Gene Epstein, founder of the Soho Forum and former economics editor at Barron’s, joins to discuss the intense intellectual battles shaping the future of economics. Gene dives deep into the challenges of hosting debates with some of the most prominent figures in the libertarian and progressive spheres.
From the complexities of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to the flaws of socialism versus capitalism, Gene shares his thoughts on how these ideas continue to evolve and impact our world.
This episode explores the ideological struggles, the intricacies of high-stakes debates, and the principles that drive Gene’s unwavering commitment to free market principles.
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Additional Resources
Earn a yield on gold, paid in gold
Keith Weiner’s debate at the Soho Forum
Transcript
Ben Nadelstein:
Welcome back to the Gold Exchange podcast. My name is Ben Nadelstein. I’m joined by our good friend, Gene Epstein. For those who don’t know, Gene Epstein is the founder, director, and moderator of the Soho Forum, and also the former economics and books editor at Baron’s. Gene, welcome to the podcast.
Gene Epstein:
Thank you very much. I should, of course, point out that while, of course, most of the world knows, unless you’ve been sitting under a rock, that the Soho Forum It was a monthly debate series that meets live in front of a live audience. We’ve been doing monthly debates since September of 2016. In Lowe Manhattan, usually a couple of times we went up to a larger theater when we had debaters who would retract a huge audience, but they usually We were downtown. During the lockdowns, we did have to go on Zoom for 11 months. I got Zoom fatigue. I couldn’t take it. I like debates. That’s my niche. I do one-on-one debates, which I believe in. I think two versus two. Generally, there’s too many sound bites. The debaters aren’t really coordinated. And of course, I had the honor of hosting Keith Wiener whom you may have heard of, and had a debate on gold versus crypto, and that was at the Mises Institute. We took the show on the road occasionally. That was at the Mises Institute, and that was three years ago to the month, July of 2022. I know that Keith had dinner with Jeff Deist afterwards, and that probably led to Jeff Deist joining Monetary Metals.
So I played a key role in the creation of so many things, including Jeff Deist joining Monetary Metals. I just wanted to elaborate on that, and you take it from there. Go ahead.
Ben Nadelstein:
Yeah, we owe you a debt of gratitude for sure. For those who have not seen the Soho Forum, it’s really fun. These debate topics, obviously, they are of interest to libertarians, but they really just span the entire spectrum, from intellectual property, to open borders, to really guns. Anything that you can think of, they’ve probably debated it. So I want to pull back the curtain a little bit on the Soho Forum, and the man behind the Soho Forum. So first of all, when you go into finding these resolutions and finding these debaters, how difficult is it to manage these people or their last minute dropouts? Is it harder to get some people than others? We’ve noticed that for some podcast, it’s very hard to get people on the right to join, and on others, it’s very difficult to get people from the left to join. From your experience at the Soho Forum, what’s it been like behind the scenes, behind the curtain, getting these different debaters?
Gene Epstein:
Well, the paramount and overwhelming difficulty that I have had is to get progressives to come. They’ve appropriated every nice word. They don’t really stand for progress, but they do call themselves progressives, and you know what I mean. And the Liberals, these prominent or even not so prominent types, they don’t want to have to walk into the lion’s den. This is not going to be an ask-kissing interview. This is going to be stress. And I’ve done 12 debates myself at the Soul Forum. I prepare very assiduously, and I always experience some stress. You’re not in front of an audience that’s pulling for you. Half the audience might have their knives out for you, and you’ve got somebody else on the stage who’s contradicting you. And these people usually have too much to lose, and so they frequently say no to my invitations. So that’s my primary headache, getting progressives to come and debate a libertarian. And of course, many of my debates have been like that. And what that has forced me to do in one case, and this is what I do, which you might find rather startling, is that our base rate is now $2,500 to appear.
And for some professors, that’s a lot. Normal professors. But you are traveling frequently. I’ve I brought in somebody in from London. I want to get the best I can, and so I will pay travel expenses. I don’t want to feel that financial constraint. But I offered, in a couple of cases, I said to a left winger, $2,500 to a peer, plus expenses, of course. Hotel. We put you up for a couple of nights before the debate so that you’re in a jet lag. And then I get a no. I’m not interested debating. But then the next thing I do, which you might regard as pretty stupid for a Jewish guy, is that I then say, Would you do it for 12,500? And why is that stupid? Well, you might say, I started at 2,500 and now offering 12,500. And not infrequently, the left wingers who say they don’t do debates suddenly say yes when I zap them with that amount of money. And I find that startling them with that generosity, probably helps, staggers them. Whoever heard of my getting paid that much money. But in addition to that, I don’t want them to think that I’m auctioning them off like they’re meat.
I don’t want have to say, Okay, how about 3,500? All right, 4,500. All right, 3,500. And then they might start feeling that I’m manipulating them and then I’m auctioning them and then I’m engaging in low-level capitalist auctioneering tactics. And so I just jump to that high figure, 10,000 or 12,500, and I usually get them to come. So what that generally means is that the libertarians that I invite, the free market people, get paid a lot less than the progressives do. But what can I do?
Of course, I guess you could say, What the hell are you doing? Enriching the progressives? Sending so much damn good money? God, not good money. Of course, it’s shitcoin, it’s dollars. To these people. So that’s what I frequently do. There’s another debater who’s very debater-shy. I’m paying him $15,000. He’s pretty well known and pretty much of a good draw, and he somehow rather was allergic to debating. I know a lot of people are. Look, there’s a lot of things you can say against the idea of debating, and I agree with every one of them. But the other thing I do with my format is because it’s one versus one, I have each debater getting a chance to speak for at least 15 minutes, which is actually a short speech. But if you listen to most of the debates that I put out on podcast and elsewhere, each debater gets 10 minutes at most, usually six minutes. The moderator takes over. Often it’s unstructured. I structure 15 minutes, 15 minutes, 5, 5. Then I have a Q&A, which is unstructured. But I I imposed a lot of structure. There are so many debates that you can hear on podcast where you get a lot of, I didn’t interrupt you, so why are you interrupting me?
It turns into a disorganized situation. Now, with respect to thinking of topics, I actually have debates already scheduled through November. I need to be about at least three months ahead because we’re talking about getting people with busy schedules to plan in advance to come to New York, to set aside the time. That’s the headache of making it, of doing it in front of a live audience. But I think that we have 11,000 subscribers, and I think that we built our audience partly because a one-on-one debate on a stage is a a theatrical experience. It’s like when Dave Smith talks about debates, he inadvertently falls into pugilistic metaphors. He landed a blow that time, but then the other guy landed another blow. It’s like prize fighters. In a way, of course, you might say that it is. But of course, I don’t allow character assessment The only time there was ever character assassination when I didn’t intervene was when Scott Horton debated William Crystal. William Crystal, not only was the father of Conservatives. He really was very directly involved in some of America’s… I’ll speak in delicate terms, some of America’s major interventions. And so Scott said that you basically acted like a war criminal, and that was really not something that I should normally permit.
I didn’t do anything about it. The funny thing, I don’t know if you know Scott Horton, but he’s a brilliant eccentric. I think I think his books are brilliant. But afterwards, he told me this. He told me Bill Crystal had to make a plane, so he’s shooting up the aisle. And Scott follows him up the aisle and says to him, Let’s stay in touch. And Crystal turns around and says, I don’t want to have anything to do with you ever again. And Scott said, That’s what he actually said to me. Can you imagine that that’s what he said to me? And I said to Scott, You called him a war criminal on stage. What do you expect the guy to say? We’re talking about brilliant autistic people sometimes who miss certain obvious things like Scott does. But Scott, again, writes brilliant books, although I think he can improve as a debater. I’m digressing. The other part of it is that, again, I get people who just don’t like the pressure of debating. There are people who will, of course, say that a debate is… I always have a declarative resolution Yes. And then I always do Oxford style voting.
Oxford style voting has been criticized. And of course, I share the criticism in this. At Oxford, you would vote yes, no, or undecided on the resolution before the debate begins. And then you vote yes, no, undecided after the debate ends. And of course, the initial vote is like the control. And you win to the extent that you move the vote in your favor. Now, I admit that some people might game the system, game it by voting against the person they like and then for him. But the gaming tends to balance out. I admit that it’s really just a sample. I personally believe that unless you win by at least a 5 percentage point, we do it in percentages. We have a program that is strict in rejecting you. If you voted the first time, but you didn’t vote the second time, your vote doesn’t count. If you voted the second time, but not the first time, your vote doesn’t count. So we have uniform denominators of whoever voted both times And then whoever moves the needle in percentage terms wins. I’ll tell you, I guess another thing that’s of interest is that there are those who have told me that research has shown that those who started in the basement, like if you start with 12 % of the vote versus somebody who starts with 52 % of the vote, you have an inherent advantage because you have more potential upside.
I have looked at our… The last time we looked was when we had about 80 to 90 debates, and I found no such pattern with our debates. I found that people who began with 40 to 50 to 60 % of the vote had just as much chance of picking up more votes as those who started in the basement. So I didn’t find that bias. But But I will say only that the voting, it gives a little drama to the evening, a little bit of climax to the battle. And I award the so platform, Tootsie Roll, to the winner, just to show that it’s all a little bit of a joke because, again, it’s a sample of a sample. About half the audience even bothers to vote. And Of course, some of them are gaming a little bit. So there’s a sampling error in the voting, and I don’t think it’s ever decisive, the vote. It’s really, what did you learn from the exchange? Even if your mind wasn’t changed, did you at least walk away with a deeper appreciation for the viewpoint that you disagree with? The other thing is this about debate There are those who have the impression that since we get a lot of undecideds, a huge number of undecideds initially, yes, no, undecided, there are those who think that there must be a lot of open-minded people in this world.
But really, I think that what actually happens is that even if you lean strongly in one direction or another, even strongly in one direction or another, You might just, in any case, vote undecided because you’re going to say, Hey, look, let them convince me. I’m not going to take a position yet. My point is that if you were asked by a pollster what you think, then you’ll probably give an opinion. But a lot of people who might lean in one direction or another will vote undecided, partly because there’s an ambiguity in the voting as well. Are you voting for the person who convinced you, or are you voting for the person who did the best job of defending his or her point of view? And the two aren’t always the same. And I don’t even bother to explain that. Only because the Oxford style voting is just a way, a game to give the evening a little bit of a climax, a little bit of a And usually, I agree with the way the boat swung. About one-third of our wins have been with a 5 % range. In other words, you might have picked up 15 points, and your opponent might have picked up 11 points.
So you beat that opponent by four points. I regard that as within the range of statistical error. Two-thirds of them, the wins are 10 percentage points or greater, and they tend to be a little bit more decisive.
Again, it’s the progressives who get paid the most, the most difficult people for me to get to come. There are people who fear debates, and I heartily agree with anyone that debating is my niche. I think I do it better than others because I have a resolution. I have it one-on-one. I have it structured. Each debater gets plenty of opportunity to go into the nuances of his or her position. But I still love interviews and symposium and reading articles. It’s not the only way to go. It’s just one way to present a different side of a point of view. And also, look, I know of debating societies where they don’t even have the debaters vet the resolution. I sometimes have gone through days of back and forth negotiation because they’re negotiating the wording of the resolution.
Each side has got to sign off on the wording of the resolution. And One of the tactics I occasionally use is when to reach an impasse, I find that after four iterations, they still can’t agree on the wording, then I usually switch it and say, Let’s shift gears. Instead of you taking the affirmative, you take the negative, and the other side will take the affirmative, and let’s see if we can find some wording. Usually, that helps to do it. The other thing that has bothered me in particular, that has to do with debating capitalism versus socialism. There are so many debates that put capitalism on trial. I’ve never seen them. Capitalism is an exploitative system, or capitalism is a beneficial system, or capitalism is this, and capitalism is that. And then I’ve gone to these debates. They define capitalism, and then they put capitalism capitalism on trial. Now, I imagine you might understand the problem with that. I have done three debates on capitalism, but in all cases, it’s capitalism versus socialism. In other words, if you’re going to compare certainly the very, very flawed capitalist system we have today, I would still say I call it crony capitalism to a great extent, shorthand for capitalism.
There’s so many distortions in our current capitalist system. However, even ideally, human nature being what it is, capitalism is not going to bring heaven on Earth. It will have many flaws, injustices. There will always be shysters, scam artists. There’ll always be problems. And so if you put capitalism on trial, against some ideal standard, then you’re getting nowhere. And yet it’s done over and over again. You know the quote from Joseph Schumpeter, who was a flawed thinker, but he wrote, Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They’re going to pass it No matter what defense they hear, the only success Victoria’s defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment. You’ll hate capitalism. But again, how else can we organize the economy? That’s what’s crucial. But I would sit there. I went to a debate where somebody raised a question about socialism, and the moderator, I can name names, but I really shouldn’t, the moderator said, Oh, no, no, no. Question is inadmissible. We’re not talking about socialism this evening. We’re talking about capitalism, only capitalism. And obviously, if you only talk about capitalism, you can emphasize the flaws of capitalism, even in its most ideal form.
And so that was one of the things that motivated me to start my own debate. Society because I’ve done three debates. That’s the one that you and I were talking about earlier. I debated the Marxist Richard Wolf, and it’s exceeded eight million YouTube views. I had two other debates with Socialists, Ben Burgess and Bhaskar Sunkar, who were actually fairly prominent, but those debates got 100,000 a piece, a little over 100,000. But it must have something to do with the celebrity of Richard Wolf, that this thing keeps climbing. It broke 8 million a few weeks ago, and it added another 26,000 just over the last couple of weeks. So it keeps climbing. I don’t know. I have the impression maybe Vladimir Putin keeps watching it and recommending it to his countrymen. I don’t know where those 8 million viewers are coming from, but I’m certainly quite pleased. When I debated Bhaskar Sunkar, I lost my temper with him, even though a lot of people thought that was great that I yelled at him. A lot of people thought it was dumb for me to yell at him, and I agree with them. But with Richard Wolf, I kept my cool, and I think I put my case over very clearly.
And of course, the major point that we, capitalists, make about worker ownership and control is that capitalism consists of private ownership of the means of production, full stop. It doesn’t say… Protected by law. It doesn’t say who is going to own the means of production. If the workers… There are worker co-ops. There’s a worker co-op that they keep touting in Spain called Mondragon. There’s nothing that says that workers can’t be the capitalists who own the means of production. That’s perfectly feasible and also So, of course, it’s perfectly achievable because as I emphasize, the labor unions have trillions of dollars of assets. Individuals have trillions of wealth in their houses. Consumers spending on the part of the lower 90% accounts for easily about two-thirds or more of all consumer spending, so they could buy from co-ops. And they keep touting Mondragon in Spain, that was started in the 1950s in a much poorer capitalist country. So Mondragon, the example that they keep using, and I’m not even sure it’s such a paradigm, paragon of worker ownership, but even assuming it is, that’s in a capitalist country. But we have yet to see a Mondragon formed in this country.
The other part of it, by the way, is that they all would impress reason, and that includes Richard Wolf, Ben Burgess, Bhaskar, if you’re a capitalist running a conventionally structured firm, even if the workers voluntarily want to work for you on a salary, You’ve committed a crime. And if you keep at it, they’ll put you on warning, but you could end up in prison. That’s how much they trust. I asked Ben Burgess, the one I said, You want to put them in prison? What are you afraid of? If this is such a hard thing… And of course, they want government subsidies to finance this worker ownership. And I said, Well, that’s the tragedy of socialism. Always the reform comes from above and never from below. The Marxist script keeps getting violated. It always comes from above, from a coup. Never never from the people themselves. I’ve talked enough. What’s your next question?
Ben Nadelstein:
I have a series of lightning round questions, of rapid fire question.
Gene Epstein:
Oh, so I can finally not be so damn verbose.
Ben Nadelstein:
No, not at all. But obviously, you have all these different views, and you’ve seen all these different debates, and I want to get your take. First of all, who is on your list of dream debaters to get, past or present? Who’s someone you wish you could host at the Soho Forum?
Gene Epstein:
Well, let’s see. I’ve had a number of people. Well, I’d like to get Donald Trump, and I Let’s see who else. I’d like to get Bill Kristol back, but he came in. He really surprised me. He charged me only $2,500, which was funny. That’s the other thing. The neocons walk in. They too think they’re walking into the lion’s den. Let’s see. I’d like to I’d like to get Vladimir Putin. And a lot of those prominent guys I’d like to get. Who else? I’m getting a little Prior to the Socialist, I did three Socialist debates, so I would like to get the democratically nominated mayor in New York City, Mamdani, to debate as well. But I’ve been told that given the legal limitations, because I’m part of reason, if I get politician, I have to get all the other politicians to come as well. Curtis Sliwa. So unfortunately, I can’t get him to defend his viewpoint. I’d like to get Nancy Pelosi I’d like to get AOC. I’d like to get… What am I doing? I’m listening a lot of loudmouth foules who are quite prominent, who get a lot attention. I guess I would like to be able to expose them on the debate stage in a one-on-one debate.
I guess that It’s pretty much it. Karl Marx is dead, so I can’t get him.
Ben Nadelstein:
Okay, next one for you. There’s this school of thought called Modern Monetary Theory. For those who haven’t heard, they’re quite the rage nowadays. Obviously, Honestly, I think on one side would be Bob Murphy debating, but who from the Modern Monetary Theory camp would you like to have on?
Gene Epstein:
Oh, I guess. Well, jokingly, I have two jokes. It really should be called modern monetary tyranny, or it should be called Moronic Monetary Theory. I don’t even know if I want… Bob Murphy is sometimes a little bit too popular. I might debate. Well, obviously, the person I would… I have hesitated to have a debate about MMT, and maybe that’s a fault, modern monetary theory, as it’s called, because they’re very slippery characters. I’ve heard the exchanges. You can’t quite pin them down with respect to what they really believe. But of course, it would be the woman whose name escapes me who wrote the best selling book.
Ben Nadelstein:
Stephanie Kelton.
Gene Epstein:
Yes, Stephanie Kelton. Yeah. But there’s an analogy, I guess, where they’re basically shadows on the wall. They’ll concede one point, and then they’ll basically jump to another point. It’s a little bit like punching a pillow debating these people. But basically, you could just summarize it simply in a tweet, as I have. It’s just that they want the government spending to be run by the printing press. We don’t need taxes. They’re right. The government can simply print all the money it needs, and then I guess they’ll balk when it comes to it creating inflation. But clearly, that’s why it’s modern monetary tyranny. I suppose in a way, we’re on different wavelengths. Certainly, we don’t have anywhere near, and it’s almost inconceivable, that we really could have a government that’s answerable to the people. But I certainly think that to the extent that the government spends, it should come out of taxes and that people will at least feel the pinch, at least know that the government is spending their money. If the government wants to wage a war, it’ll just have to raise the money through higher taxes or through legitimate borrowing against future taxes. That’s at least a lot better than basically the modern monetary theory we have right now.
It would have been inconceivable for the lockdown to occur with tens of millions being put out of work, had the Federal Reserve not brought up the trillions of debt. All of that is very directly, empirically demonstrated through official numbers. The Federal Reserve increased its holdings of US Treasury debt by $2, $3 trillion, buying up all of that debt. And then so predictably, of course, we had price inflation. I better shut up now because the lightning is turning into too much sound. Let’s get to the next one. I have to cooperate with you with the lightning. Go ahead.
Ben Nadelstein:
For those who know about the socialist calculation debate, it was an argument between the camps of Mises and Hayek and the Austrians, and then Aba Lerner, Oskar Lange on the other side, saying basically on one side, Hey, we can have a centrally planned economy where we can move prices and change things all from one central location. Then the other argument saying, No, actually, prices are best done in a private property system where prices go from the bottom. So question for Gene Epstein, who do you think would be a better debate partner, Mises or Hayek, for the socialist calculation debate?
Gene Epstein:
Yeah, I guess they both had their different takes. I wanted to say, I’d say probably I do better than either of them, only because I know where the debate is at at the moment. The Socialists will say, as you know, I’ve encountered many of them, that they, too, believe in markets. And what they really mean by that is that they believe in consumer markets. And they just don’t believe in capital markets. And they think that there’s As long as you have a consumer market, a worker-owned company could go out of business. If it runs down inventory, then it will have to raise its price. They say, and of course, that was Lange. But the point is that what they don’t grasp, and I don’t remember Hayek or Mises really nailing this point directly, The point is that most market transactions do not consist of consumer transactions. Most market transactions are B2B. Most market transactions are investment in capital goods and the allocations, and of course, entrepreneurship, which takes place in the capital markets. That, they want to be government-controlled. And clearly, if that’s going to be the case, then they’ll have chaos. But the point is that they really…
I There are a couple of socialists who are apparently, Ben Burgess, they’re apparently planning a book which supposed to have been published this past year, but it hasn’t come out, solving the socialist calculation debate. And I think they We’re not going to commit the same error, which is to think that as long as you have markets in the consumer sector, then you have all the price signals that you need. But clearly, Clearly, you don’t know, other than through prices, what materials these consumer companies should be purchasing. You only know that through price signals. Of course, most especially, you don’t know whether one entrepreneur’s idea is going to be good or another entrepreneur’s idea is going to be bad. He needs the finance capital in order to get off the ground. And who is going to give it to them? Who’s going to judge the government? Well, they want each state to have a council of decision makers who will allocate the funds to bring out various goods and services. And obviously, if they don’t have prices, if it’s simply a political decision in the capital markets, the the advanced capital and the physical capital markets, then we’re clearly not going to have markets.
But it is amazing how they smugly say, we want markets also. That’s what you capitalists don’t understand. We want markets also. They want consumer markets. I was a little surprised. I did ask Baskar, “Can a company go out of business in your socialist economy?” Oh, yes. A company can go bankrupt, a consumer company can go out of business. But of course, a company that gets backing from the political process to manufacture certain capital goods, or of course, Obviously, those who put up the money to finance entrepreneurial activities, there is just completely arbitrary. There’ll be plenty of excuse to turn on new ideas because most new ideas won’t work out at all. I used the example. I said, Imagine Steve Jobs going before a committee to raise money for some of his crazy ideas. First of all, there’d be a lot of people who would say, What do you want to do? People aren’t going to buy watches anymore. They aren’t going to buy compasses. They aren’t going to buy navigators. You’re going to put all this into… You know how much you’re going to wreck in the the rest of the economy? And then how are people going to use this?
And of course, what they’re going to have on their side, of course, is that there’s always scarce resources. So they will have the excuse, Look, we don’t have the resources for this. Steve Jobs, with his charmless ways of talking, would clearly never have gotten his ideas off the ground. So anyway, I inject your question. Mises and Hayek would have been equally good. I could see there’s been a lot of criticism of Hayek emphasizing knowledge. I know that Hans Herman Hoppe has criticized him. I think Hayek pretty much got it right in that regard. Hayek, of course, as you know, Hayek was in a way a social Democrat. He wanted a great many activities to be financed by government. I defend Hayek by arguing that I don’t know. I think Hayek might have changed his mind by now. In other words, after what he died in 1990, after 35 years of seeing what government does with all those activities of schooling and health care, Hayek would have said, No, I was wrong about that. That’s probably what Hayek would say.
Ben Nadelstein:
You were I’m a former editor at Barons, so I have an inside baseball question for you, which is that, in the gold world, there’s a sentiment, or a market indicator, which is that when gold is on the cover of Barons, that means it’s time to sell, because people are now all talking about gold, meaning that the trade is basically over. Do you guys think about that at all in the newsroom, where it’s like, Oh, we’re getting to this now that it’s popular, or how does the news shape or create the demand or the idea for different asset classes and different trades?
Gene Epstein:
Well, what’s funny is that Barron’s… Two points to that. Number one, I actually took a back seat pretty much to discussing or writing in my column about the markets as such. I covered the economy, which very much included the labor markets, and said standard measures. I did occasional pieces, actually, about precious metals. I did editorials about precious metals, as a matter of fact, editorial pieces. So I was a little bit out of it. But actually, Barron’s fancied itself to be a kick-ass publication. It was often writing short-sale stories about different stocks, and often preaching, often predicting, doom and gloom in the economy. And so the old saying had been, When it makes the cover of the New York Times, it’s time to sell. Barons was read by relatively… It had a circulation of 500,000. So 500,000 people who just want to read about the market all the time and then who would tolerate me writing about the economy. What was it? Two-thirds of the readers have claimed that they read me regularly because they had spillover intellectual interest in the economy. As a whole. So Barons would not have considered itself in that category. I used to joke that now that if the bull market appears on the view on that television show, that’s what you know to sell because the New York Times is more sophisticated.
So Barons didn’t think of itself as that. You’re belittling Barons. I’m insulting, and I’m kidding. But no, Barons didn’t consider itself to be that naive about… And also was very much cognizant to the fact that if If something is really way off the charts on the upside, that’s really not the time to write about it. That’s when you might be interested in seeing if there’s any bearish prospects. You don’t write about a bull market that’s in mid-passage unless, of course, you’re going to claim it’s got a lot more upside. So we weren’t that naive. There’s only the New York Times or The View that would do that. My colleagues were pretty sophisticated about the markets. I think that’s a calumny about Barons that I’m happy to clear up. But I wanted to… So now the lightning round is over, I wanted to mention a few other things.
Ben Nadelstein:
Gene, I know our time is flying by. Let me get you one last question, which is, what’s a question I should be asking all future guests of the Gold Exchange podcast.
Gene Epstein:
Well, you see, some of the ones… Well, that segues into what I have talked about as being some of the fallacies. I’ll mention just one of them. I’ll go with them quickly. Libertarians like to say that they believe in equality of opportunity, but they don’t believe in equality of result. Do Do you see a distinction between the two? A quality of opportunity, but not a quality of result. And really, the problem with that is that if you don’t have a quality of result, then you’re not going to have a quality of opportunity because the results are going to be you might have rich parents who launch you and give you a greater opportunity to achieve something, and therefore The distinction between the quality of opportunity and the quality of result is really a false distinction. If you’re going to allow inequality of result, then you will have some inequality of opportunity. Another one has to do with, do you agree or disagree with Hayek in his book, The Mirage of Social Justice? Do you think that That in our society, those who do well, who make billions, are always doing good in the world? They’re getting their just price, they’re getting their just wage?
Or do you think that, obviously, People have a right to spend their money as they see fit. If McDonald’s wants to bring out a fat-free burger, which it did try, a healthy food, and it can’t sell, but people refer the Big Macs, and the Big Macs are getting them chubby, they’ve got a right to spend their money as they see fit. My point being that we don’t want to get caught up on thinking that, that in free market society, it’s always the most worthy who work the hardest who do the best. And of course, we also want to allow inheritance. If you’ve made your money legitimately, then you have a right to give it to your kids. But do they have a right? Do you believe that That there is… That social justice is a mirage? Or do you think that social justice always occurs in a market economy? And of course, it doesn’t always occur. It just gets back to freedom, freedom to do what you want, including the freedom to buy things that aren’t necessarily good for you. And I guess those are the two. Because, again, you hear that frequently. You used to hear that frequently from Milton Friedman.
Oh, well, of course, we believe in equality of opportunity, but not an equality of result. And the fact of the matter is that if you believe in inequality of result, then clearly, some people are going to have more opportunities than others. So ask them that one and then ask them as well, do you think that all the people who make a lot of money in a free market are necessarily deserve it? Do you think that people get their just desserts in a free market? Or do you agree with Hayek that really social justice is a mirage? There is no just price, there is no just wage. Good-looking people make more to Do better than ugly people, smart people. We can’t start. We want freedom in our society, and freedom doesn’t always bring the kinds of results that you and I, from our personal point of view, would want to see. But freedom is paramount than fundamental. That’s the first principle. And freedom doesn’t always lead to the results that are ideal. Those are two things that I want you to ask them.
Ben Nadelstein:
Gene, I want you to tell our audience first where they can watch these Soho forum debates, whether live or in person. And then what are some upcoming debates that they might be able to see?
Gene Epstein:
Well, I guess, go on thesohoforum. Org, and you can go into past events, and you can find all of our debates, including, of course, Keith Wiener’s debate. You have to go to past events, hit 2022, I guess it was, three years ago, July. And you can catch Keith Wiener himself doing a Soul Forum debate with me moderating. And so, again, it’s thesohoforum. Org for all of our debates on video and podcast. You can add to the eight million plus debates, 8 Million Plus, of YouTube’s. And that doesn’t even include the podcast that I’ve done. That was in November of 2019. It’s taken five years to get above 8 Million, but it keeps climbing. And so that was a classic because, again, Richard Wolf is the the most prominent Marxist economist. So you don’t want to miss that one. That’s November of 2019. You’ll find that. Browse through them more. I’m sure you’ll see a few of the event. What’s coming up in a couple of weeks, we’re going to do yet another debate with an interesting guy named David Goldil, who has an interesting An entrepreneur who started a medical care business who’s going to debate a professor from Yale about the potential for government to get even more into medical care than it already has.
A debate on medical care. We’re selling pretty well on that one. And then we are getting Glenn Greenwald back in August to debate whether Trump’s policies do or do not violate the Constitution. That’s in August. That one sell out pretty well. And then in addition, right now, we’re working on doing a bonus debate, a bonus debate about the mayoral election. We want to do that a few days after Labor Day. It symphony space, a very large theater uptown. There has been, obviously, a surprising number of people who voted for Mme. Dane. He hates capitalism. He wants to abolish all the billionaires. Billionaires, obviously, don’t do us any good. They shouldn’t exist. Of course, obviously, as mayor of New York City, most of what he wants to do, he really can’t do. However, certainly, there are a lot of things that he can do. So we want to do a debate about that. That will be posted soon for early September. And in mid-September, as part of our monthly debate series, we’re going to be doing a debate about sex work and the great movement. Because there are a lot of sex traffickers, as you know, who enslave women, especially into offering sex We will be debating sex work.
So go on our thesohoform. Org website, and you can see a cornucopia of fascinating one-on-one debates. Thank you very much for allowing me to make that plug.
Ben Nadelstein:
Gene, it’s been so fun interviewing you and getting to see behind the curtain of the famous Soho Forum. We’ll have to have you back.
