0:00 Do we get to a point where people like Donald Trump and uh AOC and whatever whatever is becoming popular nowadays, how do ideas that are so evil get to such a point that they are mainstream and basically taking over? That's the topic of tonight's talk. And uh we have Keith Weiner um CEO and founder of Monetary Medals. Keith, welcome back to the Imran Center UK. Please join me in welcome to keep me. Thanks for having me, Razie. How the hell do we get here? The world's in mess. We have such a vast
0:45 vast welfare state that communist manifesto plank number two, which is high in progressive income taxes, is not sufficient to pay for it. So we need communist manifesto plank number five which is the central bank in order to finance it by what people call money printing. I call it borrowing. Whole different whole different topic. Um everything is regulated. Every pro productive enterprise is answerable to one or more usually more regulators. Most professions licensed. The government outright owns, let's see, roads, trains, mail, radio spectrum, airports, harbors, electric grids, water,
1:30 sewer, and schools. Plank number 10 of the Communist Manifesto. So, we got at least three planks absolutely confirmed. But where we're at today, this is a mess. So today I thought normally I talk about monetary topics and I approach monetary science as a science and conclusions about a science should be um if if one has done the work all the way uh certain um because the world behaves the way it does there definable principles one can articulate those principles that's not speculative that's not uh making assumptions about how people are going to behave uh Today I have a slightly less formal talk on a social science
2:16 which is the social trends that have brought us here. you know looking at the things that Ein Rand was saying in the 1950s and 1960s um and extrapolating forward think a lot of what's happening today she absolutely foresaw foretold and then other things that are happening today that I think she'd be rolling over in her grave saying oh my god even I didn't you know foresee that you know happening and one of which is you know objectivists coming on board a bandwagon of uh you know one of the two socialist parties, the United States, you know, how does all this happen? Um, I think it's worth saying the average person thinks that the average person is not on board with this
3:04 whole mess that we have today. Most people think that somehow they right. So in the United States, 537 evil people in Washington, that's 535 congressmen and senators plus two, you know, president and vice president who somehow hijacked a a libertyloving, freedomloving culture and somehow dragged it all the way towards either socialism or national socialism depending on, you know, take your pick. And that somehow the solution is guns or or whatever. We're going to shoot our way out of this. Um, so the average person thinks this is unpopular with the average person. And yet that's not really so. And I know that I'm unpopular online whenever I point this out. Uh, and I say in the right frame, framed in
3:52 the right way, everybody supports virtually everybody supports virtually every aspect of our system. And so think about framing the question, should any old Yahoo be allowed to practice medicine? Almost everybody will say no. Of course not. So, okay, we've just established that professions, at least important ones, so maybe not hairdressers, but doctors, doctor, doctoring is important, cutting hair is not important. That being the distinction between the two important professions, should have to get a license, which means obtain permission, prior consent from the government before um you know practicing medicine. Should bankers be allowed to sell any old security to any old widow
4:38 and orphan? No, of course not. So then we need the full set of banking regulation, securities regulation, accredited investor that we have to protect the little people from investments that might lose money. And so uh we should have a rule that only rich smart people should be allowed to buy, um what I think are the most lucrative investments, frankly. But um you know whatever the case may be uh and so on. So in the right framing um you know people people absolutely not only support but demand insist that we should have all of these things. Should corporations be allowed to run rampant and make as much money as they possibly can? Almost nobody would say yes. Of
5:23 course they should. Of course everybody would say well there's got to be curves. I remember a uh an old uncle that I had with this heavy nigawak accent. There's got to be cos ko. He said there's got to be um without being specific, it was just he wanted restrictions, you know, slammed on businesses on anybody doing anything productive. Um so the in in political theory there's something called the Overton window. The Overton window is the spectrum of what is allowed in polite debate. I don't know if was it Noan Ksky who said that um the way to control a society is to allow very vigorous debate but only
6:09 within a narrow uh spectrum or narrow band. I think it was KSY who said that. Uh I could be wrong on on the author of that. So please don't kill me if that turns out to be some other guy said that. And so that's what we have today in every topic. We have a false alternative. You know, either you are for the government forcing everybody to get vaccinated according to the government's dictates or you are for the government banning certain vaccines, right? It's a false alternative. uh and monetary policy, you're either for um the central bank um you know hiking interest rates to protect the value of your purchasing power of your of your savings by unemploying your neighbor. So if the
6:56 central bank causes your neighbor to be unemployed, he can't out compete you at the grocery store and prices will remain soft. And then the other side of the false alternative is the central bank should print more which allegedly causes more employment and then allegedly causes rising prices by the mechanism that your neighbor is out competing you at the grocery store because he has a good job enabled by all the money printing. So it's either unemploy your neighbor uh or devalue your bank account in order to employ your neighbor. Every topic we have today is a false alternative in immigration. Either the government should import that essentially plan let's bring a million of these group over here or the government should prohibit and maybe even deport a million people. Everything is a false alternative today because
7:42 that's what is allowed to exist within the Overton window. There's a short story that just fascinated me when I first read it called the road to Abalene uh which is set in Texas. Abalene was a town I guess three or four hour drive away and this family is kind of all discussing do you want to drive to Abalene and they had one of I think this in the 19 um 30s or 1940s um hang on a second we got a disruption here that in the 1930s or 1940s caron out of air conditioning the summer in Texas gets very hot I'm sure the temperature would have been um 110
8:29 degrees in the shade or whatever that works out to in centiggrade 42 or 43 degrees or something plus humidity and the cars in those days were black. It would have been miserable and so everyone's like well if you want to go I want to go and everyone sort of agreed that yes we should drive to Abalene even though actually nobody wanted to go that everybody sort of wanted to go along with what everyone else wanted or what they thought everyone else wanted. And so you end up going to Abalene and everyone's sitting in cramped, you know, six people in this car, whatever it was, um, swelteringly, blisteringly hot, just being miserable about it and nobody actually wanted to be there. And that's kind of our, um, you know, political system today. Um, I thought I'd ask the
9:15 audience a question. And for those of you that are watching this, ask yourself this question. who has worked with regulation and compliance. Anybody familiar with this? And and what what's involved in this? So, I I coined a term that I call the regulatorium. And that's this artificial and unnecessary um man-made environment in which nothing really makes sense. There's no common sense to it. Um and in fact you go from one country to another and in one country the regulation forces certain things a certain way and in another country the regulation forces the same things to be the opposite way. In the United States bathrooms like other rooms in the house must have a certain number of outlets. They must be no more than a
10:02 certain distance apart and so on but they have to be soal GFCI outlets ground fault circuit interrupt. In the United Kingdom, uh I found out that it is illegal to have uh power outlets in bathrooms. So if you want to plug in a hairdryer, you need to have a mirror somewhere else because not allowed in the in the bathroom, which is where you have the mirror and the vanity and everything else. So both of these sets of regulations are nominally supposed uh to uh make things safer um and yet they actually mandate opposite uh outcomes. So clearly one of them can't be both of them can't be right. At least one of them has to be wrong. Right. Um but there's no asking does regulation make sense. Regulation isn't about
10:47 making sense. Regulation is about cos. It's about imposing cos. If you're going to build a house then damn it. We're not going to let you build it the way you'd want to build it. We're going to force you to put GFC outlets every five feet along the counters in the in the bathroom or we're going to force you not to have power outlets even if your customer wants them. Uh but it's about forcing every little decision and micromanaging it to the end degree. Regulation adds enormous amounts of friction um that slow business down, especially slow innovation and tends to protect large crony uh incumbents and tends to prevent startups from even getting formed in the first place because the cost of all the legal advice would be beyond what most startups can actually
11:33 afford. Um the problem with the regulator and regulation, number one, it makes no sense. Number two, it doesn't actually create safety. Doesn't actually protect the little guy, protects the incumbents and so on. Um, but everybody has a general belief that there's got to be cos number one. And number two, the people that actually have to live in this regulator fall into one of two categories. Either they make their living as compliance managers and compliance officers and they see a good thing going. It's job security. Do they get at some level that this actually makes no sense and this is hurting their employer? Maybe. But uh I think this is Upton Singler who said it's almost impossible or it is
12:20 impossible to make somebody to teach something to somebody that his salary depends on him not knowing. So you're not going to go have a lot of luck with compliance officers, compliance lawyers, and so on to, you know, to convince them that regulation is is harmful, let alone get them to speak out against it. the other types. There are plenty of businesses that are suffering under this, but there are real consequences if you speak out against your regulator. If you're regulated by a particular agency and speak out against the regulation, um the regulation, the regulators are going to nail you. So, you better be really careful. So the people that are actually experts that understand what all this regulation is doing either kind of like
13:06 it because they're getting paid a salary and they don't care that it's making their employer less profitable or they are a little bit afraid and they should be because the regulator has essentially arbitrary and capricious powers virtually unlimited powers and the regulator can get back at you in ways that would never be traceable. The regulator isn't going to say, "Hey, you know, John Smith, you said this on this date and we're going to get revenge against you." Of course not. They're going to say, "You have a money laundering compliance problem here, and they're going to drill and drill and drill into something and make a mountain out of a molehill." Now, where does anti-moneyaundering come from? Somewhere, I assume back in the 1960s, some crook got caught doing something bad and the angry mob said, "Why did his
13:55 banker let him do that? Why did his bank let him get away with that?" And that the human cry was taken. People are angry at the bankers. That was, I think, long before the term bankster stir, which I the first time I ever heard that term was after 2008 of the crisis. Why do the bankers let him do that? at as if it was the decision of the banker to be a criminal rather than that the client the criminal happened to be a client of the bank. So the United States passed the bank secrecy act of don't quote me I want to say 1973. This is old stuff. And and since then, the rest of the world has passed their equivalents of this. And every year or two or three the um the regulations are ratcheted up and compliance enforcement ratchets up and
14:41 it gets crazier and crazier and crazier and crazier and crazier until to the point where any company could be accused of having made some um uh error or omission in the case of of moneyaundering compliance. And if you're accused of that, you can't say, "Well, look, really, it's just because six months ago I was critical of the regulator." Not going to fly. The regulatory hearings are not going to hear that. Even if it went to a jury trial, which it never does, that they're not going to hear that. Nobody's going to agree with that. Nobody's going to understand that. Nobody's going to believe that. And meanwhile, you're up against either ruinous fines or sanctions that prohibit you from doing parts of your business being shut down, etc., etc., etc.
15:27 So where am I going with all this? Um and this is kind of a loosely organized talk. Um we know and Ein said quote evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. Unquote. We know that the evil is impotent and yet it seems like evil is winning. And if you look today, the trend has been over at least the last 150 years um that bit by bit regulation and tax and welfare and lenture and all these things um civil asset forfeite on and on and on and on with all of these attacks on the United States freedom of speech, the first amendment, the second
16:14 amendment. The attacks are relentless and have been for this is a long time. This is not like, oh, you know, this was Biden created this or Obama created this or Clinton created this or dare I say Bush, Trump, uh, you know, Reagan, uh, Nixon, Ford, etc. This is very, very old. Why does evil seem to be winning if evil is impotent? And the first conceptual error that I want to call attention to with this line of of thought, why does evil seem to be potent and Ein said it's impotent? Is objectivism wrong? Was Einran just simply mistaken in this? And my answer is no. This is actually equivocation. When she says evil is infinite, she means impotent over reality. You know, you can evade
17:00 reality, but you can't evade the consequences of having evaded reality. Um, evil is winning politically. That means that more and more people are inclined to give more and more evil people more and more power. So, in that sense, it's winning. It doesn't mean that it's effective. It doesn't mean that as the economy gets under more controls, more subsidies, more taxes, more regulations, more lensure that the economy becomes more productive and people become wealthier and happier with live longer, more prosperous lives. That certainly doesn't mean that evil is not winning in that sense. Evil is winning in the sense that it's taking over. And so the good is giving its sanction for some odd reason or another. The good is giving it sanction to the evil. What is going on here? So I have another
17:49 quote from Einrand. When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side. When they are not clearly defined but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side. So let's let's unpack that. Where where is this all going? Um Einrand observed in the 1960s that America had a great sense of life and that America's sense of life is what was standing as the bull work against uh you know the the had and had act as a bull work against the sweep of socialism and national socialism which was the trend of the 20th century certainly the first
18:34 half but it didn't really it entered a more quescent phase after the end of World War II. too, but it certainly didn't uh didn't end. That sense of life made America's stop and and hesitate about um dallying with us and supporting this. But sense of life is precisely when the people who have the opposite principle. They have the principle of liberty. They have the principle of self-sufficiency of independence of rationality to some degree or at least product and and pride and all the rugged individualism that America had. Uh and I I do unfortunately have to say past tense for the most part at this point. um it was implicitly uh held not explicitly and
19:22 clearly uh clearly and openly defined. And so against the relentless assault of the left, it could only but retreat. It didn't define its terms. The left was very clear as to what it wanted. Um Saul Wolinsky, I'll be talking more about him uh in a bit. um asked his students, you know, because all of his stuff is all about how to get power and how to, you know, disrupt and how to protest and how to do all these things and write letters to editor to get power. And he said, "No, what's the goal of power?" And his students are like, "Well, to help the poor, to help the working people." No. He thundered at them. The purpose of power is to have
20:08 power. The rest is all bull beep, right? It's all just a pretext. The purpose of power. You want power for the sake of having power. That's it. And every communist is clear on this point. The socialists leadership certainly are. And the and the the useful idiots some cases yes, some cases no. Um so against this onslaught sense of life uh is is uh not able to to it can slow it maybe but it can't it can't win and what the left does and now the right every word that matters they apply a relentless pressure every day there's articles every day there's talking points every day they're
20:54 questioning questioning questioning we're just questioning the science they say we're just asking questions The left said that in the 1960s and one of the uh one of the key words when someone says just I'm just doing XYZ that's a subtrauge for yeah I know exactly what the hell I'm doing and I want to get away with it and I want a little bit of slight of hand. I don't really think that what I'm doing is small. I want you to think it's small. Every word take the word justice. There's been a relentless pressure on the word justice for decades to imply social justice, environmental justice, racial justice, justice for this this or that cause or this or that individual who was allegedly wronged, you know, and so on. Um, freedom, what
21:40 the hell does freedom mean? Um, you know, if you read about groups like the Hell's Angels, not to pick on them in particular, but everybody in in that biker, any of the biker gangs will say that they're all about freedom, man. And then you read when people have left the gangs and they give interviews and they talk about it. That is one of the most controlling, restrictive, you know, social groups you could possibly imagine. I mean, you have to swear to your brothers that you'll put your brotherhood with the bikers ahead of any female romantic interest you might have. You are obligated to show up for certain things and support your brothers in certain ways and yes, even commit criminal acts uh you know, if called upon to do so. They don't necessarily ask everybody to commit murder, but they
22:25 ask everybody to be participants in bullying and all kinds of stuff, you know, when it when it suits the gang. And they call that freedom. What the hell does freedom mean anymore? Well, after, you know, half a century of relentless assault on a word like that, nobody can define it. What does vaccine mean? I've seen people, including in our own objectivist community, insisting apparently earnestly that the COVID vaccine is not really, you see, it's not really a vaccine because and then they they insert something that no, forget first year med student, no student of biology, even at the undergraduate level would you would accept. that would just laugh at. It's not a vaccine. You see, due process. Well, anybody here illegally doesn't deserve due process.
23:12 We don't need to give them due process. So, somehow the word due process is under such stress, it's been so distorted and mutated. Apparently, now it's a gift of the government, something we gift maybe certain groups but not others in this particular twisted, mutated, perverted interview. science. What's the false alternative today? Either you are for and without using the word for a moment, the activity of government officials claiming the mantle of this thing, which I won't name the word, in order to browbeat you or even literally pass laws to force you to do this and not do that. And some of them would have taken it as far as to have you held down
23:58 by, you know, US marshalss while they inject you with something you didn't want to be injected with. Um, they're certainly in this country talking about net zero. They're going to force you to be cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and not driving anywhere. Um, so you can take mass transit to to your job and you can come home at the end of the day and that's it, and you will have nothing and be happy. Um, that's science. And the other side, what are they doing? They're saying, "We're just questioning the science." People who've never taken a science class in their life, whose daily activity involves repetitious labor of some sort, are questioning the science. And then they'll quote Richard Fineman or somebody like that with some outof context quote about, you know, answers have to be questioned or whatever, not
24:44 understanding. And it takes a certain level of basic e education of not expertise in order to question anything. So the concept of questioning basically means I don't like what the mainstream is saying and I have a whim that I'd like to substitute and I'll call that questioning. So every word comes under this relentless pressure and so of course the sense of life retreats ahead of this because it hasn't defined its terms. There's another quote from Rand that I want to uh bring out now. In any conflict between two men or two groups hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins. I think that is one of the most important principles. And there's so
25:30 many. Uh I know I'm going to get hate mail. This one is more important than that important. Yes, they're all right. Um, there's so many important principles, but this one is so so important and I think underappreciated. If two groups are trying to collaborate, the one that's evil is smirking and gloating and happy for that collaboration. And um I'm sorry uh I'm sorry, I'm I'm ahead of myself. and the conflict. Um, two groups agree on basic principles and uh, one is one is much more consistently evil and the other one is inconsistently evil or more mixed premises. You know, look what happened um, and you know, in the right-wing
26:17 politics in America today. You know, you have various kinds of libertyleaning Republicans throwing in with somebody who says it's going to be a bloodbath of of of tens of millions of deportations. Um, we're seeing what that means now. It means without due process, which they believe to be a gift, we can nab anybody off the street and render them to a torture prison in El Salvador. Were everybody on the right wing on board with this? Well, not exactly or not explicitly, but they're sort of on board and they want to collaborate because America has to be cleaned up and cleaning up America in part means cleaning up the illegals. Although maybe they felt that we should be more sure of who's actually here legally before we start deporting them.
27:03 But uh you see you see this collaboration all over the place. I'm sorry. You see this conflict where one side I'm sorry, I keep getting ahead of myself. and conflict between two groups that hold the same principles that the example for that is the Republicans versus the Democrats over the last 80 years. The the Democrats say we have to build social security. The Republicans say, "Well, no." And then once Social Security is enacted, well, we have to preserve it. And the Democrats are saying, "Grow it." And the Republicans are sort of posing at fighting against it. And uh the the welfare state just advances, you know, relentlessly. You can't oppose somebody who has the same
27:48 uh the same basic idea. This happens with regulation. This happens with the welfare state. This happens with security. sounds with everything. Um, end result of this is that because everybody does share the same basic principles, we're headed towards some sort of socialist, socialism is ultimately totalitarian. That's the endgame. And everything short of totalitarianism is just a temporary stage where the socialists, the leaders out there who know what they're doing are taking inch by inch. They know they can't get it all in one go. Um each temporary staging ground is just the opportunity to launch the next assault.
28:34 And as long as all sides accept, what do they accept? It's altruism. If everybody accepts altruism, that's why they want curbs on rich corporations. That's why they want lenture. They feel that in any interaction between two people is necessarily win-lose. The side that's profiting is winning and the customer is losing. The bank is winning, the borrower or the depositor is losing, the landlord is winning, the tenant is losing, the doctor is winning or the hospital is winning, the patient is losing and so on, you know, down the as long as everybody accepts that to some degree, all you have is this fighting along retreat. And that's been kind of how our society uh has worked. Now I get to any collaboration between two groups of all
29:21 different principles. Uh it's the more evil irrational ones who win. Uh that's qual for mine rant. So, how do we have longtime objectivists, even longtime teachers of objectivism who are throwing on board something that clearly falls into this uh into into this idea of collaboration with somebody who has different basic principles. These are altruists. These are socialists of the nationalist variety. People are confused. I want to say one thing about national socialism. And I'm not calling it Nazism because I don't want the, you know, Godwin's law. Everyone's saying, "Oh, he said Hitler blah blah blah blah blah and you know,
30:06 this politician or that politician isn't literally Yeah, that's right. It's not uh the National Socialist in Germany in the 1930s, there was a um early party leader named Gregor Strasser who said from the left we must take socialism without internationalism. from the right we must take nationalism without capitalism. So that's what they combined is nationalism and socialism. Everybody somehow because the left and because of of everything I've been talking about believes that fascism is a right-wing idea, but actually it combines a right-wing idea and a leftwing idea. It's it's actually of both or really of it's really left because of socialism.
30:53 Um so why why are knowing these principles including people who've taught these principles formally knowing these principles why are they on board collaboration with somebody of opposite basic ideas knowing that Ein said in that collaboration the guy with the opposite idea who's e evil idea is going to win why are they on board this let's give everybody a moment to pause and for the live audience see if anybody body cares to volunteer an answer to that. I mean this is the existential question of our era I think I from a from a perspective of studying social movement social trends why even I mean let alone
31:40 you know so many folks in the Republican party so even libertarians coming on board you authoritarianism why is this the case let alone that even objectivists are doing it and if if we in our movement are doing it you can see how it's going to be incredibly tempting to everyone else who's not friending along with Ein Rand who doesn't have the admonition that if you collaborate with somebody with opposite basic ideas evil side is going to win even we're doing it and we know that why because they think evil is powerful and either therefore you have to do it because you have to win it's about win or they know that the powerful is impotent sorry the evil is impotent powerful ful is potent and therefore
32:27 because they think that evil is is is potent is powerful. They then deduce therefore it's not evil, it's actually the good. And we saw this over and over and over again with people saying well you have to vote for the lesser evil. And you know a year later you know they're insisting that it's the greater good and they will um ostracize you and hate you if you say that it's it's not the greater good. They believe it is fundamentally powerful. It is potent. Politically it is. I'm going to talk about Saul Waldinsky and his rules for radicals. At least a few of them. Uh but politically it's potent. It's not potent in reality. It's not going to make America great again. It's not going to make America great at all. It's going to make America
33:13 weak and less great than it had been. Um but uh they believe that it is potent and that is something that is really remarkable should be really remarkable that somehow the culture because of the way things are framed and because of political alliances today we've reached a point that if somebody says they believe in some something and you think they're holding as a principle if the opposite party advocates that as a policy they will then turn around and say well of course that's evil. I've never believed we should do X. Whereas for the last 20 years they believed we should do X. Now I'm against X because the other guys are for it. That's part of in the right with the right framing. Um people will uh go along the road to
34:01 Abalene with all kinds of things. So this guy named Saul Alinski was a professor in New York City. I want to say it must have been City College cuz that's where the hard left was. I don't exactly know what his university affiliation was. Um they used to call City College the little red schoolhouse. That was um RAD being the key thing that that uh pjorative came about in the 1930s but it could have been Colombia. It could have been um you know City UN University of New York. I don't know exactly which university. and he was a communist and he was all about teaching these young radicals um you know posturing as hippies who just wanted to have fun and just wanted
34:47 freedom man um about protesting and about how to get power um you know to to advance the cause of communism. And so he taught in his in his classroom this stuff um and uh you know as I said earlier um he said to his class one time what is the purpose of power and people said you know one student he said well it's to uh help the poor and another one said help the working people no he thundered power the sake of power is power this is about getting power period that's what you're after this is what he was trying to sculpt this army of people to lust for power to lust for the unearned lust for
35:32 the ability to command others to do what they would not do. So he wrote a book called rules for radicals and um this is regarded just like makavelli regarded as intrinsically evil you know yada yada yada. I think as part of a good well-rounded education people should read stuff like this. I think you should read the communist manifesto. I think you should read the prince by makavelli. I think you should read rules for radicals. Um and some of the stuff is pretty turgid pros. Marx was not a great writer. Alinsky is much simpler and clearer. Um, I found the prince by Makaveli certainly to be easy enough to read. The ideas are clear enough to what he's saying. And so I'm going to skip to the point he had 12 or 13 I think 13 rules for radicals. And
36:19 this is all about how do you you know plan if you're the organizer of these protests and letter campaigns and sitins and all the stuff that they were doing think 1960s um you know what should you do? Number four, and I think this is the most interesting in the context of everything I've been talking about, make the enemy live up to his own book of rules. Something I've observed today, and I think this is just a sign of moral relativism. What is the most deadly thing that both sides, left and right, can think to accuse the other side of? Anybody have any idea on that? You see over and over and over and over and over and all these memes alleging that AOC did this, Bernie did this, Elizabeth
37:06 Warren did this, Trump did this, um K Star did this, etc., etc., etc. Hypocrisy. The worst possible sin is to act in some way against the words that you yourself have said. So there's no objective standard. There's only your own words, your own prior recent words. And if you did something against your own pre previous words, that is irredeemably evil according to the hit and run score a point bumper sticker logic that passes for you know political debate nowadays. Um so Alinsky is saying your enemy claims to be all altruistic and good and this and that and the other thing. Force him into a situation he can be exposed as a filthy hypocrite. Now,
37:53 Elinsky knows full well that their side is also a bunch of filthy hypocrites. But this is all about going on the offensive. It's about accusing the other side of things. Even if you yourself are just guilty of sin, doesn't matter. I mean, look at how Trump will say so and so is a liar, so and so is this, so and so did that. You could say, well, wait, you're doing the same thing, right? Doesn't matter. The one who is standing behind that that finger of accusation, the finger of blame has the power. The person who's on the other side is now what is he going to do? Rule number 13, pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Joe Biden is a liar. Lying Joe. Now, what Joe Biden supposed to
38:39 say? Well, I'm not a liar. You see, I whatever blah blah blah blah. You know, Richard Nixon infamously declared, "I'm not a correct." Was basically all over for for Richard Nixon after that. Once somebody's denying something, it gives it a credibility, especially if the other side is relentlessly pressing the attack. And everybody on both sides of this altruism, everybody accepts altruism as the moral code. Altruism is not practicable. That's the problem with it. So, everybody who professes serious altruism is a hypocrite. They all have to draw the line of how far they practice it and how they actually want to remain living and and succeed in life to any degree. Um, altruism. So, it's not an effective code for living. It doesn't give you any guidance to how to
39:26 live. You just have to break your moral code and feel guilty for living. But it's a heck of a formula for judging other people. And the other side of it when altruism is used to judge other people's is envy. And I like to talk about there's an old Soviet joke and I posted this online many many times. Farmer is digging in his field, finds a old lamp, pulls it out, the genie comes out and the genie says, "I will grant you one wish, but whatever I do for you, I will double for your neighbor." The guy thinks about it for a minute and the farmer says to the genie, "Blind me in one eye." Envy. Envy. Not the desire to succeed, not the
40:12 desire to help the poor, the desire to take that guy down who's richer than you or in any way more successful than you or whatever it is. His farm is growing one more vegetable per year than you are. Take him down. Now that guy is blind. Let's now see how he can farm blinded. And of course, socialism especially when it was practiced consistently as in Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao China, Paul's Cambodia, um, Ho Chi Min's, you know, Vietnam, um, Kim's North Korea, the most consistent of all. The more consistently it's practiced, the more consistently it finds everybody with sight and blinds them. And instead of uplifting everyone else, all it does is it tears the whole society down. all your farmers are
40:57 blind, then you're not going to grow a lot of food and everybody starves. And that's basically uh you know, North Korea today. Um ridicule, this is uh number five, ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition who then react to your advantage. Now, what do we know about ridicule and laughing at virtue, laughing at values? Wasn't there a little scene in the fountain head where this is happening? And Ellsworth Tui, who's the evil villain, is talking about you don't have to uh, you know, ban books or ban virtue, ban all these things. Just laugh
41:42 at it and the laughter will destroy it and wipe it out. You know, laughter is negation. If you're laughing at virtue, you're negating virtue. So ridicule somebody, make everybody laugh at him and he has now become persona nongrada he's done for. Um and Trump of course uses this to his uh success as certainly the left has done many many times. Um, these are potent weapons only to the extent that the allegedly opposite side is actually the same as your side. But both sides accept the same basic principles. Both sides want socialism maybe to slightly differing degrees. Or maybe they want the government to have more control over this part of the economy and this rival
42:29 gang wants government to have more control over this part of the economy. But they're both basically similar. And Minsky is saying given that now he takes that as metaphysically given. Objectiveism teaches that you should never confuse the man-made with a metaphysical. This is man-made. The fact that our entire society has has gone allin on this altruist and and envy creed. Um but given that everybody has uh Alinsky is treating this as a god-given fact of nature, which it is not. But given that then these weapons or to use a modern term to weaponize ridicule to weapon weaponize personalizing things weaponize hypocrisy
43:14 um is very powerful politically it's very effective once you get the mob laughing like a bunch of hyenas at somebody uh you could foreclose on any further debate. uh it's kind of argument hamm as well. Whatever that person was saying is wiped out along with that person's character and public you know ability to show his face in public ever again. And now you can just smoothly proceed as if your next agenda of whatever wealth tax was the consensus all along. And for all these variety of reasons, the Overton window, the road to abolene, um the basic acceptance of altruism, which means those who oppose these things say, "Well, but it's expensive and it's inefficient and whatever." where those objections are swept out to sea, especially when they
44:00 see that the leading spokesman against a wealth tax has just been ridiculed and laughed out of town and so on. So, this is a powerful uh you know tool and technique uh to drive um a social trend. Um, I thought I'd end that's a pretty bleak idea. I've basically said look in the realm of politics the evil is quite potent for all these reasons and even half of the objectivist community is willing to be on board for a variety of reasons and I've I've touched on some of them. I don't want to leave it there. I don't want to leave everybody that was just no hope that there's any way out of this that our our society is irrevocably, you know, going to hell in a hand basket. Um, so I ask the
44:47 question, what's the solution? How the hell do you get out of this? Because this is classic self-fulfilling. You know, it's a positive feedback loop and there there's a ratchet and there's there's resonance. Um, so engineering resonance is when a system responds in a way such that it's um, uh, synergistic with whatever forces are perturbing it. Is everybody familiar with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in um Washington State collapsed? I think it was 1947. What's amazing about this is somebody was actually there with of course there was no video in those days, let alone iPhones. Somebody was there with an 8 millimeter film movie camera to actually watch the bridge collapse.
45:35 And so this is on YouTube. Everybody should Google Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State. So this bridge goes over this gorge or this ravine um gorge I guess in Washington state and there's a river you know whatever 100 meters below and um the nature of this valley that that a bridge spans across um has the has this wind that comes down the ravine but it's not a steady wind which would have been okay. It's a gusting wind and the gusting was periodic and the period of the wind happened to match resonant frequency of the structure. Every every building every everything has a resonant
46:21 frequency to it and if you get this gust of wind and the bridge isn't designed with the right aerodynamics and and other things so that different parts of the bridge should have different resonant frequencies. They didn't understand that principle at that time or at least the people designing that bridge didn't understand that. And so every gust of wind caused the bridge to to move. And what it did, it created a torsional wave. The bridge was twisting along its long axis. With every gust, it twisted just a little bit more. And the amplitude of the twist, I'm exaggerating, it became more and more and more until the steel couldn't handle the chain anymore. and it and it started to tear and snap. And then the whole thing collapsed and fell into the water
47:06 below. And there was one guy whose car was on it while it was bucking and twisting. But he got out of the car and as far as I know, he actually ran off the bridge to safety. The car went down and I don't think anybody actually got hurt. But the bridge was destroyed and now whatever side of the river he was on, he would have had eight hours to find his way to the next thing to get back home. So that is an example of resonance. And what we have today there's resonant system of positive feedback and that's why the system just continues to go further and further off the rails. There's no selfcorrection mechanism. People say well if it gets bad enough then you know people will demand a change. Well it gets worse and worse and worse. We are much worse today than whatever people would have thought enough might have meant in the 1990s and yet they keep demanding well. Yes they
47:52 want to change. They want more of the poison that's killing us because they don't recognize this as a poison for all the reasons we've been talking about. What the hell is the solution to this? And I think I've got uh I think I've got the right answer. At least I have an interesting one that um I want to pose for everybody to consider. And that is instead of having one um let's just say overarching institute that teaches all things objectivism and of course people aren't going to tune in and follow that institute unless they agree across the board on all the different issues which is almost impossible with each issue. Most of these issues are quite controversial. Each issue divides the audience in half and half again and half again. and the
48:38 group of people if you have you know 10 issues you know the size of the group is one 1,024th of where you started and if there's 20 issues it would be uh 1 millionth uh and so on um I would like to propose and I think I've said this in another talk before that people consider the idea of a thousand for-profit enterprises each enterprise targeting a specific area where the government is attacking liberty and therefore attacking prosperity and therefore attacking what ultimately what people want to be able to do and now prevented from doing or the government makes it prohibitively expensive or whatever the case may be. Um, each of
49:23 these for-profit but forpurpose enterprises can solve one problem and build quite a large market and quite a large following because they're not insisting on loyalty to a million other uh uh you know unrelated issues to their one issue. Obviously myself, monetary medals, we're trying to fix the monetary system or if even if we don't necessarily go that far, give people a way to save in money and get a return paid that money not subject to inflation and debasement and devaluation and all the things that governments are doing to their currencies today. Um, you know, there's other for-profit enterprises out
50:09 there. Um, Arc UK being one of them. um you know solving the problem I guess I I don't know how Rosie would put this correct me if I'm wrong uh that the mainstream media perhaps because of lenture and all kinds of other things has become kind of an organ of the state there isn't really a great deal of spectrum you know within the Overton window but there's things that need to be said and there's an audience who wants to hear them and so by creating a channel you've got an audience who just would otherwise be completely disenfranchised and disaffected did um whatever the case may be. You know, look at Uber. Now, Uber didn't try to set out to provide greater liberty to anybody. But what they ended up doing is an end run and taxi regulation and provided a
50:56 radically better experience besides. So, if I want to take an Uber home, instead of having to go to the high street from here, I can just call an Uber and watch on a visual map of the streets here of London until the cars right out in front. And then I can just walk out, get into the car, and have to stand there in the rain and the cold and whatever. Effectively, they've given people some of their liberty back that was taken by, you know, the taxi regulators. Um, so this is what I would like to see. I'm I'm deadly serious about this. If so, let me put it this way. Everybody sees problems in the world. Most people think the government's going to solve their problems and they either want to lobby the government for something or they
51:42 want to find whichever party seems to, you know, in a loose gestalt sort of sense resonate with those problems and they want to vote their way to have the government fix their problems for them. Um, that's obviously not working. I think that's abundantly clear. Um, other people will, you know, complain to to their friends over a beer and then go back to work. The entrepreneur is the crazy guy who says, "I see the problem and I see a way to make money solving the problem." So, I'm I'm not just exhorting people to altruistically start companies for the good of everyone else and at the sacrifice of yourself. that would just be a repetition of the same altruist
52:28 dogma that you get everywhere else. I'm saying if you do this well, you can make a lot of money and you can have a great deal of satisfaction. And I think there's a massive opportunity because nobody else is thinking this way about entrepreneurship and liberty and combining them in that way. And if you can do that and come up with something good, first of all, please do reach out and let me know because if nothing else, I want I want to cheer you on and uh I can I can shine a little bit of uh public spotlight your way um given my uh my own audience at this point. But I want to encourage everybody to think about that. If you want more liberty, think about being an entrepreneur to create it.
53:21 Okay, people people in the room, if you have a question, uh, unless you're in the front row, come up here so that the mic will pick it up. Are you sure? All right, then. If you're not coming up here, speak up. Uh, there was a question. Thank you, Bonnie, for the super chat. There was a question here. Uh, Elrito asks, "Why are why are the wrong ideas allowed to proliferate?" Obed by whom? Uh, it doesn't. But maybe I mean one of the ideas that is becoming more popular in the right is that some people have the wrong ideas and and the government should actually the right is now in the
54:07 US openly talking about rooting out evil and they use the word rooting out and purifying is another word they use. These are medieval you know terms. This should picture this should this should conjure up images of the uh Inquisition uh you know in the in the 15th century. Um you know it's the nature of a free society that people can promote evil ideas. It's not the nature of a free society that evil ideas are fundamentally potent even in the realm of politics. They're potent only because they're appealing to something people already deeply hold which is altruism. I said um so yes evil ideas are going to be out there. The question is why do they take you know
54:53 why do they take hold to sweep the entire you know culture globally. Um that's the thing that we should be confronting not the fact that the evil idea was uttered in the first place. I don't think the right answer. So my understanding is to this day it is illegal in Germany to say anything pro-Nazi or pro- Hitler. Um, I don't think I understand the historical re reasons when, you know, the allies went in in 1945 and denazified Germany why that was arguably necessary at that time. But and here we are many many many years later, 80 years later that long ago should have been scrapped. If somebody wants to say something good about Hitler, well, you
55:39 know, say it and then be prepared to be judged for the buffoon or worse that you that you are. Anybody raising their hand, but I have a question. Um, so I love the idea of uh basically offering free market solutions to problems the government creates in many in many fields. So you're doing that um Alex Epstein I don't know. Yeah absolutely I would say yes absolutely uh but there are fields in which you can't uh because they won't in the uh you know in the spirit of who allows it there are things the government will not allow there you know
56:24 you can't you know put lay tracks and have trains competing with the government trains in this country. Right. Uh yeah. So, how do you how do you navigate that and also how do you um I'm thinking the trend is there's going to be more of that uh more more things that you can't do uh certainly in this country and it looks like in the US. I mean obviously if something's illegal and and they mean I guess there's some things that I mean when Uber started what they were doing was illegal and they just said well full steam ahead and they figured they would scale before the regulators really catch up to them and forgiven given something
57:11 like taxi regulation which is obviously highly uh fragmented um turned out not to be a bad strategy and by the time city of Austin Texas everyone thinks of Texas as free markets. Texas is one of the few places where they tried to ban Uber and Lift. And in Austin, it was illegal to Uber and Lift for I think it was a month or something like I don't know how long it actually lasted, but but at that point they were so big. What I was there in Austin when they banned it for that month or whatever it was, but it was overruled, wasn't it? by the state. Well, I was going to say it was so overwhelmingly unpopular because there were so many customers that wanted Uber that got angry with the politicians for doing that that it became politically untenable and uh so they reversed their
57:58 decision and Uber is perfectly legal in in Austin today. Look, obviously you can't offer a hospital and call it a free market in medicine and just build that hospital right here in London. Um, you know, there's a lot of rules and regulations around that, who you can hire and what services you can offer and how and how to get reimbursed. And I don't know if the UK is one of those countries where it is actually illegal to have any private medicine. I know there are some socialized medicine countries that have that. Others allow a parallel private system. uh you have to be if you want to innovate in that area, you have to be you have to become really educated on what the regulations are and um you're going to have to work with major law
58:45 firm to get an opinion letter to give you a freedom to operate, you know, memo. Um you got to be really really careful with this Um, but I do think that there's a ton of areas where this kind of innovation is possible either because of taxi regulation that's not all that serious about it and they're fragmented and not organized and they don't the government doesn't move that fast. You can get to your critical mass of customers. Um, it becomes politically untenable for them to, you know, stop you. Um, or there's other areas where they haven't gotten around to regulating yet or they haven't thought of it or, you know, whatever. And um I I I think there's a ton of opportunity. Not everywhere. That is true. There is no answer to that. Uh ultimately, unless you can build a
59:31 constituency to lobby for it, that's hard. I've given up on lobbying. I lobbied for gold at the state level for five years. Finally, at the end of that, and I lobbed in se a bunch of states. Um, finally at the end of five years, Arizona finally passed a very watered down version of what the original bill had been five years earlier. Um, so I'm not big fan of wasting my time doing that. Um, so going back to one of the one of the things you were talking about, which was that some objectivists are aligning themselves with I'm guessing you're saying the Republicans and Trump. That's like I
1:00:17 don't know if that's the Yeah, I don't really want to make it too political because this is way bigger than just, you know, if you like Trump or hate Trump. This is, you know, do you somehow throw in saying we have to vote for the lesser evil and that becomes support the lesser evil and that becomes it's actually not evil at all. It's the greater good. How does that happen? How did that happen? Because it has happened and what are the causes for that and how do we address that? Yes, you're making a distinction between someone who says I think it's important to vote in this particular particular election. I think the alternative to say Trump is even is really really bad but I recognize that Trump is bad and that's
1:01:03 how you know and then subsequently when Trump does stuff you should condemn that they condemn it versus the person who let's say because for me like you I wanted to move to the point where you're you're saying why are they supporting this evil person or evil policies and I think you said something like because they think evil is not impotent they think evil is powerful. So an alternative interpretation is that they've been they have turned the other side into such a massive great evil. So they think the Democrats are about to destroy the country that
1:01:49 they're just suppressing and evading um the facts the back you know the the negative facts about the other side of the movement they're pinning all their hopes on to save them from the left but isn't that the same thing that they think the evil is fundamentally potent and they they imbue all that potency into Biden or or Harris it's the same thing it's politically potent as you say but they but they don't necessarily make that distinction they just think they believe it's powerful And right they have a great deal of fear of what of what Harris would do. And one of the observations that I made at the time before the election was even I mean both Biden and Harris
1:02:35 were quite ineffectual. I mean Biden for four years accomplished almost none of his agenda. The United States the whole world over the idea of a minimum wage is uncontroversial. that is virtually everybody accepts that there should be a minimum wage set by statute and the only real debate is whether it should be 750 an hour, 15 an hour or 30 an hour or whatever. Um Biden was not even successful in getting a national minimum wage hike where he wanted it to be, let alone anything else because he was bumbling and incompetent and stupid and also not particularly popular even on his own side. He was not a rallying point for the left. He was just like, "Well, he's the schmuckola that we got, so I guess we better show up on election
1:03:23 day and support him." Harris was even less popular than Biden. I don't think if the Democrats had time to devise a strategy, they ever would have put her on the ballot. But when it finally came out that Biden was too scenile to continue, um, in fact, didn't he get out of some allegation? it was some criminal thing that he did, something he did that was really wrong. And the defense was basically he's got dementia and therefore doesn't have um uh you know inventious compass. Um so uh the f you know very very late in the process I run the VP and um I argued wouldn't it be better to have ineffectual
1:04:09 incompetent and broadly disliked evil politician that everybody could oppose and their her friends would be completely demoralized. the left would be completely demoralized not showing up in support and everybody could rally behind let's oppose this rather than having somebody whose policies are actually pretty damn similar but who's incredibly popular and doing it in the name of capitalism and freedom and American greatness and um but my answer to your my response to your question is there are very few of the former of the people who said okay this other side is greater evil let's vote for the lesser evil and hold it accountable they're surprising ly astonishingly few people in that category and the vast majority of them may have begun well you know yes it's a lesser
1:04:56 evil but we have to vote for it because you have to vote for somebody who's your choice and all these sort of evasive pivoting type arguments and then after the election they're on board and you have to support President Trump and you have to support this you have to support that and they're going all the way down you know down the line supporting everything. And so if they said that they recognized it was a lesser evil, they were disingenuous at the time uh that they said that and it's not what they really meant. And and that's where we are today is they're they're fully on board. Um you know, with with one or two notable exceptions, um you know, without getting into names, I don't really want to personalize this. And it's not really about Trump. I mean,
1:05:42 it's no secret I'm not a fan of Trump. I'm not a fan of Biden either. A lot of times the Trumpists will disingenuously say, "Well, you support Biden and you support the communists." No, I don't. I'm a radical for it for capitalism and the one area that the other even the otherwise free marketers are not for free market in which is money and credit. Um so you know this is this is a broader issue which is we have a social trend that's headed in this direction and and if it's not Trump it will be somebody else and you know Trump is now approaching 80s you know in four years it will be somebody else. Who's it going to be? What are they going to stand for? And as this dynamic continues it's only going to get worse. This trend continues uh towards
1:06:28 nationalism and socialism. All right. Um, so thanks everyone. Thanks everyone for coming. Wait, before you uh click out, the next thing on this uh on this channel is Oh, did you already No, no, but they can see you. They don't need to see me. They can hear me. Uh, tomorrow the daily objective, fifth birthday. Uh, make sure you tune in uh for that. Thanks, Keith. Thanks everybody for joining and uh coming here and we'll see you tomorrow.
