My very rough notes here.
This video available at Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.
I was honestly a little worried from some of the talk I had heard about the most recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, with Jordan Peterson.
I sat down and watched the whole thing, and ended up being pleasantly surprised.
Chapter 13 is titled “The Collectivist Wages System” and it is a tissue of faulty comparisons, bad conclusions stapled to obsolete theories, and nonsensical figures attached to shifting goalposts.
Chapter 12 is supposed to be Kropotkin’s answers to objections, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) he only goes after a few cursory criticisms and even his answers to those are seriously flawed.
Full show notes here.
Practically every argument Kropotkin makes is even better satisfied by private property, free markets, and voluntary exchange.
There are even some terrifying positions he takes that basically confirm that his “voluntary associations” are simply the coercive state with a prettier name. They have the potential to be even more tyrannical than the most callous private employer.
This video available on Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.
Intro quote is from “Kropotkin’s Ethics and the Public Good,” by Williamson M. Evers:
https://mises.org/journal-libertarian-studies/kropotkins-ethics-and-publc-good
Article reference:
“Sweatshops: A Way Out of Poverty,” an interview with Benjamin Powell
https://mises.org/mises-daily/sweatshops-way-out-poverty
Intro music edited from a piece by Music for Video, courtesy Pixabay:
https://pixabay.com/users/music_for_video-22579021/
A man was walking through a lonely forest one day, when he saw a tiny sapling. “This sapling,” he said, “will someday become a great bush that will grow many delicious berries. Perhaps I should try to make sure it survives.”
More bizarre economic ignorance from Kropotkin in these two chapters, which demonstrate his inability to comprehend the concept of trade-offs–specifically in labor comfort and safety and in the quality and/or durability of capital goods.
Full show notes here.
Short video today because where I really want you to go is over to the Mises Institute’s channel and check out these two:
We’re speedrunning these chapters of Kropotkin’s book because they’re basically repetitions of the same mistakes and fallacies again and again, only applied to different types of goods.
Full show notes here.
Watch the JRE episode with Dave Smith and Douglas Murray here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah6kirkSwTg
In this video, using that episode as a springboard, I talk a little about the idea of expertise, what it means in the best cases, how it is misused in the worst cases, and how expertise differs from credentials.
I also cover a brief thought experiment about a body of experts evaluating a specific proposition, and how such a situation might go down…
Chapter 4 is titled “Expropriation,” and (perhaps unsurprisingly) it is another chapter of assertions not backed up by significant arguments.
Full show notes available here.
Chapter 3 of the book is titled “Anarcho-Communism,” so I was expecting to finally get Kropotkin’s great argument for how to establish communes without a state apparatus forming.
What I got was a series of weird historical cherry-picking and declarations pretending to be arguments.
Detailed notes available here.