Fundamental Disadvantages of Capitalism, a Pro-Capitalist Perspective.

we open with my favorite caveat if I
look exhausted it's because I am exhausted 'sheriff to everyone who's been watching this channel since 2015 you'll recognize that phrase and for those of you who have been watching my channel for a long time you might be surprised that this video opens with the declaration idealogy is not an entirely negative influence on people's lives one of the most positive effects of ideology is that it provokes people into thinking through their own ideas in a coherent way to think about the consequences of their ideas for society as a whole scaling it up moving beyond their own narrow and isolated self-interest I think one really positive example of this right now is the effect that discussions surrounding transgender political ideology are having for individual transgender people now if you've known a couple of transgender people in your life you've probably known at least one who said to you at some point look for them personally this isn't a political movement you've probably met at some point a transgender person who took you aside and said look for them it isn't a philosophy it isn't an ideology it's not a political party that wanted to write up - this is just what they do on the weekends this is just what they enjoy sexually in their private life or this is the nightclub they choose to go to and for them that is it well there's something kind of isolated and narrowly self-serving about that in contrast to engaging with a political ideology that challenges you to ask yourself the question what kind of society are we building when we move beyond tolerance when we move beyond you know removing short term simplistic obstacles like is it possible or impossible for a transgender person to be a school teacher to be a university professor those are real questions in almost every society on earth in the 21st century we move beyond those narrow you know simple problem solving challenges where are we going with this thinking about that ad logically I think it really is a kind of positive stimulus for people that reflect on who they are on their desires and on the implications of their desires for other people for society as a whole ethically what it is you're trying to do so etiology is not an entirely negative thing it's not just something we should lament for the dangers it prevents in 21st century society without admin said one of the problems with the ideological charged nature of debate on the Internet is that some things get discussed and debated as ideologies when that is not truly what they are um the capitalist system is not an ideology and I openly say for example that I am anti-communist that I utterly despise cool unquote anti capitalism I'm even pretty harsh on social so if you've watched this channel socialism as a concept in its historical context um communism is an ideology and it's very easy for people to slip into the mentality of saying that therefore they oppose capitalism as a counter posing an alternative ideology but when you really get down to it what you're talking about with capitalism is a set of social norms and practices that emerged out of the collapse of feudalism and emerged independently in for example Japan and Holland Holland now the Netherlands emerged independently in different political social and cultural conditions all over the world and it was not guided by an ideologies it was not guided by a utopian vision okay the single greatest transforming force in human history was the indulge the Industrial Revolution okay the Industrial Revolution was never a utopian project it was never an ideology this scientific breakthroughs that took place in what's now called the Scottish enlightenment so really the discovery of electromagnetism even the discovery of the modern toilet and then deploying you know for the first time you know whole cities the first time having sewage and running water deployed to them huge transformations in in modern life that we now take for granted many of these things came about with no ideology whatsoever likewise if you look at the historical development of the stock market the stock market was not created for any ideological purpose it didn't result from some grand scheme of what society ought to be or what have you and interestingly the stock market had completely separate origins in Japan and in the Netherlands it's a very specific example of what's now a crucial aspect of capitalism as we understand ok the development of the banking industry in Europe is unique because in Europe they had this religion you may have never heard of called Christianity and that made banking illegal so against the conditions that shape the emergence of capitalism the breakdown of feudalism the breakdown of the hegemony of the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church of the breakdown of the control of European Christianity that prevented banking as we know it this this wasn't an ideology it wasn't the grand plan it wasn't utopian vision even the transformation of the meaning of property this is one of the least document at least understood issues in the genesis of capitalism the fact that words in French like immobilier it used to truly mean immobilier they used to be unbelievable restrictions on on property the transformation of the system of monopolies into free enterprise of course the end of slavery piece by piece the components of capitalism came together I can't even call it like a bird's nest I mean what we now refer to as capitalism is a set of best practices that largely emerged from the failure of practices with no guiding ideology with no utopian strategy with no grand design now likewise today what most of us live in is a mixed economy and of course we say next because we mean a mix of free market and centrally provided taxpayer-funded government services the private sector and the public sector mmm all of those compromises likewise emerge in a completely unplanned its funniest way right if you can look at the history of each country and it's a different story but of course in some ways it's kind of sort of the same story when the United States has this narrative about the Great Depression also we can't actually start there the Progressive Era in the 1890s and then the Great Depression and then world war two unionization and workers rights and minimum wage all these things emerging well you know guess what if you study the history of Holland and history of Japan it's a different history that produced fundamentally similar compromises and thus there's a kind of homogeneity to capitalism globally now even though normally when you're looking at what we describe as capitalism in any one place it's emerged from different circumstances in a very strange staggering unplanned way it's also worth noting that the exceptions to the rule are by and large less successful than the places where it emerged unplanned and if you like organically or spontaneously so you know Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism which is recent history so really talking about after 1991 varies a little bit from place to place what you're talking about those are places where capitalism was constructed more consciously and intentionally nobody today looks at the Ukraine as a positive example of what capitalist must be I hate I hate to do this to you guys I hate to do this to you nobody looks at Hungary as a positive example nobody looks at the former Yugoslavia as a positive example now admittedly there's some bias involved there but if you believe that ideological chalkboard planning of capitalism is a huge advantage then we should be able to look at these relatively recent relatively artificial consciously intentionally planned capitalist economies and we should see much greater success than the places where capitalism emerged in a zigzag messy unplanned way and by the way guys if you would know anything about the history of Hong Kong and Singapore you'd be surprised it's you'd be surprised just how messy and unplanned the emergence of capitalism there another great case study Israel the emergence of capitalism in Israel it's a very short history and you know the success of Israel is a free-market economy another anyway another fascinating bizarre case study all right so I am here my lengthy preamble about the fact that capitalism cannot be understood as something created by the capitalist manifesto all right communism has the Communist Manifesto and capitalism does not have a capitalist manifested all right what capitalism has is a set of lessons learned from the drawbacks and color ultimately the collapse of feudalism in Europe it was European feudalism in Japan it was Japanese feudalism and you know I think it's really worthwhile to say to yourself hey look you know what when you're talking about Malaysia it's a completely different story of how we've ended up with capitalism and that's why in some ways capitalist Malaysia has not been successful in the same way that it was in some other cultural context they never got they never got the capitalist manifest though they never tried to live up to to a set of J market okay so probably this preamble could be a perfectly good standalone video in itself but is not why turned on the camera day this isn't the message I can deliver to you some people knowing that I am in this way a defender of capitalism against communism and maybe more importantly that I defend capitalism against so-called anti capitalism the stupidest ideology of them all um they're surprised when I say in a frank honest down-to-earth way the capitalism has serious disadvantages the capitalism has serious drawbacks okay no why would I be reluctant to say that um you know refrigerators have serious drawbacks I own a refrigerator right now technologically I don't have anything better to replace it with but you know what for thing refrigerators are noisy I don't want to have a refrigerator in the same room I sleep in they use a lot of electricity they take up a lot of space they're incredibly heavy we can start listing all the ways in which a refrigerator is less than optimal and yet it's something right now we're all making our compromise with until somebody can come up with something better so there's there's absolutely no reason to you know be mosy or apologetic in bluntly and directly talking about the drawbacks and disadvantages of capitalism for me the number one issue that nobody wants to talk about on the left or the right with capitalism is actually the depopulation of rural areas or to put it in more universal terms the increasingly unequal distribution of your population geographically so under feudalism you had a system that was very very good at keeping the population fixed to a plot of land to some extent even tribalism does this much more effectively than capitalism it distributes the population and then you know communicates to people powerfully this is your land your to it this is your responsibility so you know if you're talking about distributing human beings along a frontier or even along a highway or along a river you could pass many centuries in a feudal system with your population distributed this way as soon as feudalism starts decay in and starts being replaced by capitalism and piece by piece and again there's this different history in France in Germany and England in Japan part of the dynamism of capitalism is that people abandon the countryside and start moving to the cities they start moving to the places where the greatest opportunities generally the greatest risk as well as the greatest rewards and they even do this when there is not yet any technology that offers them the type of rewards we now associate with urbanization they even do this when moving to the city means that you're risking death by cholera or death by malaria depending on which clime were talking about when really your quality of life and health get much much worse so the crowding of people into cities now in the 21st century you you look at a map of Japan you know tell this in a more human and tangible way I met at my University Canada a team of people doing research on this in in rural Japan they're visiting my University in Canada they were talking with the fact that basically all of Japan has these villages and small towns were now the only people are elderly retired people and occasionally the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of those overly retired people who are left there with the elderly people while the parents are working in Tokyo while the parents are working in a big city and the parents come to visit once every two weeks or something but the kid gets to grow up in the countryside and those few kids light up the lives of these elderly people who otherwise live in a in a ghost town that is nothing but elderly people because everyone who's up working in each has abandoned the town everyone is even of university age has a ban of the talent to pursue education and opportunity in the big city now this is a profound problem with capitalism and I wouldn't claim that there is no solution for it the problem is that almost nobody is even talking about a solution in a country like Canada the more urban property prices go up the more money the government makes out of those properties the government makes money out of every new apartment and condominium and house that gets sold in Vancouver and Toronto as each property goes up above a million dollars the government's making more and more money they have a vested interest in fueling the property speculation and real estate development cycle and seemingly the whole public is happy to participate in there's a ludicrous and self-destructive process whereby the countryside and smaller towns all get emptied out and hollowed out and everyone starts living in just a couple of cities a couple of big cities where again kind of greatest risk and greatest reward people are no longer afraid of cholera but they move to a city where more than 50% of their income is being spent on their rent of course the only other way of coping is to commute huge distances to get back and forth from these mobile crisis it ease there is basically no capitalist country in the world today that is sincerely interested in decimating the property that was proved in 2008 right there is no government that's going to be elected in New York City and so you know what we need to do the government needs to completely sabotage the value of condominum condominiums and apartments we need rent to fall by like five to one and we need the sale prices of houses and apartments to fall by ten to one and we're gonna make it happen you know governments can make that happen the problem can't be solved and I don't even mean rent control I mean there it was pretty simple toolbox the urbanized the prom' is okay it's partly just a free market phenomenon this again is already kind of evident in the Renaissance it's already evident for centuries in some countries it's accelerating in the twenty-first century but in case it's still a profound problem but it's a tendency that governments now are not checking or deterring if anything government's are part and parcel of this problem that's inherent in or emerges from market forces okay now point two is there is absolutely no natural relationship between education and employment under capitalism okay they don't believe me I'm not suggesting to you that education was better under feudalism but I'm not suggesting it was better at her communism so hot but we live in a world where people as students as teenagers are expected to make a speculative decision with tens of thousands of dollars of their own money and with many years of their lives to choose a university or choose a college even choose a technical training program for some for some skill some craft some art they are supposed to make that bet on the assumption that there will be demand for them to do that job that they'll be paid a good wage that they'll earn a good living doing it and very often they are wrong mmm conversely the most popular areas of Education in Canada being a schoolteacher in Canada being a history major you have a situation where academia produces a hundred times more people than could possibly be needed or wanted in that sector one that I actually formally enrolled in and then decided not to do the course you know even in Canada being a paramedic it's massively over enrolled I wonder if that's because people watch reality TV in the 1990s like people used to watch these TV shows that showed paramedics but a lot of people want to be a paramedic they like the idea of working in the back of an ambulance even though it's very low paid they like the idea of driving the ambulance in whenever and I forget at the time it was certainly ten to one but they were afraid it was ten to one or 51 but Canada was producing far too many paramedics and there really were not jobs for all of them and also they were being underpaid so we have a situation where there is no relationship between free market mechanisms the economy whatever II want to say capitalism as such in the mix of free market and government involvement in the provision of education now the other fundamental absurdity which combines with both of these first two problems in a dynamic way is rent itself pretty much any textbook will tell you rent is irrational under in terms of the logic of capitalism and of course rent shapes everything we do which shapes my life right now I'm living here right now partly because rent is cheap um if you have two businesses that are competing there are two shops that are both selling falafels okay one falafel shop makes better falafels and they innovate more and they have a greater selection of products let's and they have a smoothie machine they sell drinks and vegetable juices they're really great and there's another falafel shop where the owner is lazy he only makes three kinds of falafels he doesn't care there's no innovation no smoothies and let's also just say it's kind of dismal he doesn't make a make an effort to make it a nice place to sit guess who's gonna win in free market competition the person who pays less rascal all free market competition is unfair on an irrational basis because the guy who owns the lousy falafel shop if his grandfather owns the property and his grandfather is charging him rent whose grandfather may let him run the business for free but let's say his grandfather just says hey look you know what you know you and I were blood I'm gonna charge you a really low rent for this reason happens very common and the other person is renting from a complete stranger at market rates maybe they even get ripped off they have a really mean landlord who's charging the absolute maximum guess who is gonna win and guess who is gonna lose in terms of free market competition and there's no counter-argument to this and it infests every part of our lives the amount you're going to spend on rent in most cases is going to be more than the cost of tuition and I looked at going to university in Tokyo tuition was a lot but the cost of living in Tokyo if I wanted to do university there is so astronomical I looked at doing University in Hong Kong in a totally different field I have looked at a college program once what it was in Manhattan New York New York you could be spending so much money on rent that it completely Dwarfs it completely obliterates the significance of tuition costs of Education right and then the cost of rent again it's part of this bizarre invidious cycle of capitalism hollowing out and abandoning the countryside abandoning the frontiers abandoning the majority of every country on Earth from Japan to Canada or the United States and leaving us with this remnant of overcrowded overpriced big cities where all of the cultural and economic life is almost forced to transpire even past the point of diminishing returns even to the point of economic irrationality where people are spending the majority of their income just on rent which is again by textbook definition something that is economically irrational in Tokyo today the the people who pay rent are poor and the people who don't pay rent for example because they inherited an apartment that their grandfather they're rich you can have two people who have exactly the same you have two people who both work as an accountant in Tokyo but one of them pays rent you have another one who might live in the same apartment building but they don't pay rent because they inherited that apartment from their grandpa one of them is rich one of them's for doing exactly the same job at exactly the same level of productivity making the same contribution to society so these are my these are my big simple completes about what is wrong with capitalism and from my perspective the tragedy is that these problems can be solved and I think that you know like with education No who's motivated to solve the problem who's even motivated to ask these questions who's motivated to even experiment with coming up with new solutions who's motivated to take risks and then be honest about which solutions worked and which ones didn't the future of capitalism you know again this comes back to my major premise there is no ideologies there is no utopia there is no destination it's moving towards there is no capitalist manifesto and whether you find that inspirational or depressing you have to admit to yourself there is no one destination that unites the fate of Japan of Canada of the United States when I took a long train journey around France recently so you know when I visit my daughter end up taking the train and a crazy zig-zag pattern across France I was shocked genuinely shocked to see that these same factors the same hollowing out phenomenon the abandonment of the countryside was happening in France to the same extent maybe it was even worse in France than in Canada or Japan and you know I like to read I started reading articles about it I was reading in English not in French but I found a lot of magazine articles a lot of newspaper articles discussing this phenomenon and the struggle of governments and in some cases charities to try to prevent the abandonment of the French countryside you know how can we do this what are the what are the water message methods to actually tackle the problem the problems with capitalism don't come from any one source from any one cause and they're not tending toward any one destination and it's for that reason that we need to be willing to experiment with many different solutions and we need to be willing to learn from many different failures never forget an experiment by definition is something undertaken the outcome being unknown social experiments political experiments our ideas that we have to test without knowing what the outcome may be