• 2 days ago
In this lecture, Stefan Molyneux analyzes the relationship between capitalism and socialism through Peter Kropotkin's critiques. He emphasizes the importance of addressing societal needs over profit motives and discusses capitalism's inefficiencies and mischaracterizations, particularly in terms of overproduction and scarcity. Molyneux contrasts Kropotkin's vision of decentralized production with capitalist structures, examining the dynamics between workers and capitalists while critiquing governmental roles in sustaining monopolies. He advocates for a transformative perspective that prioritizes genuine needs in economic frameworks.

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Transcript
00:00Hello, hello. Yes, this is to them all in here from free domain. Hope you're doing well.
00:04So that's interesting. I was trying to figure out sort of what's going on with the socialists
00:11and the anarcho-socialists and so on and their critique of capitalism, right? So let's have
00:18a look at this. This is from Anarchist Studies Labor Issues Social Economics as of 2018 by
00:22John Beckham. Bend it like Beckham. All right. Peter Kropotkin devoted a major part of his
00:30prolific anarchist writings to two related themes, examining the actual workings of capitalist
00:34economies and developing the broad outlines of an anarcho-communist society. Kropotkin
00:40was not satisfied to merely assert that a free society was possible. He sought to show
00:45how such a society could be constructed from the materials at hand, realizing that a revolutionary
00:49movement that failed to consider the problems of production and distribution would quickly
00:52collapse. This installment outlines Kropotkin's critique of capitalist political economy.
00:58So what are the socialists saying that is so objectionable about the capitalism? It's
01:07a great question for me anyway. Very interesting. Economic doctrine. For Kropotkin, the purpose
01:12of political economy was to study society's needs and the means available, either currently
01:19in use or which could be developed with present knowledge, to meet them. To study society's
01:24needs and the means available to meet them. So it is not to study what is true and good
01:35and right and moral. It is not a moral study. It is a study of meeting people's needs,
01:44not morals. Now, this is, again, 51-49, a little bit more. This is a female perspective,
01:52that the important thing is to meet someone's needs rather than the morality of the situation.
02:02So if you've ever talked to someone who's gone to, I don't know, sex workers or strip
02:06clubs or whatever, they don't care whether the money is legal or not. They just want
02:10the money. Women in general, single moms in particular, cannot afford to have moral
02:17scruples because their kids need to be fed. So to study society's needs and the means
02:25available to meet them, that is not a moral journey. So what they're saying is that capitalism
02:32is inefficient at meeting people's needs. But in capitalism, you get to define your
02:38own needs. So I wanted to go to theater school, I went to theater school. I wanted to start
02:43a business, I started a business. I wanted to quit my business career to write novels,
02:47that's what I did. I had to figure out my own needs and how best to satisfy them. So
02:53when you're talking about society's needs, you're talking about deciding other people's
02:57needs for them. Because in the free market, you get to decide your own needs and preferences.
03:02If you're looking at society's needs and preferences, then what's happening is you're trying to
03:07determine other people's needs and that is a livestock situation. That is viewing society
03:14like a farm. So this is a quote from Kropotkin. It should try to analyze how far the present
03:23means are expedient and satisfactory and should concern itself with the discovery of the means
03:29for the satisfaction of those needs with the smallest possible waste of labor with the
03:32greatest benefit to mankind in general. Okay, so the purpose of political economy, it should
03:39try to analyze how far the present means are expedient and satisfactory and should concern
03:45itself with the discovery of means for the satisfaction of those needs with the smallest
03:49possible waste of labor and with the greatest benefit to mankind in general. So that is
03:54not, this is just this windy verbiage, right? This is, I mean, if you hired, this is a consultant,
04:01he says, I know how to run society. So if you were in business and you hired a consultant
04:05and the consultant said, well, we should try and figure out how far your present production
04:13line is expedient and satisfactory and my, I should concern, you should concern yourself
04:20with the discovery of the means for the satisfaction of these needs with the smallest possible
04:23waste of labor and with the greatest benefit to mankind in general. That is just wordy
04:28verbiage, right? It is, we used to make fun of consultants in the business world who
04:33would come in and say, you know, it's really important to cut costs and increase profits.
04:37It's really important to satisfy your customer. It's really important to let creative people
04:40be creative. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so right. All right. So rather than
04:46engage in the abstract theorizing that dominated Dennis, now the field, he carried out detailed
04:51studies of the agricultural and industrial techniques practiced in his day, whether they
04:56were in general use of not, and the capacity to meet human needs. Unlike most economists,
05:01Kropotkin insisted on subjecting economic theories to the same rigorous inquiry he would
05:05apply to any quote scientific theory. So of course, communism is referred to as scientific
05:10socialism. So science these days, we can certainly see this post COVID is just another bully
05:17word that is deployed to browbeat people who aren't scientists. So you use hundreds of
05:23billions of dollars around the world of government money to scoop up and capture all of the state
05:29sucking toadiest scientists. And then you attack everyone who doesn't agree with them
05:35as being non-scientific, right? So this is a sciences I've talked about before is the
05:40new mystery religion. You have to believe the priests and you can't have access to the
05:44texts yourselves. You buy up all the scientists with government money, and then you attack
05:50anyone who criticizes them or hold skepticism, right? As being a conspiracy theorist, non-scientific.
05:58There was a sort of famous cartoon from a couple of years ago where some guy was talking
06:04to his wife, he was at the computer and said, Hey honey, I figured out what thousands of
06:08the world's best scientists have somehow overlooked, right? Crazy. So scientific socialism. Now
06:15the problem is of course, that science, science concerns itself with matter and energy, not
06:24life and morality. I mean, Zyklon B is part of science. The guillotine uses principles
06:32of weight and momentum to cut people's heads off. So you are dealing with inanimate objects
06:39when you are talking about science. So whenever people talk about the science of human behavior,
06:45they're reducing human beings to mere buckets and bags of matter and energy. Absolutely
06:50monstrous and completely sociopathic, by the way, because sociopaths view other human beings
06:57as mere machines that are supposed to serve their ends, right? So they have the same relationship
07:01to other people that you have with your electronics, that they're supposed to work and you get
07:04kind of annoyed and thump them when they don't. So they don't have any free will of their
07:08own, your electronics, right? All right. So he writes, when certain economists tell
07:15us that quote, in a perfectly free market, the price of commodities is measured by the
07:19amount of labor socially necessary for their production. We do not take this assertion
07:23on faith. We not only find most of these so-called laws grossly erroneous, but maintain also
07:28that those who believe in them will themselves become convinced of their error as soon as
07:32they come to see the necessity of verifying them by quantitative investigation. Okay.
07:37So he's saying, he's quoting economists who say, in a perfectly free market, the price
07:41of commodities is measured by the amount of labor socially necessary for their production.
07:46Absolutely false. Absolutely, completely, and you don't even need to be an economist.
07:51You just need to have been to a mall. All right. So let me, let me ask you, right? So
07:55you've been to GameStop. Let's talk about GameStop, right? Is it GameStop? I don't know.
08:01Some video game store, right? So with some video game store, they sell the newest releases
08:06at full price, and then you can find a bargain bin where you can get games 90% off. So the
08:14value of the games has dropped by 90%. They are one tenth the price that they used to
08:20be used to be 50 bucks. Now they're five bucks, right? So has the labor that was required
08:27to produce those older video games dropped in value? In other words, can you retroactively,
08:32let's say the video game is five years old, can you retroactively go back in time, take
08:37the money back from the developers you paid, and instead of paying them $100,000 a year,
08:41pay them now $10,000 a year, right? Some guy worked for you five years to produce this
08:45video game. You paid him $500,000. Oh, oh, don't worry. In five years, the price of the
08:51video game is going to drop by 90%. Therefore, we have to get that half million dollars back,
08:55but don't worry, we'll pay you your 50 grand, right? The price of commodities is measured
09:01by the amount of labor socially necessary for their production. Absolutely false. The
09:06price is determined by subjective value and nothing else. Price is determined by subjective
09:13value and nothing else. Now, of course, you can say that some value is more objective
09:19than others, right? So people don't need the latest iPhone, but they do need food, water,
09:24and shelter. I get all of that. But people who want to die don't need those things. People
09:30who prefer drugs to shelter don't, like they're homeless, right? So this is the labor theory
09:37of value, which says that the price of something is based upon the cost of the labor that's
09:44needed to produce it, which is entirely false. The price of something is determined by the
09:50subjective value somebody places on a good or service, and if people have a strong demand
09:56for that good or service, you will hire more people, and that will drive up the wages.
10:00So if people want a whole bunch of new iPhones, then you will hire a bunch of people to produce
10:03iPhones, and in a free market, that will drive the price up, right? So it's completely ass-backwards
10:09or boss-ackwards, as you would say, right? It's completely backwards. So people say,
10:15well, the people paid to produce iPhones are paid more than they were last year. That must
10:19mean that the value of the iPhone has gone up. It's like, no, because there is a demand
10:23for more of the newest iPhones, you hire more workers. So this is all... Now, I can
10:30understand where people, like if you're looking at the medieval sort of serf-based and lord-based
10:35economy model, then that's a little bit different, right? But this is not true at all. The value
10:43of something is what people are willing to pay for it in the marketplace, right? So what
10:49is the value of my podcast monetarily? The value of my podcast is what people are willing
10:55to donate. Now, of course, I think they should donate more, freedomain.com slash donate,
11:00if you are of a mind to agree. I believe that people should donate more, but my belief does
11:05not determine the value of what it is that I'm doing, right? So, all right. While there
11:12certainly was a relationship between the price of commodities and the amount of labor necessary
11:15for their production, Kropotkin argued they were by no means proportional to one another,
11:21as the labor theory of value would imply. Nor had socialist economists troubled themselves
11:25to investigate whether or not the theory was true by actually gathering data to test the
11:28alleged relationship. I mean, you could get a bunch of people to carry around food in
11:35the woods with no customers to do exactly what waiters do, and those people would not
11:43be paid by anyone. Maybe a bear would, but those people, so they're doing the same labor,
11:49but they're not paid. You could pay someone, of course, or you could demand, you could
11:54go into the woods and you could dig a ditch and you could fill it in again and dig a ditch
11:57and fill it in again. It's a huge amount of labor. I mean, I've dug wells in the woods.
12:01It's a huge amount of sweaty labor. A lot of work, man. A lot of work. As opposed to,
12:07say, Paul McCartney wakes up, lovely legs, scrambled eggs. Oh, my dear, you have got
12:15lovely legs, right? So he woke up with the tune for Yesterday floating in his head, right?
12:22That's what he did. So the guy who's digging the ditch and filling it in, which nobody's
12:26asked him to do, in the woods is working very hard to no value. Paul McCartney wakes up.
12:33Now, of course, you could say this is the result of his prior labor in music and all
12:37of that, but lots of people put time into music and don't come up with the song like
12:40Yesterday. Arguably, you know, the most popular, and certainly it's got like 3,000 covers or
12:45something like that. I guess 3,001, because I just did one. So, yeah, labor. All right.
12:52Okay. Anyone who took the trouble to engage in such an investigation would quickly learn
12:55that the theory was false. We only need to consider the price of oil or gold to realize
12:59that these prices are set not by the amount of labor power required to extract and process
13:03them, but rather by external market and social conditions. So, good. Most so-called economic
13:08laws, Kropotkin concluded, were mere suppositions. And although socialist economists criticize
13:13some of these deductions, it has not yet been original enough to find a path of its own.
13:18Now, labor is not irrelevant to the price of something, because if there is a demand
13:27for something, like gold, and gold is hard to find, then the price of gold will go up.
13:33Whereas, if you sort of remember the old days of Napster, you could just download any song
13:36that you wanted, and the labor to get music and so on was very low. So, it sounds like
13:43Kropotkin is agreeing that the labor theory of value is not true, so that's good. Thus,
13:48when Marx argued against Proudhon that all products exchanged at, or at least fluctuated
13:53around their labor value, he was implicitly arguing for what had been called the iron
13:57law of wages, although Marx later refuted himself by conceding that union activity could
14:01decrease the level of exploitation. The Socialist Party of Great Britain and similar tendencies
14:06are wholly correct when they maintain that a Marxian analysis requires that all commodities,
14:10including labor power, are valued under capitalism at the cost of their reproduction, which is
14:15in turn determined by the most productive available methods. Thus, a shirt that takes
14:1960 minutes to make by hand or 5 minutes to make by machine sells for the same price on
14:24the world market. What the heck? All commodities are valued at the cost of their reproduction.
14:35A shirt that takes 60 minutes to make by hand or 5 minutes to make by machine sells for
14:39the same price on the world market. I don't think that's true at all. I really don't think
14:43that's true at all. I can't imagine that that's true, because if you can produce more with
14:49less input, then you can sell for cheaper and undercut, right? There's price competition,
14:53right? Now, the labor theory of value, though, is there because more people work than manage,
14:58right? You have more workers on the factory floor than managers, right? And so because
15:02more people work than manage, it appeals to their vanity if you tell them that their labor
15:08is what determines the real value, right? And so they then get resentful that they're
15:12not being paid as much as the boss, and it's just another troll thing to set people against
15:16each other, right? There is, of course, an element of truth to this, which is why the
15:21theory was widely accepted by the labor movement. The labor movement just liked to think that
15:24labor was the primary cause of value because it's good for their vanity and good for their
15:29aggression, right? But as we shall see, it mistakes an association for a causal relationship.
15:35The commodity theory of labor would indicate that only by increasing productivity can workers
15:39make possible an improved standard of living, and only through socialist revolution can
15:43those possible improvements be actually realized. Otherwise, the benefits merely accrue to the
15:47capitalists and their underlings, right? So this is the idea that when the value of
15:54a worker's labor is increased, then the capitalist scoops up all the profits and keeps it for
16:02himself, which is, again, this is just boring people who've never run a business, right?
16:07Boring people who've never run a business. So I was, of course, as I've mentioned before
16:10in this show, I got about a million dollars worth of raises for my employees when I worked
16:17in the software field. This is not my company, but a company I worked at another time. I
16:22got about a million dollars worth of wages because all my employees were coming and saying
16:25that they were underpaid, and I paid for market analysis, produced a presentation, argued
16:30my case strenuously in front of the board, and got them about a million dollars worth
16:35of raises because they said, I said, look, it's six to 12 months to train someone on
16:39the code base. And I gave the cost benefit analysis of people leaving and got them raises.
16:47So let's say that this group, right? I mean, in the socialist, they're keeping too much
16:51profit for themselves. It's like, okay, but then you lose workers. And if you lose workers,
16:57it's very costly. So yeah, it's not the case. I mean, bad capitalists will keep all the
17:02profit for themselves, but then they just lose their workers to better capitalists who
17:06retain them. So, all right. I turn below to Kropotkin's proof that wage levels have nothing
17:14to do with the cost of reproduction. The essential view is that wage levels, like the price of
17:18all commodities, are set not by the cost of production or the amount of labor they require,
17:22but by relative economic, military, and social power had by the respective parties, monopolies,
17:27cartels, police clubs, prisons, labor organization, cooperative associations, these and other
17:31power relationships skew the relative quote value of commodities, or at least of the price
17:36that can be gotten for them. And it really matters very little whether a cantaloupe has
17:39a theoretical labor derived value of 25 cents if all the stores charge a dollar. Well, profit,
17:46of course, is the buffer that you can lower price on and still make money. So if you're
17:49making 10% profit, you can lower it to 8% and still make money. And of course, if you
17:54lower it too low, then capital won't flow into that business. If you make 1% a profit,
17:59then capital will flow into businesses that make more, right? So that's punishment for
18:02lack of efficiency. And of course, the other thing too, if you want to raise workers' wages,
18:08then you need to have better schools, right? If you have better schools, then workers'
18:12wages will go up because they'll actually graduate after 12 years of government education
18:16with useful skills. So everybody who is a socialist who complains that workers are underpaid
18:22is actually complaining about the socialist educational system, for God's sakes. Oh, it's
18:28so bad. Workers get exploited. They don't have enough leveraging and they don't have
18:32enough leverage in the relationship, but they're capitalists. Okay, well, then you have to
18:37be against the socialized school system because the socialized school system is having them
18:41graduate with virtually no skills, right? So then they don't have any leverage. Like
18:46most socialists, Kropotkin initially assumed that an abundance of goods was being produced
18:51and thus that the primary problem facing socialists was arranging their distribution. But when
18:57Malatesta suggested that this could not be true, Kropotkin investigated the matter and
19:01found that, quoting Malatesta, quote, this accumulation of products could not possibly
19:06exist because the bosses normally only allow for the production of what they can sell at
19:09a profit. Some countries were continually threatened by shortages. Right. So the bosses
19:16normally only allow for the production of what they sell at a profit, but the profit
19:22is determined by the customer. The profit is determined by the customer. It is not determined
19:27by labor and it is not determined by the preferences of the bosses. The profit is determined
19:32by the preferences of the customer. If you have a new iPhone and people want the new
19:38iPhone, they'll line up all night and they'll pay $2,000 for it and it costs you $1,500
19:42to produce, you get your $500 profit, but it is determined entirely by the customer.
19:49In fact, the article goes on, in fact, there was only enough food on hand in most major
19:54cities to sustain the population for a few days. Yet upon further investigation, Kropotkin
19:58established that the shortages, economic crises, and general distress endemic to his age, and
20:03which continues to this day, did not result, as was widely believed, from overpopulation,
20:07poor soil, or other such natural causes. Rather, they resulted from a failure to utilize the
20:10means already at hand to meet society's needs. Okay, so when you talk about needs absent
20:17cost, you're talking about wish. You know, when my daughter was little, we used to design
20:22all of these lovely restaurants with birds and in the tops of trees, I actually translated
20:27it to a great scene in my novel, The Future, freedomain.com books. And so, it was a wish
20:33list, right? When we played a version of Dungeons and Dragons, we would design these magical
20:39items that were super powerful and super funny and super fun. And so that's just wish stuff.
20:47So when you say to people, what do you need? It's irrelevant unless they're children, right?
20:53It's irrelevant unless they have some skin in the game. You know, this is sort of joke
20:57about like, I want world peace. Well, who doesn't want world peace? But what are you
21:01willing to do to get it? Are you willing to confront the warmongers and be slandered?
21:04Well, then you're not going to, if you're not, then you're not going to get world peace.
21:07So people saying, right, this is sort of like the immigration thing, where people say, should
21:12we take in refugees? They say this to people on the street, and everyone says yes. And
21:16then they say, great, we've got three refugees here, they need a place to sleep, they can
21:19sleep on the floor of your house, and suddenly they don't want to, right? So it's just wishes
21:24and dreams and nonsense until people have skin in the game. So when you say, well, we
21:32want to meet society's needs. Well, what's society going to say it needs? Society's going
21:35to say it needs everything because it's just, you know, human desires are infinite. Resources
21:40are finite, human desires are infinite. So anybody who talks about their needs without
21:45talking about the costs, right? Ah, I want a new iPhone, right? So let's say you make
21:51$17 an hour, right? And you want a new iPhone for $1,700. Okay, well, you want a new iPhone.
21:59Great. Okay. Are you willing to work 100 hours to get it? Well, I mean, probably 150 with
22:07taxes, right? So are you willing to work for a month straight to get the new iPhone? Now,
22:11if somebody says, do you want a new iPhone? And there's no cost, people will say, well,
22:15but if you then say, are you willing to work for six weeks to get a new iPhone? Actually,
22:22no, probably closer to two months. So yeah, are you willing to work for a month or two
22:31to get a new iPhone, right? Then they'd be like, eh, right? So society's needs, it's
22:36just, it's nonsense and wish fulfillment unless people have their own money and their own
22:40skin in the game, right? Kropotkin presented his findings in fields, factories, and workshops
22:44and anarchist classic that proved that people using then existing technologies could meet
22:48all their needs with just a few months of labor per year. Space precludes anything more
22:52than the briefest summary of a volume with which every anarchist should have long made
22:56themselves familiar. I'll look into that. It's very interesting. He demonstrated that
23:00the technical means then existed to produce abundant and healthful food with relatively
23:03little effort or expense. A vision quite distinct from today's factory farms, the precursors
23:08of which already existed, but which he noted destroyed the soul for generations to come
23:11as well as displacing people who might otherwise derive a comfortable living from the life
23:14of the land. Contrary to many economists, Kropotkin argued for decentralizing agriculture
23:19and industry, noting that huge industrial establishments were both less common than
23:23generally believed and established less to realize largely dubious economies of scale
23:27than to facilitate managerial control. Right. So if you're going to talk about corporations,
23:31then you're going to talk about legal fictions by which people can prey upon society and
23:37escape legal and economic consequences. I mean, just look at all the bankers, right?
23:42I mean, how many go to jail, right? So if you have a corporation, you can have a corporation
23:47do a whole bunch of farming, deplete the soil, destroy the soil, and then the corporation
23:52can close and everybody escapes legal issues, right? Also, governments will often sell,
23:59I know this is the case in Canada, or at least it used to be, the governments will sell timber
24:03rights but not land rights. If you sell land rights, then they want to replant the trees.
24:07If you sell timber rights, they have no incentive to replant the trees, which is just another
24:10government program for all these kinds of things. So in a free society, right, and people
24:19want to just do the Amish thing, they just want to live on their farms and produce for
24:22themselves, absolutely nothing wrong with that. Absolutely, it's not immoral, right?
24:28If they want to just farm for them, there's nothing wrong with that, and they can do that
24:31perfectly freely. But if you're going to talk about corporations, you're not talking about
24:36the free market. The free market would in no way, shape, or form support the concept
24:40of corporations. In the past, when you had a bank, if the bank went bankrupt, the bank
24:47owners lost all their savings, and they got sued, and they lost their houses. But now,
24:53piecing the corporate veil to get after personal assets is very hard, if not impossible. It's
24:57a purely fascistic structure designed to have people at the top escape the consequences
25:02of bad decisions. But it's a fascistic or socialist idea, the whole concept of corporations.
25:08All right. As is well known... I'm sorry. The doctrine of national specialization or
25:16competitive advantage, then coming into prominence, and which has since been used as an excuse
25:21to ravish third world economies, was demonstrably harmful to the interests of the population,
25:27as is well known, to peasants compelled to grow coffee beans and sugar cane on land that
25:30could otherwise feed their families. If the debilitating influence of capitalist control
25:35and ignorance could be ended, abundance for all was well within reach. So, capitalistic
25:40control, does that mean corporations? Does that mean business combined with the power
25:45of the state? Well, of course, right? Of course. Of course. Governments love forcing people
25:53to produce for external economies, because then they get, let's say they produce for
25:57the US market, they get US dollars with which to buy US luxuries. And that's very good for
26:01the people at the top, plus they get more taxes, right? So, the governments want you
26:06to be working as hard as possible. It's one of the reasons why the inflation goes on,
26:10that keeps stealing your money, is that they take your savings, and then if you invest,
26:14they get capital gains taxes. And if you don't invest and you get poorer, they just want
26:18to keep you running at a feverish, coked up, hamster wheel pace, so that they can keep
26:22taxing everything you do. That wouldn't be the case in a free society. So, he wrote,
26:26all this has been proved despite the innumerable obstacles. All was thrown in the way of every
26:30innovative mind. Thousands of years to grow one's own food was the burden, almost the
26:34curse of mankind, but it need be so no longer. To grow the yearly food of a family under
26:39rational conditions of culture requires so little labor that it might almost be done
26:43as a mere change from other pursuits. And again, you will be struck to see with what
26:50facility and in how short a time your needs of dress and of thousands of articles of luxury
26:54can be satisfied when production is carried on for satisfying real needs rather than for
26:58satisfying shareholders. And yet, everywhere workers lived in misery. Contrary to the teachings
27:04of every economic school, Kropotkin argued that overproduction was far from a problem.
27:10Far from producing more than is needed to assure material riches, we do not produce enough.
27:14If certain economists delight in writing treatises on overproduction and in explaining
27:19each industrial crisis by this course, they would be much at a loss. If called upon to
27:25name a single article produced by France in greater quantities than are necessary to satisfy
27:29the needs of the whole population, what economists call overproduction is but a production that is
27:34above the purchasing power of the worker who is reduced to poverty by capital and the state.
27:39Right, capital and the state. Only exploiters included were in abundant supply. Today,
27:45ninety-four years later, there may well be overproduction of some goods, nuclear weapons,
27:49toxic chemicals, and products that must almost immediately be replaced, but it is just as
27:54obscene today to talk of, for example, an overproduction crisis in agriculture
27:58where millions face immediate starvation. Thus, rather than celebrating capitalism's development
28:04of society's productive capacity, as Marxists do, Kropotkin demonstrated that capitalism resulted
28:11in chronic underproduction and deprivation. Well, of course, I mean, you don't want to
28:15overproduce things. You don't want to overproduce things because then the price is going to go down,
28:19but if you underproduce things, people find alternatives, right? So, if Apple only produced
28:24one iPhone 18 in the world, it would go for a very high price, but then Samsung and LG and
28:32whoever would then produce other phones and would take the market, right? So, you don't want to
28:36overproduce, drive down the price, but you don't want to underproduce because then you give business
28:41to your competitors. So, again, all of that is chosen. All of that is chosen by the consumers.
28:49All of that is chosen by the consumers. Now, of course, this is all influenced by the power of
28:54the state, but fundamentally, it is chosen by the consumers. And capitalists and workers,
28:59to use the nomenclature, are in alignment in trying to satisfy the needs and preferences of
29:05the consumers. And they are in alignment, and whatever is best in getting things into the
29:12hand of the consumers is a good thing. And so, they are aligned. If the workers think that the
29:19capitalist is exploiting them, then they both ignore the consumer and fight with each other,
29:23and the business goes, tits up. So, yeah, it's really sad. People should be working together.
29:29Is the coach more important than the players? No, they're both important, right? There's no coach
29:32without the players, and the players lose without the coach. So, to think that they should fight
29:36with each other rather than the opposing team is kind of crazy. And then, in fact, all of the...
29:44This is the Jerry Maguire argument, right? Fundamentally, all of the coaches and the
29:49waterboys and the athletes and the massage therapists and all of that, all of them are
29:54serving the crowd. All of them are serving the paying consumer, the audience, right? The sports
30:00ball watchers, they're all serving those people. And to fight with each other at the expense of
30:04serving those people puts them in WNBA territory. Well, I'll stop here. I'm happy to go on. Let me
30:09know what you think of this kind of analysis, if you find it helpful and interesting. And let me
30:15know, freedomain.com slash donate. Lots of love, everyone. Take care. Bye.