Joe Rogan | Why Socialism Has Yet to Work w/Naval Ravikat

That brings us back to the idea of meaning and universal basic income. I think the idea of giving someone $15,000 a year doesn't necessarily cause whatever, what everyone would worry about is people being on the dole, you would have a bunch of listless people out there with no meaning in life. But the idea is that $15,000 a year, and I'm not necessarily sure I agree with this, I'm not even endorsing this, but that $15,000 a year would just provide you with the necessities to get by in life. It would give you food, it would give you shelter. Well, it's not going to stop at $15,000, because the moment people are like, I mean, $15,000, like... Then people demand more. Yeah. Bernie Sanders will be on the... I want $25,000 a year. $16,000, $17,000, $18,000 a year. These companies are too big. Yeah. That could happen. It doesn't stop. It just goes all the way to bankruptcy. The concern is the slide to socialism. It's obvious. I mean, heck, if I was not working and I was getting my $15,000 a year, I would happily vote for the guy who would give me $20,000 or $25,000. It's just common sense. You'd be stupid not to. What do you say to the people that don't believe that there is such a thing as ethical or compassionate capitalism? There's many people today that are espousing Marxism, and they're espousing some sort of a socialist society where they believe that capitalism has screwed people over and eliminated the middle class. There are absolutely problems with capitalism. I think monopolies are a problem. I think that crony capitalism is a problem, but the government kind of gets in bed with them and sort of forces things. I think the bankers have really raped society, and the rest of us are suffering for it. Literally. Yeah. They've essentially taken huge risks where they privatize the gains and they socialize the losses. So when it fails, they basically get billed out and bankrupt everybody else. So capitalism has gotten a really bad name. Let's talk about it as free exchange, free markets. Free markets and free exchanges are intrinsic to humans. From when the first person started a fire and somebody came along with a deer and said, hey, if I cook my deer on your fire, I'll share some of it with you. So specialization of labor, we trade. That's built into the human species. Basic math comes from accounting, keeping track of debts and credits and so on. We need to be able to engage in free trade. The correct criticism of capitalism is when it does not provide equal opportunity. And so we should always strive to provide equal opportunity. But people confuse that with equal outcome. When you have equal outcome, that can only be enforced through violence because different people, free people, make different choices. And when they make different choices, they have different outcomes. And if you don't let them suffer the consequences of bad choices or reap the rewards from good choices, then you are forcibly redistributing through violence. It's interesting that there are no socialist, working socialist examples that exist without violence. You basically need someone to show up with a gun and say, okay, you're not allowed to do that. You hand this over to that person. So one of the reasons why I do this podcast is because I believe everybody can be wealthy. Everybody. It's not a zero sum game. It is a positive sum game. You create something brand new. You exchange it with me for something brand new. I've created this higher utility for both of us. The sum of the value created is positive. It's not like status where it's like, you're higher up. I'm lower down. You're president, so I must be vice president. You're a plus one. I'm a minus one. It has to cancel a zero. We should be all for playing positive sum ethical games. The problem is because of these looters who have ruined capitalism's name, that then you get socialists coming in and saying, burn the whole system down. You burn the whole system down. We end up like Venezuela or the former Soviet Union. You don't want to be a fail socialist states with emaciated teens hunting cats in the streets to eat. That's literally what happens in some of these places. So I think it's very important not to destroy the engine of progress that brought us here. Yeah. The idea that socialism just hasn't worked yet, that it needs to, we just need to do it right. If we do it right, we can net you. If you ever. 100 million dead. Yeah. Yeah. Let's keep trying all over the world. Yeah. And every single time it's been implemented. Have you ever had a conversation with someone who's a socialist? Many times some of my better friends are socialists. Really? We'd really get into it. Yeah. And what is there, I mean, does anyone have a compelling perspective at all? I think really socialism comes from the heart, right? We all want to be socialist. Capitalism comes from the head. Because there are always cheaters in any system. Yes. And there's incentives in any system. So when you're young, if you're not a socialist, you have no heart. When you're older, if you're not a capitalist, you have no head, right? You haven't thought it through. So I understand where it comes from. I always like Nassim Taleb's framing on this, where he said, with my family, I'm a communist. With my close friends, I'm a socialist. You know, at my state level politics, I'm a Democrat. At, you know, higher levels, I'm a Republican. And at the federal level, I'm a libertarian. Right? So basically the larger the group of people you have massed together who have different interests, the less trust there is, the more cheating there is, the better the incentives have to be aligned, the better the system has to work, the more you go towards capitalism. The smaller the group you're in, you're in a kibbutz, you're in your kami, you're in your house, you're in your tribe, by all means be a socialist. With my aunts, with my brother, with my cousins, with my uncles, with my mom, with my family, I'm a socialist. That's the right way to live a loving, happy, integrated life. But when you're dealing with strangers, I mean, you want to be a real socialist? Great. Open all your doors and windows tomorrow. Please, everybody, come take what you want. See how that works out. Yeah. This idea of income inequality, that always strikes me as a very, it's a deceptive term, income inequality. Well, let's flip it around. It comes from outcome inequality. Yeah. And the outcome inequality is there because you made different choices. Now, again, going back, if it was because you didn't have the same opportunities, that's a problem. Yes. So society should always try to give people equal opportunities. So, for example, instead of basic income, what if we had a retraining program built into our basic social fabric, which said that every four years or every six years or whatever it is, maybe it's every 10, you can take one year out and we'll pay for you to go retrain completely. And you can go into any profession you like that has some earning power and output, hopefully a creative long term profession, and you can reeducate yourself. That would be much better for society on all levels than basically just saying, now you're going to be the dole for the rest of your life. Yeah. You just, you'd have to lead that horse to water and then make him drink. It requires people to put in some effort. You know, we can't all just sit around. It's just not. Well, that's my perspective on income inequality. There's always effort inequality and thought inequality. I mean, there's just some people that are obsessed. And if those people become successful, it doesn't mean they stole from you. It just means that they put in the amount of energy and effort that it's required to reach where they're at. And there's a lot of virtue signaling that goes on now where people say, well, it's because you're privileged. It's like, well, you know what the greatest privilege is? You're alive. 85% of humanity is dead. So how privileged are you? Then you're living in the first world and you're, you know, you have four limbs, et cetera. So you can take that argument all the way. It's kind of a nonsense discussion. You