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Socialism keeps getting a rebrand decade after decade. It's the brand new socialism. The last time that wasn't the real socialism. This one is so much better. Why won't socialism just stay dead? Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and now get ready New York City. In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in a Parisian cafe over the span of six weeks. They of course were living high on the hog. You know, in non communist countries, all of world history, they said was a class struggle. The proletariat, those would be the workers, are exploited by the bourgeois, those would be the owners. So Marx's solution was state ownership of the means of production. Marx believed that capitalism would inevitably devour itself and that socialism would arise naturally. Now it turns out that wasn't true at all. But that's never stopped the socialists. So what is socialism and what is not? First of all, socialism is not wanting to help poor people. Socialism is instead giving the government complete control of the economy. And it is a failure everywhere it is tried. The number of deaths caused by socialism in the 20th century alone are staggering. Low estimates are 20 to 30 million people. That would be just based on direct political executions. The mid range estimates would be 60 to 70 million people if you include man made famines. And high estimates would include all excess mortality, civil wars, regime policy effects. That would be all the way up to 100 to 148 million people. China under Chairman Mao saw at least 55 million dead in the Great Leap Forward. Then of course the Soviet Union saw under Stalin and Lenin 20 million dead in gulags. The Holodomar famine in Ukraine, the Bolshevik revolution. Cambodia's pol pot saw 2 million dead due to starvation and ethnic cleansing. North Korea saw 2 million dead due to state sponsored famine, labor camps, executions. Ethiopia saw 1.7 million dead in the red terror, forced resettlement and famine. Eastern Europe saw 1 million dead in post World War II purges, labor camps and executions. Vietnam saw a million dead in re education camps and purges. And that's not to mention the tens or even hundreds of thousands dead who disappeared in Cuba or Venezuela. Let's talk about the objections that socialists will speak on behalf of socialism against capitalism. Objection number one, the rich don't pay their fair share. Utter horse. Leftists today say that our progressive income tax does not take into account the fact that billionaires barely have any salaried income whatsoever and that the wealthy borrow against their assets. They say that corporate tax rates should be hiked as well. And they say the government debt problem isn't real. We can always just print more money. First of all, most US tax collections are on businesses. According to the Tax foundation, out of $4.4 trillion collected by the government in 2017, only $308 billion was non business tax collection, or about 7%. As for the income tax, who pays it? Well, in 2018, the top 1% of earners paid $616 billion in federal income tax. That is 40% of all federal income taxes. The top 1% of taxpayers account for about 20% of the nation's income. The top 0.1% of taxpayers paid a greater share of the income tax burden than the bottom 75% of taxpayers combined. We already have a massively redistributive system, a massively progressive tax system. And by the way, none of this includes what people receive back in tax dollars, meaning, for example, the earned Income tax credit, which disproportionately affects low income households, many of whom don't pay tax in the first place. In fact, if you look at net taxes, meaning the amount you pay in taxes minus the services you collect from the government, people in the top quintiles pay all tax in the United States. In 2017, households in the bottom three quintiles collectively received more than 1tr trillion dollars in direct government benefits than they paid in all federal taxes that year. Households in the top 20% pay $1.7 trillion more in taxes than they receive in direct government benefits. And when it comes to inequality itself, that too is a sort of myth. The rise of pass through corporations means that more wealth is reflected on income tax forms than ever before, which makes it look like an explosion of personal income among the top 1%. But there's an equivalent decline in business income and divided income. With that rise, there's an inevitable problem. When the government manages such a large budget, it doesn't manage it at all. Objection number two. It's impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps under capitalism. This is, of course, sheer nonsense. The myth is that hard work doesn't bridge the gap of someone starting with nothing versus another person starting with wealth, and that individual responsibility is a way for rich people to preach to poor people. But it won't actually help poor people. Well, here is the thing. The structural barriers that the left says exist don't actually exist. A Pew study on the economic advancement of families compared income of parents to that of their children. Thirty years later, inflation adjusted, it turns out 93% of children who grew up in the bottom quintile were better off than their parents. 86% of children from the middle 3/5 of the income quintiles grew up to live with higher income than their parents. 70% of children of parents in the top quintile of income were better off than their parents. Of the children who grew up in the middle quintiles of income, 39% rose to a higher quintile. About 30 years later, 37% fell to a lower one. 62% of children from the top quintile fell to a lower quintile. By the same token, 63% of children who grew up in the bottom quintile rose to a higher one. Upward mobility. So would you like to not be impoverished in the United States? It turns out virtually everyone who does these three things will not be permanently poor in the United States. Graduate High school, get married before you have kids, get a full time job. Statistically speaking, you will not be permanently poor in the United States. Bottom line is, personal decision making is still the number one factor in success. Proclaiming victimhood at the hands of a system, a broader system is unlikely to lead you to actual true achievement in this life. We'll get to more on this in a moment. First, imagine this. A stranger breaks into your house, sets up cameras, sells the footage of your private life. Outrageous, right? Illegal, clearly. But online, that actually is totally legal. Your Internet provider can monitor everything you click, everything you read, everything you buy, and then sell your data to whomever pays the most. It's digital spying, plain and simple. And the only way to stop it is with our sponsor, ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN locks down your online activity. Think of it as a deadbolt for your Internet connection. It reroutes all your traffic through secure encrypted servers, meaning nobody sees what you do or uses your data against you. It also hides your IP address. That's the digital ID companies use to track you. But a profile on you sell it to advertisers, scammers, even criminals. I'm constantly using ExpressVPN. Obviously I travel a lot for work. That means I'm on public WI fi. Well, public WI fi is a paradise, a cornucopia of joy for all of the online criminals. ExpressVPN stops all of that. ExpressVPN works on any device. One click, you are protected up to 14 devices at once. They've also just launched Express Mail Guard, which works with any email provider, shielding your real email address wherever you sign up online. The result? A cleaner inbox and tougher defense against spam and phishing. Without changing how you use your email, find out how you can get up to four extra months by scanning that QR code on screen, clicking the link in the description box below, or by heading ON over to ExpressVPN.com BENYT Objection. Number three, real Marxism and socialism. They've never been tried. So number one, people say socialism has to be global to succeed. Karl Marx wanted a global socialist system versus Stalin's socialism in just one country. Well, it turns out that this is just the no true Scotsman fallacy. Because it turns out socialism has been tried pretty much everywhere and it's failed miserably over and over and over. Because the idea of Marxism is just wrong. Marxism is a utopian philosophy that basically suggests the perfectibility of mankind, that if you change the economic structures, greed will disappear and people will become better, they will transform. It is not true. The reality is the vast majority of countries that even socialists call socialists are not in fact socialist. Denmark is not socialist. Norway is not socialist. These countries are highly capitalist economies with high taxes and welfare systems. They are mixed economies. Here, for example, is the Prime Minister of Denmark at the Harvard Kennedy School of government in 2019 explaining this.
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I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security for its citizens. But it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.
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The 2026 Index of Economic Freedom from the Heritage foundation shows that economic freedom, advances and prosperity follows. The countries at the top of the list, by the way, might surprise you. 1. Singapore, 2 Switzerland, 3 Ireland, 4 Australia and 5 Taiwan. Those Nordic countries, the Northern European countries, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, ICELAND, all top 20 US ranked number 22. How about the socialist countries? While China's 154 and North Korea's 176. By the way, that freedom index is measured using four rule of law, government size, regulatory efficiency and open markets. Since the Trump administration changed a bunch of Biden policy, that 2026 index shows the United States moving up in the rankings. How about those big socialist systems in the United States? Well, pretty much all are subsidized by, of course, the market economy. Those systems are essentially draws on capitalism. They cannot exist separate from the supportive network of capitalism that generates all the revenue and all the services upon which they leech. Objection number four, we already have socialism here in America. Well, no, we actually have some socialized systems, kind of sort of like Medicare. Some people try to pretend that, for example, the police department is a socialized system. Nope, this is just called a public good. Public goods exist in every system. These would be non rivalrous and non excludable goods. Meaning my use of the system does not burden your use of the system. So a great example of this. We all pay into the military. The military defends all of us equivalently. Therefore, it is not a socialist system. It is called a public good. I could not pay for it myself. We all pay for it together and we all benefit from it. That is not the same as a socialized system like Medicare, for example, with an individual recipient of benefits. Objection number five. A just society should produce equal outcomes, not just equal opportunity. This is the big philosophical objection to capitalism. The idea here is that capitalism is fundamentally unfair and that we ought to correct all of the terrible injustices of living on this planet with the power of government. On a moral level, this is wrong. Inequality of outcome will always exist because humans are not the same. In fact, your level of wealth today is not the same as your level of wealth in 40 years. Does that mean that you are inferior now to the person you will be 40 years from now? Of course not. The fact is, true justice is that equals are treated equally and unequals unequally, as Aristotle suggested. Thomas Sowell observed in his 1999 book, the Quest for cosmic 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. We must begin with a universe that we were born into and weigh the cost of making any specific change in it to achieve a specific end. Inequality is not inherently inequity, and disparity is not inherently injustice. Also, from a utilitarian angle, this is just wrong. Socialism may create more equality, but only in poverty. Capitalism, meanwhile, may create more inequality, but mainly because everybody is richer. If I make a million dollars and Bill Gates makes $10 million, we have more inequality than if we both made $0. Socialism thinks the latter is better. In 1820, 80 to 90% of the world lived in extreme poverty. By 2026, 10% of the world lives in extreme poverty. That is free markets, not socialism. Socialism. Government ownership of the means of production eliminates the mechanism by which producers know what to make and how much to make of it. Without markets, you get shortages. This is why people die of starvation in socialist countries. Inequality under capitalism is a byproduct of the generation of wealth. Inequality under socialism is a byproduct of power consolidation. It's why Stalin owned a really nice dasha. Even presiding over a communist country. So is there anything socialists get right? I mean, only that inequality exists and that poverty exists. But what socialists get wrong is the idea that poverty can be alleviated by focusing on rich people. The problem with poverty is not that there are rich people. The problem with poverty is that we need to help poor people get richer. Centralizing economic power in the state kills all the price signals you need to actually generate functioning markets. It destroys incentives, it destroys individual freedom. It hands a ton of power to whomever is in control of the state. Well, I'm sure there will be a thousand videos attempting to debunk what I'm saying here. So have at it and tell me why I'm wrong. We'll get to more on this in just one moment first. 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