1968 but that was not the situation in 1968 there was i mean the 1960s they very much prefigured and produced our current culture of drug addiction it was a time when the rate of of drug use was exploded but i'm just saying we are now living with the consequences we're now several stages uh further down that road the problem is to be blunt exponentially worse now than it was in 1968 although i'm sure philosophically you could say that the same debate existed uh already at that time hmm okay guys so i'm going to wrap it up there let's let's come back to the title of this channel and then call it a day um look you know um it's easy to blame the rich for your problems and it's easy to imagine you would have a better society if only you could get rid of the rich and it is just as easy and just as stupid for wealthy people to blame all their problems on the poor and think that we could have a better society if we just got rid of the poor and um the reality is you will find this in a little known author named machiavelli wrote a book called discourses on livy you know the reality is that when we just use the term society what are we talking about we are precisely talking about how the rich work with the poor and yes also how the rich work against the poor and how the how the poor struggle against the rich but it is the synergy between these two social classes that we call society or is the synergy between the six or eight or twelve social classes however you want to number them i had a friend in high school and he told me an anecdote that shows how how liberal high schools were when i was grant canada he told me an anecdote how he was in the classroom though many of you will have heard this opinion from your own parents or grandparents or odds and or uncles you have heard this from some adult in your child his his teacher in high school he was quite an old cynical guy in his last year of high school at this time his teacher stood up in front of the class and said that she felt the government should force all of the poor people who are receiving welfare to get vasectomies and tubal ligations to be uh sterilized to be incapable of having children so that poor people who receive welfare stop having babies because her vision of society was that this is what's destroying society was uh was was was uh poor people uh breeding uh well well well using up the taxpayers dollars so again some of you may have heard this from your your parents or grandparents or whatever you may have heard it from from various sources anyway and um uh my friend this shows what you could get away with in high school this way he um satirized this position by standing up in class and very politely agreeing with the teacher but then going further to suggest that this policy could be applied to a number of ethnic minorities which he named in the most offensive terms so that they also without any violence uh without anything that would be called genocide would disappear from our society anyway when he told me this and and then he sat down this isn't like i can't say it's a majority in black high school i don't know if we had thirty percent or forty percent we had a big black uh population that high school fell it was a very ethnically diverse high school specifically uh africa black canadians we had a lot of black what did peop teacher say like what happens next like it's a good anecdote but then what happens and he said he he sat down in silence and he said she just said gulp i'm guessing the other students were just indifferent they just sat there silently no nobody laughed and also nobody uh nobody was offended okay my point is here yes actually we do have a kind of tremendous uh culture of the rich blaming the poor you know and now for the moment at least we have this political movement however benighted however ill-fated of trying to motivate and mobilize radical left-wing politics the united states through the poor uh blaming the rich now okay in the united states of america in the year 2021 who is more racist the rich or the poor in the united states of america and year 2021 who is more religious the richer the poor in the united states of america and your 2021 who is employed by the police what kind of person becomes a police officer the rich or the poor we just went through this whole phase of demanding police reform is it highly educated cosmopolitan wealthy are those the people who sign up to spend their lives as police officers are those the people you're you're protesting against and we can even get into the demographics of who elected donald trump was it the rich or was it the poor who are your real political enemies here you know what i'm saying if you're left of center of your left wing really who are your enemies who are you who are you struggling against you know in in reality in the united states of america right now the wealthy the rich are the most highly educated the most liberal and libertine they are the most concerned about and will induce line to change police violence they are the ones who are most capable of and most interested in militating for reform whether that is reform of the hospitals reform of the universities or reform of the police stations in fact the people who are oppressing you the people you struggle against not just in elections but like at the police station dealing with police violence dealing with police brutality in fact to a tremendous extent the problems you have in the united states america today are the poor in fact the reason why detroit as a city as such a failure cannot be easily blamed on the rich it has to to a remarkable extent be blamed on the poor and to demagogues people who were elected by drumming up support uh from the poor people who were not uh cynically employed by the ruling class to serve the interests of the rich but on the contrary people like coleman young and people like kwame kilpatrick you know what i'm saying so you know uh and you know kind of last things first first things last fundamentally the distinction between rich and poor is an analytical framework that can be foisted onto any problem but it is not always going to be a useful analysis for that problem okay well i can use the same examples or i can use all new examples okay militarism okay who is it who supports the american military is it the rich or the poor like again whether you do this through polling data or you've just actually lived in america who's more pro-military who's like we have this myth especially on the american oh the problem is the military-industrial context but probably the military-industrial complex you know like there's this there's this small conspiracy of millionaires who profit from the military and they're the ones who support the expression of it really have you met any republicans have you ever been to a trailer park like have you met poor people working class people even people who work in factories they're incredibly pro-military they're incredibly militaristic something like militarism you think you can voice the rich versus poor class now same examples what's wrong with the education system what's wrong with the health care system what's wrong with policing you can try to foist a rich versus poor class analysis onto it and you know some problems once in a while you do you do have a real political issue where it's important and necessary to disaggregate the issue into rich and poor how it affects the rich and poor what the rich and the poor lobbying for so on and so forth but very often all too often instead we are cynically misrepresenting the nature of these problems and their solutions so that we can pretend that the problem was created by the ranch so that we can blame the rich and so that we can mobilize as insincere demagogues we can whip up support from the poor to to support our political party our faction however sincerely or and sincerely in trying to you know promise you that the solution is not to actually improve the hospital and it's not to actually make the hospital cheaper the problem is to blame the rich punish the rich tax the rich vote for us support us we'll support you and that uh the problem can in no way be put onto the shoulders of the poor