https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=b8PLWCv5ZYs
All right, well, today what I’d like to talk to you about is capitalism, the way people are using the word, maybe how people should use the word, what it is they’re on about when they’re blaming capitalism or talking about capitalism. And this is gonna be a little bit of a different video because we do kind of have what you might call a sponsor. So let’s dive in. The way I classify how people are talking about capitalism is as if it is a mind control space dragon. And that leads us into our sponsor. Today’s video is sponsored by Space Dragons. That’s right, psychic space dragons. Because psychic space dragons are cool. Just notice the psychic space dragon flying around. He’s cool. So my friend Sally Jo came up with psychic space dragons based on my mind control space dragon idea that is capitalism. And she has made a bunch of artwork around that. And so this video is sponsored by that. Check out the link to her Redbubble store. If you wanna buy some psychic space dragons, they’re very handy. There’s a bunch of them. You can check them out and see how you like them. And I thought this would be, inject a little fun into the videos. And that’s where the psychic space dragons came from, is this idea of capitalism being a mind control space dragon. See, a lot of people when they’re talking about capitalism, they say, well, capitalism made people do this and capitalism made me do that. And if it’s not for capitalism, I would be doing this. And capitalism made Elon Musk wealthy or whatever nonsense they come up with. And you may notice, I think it’s all nonsense. That’s not the way capitalism works. It’s not what capitalism does. Capitalism is not an agent in the world. It can’t force you to do things. It can’t force other people to do things. And it’s just a bad way to think about what’s happening. So we’ve got money. I’ve got videos on money. I’ve got videos on what money is. I’ve got a couple of them. And I’ve got a video on the economy and what the economy is. And this is wrapped up in capitalism. So the way I think about capitalism is it’s a measure of economic freedom. So the more capitalism you have, the more access to capital you have. It’s not necessarily the wealthier you are, but the wealthier you have the option to become. So the free flow of money from you to someone or something else is the measure of capitalism. The freer that flow, the more capitalism you have with the more access to capitalism you have. And what you do with that is up to you. So children and the third generation of wealth tend to blow all that money. So it’s not like capitalism as measured by wealth has a net effect of always making you richer because it’s not what happens at all. In fact, usually the wealthy people are the first generation ones that made the money. And you can criticize how they made the money all day long. But they made the money. And then of course, because they have children, that fortune gets split and then it’s a lesser fortune. So having money doesn’t make money go up necessarily. Although it takes money to make money. And the more money you have, the easier it is to make more money. Also true. But if your gold isn’t worth the same as the king’s gold, you can have all the gold you want and you’re not going to be able to have the buying power that you need and therefore your capitalism is low. Even though you may have access to something very valuable. And this has happened in history and it continues to happen today in some countries. So for example, it is much harder for you to do things with the same amount of money in India because they still have to some extent a class system. And where you were born, which family you were born into actually matters. And so families with a certain last name have better access to capital. And so they have a limited form of capitalism. And I would argue all forms of capitalism are limited. There’s no perfect capitalism. But you can always flip that around and say, you know, true communism hasn’t been tried. I would say, yeah, true capitalism hasn’t been tried either. Not that I want to though, but the difference between me and the communists is I don’t want to try true capitalism and I don’t want them to try to true communism. I think they’re both born of idealism and probably bad ideas. The fact is every capitalist attempt so far has had limits on the amount of capitalism, the amount of freedom of trade that goes on. Like there are certain things you cannot buy and sell in the United States. They’re just not an option, whether that be guns or people or whatever. And you can argue that there was a time when some of these things weren’t true. Also true, we fixed that though. So let’s move on. Right. So yeah, I mean, it was much easier to buy a cannon 150 years ago. You can’t really buy a cannon very easily anymore. And that’s a restriction on capitalism. There’s banking regulations. And some of these things are good to prevent fraud. Some of these things are good to prevent runaway money. Although most government attempts throughout history in the United States to limit capital have failed. They failed for good reason. That is because the economy is a very large thing that no single person or group of people understands very well. And that’s evidenced by the fact that every time they try to interfere in it, they fail. Economics is a failed attempt. And when it seems to work, and Nassim Taleb talks about this in his book, you should read all his books, so wonderful. But Nassim Taleb talks about this. When economists seem to be doing well, the economy is just chugging along and what they do doesn’t seem to have any effect or much effect. But when things get extreme and they oddly never see these things coming, very strange. They are always missing that big event that for some people who aren’t economists is rather obvious. Probably no coincidence there. They seem to overcorrect or undercorrect or in any case not be able to fix it. Which is super unfortunate for the rest of us, especially because we’ve put them in charge of our capitalism and they seem to be breaking it. So that would be my argument against the view of capitalism. Nobody’s putting out unfettered capitalism. That just doesn’t happen. People like limitations on things. There’s lots of good limitations or some bad limitations too. We tend to get in trouble when we release limitations. So one thing we’ve done is repeal Glass-Steagall in the United States and it’s easy to argue and probably correct that that is a contributing factor to the 2008 financial housing crisis. Kind of easy to see the relationship there. And there’s a cause and effect. There’s a line of effect right from the moment that happened to the moment that the housing market blew up. That’s a real thing. You can just go plot it on a graph. Not that hard. And people have done that and people have shown that graph and people continue to ignore this data because they want to blame capitalism. And look, I mean, having that limitation was good. We should bring it back. Having limitations on how people buy things and what people can buy and even having taxes on things that you want to discourage and encourage are all things that I support within reason, within limits. And most people do. Now, I have met a few crazy people, but a very few, who believe in sort of unfettered capitalism, right? That the free market, right? The total free market, which is usually what people are complaining about, by the way. If the market is free and you are unsuccessful, then you suck. That’s the implication anyway. And so I can understand why people are upset about the free market. If it reveals their inadequacies or their incompetence or their ignorance or their inability or their fear, right? I get that. But also maybe that’s you. Just saying. Right? So, and it’s not going to work for everybody. Like, some people are unlucky. I’ve met unlucky people. They exist. Scary thing. But some people are just unlucky. Things just happen to them. They move somewhere and, you know, there’s a one in 100 flood or storm or whatever, and they lose everything. And then they move somewhere else to get away from that thing, which is sort of a foolish move, by the way. And it happens again. I’ve met people like this. It’s really unfortunate. So, you know, you just can’t blame every other thing because sometimes you’re just unlucky, right? And sometimes it’s you. Like, sometimes there’s inadequacy in you. And so blaming capitalism doesn’t really work. But using capitalism as a measure of your economic freedom or the economic freedom of an individual or a group of people or a country or whatever seems to be a very useful way to understand the world. It’s not perfect by any means, but I think it’s really helpful. I’ve been using it for years and it’s fantastic. Like, you can just see. And I think Jordan Peterson, to some extent, makes these cases, right? Like when you have a freedom of trade, right? Or more free trade or free market, people tend to do better because you’re giving an equal opportunity to everybody to rise to the top. And when you do that, you have a larger pool of people that can rise to the top. And so in that model, you will, in theory, catch the maximum number of people that can rise to the top because you’re drawing from a larger number, right? That’s good for everybody because a rising tide raises all boats. It doesn’t raise them all equally because tides are only one factor in how high your boat is, but it does raise them. And so, you know, you can make arguments against trickle-down economics and things like that all day long. But, you know, the correlation seems to work. Just saying pragmatist, like the data, look at the data, enjoy the data. So when we demonize capitalism and make it into a literal demon or a mind-controlled space dragon, psychic space dragon, right? We’re sort of making a mistake, right? We’re trying to gin up an external force, right? Where none is necessary to describe the world. You can just describe the world in terms of economic freedom, right? How free are you? How much capitalism do you have in any given moment? These are important questions to ponder. And using those models, I think you come up with a better descriptive model and an actual predictive model at scale. And I do mean at any scale you care to look at. And, you know, why? You’re going to have to explain that, Mark. Yeah, for sure. So I think that if you look at something like Christopher Columbus, I think he had a high access to capital, right? Like his capitalism rating is really high. Why? Because he had the right contacts and connections to the people who had the most money, right? Roughly speaking, or at least the most money in his area, right? The king and queen of Spain. So he was able to use that, those connections, to get that wealth assigned to him in a way that he could get boats and people and pay them all and provision up the boats and go across the ocean, right? And then do horrible things to the native populations. But then he came back and got punished for it, too. So, you know, it wasn’t a free ride for him. But there’s a way in which his capitalism rating would be higher than capitalism rating of the poor beggar on the street, right? Who just has access to the people that walk by him, right? So it’s just been a very helpful framework for me to use. And I’m hoping maybe you can find it helpful, too, right? But if you don’t want to use it, you know, look, I’ll never know. Ignore my ideas. It’s fine. It won’t bother me at all. I’ll never even notice. It’s fine. But if you find them useful, you know, use them. And just thinking about things in terms of access to capital and that being your capitalism rating and being able to scale that up to villages, to states, to cities, right? To all the way up to nations, right? Or empires even. I think it’s helpful. I think it explains a lot of history, actually, in my opinion. It allows you to explain a lot of successive people and realize the goodness that’s in a larger free market, right? Because a larger free market, when you have capitalism equally spread out or roughly equally spread out, is a better thing for the society, like for everybody, for the whole world, even the people that aren’t in that system, right? Because when one outfit prospers, many others do. And you can sort of understand this by looking at the so-called Gilded Age in the United States. So, you know, what happened in the Gilded Age? What happened was this new breed of wealth came up, right? They’re often referred to as robber barons, rather unfairly. There are reasons for that, but they’re mostly around jealousy and bad framing. But what they did was they became wealthy as individuals who had never known wealth, right? This is new wealth, the nouveau riche, as it were, almost exclusively out of New York City, by the way, or at least not out of the Boston area, which is part of where the trouble comes from between Boston and New York, although it dates back older than that. So they made enormous fortunes, just enormous fortunes. And those fortunes came from people who didn’t have wealth before, right? And when they built the houses, say that the cottages in Rhode Island, which I’ve been to, by the way, there’s a bunch of so-called summer cottages, right? They’re the mansions on, I think it’s Bellevue, if I remember correctly. Beautiful, just beautiful building. What did they do? They hired craftsmen from Italy to come to the United States to build them things. For their mansions, sculptures, to sculpt the outsides of the buildings, to paint them, artistic works. They hired bunches of workmen to do this work for them, craftsmen, and some of it’s absolutely beautiful. Like you haven’t been out there. You got to go to the Newport Mansions. They’re quite pretty and they’re well worth visiting. So that helped a bunch of people who otherwise, like those people wouldn’t have had employment necessarily, right? Or they wouldn’t have had as good employment because they were very well paid, right? They get their trip to the United States paid for, right? A bunch of people had to quarry a bunch of marble, right? A bunch of people had to go pound some gold into gold leaf. Because yeah, some of the walls are actually inlaid with gold leaf that wasn’t uncommon for the Newport Mansions. So yeah, all these mansions got built all over. There’s one in North Carolina outside of Asheville, I believe. So they got built all over. And that wealth helped a bunch of people all around the world basically, right? Because when you buy raw materials to build one of these ridiculous mansions, and they are ridiculous, but it’s their money, like capitalism rules. So I’m okay with it. A lot of people benefit. And then they had servants. So they used to move house. So when they moved summer and winter quarters every year, these families, like the Vanderbilts, right? And the Rockefellers, et cetera. And they would have quite a few people with them to do the moving. And those people had jobs because of that. And they were very high paying jobs. So they benefited quite a bit. So you can see the way in which just the top end capitalism helps a bunch of people that aren’t sort of at the top end, right? It brings up the bottom. This is that a rising tide raises all boats sort of metaphor again. And I think that’s true. And so I think we should be happy about the ability of any people with competence. And sometimes people get lucky and they’re incompetent. And I could point to a bunch of people that I think are like that, but that might be unfair. And it’s certainly unnecessary because luck and unlock happens, right? Things happen. But it’s more likely that more people with more competence will have more money than they would without free market capitalism, right? It’s just mathematically certain at some point. And I think we’ve reached that point, by the way. Not that I don’t think we could improve upon the amount of capitalism in the United States, for example, right? There are certain some tweaks I’d like to see. And we’re all good critics because that’s an easy job. I sort of went over that my postmodernism video, right? Three-year-olds are good critics because they ask why until you don’t have an answer. But check that video out if you want to know more about that style of critique. And certainly there are legitimate ways we could find to improve capitalism and free market capitalism in particular. But that’s not what this video is about, just about how people are using it. So I want you to listen carefully to how people are using it and see what it matches, right? See what those concepts match. Because in my mind, they match mind control space dragons. And they don’t match anything useful for me to map the world. And figure out why people like Elon Musk. And of course, I have a video where I mention that too. That’s one of my ones on money. But it’s a good video. You should check that one out because I think my thesis there is pretty solid. And, you know, look, for better or for worse, there’s a capitalism thing out there. And we need to learn to understand it and have a good model for it so that we can take advantage of it so it works for us instead of against us. And if it’s a mind control space dragon that’s controlling other people to do things to us or preventing us from doing things, that’s not a useful model in my mind. And I’m a pragmatist. So I like useful models. So hopefully that helps you. I know it’s helped me for years and years. I’ve been using this conception and it’s really helped me to understand things and be able to get along better in the world and make smarter decisions in my life and be a little bit more relaxed about everything because I don’t feel like I’m being controlled by the money around me or anything or the flow of money around me. And it’s helped me to make some money. So, you know, there’s that too. So I just wanted to share that with you. And I want to thank you as always because you give me something much more valuable to me than capitalism, which is your time and attention.