Please make your opening arguments, including what socialism and capitalism mean to you and why you believe capitalism is better. The floor is yours and you have 4 minutes for your opening remarks. To clarify, when I say communism, I'm referring to the abolition of private property and voluntary contracts. Socialism is most accurately described as the institutionalized aggression against private property and
voluntary exchanges. Capitalism is a social system based on the explicit right of private property and voluntary contracts between consenting adults. In advocating capitalism, I'm simply affirming the truism that human beings are self interested. This is why we are devastated when someone close to us dies, but have trouble getting worked up over the 100,000 deaths that took place during the Franco Prussian War.
Human beings do not stop being self interested just because they are elected to public office or because they enter a voting booth. The key difference between capitalism and socialism is the constraints faced by self
interested actors. Under a system of private property and voluntary exchange, no one can get a penny out of your pocket or a second of your time unless you voluntarily agree to it. This freedom of association and disassociation is the ultimate check and balance against the inevitable self-interest and greed all human societies operate within. Politicians and state employees are not unpaid volunteers or people who only demand to be paid the bare minimum in order to survive.
They too are self interested. Socialism allows greedy people to take property without consent or without creating any value in exchange through taxing the money other people have acquired voluntarily. This vitally important check and balance, the freedom of association, is also critical to raising living standards. If you don't value a product or service that I create, you have no legal obligation to allocate your scarce time or money to my endeavor.
If you want a society where the least well off have the most opportunities, you would want a system which gives those very people the most amount of opportunities to trade and contract with other people in order to raise their living standards. Far from just being theoretical, capitalist enterprises such as Amazon and Walmart have given more people access to low cost products and services than our ancestors ever could have imagined.
Companies like Apple have succeeded not because they make products only billionaires can afford, but because they make computers the average person can afford. Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but in channelling his self-interest to meet consumer demand, he made the Model T car affordable to the average worker.
Cornelius Vanderbilt lowered the cost of steamship travel from 7 dollars to six cents primarily through capital investment because he wanted to profit by creating something many people
valued. Andrew Carnegie lowered the cost of steel from $56 a ton to $11.50 a ton in 27 years by experimenting and investing in efficient production methods which everyone else in society benefited from by having an increased access to goods, which deal was used to make Grok Twitter's artificial intelligence, Wikipedia, Zoom, YouTube, the Khan Academy Internet Archive all provide more free access to education than any socialist program any
government has ever produced. On a larger scale, we see the same result in dividing up the Korean Peninsula. We see that the Koreans with more freedom to exchange have higher living standards for the average person, just as we saw W Germans have a higher living standard than E Germans, just as we saw the drastic increase in the growth of China when Deng Xiaoping allowed more people to voluntarily trade and contract
in the late 1970s. Capitalism harmonizes the self-interest among human beings, not only resulting in higher living standards, but is the only moral system since it rejects the socialist double standard where some people have a right to initiate violence and others do not. Convince our young skeptics out there, and there's plenty of them that are skeptical of capitalism in this audience. How is capitalism going to deliver the goods for them?
You have two minutes. We can look at the free education that capitalism provides when it comes to websites online, as I mentioned in my opening statement, YouTube Odyssey, Internet Archive, the Khan Academy using Grok. Thanks to people like Elon Musk, we can access more education
than we ever could have. If you advocate something like the need for college to be coercively funded by the state, that is an admission that the last 12 years that the kids spent learning absolute nonsense is created. People who are in such dire need of education that they absolutely need 4 years and we need to stay to coercively funded. I would think that you'd want to brag a little more about public education considering it's five days a week, six hours a day for 12 years.
You'd think that these kids were so brilliant that no politician could ever trick them with propaganda, that they would be immune to falling for logical fallacies and the such. But the reality is that the teachers do not have the incentive to create a very good product or service. So after 12 years, kids know so little that the socialist is demanding, gosh, we really need four more years of this. This because the last 12 years was such an unequivocal waste.
In the case of healthcare, look at the most regulated verse, least regulated things. Something like cosmetics is much less regulated and the cost has gone down. More people are able to access it than previously before because there was market competition, because there was innovation. If you go to Walgreens, you could look at the stuff that the state does not require a prescription for versus what the state does require a
prescription to get. Less regulation, more options, and lower costs as a causal result of competition. And with housing, as I mentioned earlier, people like Elvis, Summers, Jay Austin, it's not that these those are two people who were building tiny houses for the cost of between $1200 and $5000. This would have come about just as smartphones. Gordon Gekkos brick phone in Wall Street was impressive 40 years ago and now no one would
be caught dead with that. That's the innovation that capitalism can yield us. Or you could say, well, actually it's not the profit incentive, it's people just wanting better things for the future. That's totally fine. Then just fund those voluntarily. Just let us opt out of what frankly we think are just disasters as such as, you know, state schooling.
Think it's a complete waste of time and it's unpaid child labor and I would much rather kids have jobs when they were much younger getting their foot in the door and getting on the job experience so they could gain skills in the workplace. Just let us opt out. That's the only capitalism response that I have. Our final topic in this round will be an elevator pitch to the next generation.
Imagine you're speaking directly to a 22 year old who's watching this debate and feeling frustrated and cynical about their economic future. They're asking what does your side have to offer me personally? Why should I believe in capitalism or socialism, Keith? What hope can capitalism give to that young person who's worried about inequality, climate and living standards? You have two minutes to sell your case before the elevator arrives at your executive suite on the top floor.
For the same reason we should have religious freedom, we should have economic freedom. People should be free to make voluntary exchanges with their friends, their coworkers, their employers, with potential customers in the absence of a third party coercively intervening and attempting to exploit both consenting parties. I'm very happy that the Me Too movement has brought consent front and center in the
discussion. Consent is what differentiates slavery from work, rape from lovemaking, theft from trade, and kidnapping from spending time at a friend's house. Consent is the root of morality. We should extend the principle of consent to the economic sphere, allowing the average person to have the most amount of job opportunities, the most amount of access to products and services that they could have.
Embracing consent is not only the moral approach, it gives people a higher standard of living because you have entrepreneurs competing for the dollars in your pocket. Don't make it easy for them. Don't give them a big state that they could just tax the money away from you. Make them work for it. When you look at the great crimes of. Let's just stick with American history, it's commonly recognized that there were atrocities against the Native Americans.
Some people initiated violence against other people, and we had an unjustifiable double standard. Well, it's not our fault. They were just savages, and we improved on the land, so initiating violence wasn't that big of a deal. Yeah, it's OK that we coerce some people into performing labor against their will, whether it's because they're less intelligent because they come from less primitive societies. There was another blatant double standard that we are still
paying for to this day. What capitalism's advocating is US dropping this double standard and not allowing some people to initiate aggression at the expense of others. Regardless of what your theory of property rights is, it's still inconsistent. If there's a socialist state where one group has a unique right to initiate taxes against the rest of the population, that's what makes this an
inconsistent theory. Even if you said, well, it's just about making sure there's enough for everyone, well then why is it that the state has a unique monopolistic right to initiate taxes? If it's something totally legitimate, allow everyone to initiate taxes. This was the great disagreement between George Fitzhugh in his book The Sociology of the South and Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Fitzhugh wrote in his book that slavery is a great, great
paternal institution. Instead of the slave being free and then having to compete in the dog eat dog profit seeking voluntary sector, the slave is taken care of. He's given a home for free, he's given a place where he can have a shower, he's given healthcare. He is under the ownership of the slave owner. This this concept of volunteerism we should ignore and focus about really caring for people to the point of enslaving them. This is what I refer to as domestic imperialism.
The progressive will rightfully say that America should not be using the government to enforce laws on people in Haiti. The government of Britain should not be forcing itself upon people in South Africa, yet they say that that same government has the right to initiate coercion against its domestic population. It's the very principle of imperialism that they reject in a distant geographical area. They embrace it when it comes to people who happen to live in a
closer geographical area. This is today's double standard that we need to reject. This is the double standard which allows people to fund mass murder campaigns in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Iraq, in Libya, in Yemen, in Afghanistan, because we haven't taken this principle of voluntary exchange and extended it to members of the state. I'll end with a story out of Kansas City, MO. The health department is speaking out after it poured bleach on food intended to be given to the homeless.
Nellie Mccool, who helps run Free Hot Soup Kansas City, has been helping the homeless for years until Sunday. Quote officers and health inspectors demanded we destroy our food and we were violating the health code violations by sharing meals with our friends, said Mccool. The department said the group wasn't following the law about serving the homeless, quoting Dr. Rex Archer, the director for public health in Kansas City, MO.
They were notified back in a meeting in September that they needed to get a permit, and they just outright said they refused to do that. Mccool disputes that, claiming someone in their group got upset and threw food on the ground.
Inspectors then poured bleach on the food to make sure no one ate it. That is the domestic imperialism you get with the state when some people literally believe they have a better claim to the property you've justly acquired and your time and your body, and they separate themselves in an apartheid state where they have rights to do things to you, you don't have rights to do to them. That is the nature of our problem in society. We keep embracing double
standards. It's time to embrace free market capitalism and reject double standards. Zero Hedge and Mr. Burgess, thank you guys for your time.