Ten Things You Should Know About Socialism | Thomas J. DiLorenzo

my topic is 10 things you should know about socialism and it's basically based on my book the problem with socialism and a couple years ago Regnery publishing contact with me they contacted Tom woods first but he said he said Tom woods incorporated his keep them too busy so he he said call dilorenzo so they called me and said asked me if I could you know because they had been reading these opinion polls one opinion poll said 69% of people under 30 said they could they would vote for a socialist for president and and so that's kind of alarming ya hear that in America and so they asked me if I could put together a short book for the Millennial Generation about you know making the case against socialism and they asked if I could do it in five weeks and so and I did I did I just it was in this in this you know offseason I wasn't teaching so just all day every day for weeks I turned out the the book and so uh so anyways that's the purpose of the book and so I thought I'd I'd social I'm gonna summarize some of that some of the main points about socialism things you ought to know about socialism maybe these are talking points they'll help you debate your your commie roommate back at school or someone like that might even help you get kicked out of school who knows be a good thing for some people so socialism defined you know the classic definition and the early 20th century was government ownership of the means of production so when you see countries becoming more and more socialist it means their governments have been taking over the various means of production when when the British nationalized all of the the commanding heights of their economy after World War Two they became more and more socialist and so they didn't become totally socialist in the central planning centers like the Soviet Union but they moved they lurched in the direction of socialism and now in in Friedrich Hayek's famous book the Road to Serfdom in the 1976 edition he he argued that over the years you know between the early 20th century and and then mid 70s the definition of socialism had changed he said that he said that it changed to include the institutions of the welfare state and the progressive income tax because in his words of the the goal the extensible goal was always a Galit arianism recalled the pursuit of equality through forceful governmental coercion and the means just changed he said the original means were a government ownership of the means means of production and that didn't work out too well and so they switched to a different means the welfare state and a progressive income tax and so that was a Hayek's idea and now if you I would encourage you if you're interested in this read read at least some of von Mises book socialism it's a great classic it's online it's on it's for sale here at the Mises Institute and in the latter chapters of social socialism mici says that an important part of socialism is what he called destruction ISM and in the spirit of of Patrick's trying to deciphering of Murray Rothbard bad handwriting I wrote it down Patrick Newman's bad handwriting I wrote down one of the just a minute ago one of the things that Mises said in the in the book about destruction ISM said destruction is the essence of socialism if produced socialism produces nothing it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership and the means of production has created and so when you see politicians today who call themselves socialists advocating reparations for slavery a guaranteed annual income free health care for everybody free education free this free that that's basically what they're doing there they're saying we want to loot and plunder the fruits of past efforts of production under private property and give it away in order to prop us up ourselves up as with political power and be sort of uber or Santa Claus just keep giving every giving everything away government is Santa Claes hell how I think of it and so that's what destruction ISM is and that by the way the the group of socialists who came to America in the 1940s who were known as cultural Marxist their theory was that the reason why the Europeans did not voluntarily embrace socialism was that there were two wedded to the institutions and ideas of Western civilization including the ideas of capitalism in particular and private property and so forth and Christianity they were too wedded to to Christianity therefore the ideas and institutions of Western civilization and the ideas of Christianity must be destroyed in order to have socialist utopia and that in my view is why you see all these attacks on the traditional family always on capitalism for sure and just you know the tearing down of monuments and the painting over murals and things like that these are all attacks on the institutions of Western civilization and it's all part of a game plan of destruction ISM okay so that's socialism point number two is the socialism will destroy your economic future I got a laugh last week when the chief of staff of this Cortes woman the UH the bartender from Westchester County who got elected to Congress by pretending she's from the Bronx and the author of the green New Deal which Bob Murphy is gonna talk about later on today he admitted he came out of MIT he says has nothing to do with the climate it's all about socialism it's all about socialism okay and so and I'm the reason I got a chuckle it's sort of under whether to laugh or cry is that all the young people all the Millennials who are on board with this yeah the green New Deal it's all about destroying their economic future with socialism that's what it's all about and and at the same time granting tremendous amounts of power to creatures like this guy the the chief of staff of this woman the cortez woman and that's that's what it's all about and so just study history a little bit you know the Soviet Union our friend Yuri Maltsev who was an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev whose who's lectured here many times when he when he defected from the Soviet Union he started telling our government the US government that the size of the US economy was the Soviet economy was no more than 5% of the US economy at the time the CIA was telling everybody it was 65% and also at the time in the 1989 edition of Paul Samuelson's famous textbook principles of economics textbook which was the biggest cellaring textbook in the world from the 1940s until the 1980s he predicted that this was 1989 he predicted that by night by 2000 the Soviet economy would be bigger than the US economy that's that's what mainstream economics was teaching us college students in 1989 on the on the verge of the total collapse of the Soviet Union but Yuri was right Yuri's right it was more like 5% the CIA was wrong it wasn't 65% country after country Africa after after independence they adopted Soviet socialism and central planning their logo was quote only socialism can save Africa 40 years later the after these African countries were poorer than they were under colonialism Venezuela today need i say more there's there's gonna be a presentation about the disaster the socialism is created in Venezuela on Saturday and I encourage everybody to go and listen to it England after World War two adopted their version of socialism baby and socialism they nationalized many of the major industries by the 1970s the whole world was talking about the British disease because they had ruined their economy and they and they and and that's what got that's what led to the the election of Margaret Thatcher who promised there was a student of Hayek not a formal student but she read she read Hayek and and she turned things around quite a bit she wasn't she wasn't exactly a Ron Paul but but they did move in the other direction Argentina adopted its version of socialism in the 1940s and 50s under Peron and then and he of course quickly ruined the Argentine economy and was replaced with a coup and Argentina like all these other countries once they destroyed their the productive capacity of their country they tried to bail out bail themselves out by printing money and Argentina by the 1980s had 12,000 percent price inflation okay Chile the same thing the country of Chile adopted socialism in the 1970s they ended up with seven hundred and forty six percent inflation and an economy that simply stood still is just destroyed it and then they were that government was overthrown by a sort of a repressive regime after that so not not a happy history of country after country and you might have noticed that a lot of these countries are democrasy zhh Friedrich Basquiat wrote in his famous essay the law that there's really no difference if the government imposes a uniform policy on the whole country a dictator can do it and a legislature can do it so there's really no difference you know you can impose socialism with the legislature like Venezuela did you don't you don't need dictatorship to have socialism you don't need the Soviet Union to ruin your economy okay point number three is you cannot fix socialism after after Bill Clinton left office there was one of his uh one of his top economic advisors penned an article in The New York Times arguing that socialism is not such a bad idea it just needs to be administered by smart people like us and and that's that's always been the argument by the left that all the people just the wrong people have managed socialism well that ignores economics that ignores economics you cannot fix it the original explanation for why socialism is economically poisonous was the incentive problem and you know I joke with my principles of economics classes and the first day I tell them here's what we're gonna do I'm gonna give 7 exams during the course of the 14 week semester I'm going to add up and then when I get all the grades those of you who get the low grades I'm gonna take points away from the good students who got the high grades and give that give you some of their points so that everybody gets a C and I tell them well that's academic socialism that's sort of an example of the incentive problem and that's not really enough of an explanation though you've all learned about the calculation problem you need private property and market prices in order to have rational economic calculation and so that's another cause for the ruination caused by by socialism Hayek is famous for what he called a knowledge problem the fact that it's unthinkable that a human mind or even a hundred human minds working with the most powerful computer in the world could possibly possess and utilize all of the information that the millions of workers and consumers and business managers and investors and and and on and on have that they use in their daily lives it's it's a pretense is he called it the pretense of knowledge and then there's also something called you call I would call the Public Choice problem involved with socialism the way Hayek put it was under socialism the only power worth having is political power that is the way to acquire things to make yourself better off is through politics and political connection bribery and and just plain old politics you can advance by educating yourself being a producer being an entrepreneur serving your fellow man by providing him or her with valued goods and services that's illegal that's the government is control you're not in control you're not allowed to do that and so the way to succeed is through politics and so so and of course the more and more people's time spend people spend on politics by definition the less time they spend producing things and so that that extracts even more in terms of time and resources used for production in the direction of transferring what little wealth there is left into your pocket you being the rent seeker now the rent seeking involved in politics so you cannot fix socialism once you have it also under socialism there's a famous chapter and Hayek's book the Road to Serfdom called the worst why the worst rise to the top and and it made me think of something that I call the sleazo meter well you might put people like Stalin on one end over here me me Chuck Schumer over here and then you know some of the nicer ones some of the moderates like like this this woman in England she seems coming she doesn't seem too horrible Theresa May but so that's that's sort of like the sleezo meter with this you know the day of extreme sleeves on on the left side on this side of here and then people who are they're still sort of coercive thugs but they're not as bad as Stalin sometimes I saw in certain but high x article is you know under his socialism collectivism he was actually just talking about collectivism and in general that it's based on using the coercive force of government to compel people to take your orders you know the Mises Institute has a new t-shirt the what it was it says as every socialist is a secret dictator that is certainly true I think that's a quote from von Mises and so when it's all a matter of degree yeah you had some of the socialist dictators like Stalin who are willing to murder tens of millions of people for merely dissenting okay and Theresa may uh as far as I know hasn't done anything like at all like like that but she still has inherited the accumulated vehicles of coercion that are the state that have accumulated over hundreds of years in England and the same thing in our government you know when Donald Trump was elected he was he a cutey inherited the accumulated coercive powers of two hundred and some years of US government and then the next person will do the same whoever it gets elected next time will do the same and so and so and so that's always a danger even if you have relatively nice sounding people in power they've got these horrible weapons at their disposal and so the worst you know the absolute worst in history is something you should know about I had some students at my my university wants that it was like this college Republican Club and on the day when the students all put little tables out on the on the campus and they're handing out flyers about them they took a couple of more taken one of my classes and they had these statistics of mass murders by socialist governments and they're handing out and they told me that none of their classmates had ever heard anything about this they never knew that a single person died under so because of socialism anywhere and this is from a book called the black book of communism because there's a sociologist from the University of Hawaii Rudy Rummel wrote a book called demo side demo and what this is is is not death by war this is mass killing of people because they dissented from socialism they do not want their property taken they did not want to live under a tyranny and as a result they were murdered in mass and this is these were seven French scholars who published this book about some twenty years ago maybe more than twenty years ago now but also Rudolf rummells book what a career he had is a you know Canada cataloging mass killing you spent his whole life working with statistics on mass death his whole life they must have been pretty depressed it wouldn't be the kind of guy you'd want to go out and have party with what would you talk about yeah this enemy the Soviet Union 20 million our friend Yuri thinks that's it's a lowball estimate China 60 million North Korea 2 million Eastern Europe 1 million Africa 1.7 million so when Hayek said the worst rise to the top that's the sort of thing he was talking about in his day this is in the 1940s he was he was mentioning this and so you should familiarize yourself with that and this is not to say that Theresa May is the same as 8 as Stalin but there's always there's oh it's all a matter of degree of coercion isn't it ok the next point is that the most people don't know that fascism is a form of socialism fascism socialism communism it's all the same gang as far as I'm concerned they're all collectivists after all they you know when I wrote this book and I did lots of radio interviews Regnery publishing had me do 65 radio radio talk shows in a month and so I was busy I mean at 1 o'clock in the morning I'm on the radio with the California radio station they and they owned several hundred radio stations the same company Salem communication communications in a question I've always asked as people would ask me well this is of communism different than socialism and the answer's no you know the the Soviets the name of their country was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics they didn't call themselves the Union of Soviet communist republics communism was the utopian ideal that they hope to achieve in 500 years but in the meantime they're all socialists they called themselves socially so it's the same thing so don't fall for that and and of course Hayek and the road to serfdom point out that all the fascists of the 20th century Mussolini's Stalin and the rest they were all starting they all started out as socialists and of course not see the word Nazis National Socialism and so the Russians call themselves International Socialists the German socialists call themselves National Socialists but they were all socialists just just a different variety of socialism and that's like you know I'm I'm a murderer her likes to use guns and he likes to use knives you know where the board same thing we're both murderers using guns knives what's the difference and so in the of course another thing we had in common was the literature of the fascists all it attacked liberalism classical liberalism and these are you know von Mises book liberalism which is online also and also for sale at the Mises Institute you should should all read it and these you know the main points you know what is liberalism what are the main bullet points of classical liberalism private property freedom peace equality under the law inequality of income in a free market limited government and tolerance these are the basic ideas that meets these lists there these are the ideas that were attacked very voraciously by Mussolini himself and Hitler and the Nazis because they understood who the enemy was these were the ideas and the ideas that lay the groundwork for the acceptance of markets and capitalism and private property they you you can't have capitalism and private property and markets if people don't understand the virtues of them no I guess you can't have it but it's a lot it's tough it makes it a lot lot tougher and so here's a few quotes about from the horse's mouth about fascism here's a Hayek again Hayek noted in the road and the road to serfdom he said this the dominant feature of Nazi Germany he's referring to Nazi Germany was a fierce hatred of anything capitalistic individual profit seeking large-scale enterprise banks joint stock companies department stores international finance and loan capital and the system of what they called interest slavery they they equated in charging a bank charging you interest for a loan as slavery and in general he says quote the Nazis was a common characteristic of the Nazis was their anti-liberal an anti-capitalist trend they even adopted the slogan quote the end of capitalism as they're accepted Dogma so that was the that was the slogan of the Nazi ideologues they wrote about that Mussolini is that much of the same thing I read Mussolini's autobiography once when I'm doing some of my research it's kind of funny yeah if you assigned up so you signed out class of third graders yes a write a one-page autobiography I could see the third grader writing the title my autobiography that was the title of Mussolini's buck autobiography biography always thought it sounded sort of elementary school ish but he also wrote a book called fascism doctrine and institutions he said this the fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the state and accepts the individual only insofar as his interest coincide with the state it is opposed to classical liberalism which denied the state in the name of the individual so that it doesn't get any more clear than that that there was an attack on classical liberalism these ideas may you had to destroy these ideas first before you could have fascism in in the words of Benito Mussolini he also complained about and it is a quote the selfish pursuit of material prosperity he declared fascism to be a reaction against the flaccid materialistic conception of happiness and implored his audiences to quote reject the economistic literature of the 18th century so don't read Adam Smith okay don't worry that it sounds like the kind of thing they're telling American college campuses today you know don't read this stuff you know it's a racist it's sexist it's Adam Smith was a white guy after all why should we pay attention to him that's you know some of them about the level of intellect intellectual discourse and and some of the more politically correct universities and so fascism was basically it was a variety of socialism and the Nazis you know and then the and Mussolini is Italy were basically socialist countries they Hayek pointed on the Road to Serfdom in Germany they nationalized about the Nazis did about half of all industry and then the other half was so heavily regimented and controlled and regulated that it was de facto nationalized and that's probably the big difference between Soviet socialism and the German and the Nazi socialism is that fascism allowed a degree of private ownership but it was heavily controlled and dictated you know what it would do would be dictated by the government by the state so so ownership was not really private ownership since the state controlled everything and that is why our old friend Bob Higgs author of the great book crisis and Leviathan calls the American economy today participatory fascism he says businesses are so heavily regulated and controlled that it's like fascism was but at least they let us vote once in a while and so participatory but Mussolini was a dictator of course and Hitler was a dictator so he couldn't vote but our I guess our fascism Bob Higgs would say is slightly better than the Nazis in Mussolini because it's participatory yeah and so that's a trick politicians always play isn't it they want they want us to think that they're legitimate because after all we voted which is why I never vote I'm one of my old essays I'm Lew Rockwall com is entitled be patriotic don't vote yes that's that's point number five I guess point number six is that inequality historically is far worse under socialism than under capitalism if you read about Venezuela today for example I read an article in The Wall Street Journal that said Hugo Chavez's daughter who's in her 30s has a net worth of about four billion dollars and as far as I know she never started a business I don't think she's one of the original founders of Microsoft or anything like that and for banda and the wall street journal' also said that the former finance minister of Venezuela who I think they said he now lives in Switzerland had a net worth of eleven billion dollars okay and and of course even to this day you can read articles in the in the American news media about the political elites in Venezuela still living high on the hog they have the country clubs and they have the food and you also read about people killing dogs and cats to feed their children you know the normal the ordinary people in Venezuela and it's always been like that the rather people who ran the Soviet Union had multiple vacation homes all over all over the place and in accumulated great wealth and the masses were equally indigent and country after country you see that the African potentates who adopted socialists socialism it became dictators after independence in the 1960s they all lived like kings and queens and while while the people starved and so the whole business of so we need socialism to create more equality is is fraudulent it's it's never it's never been true there have been true like that not that equality is even a desirable thing because of course we're all different now we're all different in that in thousands of different ways and the only way you can move in the direction of trying to force equality is with a totalitarian society and of course you can never do that you can never have an equality because human beings are not equal as a rabbi Daniel lapin who gave a talk here some years ago on this point he said that you made the point that you know God made all human being there's a Jewish rabbi he said God made all human beings unique just like he made all stones unique stones are all different every stone is different nothing you can't find two stones that are the same but humans can make bricks identical you we can manufacture bricks you know like the bricks in a house or a building you can make those identical and he posed a question do you want to think of yourself more as a stone or a brick and and that's that's what a Galit arianism is about is making us all into identical bricks well yeah if even if it and me where's my list of mass-murder there that's that's always been the the idea even if it kills us okay point number seven the income tax is the essence of socialism the income especially the progressive income tax this is why in in the Communist Manifesto there's a 10/10 point planks tent a plank of the Communist Manifesto point number one says abolition of private property point number two number two is a heavy progressive income tax okay now of course economist the Austrians and others have studied the income tax you know it increases the rate of time preference and and destroys the work effort and has all these bad effects but it has another effect as well and I want to read a short quote about that from Frank charter off one of the great books ever written on the income tax is the income tax root of all evil by Frank Shotter off which is for sale downstairs at the bookstore my notice this morning and here's something he said he said women yet when the progressive income tax was adopted in 1913 is in the United States the absolute right of private property in the United States was violated that of course is the essence of socialism whatever else socialism is or is claimed to be its first tenant is the denial of private property well it's in the Communist Manifesto this is why all socialists beginning with Karl Marx have advocated income taxation the heavier the better and so that's certainly very true and also to have socialism so you know the socialist of the world always want a centralized governmental power they can't allow divided sovereignty or federalism or states rights whatever you want to call it devolution of power they want centralized power and nothing in in the United States history anyway so nothing gave us centralized governmental bureaucracy more than the income tax and the and so and they both happen in the same year in 1913 and so the Socialists of the world knew what they were doing and they know what they're doing when that when they they're so worshipful about the income tax because it centralizes power and it basically tells you that you don't own the income that you earn the government owns all of your income you are a slave to the government and the government will tell you how much of your income you are allowed to keep by setting the tax rates you know it's our income and we will tell you how much you get to keep and so charter off I think was right on the money when he when he wrote that and the only reason they don't of course make their the rates even higher they always try to maximize the rates is they do understand that we will cheat on our taxes and we will we will stop working and we might even have an armed revolution of if they still see if they make us destitute by confiscating too much of our income so so even the people who are on my sleazo meter have to be careful about that because as Rothbard wrote in quite a few places and it reminded us that any state in in the world is greatly outnumbered by millions and millions of people and so any state is always just a relatively small group of people and so they always run the risk of a revolution or a violent revolution that's why they spend so many resources on propaganda and indoctrination it's sort of a way to quell revolutionary impulses on the cheap they don't always use violence to put down revolutions they yeah the indoctrination and propaganda is also a tool that that is very essential there okay point number eight Scandinavian countries are about as socialist as the United States is one of the myths out there that the crazy Bernie has been spreading is that we need to be more like Sweden you need be more like Denmark since Scandinavian countries they're more socialists you know democratic socialism he says there's a huge difference between socialism and democratic socialism and the user spells huge with about 15 or 20 use in it whenever you see him on television doing that but take a look at this this is there's something called the index of economic freedom it's published it's published by several different groups the Fraser Institute in Canada publishes one Fraser or Fr a ser dot org the Heritage Foundation publishes one this is one from the Heritage Foundation they put together an index of economic freedom basically the more every country in the world is ranked and if the more in their opinion that you safeguard private property the rule of law minimal government minimal regulations lower taxes you get a higher rating and so they come up with an index number for every country and these are this is the latest rankings here the US ranking is I think I think United States is twelfth and the the number of the index number is seventy six point eight Denmark is seventy six point seven so we're about as socialist as Denmark Sweden and Finland pretty close pretty pretty much the same so we're we're pretty much you know they're there hardly can be can be said to be more socialist than the United States the top ranking goes to Hong Kong ninety point to just to get a few an idea of how far away the US and the the Scandinavian countries are at Singapore eighty nine point two I think what crazy bernie is referring to is he is Sweden in the 1950s in the 1940s the Swedes started became sort of infatuated with fascist planning and then fascism kind of got a bad name after the Hitler thing and so they they they they ditch that and they but they made a sort of adopting top of their own version of socialism and nationalized a lot of industries very heavy taxes big welfare state and according to the Swedish Academy of Economics Sweden did not create a single net new job from 1950 until 9 2005 so for 55 years there was zero job growth in Sweden and and Sweden produced and get the statistic here they did the same thing these other countries did they had well they had they tried to inflate their way out of the problem s they had created and in the 1980s they had five hundred percent interest rates in in Sweden and so and that's when Sweden the Swedish government began to retrench they privatized a lot of their industries including a big part of healthcare and moved in in the other direction so that that's why today they're pretty close to the United States in terms of their their ranking but they've pretty much destroyed they did exactly what Mises did said about destruction ISM they they lived off the past efforts and investments in sacrifices of the great Swedish capitalists of the late 19th and early 20th century that produced a lot of great things for the for the world and then and then ruined it basically okay so the Soviet Sweden Denmark Finland they have private enterprise these are these are still primarily capitalist countries with with a big welfare state just like the United States we we are still a primarily a capitalist country we have private enterprises but we have a much bigger welfare state than the Scandinavian countries do and so it doesn't make sense to say we need to be more like them more socialistic we already are we already are point number nine running out of time here socialism has caused the worst pollution problems in the history of the world at least the modern history of the world after the collapse of communism in the late 80s and early 90s all of a sudden all of these clothes to Tallinn totalitarian societies opened up and people could look around and learn a lot of things including the state of the environment over there now at the time and he's any student had studied economics was taught that the root cause of pollution is unregulated free market competition the story that you're all told is that industrialists will take into consideration the private cost to them they have to pay wages and they have to pay for raw materials but they won't take into consideration the external cost in terms of the pollution and the damage it might cause to your health or to your property or something like that and therefore they will produce too much and the government needs to step in and regulate and control production to do that well if that's theory is true then what would you expect the environment to look like in countries that outlawed the pursuit of profit for 50 60 70 years if the pursuit of profit is the root cause of pollution and then you have a society that outlaws the pursuit of profit the legal pursuit of profit for half a century what would you expect the environment to look like in those countries expected to be pristine after all if that's the root cause well the exact opposite turned out to be the truth and we felt there were even books published with titles like ecocide and the USSR and this is true not just in the Soviet Union and under communism but Venezuela yeah Venezuela today mate Lake Merritt carp Maracaibo I'm not sure that's how you pronounce it you know hundreds of tonnes of untreated sewage flow into it every day when when British Petroleum had that awful accident in a Gulf of Mexico an oil platform caught on fire people died they immediately set aside 20 billion dollars to pay compensation because they knew they were gonna have to pay compensation well Mexico the government of Mexico that their oil platforms catch on fire all the time and this is the government run business and whenever that happens they deny any liability they even denied that there was an oil slick there was one about seven or eight years ago and they denied that there was any kind of oil slick or environmental damage and then Greenpeace took a satellite image of the oil slick it was created by the Mexican government's oil platform and so under under so you know a situation there was the capitalists took responsibility for the horrible accident and then when the Mexican government has an almost identical horrible accident I don't think anybody you know one of the certainly nobody wanted this to happen they deny being liable at all and and and so if you look at the history of what happened in the socialist countries they ruined their their environments far more than anything we've seen in the United States in Russia that the volga river the steamboats had signs on them saying don't throw cigarettes overboard the river may catch on fire they almost wiped out the sturgeon population in poland people people with with lung disease or sent to underground uranium mines for as health clinics fire trucks would have to go through the streets several times a day and the industrial part of poland knock in the lead dust out of the air from the factories i have an old friend who grew up in the former yugoslavia and he had he worked for the government so he was a government lawyer i haven't been grass sick some of you the old-timers here know who he was his son was an Austrian school economist and they both were but anyway came this country but he's told me once he lived in a 30th floor apartment in Zagreb and I asked him why 30th floor and he said there's no elevator in the building and I said what are you a mountain climber or what you know I wanted a physical fitness fanatic what is it he said no the pollution is so bad that yeah you can't see if you're but if you're below the 20th floor you can't open your windows because you'll die from the lead and cadmium and zinc dust that comes in your house all day long can't do that yeah so it was pretty awful and and under socialism and so you know I have a whole chapter on that so you could read the book I guess the final thing I'll say is welfare harms the poor and I'm running out of time so you know socialist welfare harms the poor so I'm going to read you one thing about and there's a lot of literature about how with a welfare destroys work incentives causes family breakup and so forth and I'm gonna read one thing about what the an extreme welfare state in Sweden has done to the Swedish people and this is from our friend Parab island who's an Austrian school economist he's lectured here many times he's a friend of ours he's a Swedish he's a Swede but he works I think he's at Oklahoma State University now he said this I'm quoting pear when handling out benefits and therefore taking away the individual's responsibility for his or her own life a new kind of individual is created the immature irresponsible and dependence the welfare state has created a population of psychological and moral children the children and grandchildren of the welfare state are indoctrinated at an early age in the government schools that they have a supposed of right to free education health care and income and anything else they might desire you know and of course you know when you say that I mean somebody else has the obligation to be your slave to work for you and my old friend Walter Williams when it when he gives his one of his can speeches I've had him in my university several times he kind of shocked some of the students by asking them this question he says what would you call a system in which one person is forced with the threats of imprisonment kidnapping and imprisonment to work for the benefit of another person and it usually takes about five person seconds for someone to say what what would you say slavery yeah and then of course he describes the welfare state and you know what else would you call that when the average American works until may now to pay in pay taxes for mostly for the benefit of other people yeah what would you call that and that's what the welfare state has done I think I have about one minute left if we have a question or two or or any brilliant declarations or well there wasn't they went along with it Hayek criticized the cab the German capitalists who went to Louvre themselves went along with this this you know and and they kept their property but they they were happy to keep their property but then they were regimented and regulated by the government but that's not real private property you know yeah are you a free man if everything you do it your schedule every day is determined by me you know you know I tell you where to go what job you're gonna have how long you have to stay at work and so forth and how to do your job you're not a free man if in that sense and so if you have a slave master called the state you're not you're not a free man and if you have a slave master as a business person you're not a genuinely private enterprise either and that's basically what fascism was that's one more question I guess we're almost out of time yeah that's well that's the that's the brand of Marxism that affects the United States today too but we do have still have people who are making the case for economic socialism it's still you know they're there you can't separate the two really the history of this are I wrote a little essay it's on Lew Rockwell calm called necessity and destruction ISM then and now and and I summarize some of this but the cultural marxists these were European immigrants came to America and and and became extremely influential their ideas totally dominate American universities now and probably in your country as well and what they said was that these were all people who tried to bring Marxism Marxian socialism to Europe and they failed the people did not go for Marxian socialism in Europe it was imposed on Eastern Europe aftermath after the war but but the people themselves did not want that and they decided the reason for that was the institutions of Western civilization like I said earlier had free-market economics the ideas of liberalism constitutionalism democracy all these things the people did not want to give that up and also Christianity you know if God is your sovereign then some politician cannot be your sovereign God is your sovereign they didn't want that they wanted themselves to be your sovereign and that to order you around and and that's the how else could they achieve socialist utopia and so they said very clearly and in their in their writings that their their objective would be to destroy Christianity and to destroy the institutions of Western civilization and that's what political correctness is all about that's what cultural Marxism is all about that's what's going on all the attacks on the traditional family especially the traditional family you know one of these one of these characters was a Hungarian Lukacs and when he his party got into control in Hungary this is the early 20th century he was some sort of I think they made him a minister of culture and he started advocating all sorts of gun wife-swapping and all sorts of you know anything to destroy the traditional family and they were kicked out you know you know they were the Hungarian said get out of here they didn't want that and so and this is one of the people now who was like one of these leading lights leading intellectual lights of cultural Marxism and even though he's long dead and so see these are the people that those ideas have been embraced by the American left in academia and they totally have taken over like like in your country but it's but it's connected to economic socialism because their objective is they want some essentially planned totalitarian society but they have to get rid of these institutions or first that keep the existing society together destruction ISM so it's all about the struction ISM that I open my talk with that's what cultural Marxism is it's about destroying these existing institutions and Marxists have always been like they've always been about destruction ISM even if they have no idea what will come next they just want to destroy what is and then well we'll worry about that later it's kind of like when Nancy Pelosi said pass the Obama law and we'll figure out what it says later that's a classic example of how the Marxists have always thought about these things and I guess my time is up in the coffee-break time [Applause]

Channel: undefined

Views: 160,422

Rating: 4.748486 out of 5

Keywords: Socialism, Top Ten, 10, DiLorenzo, Austrian School, Economics, Mises, Mises Institute, Auburn

Id: vFrrovr7GVs

Length: 48min 58sec (2938 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019