Transcript
A (0:00)
Alrighty, folks, I wanted to give you the opportunity to hear a speech that I made down in Buenos Aires, Argentina at cpac. Speech all about free markets and socialism and why free markets matter. Here's what it sounded like.
B (0:11)
Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. First off, I want to thank everybody who organized cpac, put this amazing event together. And I also want to say thank you to the unbelievable people of Argentina who are currently engaging in the single most important economic response revitalization effort of the 21st century. What we are watching here is revolutionary. It's a restoration of freedom after generations of socialism. What's happening right now, President Milei and the people of Argentina are waking up the world to the fundamental reality that liberty means morality, decency and truth. You here in this country are all teaching the world right now. So today I want to talk about liberty and I want to talk about socialism. There's a big story that's been told throughout the west by the left in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union. And it goes something like this. Sure, socialism has never really worked all that well in practice, but really in theory, it's kind and beautiful and wonderful. And if ever it were truly tried, it would result in a more prosperous and just world. Free markets, they say, are rapacious and cruel at their root. In the words of the socialist leech on the ass of civilization, Bernie Sanders, the simple truth is that unfettered capitalism is not just creating economic misery for the majority of Americans. It is destroying our health, our well being, our democracy and our planet. Well, that story is in one word, bull. Free markets are moral. Socialism is evil. Free markets create prosperity. Socialism creates absolute misery. So let's begin at the beginning. For those who missed it, what exactly are free markets? Let's begin with a definition. So free markets are economic systems by which individuals can freely exchange the products and services of their labor. Individual liberty is the locus of free markets. As the economist and wisest living human being, Thomas Sowell, says, the market is nothing more than an option for each individual to choose among numerous existing institutions or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste. Free markets require two private property and rule of law. Private property, of course, is the private ownership of property. It's the free ability to dispense with your labor as you wish, to exchange the fruits of your labor with others without intervention by some sort of tyrannical third party. That freedom of exchange leads to a robust system of supply and demand and in which sellers and buyers agree on Prices. Free markets require a consistent rule of law, precisely so tyrants can't intervene and skew that market on behalf of a protected class or person. No dictator should be able to elevate his own priorities over that of any other individual in the market. Free markets guarantee what the Nobel Prize winning economists Darren Acemoglu and James Robinson call inclusive economic institutions. These are economic institutions that allow and encourage participation by the great mass of people in economic activities that make the best use of their talents. Markets prize diversity in the richest possible sense, not in the sense of racial diversity or tribal diversity. They take account of every individual's needs, wants and desires, which is of course why socialists and tyrants, but I repeat myself, hate them. So let's talk about the morality of markets, because this is the big rip on markets, right? Is that free markets are somehow immoral. That's a lie. Free markets are the only moral system. Well, what do I mean when I say that free markets are moral? I mean that they accord with the basic truths of human existence. Nowhere, anywhere, anywhere on the planet can find a child who doesn't know the basic principles of property ownership. I have four kids, 10, eight, four and one. They all, at a very root level, understand what is mine and what is yours. And this is true across civilizations. Now, private property isn't just a natural thing that human beings engage in. It also happens to be just. It's fair. So justice is the proposition, as Aristotle suggested, that equals should be treated equally and unequals should be treated unequally. What does that mean? Well, it means that individuals are equal in their rights, but not in their qualities. So I have the same rights that you do, but I have very different qualities, which might mean a different earning capacity. LeBron James and I have the same exact rights, but he's a way better basketball player than I am. Meanwhile, I have read way more books than LeBron James because I have read more than one book. That's not unfair. That's just the way that life is. What would be unfair would be to shackle LeBron James to a tractor if we were to play basketball so as to achieve equal outcome. Or to force me never to read another book so that we could have an equal conversation. There's a very famous Kurt Vonnegut story called Harrison Bergeron in which society does just this. If somebody is incredibly smart, they force a radio to play in their ears at all times. They can't take advantage of their intelligence. If they're incredibly strong, they force that person to wear hundreds of pounds of scrap metal, so they can't take advantage of their physical abilities. That isn't justice, that's oppression. Justice suggests that we each ought to have the same right to take advantage of our own natural abilities. As Thomas Sowell suggests, justice is a process, not an outcome. We're not God, that we can simply say, let there be equality or let there be justice. Let me equally dispense all skills equally on population. That's not the way that it works. Instead, we have to begin with the universe that we were born into, says Thomas Dole. And we have to weigh the cost of making specific changes in it to achieve a specific end. And when we do that, what we find out is that private property is a fundamental human right, that justice demands it. John Locke, who is a philosopher prized to the American Founding fathers, famously wrote, every man has property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, the work of his hands, are properly his. Whatsoever he removes out of the state of nature that hath been provided and left it in heaven, he hath mixed his labor with it and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby he makes it his property. Free markets are moral and they are just. They reward merit, they reward hard work and solid decision making. The assumption by socialists very often is that people who succeed in society are sort of leeches. They're the people who work the least. That isn't true. It's not true remotely. Elon Musk famously slept on the floor of Tesla when they weren't making their production supply. Supply requirements. Bill Gates began working insane hours at the ripe old age of 13. Thomas Edison worked 20 hours a day nearly his entire life. And as he got older, he cut it back to 18 hours a day. Free markets reward hard work. They reward risk taking and innovation. They reward people who are willing to give up something guaranteed in favor of something not guaranteed. Like Abraham in the Bible. Innovators are called to go forth and find a land that they did not know. This is what the pioneers in America did when they left cities that were well established, to cross continents to places they didn't know and to build things. And that's what innovators do today. They leave safe salaried positions very often and instead they build something with their own hands. They take risks. They are risk takers. Innovators. These are the people who make civilization better. And because entrepreneurs and innovators take the risk, they ought to reap the rewards. The reality is the vast majority of entrepreneurs fail. According to the American bureau of Labor Statistics, one in four new businesses fails within year one. Within 10 years that number is closer to two thirds. But every failure in a free market system is a further spur to further effort and further success. Henry Ford once supposedly quipped, failure is simply the opportunity to begin again. This time more intelligently. We at the Daily Wire, when we founded our company, that was on the back of a pretty dramatic failure actually. My business partner Jeremy Boring and I, we'd been working at a totally different company. It was a 501C3 and we presented a plan for how we could make this nonprofit organization actually generate money. And we presented that plan to the board. The board was made up of a bunch of 80 year old people. They didn't understand how the Internet worked. So we explained to them we wanted to spend money on social media to direct traffic to a website which would then earn money off subscriptions and advertising. We would take that money and we'd put it back into social media and create the cycle of marketing and growth. We tried to explain it didn't go over particularly well with the 80 year olds who didn't know what Internet was. In fact, they asked me to explain it simply. And I literally, I remember this, I literally took a napkin and wrote on it. I wrote on it, dollar sign arrow, Facebook arrow, website arrow back to dollar sign. I said, this is our business plan. They then fired Jeremy the next day and I quit in solidarity. It was a giant fail. We then took that exact business plan, found angel investors and built Daily Wire, which will probably do $250 million in business this year. Failure leads to success in the land of inn. Free markets also happen to reward good behavior. They tend to reward honesty, punctuality, decency. Adam Smith stated this in his lectures on jurisprudence. He said, whenever commerce is introduced in any country, probity and punctuality always accompany it. Which makes sense because if you want repeat customers, you don't cheat your customers. Socialists. They don't have to worry about it. They can always just confiscate more money from somebody or borrow money that doesn't exist. But if you actually want to succeed in the market, you better be good to your customers. You better not cheat them over and over and over. The miracle of free markets. They promote justice, hard work, innovation, honesty. They emerge evolutionarily. Free markets are not some sort of man made institution that a bunch of great minds thought out. They came about through evolution of the species. They came about naturally. And because they are spontaneously ordered and not created top down, because, because they themselves are the product of liberty. That means they also promote liberty. Socialism, unlike free markets, socialism is just evil. Socialism is the philosophy of the thief. It is the philosophy of the man who would prefer to burn everything down rather than to build anything up. Socialism is the philosophy of the man who rails against the cruelty of a universe that isn't run the way that he would like. It's a system that emboldens that whiner, that leech, to play God, complete with the power over life and death. Socialism says, I am here and what you have is therefore mine. Socialism is at its root envy, which we used to call one of the seven deadly sins. Adam Smith defined envy as quote, that passion which views with malignant dislike the superiority of those who are entitled to all the superiority they possess. It's a pretty good description of socialism. Socialism is envy. Embodied Socialism says, I will decide what you deserve. It is the morality of tyrants. Socialism is a philosophy that abolishes the individual in favor of the tyrannical collective. In the words of the postulate ulcers Marx and Engels, the theory of communists can be summed up in a single sentence. Abolition of private property. Now they say that if you abolish private property, that means you also have to abolish the middle class owner of that property, which the devotees of Marx and Engel then did to the tune of close to 100 million human beings over the course of the 20th century. Socialism is the philosophy that places the individual under the boot of the tyrant. That is what it is designed to do. It is the philosophy of the Peronists, obviously, who declare themselves in favor of a social market, putting capital to the service of the economy and the well being of the people. Pretty words. But it is of course the perennist who would decide just whose money to steal and how to spend it and who to punish. Socialism encourages revolutionaries who produce literally nothing and destroy everything they touch. It encourages laziness, it encourages stupidity and it encourages dishonesty at scale. It encourages people to lie. Very old Soviet joke that was a favor of Ronald Reagan's. Stalin is visiting a Ukrainian farm in the middle of the Holodomar and the farmer is eager to please the dictator. And he excitedly tells Stalin, he says, comrade Stalin, we have so many potatoes that if we piled them up one on top of another, they would reach all the way up to God. And Stalin says, but God doesn't exist. And the farmer says, well, neither do the potatoes.