Jesus Christ.
Edit: The full debate is here. I highly recommend listening to it.
Yaron Brook is the chair of the Ayn Rand Institute - he's very well spoken, has very good debate skills, and is highly intelligent. I can easily see how he would run circles around most people. But this is where Sam Seder's brilliance shines through. He is also well spoken, has good debate skills, and is intelligent. He was able to counter each point Brook made and further the conversation till the natural end.
The debate was civil and w/o any insults while still being challenging and intellectually stimulating. So completely unlike the usual online debate-bros. One of the things I tried to do while listening was pause it and try to form a counter to Brook on my own w/o listening to what Seder said. I needed to take far more time than Sam did and my answers were nowhere near as precise or well-articulated or counterattacking.
First of all, Sam Seder, lib as he may be, has an incredibly patient, gentle soul and he has such a great ability to get libertarians to admit the core of their ideology.
Secondly, how would anyone have time to do anything in Rand guy's free market universe? I'd have to hire my own private inspectors to constantly monitor where I live, inspect my food for poisons, monitor the weather for me, and basically keep me informed of all possible things in the universe at all times.
And all those inspectors would also need their own inspectors
just subscribe to my totally legit, non astroturfed review magazine and i'll let you know if theyre any good
The libertarians inability to admit the state's role in skill formation and cost minimization for capitalist firms is probably the second-biggest contradiction in their fantastical ideology
I genuinely feel like a lot of their ideological shortcomings are a byproduct of reflecting the concerns of early American petite bourgeois settlers rather than the actual class interests of modern bourgeoisie. They only see society in terms of rapid formation of small businesses from readily accessible resources and land. It's also part of the reason for why modern libertarians don't seem to catch on to any modern social necessities like public infrastructure, education, or healthcare. In their minds it's still the late 18th century and there's a vast amount of land to plunder and everything an individual needs to survive is still there. Just go out west and build your own log cabin in the woods and start a fur trapping business. So they can only view poverty in terms of either state interference or a failure of personal responsibility to access these infinite resources.
Is the largest contradiction all the normal capitalist profit motive stuff?
Kinda, their biggest contradiction is their delusion that states aren't necessary to create and maintain complex markets, for them civil governance and contract law just pops out of the frontier fully formed and somehow without the coercion of state violence, they mistake fantasy world-building for history and political theory
Sam is not a bad guy at all and I have a lot of admiration for him to be able to do this debate stuff. I would just get mad and leave making myself look like an ass.
But if we let the government do it, that would be inefficient!
That moment when Sam just sits back and lets the guy keep talking because the shit he's saying is patently ridiculous :chefs-kiss:
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You would most likely be someone else's private inspector. That would be the majority of your waking hours.