https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4Z3ufmjIZh4
And we’ve heard Putin complain and talk about the color revolutions, different liberalizing revolutions in post-Soviet countries. And they see us, they see the West as leading this kind of subversion and that Western ideas and Western freedoms are a fundamental threat to their own power, and given the uses some of them have made of that power, made to their personal survival. Right, right. Well, that seems like a reasonable concern for ideologically motivated totalitarian dictators. It’s definitely the case that Western liberal ideals will not provide an environment where their kind of psychopathic power playing is going to be successful. So they have every reason to be intimidated by that. Right. And I think our mistake was not to realize that, you know, we were saying, hey, we’re going to wait patiently for China to evolve, but on the side of the Chinese Communist Party, they were saying, well, we’re not just going to wait patiently until liberalism comes in and wrecks us, we’re going to preemptively do what we need to do to maintain our power. So I think we… Right, well, maybe we should have known that because they never wavered in their support for North Korea. That’s right, and they were also very careful always to say, we want economic liberalization, not political liberalization. Yeah, yeah, as if those… Well, OK, so let’s concentrate on that a little bit. So it’s not obvious to me at all that you get to have economic liberalization without political liberalization. In fact, I think the order of events in that causal link is reversed. Is that the reason that we have abundance and material prosperity in the West is because of liberalism. Liberalism isn’t the consequence of wealth, it’s the precondition for wealth. And you can think about that particularly with regards to such things as the right to private property and the right to the fruits of your own labour. If your society isn’t predicated on the idea that the individual is somehow intrinsically worthwhile and sovereign in a manner that’s not merely a gift of the state, but something intrinsic to the person, as soon as you have that, you have, at least in principle, an inviolable right to something approximating private property and to the fruits of your own labour. And without that fundamental presumption, which I think most particularly is a Judeo-Christian biblical presumption, the whole capitalist enterprise, and because it’s so reliant on trust and honesty as well, for example, to really flourish and on the right of private property, it’s just a non-starter. And so this is a favourite shibboleth of the West, is that while we can have all this economic prosperity, or even more of it, with a centralised top-down control system that’s predicated on the idea of equality, but in reality, that never seems to pan out. And so, I mean, you could point to regimes maybe like Singapore as a potential exception, but Singapore isn’t very old, and so we’ll see how it does with regards to such things as power transitions. But the idea that you can have economic progress without that underlying ethos of individual sovereignty, I don’t think there’s any historical evidence for that at all, and there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. You describe that in terms of the constant failure of the dictator states. You know, what’s interesting is that, I mean, I think you’re right. And that the sort of human nature exists in such a way that this kind of private property and the culture of individual rights together with honesty is a foundation for greater prosperity. But the foundations of different cultures around the world have a very different relationship to that set of ideas. And I remember the first time I started travelling in Russia, it was still the Soviet Union. One of the… I’m giving away how old I am, I suppose. But one of the things I noticed there was that Marxism was culturally attractive to a lot of people in Russia because there was a deep distrust of economic exchange. That the people kind of intuitively felt that if you… At least this is the way it seemed to me, that if a merchant went into the countryside and bought a bushel of wheat for five rubles from the farmer and then took it into town and sold it for ten rubles to the consumers in the town, he was cheating somebody. You know, maybe he was cheating the farmer, maybe he was cheating his customers. But that this kind of exchange was fundamentally morally illegitimate. And so there was… So Marxism felt right, that capitalism was by nature exploitative. A lot of people were induced to believe that. Yeah, well, it’s easy for that belief to be induced because it can capitalise on envy. And envy is a deadly sin, let’s say. And it’s easy to become envious of anyone who seems to have something that you don’t have. Especially if you don’t look at the other person’s life in totality, you see one feature in their life that in some manner exceeds what you’ve been able to manage. And then it’s also extremely convenient for you to assume that if someone has exceeded you in a particular dimension of attainment, that the reason they did that is because they’re corrupt and malevolent, not because they’re useful and productive compared to you. And so one of the psychological advantages that envious Marxism has is that it plays to envy in an extremely powerful manner. The problem with that seems to be, and maybe this is another principle for economic advancement, if your society is predicated on the idea that all difference in attainment or socioeconomic status is a consequence of theft and exploitation, then basically you set up a situation where no one can ever have anything more than anyone else, in which case you have no basis for trade whatsoever, and you certainly can’t generate anything approximating wealth, because there’s just no way that everyone can become equally rich at the same instantaneous moment. There’s always going to be a gradation of distribution. And one of the weird things the West has managed, and this has something to do with that implicit trust, is that we’ve actually managed to develop a society where there’s not only tolerance for inequality, but there’s a certain degree of admiration for it. And I think this is particularly true of the US, where it’s less true of Canada and Europe, but one of the things that’s always struck me so positively about the US is that there is a general sense of admiration among the populace for people who’ve been able to achieve spectacularly and singularly in some domain. And some of that’s associated with the desire in the US that parents have for their children to be able to perhaps accomplish the same thing. But it really is quite the miracle that any society has ever managed at all. You know, it’s interesting in some dimensions, even in the Soviet Union, you could see that, because if you went to a concert in the Soviet Union, classical music was a big thing. The admiration that people felt for a great violinist or a great dancer was extraordinary, because in every other channel of life, it was utterly corrupted by the party. If you had a good job, it was because the Communist Party gave it to you. If you were a factory director, it was because your brother-in-law was the party commissar, something like that. But in the arts, that violinist is just up there playing it. You hear it. And that gives you… So there was this direct contact with excellence. So the human spirit, I think, does instinctively respond to excellence with admiration. They weren’t thinking, let’s go break his fingers. You know, he plays better than the others, so he should lose a finger, and then he won’t play any better than anybody else. But in the realm of economics, no. They had a very different view.