Part Of The Problem - Against Socialism with Keith Knight

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

Dave Smith brings you the latest in politics! On this episode of Part Of The Problem, Dave is joined by Keith Knight! They take down several arguments in favor of democratic socialism, and more.64 Arguments Against Democratic Socialism: https://youtu.be/RfBaeytnqfk?si=D-maBi9N8PHHIw4CSupport Our Sponsors:Prolon - https://prolonlife.com/potpTroll Co - https://www.trollco.com/problem and use code DAVE25 for 25% off your first order!My Patriot Supply - http://preparelikedave.comGoldback - https://www.goldback.com/dave/ Part Of The Problem is available for early pre-release at https://partoftheproblem.com as well as an exclusive episode on Thursday!PORCH TOUR DATES HERE:https://robbernsteincomedy.com/eventsFind Run Your Mouth here:YouTube - http://youtube.com/@RunYourMouthiTunes - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/run-your-mouth-podcast/id1211469807Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/4ka50RAKTxFTxbtyPP8AHmFollow the show on social media:X:http://x.com/ComicDaveSmithhttp://x.com/RobbieTheFireInstagram:http://instagram.com/theproblemdavesmithhttp://instagram.com/robbiethefire#libertarian See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What's up, everybody. Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. Thank you so much, as always, for tuning in. A couple quick announcements before we get the show started. July 28th, I will be out in Cincinnati, Ohio, at the Young Americans for Liberty YALCON. I'll be given a speech there that night. So looking forward to that, I don't know. I know a bunch of other people are coming through, but I'm not sure who's coming on what days or whatever. But I'll be there on July 28th. And then, that's, weekend, which would be not this very coming weekend, but the one after that, July 30th and 31st, me and Robbie the Fire will be out slinging some jokes in Fort Lauderdale at the Rea. I'm sorry, wait, no, is that, whatever, the improv comedy out there. Comic Dave Smith.com. Dania Beach Improv, I apologize. The Dania Beach Improv out there right outside of Fort Lauderdale. Comicdavismith.com. And then we got a bunch more coming up, Appleton, Wisconsin, Austin, Texas at the mothership, Louville, Fort Worth, Dallas, all.

coming up,com, comickdaversmith.com for all of those ticket links. All right. We got a good one for you today. We got my buddy Keith Knight back on the show. I'm sure most of you guys know Keith at this point, but if you do not, you really should familiarize yourself with him. You know, I was just mentioning the other day, both to you privately and then on the podcast. Keith just put out this video that is 64 arguments against Democratic socialism.

It's phenomenal. all. I told Scott Horton when I was, I was like in the middle of watching it. And I told him, I go, and this is literally I thought as I was watching it. I go, there are moments with Keith where I watch you. And I just go, man, he is just the best at this. Just the best at this. And I've known a lot of people who are really good at this. I dabble in it myself. But man, it is like, this was like, it's a four-hour masterpiece, 64 arguments against Democratic socialism, I would say honestly, if I'm being generous, I think probably about 51 of them destroy socialism by themselves.

Like, maybe there's a handful of other arguments where you'd go like, oh, that was a, you knocked them down, but you'd still have to come knock them out with one more argument. But about 50 plus of them, just on its own, this destroys the entire thing. So like, if you are intellectually curious about this at all, I really highly recommend the video. Keith does a great job of crediting other people who have this. advanced these arguments. You know, this is obviously a piece put together that a lot of people have worked toward and there's a whole school of thought behind it. So anyway, I say all that say,

we're going to talk about the rise of democratic socialism and try to do an episode tear on them apart. Couldn't be anyone better for me to have on my left flank here to do that, right flank, whatever, than the great Keith Knight. How are you, sir? Thank you for coming on. I am doing pretty well, Dave. Thank you so much for having me. I thought it'd be relevant because we get along so well with the Democratic Socialists when it comes to criticizing the Afghan War, the Iraq War, Libya, Syria, Gaza, and now Iran. But something interesting happened where in the Iran war, there was such a clear correlation between Trump and Netanyahu, starting the war against Iran, the supply of gas and oil being heavily restricted, restricting the

supply and the cost immediately going up. The Democratic Socialists were humble enough to say, you know, it looks like coercive government intervention limiting the supply that's available to the market drastically increase the supply, drastically increase the cost of this product to everyone in the economy. This is contrary to the view that high prices are the result of greed and corporations being privately owned. So now not only are we in good agreement with them on foreign policy, even in the economic realm, they're still considering the fact that the state restricting the supply could lead to higher prices than we otherwise would have. So I thought it'd be a good opportunity

to discuss this with them. No, I mean, I think that this is, you start off the video by making this point. And I think it's one that it's very crucial. And I think that maybe some people could, could look at that and go like, oh, yeah, there is kind of something to what Keith's saying. here, but no, you can really, and there's a reason why Keith is jumping on this in his, because in the same way, essentially like what Mises did with action or what Hapa did with argumentation, you can also really deduce a lot from this one starting point, this one admission that you're saying that like, hey, if government coercively reduces the supply of something, it will become more expensive. Because like, right, look, immediately, we could already just draw from that, like, okay, now,

what if government were to coercibly expand the supply of something? Okay. Now, let's say they did that with money. Now, let's say over the last 20 years, we had the biggest experiment in money printing in the history of humanity. What might happen to the value of the dollar? Okay, well, if gas got much more expensive when it was restricted, the dollar might get much less value when it's coercively They expand. Like, there's a lot that they're giving up there. And I think that you're right to insist that maybe they apply that to some other energy or to some other area.

In fact, to all other areas. But, and to your point, look, they've been opposing this war. We've been opposing this war. Obviously, there is a thing here where, and you talked about this a bit, a bit at the beginning of your video too, but like they are clearly ascendant. Obviously, they have a little bit of the wind at their back right now, because, you know, because, you know, say whatever you will about Mom Donnie, but he was against a genocide that just happened.

He was against a stupid war that just took place. And all the people who were for that war in genocide are trying to morally scold this guy. So screw, you know, and in the same way, now guys like me and you, we're kind of in a position where we got a little bit of the wind at our back too because we were against this war. We were against the genocide.

We are getting a lot of, you know, credit for that publicly. And the people, you know, who were against the 12-day war are looking really good now and the people who supported are looking pretty bad. But, you know, Keith, as you know, like if we were able to play any role in this podcast world, and I think maybe we were in, you know, convincing people to be against the COVID regime or convincing people not to believe Russiagate or convincing people to be against the war in Ukraine or convincing people to be against, you know, whatever woke nonsense or whatever the latest war is, I mean, if anybody is now going, the answer to this is socialism.

God, man, they are so wrong. And if we got any type of platform, it's incumbent on us to just point out how this is just, this is, it's 180 degrees the wrong answer. It is going in because you have cancer and the doctor's recommendation being, why don't we give you more cancer? This is the absolute wrong direction, and it's incumbent on us to make that argument. Exactly. Condoleezza Rice actually got something right once on a podcast. It was incredible. She's talking to Andrew Roberts and he said, what is the most interesting historical counterfactual that you like to consider? And she thought about it and said, you know, in early 1917, the Allies America, Britain, France should not have pushed Alexander Karinsky's regime in Russia to stay in the war. By doing that and reality, allocating resources toward a war effort, what happened was the Bolsheviks ran on peace, bread, and land,

and that's what appealed to the people. The state was so war-hungry, so focused on murdering other people that when they heard the Bolsheviks offering peace, bread, and land, then the people saw, hey, maybe the Bolsheviks aren't my first choice, but this war is so psychotic. I think Russia lost 1.7 million people in the First World War. then it drew people to them. And that's exactly where Donald Trump is bringing us. He has the House. He has the Senate.

He has a six to three majority on the Supreme Court. He has the executive branch. He's got a huge federal budget to deal with. And what does he talk about? The ballroom. He talks about expanding the military budget to $1.5 trillion. You can't blame people for saying, even if I don't love the mom don'ties of the world,

that's a hell of a lot better than what Trump is giving us. All right, guys. let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Goldback. If you haven't watched my interview with Jeremy Corden, he's the CEO over at Goldback, click over and watch that. It was a really good interview. It was one of those ones that stuck with me. There's a lot of problems that we have in this economy that we talk about on the show all the time. Right up there at the top is the debasement of the currency. And that's the problem that Goldback is trying to solve. The dollar is lost over 99% of its value as measured in gold.

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All right. Let's get back into the show. Yeah, that's right. And I mean, look, the Mom Dani example, he was, he had to beat Andrew Cuomo. He literally, it was, I mean, it was like the avatar of now listen, people, you really want to go crazy and go out with this radical socialist when you've got a good Zionist love and lockdown governor right here for you to come home to. Like, I can't believe these kids chose something.

different than you know like it's just it's it's almost um i don't know it's something out of like a novel that was written by a not very sophisticated author you know what i mean like you're like this scene is almost too simple you got to you got to add some nuance to this uh anyway but it's the reality we inherit so we got to talk about it and one of the things that i find interesting me and rob were just talking about we just did like a member's only episode before this one and we were talking about how i had you coming up and we talked a little bit about this but it is genuinely and me, Keith, Rob, Natalie, we've all put a fair amount of effort into this. We're not rocket scientists, reasonably intelligent people.

It is very hard to get any of these people on record defining what it is that they believe. And I'm just saying as a starting point, you know, like before you even get into it, I do think we have a right to be like, hey, that's kind of bullshit. Like what it's, I said to Rob, it's like trying to wrestle a giant slippery egg. you're like, what do I even grab onto here? Because you're not explaining what it is that you stand for. You know, we've talked, I've recommended both. If people are really interested in this topic, like, and you just want to watch videos on it,

I start with three. Recommend Keith's video and watch Gene Epstein debate, Bascar Sankara, and watch Gene Epstein debate the other guy. What's his name? The professor. Ben Burgess. No, no, no, no. That, which was also a good one, but I was thinking of the older professor.

Richard Wolfe. Yes, that's right. Thank you, Professor Wolf. So, but look, those guys, when they talk about Democratic socialism, they're talking about democratizing the workforce. They're talking about the fact that there shouldn't be bosses and workers anymore, outlawing employers. Now, again, that still raises a lot of questions because the questions are like, well, how

would you enforce this? What would be illegal? What would be legal to fund? All types of things. But when AOC and Mamdani and Bernie Sanders talk about democratic socialism, that's not what they're talking about. They're talking about essentially being for more welfare, being more liberal than the average liberal in common parlance or whatever. And then when they give these definitions, you hear AOC say the definition of democratic socialism is that in an advanced society, everyone should have the right to live and thrive and have respect. I'm sorry, the exact quote, in a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person in America

should be too poor to live. Well, gee, Keith, argue against that. We think people should be so poor they die. Like, what do you mean? Nobody thinks people should be so poor they do. So anyway, essentially, it's they leave it on you to sit here and define what it is that they are talking about because they won't ever actually define it in a coherent way themselves.

And I will just say, if you're an honest observer, observer of this debate going in, I think it is fair to say that's bullshit. Like, hey, we don't do that. But you don't see libertarians going around like, I'm an anarchist. And so I believe in a minimal state. And you're like, oh, wait a minute. No, no, no, no, you're not. If you're an anarchist, you don't believe in a minimal state.

If you believe in a minimal state, you're not an anarchist. We don't contradict ourselves in these ways. Are you a socialist or are you not? Do you believe, you know, so we are sitting here saying, we believe in private property rights and laissez-faire government. We're being very clear on what it is we believe in, and they are not. And that's frustrating. Oh, it's extremely difficult to grab onto.

Baskar Sankara mentions in his book, The Socialist Manifesto, that it's important for the workers to own the factors of production. But even that, in under capitalism, when there is a stock market, the workers in about 15 minutes can find somewhere online to invest in companies, to own stock. This is even better than democratic socialism, because if I work as part of the problem, well, I don't know if you guys are going to go wonder. I might want to invest in the Tim Dillon podcast.

I might also want to invest in the Theo Vaughn podcast. I don't love the specific examples, but I get the point. I get the general point you're making, but yeah, sure. You want to be diversified, and that's what capitalism allows with access to a stock market. So it's not even the workers own the factors of production. With him, a much better definition would be the outlawing of employer-employee contracts. That would be a consistent definition. With someone like AOC, though, this simply is what Hans Hoppa says in the theory of socialism and capitalism.

Communism is the abolition of private property. Socialism is the institutionalized aggression against private property and all contractual exchanges. Capitalism is a social system based on the explicit recognition of self-ownership, private property, and non-aggressive contractual exchanges between consenting adults. That's important to start with. just because when you don't allow someone to define something, they can call anything they want what they already like. How is it that social security given to us by Congress is different than the Gulf of Tonkin

Resolution, also given to us by conference, both under the guise of helping human beings improve their well-being. The intentions are always there. So, yes, the definitions are vitally important. Yeah, that's right. Because you kind of can't, you know, we want to figure out what's right here and what's correct. And we can't do that unless we know what we're talking about. It's a pretty basic demand of any debate.

So, well, as we see the kind of the rise of Democratic socialists, there's obviously one of the reasons why it's important that people like you take them on is because well, quite frankly, everybody else seems to be unable to do it, except kind of people almost in our camp, able to do it in the most effective way, because so many of them already concede all of these principles in their worldview. And so they can't really attack these principles, and you see them trying to attack Mamdani for every other reason, rather than going right at the heart of why this program can't work. And you don't have to make him a secret jihadist or say, oh, my God, the problem is he

won't visit Israel. Well, that's stupid. No one cares about that anyway. And, you know, we've already seen the, you know, the Israeli government looks pretty indistinguishable from jihadists themselves these days. So it's just not alarming people that much. But so why, what is it that you would say, right? You know, me and you are both guys who are former leftists.

You know, I really was, and I was young and dumb at the time, but I was like an economic leftist until I encountered these ideas. You were also. And so let's go through a few of them, like why it is that this system cannot work for the ends that they wish to achieve. So before we even get to that, let's get to the logic behind what they say and what they're literally advocating. So Momdani is on the John Stewart Show and says, a lot of what we've come to accept as the facts of life across our country is driven by democratic socialist principles.

If today you and I were to introduce the idea of a building that lends out books for free, we would be slandered in the same way that so many new ideas are slandered today. And yet, that's the library. So this is the fallacy of looking at one side of the equation, looking at a person going into a building, getting a book, not having to engage in monetary exchanges, therefore it is free. He then compares that to government schools. Now, it's odd to think, why is there a huge federal budget for government schools if they are free? Well, it's because taxpayers are actually paying for it. This is equally as fallacious as saying, why do you care that Pete Hegseth wants a $1.5 trillion defense budget?

One, it's for defense and defense is good. And two, it's free. I've never gotten a bill from the Marines, from the Army, from the Navy, from the Air Force. It's just free. Well, what you're looking at is one side of the equation and not looking at the coercive funding mechanism that is actually financing this, whether it's through increasing the money supply or whether it's through taxation. So the myth of free is vitally important. So then say, well, I'm actually such a democratic socialist. I don't even believe in money.

So, yes, that's how we're going to make it free. This is not recognizing that there are costs associated with all actions. Your time is scarce. Every minute you spend doing one thing, it's a minute you're not spent doing something else. Every cubic pound of concrete that is used to build the Hans Hoppa Museum is not used to build the Rosa Parks Museum or the Momdani Museum. Where should it be located? Should it be in the middle of Times Square? or should it be in Montana.

Prices would be a way that you would generally coordinate these things with the profit incentive, but there are no such prices to coordinate with under the concept of democratic socialism. Once you say something should be free, the military health care housing, you've already lied and said something that costs trillions of dollars a year is free. Okay. So once you've passed that, notice there is a general experience. he who pays the piper calls the tune and this is where whoever's paying the piper the piper is reliant on the person who pays him so he's going to have some influence on what the piper does

this is exactly what takes place in the marketplace the reason we have a saying the customer's always right is because in order for producers to get our scarce dollars they have to first meet our consumer demand that's why most companies try to build products and services and distribute them to as many people as possible. This is how Amazon gets wealthy. Walmart, that's how Red Robin and an Out Burger, it's how Cornelius Vanderbilt got so wealthy by lowering the cost of steamship travel, making it accessible to the average person. It's how Henry Ford got so much money by making the Model T cost less than his competitors. It's how Rockefeller made money by lowering the cost of oil. Andrew Carnegie did this with steel. The Democratic Socialists,

when these things are privatized under the greedy profit incentive, have no explanation for why these things go down in price and larger numbers of people over time are able to accumulate them. So by not only lying about that, it's free, but by taking away the producers focus on consumers where their money comes from, and now they're getting paid by the politicians. So now the producers answer to Congress and try to make Congress happy instead of the consumers. So we would naturally expect there to be lower quality and higher prices than they otherwise would when producers are primarily focused on pleasing Congress and regulators rather than pleasing consumers because they will please whoever is giving them the money.

That is the principled reason for why more socialism leads to lower quality and higher prices than it otherwise would. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is my Patriot Supply. I love this company. I'm a big believer in preparedness. and so always been thrilled to have them on board. Just a few years ago, if you told someone you were stocking up on emergency food,

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All right. Let's get back on the show. Yes. Okay. Beautiful. So if I could, and correct me if I'm wrong, but almost like if we were to crystallize kind of, I think some points here, right? That almost, and almost even if we were phrased them in ways to challenge to democratic

socialist. So like, I think so far what we've said here is like, number one, there's a very, a couple of reasonable requests in this. kind of conversation. I'm almost phrasing this like some of the lefties that I like. I want to send this episode to them and get some feedback from them. But so number one, I think it's a reasonable request that we say, hey, you got to define like what you actually are. And in a way that makes sense. So we can talk about what we're actually disagreeing over here. And that number two, you got to admit it's very unfair for you to say, we're for free health care, we're for free

housing, we're for this because it's kind of obvious what you're doing here is you're shifting this into a debate about morality, about like, as if we all hate health care and education, all the stuff when obviously the real debate here that we're having is whether the system of taxation at the threat of violent imprisonment and then the redistribution of that money, whether that is a better system than voluntary exchanges between people. And then you're going to have to get into actually looking at those systems. and describing it like why one is. And I think some of the points you get into there is that then you have to actually make

the argument of like why they don't have all of the incentive problems that the market has, but none of the incentive solutions that the market has. And so then that like that action there is where the actual debate is. So we can at least ask them to like, let's be honest and describe what we're talking about and describe the actual mechanism by which you're going to enforce these policies. One of the differences that I see between myself and Democratic Socialists, it's sort of like the root issue, is someone like myself who is on the right, who believes in the constrained division. I believe that human beings are inherently self-interested. So when I see that there are profitable opportunities to make profits off food, housing, health care, books, computers, microphones, I say, oh, that's a really good.

good thing because people are self-interested. They want the money. They're going to have an incentive to produce those, not just in a small quantity, but in a large quantity because people want more money than less money in general. People want more resources, more power when they have the opportunity to do so. If you don't believe in self-interest, you don't think taxing at 40, 60, 90% will really diminish anyone's work ethic. You don't think that having tons of of regulations makes it so there are going to be fewer producers, fewer contractors, fewer employers. With fewer contractors and fewer employers, employees and consumers have less options than they otherwise would. This is what creates the oligopolis that we experience today

that Mamdani just calls monopolies. But anytime there's an oligopoly, those oligopolis tend to advocate more regulations. They seem to be very happy with things as they currently are. When I worked at Walmart, we had two CEOs, H. Lee Scott and Doug McMullen, explicitly come out in favor of the minimum wage. The same thing Hassan Piker advocates. Now, how does he explain that? There is no mechanism by which you can increase the cost of something drastically and still get the same result. They see that when health care costs rise, fewer people can access them. But when the number of regulations rise, when it used to take 400,000, 10 days to build the Empire State Building in 1933. It now takes 410 days for me to find a permit

to put an expansion on my small house here. That is what regulation does. That's the level of innovation that's been stifled because of the coercive apparatus of the state and the concept of socialists saying, instead of achieving our ends with social cooperation in the voluntary realm, we're going to delegate surrogate decision-making processes to the coercive apparatus of government. This is the heart of why democratic socialism is terrible. It raises the cost of production means we're less productive. It raises the cost of social cooperation and contracting. So we get less cooperation, less contracting, less wealth, and lower standards of living.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think there's some questions that you just hit on here in this already on the podcast and that you hit on in your longer video where it's like these kind of very basic questions that you, I really would like to hear. We're taking this back to like basic philosophical stuff here. But I would like to hear answers from this, from some of the Democratic Socialists, like questions like, why doesn't everyone make the minimum wage? Why is such a small percentage of the workforce make the minimum allowed wage?

Like, why are employers voluntarily giving more money that they don't have to? And as you also said, why do prices of things ever go down? You know, like, why do the prices of electronics ever? You know, you got to think here you have a producer who's already gotten you to pay so much money for an iPhone and they're going to lower the price or they're going to make it better than it was when they already know they got you? I mean, why wouldn't the greed that spiked during 2008 and spike during 2021? Why wouldn't that same greed spike right there and have them raise the price? I mean, it does seem, I got to say over here,

there is no coherent answer to this question under the Democratic Socialist worldview. you. Why would it not? You know, if this is a thing, you know, as they say, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer or whatever like that, it's like, okay, but you wouldn't say like at a certain point what happens there, right, to all the poor people. Like if there's only pressure in one direction, which is the capitalist class always being more greedy and driving our wages down and down and down, wouldn't you expect to see 95% of the, of the workforce at the minimum wage? And if the poor get poor, what we should see is instead of looking at money, or dollars, it's so hard to compare how much is $100 in America versus $100 in the Great Britain's currency versus the euro. How do you compare today to 1970? Yeah, yeah. Countries, it's so difficult. The best measure to use are time prices. This would be the average amount of time a person has to work in order to access a product or service. In short, the time prices of accessing products and services has drastically decreased in the last 100 years.

Now, that is a microscopic amount of time that the human race has been in existence. And in the last hundred years since 1926, there's no democratic socialist explanation outside of price controls, which obviously disincentivized production and lead to shortages, clearly. So what we should see if the poor get poor, there is no increase in accessibility to the average person of anything that's privatized. Tylenol, dayquil, computers, Lasic eye surgery, water bottles, printers, paintings, books, televisions. All of these things should have been at one percent because only the one percent, only the bourgeoisie can afford such things. In 1926, one percent of people

had them. In 1966, one percent of people had them. And today, only the top one percent can afford these things because they are privatized. So that's one way. to measure wealth. Another way, if you want to use dollars, is to look at the average earnings of a 16-year-old and then compare it to the average earnings of a 46-year-old. By looking at these groups, we see that one group, even though the same minimum wage applies to them, one group earns a lot more than the other group. That disparity alone disproves the idea that it's about greed or if you happen to have a nephew, it's all about nepotism, or it's, well, because of white supremacy. Other groups get paid different.

Of course, Nigerian Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans all have higher incomes than more Americans. So the fact that there is a disparity, the fact that when someone starts a job, they're getting paid a very small amount of money. Each year they get on the job experience, the average person's wage tends to increase. If the poor got poor, what we would see is the average person's income over time. starts at a spot and then decreases. You start at, you know, $10 an hour, and then after five years, you go to $9.50, and then after five more years, you go to $9. We see literally the exact opposite.

Now, say that there was the stagnating wages that Paul Krugman loves to lie about. If prices are drastically decreasing in the economy, because there isn't a central bank and there's mass production, and the producers are trying to appeal to mass consumption, that actually wouldn't be an issue because your purchasing power would be increasing and you wouldn't really mind, okay, I'm going to get 20 bucks an hour for the rest of my life. But over time, that money's going to buy more and more and more. So even that wouldn't really be an issue. If you had no central bank, if there were mass production, if there were fewer regulations. One more thing. I don't, I should have made this on the self-interest point because do you agree with me that the rejection of

self-interest is critical to the foundational dispute between us and Democratic socialists? Yes. I think that there's, I think that, and maybe this is like some kind of Adam Smith basic stuff here, but I think that capitalism incorporates the human reality of greed and self-interest, and it can channel it. And socialists essentially have to just pretend it's not there. And they have to, because they, or certainly at least, they have to pretend it's not there for those in government, for sure, because otherwise you've got major problems is that individuals who are this selfish in the market are now also this selfish and now with the power of the state, which has to be stronger than the market in order for the whole thing to work anyway. So you have to give them more power. And yes, also I think there's an enormous, but socialism doesn't have a cleansing mechanism for the negatives of selfishness, the way that. that markets do. In other words, so you can only get successful if you're serving other people

in a free market. Whereas, for example, if you were having, which is something socialists, never even try to deal with, but like if everything in the economy is democratically decided, well, like, how exactly does it help for everyone who works in the typewriter industry to get a vote on whether the home computer should be produced? Because obviously they're going to vote against that. We all recognize that it was really not in the typewriter store's interest that home computers became the thing that they are. But when you have a market, you can go, well, the consumers wanted it and some producer wanted to produce it. And so, sorry, that's like, in other words, there's going to be losers. It will be against their self-interest. And democracy only

mucks that up. So yes, I think you're absolutely on to something huge there. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is prolon. If you want to be your most radiant this summer. Check out Prolon's five-day fasting, mimicking diet. It makes it easy to target fat loss, support lean muscle, and reset your metabolism. So you look and feel your best all summer long. In just five days, Prolon works at the cellular level to rejuvenate you from the inside out and help you hit your summer goals. Prolon, as I've been telling you about for a while now, guys, it's a plant-based nutrition program. They have soup, snacks, beverages, and they're all designed to nourish your body while keeping it in a fasting state. So you trick your cells into thinking that

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All right, let's get back into the show. Thank heavens, NBC, ABC, and Fox were unable to vote on whether or not podcasts could enter the competition market. So one thing about criticizing the rich and just supporting the poor, we can say to them, or just supporting the masses instead of the bourgeoisie, one thing we can say in their favor is being rich almost necessarily meant you were evil for the vast majority of history because the only way to acquire large amounts. of wealth and resources was theft and conquest. It wasn't until there was the concept of private property, the freedom to contract, and make mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges that people then could reasonably create large amounts of wealth in a first generation timeframe by meeting consumer demand. So for the vast majority of history, being rich could necessarily equate with evil. So what I use for the self-interest proof or way to provide some evidence, you can look at what I call the Donald Trump test.

What we can do is take someone, have them in the private sector, and then put that same person in the public sector. Because according to Democratic socialism, in the public sector, they have to answer to us, the voters. So they're going to be trying to please us. But in the private sector, evil, greedy, self-interest, individual. doggy dog mentalities and externalities. That's horrible. We want people in the public sector. What happened was we actually took someone, Donald Trump, from the private sector where he had the apprentice, he had buildings, which, whether or not you like them, Donald Trump was not that much of a threat to society as far as, you know, being totally detrimental when he was in this

voluntary sector. Even if you didn't like him, he had no right to conscript you with the selective service. He had no recognized right to declare war. He had no access to a central bank. He had no right to take 20, 30, 40 percent of your annual income by force with a threat of putting you in jail if you don't chip in. So this actually provides an insight into the reality. This is not just theory. This test the theory. If we have a nefarious actor, are they more detrimental to society in the voluntary sector, in the private sector, or in the coercive sector of politics. Because I don't like that building in Vegas.

I think it's really hideous. But compare that to tonight a civilization might have to end. I don't want it to, but it probably will. That's a little different. Killing 156 civilians on February 28th of 2026, a little bit worse than the horrible episodes of The Apprentice. This is a real world. If you don't like something, make sure there's not an apparatus that has a lot of power

that those bad people can occupy because humans are inherently self-interested. The example I use in the video is compare the thought of someone who passed away in your life that you cared about, take one person, and compare your emotions with how you feel about that one person to the 500,000 deaths that took place during the Crimean War in the 1860s between the British, the French, the Ottomans, and the Russians. If people weren't self-interested, they'd get 500,000 times as sad about those as they would about this one, or they would get, according to World Population Review, 167,000 people across the world die every single day. You would, thank God, we're self-interested or we wouldn't be able to operate.

You should be get, if you're not self-interested, you should be getting 167,000 times of sad about everyone else who dies every day than you would about your boyfriend, girlfriend, mother, father, because those people are just as equally worthy of life as anyone else. You can even put the Scandinavian test. Why are their luxury item goods in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden? When those people know that they're starving people in Africa, India, Indonesia, shouldn't they take their scarce resources and say, we can't have any bars, any TVs, any computers, we have to give this money to the poor.

Every time a Democratic socialist watches Netflix or watches YouTube or takes a nap or goes to a restaurant, they are spending scarce time and resources that could be allocated to helping the poor. Why don't they do that? Because they're self-interested, just like everyone else. So the difference between the free market and socialism is not whether or not people are self-interested. Self-interest is a universal condition of the human race. The difference is under which constraints are self-interested actors operating.

Can I as a self-interested person only get money if I first please you? Or do I have access to the coercive apparatus of the state? And I could meet my ends absent your consent. Then I don't have to raise your standard of living before I get your money. Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. So I want to, okay, I want to end on against me. And actually, I want to kind of do against me last. and I want to do maybe Gene Epstein's, I think, go together with, with against me,

like the, um, the Gene Epstein argument about voluntary, uh, cooperatives and stuff like that. But I want to do, let's do like another economic one before we get to that because I do find more and more that I did the example I use, I can't, I got to look this up because I don't know what the term for it is, but I think it was like an ancient Rome. I think this, for like a thousand years, humans best scientists thought that viruses came from the clouds and that that was just how you got sick. Like if you had a runny nose, your doctor would just be like, I know, there's a damn storm clouds coming in. That's what happens. And it's just totally wrong. It's not true. And it's just, they thought they were doing science, but it's not science.

It's just they had it all wrong. And that's kind of how we feel about everyone else with economics. Like we really do like, like almost the Austrians really do feel like, listen, I don't know what it is that you, econometrics start doing it. But like none of this is science. This is all just kind of nonsense. And there is, so like, I don't know, there's something about how the idea that you're, you're trying to use a tool that cannot deliver prosperity for prosperity, you know, there's something about like you're trying to, it's all comes down to just price controls and price controls don't work essentially. When it comes to economic arguments, one of I, one of the ones I use is, uh,

Alessing number 49, the surplus value myth. So a lot of democratic socialists, which makes them different from your average Democrats, will necessarily see the surplus value aspect of the economy as the rich, not necessarily the employer, but the stock owners, the rich, the influential people are in some ways extracting surplus value from the labor. A few things about this. on the concept of getting money from the worker. Notice they don't differentiate between voluntary and coercive if you're benefiting. So even if I voluntarily contract with the employer, they still say the employer's extracting my surplus value or take this concept and extend it to stay at home moms.

The stay at home mom is reaping benefits from her husband who works. she would be extracting the surplus value of the husband. There's nothing wrong with this, according to U or I. But the Democratic Socialist needs to make sure that this mom is also part of the working class or else she's not contributing to the workers' production of goods and services. She is extracting the labor surplus of her husband. This would mean immediately all welfare has to end because welfare recipients are necessarily getting tax money.

that is the surplus value of the workers. Anyone who goes to college or is in school, the colleges make money by getting the students to work. That is extracting their surplus value. Any internship should be illegal automatically because the employer is benefiting with the surplus value that the laborer creates. So this is completely psychotic, obviously. These are voluntary transactions where people see well, I'd like an internship because I want on the job experience so I could have a better income in the future. I work for $0 an hour at school in hopes of getting more money in the future. I go to work to give money to my wife because this is a relationship that I greatly value. So by not differentiating between voluntary surplus value and involuntary, the socialist is already

at a complete deficit. Also, notice how this only applies to profitable industries, where the surplus value is being extracted. The majority of businesses are not profitable. So in that case, it would be the employees extracting surplus value from the employers. And then the employees, I guess, are the criminals in this case. And then they lie and say, well, we're just against, we embrace the spirit of Karl Marx. It's not that we're anti-private property. We're just anti-bouchozy private property.

But these morons are always taxing the working class with sales tax, income taxes, property taxes, estate taxes, or death taxes. So even in the economic realm, by regulating the actions, by coercively limiting the actions of the employees, they're making the employees worse off than they otherwise would be by rejecting their freedom to contract and have access to an employer who comes up with the, okay, before the value of the capitalist, comment on the surplus value thing. Yeah. Well, look, I'll say this, right?

So right here, and this is the way I said it a few episodes back was that I think, you know, in Marx's use of the labor theory of value, it's just, I think this is right at the heart of what messes up this whole kind of understanding. And look, the labor theory of value is just objectively wrong. It's been disproving. It's the clouds cause viruses. No, it's not. It's germs.

There's a different answer. That's not what's creating the value. this can be demonstrated and logically proven that the labor is not. Now, Adam Smith, despite his flaws, like he relied on the labor theory of value, but it didn't really muck up the theory of the invisible hand, let's say. But socialism is destroyed by that because their entire worldview here, which is just, again, objectively wrong, is that essentially the worker is creating the value with their labor.

Now, if that were true, then in a sense they've, got a little bit of a case because you would go, yeah, you're going into work, you're bringing in 15, you're creating $15 an hour of value and your employer's only paying you 10. His job is just to sit there and siphon off the excess value that you created by working. But the fact is that none of that's true and we all know that on a human level. And actually, we wouldn't even go get the job if that were true because we already have the work. I got the value. Why do I need to go to an employer then? No, look, if I'm a really good salesman, because I'm just, I got a silver tongue and I'm really good at selling, and I go get a job selling computers, and I make 300K a year because I'm such a good salesman. It's not that I just brought in 500K and my boss chooses to only give me 300 of it.

So this one, they're stealing 200K for me. If you look at things like that, you got it all. No, I didn't have any computers. All I had was my skills to sell. This dude was sitting on a factory of 10,000 computers. I didn't have that. In order to get that, I would have had to lay out like $5 million, you know, in order to eventually go make the $500,000.

I would have had to take enormous risk. I would have had to put a ton of work into building a store and building a brand name and getting a customer base and all of these other things. So the deal was you take care of all that and I got the selling and we agreed upon a split of the value that both of us are creating by coming together. You know, if somebody built a factory that was because they had money, they could have spent that on present consumption. Instead, they spent that on a factory that now people,

so again, the point is that, yes, your employer isn't stealing from you. You came to an agreement in the same way your housewife isn't stealing from you. You came to an agreement. So, yes, I think the whole idea of the value, being derived from the worker and then being stolen from everybody else is made up. It's all nonsense. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Trollco.

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and you don't need to be in the trades to wear it. If you value self-reliance, responsibility, and honest hard work, trollco is for you. Go check them out at trollco.com.com slash problem. That's T-R-O-L-L-C-O-com.com. problem. Use the promo code Dave 25 for 25% off your first order. Trollco, dirty hands, clean money, support a brand that supports real people. All right, let's get back into the show. Imagine going on to Shark Tank. This is how we can test the value of an idea, either to investors or to customers. And when you go on, you say, I have an idea. I'll have a thousand workers for

my company. Or actually, I want it to be more valuable. I want to be more valuable. I want more workers. I want 10,000 workers. I don't have an idea of what to sell, how to sell it, how to market it. I don't know where we're going to be located. I don't know if it's going to be a product or a service. I don't know what training methods will use for these 10,000 employees, but I have the 10,000 employees. And this is where all the value comes from. So just give us an idea that's going to generate billions of dollars in revenue by meeting consumer demand. And then we're all good. Anyone watching that would realize, huh, I think the idea of coming up with what to sell product or service kind of does play an important role, a vitally important role in determining a company's

value or the value that workers have when they have access to capital equipment. So what Marks would say. Well, look, I mean, well, again, look, because and look, it's just, it sometimes it comes off like you're being a dick to like, to low-skilled workers or something like that. But like, you kind of got to tell the truth to people. Otherwise, you know what I mean? Like in the same way that like your kid, well, maybe when they're real young, you want to lie to him about some stuff. Like everything always works out and is going to be okay. And there's no chance that you die in a horrible car accident or something. You might tell your four-year-old. But, but you wouldn't tell your 18-year-old

that there's nothing wrong about them and they're perfect. And actually, the reason the world exists is because you and everybody else is just taking value away. from you. And the truth is that, say, for example, look, if you, I don't know exactly what to use, but let's just say, so here in this podcast, right, I got people who work on it. Natalie produces the show here. We have people who sell ads for the show. We have people who do, you know, there's people who do a bunch of different jobs. Now, you could look at this and you could say, oh, like, well, because Dave gets paid more, that means he's ripping all these people off. He's taking advantage of them and they're just making like a little salary, but he's making more money.

And it's like, well, no, look, the reality of the situation is that you're, these people that I'm talking about are much younger than May. They're 20 years younger than May. I wasn't making any money 20 years ago. They're paying their dues. They're learning the industry. They're coming up. But the truth is that if I've had people, if somebody said like, well, I demand $500,000. I'd go, okay, well, we can't afford to pay you that.

and we'll find someone else who can do the job. And that's that. Somebody else can come in and do this. That's why you're not worth more money. I mean, it's just like, look, if you, I'm sorry, like, if you are a minimum wage worker, then no, you're not the one producing all of the value who everybody else is ripping off. You are replaceable. Get your skills up.

Sorry, this is real life. And that's how things get produced and how things work. And Jordan Peterson brought that to the dating market. And that's why it's so important. I'm alone because I'm just too terrific. No, clean your room, better yourself. This is one metric to use to determine whether or not a democratic socialist is a nefarious person or a well-meaning person who is mistaken. And this is their willingness to accept voluntary solutions in the interim.

So they could say, I want the state to coercibly fund and monopolize health care and education. And you can say, all right, well, that's probably going to take a little. while, even if you think it's right or wrong, is there anything the working class can do in the present to increase their income or make themselves healthier? You want to get healthy? Go to YouTube, search the keto diet. That'll change your life dramatically for the better. We have an obesity epidemic because people have not watched enough keto videos on YouTube, which I didn't lost 110 pounds. And if you want a higher wage, we could stage a protest outside the White House, raise the minimum wage, But there's another way, which is look at people in a company.

Some get paid more than others. What are these people doing that the others are not? Showing up on time, getting on the job experience, requesting a raise, increasing their skill set. And in order to get an even higher wage, you want a general foundation where people have access to a lot of employers. So you can tell an employer to shove it more easily. But with more regulations, you have fewer employers than you otherwise would. or take the concept of education, the Democratic Socialist, even after all the Internet and computers and Amazon has given us with free books,

they still want you to go to those four years of university for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then they say, but wait, I want the state to coercibly fund that. So you'll pay for it through taxes instead of having to pay tuition. If you want to, you know, invest in a business, you've got to do that yourself. But we want you to go to college, you know, the place. place where Marxists are disproportionately influential. That's where we want everyone to go for four years. Well, maybe I could wait until on college age and all those things, or I could go back and spend four years of my life. But also, I have access to Grok. GROC is now free. I set my grandma up with it

two or three weeks ago. You could educate yourself there. You could use Google. You could use Internet Archive. You could use Wikipedia. You could use the Libertarian Institute and get a ton of free non-coercively funded education that way. Those would be solutions that if you came to the Democratic Socialists, they'd say, well, it's really good that in the healthcare industry, Tylenol and Dayquil and NyQuil and a ton of things at Walgreens, those improve your health care and those are really cheap and that's good in the meantime. And you could do things to get a raise in the meantime at your job.

And you could improve your educational value by using things that you already have access to. Yeah. If they reject those, then you're dealing with someone who's just a domestic imperialist, not someone who actually wants to improve the well-being of the poor. These fuckers every week should be celebrating the drastic decrease in absolute poverty that the human race is experienced in the last hundred years as a causal result of private property and the freedom of contract. Anyone who doesn't is a domestic imperialist, not someone who cares about the workers.

Yeah. Amen, brother. I mean, look, it's like, and look, I mean, I guess this is, and so we could do kind of the Gene Epstein one here because this is real in line with what you're just saying and then do the against me. But I think kind of the broader message and some of you guys, you more astute listeners who really followed the Libertarian Institute and all the great work they do, you probably got this if you watched Keith's awesome video. But really kind of the the secret theme there, right, that isn't exactly expressed out loud, is that all this kind of applies to statism in general, right? Like all of this is really arguments against

coercive intervention into the political life and the economy and that it's not essentially, right, it's not just the Democratic Socialists. It's basically just that they exist on this spectrum of how much you want this incident. And look, I'd say it like this. What we're saying, and I mean this in the most good faith way to any, you know, Democratic Socialists who might listen to this. What we said at the beginning is like, hey, let's like just define our terms. let's admit what the disagreement here is really about.

It's not that me and Keith hate kids learning stuff or hate hip surgeries or anything like that. We believe these things should be provided voluntarily on the market. And you are arguing for statism. Like that's the core of the disagreement here is that you. And to your point, Keith, I'll kind of segue into the point that Gene Epstein makes, which is very in line with what you were just saying. But that he likes to throw out a lot of these statistics. One of them I remember is that the body.

half of the population. So forget this 99%, you know, the rich 1%, the bottom 50%, right? So we're giving you like everyone making 80K a year is out, okay? Like this is the bottom 50% controls one third of the consumer spending. Okay. So now that's not quite as equitable as maybe the socialist would like it to be. Perhaps they think the bottom 50% should control 50%. Now, of course, don't get me wrong. I don't mean to be misleading. The top 1% they, if we were looking at investment numbers or something like that, it would be way more skewed. But just looking at consumption, okay? The bottom 50% controls one third of the consumption of the United States of America,

the biggest consumption, you know, engine in the history of the world. One third of that consumption power is completely controlled. Do you know one third of the entire consumption, the economy can move mountains, okay? So all the voluntary path is wide open to the Democratic Socialists. all you have to do is, like, look, like, let's say, let's say a first year intern here at the podcast network goes, hey, I don't think Dave should be the boss of part of the problem. I think we should all own it equally and we should all sort of, okay, well, you can't violently overtake my company, but you can go start your own company where everybody owns it equally. Nobody works for anyone at, right? So you can go start worker co-ops and let it be known that, hey, the system here is that we do it democratically. There is no owner. There is no employee. We're all in this together. And all you got to do is convince the workers of the world to you. You don't even got to convince the workers of the world.

You got to convince like a percentage of the workers of America to only shop at co-ops, only shop it at worker-owned businesses, all that. So essentially, you can have all of this right now. You can have your socialist utopia if you can persuade people. But the bottom line is that you know you can't. You know you can't persuade people. you don't even want to try. And again, Keith, to your point, correct me where I'm wrong, but somebody, show me one instance where the Democratic socialist is arguing, actually in this

case, it should be voluntary. Actually, in this case, we don't believe in government intervention. Actually, like, where is any of that? Where is any impulse to let? Because obviously, look, on some level, we all know, there's a difference between me sitting here and saying, hey, I believe in universal health care, so I'm a good person. Hey, I believe in fighting the war in Iran, so I'm a good person. And I believe in taxing the rich, so I'm a good person. Hey, I, and then there's a difference between me volunteering at a soup kitchen two nights a week, right? Like, on some level, you do understand things have to get done at some point. And so what are you actually doing other than just advocating violence, just advocating the state, do something else? Exactly.

And if we want to look at the results, you'd think they'd be very appreciative of the Jeff Bezos's of the world for giving people more access to books than anyone else for Steve Jobs, innovating the computer and saying, well, at least that was a really good thing. He really empowered the average member of the working class to have access to a computer. Instead of only the rich and their Ivy Leagues having all this information, now an average member of the working class can use GROC. Or I'm also using Claude. That also has a free version.

But imagine the power. AOC, Momdani, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, all get. on the phone, hey, we're starting a GoFundMe. Everyone is going to tweet this out every single day for six months. And the GoFundMe is going to be a eventual replacement for a public option. If you can afford your health care, do whatever. If you can't afford it, you come to us. That would be extraordinarily powerful, but it would be voluntary. And that's why it's not heavily focused on in that aspect. And that's why the definition of socialism is not people coming together and having dignity and being nice, it's actually the institutionalized aggression

against private property. And I think that's why I kind of wanted to close on the against me one here. So we'll do that next because if you concede this, which I really just don't see how, if you at least concede say that the difference between me and you and Ryan Grimm or Crystal Ball, you know, anti-war leftists who I really like a lot. But the difference between our economic policy simply is that they believe in the government, and I don't. They believe the government should do all of these things. I believe the government should stay out of all of them. That is the difference in our policy. And what this does come down to, just again, objectively assessing the thing, like we kind of did the economics, and this is getting more into just kind of the moral

argument of all of it. But I do think there's something really important here to be made, because Keith, it's kind of like this, right? If me and you could still try to put ourselves in their mind. We're sitting here and saying, objectively, you are arguing for an institution which is predicated on the initiation of violence. This is not an institution that goes around and negotiates with people. This is an institution that says we will throw you in a cage and kill you if you resist coming to the cage in, you know, if you don't do as, as we say, this is a law. There's a gun behind this opinion. Whereas in the market, it's voluntary transactions with people's individual property. Now, they somehow always feel like they are in some way the noble ones. They are the

ones saying, hey, we should have health care. Dave, Keith, you guys are sitting here. There are people struggling here and we're telling them, no, we can help that. You know, like they have it in their mind that they're kind of the noble ones and they're the anti-fascists. And to me, it's like one of the biggest things that we have to get across here because it's obviously true is that I am sorry when it comes to someone like me versus Hassan Piker. Hassan Piker's a goddamn fascist. Like, what are you talking about, dude? You absolutely suppose, there's a reason why, like, as you said here,

it's a reason why you're saying nice things about Mao Zetong. You'd never say a nice thing in a world about a capitalist who built a factory. Oh, but all of a sudden, Stalin or Mao built a few factories. That's nice to them. But so this was an argument that you described really well here. Stefan Mollinu was the first person I ever heard put this forward. but why don't you explain this here? Because I do think this kind of does to me really get down to the core difference between

the libertarian and the Democratic socialist. And as they, you know, kind of pride themselves on being anti-fascist or something like that, like this, I think, gets at the authoritarian nature of advocating for government. So you go ahead and give this argument. So this is either from his book, Everyday Anarchy or Practical Anarchy. And Malinu asks people, if I were committing a rape, would you have the right to use violence against me to stop me from doing that? The average person before you finish the sentence says, yes, absolutely.

And then Molineux says, well, if I were committing a murder, would you have the right to use force, a gun, a knife to kill me and stop me from doing this? And if I did commit a murder or a rape, would you be justified in putting me in a cage afterward? And people say, yes, absolutely. Then he asked, well, what about kidnapping or what if you caught me owning like five or six slaves? Would you have the right to use violence against me? And people unequivocally say absolutely. So then he says, I don't want to chip in for the current educational system that the state runs because I think the costs out exceed the benefits. I believe in on the job training for skills.

I don't want to chip in for this war in Iran or the education system. I think the state health care system is a complete joke. I think the courts are at this point not doing a good job. They might do a better job in the future and then I'll fund them. So I'm not going to chip in in property taxes, sales taxes or income taxes this year. Do you have the right to use violence against me if I don't chip in for those? And then the excuses start to pile on. We know that this person is okay with using violence in the case of rape, murder, kidnapping, enslavement.

because in that sense it's defensive. They're attacking you the aggressor. But in the case of what if I don't want to chip in for the Affordable Care Act, because I predict healthcare prices will increase since it limits competition in the healthcare marketplace. Do you want to put me in a cage if I don't chip in for complete bullshit? What I think is bullshit. Maybe you think it's totally virtuous and it's going to be terrific. I just don't want to chip in.

do you have the right to send the police to my house to threaten me? If I resist them, they'll kill me in front of my kids. So you better be damn sure that you're willing to use violence against me. So when Mom Donnie is happily talking about three libraries to John Stork, what he ignores is the implicit threat that if you don't chip in, the police will come to your house, put you in a cage. And if you resist, they will shoot you. we as the civilized world need to be very careful with the amount of violence we are willing to use.

And if it's people not chipping in for the U.S. government producing something, it'd be one thing if it was like a good organization. That would be evil enough. But notice, they only believe the state has a monopoly right to do this. If taxation weren't theft, Ben Burgess will say, well, it's not really theft because you don't really own it. Okay, why can't Walmart and Amazon issue taxes? It's not theft. Why can't I issue taxes? Why can't Dave Smith issue taxes?

What the hell is wrong with Dave Smith? You have a standard for Donald Trump. He can't issue taxes, but Dave Smith can't. What the fuck is that about? Stefan Malinu takes a way. Not very egalitarian. Exactly. Stefan Malinu says, we have North and South Korea.

We have East and West Germany. How do these idiots still think socialism's okay? So he takes it into the realm of the person. He says, Dave. I don't want to chip in for this evil bullshit in Iran. will you use violence against me and the people I live with if I don't chip in for this? And the lesson that Malinu extracts is because people are so hesitant to say unequivocally yes, as they are in the case of rape, murder, kidnapping, and enslavement, people don't really believe

this bullshit. It's all propaganda that was taught in schools. How do you explain the one group that has a monopoly on compulsory education is the one group who you happen to believe has a right to initiate violence against everyone? everyone else. What the fuck are the chances of that? Yeah, well, look, I mean, there's, no, that's, that's right. And very incredibly well said. You know, the thing I think about a lot is like the, you know,

the civil rights movement. And the, look, I mean, it really was a stunt that Martin Luther King and then pulled in Birmingham, Alabama. They went there intentionally because they knew they were going to get that reaction. And they had done a bunch of like peaceful sit-ins before and just didn't get that reaction. And so it just didn't

like blow up the way. But there was something about making, Americans watch young black men in suits and ties get sprayed with fire hoses and have, have, you know, golden or excuse me, German Shepherds, you know, sick on them and all this stuff, that you had to look at like the enforcement arm of this. You know, it's easy to support segregation in abstract, but like, do you really support German Shepherds being unleashed on 17-year-olds in suits and ties for standing up and demanding equal treatment? That's pretty harsh. And just saying, if your whole thing's going to be about supporting government policy,

which is what you guys are, you know, you won't define it, but clearly it's all about the government should do more in all of these areas. It's like, okay, well, this is the actual nature of the beast.

Like the actual way that this system that you're advocating works is like, okay, like I have a house. We said, we accept that I own my house. We, in the same sense as you said that nobody else can take it, right,

only the government. But okay, like, if I don't pay my property taxes, or if I don't pay my property taxes, or if I don't pay my, taxes or I don't pay way. They will come for this house. They will come for what I have. They will come for me eventually and throw me in jail. And I also, by the way, I got a fair amount of

weaponry here at this house. And if I simply do nothing else but defend myself and say, I'm not going, they will kill me in front of my children. They will murder me in front of my children. Like that is what you support. That's the system you support is them murdering you in front of your children over education, housing. And not over whether we should have education in housing, over whether one centralized monopoly ought to be the ones who provide it. So, like, I'm sorry, you support killing citizens for the purpose of maintaining the only true monopoly. So don't give me this hippie-dippy stuff about how you're the ones for dignity and you're

the ones against authoritarianism and you're the ones against monopoly control of the economy. You are for the monopolizer and you are really. willing to kill people for it. I think it's something you should look in the mirror about. Exactly. And it's not just the logic behind the law. It's out of all the groups. This is literally the same group who democratic socialists are rightfully advocating is complicit in a genocide in Gaza, starting a war with Iran killing civilians. They mentioned the atrocities in Iraq and Libya and Syria and Afghanistan. They've been mentioning mass murder, accusing the government of mass murder since at least Vietnam, the more well-read ones will understand that the Second World War and the atrocities against Japan and Germany were also unnecessary and unjustified or the First World War.

How many millions of members of the working class does the government or U.S. government have to kill, maim, and enslave with conscription before the socialist says, you know what? I think we should go to voluntary mutual aid. The state appears to be too dangerous to tolerate. They never even really seem to suggest that there'll be a period where we get all of these criminals out and then new people in before we expand their power. Like that never even seems to be stressed. I guess it's like theoretically in there kind of implied. But it's like we got this problem. We all agree on. Hey, look, we got two groups of people.

Libertarians like me and you, Keith, these free market gold bugs. And then we got the anti-war leftists over here. And we all agree that there's this gang. Let's call them the Crips. They just committed a genocide, man. They're killing tens of thousands of people. They're starting wars. They're murdering little girls in a school.

All for no reason. They're just horrible, you know? And we go, man, we disagree on everything, but we could come together that this group, the bloods, what they just did was the most evil thing ever. We hate them. And they're like, hey, what do we disagree about again? And they go, oh, we disagree about health care.

And what's the disagreement? And they're like, oh, we say put the bloods in charge. We're like, wait, what? These bloods? These same bloods is who you want to put in charge? And they go, ah, well, maybe we'll get like some new people in the gang. But like the same mechanism is what we're going to use for this. There you go, you're going to get some new people in the gang?

Like, do you have all of the new people in the gang there yet? They go, it's about 95% still the old people. But we'd like them to start having much more power right away. I mean, come on. You got to admit, guys, like on the face of it, that does sound kind of absurd, right? Listen, man, I hope, Keith, I hope to continue this actually as a conversation. I would love to do a thing with me and you and maybe two Democratic socialists who we like all get together and talk about these things. But I'm sorry, man, like we're not going to go down without a fight on this stuff because you guys are just wrong about this.

It's like, for Austrian economics is correct. There are laws of economics. If you want to pay attention to them, that's nice. If you don't, they're still going to exist. and there's the matter of human liberty and dignity and prosperity. All of these things can only be found in a system of freedom. It's the only way you can ever have to. It's, you know, one of the beautiful things, and I'll say this in closing, I'll give you

the final word because we're over time. We've got to wrap. But, okay, Austrian economics and libertarian theory might technically be separate. You know, like they might technically be like Austrian economics is, descriptive, not prescriptive, whereas libertarian theory might be prescriptive or whatever. But there is something beautiful about the fact that, like, you can only have prosperity under the conditions of liberty and to the extent that you have them. And it's the same way, you can only have prices under the condition of volunteerism. You know, it's not even necessarily

that, like, like, I do think volunteerism is a more ethical and moral way to interact. I think it's immoral to, like, impose your will on other people who are peaceful. But, at the same time, it's also the only way that we can have a real pricing system and a real economy and have real prosperity for everyone. It's just what works. What works is people voluntarily interacting. What doesn't work is war and destruction and violence and aggression. Exactly. And I would be open to, I would love for this to be a continuous discussion. I would happily discuss with Asan Piker whether or not the United States or world in general should decriminalize all economic activity between consenting adults.

That can be the premise. Gene Epstein, you have my phone number. The final word is for those who are not that interested in economics. Thank you for listening this far. Check out my video. Everything you were taught about World War II is wrong Churchill's own words. That is a two and a half hour presentation I used. I provided with primary sources, making the case that the U.S. and Britain were not just

in entering the Second World War. Dave, thank you so much for having me, brother. Keith, keep up the great work, man. You're incredible. If you guys don't already, go follow Keith Knight. His work is incredible. Of course, support the Libertarian Institute. Get Keith's book, Domestic Imperialism.

Really phenomenal book that, you know, if you got anyone in your life who's more like on the left liberal side but is willing to hear this stuff out, give them a copy of that book. It's very approachable and very readable and make some, like if you're looking at hit a liberal with some points that are going to like maybe stick with them and hit them with some punches like oh damn that's something to think about this is this is really the attack in the left from the left you know uh book so it's really great you're the man keith we'll do

this again real soon thank you everybody for watching catch next time peace