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The Ben Shapiro Show
Ben BLOWS OFF THE ROOF In Argentina
00:29:07
Ben travels to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he explains the difference between free markets and socialism — in the country leading the way toward a new dawn of capitalism. - - - Today’s Sponsor: Helix Sleep - Get an exclusive discount at https://helixsleep.com/Ben
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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.
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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.
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Helixsleep.comBen Socialism encourages radical dishonesty by the political class, by the people who work for them, and by the people at large. Politicians lie about what they're achieving because they have to lie because they're not actually achieving anything. They're not producing a damned thing. They're just stealing from some and giving to the others and then destroying all innovation in the process. They're subordinate to lie to them because they don't want to piss off the big man. And the people lie in order to live. Which is why black markets tend to thrive in socialist economies. Socialism is designed to destroy the innate creative capacity of every human being made in the image of God. By depriving human beings of their right to property, socialism robs them of that godly power to create. For men to flourish, socialism must be destroyed. So let's turn to the track record. Free markets create prosperity. Socialism creates misery. That is perfectly obvious to anyone. Free markets are the single most successful development in all of human history, bar none. Far from immiserating, the workers of the world. As Karl Marx predicted, free markets have radically expanded the living standards of literally everyone. That is because free markets create innovation and competition. In a free market, somebody creates a new thing, that thing is a luxury. Then people compete to make that new thing cheaper, and then gradually it becomes a necessity. A cell phone used to be a thing that Gordon gekko in the 1980s carried around on a beach, and it was the size of a shoebox. And now a cell phone is a thing that every poor person has. In fact, historically speaking, the richest people on Earth are poor compared to many of the poorest people living today in civilized countries. The richest man in history was likely a guy named Mansa Musa. He was ruler of the Mali empire in the 14th century and he apparently owned so much gold, literally half the gold on Earth was supposedly owned by this one human being. He literally owned so much gold that when he visited Cairo and dropped the gold, he basically bankrupted Cairo for the next 10 years because he inflated the currency so much. But here's the problem. If you're Mansa Busa and you own half the gold on Earth and you happen to live in 14th century Mali, you're really poor by today's standards. You die at the age of 57. If you're a citizen of a Western country these days, on average, you'll live into your 70s, maybe into your 80s or 90s. Mansa Musa died at 57, owning half the gold on planet Earth. Mansa Musa never sat on a working toilet. No one else did at the time either. Right around the time that he was wandering around the Middle east with enormous quantities of cash, the Black plague was ripping through Europe and killing one third of the population. It took Mansa Musa two years to travel from his empire to Mecca. Today that trip would take about six hours. Today, the poorest citizens in the world have magical devices that, that allow you to press a button and talk to anyone anywhere, at any time, across the entire planet. Why? Well, because that's what free markets do. Free markets create prosperity. See, socialism can turn gold into sand. Actually, that's a good synopsis of maybe the last 80 or 90 years of Argentinian history is turning a very rich country into a rather poor one through the mechanisms of socialism. But free markets literally transform sand into gold. Sand. Just as a thing on Earth has existed for all of human history, right? The cavemen were walking around on it. In fact, it's one of the most plentiful substances on planet earth. There are 7.5 sextillion grains of sand on planet Earth. Sand Is annoying. It's useless today. It's one of the most important things on planet Earth. Why? Because the silicon dioxide in sand is processed in order to make silicon, and then it is processed again. And then it is processed again. It is processed until it is 99.9999% pure. And then it is forged to create ingots, which are then sliced technologically, infinitesimally, into thin wafers. And then those are polished, and then those are sent to a semiconductor fab plant, and that becomes the basis for all the microprocessors in all your advanced technology, including your phone. We literally took one of the most useless substances on planet Earth and turned it into one of the most valuable substances on planet Earth. So what changed that? Sand was there when the cavemen were walking around. The only thing that changed was free markets and innovation. That is the only thing that changed. Every single thing that we take for granted on planet Earth is the product of human ideas building on one another in organic fashion over the course of centuries. We take for granted that this sludge that seeps out of the ground powers everything we do. But for literally centuries, petroleum was used as an adhesive for patching roofs. Innovation means we get better products cheaper, literally all the time, Sourced from everywhere on the globe. That is how a product made in 100 different countries arrives at your door inside of two days from Amazon Prime. The reality is that if you have faith in the free markets, you will be rewarded, and you can see it all over the planet. All you have to do is take a look at north and South Korea, for example. North and South Korea have precisely the same genetics. In fact, they work one land mass without a border. Not all that long ago. Well, today, North Koreans are on average, 3 inches shorter than South Koreans, despite having identical genetics because of malnutrition, North Koreans make somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,200 GDP per capita per year, as opposed to South Koreans, who are in the $33,000 range. 97% of North Korea's roads are unpaved, compared to only 8% of South Korea's roads. That is what happens when you don't have rule of law, when you don't have private property. Everywhere, free markets reign, Things get better, and they get cheaper. Take the example of light. Light. We don't think about it. You flip on a switch, a light goes on, it stays on as long as you want it to stay on. You flip it off, and it costs you basically nothing. But imagine the fact that for nearly all of human history, light Was actually extraordinarily expensive. William Nordhausen, Nobel prize winning economist. He points out that one modern 100 watt incandescent bulb burning for three hours every night would produce 1.5 million lumen hours of light per year. At the beginning of last century, in the year 1900, obtaining that amount of light would have required burning 17,000 candles. The average worker would have had to toil 1,000 hours to earn the dollars to buy the candles. In the modern era, those hours would require about 10 minutes of work for the average worker. That is how much capitalism and free markets work. If you look back historically, by the way, the average GDP per capita on planet Earth around the time of Caesar Augustus, basically around the year zero, was about $2 per day. By the time of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, it was $2.80 per day. Today, world GDP, thanks to free market private property and rule of law, is in excess of $13,000. That's all happened in the course of the last couple of centuries. Meanwhile, socialism creates absolute misery. It creates more misery and impoverishment than any system in human history. It replaces the spontaneous order of the free markets with a top down system where a bunch of pseudo experts decide what you should have, when you should have it, and what price supposedly you can pay. Now, in order to explain this, socialists will rely on what they call the labor theory of value. That's kind of a hangover from the classical era of economics. David Ricardo talks about the labor theory of value. The labor theory of value is basically the idea that if you could measure the amount of labor that goes into producing any object, you could objectively determine what the price of that object should be. And then if somebody charges more than that, that's exploitative. So if the normal value of a potato should be $2 and a grocer sells it for three, that means that the grocer is expropriating profit from the laborer. He has created an unfair profit margin. So Marx and many people who are socialists would say, why don't we just set the price of potatoes at $2, just set the prices at whatever we want them to be and then everything will be fair, it will be more efficient. We'll have taken the $1 in profit out of the system and you'll get a bunch of $2 potatoes. The problem is this is one of the stupidest things anyone has ever thought. The price of potatoes is not set. There is literally nothing about a potato that should make it $2 or $3 or 50 cents. Why? Well, because the preferences of human Beings are fluid. The price of a good or service can only be determined in a free market, because you get to determine what you think the price of a good or service should be. That price can change over time. As we decide individually what it is that we want, what it is that we prioritize, this becomes obvious. For example, if you stumble upon a pearl on a beach, you stumble on a pearl on no labor. You found a clam, you open it up, there's a pearl. That thing is worth a lot more than the potatoes. Why he didn't make any. No labor went into doing the thing. The answer is because the pearl is worth whatever someone else is willing to pay for it, right? This is the so called subjective theory of value. It was a discovery of the Austrian school of economics, to which President Milei is a devotee. Because again, President Milei is intelligent, unlike most of our political class. Their theory, their theory was quite simple. The value of a good or a product or a service is whatever you are willing to pay for it. That is why it is subjective. It is up to you. In this view, it doesn't matter how much labor was put into that good or product or service. All that matters is what you are willing to trade for it, which is, by the way, the way you buy products. No one has ever gone to a store and thought about a potato and said, you know what? I need to determine the inputs into the potato. I need to determine the mortgage on the farm. I need to determine how much the fertilizer cost, how many wage labor hours went into the making of the potato. What you think is, how much am I willing to pay for this potato? How much of my salary am I willing to pay for this potato? Now this seems like a pretty obvious idea, but it's an idea that's still fought by socialists every step of the way. And because that gets fought, what you end up with is a skewing of the market incentives, a perversion of the markets. You end up with false prices, overproduction or under production in a given sector, subsidies to unproductive sectors and all the rest. All of this is the stupidity of socialism. People who believe that they know everything there is to know about what things should cost, the value of things, but actually know the value of nothing. Socialists hate free markets. They hate the subjective theory of value, or the theory of marginal utility as it's also called. They believe they should be able to say just what prices are. They believe they can centrally plan the economy, put enough smart people in a room and and they'll set thousands of prices per day. This is what the Soviet Union did. The result is absolute misery. And Argentina is a perfect example of how all of these bad ideas, when implemented, cost people their lives, cost people their livelihoods, and destroy entire civilizations. In the early 20th century, as you all know, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. It was certainly the richest country in Latin America. But because it never fully developed free markets and inclusive economic institutions, and then because it was plagued by decades of Peronist tyranny, the Peronists utilized their enormous corrupt political machine to buy votes, to pay off their friends, to redirect economic resources to their supporters. Until the rise of President Milei, the government was able to basically expropriate property rights at will with impunity, and the result was radical impoverishment. If you look at the record of Argentina from 1980 to 2022, 2023, it is one of the rare countries in the west where it actually got harder to live. Here. In fact, it took more time to work to buy basic goods in 2023 than it did in 1980. Because it turns out that government interventionism, socialism, it fails literally everywhere it is tried. And by the way, Argentinian socialism represents one of the less damaging forms of the disease. The Soviet Union murdered tens of millions of its own citizens. China is still murdering millions of its own citizens. Cuba remains a tyrannized hellhole, despite idiot Westerners traveling there and thinking it's charming that people are driving around 1950 Chevys. So here's the bottom line. Free markets are moral. Socialism is evil. Free markets create prosperity. Socialism creates misery. And that's why what's happening right now in this room, in this country, is perhaps the most important political development on planet Earth at this very moment. For far too long, Argentina has been run by scavengers. Scavengers are people who believe that they get to expropriate whatever they want. They don't have to produce anything they are owed. They get to destroy the work of the lions. But now Argentina is retaking its place as the leader of the lions. That's thanks to the people of this country who have finally stood up and they've said, enough. Enough to the socialist evil, enough to the impoverishment, enough to the lies, enough to the bull. It's time to take a chainsaw to all of it. President Milei is now leading the world forward into a new golden age of liberty. I really believe that he's doing so with extraordinary audacity and courage by shouting and cutting the number of ministries from 18 to 8. By firing members of the bloated public sector en masse. By dumping the corrupt intermediaries in the welfare system, he slashed the budget by 32%. Argentina is recording surpluses now, which was unthinkable, literally unthinkable. He's moving toward revaluing the economy by devaluing the heretofore worthless pesos. Monthly inflation dropped from 25% last December month on month, to 2% last month. The stock market is skyrocketing here. That's because Javier Milei understands the power of liberty. A few months ago, I had the opportunity to sit with President Milei and he told me we need to embrace the values of freedom, which are ideas in the United States, even though in recent times they may have been degraded and some might have walked off the path. Well, Javier Milei, Argentina, you are leading the west back onto the right path. As President Milei put it before the coddled fools of Davos, economic freedom, limited government, unlimited respect for private property are essential elements of for economic growth. The impoverishment produced by collectivism is not a fantasy, nor is it an inescapable fact. It's a reality that we Argentines know very well. As President Milei knows, as you all know, the conflict between liberty and socialism is not a conflict in Argentina alone. It is a conflict throughout the West. It's a conflict between lions and scavengers, between a morality that prizes merit and innovation and productivity and dynamism and achievement, and. And a morality that prizes envy and extraction and ugliness and laziness. In his first speech as head of state, President Milei said, today we begin the reconstruction of our country. Well, Argentina, the eyes of the world are on you. If you succeed, the rest of the world is going to follow you. And I believe that you will succeed. If you remain courageous and honest. Liberty will succeed, because liberty must succeed. Viva la libertad.