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Matt Debates Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute About Welfare

🕑 Added 2024-03-22 20:55:24 +0000 UTC

Comments

Bryan Melcher

Gg matt. "There is something wrong with that measure. I'll have to think about it. But there is something wrong with that..."

Colin Wick

Low key embarrassing for this dude

J P 3

Good debate/discussion. Some intern at the Ayn Rand Institute is probably going to get fired for scheduling the debate, but overall a civil discussion.

Ariel Cruz

I forgot how bad Brook is at waiting his turn to speak and listening to what is being said to him. 34 minutes in and it's very satisfying to hear Matt casually lapping this ghoul.

Patrick

The guy wants charities to take care of the poor and not the government. But how many charities would exist without the donations to them being a tax deduction?

kyle minton

I always think the "you own the property because you produced something with it" is funny because I just like...bought my house. I didn't cultivate or produce shit.

David Woodward

I’d be curious to hear a rebuttal to his point about Israel and the UK. I don’t know enough about either to know where to start.

Eric Dymond

Yeah that doesn't sound believable at all. US tax rates are much lower than all but a handful other countries. The top marginal tax rate is only 37%, sales taxes top out around 8% and property taxes are usually something like 1-2% of assessed value. He's some sort of hedge fund guy so presumably he's mostly taxed at the capital gains rate of 20%.

Julia

yeah when he summed it up at the end I was a little surprised that the notion of surplus hadn’t come up earlier

Julia

the confusion of average life expectancy with “everyone died at 60” alone made me angry, I can’t imagine how having more knowledge would have made me feel haha

Tim Masterson

This was so enjoyable. Lots of laughs, like when Brook basically said it's OK for some people to die. Another good one was when Matt slipped in how Brook still needed time to figure out GDP per hour.

Joey Trimboli

It’s so funny how this guy keeps misunderstanding Matt to be advocating for religion or the church when it’s just being used as an example or whatever. Every single time this guy is like “well I’m an atheist and the church is bad” - ok dude we get it, very edgy, but you’re missing the point entirely.

Justine Henry

Matt (basically): "You're such a fantastic moron, it's terrifying." Gd I love a Matt smack down. I could listen to this all day.

Andrew

On the orange example, was also surprised you guys didn't get more into the fact that the landowner probably isn't the one picking and growing the oranges, and that the underpaid farmworkers who are probably aren't making a completely free decision.

Andrew

I feel like you should have hit him on a reverse conservatism argument -- as the socialist *you're* the one advocating for tried and tested ideas, while he's going for imaginary utopian fictions.

Eric Dymond

He's a hedge fund manager so he's already rich and is likely to stay that way. He can prioritize freedom or whatever because he will be largely unaffected by the outcome.

Sam Ozminkowski

Calling this Yaron fellow “baby-brained” would be an insult to babies

Joey Trimboli

Holy crap this guy can’t string a coherent thought together to save his life. The orange was mine because I declare it’s mine, therefore when you picked it up you used force.

Joey Trimboli

Dunno if I can make it through this. 2 minutes into Matt’s opponent’s opening statement and it’s the same question begging bullshit as ever: “welfare requires me to do something I don’t want to and the highest good is for me to do whatever I want therefore welfare is bad” blah blah

Marcy Snyder

Must say, this blew my mind too. I hadn’t heard anyone actually make that argument and kind of assumed most leftists I’d heard quoting it were forming straw man arguments. It was bananas hearing it articulated.

Nick Cee

"The whole economy is a government program" legendary

Johann Strottman

Lmao it’s like every time that dude opens his mouth, he steps on a land mine that blows up his whole argument.

Mr. Mike Man

MAWWAIGE

Murtaent

No, it's things like property tax and sales tax. He's not talking about just income taxes. He's saying he pays 50% of his income in taxes, which is believable for people in the US and Europe.

KMB24

I haven't looked in a while but I'm pretty sure the median effective tax rate in the US is 25%. I guess if you want to add healthcare costs and retirement savings with the argument the state should be paying those but isn't you could get to 50%. But Yarn is implying his income taxes paid / AGI is 50% which I just find very unlikely.

Murtaent

Think that's probably true. It's true, give or take, for most of the US. And most Europeans.

Dan

Still undefeated

KMB24

He's saying he pays a 50% effective tax rate? lol sure buddy. Sure.

KMB24

People should buy insurance again poverty has me holllllllering omg. Brain worms.

Eric Dymond

Isn't that just the israeli accent?

Matthew Lee

Absolutely +1 to everyone congratulating our King on yet another W. I did appreciate that this debate revealed another core difference to be valuing work or leisure. Yaron stated that he wants to continue to work forever whereas Matt clearly implied that 20 years of retirement should be considered normal, good, and something to be planned for. Yaron also stated that one of the good things about America is how much time people work compared to Matt's argument that Nordic wealth is in part demonstrated by the amount of paid leave they are entitled to. I feel like there could be rich veins of Bruenig args once you approach matters from the value of leisure.

Ryan Yates

At one point he said there's still so much unclaimed land. Dude, the map's filled in

Aaron Cohen

We need more Nozick-style libertarians, imo. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/479572.Anarchy_State_and_Utopia

Kiwi

Yeah but are there any?

Ben Trenary

He thought Morrisey’s song about Sunday was real

Ben Trenary

This ruled

Jim Macfarlane

Well he was a piece of work. I'm curious what this coastal town in England is: over here they're nearly all notorious for deprivation, since - now people go on holiday to Spain or wherever, and most other industries have not survived deindustrialization - they basically don't have economies at all. There's no social mobility at least in part because there's barely a capitalist class at all, beyond used car dealerships and shit like that. There are, of course, "true" free market societies, although most of us prefer to call it warlordism.

Cameron Obama

also love the randian mind wanting to claim the position as being the more non-normative choice. interesting way to handicap yourself for no reason.

Nigel C

https://www.youtube.com/live/FoAGhBeYjaA

Cameron Obama

yar dog gave up the game when he reached for the no existing counter factual argument. “no, empirical argument puts me at a disadvantage and my moral argument is that morality serves my desired system that i unfortunately cant test and refute all reasonable inferences towards”

Bourbachi

Everything Yaron said about human history and society was dead wrong and I was so mad I couldn't interrupt and correct him (got a couple degrees in anthropology, so it always enrages me when people just totally make up their own ideas about these things, lol). It was only through highly socialized labor and activity that humans accomplished nearly everything they have. If people were just producing to keep themselves, individually, alive, we wouldn't have had large scale migrations across the globe, for one thing. Mechanisms for redistribution are also a HALLMARK of human society. Grain storage (via the ancient states) and "the commons" are a couple key mechanisms. Also, private property really only emerged with the appearance of the state and actually corresponds with an INCREASE in violence.

Hampus Bystrom

This was painful. I'm already in agreement with Matt of course, but always try to be open to other perspectives. It's clear libertarianism is just completely incoherent. Start with the premise, every distribution I dislike is force and violence, then pretend it's an objective fact about the world.

JoinDSA B4thePodcastEnds

The part where it got embarrassing was when Matt was helping him with read the data correctly omg

JoinDSA B4thePodcastEnds

That shit sounds like something the dumbest an-com ever would say lol

JoinDSA B4thePodcastEnds

Wow I literally laughed out loud a few times from how badly Matt was embarrassing this guy. Great job.

iamonceagain

This guy talking about a free market in the first place is meaningless. As Matt pointed out, and as is borne out by the historical record, markets and the economy exist at the whim of the state. P.S. I love when Matt cites data and Brook just says “that’s not true” and you can just hear Matt sigh

Gina Calabrese

Matt doing the lord's work but this was very painful to listen to. I started to kinda feel bad for this guy, he is just incapable of thinking clearly and it's causing him to be evil

Burlington Vote Factory

I was kind of hoping for a wild tangent about how specifically Rand folks are also atheist

Molly

Wild to hear a libertarian bring up old people on ice floes *in moral defense* of libertarianism

Eric Dymond

Also a bunch of weird assertions about how there's anti-poverty insurance that does a better job than any government program. I assume it's one of those things that has a grain of truth but is wildly misrepresented.

Eric Dymond

The weirdest thing about his argument is that it keeps returning to the idea that you need all of your property to flourish and if you're deprived of any iota of property then you're not a fully actualized person.

Eric Dymond

He basically said it's ok because there's laws to deal with people abandoning property and apparently there's lots of free real estate in the US? I guess that assumes that in the objectivist future the government gives over all the national parks to whoever asks.

victor recabarren

good god this dude was embarrassing and painful to listen to. the classic matt args seem to hold up strong

haz

one time i saw a cat toy with a field mouse for like an hour before he got it and this is what that felt like

Jeffinternet

“There’s no scarcity” lol

Damian

This guys brain is hilarious

Rorbus Von Balzar

Only 25 minutes in, but I really want to know what Yaron has to say about people who buy property and don’t do anything with it. Happens all the time. Should they have to give it up?

alexanderhg1 .

Where can we find the video?

TS + KL

He's already at going to war. These people are insane. 😵‍💫

Cheetahforce

I'm 15 minutes in and cringing so hard. I've read a fair amount of objectivism and I think Brooks is doing a better job of representing the position than Rand. It's also impressive that someone can so smoothly, clearly and confidently be so narrow minded and obtuse.

Ronald Peabus

I'm watching the video and Matt miming grabbing and eating an ear of corn off Yaron's land while Yaron gets mad about it is the funniest shit I have ever seen. Thanks Matt

Ligma

I kept waiting for you to hit him with "actually its the capitalists who don't work"

Martin Ross

Stop! Stop! He’s already dead!

Michael Hoogenakker

The funny thing is, I had the same problem. From a very young age I used to roll my Rs. Do you know what happened to me? My public school provided a free speech pathologist to help me correct that problem. From 2nd to 5th grade I would go 1 hour a week (during recess) to Mr. Alberg’s office along with 2 other students to work on our speech impediments. And what was the result of all those speech correction exercises? I don’t have a speech impediment anymore! The welfare state provided yet another valuable service that charity or capitalism didn’t believe was “necessary”.

Aaron Cohen

Yaron had no idea what he was in for. Texas just giving away PhDs these days? Wild levels of incoherence from Brook, like he couldn't even follow what were the logical conclusions of his own arguments vs. Matt's. Yes Yaron, your argument is ridiculous -- glad you could see that when it's being recounted back to you. Matt lawyered him, wonked him, and philsophized his a**. Would be nice to hear Matt debate a coherent libertarian though.

Ben

The little inhale of excitement from Matt when yaron says the Nordics have less restrictive labor market policies

Ben

You wanna see a dead body?

Joseph Dixon

Great performance Matt, I used to want you to debate more but I realize you have already said a lot of your args on the podcast. I would like to see you debate someone like Shapiro or Jordan Peterson just because I would like to see them run into the Brunig Buzzsaw.

Uri Strauss

Unbelievable. YB: Countries with high welfare are poor. Look at Sweden - lower GDP than the united states! MB: the better measure is GDP per capital per hours worked. It’s higher in Sweden but they choose more leisure. YB: but look at their high unemployment! Sweden has a 7.3 rate! They want to work but they can’t! They don’t want to work because of welfare! MB: the better measure is the employment rate. Sweden’s is higher than the US. YB: that’s because they’re poor!

☃️

PPP stands for pinfinite patural pesources

Uri Strauss

I love that Yaron spent like 15 minutes basically saying that exploiting workers by not giving them property rights over what they produce is worse than violence. BTW his name is iambic.

Will Durant

It is so jarring to hear him move from being outraged by Matt dismissing the importance of the voluntariness of redistribution, to the question of natural resource ownership not being important because there is "infinite" land.

Eric Neal

I'm about to say something petty and ableist: How does one person develop this deep a vocabulary in english but not the ability to not say their Rs like a three-year-old?

Adrian

Here is the YouTube link as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoAGhBeYjaA I recommend skipping through the Rand guy's arguments because Matt does a good job of recapping his nonsense in one sentence when he starts his own arg.

Patrick

Matt - I don’t know how painful this was to participate in (though I could hear the moments of joy in your voice), but this is the content I’m here for. Great work

Murtaent

I'm glad there is tho... adult libertarians are fascinating

Noah French

There are infinite resources. There is infinite land.

Murtaent

You used land that you didn't produce and which you excluded me from.

alexanderhg1 .

I can only imagine the grin on Matt's face

alexanderhg1 .

25:20 YB: "There is [sic] an infinite amount of resources, natural resources, in the world. There's no..." MB: "INFINITE"

Eric Neal

This guy's disregard for how humans actually behave when given unlimited power and resources is staggering. Also, I've never tapped download faster on a podcast.

Justin Hubbard

~”I’ll take freedom over GDP growth” you can’t argue with someone who’s completely disinterested in outcomes! He’d rather stick to his first principles and have every human being die than to live somewhat adequately under any other system