0:10 - Introduction to Capitalism and Its Critics
2:09 - Kropotkin's Perspective on Needs and Morality
9:32 - The Labor Theory of Value Debunked
14:44 - Understanding Wage Levels and Value
18:45 - Kropotkin's Findings on Production and Distribution
23:40 - The Role of Corporations in Society
26:44 - Kropotkin's Vision for Abundance
29:14 - Cooperation Between Workers and Capitalists
In this lecture, Stefan Molyneux examines the intricate relationship between capitalism, socialism, and the critiques posed by prominent anarchist thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin. The discussion begins with an exploration of Kropotkin's significant contributions to the critique of capitalist political economy, where he emphasizes that political economy should primarily focus on assessing society's needs and the available means to fulfill them, rather than on moral doctrines or abstract theories.
Molyneux describes Kropotkin's approach as practical and rooted in reality, arguing that a revolutionary movement must address production and distribution challenges to avoid collapse. He posits that the inefficiencies of capitalism in meeting people's needs, particularly in terms of necessity over morality, highlights a fundamental flaw in the capitalist structure. The lecture reflects on the implications of defining societal needs versus individual preferences, suggesting that the free market allows for personal choices while the pursuit of societal needs risks imposing uniformity on diverse individual requirements.
As the dialogue progresses, the lecture addresses Kropotkin's assertion that overproduction is a mischaracterization of the capitalist system, which he argues leads to chronic underproduction and deprivation. Molyneux elaborates on this point, detailing how capitalist economies, rather than maximizing abundance, often generate scarcity by prioritizing profit over the provision of essential goods and services. He critiques the labor theory of value, noting that the price of commodities is not strictly determined by the labor involved in their production but is influenced by subjective market demand.
Throughout the lecture, Molyneux contemplates the implications of Kropotkin's work in "Fields, Factories, and Workshops," which argues for the existence of sufficient means to meet societal needs with minimal labor input. He contrasts Kropotkin's vision of decentralized production with the prevailing capitalist model, illustrating how large-scale industrial practices often serve managerial control rather than genuine economic efficiency. The conversation weaves in notions of power dynamics, suggesting that the relationship between workers and capitalists is often misrepresented as adversarial, while in reality, both parties have aligned interests in fulfilling consumer demands.
Molyneux also critiques the role of government in reinforcing capitalist structures, particularly in maintaining monopolistic practices and hindering innovation. He reflects on the historical context of Kropotkin's observations and draws parallels to current economic conditions, suggesting that many systemic problems—such as scarcity and poverty—are rooted in the same failures to effectively harness available resources to meet the population's requirements.
Concluding the lecture, Molyneux encourages a reevaluation of the narratives surrounding capitalism and socialism, advocating for a more nuanced understanding of how these systems interact with human needs and societal values. By emphasizing the importance of consumer choices and the potential for cooperative relationships between workers and capitalists, he calls for a transformative approach that prioritizes genuine needs over profit-driven motives. This analytical framework not only critiques existing economic models but also invites listeners to reflect on the broader implications of their own roles within these structures.
[0:00] Hello, hello. Yes, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain. Hope you're doing well. So, that's interesting. I was trying to figure out sort of what's going on with the.
[0:10] Socialists and the anarcho-socialists and so on, and their critique of capitalism, right? So, let's have a look at this. This is from Anarchy Studies, Labor Issues, Social Economics as of 2018 by John Beckham. Bend it like Beckham. All right. Peter Kropotkin devoted a major a part of his prolific anarchist writings to two related themes, examining the actual workings of capitalist economies and developing the broad outlines of an anarcho-communist society. Kropotkin was not satisfied to merely assert that a free society was possible. He sought to show how such a society could be constructed from the materials at hand, realizing that a revolutionary movement that failed to consider the problems of production and distribution would quickly collapse. This installment outlines Kropotkin's critique of capitalist political economy. So, what are the socialists saying that is so objectionable about the capitalism? Great question. For me, anyway, very interesting. Economic doctrine. For Kropotkin, the purpose of political economy was to study society's needs and the means available, either currently in use or which could be developed with present knowledge, to meet them. To study society's needs and the means available to meet them.
[1:31] So, it is not to study what is true and good and right and moral. It is not a moral study. It is a study of meeting people's needs, not morals. Now, this is, again, 51-49, a little bit more. This is a female perspective, that the important thing is to meet someone's needs rather than the morality of the situation, right? So, if you've ever talked to someone who's gone to, I don't know, sex workers or strip clubs or whatever, they don't care whether the money's legal or not. They just want the money.
[2:10] They just need to, like, women in general, moms, single moms in particular, cannot afford to have moral scruples because their kids need to be fed.
[2:21] So, to study society's needs and the means available to meet them, that is not a moral journey. So, what they're saying is that capitalism is inefficient at meeting people's needs, but in capitalism, you get to define your own needs, right? So, I wanted to go to theater school. I went to theater school. I wanted to start a business. I started a business. I wanted to quit my business career to write novels. That's what I did. I had to figure out my own needs and how best to satisfy them. So when you're talking about society's needs, you're talking about deciding other people's needs for them. Because in the free market, you get to decide your own needs and preferences. If you're looking at society's needs and preferences, then what's happening is you're trying to determine other people's needs. And that is a livestock situation. That is viewing society like a farm. All right. So, this is a quote from Kropotkin.
[3:21] It should try to analyze how far the present means are expedient and satisfactory and should concern itself with the discovery of the means for the satisfaction of those needs with the smallest possible waste of labor with the greatest benefit to mankind in general. Okay so the purpose of political economy it should try to analyze how far the present means are expedient and satisfactory and should concern itself with the discovery of means for the satisfaction of those needs with the smallest possible waste of labor and with the greatest benefit to mankind in general so that is not uh this just this windy verbiage right, This is, I mean, if you hired, this is a consultant, he says, I know how to run society. So if you were in business and you hired a consultant and the consultant said, well, we should try and figure out how far your present production line is expedient and satisfactory.
[4:17] And you should concern yourself with the discovery of the means for the satisfaction of these needs with the smallest possible waste of labor and with the greatest benefit of mankind in general. Now, that is just wordy verbiage, right? It is, we used to make fun of consultants in the business world who would come in and say, you know, it's really important to cut costs and increase profits. It's really important to satisfy your customer. It's really important to let creative people be creative. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so, right. All right. So, rather than engage in the abstract theorizing that dominated Dennis now the field, he carried out detailed studies of the agricultural and industrial techniques practiced in his day whether they were in general use or not, and the capacity to meet human needs. Unlike most economists, Kropotkin insisted on subjecting economic theories to the same rigorous inquiry he would apply to any, quote, scientific theory. So, of course, communism is referred to as scientific socialism.
[5:13] So, science these days, we can certainly see this post-COVID, is just another bully word that is deployed to browbeat people who aren't scientists. So you use hundreds of billions of dollars around the world of government money to scoop up and capture all of the state-sucking, toady scientists, and then you attack everyone who doesn't agree with them as being non-scientific, right? So this is a science, as I've talked about before, is the new mystery religion. You have to believe the priests, and you can't have access to the texts yourself. So you buy up all the scientists with government money, and then you attack anyone who criticizes them or holds skepticism, right? As being a conspiracy theorist, non-scientific. There was a sort of famous cartoon from a couple of years ago where some guy was talking to his wife, he was at the computer and said, hey, honey, I figured out what thousands of the world's best scientists have somehow overlooked, right? Crazy. So, scientific socialism. Now, the problem is, of course, that science concerns itself with matter and energy, not life and morality.
[6:27] I mean, Zyklon B is part of science. The guillotine uses principles of weight and momentum to cut people's heads off. So, you are dealing with inanimate objects when you are talking about science. So, whenever people talk about the science of human behavior, they're reducing human beings to mere buckets and bags of matter and energy. Absolutely monstrous and completely sociopathic, by the way, because sociopaths view others, human beings, as mere machines that are supposed to serve their ends, right? So, they have the same relationship to other people that you have with your electronics, that they're supposed to work and you get kind of annoyed and thump them when they don't. So, they don't have any free will of their own, your electronics, right? All right. So, he writes, when certain economists tell us that, quote, in a perfectly free market, the price of commodities is measured by the amount of labor socially necessary for their production, We do not take this assertion on faith. We not only find most of these so-called laws grossly erroneous, but maintain also that those who believe in them will themselves become convinced of their error as soon as they come to see the necessity of verifying them by quantitative investigation. Okay, so he's saying, he's quoting economists who say, in a perfectly free market, the price of commodities is measured by the amount of labor socially necessary for their production. Absolutely false.
[7:48] Absolutely completely. And you don't even need to be an economist. You just need to have been to a mall, right? So, let me ask you, right? So, you've been to GameStop. Let's talk about GameStop, right? Is it GameStop? I don't know, some video game store, right? So, with some video game store, they sell the newest releases at full price, and then you can find a bargain bin where you can get games 90% off. So, the value of the games has dropped by 90%. They are one-tenth the price that they used to be. It used to be 50 bucks. Now they're five bucks, right? So has the labor that was required to produce those older video games dropped in value? In other words, can you retroactively, let's say the video game is five years old, can you retroactively go back in time, take the money back from the developers you paid, and instead of paying them $100,000 a year, pay them now $10,000 a year, right? Some guy worked for you five years to produce this video game. You paid him $500,000. Oh, oh, don't worry, in five years, the price of the video game is going to drop by 90%. Therefore, we have to get that half million dollars back, but don't worry, we'll pay you your 50 grand, right?
[9:00] The price of commodities is measured by the amount of labor socially necessary for their production. Absolutely false. The price is determined by subjective value and nothing else. Price is determined by subjective value and nothing else. Now, of course, you can say that some value is more objective than others, right? So, people don't need the latest iPhone, but they do need food, water, and shelter. I get all of that. But people who want to die don't need those things, people who prefer drugs to shelter don't, like they're homeless, right?
[9:33] So, this is the labor theory of value, which says that the price of something is based upon the cost of the labor that's needed to produce it, which is entirely false. The price of something is determined by the subjective value somebody places on a good or service. And if people have a strong demand for that good or service, you will hire more people and that will drive up the wages. So if people want a whole bunch of new iPhones, then you will hire a bunch of people to produce iPhones and in a free market, that will drive the price up, right? So it's completely ass backwards or bass backwards, as you would say, right? It's completely backwards. So people say, well, you know, the people paid to produce iPhones are paid more than they were last year. That must mean that the value of the iPhone has gone up. It's like, no, because there is a demand for more of the newest iPhones, you hire more workers.
[10:27] So this is all, now I can understand where people, like if you're looking at the medieval sort of surf-based and lord-based economy model, then that's a little bit different, right? But this is not true at all. The value of something is what people are willing to pay for it in the marketplace, right? So what is the value of my podcast monetarily? The value of my podcast is what people are willing to donate. Now, of course, I think they should donate more. Freedomain.com slash donate if you are of a mind to agree. I believe that people should donate more, but my belief does not determine the value of what it is that I'm doing, right? So, all right. While there certainly was a relationship between the price of commodities and the amount of labor necessary for their production, Kropotkin argued they were by no means proportional to one another, as the labor theory of value would imply. Nor had socialist economists troubled themselves to investigate whether or not the theory was true by actually gathering data to test the alleged relationship.
[11:30] I mean, you could get a bunch of people to carry around food in the woods with no customers to do exactly what waiters do, and those people would not be paid by anyone. Maybe a bear would, you know, but those people, so they're doing the same labor, but they're not paid. You could pay someone, of course, or you could demand you could go into the woods and you could dig a ditch and you could fill it in again and dig a ditch and fill it in again it's a huge amount of labor I mean I've dug wells in the woods it's a huge amount of sweaty labor a lot of work man a lot of work, as opposed to you know say.
[12:09] Paul McCartney wakes up lovely legs oh my scrambled eggs oh my dear you have got lovely legs right so he woke up with the tune for yesterday floating in his head.
[12:21] That that's what he did so the guy who's digging the ditch and filling it in which nobody's asked him to do in the woods is working very hard to no value uh he Paul McCartney wakes up now of course you could say this is the result of his prior labor uh in in music and all of that but lots of people put time into music and don't come up with the song like yesterday arguably you know the most popular and certainly it's got like 3,000 covers or something like that I guess 3,001 because I just did one. So, yeah, labor. All right. Okay.
[12:52] Anyone who took the trouble to engage in such an investigation would quickly learn that the theory was false. We only need to consider the price of oil or gold to realize that these prices are set not by the amount of labor power required to extract and process them, but rather by external market and social conditions. So good. Most so-called economic laws, Kropotkin concluded, were mere suppositions. And although socialist economists criticize some of these deductions, it has not yet been original enough to find a path of its own. Now, labor is not irrelevant to the price of something, because if there is a demand for something like gold, and gold is hard to find, then the price of gold will go up, right? Whereas if you sort of remember the old days of Napster, you could just download any song that you wanted, and the labor to get music and so on was very low, right?
[13:42] So it sounds like Kropotkin is agreeing that the labor theory of value is not true, so that's good, right? Thus, when Marx argued against Proudhon that all products exchanged at, or at least fluctuated around, their labor value, he was implicitly arguing for what had been called the iron law of wages, although Marx later refuted himself by conceding that union activity could decrease the level of exploitation. The Socialist Party of Great Britain and similar tendencies are wholly correct when they maintain that a Marxian analysis requires that all commodities, including labor power, are valued under capitalism at the cost of their reproduction, which is in turn determined by the most productive available methods. That's a shirt that takes 60 minutes to make by hand or five minutes to make by machine and sells for the same price on the world's market. What the heck?
[14:30] All commodities are valued at the cost of their reproduction. A shirt that takes 60 minutes to make by hand or five minutes to make by machine and sells for the same price on the world market. I don't think that's true at all. I really don't think that's true at all.
[14:45] I can't imagine that that's true. Because if you can produce more with less input, then you can sell for cheaper and undercut. There's price competition. Now, the labor theory of value, though, is there because more people work than manage. You have more workers on the factory floor than managers. And so, because more people work than manage, it appeals to their vanity if you tell them that their labor is what determines the real value, right? And so they then get resentful that they're not being paid as much as the boss. And it's just another troll thing to set people against each other, right?
[15:18] There is, of course, an element of truth to this, which is why the theory is widely accepted by the labor movement. The labor movement just liked to think that labor was the primary cause of value because it's good for their vanity and good for their aggression. But as we shall see, it mistakes an association for a causal relationship. The commodity theory of labor would indicate that only by increasing productivity can workers make possible an improved standard of living. And only through socialist revolution can those possible improvements be actually realized. Otherwise, the benefits merely accrue to the capitalists and their underlings, right? So this is the idea that when the value of a worker's labor is increased, then the capitalist scoops up all the profits and keeps it for himself, which is, again, this is just boring people who've never run a business, right? Boring people who've never run a business. So I was, of course, as I've mentioned before on this show, I got about a million dollars worth of raises for my employees when I worked in the software field.
[16:18] This is not my company, but a company I worked at another time. I got about a million dollars worth of wages because all my employees were coming and saying that they were underpaid. And I paid for a market analysis, produced a presentation, argued my case strenuously in front of the board, and got them about a million dollars worth of raises because they said, I said, look, it's six to 12 months to train someone on the code base. And I gave the cost benefit analysis of people leaving and got them raises. So let's say that this group, right? I mean, in the socialist, they're keeping too much profit for themselves. It's like, okay, but then you lose workers. And if you lose workers, it's very costly. So yeah, it's not the case. I mean, bad, bad capitalists will keep all the profit for themselves, but then they just lose their workers to better capitalists who retain them. So, all right.
[17:10] I turn below to Kropotkin's proof that wage levels have nothing to do with the cost of reproduction. The essential view is that wage levels, like the price of all commodities, are set not by the cost of production or the amount of labor they require, but by relative economic, military, and social power head by the respective parties. Monopolies, cartels, police clubs, prisons, labor organization, cooperative associations these and other power relationships skew the relative quote value, of commodities or at least of the price that can be gotten for them and it really matters very little whether a cantaloupe has a theoretical labor-derived value of 25 cents if all the stores charge a dollar, well profit of course is the buffer that you can lower price on and still make money so if you're making 10% profit you can lower it to 8% and still make money.
[17:53] And of course, if you lower it too low, then capital won't flow into that business. If you make 1% a profit, then capital will flow into businesses that make more, right? So that's punishment for lack of efficiency. So, and of course, the other thing too, if you want to raise workers' wages, then you need to have better schools, right? If you have better schools, then workers' wages will go up because they'll actually graduate after 12 years of government education with useful skills. So everybody who is a socialist who complains that workers are underpaid, is actually complaining about the socialist educational system, for God's sakes. Oh, it's so bad. Workers get exploited. They don't have enough leveraging, and they don't have enough leverage in the relationship, but they're capitalists. Okay, well, then you have to be against the socialized school system, because the socialized school system is having them graduate with virtually no skills, right? So then they don't have any leverage.
[18:46] Like most socialists, Kropotkin initially assumed that an abundance of goods goods was being produced, and thus that the primary problem facing socialists was arranging their distribution. But when Malatester suggested that this could not be true, Kropotkin investigated the matter and found that, quoting Malatester, quote, this accumulation of products could not possibly exist because the bosses normally only allow for the production of what they can sell at a profit. Some countries were continually threatened by shortages. Right.
[19:14] So, the bosses normally only allow for the production of what they sell at a profit, but the profit is determined by the customer. The profit is determined by the customer. It is not determined by labor, and it is not determined by the preferences of the bosses. The profit is determined by the preferences of the customer. If you have a new iPhone, and people want the new iPhone, they'll line up all night, and they'll pay $2,000 for it, and it costs you $1,500 to produce, you get your $500 profit, but it is determined entirely by the customer.
[19:48] Uh, in fact, the article goes on, in fact, there was only enough food on hand in most major cities to sustain the population for a few days. Yet upon further investigation, Kropotkin established that the shortages, economic crises, and general distress endemic to his age, and which continue to this day, did not result, as was widely believed, from overpopulation, poor soil, or other such natural causes. Rather, they resulted from a failure to utilize the means already at hand to meet society's needs. Okay so when you talk about needs absent cost you're talking about wish you know when my daughter was little we used to design all of these lovely restaurants with birds and and in the tops of trees i actually translated it to a great scene in my novel the future freedom.com slash books and so uh it was a wish list right we've when we played a version of dungeons and dragons we would design these magical items that were super powerful and super funny and super fun, And so that's just wish stuff. So when you say to people, what do you need? It's irrelevant, unless they're children, right? It's irrelevant unless they have some skin in the game.
[20:56] You know, this is sort of joke about like, I want world peace. Well, who doesn't want world peace? But what are you willing to do to get it? Are you willing to confront the warmongers and be slandered? Well, then you're not, if you're not, then you're not going to get world peace. So people saying, right, this is sort of like the immigration thing where people say, should we take in refugees? They say this to people on the street, and everyone says yes, and then they say, great, we've got three refugees here, they need a place to sleep, they can sleep on the floor of your house, and suddenly they don't want to, right? So, it's just wishes and dreams and nonsense until people have skin in the game.
[21:29] So, when you say, well, we want to meet society's needs, well, what's society going to say it needs? Society's going to say it needs everything, because it's just, you know, human desires are infinite. Resources are finite. Human desires are infinite. So anybody who talks about their needs without talking about the costs, right? Ah, I want a new iPhone, right? So let's say you make $17 an hour, right? And you want a new iPhone for $1,700. Okay, well, you want a new iPhone. Great. Okay, are you willing to work 100 hours to get it? Well, I mean, probably 150 with taxes, right? So, are you willing to work for a month straight to get the new iPhone? Now, if somebody says, do you want a new iPhone, and there's no cost, people will say, well, sure. But if you then say, are you willing to work for six weeks to get a new iPhone? Actually, no, probably closer to two months. So, yeah, are you willing to...
[22:29] Work for a month or two to get a new iPhone, right? Then they'd be like, eh, right? So society's needs, it's just, it's nonsense and wish fulfillment unless people have their own money and their own skin in the game, right?
[22:41] Kropotkin presented his findings in Fields, Factories, and Workshops, an anarchist classic that proved that people using then existing technologies could meet all their needs with just a few months of labor per year. Space precludes anything more than the briefest summary of a volume with which every anarchist should have long made themselves familiar. I'll look into that. It's very interesting. He demonstrated that the technical means then existed to produce abundant and healthful food with relatively little effort or expense, a vision quite distinct from today's factory farms, the precursors of which already existed, but which he noted destroyed the soil for generations to come, as well as displacing people who might otherwise derive a comfortable living from the land. Contrary to many economists, Kropotkin argued for decentralizing agriculture and industry, noting that huge industrial establishments were both less common than generally believed, and established less to realize largely dubious economies of scale than to facilitate Okay. Managerial control. Right. So if you're going to talk about corporations, then you're going to talk about legal fictions by which people can prey upon society and escape legal and economic consequences.
[23:40] I mean, just look at all the bankers, right? I mean, how many go to jail, right? So if you have a corporation, you can have a corporation, do a whole bunch of farming, deplete the soil, destroy the soil, and then the corporation can close and everybody escapes legal issues, right?
[23:57] Also, governments will often sell, I know this is the case in Canada, or at least it used to be, the governments will sell timber rights, but not land rights. If you sell land rights, then they want to replant the trees. If you sell timber rights, they have no incentive to replant the trees, which is just another government program for all these kinds of things.
[24:15] So, in a free society, right, and people want to just do the Amish thing, they just want to live on their farms and produce for themselves, absolutely nothing wrong with that. Absolutely. It's not immoral, right? If they want to just farm for them, there's nothing wrong with that. And they can do that perfectly freely. But if you're going to talk about corporations, you're not talking about the free market. The free market would in no way, shape or form support the concept of corporations. In the past, when you had a bank, if the bank went bankrupt, the bank owners lost all their savings and they got sued and they lost their houses, but now, piercing the corporate veil to get after personal assets is very hard, if not impossible. It's a purely fascistic structure designed to have people in the top escape the consequences of bad decisions, but it's a fascistic or socialist idea, the whole concept of corporations. All right.
[25:11] As is well known, I'm sorry, the doctrine of national specialization or competitive advantage, then coming into prominence, and which has since been used as an excuse to ravish third world economies, was demonstrably harmful to the interests of the population. As is well known, two peasants compelled to grow coffee beans and sugar cane on land that could otherwise feed their families. If the debilitating influence of capitalist control and ignorance could be ended abundance for all was well within reach. So, capitalistic control, does that mean corporations. Does that mean business combined with the power of the state? Well, of course, right? Of course. Of course. Governments love forcing people to produce for external economies because then they get, let's say they produce for the US market, they get US dollars with which to buy US luxuries. And that's very good for the people at the top. Plus they get more taxes, right? So the governments want you to be working as hard as possible. It's one of the reasons why the inflation goes on, they keep stealing your money, is that they take your savings, and then if you invest, they get capital gains taxes, and if you don't invest, then you get poorer. They just want to keep you running at a feverish, coke-duck, hamster wheel pace, so that they can keep taxing everything you do. That wouldn't be the case in a free society.
[26:25] So he wrote, all this has been proved, despite the innumerable obstacles. All was thrown in the way of every innovative mind. For thousands of years, to grow one's own food was the burden, almost the curse, of mankind. But it need be, so no longer, to grow the yearly food of a family under rational conditions of culture requires so little labor that it might almost be done as a mere change from other pursuits.
[26:44] And again, you will be struck to see with what facility and in how short a time your needs of dress and of thousands of articles of luxury can be satisfied when production is carried on for satisfying real needs rather than for satisfying shareholders.
[27:01] And yet, everywhere workers lived in misery. Contrary to the teachings of every economic school, Kropotkin argued that overproduction was far from a problem. Quote, far from producing more than is needed to assure material riches, we do not produce enough. If certain economists delight in writing treatises in overproduction and in explaining each industrial crisis by this cause, they would be much at a loss. If called upon to name a single article produced by France in greater quantities, then are necessary to satisfy the needs of the whole population. What economists call overproduction is but a production that is above the purchasing power of the worker who is reduced to poverty by capital and the state. Right, capital and the state. Only exploiters included were in abundant supply. Today, 94 years later, there may well be overproduction of some goods, nuclear weapons, toxic chemicals, and products that must almost immediately be replaced, but it is just as obscene today to talk of, for example, an overproduction crisis in agriculture when millions face immediate starvation.
[28:02] Thus, rather than celebrating capitalism's development of society's productive capacity, as Marxists do, Kropotkin demonstrated that capitalism resulted in chronic underproduction and deprivation. Well, of course, I mean, you don't want to overproduce things. You don't want to overproduce things because then the price is going to go down. But if you underproduce things, people find alternatives, right? So if Apple only produced one iPhone 18 in the world, that would go for a very high price, but then Samsung and LG and whoever would then produce other phones and would take the market, right? So you don't want to overproduce, drive down the price, but you don't want to underproduce because then you give business to your competitors. So again, all of that is chosen. All of that is chosen by the consumers. All of that is chosen by the consumers. Now, of course, this is all influenced by the power of the state, but fundamentally it is chosen by the consumers and capitalists and workers to use the nomenclature are in alignment in trying to satisfy the needs and preferences of the consumers and they are in alignment and whatever is best in getting things into the hands of the consumers is a good thing.
[29:14] And so they are aligned if the workers think that the capitalist is exploiting them then they both ignore the consumer and fight with each other. And the business goes tits up. So yeah, it's really, really sad. People should be working together. Is the coach more important than the players? No, they're both important, right? There's no coach without the players and the players lose without the coach. So to think that they should fight with each other rather than the opposing team, it's kind of crazy. So, and in fact, all of the, this is the Jerry Maguire argument, right? Fundamentally, all of the coaches and the water boys and the athletes and, right, the masseuse, massage therapists and all of that. All of them are serving the crowd. All of them are serving the paying consumer, the audience, right? The sports ball watchers, they're all serving those people. And to fight with each other at the expense of serving those people puts them in WNBA territory. Well, I'll stop here. I'm happy to go on. Let me know what you think of this kind of analysis, if you find it helpful and interesting. And let me know, freedomain.com slash donate. Lots of love, everyone. Take care. Bye.
Support the show, using a variety of donation methods
Support the show
