Lots of people just hate capitalism. They want socialism. Socialism is having a moment in American politics right now. Socialism is totally on trend. Especially among young people. The kids love socialism. I think socialism is great. Why? Because they’re told capitalism hurts the poor. The rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer. But that’s just not true. The poor get richer too. Norway! It’s as socialist as they come. And here’s another myth: People say Scandinavia is socialist. Instead of Cuba or China, think Sweden. Look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden. But Sweden isn’t socialist. Some time ago, pre-beard, I made this video about that with Swedish author, Johan Norberg. But there was more to that interview and our more recent one on his new book, The Capitalist Manifesto. So, here’s our full discussion about capitalism, the Left’s push for “de-growth,” and “Scandinavian socialism.” All I hear is that Sweden is this socialist paradise. Well, we tried with something that was similar to socialism for a brief interlude in Swedish history. In the 1970’s and the 1980’s. And that's the period that even socialists in Sweden now say, "We overreached.” What happened? Well in the 1970’s and 80’s, that's the moment when the Swedish government started to expand dramatically. Taxes rose, regulation was all over the place. And that's the moment in time when Sweden began to lag behind the other countries dramatically. There were no new net jobs created in the private sector. No new international companies. Sweden lagged behind to the extent that we went from being the 3rd richest country on the planet to the 13th richest country on the planet. 13th isn't bad. Doesn't sound like a crisis. But it makes it difficult to fund all these policies that Sweden had. So, they started to print money. So, we had a debt and inflation-fueled boom that ended in a terrible crisis. And to defend the Swedish currency, the central bank even had interest rates at 500% for a while. What made it a crisis? Well suddenly, all those systems that people depended on, the pension system, health care and so on, didn't get the funding they needed. So, there were waiting lines to get health care, people couldn't get the pension that they thought that they depended on for the future. So, everybody suddenly realized that something else has to be done. And even the socialist-leaning politicians agreed? The socialist Minister of Finance in Sweden said that, "Our policies have been unsustainable, sometimes absurd, and the tax system is perverse." So even they wanted to dismantle the big government that they had built. So, what happened? Well, early 1990’s, we had a wide agreement, from the left to the right, that we have to reform the economy. Open up new markets, liberalize product markets so businesses could start in new areas, do away with occupational licenses and things like that. Lower taxes, reform the pension system so that it wasn't unsustainable, partly privatize the pension system. Privatize the pension system. That terrifies people. Yeah, it does. It means you're not guaranteed money from the government. Exactly, it's only a defined contribution, you don't know what you will get. And obviously that scares people who wanted a lot. But when they realized that the alternative was that the whole pension system would collapse, they thought that this was much better than nothing. But Sweden is still cited as the socialist paradise. When you look at our policies, we do have a bigger welfare state than the U.S., higher taxes than the U.S., but in other areas, when it comes to free markets, when it comes to competition, when it comes to free trade, Sweden is actually more free market. If you look at the latest statistics from the Heritage Foundation in the Wall Street Journal, Sweden is apparently more free market than the United States. There's no minimum wage. Government doesn't control production. Yeah, and we've also tried to open up the welfare state to private providers, because we've realized that we've got problems with a nationalized health care system, so we need to, well, privatize one of the biggest hospitals in Stockholm and open up to other private companies. And in the education system, because it didn't work, it didn't work very well. So, we needed competition, innovation, new ideas. So, we rolled out a national school voucher system so that private schools got the same funding as the public ones. From The View— Name one country that socialism has ever worked and also– Sweden. First of all, socialism means the government owning the means of production. Sweden has never had that. The socialists realized in Sweden that they need big business, they need multinational companies to fund the welfare state. So, it was always a free market to that extent, and they, the big businesses even got specific benefits and privileges because the economy was so dependent on them. Jim Carrey— I grew up in Canada, okay. We had socialized medicine. And I am, I’m here to tell you that this bullshit line that you get on all of the political shows from people, is that it's a failure. “The system is a failure in Canada.” It is not a failure in Canada. I never waited for anything in my life. I chose my own doctors. My mother never paid for a prescription. It was fantastic. He must have been lucky. That's great. But in the recent Swedish election, the top priority for voters in the polls was not crime or immigration or the economy, it was healthcare and the fact that people had to wait in line for treatment for such a long time. Specifically, when it comes to cancer treatment. For certain types of cancer, you have to wait for more than 200 days to get treatment. And that tells you something about the problem of rationing health care by just not giving people what they need. They’ve got a booming economy that is growing at twice the rate of the American economy. They’ve got surpluses. They've got more people working. And they have a society that works. Well, everybody has to work in Sweden to fund the welfare state because it's so large. So, we really have to do hard work to get people into jobs. But the way we do that is by opening up more markets, having fewer license requirements, occupational licenses, the kind of things that America has to stop people from entering new jobs and so, in a way, we have a successful economy, but that's partly because we're free market to some extent. From your movie— It is a socialist economy. Volvos and socialized medicine. All those stereotypes are quite interesting. And many of them are stuck in the past. Volvo is now a Chinese company. What does that mean from a classical liberal point of view? Well, it means that for a while, the Swedish economy was doing so bad and the currency was going south. So, everything was quite cheap so that Chinese and others could buy our big companies. And that was incredibly problematic at that time for the reason that, not that they were bought by someone else. It's in a way, in a sign of strength that they want to invest in our economy. But it's a problem if we don't grow the new companies like that. In around the turn of the millennium, we didn't have one company among the 50 biggest that had been created over the last 25 years. So, they were all created during the, sort of, small government, laissez-faire era. But after the reforms, suddenly we've made, we’ve reformed the economy, opened up new markets, and then suddenly we've got the new companies in telecoms, in tech and so on. And is this just Sweden or is this also true for Denmark, Norway? Well, Norway's got oil money. Yeah, Norway is always a strange exception because they have all that oil. So, unless American socialists have the plan to strike oil everywhere, that's not a relevant example. But Denmark shrank its government too? Yes. Finland? Iceland? Yeah. Astrid Lindgren, 102% in taxes. How is this even possible? Yeah, 102% taxes, too much even for the socialists. But how can it be more than 100%? Yeah, it's quite absurd. She was this famous author of children's books, like "Pippi Longstocking" and so on, and a longtime Social Democrat. She found out that when she sold another book, she ended up with a marginal tax rate. She ended up in a higher threshold that increased the taxes totally so that she had to pay for selling more books. And she wrote this angry essay about a witch who was quite mean and vicious, but not at all as vicious as the Swedish tax authorities. How can you have more than 100% tax bill? Yeah, well, no one got that math. And actually, the Swedish socialist finance minister at that time said, "No, she's wrong. She must've, she's bad at math." But actually, he was the one who was wrong. The Swedish tax system at that time was so perverse and strange that the Swedish population just said, "Enough, we can't do this." And even the socialists said, "This is perverse. We can't do this." So, for every extra dollar she earned, she'd owe $1.02? That was too much, even for the socialists. We have some very interesting reforms on letting private enterprises into welfare, schools, hospitals, healthcare, elderly care, that have worked out quite well. Private enterprise runs schools, hospitals? Yeah. Because we realized in Sweden that with these government monopolies, nothing happens. We don't get the innovation that we get when we have competition in other areas. So, the way to create competition was to allow private businesses to start new schools, with new ideas, with new teaching models, and then allow families to pick a school themselves. Which forces schools to become better. And one of the results that we've seen is not just that the private schools are better than the public ones, but even the public schools in the vicinity of private schools, they often improve, because they have to, to get then, pupils and the funding that comes with them. To compete. You see that everywhere else in the economy. If you're forced to compete, you have to step up, you have to be better. Why not in the welfare services? Today the health care system is not primarily run by the national government? No, we don't have a, sort of, single payer system and the kind of thing that American socialists think we do in Sweden. This is based on the regional level in Sweden and, therefore, also funded by local taxes primarily, which is a flat tax. And then the national government steps in and has some extra funding for specific things that they want to do. But this is primarily a regional issue. But government run? Yes. Government run, but quite often private businesses in this sector, funded by government money. What can America learn from Sweden? Well, you can learn both from the good and from the bad. The bad experiences we've had and others should learn from is, don't get cocky. I mean, even though the economy might work very well, you have all this money, you're on top of the world, you can't turn your backs to the, to the well, to the creation of wealth. That's what we did in the 1970’s and 1980’s and just started to redistribute and make strange policy decisions that ran counter to any kind of economic orthodoxy. And that almost killed the Swedish economy, it almost ruined us completely. So, you have to continue to create wealth in order to use it. The good thing to be learned from Sweden is how you reform the economy. I think it's important for the U.S. then, to learn from how you can introduce competition and choice in government services, like education, for example, if you want a better future for our kids. You can learn how to reform those systems that we all rely on. The pension systems, social security, things that are unsustainable with the kind of demographic future we have, unless we change this into more of a defined contribution, rather than defined benefits. Low-income earners in Sweden pay a lot more than low-income earners in America. So, despite the fact that Sweden looks like sort of a socialist country which taxes the rich exorbitantly high, the truth is the opposite. Really? This is the dirty little secret about the Swedish tax system. We don't take from the rich and give to the poor. We squeeze the poor, because they are loyal taxpayers. They don't move to Monaco and they don't dodge. They don't have tax lawyers. So, we have, most of our income tax come from a flat, regional tax at around 30%. Even on the poor, even on the middle class. And then, we also have a system of the A.T. A consumption tax at 25%, where the poor pay exactly the same amount as the rich do. So, all of this— And it’s quite a bit. It's about 50-60% once you're earning $37,000. But it's interesting that the Swedish tax system is less progressive than the American. If you look at the whole situation in the U.S., the 10% of the richest households, they pay around 45% of all the income taxes. In Sweden they only pay 27%. And the reason is that Swedish socialists realized, you can have a big government or you can force the rich to pay for it all. You have to pick one, you can't do both. Because if the rich and the big businesses leave the country, then we have nothing. All these celebrities and politicians say, "Sweden is socialist. A socialist success." Well, Sweden is not socialist, because the government doesn't own the means of productions. To see that, you have to go to Venezuela or to Cuba or North Korea. But we did have a period in the 1970’s and 1980’s when we had something that resembled socialism. A big government that taxed and spent heavily. And that's the period in Swedish history when our economy was going south dramatically. And even socialists nowadays say, "That was awful. That was a terrible failure that almost killed our economy." Unfortunately, today, most socialists still don’t accept the lessons of history. that real socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried. But we who understand the benefits of free and competitive markets shouldn’t just point out socialism’s problems. We ought to make the case for why capitalism works. So, I was happy that Norberg has written this new book, The Capitalist Manifesto. The subtitle says, “The global free market will save the world.” That's pretty grandiose. But it is saving the world bit by bit, step-by-step every day. Every day, over the past 20 years, more than 130,000 people were lifted out of extreme poverty. Every day for 20 years. And it happened in societies that began to open up their economies and integrate into trade and global investments. And that's what capitalism does. That's not just a fancy theory, it's something real that is happening. And it's also something that we should keep in mind every time somebody talks about how we should have more tariffs and protectionism and regulations, that every kind of intervention like that limits what human beings can do with their lives. And that hurts opportunity and it increases poverty. And we have to save the world from such interventions. Elon Musk recommended your book on Twitter and that's gotten millions of views. Congratulations. But, he says, especially chapter four. So, I look at chapter four. It's titled “In Defense of the 1%.” So, he only likes it because you're defending rich people like him. The question is, how did he get rich? How does someone get rich? That's more interesting than how much money they've got. In every society, we have people who control resources. Did they take them from somebody else? That's bad. We should stop that. But in a capitalist society, you get rich by enriching others, by producing electric cars, for example, or new technological capabilities and making them come down in price and making sure that more people have access to them. In that case, if they get rich because we hand over our money because we think those goods and services are more valuable to us, then it's a great thing that they are rich, because they got rich by helping us. The Nobel laureate William Nordhaus, he made a back of the envelope calculation of how much does rich entrepreneurs, who introduced new technologies and goods and services in the economy, capture of the value that they create. And he came up with the conclusion that they get to keep some 2% of the value that they create, which means that the rest of us who just laid on the couch and watched Netflix, we got 98% because we got increased purchasing power. Musk has got billions of dollars. He only kept 2% of each transaction? The greatest value of new goods and services and technologies does not come in the dollars and cents that we hand over to the producer. It comes in how they enrich our lives. How we use these goods and how they keep coming down in price and become much more accessible to more people. Constantly making sure that what was luxury goods a couple of decades ago, are suddenly something that most of us can afford. One of the most astonishing statistics about the U.S. is that, people who fall below the poverty line in the U.S., now has a greater chance of owning amenities like refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines, dishwashers, dryers, and of course cell phones and computers than the average American did in 1970. That's the greatest voluntary, spontaneous redistribution of resources that exists. The fact that all those luxury goods come down in price and are suddenly accessible to most people. The headlines, “A mass loneliness crisis.” Loneliness is an epidemic. We are absolutely in a loneliness crisis. Nothing to back it up. Well, yes, there is an epidemic of headlines saying that there is a loneliness epidemic, but there's no empirical data that actually shows that we feel more lonely now than we did in the past. This is often based on just looking at different generations and notices that yes, the youngest feel like they're more lonely than the rest of us, but the question is, are they more lonely than we were when we were young? And so, you have to compare like with like. So, young today compared with young back then, old today compared to old back then. And then, there is no such increase in loneliness. Which is interesting because I would also think that it's less of a stigma to tell people that you feel lonely nowadays than it was in the 1950’s or 70’s. But more people live alone now. I would think that would make more people lonelier. That's correct. More people live alone and there are also instances of people spending less time surrounded by other people. But the interesting thing, and this is what they never tell you in the reports in the media, is that people who live alone and spend less time with, surrounded by other people are also more happy with those relationships. So, it seems to be something interesting that happens when you choose your own relationships, when you choose your own partners and colleagues and friends to associate with. It's not necessarily a better world, a more harmonious relationship when you're forced into traditional overcrowding or forced to spend time with people because there are no options. And yet these capitalist media, Forbes, “Capitalism keeps people isolated because of support for personal gain.” This talk about how we're all getting lonelier in capitalist societies, but the question is, if this was the result of capitalism, then surely we would have more loneliness in capitalist, free market societies. But every survey, every poll, we're looking at shows that people say that they're less lonely in the most market-oriented societies. There is even a human freedom index produced by Fraser and Cato Institute, which measures how free a society is, how economically free it is. And it tells you that on this 10-point scale, if you increase freedom by one point, you reduce loneliness levels by six percentage points according to what people tell the pollster. And that's interesting because there's no such correlation when it comes to what the left and the right talks about, that they want a more equal society or a more religious society. There's no correlation between religion and equality and loneliness. So actually, we need more capitalism and more personal freedom to compensate for the loneliness that apparently equality and religion produces. In your book you cite a survey which basically says this, which is surprising. They ask people, “Do you have someone you can count on in times of trouble?” And it turns out, in America and other capitalist countries, very few people say that, but in places like India and China, where I would think they'd have big families to count on, many more say they have no one. Yeah, it's the complete opposite of what people expect. They think that in traditional societies with enforced communities and collective policies, people would say that they have more people to trust on, more friends and more loyalty. But it's the complete opposite. It seems like in traditional and less market-based societies, between 20% to 30% to 40% say they have no one to count on if they need help. Whereas in the richest and most individualist societies, it's in the low single digits. And it tells you, I think that, enforced community doesn't really create community and solidarity. We have that in our past as well. Overcrowding and enforced relationships. That's not necessarily something that creates solidarity. Once upon a time, the most frequent crime, the most frequent violent crime, was children being violent to their parents. It seems like there's something in these voluntary relationships in modern market-oriented societies that creates more decent relationships. The material incentives of capitalists isolate us from nature, each other, and ourselves. It’s a miracle we aren't even lonelier. One of the huge sources of loneliness is capitalism. I understand why those charlatans get an audience, because yeah, at times we all feel lonely and life and relationships are hard. But do people think that any other non-market society has less of greed? Do they think that the Venezuelan oligarchs or Putin's friends or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have less interest in personal gain? I think that North Korea is the place where the leaders are most interested in Rolex watches and limousines and fancy cognac, but it's the world’s least market-based society. So, everybody's into some sort of gain, but how do they get it? Well, in market-based societies, we only enrich ourselves by enriching others. By coming up with work, goods, services, technologies, opportunities that others are willing to pay for. So, it's actually a way of caring for other peoples, taking their interests and their demand into consideration. Whereas in Russia and Venezuela, they get that personal gain by taking it from others. I believe that socialism is the only way forward for humanity. It is moral. It is just. At this point, it is just common sense. With the boot of capitalism off your neck, you will be more able to enjoy freedom in every sense of the word. This is the traditional way of comparing the everyday existing capitalism with all its flaws, with this dream of how socialism would work in the best circumstances. But when you look at real existing socialism, it doesn't just produce poverty and breadlines, it produces much worse human relationship because it's a top-down system. It's a system where all the resources are distributed from the top command and control and what they get, you don't get. So, it's a zero-sum game. And we can see that impulse. Countries that have lived through communism, they express much less subjective wellbeing, much less trust in human relationship because they are the places where you have to exploit every meeting to get the resources you need. Not in capitalism. Capitalist values of ruthless greed and competition. Under capitalism, people compete. Sounds divisive. Sounds like it would pull us apart. It sounds divisive because we use that language about competition, but I would say that the most important aspect of capitalism is cooperation, voluntary cooperation. The fact that you constantly associate with and work with and do transactions with other people on a voluntary basis. And that's why you constantly hear, every time you buy something, this double thank you. You say, “Thank you.” And in the grocery, they thank you. It's weird you both say, “Thank you.” You both feel you won. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. It's strange. I'm brought up with the idea that I should say thank you when someone has done me a service. But in the market economy, we do each other services constantly. That's how we get richer. No deal ever happens unless both parties think that they benefit more from doing that than not doing that. And that's a brand new innovation in human history. All traditional ways of organizing an economy, slavery, feudalism, communism, fascism, that's all based on getting resources by taking them from somebody else. That's divisive. What capitalism does, is that it forces us to think about what do the other guy want? What are strangers interested in? And then trying to find a way to help them because that helps us. You argue capitalism makes us generous? It sounds surprising, and this surprised the researchers as well. For many years, lots of researchers around the world have been looking at how generous are people when they're playing different economic games in a kind of social experiment. There are many real-life tests of that. This YouTube channel demonstrated a common experiment. Here the host gives people 20 dollars. You're not allowed to communicate what you're thinking. Talk about the decision you're making until you make it. You can divide this between yourself and a stranger in any way you like, but the only condition is, the other person has to accept the offer. If he refuses it— Then you get nothing. Then I get nothing. Then nobody gets anything. Then it's game over. So, you have to offer something to the other person. So at least give me a cent. That's what lots of people would expect that capitalists would do. But interestingly, that never happens, almost never happens anywhere. Because people have this intuitive sense for justice, even in a relationship with strangers, even if it's not a repeated game, they get closer to something like handing a third to even half to the other person. $8 dollars. $8 bucks. And the $12 is yours to keep. So, you've got $10 dollars here. I’ve got $10 dollars, yeah. Do you accept Sean’s offer of $10 dollars? I do accept Sean’s offer. The most interesting thing is that, where, in which countries, from Missouri to Ethiopia to Mongolia, in which countries and places are people most generous in their offers? You wouldn’t have guessed it. In capitalist societies. Because we're used to bargaining. We have to give something to get something. That's right. In places where people have more of buying and selling in their everyday lives. There are even studies in Ethiopia, among 53 different groups, trying to see who is most generous in a transaction in an economic game. And it shows you that the closer people live to marketplaces, the more generous they are. So, if they constantly buy and sell and negotiate, they begin to take other people's interests into consideration. That's what markets do. They do affect our character, but not in this way that the critics say that it makes us more divisive and aggressive and neglect the interests of others. It makes us more generous. And in fact, this is what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also said, that those authors of another manifesto. They notice that look, the friendlier you are, the more beneficial it is to you in capitalism. And obviously they saw that as a bad thing. It wasn’t real generosity, you were just being generous to help yourself. But I for one think it's better if we can get bad people to behave in good ways rather than good people behaving in bad ways, as we've seen in Marxist societies. Comparing willingness to donate blood, organs, bone marrow, give to charity, volunteer, help strangers. It's the capitalist countries that win? And this is a surprise to the researchers because so many people expect us, in capitalist individualist societies, to just elbow our way through life. But it seems like it's quite the opposite. It's in capitalist societies that we behave in the most generous way. And one reason could be that we're free to do that. We're not forced into self-sacrificial relationships with others. And if you are allowed to go about your own business and improve the lives of yourselves and of those around you, then you might be more likely to also extend a helping hand to others. Moving on to growth. Our addiction to economic growth is killing us. Growth is not killing us. It is saving us. It's an incredibly strong correlation between economic growth in a society, and a reduction in poverty, better health, less child mortality. Growth is most important for people who have the least. In poor countries, if you open up your economy, if you manage to grow by 4% annually over 20 years, that reduces poverty in that country, on average, by 80%. Alright, so far. But growth means climate change is worse. It means a future of climate chaos. In fact, the risk of dying in a climate related natural disaster has declined by some 90% since the 1950’s. And that's not because we have fewer disasters or because there is no global warming. It's because we are wealthier than we've ever been before because we've had economic growth. And it means that we improve construction, we improve early warning systems, we improve healthcare, which means that we can deal with all these problems and all disasters in a better way than we would otherwise have had. If we didn't have any economic growth since the 1950’s, yes, surely we would have slightly less global warming, but many more people, around half a million more people, would die because of climate related natural disasters. But the activists claim— Our addiction to making and consuming more stuff is exhausting the planet. More than a thousand so-called “experts” signed this letter— Calling for an end to a capitalist system which pursues growth at all costs. Instead, they advocated for degrowth. A smaller, slower economy, could also be a sweeter economy. We've just had an experiment with degrowth, unintentionally, during the pandemic, Suspending all travel from Europe. States urging people to stay home. The whole world shut down and half the world's population was under house arrest. All the flights were grounded. Did that save us? No. It was a terrible tragedy for humanity. 60 million people were thrown into extreme poverty in that one year alone, 2020. And how much did this reduce CO2 emissions? By no more than 6%. So, if we wanted to reduce global warming, in like the Paris Climate Accords and just tell us what to do until 2030, by doing less, then we would need one pandemic like that every year until 2030 without any rebound in between. And that would be a terrible disaster for human life and health. Even a little growth makes a huge beneficial difference. Yeah. Compounded interest is the greatest force in the universe. If Sweden, my own country, had had just one percentage point lower economic growth per capita since we started to become rich, then Sweden today would be as poor as Albania. What's wrong with Albania? There's nothing much wrong with Albania, but Albanians are a quarter as rich as Swedes. And that shows in everything from life expectancy and child mortality, to working conditions, to how you can invest in taking care of the environment. It tells you that growth is not really about money, it's about opportunity. It's about the chance of doing the things that we want to do with our lives and for our society and for our young and for our old. Today, people in Albania risk their lives and safety to get to places like Sweden. Albanians now make up the single largest group arriving in small boats. And that's what you need to know about different economic and political systems. Look at where the refugees go. They always go from more oppressed societies to freer societies, from more socialist economies to capitalist economies. People risk their lives to get to freedom and to prosperity. And that's a more important indicator than the fantasies of some intellectuals about where they should be heading. In that case, the refugees would find a stream of people moving from the loneliness and hopelessness in the U.S. down south. So, what's up with the intellectuals? It's not just now. Forever, they have embraced socialism. I think there's always a temptation for the most educated and intellectual people in a society to think that common people are vulgar and they're hopeless and they can't see how they can really thrive and find meaning in such a shallow society with the kind of media and the “Taco Tuesdays” that we've got. So, I think that intellectuals often search for something else. They want people to reach for something that they find more of meaning into. And since Plato, they often think that they should be the kings themselves. Angela Davis, famous socialist— Yeah, racism is intricately linked to capitalism, and I think it's a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place. I classify racism and capitalism as these conjoined twins. In order to truly be anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist. What? That's complete nonsense. When you look around the world, the least racist societies with the fewest expressions of racist attitudes are the most capitalist countries. And why is that? Capitalism is the first economic system where you only get rich by opening up opportunities for others, for customers, for workers, for other businesses. And in that case, it pays to be colorblind. It pays to be open to willing customers and to workers who could enrich your company. And to do business with other businesses, no matter religion or race, or if they happen to cheer for another team. Doesn't mean that every person will be colorblind. There will always be idiots, but in capitalism, it's costly to be an idiot. In the Jim Crow South, it was businesses that fought Jim Crow because they were losing money. It's often forgotten that owners of buses, railways, street cars, in the American south, didn't really segregate systematically until the late 19th century. Why didn't they do that? It was probably not because they were less racist than others in the South, but they were capitalists. They wanted money, they wanted clients, and they didn't want to engage in some sort of costly and brutal policing business in segregating buses. Rosa Parks in Alabama who famously got on board that bus and protested against segregation. Well, buses in Alabama wasn't segregated until the year 1900 because the owners were capitalists. And that's exactly why the rulers in the American South instituted laws, Jim Crow laws, to force them to segregate their businesses. Because they didn't like greedy capitalists who weren't willing to discriminate against the blacks because it was costly to them. They cared about green money dollars, not black or white. Yeah. The first rule of business is: don't reject willing paying customers and don't harass them because they won't like what you're doing. So, the owners of these transport companies in the south, they tried to avoid those laws, bypass them secretly and fight them in courts. And they were often fined. And the owners were threatened with being imprisoned by southern states because they weren't willing to discriminate. And that's exactly why we got Jim Crow laws. Because free markets weren't willing to discriminate. So, politicians had to regulate them to force them to do it. Thank You, Johan Norberg. Thank You. [Swoosh] Thanks for watching this longer than usual interview. I'm still confused by that because I spent my whole career shortening interviews, mostly for 20/20. But seems lots of you like longer interviews so we'll do more. If there's someone you think I should talk to for a longer time, Let us know in the comments below.
