Understanding Collectivism and Its Impacts

Welcome to Lecture 9, Collectivism, Collective Property Rights, Collective Enterprise, or There Is No I in Team. Again, quite literally, when you're spelling the word team, there's no I. All right, sometimes it's probably helpful to put disclaimers on things, give you some idea of where I'm coming from on some of these topics. So I figured I should put one here. We're going to be talking about communalism. And so I should probably tell you, I live in a bit of a commune. I live in this community where we pool our resources, use some of our time for the good of other members. What's mine is theirs. What's theirs often is mine. There are some things, I suppose, that people can keep for themselves, but for the most part, I mean, when I earn income, I throw the entirety of my income into this collective. I'm not stinking a claim to, oh, my goodness, this is mine. In fact, I don't think there's anything I don't share in this collective. So obviously, I've got some individual impulse to share with others that perhaps I feel called to share. Maybe it's because I love the people that I'm sharing with or want to see them to. live to their fullest potential. But there's not a lot of mine, me, my, mine in this collective, as far as I'm concerned. And so I should, again, probably put that out there just so you know that when we're talking about different types of collectivism, I'm not unsympathetic to the idea of sharing. So you might wonder to yourself, yeah, I kind of wonder where Where Dean Strau is coming from here, what is the name of the collective that he lives in? It's called the Strau family. Yes, indeed. When I earn income from Palm Beach Atlantic University, I throw it into our collective family checking account. It's used not just for my purposes, but for the purposes of my wife, the other Dr. Strau, my kids. We've got four kids. You know, my youngest child doesn't have a job. you know, you could call him an unproductive eater, but we still keep feeding him anyway. He pulls out way more resources at this point than he's adding to the collective. But, you know, we have this objective, at least my wife and I have this objective that we're willing to go to work and share with our family, share with our kids. We care about the outcome of our kids very deeply. You know, I almost see it as a privilege, an honor to show up to work in order to earn money. provide for my children and help pay for college, for instance. That could be seen as a chore by some people. To me, it's an honor and a privilege. So, okay, maybe this collectivism writ large on an economy as something different or juxtaposed to a free enterprise, maybe it's got a root somewhere. Maybe that root is this internal feeling that many of us have to share. to care about those near us and not always think about what's in it for me, but to try to give back to others. So a more broad view here of collectivism is it's characterized by some type of bonding or cohesiveness between individuals where they try to prioritize the group over themselves. So rather than just thinking about, oh, what's the best restaurant that would fulfill my... desires to go to dinner tonight, maybe I think about, well, do other people want to eat there? Do they have allergies? It would prevent them from enjoying anything they were getting sick after. But maybe we need to think about more than just one individual's outcome. All right, let's think about types of collectivism. So let's start with voluntary collectivism, much like the Strau family. My wife wasn't forced into this. This is not some arranged marriage. She wasn't forced into it. There's no shotgun involved. I wasn't forced into this. We voluntarily decided to combine checking accounts, savings accounts, retirement funds, and home ownership, all kinds of assets we've co-signed. But it was a voluntary transaction to do so. And you could argue our kids didn't voluntarily sign up to be part of this family. I mean, yes. We as parents voluntarily decided to bring them into this world, but you could argue that the kids are trapped in this system of collectivism, and you can put yourself in that perspective. You were each born into some type of family structure. And you could argue, well, I didn't get to choose. Well, someday you'll get to choose. You'll become an adult. You can move out. Problem is moving out may sometimes come with paying for your own bills. It's all fun and games until you start paying for your own car insurance and health insurance premiums. So why might people voluntarily decide to share? I mean, why don't people just go through life saying, ooh, ooh, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. I'm not helping you in any way, shape, or form. Well. kind of a boring life, I think, for most of us. And so some of us come together and say, hey, we've got some shared interests. So my wife and I had a shared interest of creating and starting a family and raising these kids in the way they should go. So when they are old, they will not depart from it. We're trying to, in our little way, make the world a better place and do that by showing love to our children and teaching them to show love to others. All right. But there's a lot of different types of collectives we can talk about. We can talk about the family structure because in most families, there is some element of collectivism. But in some societies that goes further than just family, they extend the idea to clan. So maybe extended family. I mean, a clan is often an extended family. So beyond aunts and uncles and cousins, maybe into people who generally share a DNA. Maybe you think about collectivism in terms of your locality. You say, hey, I'm going to put myself above others and serve my local community. I'm going to go pick up trash on trash pickup day. Not because I get paid to do it, not because it's beneficial just to me to go do it, but because I'm part of this group and I want the group to succeed. I want my locality, my town to be cleaned, to attract others to move in. And so you think about things other than yourself. You could think a commonwealth. There are countries that are called commonwealths. There are states in the United States that are called commonwealths. But the idea is, hey, we're at some element, we're in this together. It's quite literally what the term commonwealth means is, yes, you might have some individual needs and wants and own some individual property, but there are some group goals that we have in common. Really, anytime you join a club, you're joining some type. of collectivist society where you're you've decided to maybe pay some dues maybe do some service for the club maybe take oaths to do things for other members of the club where you're trying to put others above yourself so any of these family all the way to club commonwealth locality you can call this broadly speaking some sense of community and you know people register high levels of happiness when they feel like they are part of a community, when they're part of a family or club or group that shares their interests and goals. There is some part of our human nature that is a very social aspect, and we do like to be in community with each other. We can put faith groups in here as well. So you get together with people who believe like yourself. And you say, oh, well, you know, we'll deny ourselves, pick up a cross and follow Jesus, as it were. We'll put some other interests ahead of our own. We'll put the interests of our small group ahead of ourselves, for instance. But there are aspects here which we can all agree, or most of us would probably agree, the community has some very good aspects to it. It brings with it some sense of belonging. And a community is only possible if people look beyond themselves. All right, so that was voluntary collectivism. You decide, hey, there's a church you want to go to and people to associate with. You decide if there's a locality, so some town that you identify with and want to be part of, and you move there. And you can always move out. Family's a little harder. I mean, yes, you could stop calling mom and dad, I suppose, and say, well, I'm not checking in anymore. You can. emancipate yourself. But for the most part, these are voluntary types of institutions. Well, what about the types of collectivism that are not voluntary? Because those exist as well. So we need to talk about those. We'll call these involuntary collectivism. Again, if we're going to use the term collectivism, we're going to be talking about the pooling of resources. What's mine is not mine. So if I show up for work and I earn some money by shoveling snow, then that money is not mine. Yes, it was my effort. Yes, it's the fruit of my labor. but someone else is going to be laying claim to the fruit of my labor. That labor is not my own, but it's for the good of a group. Now, you might think to yourself, I might shovel some snow for the good of the group. You might ask yourself, how often you will shovel that snow, and will you do it at 3 o'clock in the morning for the good of the group? I mean, sure, I was part of a Christian community as an undergraduate at Wheaton College in Chicago. And yes, I cared for those around me. And yes, I would do things for them. And, you know, I could put shoveling snow on that list. But if you're going to get me on a regular basis to shovel snow at three o'clock in the morning so that other people don't have to walk in snow as they walk to class, I probably at some point I'm going to say, well, what's in this for me? Why is everyone else going to sleep at three o'clock in the morning if I have to be out shoveling snow? And the answer was, well, I got paid. to shovel snow. And okay, so if there is something in it for me, you know, I'm all for giving, but giving at three o'clock in the morning is not also a very, when it's cold outside and below zero degrees Fahrenheit, you're shoveling snow at three o'clock in the morning. Yes, people can do that voluntarily. If you want a repeated action month after month, year after year, you're going to find that, you know, this denial of self does have some limits. Well, what about this types of collectivism, again, that are not voluntary? Well, if those limits get stretched then, or what you're willing to do, you might say, but if everyone else gets to sleep in, this is year 27 of me shoveling snow at three in the morning while everyone else sleeps in, I think we should probably share this load. Someone else can come shovel the snow for a bit. You might get irritated with the fact that you're giving back disproportionately to others. You might say, well, all right, that's fine. If this were voluntary collectivism, you're just going to. slack off, not get up at three in the morning, not have the sidewalk shovel. That's all fun and games, but in voluntary collectivism, you don't have a choice. You're assigned a task. This is a task you will do whether you like it or not. Well, shoot, where's the voluntary side here? What was the part about the shared interests? This is more of a... someone else has an interest and I don't agree with that interest and now I have to do it. In under Soviet rule Germany was broken up into two countries after World War II. East Germany became part of the Soviet bloc and West Germany was a democracy. Nowhere was this more evident than in the city of Berlin itself. There was a line down the middle of Berlin and one half of Berlin was under the Soviet bloc and one half was a democracy. And at the beginning of this experiment running two different systems, one was a collectivist system, East Germany, and one was, or East Berlin in this case, and one was a free enterprise community, West Berlin and West Germany. It was a bit of an experiment and people went about their work and it turned out there was a mass exodus of people from East Berlin to West Berlin. They tired very quickly of being forced to do things for others that they did not see was a good use of their time or they saw that they were being leaned upon more than others were being leaned upon to do work. And so they decided, hey, I want to go have choices in my life. I want to have property right to the fruits of my labor. I don't want to be enslaved by others to be forced to use my labor as a soft fit. And so people started leaving. Now the rulers of East Germany decided, Ooh, this is looking bad. Our workers keep leaving. So they built a wall. And that wall is called the Berlin wall, went right down that dividing line. And this is not a wall to keep people out. This is not. uh that type of wall this is a wall that was designed to keep people in no longer were you allowed to disassociate with east germany you and your labor belonged to them they actually said that if you were trying to leave uh east berlin for west berlin let's say you wanted to climb over a wall it's actually a series of walls there was one wall barbed wire and then something called no man's land and then a second wall with barbed wire. So if you got up over the first wall and down into no man's land they had dogs who would get you, they had snipers who would shoot at you. And then you still had to get up and over another wall. So it made it quite complicated. But here's the idea. They shot to kill. And you say, why are they shooting you if you try to leave their country? It's because they said you were robbing from the country. You say, well, I didn't take any property with me. I just myself, I'm leaving. The clothes on my back is all I took. And they would say, yes, but you belong to the state. The state owns you. owns the right to your labor. So you're attempting to steal your labor from the state. All right, so there's two types of collectivism. One where you voluntarily join a church, a family, a club, and there's the type of collectivism where the membership invitation is something you cannot actively disagree with. It's not your choice. If you try to leave, there's no freedom of exit. Now, if there's no freedom of exit, one doesn't have to wonder, again, in a social welfare type of perspective, how do you know that the system is actually working out for individuals? I mean, shouldn't it be a little bit of a signal if you have to shoot people who are trying to leave your system in order to try to keep people there, that maybe the system isn't in fact working for the good of all? You should at least, you know, we should raise some eyebrows. We'll put it that way. All right. Well, what's, what is socialism then? We're going to talk about variance here of collectivism in this lecture. Well, it's going to mean common ownership of something called the means of production. What the heck is means of production? Well, the three major means of production are natural resources, labor, and capital. So if you're going to have common ownership of the means of production, you'd have common ownership of land. So all land belongs to the state. You don't own as a farmer your own land. You're just working land that belongs to the common people. Labor. Well, again, it means you don't own the fruits of your labor. Your labor actually belongs to the government itself. And so they can tell you what to produce, how to produce, which job to go to. Hey, you're going to be a coal miner. but I don't want to be a coal miner. Oh, I don't care. Your labor belongs to the state. We have assigned you coal miner. We have assigned you ballerina. Ooh, yay. I always wanted to be ballerina. Worked out well. Okay. Well, someone's going to decide what to produce, how to produce, who gets it. It's not you because your labor belongs to the state. And then capital is the other means of production. So machines, tools, and factories. So the government owns the factories. The government tells you where to work, whether you're in a mine or a farm. factory, and they own the land as well, and natural resources. Karl Marx is kind of thought as the intellectual founder here of socialism, and his big phrase is, from each according to his ability, and to each according to his need. Again, in a family context, I can understand that. My earning potential is bigger than that of my children, so... I'm going to put more into this commune than my children are. To each according to his need. Well, yeah, I mean, my kids have some bigger needs when it comes to schooling expenses or eating expenses or growing kids. So, yeah, it seems to make sense. It's from each according to their ability and to each according to their need type of idea within my voluntary family collective context. But what does it mean when you try to apply it for an economic system itself? It means if you're of a high skill level and have a high work output, they're going to work you harder. They're going to take more from you than they will take from other people. You will look around and say, hey, wait a second, but they took $5 from me and only a nickel from someone else. Why did the other person get to only ante up a nickel for this collective enterprise? When I have to put in $5, well, you have greater ability. And so we're going to take from those who have greater ability, and we're going to give it to those who have the greatest need. So it becomes whoever can show the greatest need will get more resources out than they put in. Well, let's supersize this idea. So in the writings of Karl Marx, he and Friedrich Engels are going to create something called the Communist Manifesto. And so communism, the political economic theory. was born from the works of Karl Marx as well. So communism is a political theory that advocates class warfare. So you can think of a two-class society in the Karl Marx socialist writings. There's the bourgeois class or bourgeoisie, those who own capital, machines, tools, and factories, upper-income people. And there's the proletariat. who they see as the working class, the worker bees, as it were, who just work and toil for other people and never get ahead. And that's how Karl Marx viewed the world. You're either a bourgeoisie or a member of the proletariat. His idea was that there are more, in terms of numbers, people in the proletariat class than there are bourgeois people, and so they're going to rise up. and take over and go break things and kill people until they take over. And they will establish their own rule and they will take from those who had things. So the upper income people who owned machines, tools and factories, those will be confiscated. Their homes will be taken and shared with the masses. So this is a political doctrine of the masses will rise up, kill people and break things until they take over. And that's in practice exactly how they did take over. So we're looking at Mao Zedong taking over in China. It's not with some democratic election. It's not with winning the hearts and minds of majority people. It was by getting arms and killing people who oppose them. Same thing in Cuba. Fidel Castro came to power, getting a band of people together with guns and killing their opponents and forcibly taking property from people who disagreed. Same thing in North Korea, same thing in North, in Vietnam. Started in North Vietnam, became all of Vietnam. This is the political ideology that says, if you don't like how much you're getting out of society right now, you have a call to arms. Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. So, you know, go take your shovels and pickaxes and go kill some people and take their stuff. And then we'll create a system where we're all in this together, where all individuals are in some way working for the good of a collective. No longer will there be special interests of individuals in a communist system. So it's the good of the country. So it's good of North Korea or for the good of China or for the good of Cuba in practice. Now, again, in practice. As George Orwell would go on to write in Animal Farm, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. So, no, the Castro family does not live at the same standard of living as the average Cuban. No, the leader of China does not live at the same standard of living as the average person. I mean, so let's not say that all class systems have been gotten rid of. The former Soviet Union was part of this. communist system as well. They finally gave it up, at least nominally gave it up, moved toward a toward, by no means a free enterprise system, but they did dump a lot of the central planning aspects of communism and did open up private property in the 1990s. All right, well, let's look at this communist manifesto. So this is ripped from the headlines, as it were. This is quoting from the Communist Manifesto. There's a top 10. If you read through, it's not that big of a book. If you read through the Communist Manifesto, you'd see they've got some top 10 key points that they want to put across. So number one, and this is again, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, abolition of property and land. All right, so you can't own land. You can't own where your house is. You can't own farmland. All land must belong to the government. You're going to have a heavy progressive income tax. So again, if you're showing up for work, it's not really for your benefit. The more you earn, the bigger percentage of your labor we're going to take from you to give to other people. Abolish any rights of inheritance. So if you were to gain some assets, any type of private property, a condo, you can't pass that condo on. They just confiscate the condo at the end of your life and hand it to someone else who the government wants to hand it to. confiscation of all property of immigrants and rebels. Oh, there's the, hey, if you try to leave, again, we can kill you and take all your stuff. So even if you get out, we're still gonna steal your stuff. That's the immigrants side. Anyone who tries to leave, you're ours. And it's a very sad situation in practice. I know many of you listening to this are not around for the heyday of the Soviet Union with the Iron Curtain, but all through Eastern Europe, people and country after country, if they tried to flee, they were shot and killed. Their property was taken from them. And it's not just immigrants. It was also people deemed rebels. So if you're deemed an enemy of the state in the Soviet Union, they would confiscate your property and send you off to work in work camps in Siberia until they worked you to death. The leader of Russia, Stalin, killed millions of people in these concentration work camps in Siberia. Millions. If you got labeled an enemy of the state, uh off to work to death was your fate again you know well here's a here's a famous quote from stalin uh well i'll better paraphrase we'll call it a famous paraphrase of stalin uh if you kill one man it's murder if you kill a million it's a statistic he killed millions uh you know even if he personally didn't pull the trigger one person at a time you organize and arrange the death of millions of individuals. Well, again, if your life is owned not by you, but by the state, it's really a prerogative of the state. If the state doesn't think you're helping out the state, then off with your head. All right, back to the Communist Manifesto, a list of top 10. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state. So you could not get a loan, you could not have access to a bank unless it's the government telling you. Again, you say something that the government doesn't like, believe something the government doesn't like, you're going to make sure you don't have access to money and capital to live your life. Again, you know, maybe that's not so bad if you believe lock, stock, and barrel, everything the government officials tell you to believe. But let's say if you were a religious minority in an atheist system, so maybe you believed in God and the atheist government said, hey, no, that's not a thing. The. State is God. And so you start speaking about this God thing. We're just, we're going to, we're going to cut off your access to job. We're going to cut your access to money. We're going to, we're going to send you to the concentration camp as a rebel. And if you think, that seems, that seems awful extreme Dean Strau. Who's. There's not really going to be countries that say if you believe in God, they send you to concentration camps. I beg to differ. You need to do a lot of reading then about the history of the Soviet Union. And even to this day, China has some concentration camps for people who are believing differently than the government would have them believe. So number six, centralization of the means of communication and transport. So you can't get from point A to point B without the government saying you can. All information is coming from the government. And guess what? None of it's going to be critical. None of it's going to be pointing out bad decisions or unfortunate consequences of government policy. It's all going to be propaganda. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state. Okay. So, man, if there's land, you got to put it into practice. You can't just let land sitting around. This land is supposed to be used for the good of the collective. They would extend the factory. They wanted to create this, instead of having cities and countryside, they wanted, in a sense, suburban sprawl through the whole place. We got to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. And if you look at how the Soviet Union did this. They really were very big fans of block after block after block of concrete, concrete, concrete, concrete. They thought there was too much inequality between rural areas and urban areas. So they wanted to put pig farms and factories right next to each other, make it all just one big monolith geographically. And rates equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies. Well, there you are. You're drafted. And we're going to tell you what to do. Everyone's got to work. This is not one of these options of, well, oh, you have little children at home and you want to stay home and raise your children. No, no. we have a factory for you to go work in. So off to the state school, go your preschool kids. We will indoctrinate them for you. We're not going to allow you the option of staying home with them. It's equal obligation of all the work. As a result, there were vast differences in childcare in these systems and rates of work because this was not, in that way, they were very more gender equal. in terms of drafting everyone into this industrial army. It didn't matter if you were male, female, they were going to draft you and you're going to be put into work, into the system. Your work belonged to the state, not to your individual choice. There's where they're combining in number nine, agricultural and manufacturing systems together. Again, we're trying to spread people equally over the geography. And the last one there, free education of all children in public schools, private ones are banned. You can only do public schools. You can only have people being taught by people the government hires to teach them. That way they get the story that we're all in this for the good of the country, the country itself, the government of the country is the God to be worshiped. And then we're going to combine education with industrial production. All right. Well, it's, it's not. So in farce, that's actually the words used in the communist manifesto. All right. So many of you might think, be thinking, all right, well, on the one hand, this collectivism sounds pretty good. I don't mind sharing, certainly with my family, although even then it can get a little annoying. If if there's a dinner and all the food is put out in the middle, sometimes you might think to yourself, I didn't get all the food I wanted. One of my siblings, if I had a sibling, eat food. quicker than I did and took the good, they took the good meat and maybe I wanted the drumstick and they routinely were too quick for me and kept taking the drumstick, even though that's what I wanted. They didn't want to share. And so, you know, maybe you have your own personal story of how even living in a, in a family structure is how the sharing got a little bit of a problem. Oh, I had to share a bathroom and the other person would use all the hot water. And this is just a, just a problem. So whether it's your family, whether it's your dorm, situation, whoever you're sharing with, sharing can be hard. It does have some limits, even in a voluntary sense. But in an involuntary sense, it becomes even more grating on people. You say, well, this communism thing, maybe that's too far and extreme, forcing people into communes, not asking them if they care about others around them, just forcing them to work in certain ways and expropriating their incomes. You might think to yourself, I mean... How did that really vary different, very much different from feudalism, when the lords said that you had to work a certain plot of land and give the fruits of your labor to the lord? Well, the lord's small elm. Well, there is this sense in which there's either a system based on force or voluntary exchange. And if you're the one being forced, it really doesn't matter to you who's doing the forcing. All right, what about this democratic socialism? You say, all right, well, I like this idea of sharing at the family level, maybe communism's a bridge too far, where we're shooting people when they try to flee, where they're forced to do things against their will, forced to believe things against their will. So what about this democratic socialism? So what is that? It's been in the news recently. Well, it's a socialist economy. So we're going to start then with the definition of that socialism stuff. It's where the government owns the means of production. So the government owns, again, the natural resources, the land, owns the machines, tools, and factories, and owns your labor. But rather than have some dictator, a Stalin, a Mao Zedong, a Fidel Castro, just dictate where you got to work, which coal mine you got to do your time in, we'll have some elections. We'll vote. on what needs to be produced and how to produce it and who gets it. And whoever, you know, whatever ideas win the popular votes, that's what we'll decide to do collectively. Now, so I guess if there's a democratic system and everyone else votes for me to go down to the coal mine, well, it's democracy. So I don't want to go to the coal mine, but I have to now. And so I agree that if everyone else votes me into a coal mine, I have to go work for them in a coal mine. As you might imagine. In a system where it was 50% plus one makes a decision, minority interests tend to be ignored. So, for instance. you could have in a democratic socialist society, a majority ethnic population and a minority ethnic population. If you put everything to a vote and the majority ethnic population says, yes, we shall put all the minority ethnic workers into the least favorable jobs. We're going to make them clean toilets. We'll make them go to coal mines. We're going to put that on you. And the ethnic minority says, hey, wait a second, you're picking on us. This isn't fair. We don't want to do this. We're taking the low end jobs all the time. And the majority says, oh, we had a vote. It's democracy. So as long as we voted on it, it's perfectly moral. I mean, you have to decide yourself what becomes moral just because more people vote for it. uh comes to you uh in a dark alley and there's two of them and one of you uh and they beat you up and take your stuff you might cry foul and you say where were the police uh uh they've stolen my stuff but if the two of them come into the dark alley with you and say hey let's have a vote who here wants to take uh your stuff and give it to us and you of course vote no and the other two vote yes and they say well we voted it was a democracy um Majority rules. Two of us, only one of you, you are morally obligated to hand all of your stuff over to us. You decide whether or not that becomes moral at that point. It's just because other people in mass decided they want your stuff, one of the fruits of your labor, that they are allowed to do that. It doesn't matter if there's freedom of entry and exit into the system. Can you leave and take your person and your property with you if you don't like how they're ruling? Or are they going to, again, confiscate? the property of all immigrants and rebels. Do you not have a way out of the system? So this is one of the problems, of course, with any type of democratic system is who's going to look out for the minority interests. And minority can mean a lot of things. It could mean an ethnicity, it could be a gender, it could be a religious belief. Insert your particular minority here. People. Imagine a democracy, democratic socialism, when we say, oh, you know, all left-handed people get half the amount of stuff that all the right-handed people do. Why? Because, well, right-handed people are greater in number. See, under the communist system, the idea was, well, the majority should just go kill the minority, take their stuff. Here, it's, well, you don't have to kill the minority. You just raise hands and say, hey, we want their stuff. Oh, majority wins. We're taking your stuff. And if you don't like it, we'll have a military and a police force funded by the government to. We'll kill you if necessary. Under the democratic socialism, the idea of how this would work would be that you would have elections, you would vote for leaders who would then make the economic decisions of what to produce, how to produce, and who gets stuff for the masses. So they would centralize economic decision making. Again, you wouldn't be in charge of deciding where you worked or… what kind of products you made because you wouldn't be owning any capital. Your part in this is voting. And once you vote, the elected officials tell you what to do. It's a very top-down economic system. So the downside is if you don't have control over yourself, you don't have the opportunity to go seek out and engage in wealth-creating, mutually beneficial trades. So an example of democratic socialism would be Venezuela until their leader decided the democratic part was just nonsense and imposed himself as a dictator, got rid of fair and free elections. Once you start rigging all the elections, it's really difficult to call you a democratic socialist country anymore. If you want to tune in on how that went, Venezuela has had more than four million people flee. Their economy is in free fall. They've now started printing a million Bolivar banknotes. It's worth about 50 cents at the time of this recording. They have completely imploded their economy. And it's now a dictatorship to move. All right, so what's the point of this collectivism stuff? Well, we do have this internal sense, many of us do, to live in community and to live beyond ourselves, to work. for the good of others. Again, families are often structured this way, but cooperative sharing can be... you know, a bit of an antidote for competition. It's not all about I win, you lose. Maybe it's about, well, what can we do together to benefit you and me and society generally? One of the articles we're reading in this section is from Wendell Berry, a poet laureate from Kentucky, and he often laments this idea of competition. Hey, we shouldn't compete in anything. There shouldn't be ever winners and losers. We should just all hang out together and cooperate on everything. So we should buy things from our local community. Don't buy things from the best things, products at the cheapest prices. Just buy stuff from the people closest to you because you care about them, would be his argument. It's not about gaining more access to meeting your needs and wants. He thinks that the need and want that you need. the most and should value the most is just living in community with those closest to you. Well, we had some arguments during the readings for this section on why socialism would be preferred and here are a couple of the highlights. So capitalism or free enterprise, they say, lacks order. It's anarchical. Well, that's true. There's no planning, central planning in a free enterprise system. Individuals make their own decisions. They're free to change their mind. New products come in. They put old products out of business. There is freedom of entry into the marketplace. Just because your company exists now does not mean it will exist later. So it is chaotic. It's that creative destruction aspect. New companies come in because people change their tastes and preferences. New products aren't. And so some say, well, that's just too much change. I want everything to stay the same. one generation to the next. I want the same products produced by the same people in the same way from generation to generation. I don't want there to be economic growth. I want the same thing to happen all the time because then there's no order to it. One of the arguments that were made in the articles is that free enterprise or capitalism is immoral. If you're basing things on individual self-interest, the People who defend free enterprise say, oh, it's enlightened self-interest. And those who say, no, no, this free enterprise is bad, say, no, it's not enlightened self-interest. It's based upon greed. And people saying, just what's in it for me? That's an inherently immoral attitude to take. You should never think about yourself. You should always be putting others ahead of you. There's this idea in the literature that says, hey, one of the reasons we should pursue socialism is it guarantees. equality of outcome. And we're not going to treat everyone the same, right? If you're going to take from those according to their ability and give to those according to their need, you're not treating people equally, but you're trying to guarantee some equality of outcome. Everybody gets the same result regardless of what they put into the system. And so maybe that's attractive to some people. They say, hey, I didn't really want to put a lot into the system anyway, but I want the same amount as everyone else. And you might like that. No winners and losers. Everyone is in the same vote. Preferences are determined electorally if it's democratic socialism, at least that's the idea, that you elect politicians and then they, in a sense, impose the will of the people on the rest of the people who didn't vote for them. The use of force is necessary to get people to cooperate is why some would advocate socialism. that people are too selfish. And so if you just leave them up to themselves, they'll continue to engage in this immoral, selfish behavior. So we need to force them to think about the good of the collective. So there are some interesting arguments there, that socialism is more scientific. It's based on order. We're going to centrally plan and collect all this data, and the government will know what's best to produce and how to produce and who gets it. And we're not going to let individuals... muck this up by going off on tangents, producing goods that are not needed, or getting people to buy things that really aren't going to improve their lives. So that's what this module in the course is going to be about. We're going to talk about different variants of collectivism.

And so I should probably tell you, I live in a bit of a commune. I live in this community where we pool our resources, use some of our time for the good of other members. What's mine is theirs.

What's theirs often is mine. There are some things, I suppose, that people can keep for themselves, but for the most part, I mean, when I earn income, I throw the entirety of my income into this collective. I'm not stinking a claim to, oh, my goodness, this is mine.

In fact, I don't think there's anything I don't share in this collective. So obviously, I've got some individual impulse to share with others that perhaps I feel called to share. Maybe it's because I love the people that I'm sharing with or want to see them to.

live to their fullest potential. But there's not a lot of mine, me, my, mine in this collective, as far as I'm concerned. And so I should, again, probably put that out there just so you know that when we're talking about different types of collectivism, I'm not unsympathetic to the idea of sharing.

So you might wonder to yourself, yeah, I kind of wonder where Where Dean Strau is coming from here, what is the name of the collective that he lives in? It's called the Strau family. Yes, indeed.

When I earn income from Palm Beach Atlantic University, I throw it into our collective family checking account. It's used not just for my purposes, but for the purposes of my wife, the other Dr. Strau, my kids. We've got four kids. You know, my youngest child doesn't have a job.

you know, you could call him an unproductive eater, but we still keep feeding him anyway. He pulls out way more resources at this point than he's adding to the collective. But, you know, we have this objective, at least my wife and I have this objective that we're willing to go to work and share with our family, share with our kids.

We care about the outcome of our kids very deeply. You know, I almost see it as a privilege, an honor to show up to work in order to earn money. provide for my children and help pay for college, for instance. That could be seen as a chore by some people.

To me, it's an honor and a privilege. So, okay, maybe this collectivism writ large on an economy as something different or juxtaposed to a free enterprise, maybe it's got a root somewhere. Maybe that root is this internal feeling that many of us have to share. to care about those near us and not always think about what's in it for me, but to try to give back to others. So a more broad view here of collectivism is it's characterized by some type of bonding or cohesiveness between individuals where they try to prioritize the group over themselves.

So rather than just thinking about, oh, what's the best restaurant that would fulfill my... desires to go to dinner tonight, maybe I think about, well, do other people want to eat there? Do they have allergies?

It would prevent them from enjoying anything they were getting sick after. But maybe we need to think about more than just one individual's outcome. All right, let's think about types of collectivism. So let's start with voluntary collectivism, much like the Strau family. My wife wasn't forced into this.

This is not some arranged marriage. She wasn't forced into it. There's no shotgun involved. I wasn't forced into this. We voluntarily decided to combine checking accounts, savings accounts, retirement funds, and home ownership, all kinds of assets we've co-signed.

But it was a voluntary transaction to do so. And you could argue our kids didn't voluntarily sign up to be part of this family. I mean, yes.

We as parents voluntarily decided to bring them into this world, but you could argue that the kids are trapped in this system of collectivism, and you can put yourself in that perspective. You were each born into some type of family structure. And you could argue, well, I didn't get to choose.

Well, someday you'll get to choose. You'll become an adult. You can move out.

Problem is moving out may sometimes come with paying for your own bills. It's all fun and games until you start paying for your own car insurance and health insurance premiums. So why might people voluntarily decide to share? I mean, why don't people just go through life saying, ooh, ooh, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. I'm not helping you in any way, shape, or form.

Well. kind of a boring life, I think, for most of us. And so some of us come together and say, hey, we've got some shared interests. So my wife and I had a shared interest of creating and starting a family and raising these kids in the way they should go. So when they are old, they will not depart from it.

We're trying to, in our little way, make the world a better place and do that by showing love to our children and teaching them to show love to others. All right. But there's a lot of different types of collectives we can talk about.

We can talk about the family structure because in most families, there is some element of collectivism. But in some societies that goes further than just family, they extend the idea to clan. So maybe extended family.

I mean, a clan is often an extended family. So beyond aunts and uncles and cousins, maybe into people who generally share a DNA. Maybe you think about collectivism in terms of your locality. You say, hey, I'm going to put myself above others and serve my local community. I'm going to go pick up trash on trash pickup day.

Not because I get paid to do it, not because it's beneficial just to me to go do it, but because I'm part of this group and I want the group to succeed. I want my locality, my town to be cleaned, to attract others to move in. And so you think about things other than yourself.

You could think a commonwealth. There are countries that are called commonwealths. There are states in the United States that are called commonwealths.

But the idea is, hey, we're at some element, we're in this together. It's quite literally what the term commonwealth means is, yes, you might have some individual needs and wants and own some individual property, but there are some group goals that we have in common. Really, anytime you join a club, you're joining some type.

of collectivist society where you're you've decided to maybe pay some dues maybe do some service for the club maybe take oaths to do things for other members of the club where you're trying to put others above yourself so any of these family all the way to club commonwealth locality you can call this broadly speaking some sense of community and you know people register high levels of happiness when they feel like they are part of a community, when they're part of a family or club or group that shares their interests and goals. There is some part of our human nature that is a very social aspect, and we do like to be in community with each other. We can put faith groups in here as well.

So you get together with people who believe like yourself. And you say, oh, well, you know, we'll deny ourselves, pick up a cross and follow Jesus, as it were. We'll put some other interests ahead of our own. We'll put the interests of our small group ahead of ourselves, for instance.

But there are aspects here which we can all agree, or most of us would probably agree, the community has some very good aspects to it. It brings with it some sense of belonging. And a community is only possible if people look beyond themselves.

All right, so that was voluntary collectivism. You decide, hey, there's a church you want to go to and people to associate with. You decide if there's a locality, so some town that you identify with and want to be part of, and you move there.

And you can always move out. Family's a little harder. I mean, yes, you could stop calling mom and dad, I suppose, and say, well, I'm not checking in anymore.

You can. emancipate yourself. But for the most part, these are voluntary types of institutions. Well, what about the types of collectivism that are not voluntary?

Because those exist as well. So we need to talk about those. We'll call these involuntary collectivism.

Again, if we're going to use the term collectivism, we're going to be talking about the pooling of resources. What's mine is not mine. So if I show up for work and I earn some money by shoveling snow, then that money is not mine. Yes, it was my effort. Yes, it's the fruit of my labor.

but someone else is going to be laying claim to the fruit of my labor. That labor is not my own, but it's for the good of a group. Now, you might think to yourself, I might shovel some snow for the good of the group.

You might ask yourself, how often you will shovel that snow, and will you do it at 3 o'clock in the morning for the good of the group? I mean, sure, I was part of a Christian community as an undergraduate at Wheaton College in Chicago. And yes, I cared for those around me.

And yes, I would do things for them. And, you know, I could put shoveling snow on that list. But if you're going to get me on a regular basis to shovel snow at three o'clock in the morning so that other people don't have to walk in snow as they walk to class, I probably at some point I'm going to say, well, what's in this for me?

Why is everyone else going to sleep at three o'clock in the morning if I have to be out shoveling snow? And the answer was, well, I got paid. to shovel snow. And okay, so if there is something in it for me, you know, I'm all for giving, but giving at three o'clock in the morning is not also a very, when it's cold outside and below zero degrees Fahrenheit, you're shoveling snow at three o'clock in the morning. Yes, people can do that voluntarily.

If you want a repeated action month after month, year after year, you're going to find that, you know, this denial of self does have some limits. Well, what about this types of collectivism, again, that are not voluntary? Well, if those limits get stretched then, or what you're willing to do, you might say, but if everyone else gets to sleep in, this is year 27 of me shoveling snow at three in the morning while everyone else sleeps in, I think we should probably share this load. Someone else can come shovel the snow for a bit. You might get irritated with the fact that you're giving back disproportionately to others.

You might say, well, all right, that's fine. If this were voluntary collectivism, you're just going to. slack off, not get up at three in the morning, not have the sidewalk shovel.

That's all fun and games, but in voluntary collectivism, you don't have a choice. You're assigned a task. This is a task you will do whether you like it or not. Well, shoot, where's the voluntary side here?

What was the part about the shared interests? This is more of a... someone else has an interest and I don't agree with that interest and now I have to do it. In under Soviet rule Germany was broken up into two countries after World War II.

East Germany became part of the Soviet bloc and West Germany was a democracy. Nowhere was this more evident than in the city of Berlin itself. There was a line down the middle of Berlin and one half of Berlin was under the Soviet bloc and one half was a democracy.

And at the beginning of this experiment running two different systems, one was a collectivist system, East Germany, and one was, or East Berlin in this case, and one was a free enterprise community, West Berlin and West Germany. It was a bit of an experiment and people went about their work and it turned out there was a mass exodus of people from East Berlin to West Berlin. They tired very quickly of being forced to do things for others that they did not see was a good use of their time or they saw that they were being leaned upon more than others were being leaned upon to do work.

And so they decided, hey, I want to go have choices in my life. I want to have property right to the fruits of my labor. I don't want to be enslaved by others to be forced to use my labor as a soft fit.

And so people started leaving. Now the rulers of East Germany decided, Ooh, this is looking bad. Our workers keep leaving. So they built a wall. And that wall is called the Berlin wall, went right down that dividing line.

And this is not a wall to keep people out. This is not. uh that type of wall this is a wall that was designed to keep people in no longer were you allowed to disassociate with east germany you and your labor belonged to them they actually said that if you were trying to leave uh east berlin for west berlin let's say you wanted to climb over a wall it's actually a series of walls there was one wall barbed wire and then something called no man's land and then a second wall with barbed wire.

So if you got up over the first wall and down into no man's land they had dogs who would get you, they had snipers who would shoot at you. And then you still had to get up and over another wall. So it made it quite complicated. But here's the idea.

They shot to kill. And you say, why are they shooting you if you try to leave their country? It's because they said you were robbing from the country.

You say, well, I didn't take any property with me. I just myself, I'm leaving. The clothes on my back is all I took.

And they would say, yes, but you belong to the state. The state owns you. owns the right to your labor. So you're attempting to steal your labor from the state.

All right, so there's two types of collectivism. One where you voluntarily join a church, a family, a club, and there's the type of collectivism where the membership invitation is something you cannot actively disagree with. It's not your choice. If you try to leave, there's no freedom of exit. Now, if there's no freedom of exit, one doesn't have to wonder, again, in a social welfare type of perspective, how do you know that the system is actually working out for individuals?

I mean, shouldn't it be a little bit of a signal if you have to shoot people who are trying to leave your system in order to try to keep people there, that maybe the system isn't in fact working for the good of all? You should at least, you know, we should raise some eyebrows. We'll put it that way. All right.

Well, what's, what is socialism then? We're going to talk about variance here of collectivism in this lecture. Well, it's going to mean common ownership of something called the means of production. What the heck is means of production? Well, the three major means of production are natural resources, labor, and capital.

So if you're going to have common ownership of the means of production, you'd have common ownership of land. So all land belongs to the state. You don't own as a farmer your own land.

You're just working land that belongs to the common people. Labor. Well, again, it means you don't own the fruits of your labor. Your labor actually belongs to the government itself. And so they can tell you what to produce, how to produce, which job to go to.

Hey, you're going to be a coal miner. but I don't want to be a coal miner. Oh, I don't care. Your labor belongs to the state.

We have assigned you coal miner. We have assigned you ballerina. Ooh, yay.

I always wanted to be ballerina. Worked out well. Okay. Well, someone's going to decide what to produce, how to produce, who gets it.

It's not you because your labor belongs to the state. And then capital is the other means of production. So machines, tools, and factories.

So the government owns the factories. The government tells you where to work, whether you're in a mine or a farm. factory, and they own the land as well, and natural resources. Karl Marx is kind of thought as the intellectual founder here of socialism, and his big phrase is, from each according to his ability, and to each according to his need. Again, in a family context, I can understand that.

My earning potential is bigger than that of my children, so... I'm going to put more into this commune than my children are. To each according to his need.

Well, yeah, I mean, my kids have some bigger needs when it comes to schooling expenses or eating expenses or growing kids. So, yeah, it seems to make sense. It's from each according to their ability and to each according to their need type of idea within my voluntary family collective context. But what does it mean when you try to apply it for an economic system itself? It means if you're of a high skill level and have a high work output, they're going to work you harder.

They're going to take more from you than they will take from other people. You will look around and say, hey, wait a second, but they took $5 from me and only a nickel from someone else. Why did the other person get to only ante up a nickel for this collective enterprise? When I have to put in $5, well, you have greater ability. And so we're going to take from those who have greater ability, and we're going to give it to those who have the greatest need.

So it becomes whoever can show the greatest need will get more resources out than they put in. Well, let's supersize this idea. So in the writings of Karl Marx, he and Friedrich Engels are going to create something called the Communist Manifesto. And so communism, the political economic theory. was born from the works of Karl Marx as well.

So communism is a political theory that advocates class warfare. So you can think of a two-class society in the Karl Marx socialist writings. There's the bourgeois class or bourgeoisie, those who own capital, machines, tools, and factories, upper-income people. And there's the proletariat.

who they see as the working class, the worker bees, as it were, who just work and toil for other people and never get ahead. And that's how Karl Marx viewed the world. You're either a bourgeoisie or a member of the proletariat.

His idea was that there are more, in terms of numbers, people in the proletariat class than there are bourgeois people, and so they're going to rise up. and take over and go break things and kill people until they take over. And they will establish their own rule and they will take from those who had things. So the upper income people who owned machines, tools and factories, those will be confiscated. Their homes will be taken and shared with the masses.

So this is a political doctrine of the masses will rise up, kill people and break things until they take over. And that's in practice exactly how they did take over. So we're looking at Mao Zedong taking over in China.

It's not with some democratic election. It's not with winning the hearts and minds of majority people. It was by getting arms and killing people who oppose them. Same thing in Cuba.

Fidel Castro came to power, getting a band of people together with guns and killing their opponents and forcibly taking property from people who disagreed. Same thing in North Korea, same thing in North, in Vietnam. Started in North Vietnam, became all of Vietnam. This is the political ideology that says, if you don't like how much you're getting out of society right now, you have a call to arms.

Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. So, you know, go take your shovels and pickaxes and go kill some people and take their stuff.

And then we'll create a system where we're all in this together, where all individuals are in some way working for the good of a collective. No longer will there be special interests of individuals in a communist system. So it's the good of the country. So it's good of North Korea or for the good of China or for the good of Cuba in practice.

Now, again, in practice. As George Orwell would go on to write in Animal Farm, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. So, no, the Castro family does not live at the same standard of living as the average Cuban.

No, the leader of China does not live at the same standard of living as the average person. I mean, so let's not say that all class systems have been gotten rid of. The former Soviet Union was part of this.

communist system as well. They finally gave it up, at least nominally gave it up, moved toward a toward, by no means a free enterprise system, but they did dump a lot of the central planning aspects of communism and did open up private property in the 1990s. All right, well, let's look at this communist manifesto. So this is ripped from the headlines, as it were. This is quoting from the Communist Manifesto.

There's a top 10. If you read through, it's not that big of a book. If you read through the Communist Manifesto, you'd see they've got some top 10 key points that they want to put across. So number one, and this is again, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, abolition of property and land.

All right, so you can't own land. You can't own where your house is. You can't own farmland.

All land must belong to the government. You're going to have a heavy progressive income tax. So again, if you're showing up for work, it's not really for your benefit. The more you earn, the bigger percentage of your labor we're going to take from you to give to other people. Abolish any rights of inheritance.

So if you were to gain some assets, any type of private property, a condo, you can't pass that condo on. They just confiscate the condo at the end of your life and hand it to someone else who the government wants to hand it to. confiscation of all property of immigrants and rebels. Oh, there's the, hey, if you try to leave, again, we can kill you and take all your stuff. So even if you get out, we're still gonna steal your stuff.

That's the immigrants side. Anyone who tries to leave, you're ours. And it's a very sad situation in practice. I know many of you listening to this are not around for the heyday of the Soviet Union with the Iron Curtain, but all through Eastern Europe, people and country after country, if they tried to flee, they were shot and killed. Their property was taken from them.

And it's not just immigrants. It was also people deemed rebels. So if you're deemed an enemy of the state in the Soviet Union, they would confiscate your property and send you off to work in work camps in Siberia until they worked you to death. The leader of Russia, Stalin, killed millions of people in these concentration work camps in Siberia.

Millions. If you got labeled an enemy of the state, uh off to work to death was your fate again you know well here's a here's a famous quote from stalin uh well i'll better paraphrase we'll call it a famous paraphrase of stalin uh if you kill one man it's murder if you kill a million it's a statistic he killed millions uh you know even if he personally didn't pull the trigger one person at a time you organize and arrange the death of millions of individuals. Well, again, if your life is owned not by you, but by the state, it's really a prerogative of the state. If the state doesn't think you're helping out the state, then off with your head.

All right, back to the Communist Manifesto, a list of top 10. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state. So you could not get a loan, you could not have access to a bank unless it's the government telling you. Again, you say something that the government doesn't like, believe something the government doesn't like, you're going to make sure you don't have access to money and capital to live your life. Again, you know, maybe that's not so bad if you believe lock, stock, and barrel, everything the government officials tell you to believe.

But let's say if you were a religious minority in an atheist system, so maybe you believed in God and the atheist government said, hey, no, that's not a thing. The. State is God.

And so you start speaking about this God thing. We're just, we're going to, we're going to cut off your access to job. We're going to cut your access to money. We're going to, we're going to send you to the concentration camp as a rebel.

And if you think, that seems, that seems awful extreme Dean Strau. Who's. There's not really going to be countries that say if you believe in God, they send you to concentration camps. I beg to differ. You need to do a lot of reading then about the history of the Soviet Union.

And even to this day, China has some concentration camps for people who are believing differently than the government would have them believe. So number six, centralization of the means of communication and transport. So you can't get from point A to point B without the government saying you can.

All information is coming from the government. And guess what? None of it's going to be critical. None of it's going to be pointing out bad decisions or unfortunate consequences of government policy. It's all going to be propaganda.

Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state. Okay. So, man, if there's land, you got to put it into practice. You can't just let land sitting around. This land is supposed to be used for the good of the collective.

They would extend the factory. They wanted to create this, instead of having cities and countryside, they wanted, in a sense, suburban sprawl through the whole place. We got to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. And if you look at how the Soviet Union did this.

They really were very big fans of block after block after block of concrete, concrete, concrete, concrete. They thought there was too much inequality between rural areas and urban areas. So they wanted to put pig farms and factories right next to each other, make it all just one big monolith geographically. And rates equal obligation of all to work.

Establishment of industrial armies. Well, there you are. You're drafted.

And we're going to tell you what to do. Everyone's got to work. This is not one of these options of, well, oh, you have little children at home and you want to stay home and raise your children.

No, no. we have a factory for you to go work in. So off to the state school, go your preschool kids. We will indoctrinate them for you. We're not going to allow you the option of staying home with them. It's equal obligation of all the work.

As a result, there were vast differences in childcare in these systems and rates of work because this was not, in that way, they were very more gender equal. in terms of drafting everyone into this industrial army. It didn't matter if you were male, female, they were going to draft you and you're going to be put into work, into the system.

Your work belonged to the state, not to your individual choice. There's where they're combining in number nine, agricultural and manufacturing systems together. Again, we're trying to spread people equally over the geography.

And the last one there, free education of all children in public schools, private ones are banned. You can only do public schools. You can only have people being taught by people the government hires to teach them. That way they get the story that we're all in this for the good of the country, the country itself, the government of the country is the God to be worshiped. And then we're going to combine education with industrial production.

All right. Well, it's, it's not. So in farce, that's actually the words used in the communist manifesto.

All right. So many of you might think, be thinking, all right, well, on the one hand, this collectivism sounds pretty good. I don't mind sharing, certainly with my family, although even then it can get a little annoying.

If if there's a dinner and all the food is put out in the middle, sometimes you might think to yourself, I didn't get all the food I wanted. One of my siblings, if I had a sibling, eat food. quicker than I did and took the good, they took the good meat and maybe I wanted the drumstick and they routinely were too quick for me and kept taking the drumstick, even though that's what I wanted.

They didn't want to share. And so, you know, maybe you have your own personal story of how even living in a, in a family structure is how the sharing got a little bit of a problem. Oh, I had to share a bathroom and the other person would use all the hot water.

And this is just a, just a problem. So whether it's your family, whether it's your dorm, situation, whoever you're sharing with, sharing can be hard. It does have some limits, even in a voluntary sense.

But in an involuntary sense, it becomes even more grating on people. You say, well, this communism thing, maybe that's too far and extreme, forcing people into communes, not asking them if they care about others around them, just forcing them to work in certain ways and expropriating their incomes. You might think to yourself, I mean...

How did that really vary different, very much different from feudalism, when the lords said that you had to work a certain plot of land and give the fruits of your labor to the lord? Well, the lord's small elm. Well, there is this sense in which there's either a system based on force or voluntary exchange. And if you're the one being forced, it really doesn't matter to you who's doing the forcing.

All right, what about this democratic socialism? You say, all right, well, I like this idea of sharing at the family level, maybe communism's a bridge too far, where we're shooting people when they try to flee, where they're forced to do things against their will, forced to believe things against their will. So what about this democratic socialism?

So what is that? It's been in the news recently. Well, it's a socialist economy. So we're going to start then with the definition of that socialism stuff.

It's where the government owns the means of production. So the government owns, again, the natural resources, the land, owns the machines, tools, and factories, and owns your labor. But rather than have some dictator, a Stalin, a Mao Zedong, a Fidel Castro, just dictate where you got to work, which coal mine you got to do your time in, we'll have some elections. We'll vote.

on what needs to be produced and how to produce it and who gets it. And whoever, you know, whatever ideas win the popular votes, that's what we'll decide to do collectively. Now, so I guess if there's a democratic system and everyone else votes for me to go down to the coal mine, well, it's democracy.

So I don't want to go to the coal mine, but I have to now. And so I agree that if everyone else votes me into a coal mine, I have to go work for them in a coal mine. As you might imagine.

In a system where it was 50% plus one makes a decision, minority interests tend to be ignored. So, for instance. you could have in a democratic socialist society, a majority ethnic population and a minority ethnic population. If you put everything to a vote and the majority ethnic population says, yes, we shall put all the minority ethnic workers into the least favorable jobs. We're going to make them clean toilets.

We'll make them go to coal mines. We're going to put that on you. And the ethnic minority says, hey, wait a second, you're picking on us. This isn't fair. We don't want to do this.

We're taking the low end jobs all the time. And the majority says, oh, we had a vote. It's democracy. So as long as we voted on it, it's perfectly moral. I mean, you have to decide yourself what becomes moral just because more people vote for it.

uh comes to you uh in a dark alley and there's two of them and one of you uh and they beat you up and take your stuff you might cry foul and you say where were the police uh uh they've stolen my stuff but if the two of them come into the dark alley with you and say hey let's have a vote who here wants to take uh your stuff and give it to us and you of course vote no and the other two vote yes and they say well we voted it was a democracy um Majority rules. Two of us, only one of you, you are morally obligated to hand all of your stuff over to us. You decide whether or not that becomes moral at that point. It's just because other people in mass decided they want your stuff, one of the fruits of your labor, that they are allowed to do that.

It doesn't matter if there's freedom of entry and exit into the system. Can you leave and take your person and your property with you if you don't like how they're ruling? Or are they going to, again, confiscate?

the property of all immigrants and rebels. Do you not have a way out of the system? So this is one of the problems, of course, with any type of democratic system is who's going to look out for the minority interests.

And minority can mean a lot of things. It could mean an ethnicity, it could be a gender, it could be a religious belief. Insert your particular minority here. People. Imagine a democracy, democratic socialism, when we say, oh, you know, all left-handed people get half the amount of stuff that all the right-handed people do.

Why? Because, well, right-handed people are greater in number. See, under the communist system, the idea was, well, the majority should just go kill the minority, take their stuff.

Here, it's, well, you don't have to kill the minority. You just raise hands and say, hey, we want their stuff. Oh, majority wins. We're taking your stuff. And if you don't like it, we'll have a military and a police force funded by the government to.

We'll kill you if necessary. Under the democratic socialism, the idea of how this would work would be that you would have elections, you would vote for leaders who would then make the economic decisions of what to produce, how to produce, and who gets stuff for the masses. So they would centralize economic decision making. Again, you wouldn't be in charge of deciding where you worked or… what kind of products you made because you wouldn't be owning any capital. Your part in this is voting.

And once you vote, the elected officials tell you what to do. It's a very top-down economic system. So the downside is if you don't have control over yourself, you don't have the opportunity to go seek out and engage in wealth-creating, mutually beneficial trades. So an example of democratic socialism would be Venezuela until their leader decided the democratic part was just nonsense and imposed himself as a dictator, got rid of fair and free elections. Once you start rigging all the elections, it's really difficult to call you a democratic socialist country anymore.

If you want to tune in on how that went, Venezuela has had more than four million people flee. Their economy is in free fall. They've now started printing a million Bolivar banknotes. It's worth about 50 cents at the time of this recording.

They have completely imploded their economy. And it's now a dictatorship to move. All right, so what's the point of this collectivism stuff? Well, we do have this internal sense, many of us do, to live in community and to live beyond ourselves, to work. for the good of others.

Again, families are often structured this way, but cooperative sharing can be... you know, a bit of an antidote for competition. It's not all about I win, you lose.

Maybe it's about, well, what can we do together to benefit you and me and society generally? One of the articles we're reading in this section is from Wendell Berry, a poet laureate from Kentucky, and he often laments this idea of competition. Hey, we shouldn't compete in anything.

There shouldn't be ever winners and losers. We should just all hang out together and cooperate on everything. So we should buy things from our local community.

Don't buy things from the best things, products at the cheapest prices. Just buy stuff from the people closest to you because you care about them, would be his argument. It's not about gaining more access to meeting your needs and wants. He thinks that the need and want that you need. the most and should value the most is just living in community with those closest to you.

Well, we had some arguments during the readings for this section on why socialism would be preferred and here are a couple of the highlights. So capitalism or free enterprise, they say, lacks order. It's anarchical. Well, that's true. There's no planning, central planning in a free enterprise system.

Individuals make their own decisions. They're free to change their mind. New products come in.

They put old products out of business. There is freedom of entry into the marketplace. Just because your company exists now does not mean it will exist later. So it is chaotic. It's that creative destruction aspect.

New companies come in because people change their tastes and preferences. New products aren't. And so some say, well, that's just too much change.

I want everything to stay the same. one generation to the next. I want the same products produced by the same people in the same way from generation to generation. I don't want there to be economic growth. I want the same thing to happen all the time because then there's no order to it.

One of the arguments that were made in the articles is that free enterprise or capitalism is immoral. If you're basing things on individual self-interest, the People who defend free enterprise say, oh, it's enlightened self-interest. And those who say, no, no, this free enterprise is bad, say, no, it's not enlightened self-interest. It's based upon greed. And people saying, just what's in it for me?

That's an inherently immoral attitude to take. You should never think about yourself. You should always be putting others ahead of you.

There's this idea in the literature that says, hey, one of the reasons we should pursue socialism is it guarantees. equality of outcome. And we're not going to treat everyone the same, right? If you're going to take from those according to their ability and give to those according to their need, you're not treating people equally, but you're trying to guarantee some equality of outcome. Everybody gets the same result regardless of what they put into the system.

And so maybe that's attractive to some people. They say, hey, I didn't really want to put a lot into the system anyway, but I want the same amount as everyone else. And you might like that.

No winners and losers. Everyone is in the same vote. Preferences are determined electorally if it's democratic socialism, at least that's the idea, that you elect politicians and then they, in a sense, impose the will of the people on the rest of the people who didn't vote for them.

The use of force is necessary to get people to cooperate is why some would advocate socialism. that people are too selfish. And so if you just leave them up to themselves, they'll continue to engage in this immoral, selfish behavior. So we need to force them to think about the good of the collective.

So there are some interesting arguments there, that socialism is more scientific. It's based on order. We're going to centrally plan and collect all this data, and the government will know what's best to produce and how to produce and who gets it.

And we're not going to let individuals... muck this up by going off on tangents, producing goods that are not needed, or getting people to buy things that really aren't going to improve their lives. So that's what this module in the course is going to be about. We're going to talk about different variants of collectivism.

Transcript for:Understanding Collectivism and Its Impacts

Transcript for:
Understanding Collectivism and Its Impacts