I'm a bit disappointed. I thought this was going to be an awesome, eye-opening talk that would give me loads of material to wrestle with for weeks to come. Instead, the video can be responded to in pretty sure order, as follows:
Coercion
Any property law is coercion. To use a crude analogy, capitalism throws a toy between Timmy and Johnny and says, “That toy belongs to Johnny,so if Timmy touches it, I'm going to spank him,” and socialism says, “That toy doesn't belong to either of you, so if either of you act like it's yours-yours-all-yours, then you're going to get spanked.” Making it sound like either involves a freedom beyond social contract would be misleading. ANY society with a governing body that has any opinion whatsoever on who uses what when involves compulsion (even a supposedly “lasse faire” one; markets themselves are free, but property law of everything from hard property to debt and investments to friggin' thoughts and ideas come with an insane amount of restrictions that everyone has to play by).But even in an extreme form of anarchy (where there aren't even micro-social-structures) one might argue that there's an implicit coercion created by a society that doesn't “protect” freedoms.
His argument is potentially useful insofar as it tears down some idealist view that it's all roses and flowers and sharing is caring and all that, but that's a pretty goddamned limited “insofar as.” In Other words, he is correct to shoot down any sort of highfalutin rhetoric socialists tout, but to argue that socialism, specifically, is coercive heavily implies that socialism is especially coercive, which means his argument has done at least as much harm as good. It's not very difficult to include qualifiers like, “Of course, there's just as much coercion in capitalism, but this point goes to show that the socialist ideal is fundamentally flawed.”
“Capitalism harnesses energy to a social, usable end ... ”
His illustration of capitalism being a reward and punishment system for social utility and other systems being nothing but cronyism is at its very very best simplistic. Look, capitalism is very good at filling gaps in markets, so in these categories, it is excellent at driving innovation. Every monetizable idea will be created the fastest in capitalism, and a lot of monetizable ideas are helpful to society.How this logic somehow got turned into some sort of fundamental understanding of capitalism as an engine driving social utility is …just … what the fuck humans? Get your shit together.
(LivingSocial figured out how to more effectively connect consumers and producers in the IT age, and everyone ended up better off for it ...especially Groupon :P . While Amazon's initial innovation was an incredible boon for society, they now focus their efforts on figuring out how to be the only channel of distribution for pretty much motherfucking everything, and mostly just the shareholders of Amazon are better off for it.)
I think everyone who lives in a capitalist society will easily relate to the idea that there are the things you do to make money so that you can eat and live in a safe neighborhood, and then there is everything else you do with your life. The things people do at work is just about always of SOME value (and sometimes even very important), but the vast majority of the things that the vast majority of people can do with their lives that is of any value is done, literally, pro-bono, and thus doing things for the greater good is more-often-than-not discouraged by capitalism. Time is money and so people are very-close-to-directly-punished by wasting time stopping to help someone change a tire, spending time with their children, cooking homemade dinners, expressing non-sponsor friendly opinions on, creating things of niche interest, etc.
I don't just mean this anecdotally: not all actions that are good for society are monetizable and only monetizable ideas are rewarded in capitalism; this APODEICTICALLY means that capitalism doesn't harness the energy of shit to a social, usable end. The relationship between the two is arbitrary, at best; in the real world time, energy and talents spent making money, and time, energy and talents spent doing good for society are (much more often than not) a conflict of interest in capitalism.
This Isn't to argue that a pure socialist society effectively “harnesses energy to a social, usable end” (anything purely reliant on the public is probably going to be fatty and stuck-in-its-ways and corruptible, though it's also going to be very inclusive [everyone gets to be judged by a jury and everyone has jury duty]) or, indeed,that any other system I have off the top of my head effectively“harnesses energy to a social, usable end”; I would just fuckingtake that phrase out of my economic vocabulary. (See how easy it was to add a qualifier like that to the end of mypoint?)
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From that point on, it just kind of seems to be a lot of hand waving (literally) and hushing dissenters (literally). I'm not holding these against the guy;I'm just not sure there's a whole lot of substance worth covering.
I'm not really going to commit much to the Godwin's Law argument because I don't care. Godwin's isn't a hard fallacy or even a weak fallacy;it's just a comment on the rhetorical ickiness of comparing bad things to the worst thing to have ever happened. That ickiness applies here (IMHO, the bad part about Hitler wasn't so much that he marched under a red banner as it was that he killed 14 million people based on their race, religion and/or sexuality). But, again, Idon't care that much because it doesn't make anything he says wrong,and especially given his acknowledgement of invoking Godwin's, it doesn't even necessarily make him an ass, but it does mean that, if nothing else, we're wasting perfectly good time that could be spent serving our capitalist overlord--I mean, that could be spent discussing his lecture on arguing about Godwin's.
But clearly, this guy doesn't give two shits—[clears throat and puts on his stern poshness and posh sterniness persona that this guy uses throughout the video] nay, even just one shit!—about dealing in rhetorical ickiness. His reliance on rhetorical devices—I daresay—remind me of a certain Central European monocrat of the mid-19th century … haha obvi jk.
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