The first thing that struck me about this libertarian forum were the
arguments of my other debater (the one debating against me) that kept referring
to the problem of socialism being that Russian leadership under socialism and
Chinese [leadership] had killed millions of people. I always find this a bizarre way of
arguing about economic systems, a kind of a body count approach. But okay, if that's
what they want to do let's make a comparison. Capitalism has been the
dominant system for the last 150-200 years, pretty much around the world.
What's its record in terms of the killing of people out of capitalist
competition, capitalist enmity, inside countries [and] across countries? Well, it's way
in excess of anything that socialists could claim. Let's start with World Wars
I & II. I mean, conservatively those killed 50 to 100 million people, somewhere
already in a different league. And those were wars that came out of competition
among capitalist countries like Germany, England, the United States, Japan, and so on.
So, really are we gonna go down that road?
Then there's the thing called colonialism and imperialism, in which
capitalist countries (mostly in Europe) went around the world killing huge
numbers of people to make the whole world useful and profitable to Europe.
I mean, why do you think there was a slave trade that basically destroyed Africa
for hundreds of years, diluting it of its people? That was in
order to bring those Africans to the Western Hemisphere first for sugar, and
then for cotton, which were very profitable commodities capitalists
bought and sold. And then there was colonialism everywhere else in the world.
First book I ever wrote was an economic study of Britain in Kenya in East Africa.
And one of the things I discovered is when the British arrived in 1895 they
did a census. Four million Africans lived in Kenya. 30 years later they did another census.
2.5 million people lived [there]. In that little country,
over that few years, 1.5 million people disappeared.
That has to be chalked up to capitalism. So if you're gonna go this route of
counting the dead, sure you can make a criticism of Stalin and Mao (they deserve
criticism. Killing is not good anywhere). But the idea that you have found a flaw
in the capitalism-socialism debate is bizarre. Why would you even go down that
road especially with five minutes of reflection showing you it's not good for
your side of the argument. Then there was an even stranger kind of thing, very
typical I think for libertarians. The fellow on the other side argued that
he agreed with me that capitalism was full of flaws. I had laid those out, as I
do on this program often, and he agreed with me. He said it's so bad he would
call it (in his words) CRAP-italism. Okay, everybody giggled. But then he kept
saying to me "Yeah, it's terrible. But your socialism is worse." "Why?" I asked. Well he
answered "because then the government will become very powerful and the
government is bad." I said, really is the government bad by definition? Are
we like talking in religion where God is good and the devil is bad and the world
is nicely organized in that way? Is the government necessarily bad? And his basic
answer to me was yes, the government ipso facto is bad. And you don't ask
why the government does something? Apparently among these folks they don't
explain it. It's just sort of given. Government is bad. What government does
is unwanted, because it's bad. The idea that the government is what it is
because of the society in which it exists, that it doesn't come fully
finished out of nowhere but is a product of the society that is trying to govern,
that doesn't seem to have gotten in. I find that bizarre in the history
of the United States when most observers would agree that both in 1929 when the
stock market crashed, and again in 2008 when the stock market crashed,
everybody, led by the business community, went to the government to save us.
It saved us with a new deal in the 1930s, and it saved us with the Bush and Obama
stimulus programs. Apparently the government sometimes does good things
so the issue is why would the government be unnecessary? Bad [argument].