My lecture in Euro college in North Macedonia went viral, or at least mini-viral.
It was a surprise because it's a very complex lecture. It involves history, cultural studies, economics and so on and so forth.
Not your typical viral material, no cats jumping off very hot roofs and no babes peeling bananas suggestively.
Unfortunately for you.
And of course immediately there was a tsunami, an avalanche of comments, arrogant comments from brain dead viewers or brainwashed viewers and very frequently both.
Today I would like to clarify two points that I've made in my lecture in Euro college and set the record straight.
Also possibly open up your mind to reality and the facts.
I don't know which planet you're coming from.
It's not mine.
Okay, first of all, who am I to talk about economics? Am I not a professor of psychology? What do I know about economics?
Well, here's a surprise for you.
I spent the first 30 years of my adult life in the field of business, finance and economics. I've been a businessman, I've been a stockbroker, I've been a venture capitalist, I've been an entrepreneur and for well over 30 years I served as economic advisor to eight governments, big, very big, small on three continents. I have written 300 papers and articles in various economic fields and I've published six books on economics. I think I'm mildly qualified to discuss economics.
Okay, one point before we go to the main issue.
Donald Trump.
I said in the lecture that poor people voted for Donald Trump and immediately all the Trump count members started to attack me that it's not true. Poor people voted for Hillary Clinton.
Well, here are the facts.
40% of people with income under $50,000 and also with income under $30,000 in both these demographic groups, that's 40%.
That's almost half voted for Donald Trump.
So many of these people are defined as poor. They're under the poverty line and yet 40% of them voted for Donald Trump came as a major shock to the Democratic Party.
70%, 70%, that's 70% of people without a college degree, people who have graduated high school or not even that, voted for Donald Trump.
A majority of blue-collar working class whites voted for Donald Trump.
These are the facts.
Donald Trump swept the slate mainly with uneducated, underpaid blue-collar workers while technically and clinically not poor, they are still not exactly the aristocracy and they're definitely not educated.
In addition to that, 40% of people with very low incomes, annual incomes, have voted for him.
So I don't feel that I've misled you in any major way.
Now let's get to the main point.
The main argument that many of you have made is that capitalism is not a zero-sum game.
Let me explain what is a zero-sum game.
A zero-sum game is when, let me see that I'm still recording, a zero-sum game is when my gain is your loss. If I make $10, you lose $10. Your $10 enter my pocket never to re-emerge.
That's a zero-sum game.
Win, lose, lose, win. No one can win without someone else losing. No one can lose without someone else winning.
That's a zero-sum game.
Now the elites, especially rich people, want you to believe, want you to believe that capitalism is not a zero-sum game.
They want you to believe that everyone in capitalism can win simultaneously.
And this is the false hope that fuels the much tarnished and totally delusional and counterfactual American dream.
The truth is that capitalism is definitely a zero-sum game.
As I will explain in a minute, the truth is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, relatively speaking, because it's a zero-sum game.
Now, they don't want you to believe this.
They're brainwashing you.
They want to give you false hope because they are terrified of social unrest, rebellion, French revolutions, Russian revolutions, and revolutions in general.
The fact is that social mobility in the United States of America is lower than it is in most in all socialist industrialized countries, such as the countries of Scandinavia, such as France, such as Germany, such as Canada.
What is social mobility?
Social mobility is when you make more money than your parents.
Social mobility is when you end up with more wealth than your parents.
Social mobility is when you are more educated than your parents.
Social mobility is when you end up on a higher rung in the social ladder than your parents.
In America, this is nearly impossible.
The figures, the numbers, the statistics, the studies are clear-cut, unequivocal, unambiguous, indisputable, non-debatable.
People in America remain stuck in the same social economic stratum, in the same social economic level they were born into.
If you're born into a poor family, in vast majority of cases, you will end up your life poor or even poorer than your parents.
If you're born into a rich family, obviously you will end up rich.
End of story.
No amount of education and hard work will get you anywhere.
That's why student loans are such a problem.
Nothing.
It's nonsense.
It's an illusion.
It's a delusion.
It's a lie.
It's a fabrication and a deception of the elites who are trying to mislead you, trying to keep you tranquil and quiet, trying to avoid your wrath.
Because if you were to see the true picture, you would storm all the bastions of the elites and demolish them and their inhabitants.
And they don't want that.
They want you immersed in a fantasy, a matrix-type reality.
They keep feeding you through their tubes, all these inane delusions and hallucinations.
I repeat, studies, all studies, there's not a single exception inside the United States and outside the United States, show conclusively that your chance to move up in life in the United States is the lowest among industrialized countries, period.
And that includes countries whose system is basically socialist.
And so there's no American dream.
It's an American hallucination, not a dream.
And this sits well with the assumption that capitalism is a zero-sum game because had capitalism not been a zero-sum game, social mobility would have been higher in countries which are more capitalistic.
Had capitalism not been a zero-sum game, you would have expected to see people progressing moving up in life much more in capitalist countries than in socialist countries.
But that's not the case.
That's not the case.
When the country is purely capitalistic or highly capitalistic or more capitalistic, people's positions are fixed for life.
They can't move up.
There's no redistribution of wealth.
There's no division of accumulated profits and so on.
The rich take it all.
The rich take it all.
Read my lips.
The rich take it all.
The statistics are breathtaking.
The upper 1% control more wealth than the lower 67%.
This is my income inequality is mind-boggling.
Is mind-boggling.
It's never been worse since the 1920s at least.
So most wealth in the West is not made.
It is inherited.
That is the work of Tomapeketi, the French demographer and economist, whose books revolutionize our perception of wealth, wealth accumulation and income inequality.
The vast majority of rich people have inherited their wealth.
They haven't made it.
And that includes people like Donald Trump.
They haven't made this wealth.
They inherited it.
Ironically, new fortunes are generated in pseudo-capitalistic and quasi-capitalistic places like China, Russia, Vietnam, India, and even in the West, places like Sweden and Germany and France, which are in Italy, which are essentially socialist countries, not capitalistic.
Now, as I said, the brain dead and the brainwashed will tell you that capitalism is not a zero-sum game.
And the reason is that they're confusing the economy with capitalism.
Capitalism is not the economy, and the economy of a country or a city or a family is not capitalism.
Economy is one thing.
Capitalism is another thing.
The economy is not a zero-sum game because economies tend to grow.
As the economy grows, the pie available for division and distribution grows.
So there's a bigger pie.
There's a bigger pie all around.
There's a bigger pie for consumers.
There's a bigger pie for producers.
So it is true that economies, not all economies, even non-capitalistic economies, economies are not zero-sum games because technology mainly allows us to increase the pie all the time.
There are two types of technologies, manufacturing technologies that includes agricultural technologies and industrial technologies and so on, and technologies that have to do with the manipulation of symbols.
Finance is such a technology.
Social media, internet is such a technology.
So these types of technology increase production and increase products than the amount, the quantity, availability and accessibility of products to consumers.
So there is this impression of a growing environment, environment of growth, that everything is much more, everything is better, everything is, and this is largely actually true.
That is not a delusion.
The pie is growing for consumers and for producers.
But while the economy is not a zero-sum game, capitalism is a zero-sum game.
And I will explain to you the difference in a minute.
Marx, the famous Marx, was right about this, possibly only about this, but he was right about this.
Now, what is capitalism?
Capitalism is like communism.
Capitalism is like fascism, corporateism.
Capitalism is like socialism.
It's a method.
It's a methodology.
It's a system.
It's a mechanism.
It's a method to allocate resources, a mechanism to allocate the means of production and surpluses created in the system.
It's just an accounting system.
It's a way to allocate elements in the economic system.
If they are profits, how to allocate them?
If they are means of production, how to allocate them?
If there's a surplus generated in agriculture or industry, what to do with it?
Products, there is products, there is goods, there is services.
Capitalism is a prescription, an algorithm for distributing goods and services.
End of story.
Capitalism is one of these goods and services.
In a variety of forms, capital gains, wealth, you name it.
Capitalism is a recipe, an algorithm for distribution and allocation.
End of story.
It's not the economy.
It's not the economy.
It's not even the driving force of the economy.
It's a post facto allocation mechanism.
Now, of course, the allocation mechanism generates psychological motivation.
Motivation to work, to produce and so on.
So knowing the allocation algorithm motivates you to invest, to work, to produce, to profit, to become prosperous.
So capitalism has a psychological dimension like communism, like socialism and so on.
They all have psychological dimensions.
Only human activity has a psychological dimension.
But capitalism is not about motivating people to work.
Capitalism is not about the economy.
Capitalism is not about any specific good or service.
Capitalism has nothing to do with reality.
Capitalism is just an instruction on how to allocate resources.
It uses the price signal in free markets.
That's the way capitalism allocates resources.
It prices them.
It assigns to them a price.
And this price in a free market motivates people to transact one way or another.
This is a mechanism unique to capitalism, as opposed, for example, to central planning in communism and to some extent in socialism.
So this is what capitalism is.
And because capitalism is not the economy, because capitalism is incapable of growing, an algorithm cannot grow, a principle of allocation cannot grow, a methodology cannot grow.
There's no growth in capitalism.
This is nonsense.
Because it's not the economy, capitalism does produce a zero-sum game.
The economy is not zero-sum.
The economy is growing.
But capitalism is distributing this growth in a way that produces a zero-sum game.
Capitalism distributes this growth only to the rich.
All the wealth goes only to the rich.
This is the core of capitalism.
Capitalism is the belief that is a protestant system.
It's a belief that if you are rich, you've been blessed and chosen by God.
And so you deserve, you're entitled.
Capitalism codifies this belief.
And so while the economy is growing all the time, only the 1%, only the richest of the rich benefit from it.
And this is what I mean when I say zero-sum game.
Zero-sum game is when a select group of people benefits while all the others don't.
And they don't because ultimately everything is limited.
Ultimately, all resources, even when the pie is growing, it's not growing infinitely.
And capitalism will make sure that the allocation is skewed, that the poor are discriminated against, that the rich benefit inordinately, extraordinarily.
I can prove easily to you that capitalism is a zero-sum game.
If it's not a zero-sum game, why do we take from the rich and give to the poor?
This is called taxation.
If you need to take from one group and give to another, that's proof of a zero-sum game, of a limited system.
It's taxation, progressive, distributive justice system.
But why is it needed at all? Because the rich have taken everything.
And we need to use violence, aggression, threats of prison time to take their money from them and give it to the poor.
We need to do that, and it's called taxation.
Taxation is a violent act.
It's an act of aggression.
Another proof.
Why do we take from the poor and give to the rich?
Inflation. This is known as inflation.
Inflation is regressive.
It punishes the poor and rewards the rich.
It's a form of indirect or hidden taxation.
It also leads to acid bubbles, which also benefit the rich and tax the poor.
Inflation is a tax on the poor because it reduces their purchasing power.
It makes the dollars or the yens or the whatever in their pockets less valuable.
Prices go up.
Prices go up in inflation, and the poor are taxed in this sense.
It's like paying a tax.
Their purchasing power is diminished.
The same way it is diminished when you pay a tax.
On the other hand, inflation is good for the rich because rich people owe money.
They're leveraged.
They have debt.
And inflation makes the repayment of this debt much cheaper.
The dollars you pay your debt with later are much less valuable than the dollars you have received when you took the credit.
So rich people benefit from inflation.
Poor people are harmed.
It's a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
Similarly, taxation is a transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor.
Why do we need these transmission mechanisms?
Why do we need all these transfers?
If indeed capitalism is not a zero-sum game ever growing and everyone is benefiting, why do we need to use violence?
Why do we need to threaten the rich with treason sentences?
Why do we need to impose a tax on the poor pretending that it's not a tax, lying to them, deceiving them?
Because the system is like that.
It's unfair.
Capitalism is unfair constitutionally.
It's unfair because it inevitably leads to two outcomes, income inequality and boom-bust cycles.
It's built into capitalism.
We do all these things, taxation, inflation, because the environment of growth is unevenly distributed, unevenly allocated.
The rich benefit disproportionately, the poor don't.
How can we reconcile it?
Why in the environment of growth is the game zero-sum?
Why are the rich so rapacious?
The pie is growing.
Why not give some to the poor?
Why do they want to take it all over, to take all the pie and leave nothing to the poor?
That is the situation, make no mistake about it.
During the pandemic, billionaires made billions and billions of people were impoverished.
Fact, why are rich people so disempathic?
By the way, studies in psychology have shown that rich people are disempathic.
They lack empathy.
Why are they so disempathic to the point of provoking civil unrest, rebellion, a danger to themselves because of scarcity?
The rich cannot reinvest all their income.
So this income that the rich cannot reinvest, this income, this wealth that lies in bank vaults, it's taken out of circulation and the poor cannot benefit from it.
You could consider rich people as kind of parasites or leeches.
They take the blood life out of the body.
They make a lot of money.
They invest a small part of it or a big part of it, doesn't matter.
And the rest, they hoard.
They keep in bank safes and bank vaults, in deposit accounts.
And this money is dead, is not active, does not participate in economic activity, has no velocity, as we say in economics.
The rich siphon off money from the money supply, thereby endangering the entire economy, deactivating enormous resources, hoarding them, collecting them, hiding them, concealing them, refusing to pay taxes on them, and so on and so forth.
They're taken out of the economic system.
This process is known as demonetization.
The rich demonetize the economy.
They make it much less liquid because they take out of circulation huge parts of their wealth.
And so the poor are exposed to a demonetized non-liquid environment where wages cannot be increased, products cannot be bought, huge debt, personal debt cannot be repaid.
Now, it is true that rich people's deposits are available through the banking system to businesses in the form of credits.
So the deposits of the rich finance credits to businesses.
This is an optical illusion.
Who owns these businesses?
The rich.
So the rich give in one hand and take it immediately with the other.
The banking system is owned by the rich.
It's only rich people's game.
The poor has no say, no participation, no vote, no nothing.
And so this is the first reason why capitalism is a zero-sum game because the poor take huge dollops of cash out of the system.
They're unable or unwilling to reinvest it in productive economic activities and benefit the poor.
It is not trickle-down effect.
It's a Reagan era myth.
It's nonsense.
It's been disproven in countless, countless economic studies.
When the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
They never get richer.
It's not true that a rich person kind of benefits the poor by creating new jobs and so on.
This is nonsense.
This is a myth.
It's not substantiated.
This is known as the trickle-down theory.
It's nonsensical.
It's part of the discredited school of monetarism, basically.
So that's the first reason.
The poor suck the lifeblood out of the economic system, make it ex-sanguinated, make it bleed, make it illiquid, demonetize it.
The second reason for scarcity is, of course, the depletion of natural resources.
We think that growing economy is a good thing, but we tend to ignore the price we pay in terms of natural resources, air quality, rivers, seas, soil erosion, deforestation, you name it.
These costs are hidden because they are not reflected in financial statements, but they are real.
So even the growth of the pie, even the growth of economies is an illusion.
Who is paying the price of environmental depletion?
The poor, of course.
The poor pay the price.
The rich live in gated communities, isolated from the pollution and the degradation and the depletion of natural resources.
The poor pay the price.
So capitalism is a zero-sum game also because the growth, economic growth, has a hidden cost paid by the poor.
Scarcity is a real thing, is a real thing.
Pretending that we can extract more from the soil via the agricultural revolution without paying a long-term price is delusional.
It's mentally ill.
So we live on a finite planet.
Everything is finite.
And so everything is scarce.
people are competing for these scarce resources.
Optically, economically, economies seem to grow.
But someone is paying the price down the line.
And that someone is bound to be a poor person, not a rich one.
So all in all, the system is rigged to benefit the poor, the rich, and the expense of the poor.
To benefit the rich and the expense of the poor.
To benefit the rich and the expense of the poor.
Thick skulls, did it get through?
This is not what is known as zero-sum game.
I'm sorry to break the news to you.
I'm also a mathematician.
So game theory is topic that I'm well acquainted with.
Now these shortages, depletion of natural resources, demonetization of the economy by the rich, and so on and so forth.
These shortages, these hidden scarcities are camouflaged, they're camouflaged, they're disguised by, for example, fiat money.
When things go bad, central banks print money out of thin air, ex nihilo.
I mean, creation out of nothing, out of vacuum.
They just print as much money as they want.
Yes, the cost is inflation, but when there's a need to protect the interest of the rich, inflation is a good thing because the poor pay the price, not the rich.
So you can definitely see that whenever there's an economic crisis or financial crisis that threatens the well-being of the rich, their interests, their wealth, their position in society, their access to lawmakers, everything.
Whenever there's such a crisis, central banks throw caution to the winds, ignore inflation and print money like crazy in a variety of ways.
Why? Because the poor pay the price.
The rich just get richer.
Even in cycles of crisis, in the crisis part of the cycle, the rich get richer.
So fiat money is one way to disguise scarcity, because if you print a lot more money, it seems like the economy is growing.
Debt is another way.
If you take debts, credits, loans, it gives the illusion that you're rich because you have a lot of money. You have a lot of money now.
Never mind that this money has been taken mostly from the deposits of poor people, from the savings of poor people.
The rich take the savings of poor people in the form of credits and loans.
All the giant enterprises and successful entrepreneurs and amazing minds in business and so on, they are leveraged to the hilt.
They're drowning in credits and loans.
And in many cases, they don't pay them back either through bankruptcy or through inflation. Inflation reduces the value of the money they return.
So these are ways to avoid paying back the value that they have taken.
Taken from whom? From the poor.
That's another way to camouflage or to disguise the fact that there is a limit.
There's a limit to everything.
There's a limit to money.
There's a limit to land.
There's a limit to water.
There's a limit to plants and forests.
There's a limit to products.
There's a limit.
There's always a limit.
Someone has to pay the price of scarcity and that someone is a poor person.
And finally, another way to camouflage the fact that we are living on a finite, limited planet with finite, limited resources, with finite, limited ability to allocate them justly to camouflage all this.
We said that one way is to print money, create the illusion of prosperity.
Another way is to give away credits and loans to the rich, mainly to the rich, and create again the illusion of prosperity.
And the third way is a symbolic economy.
It's the economy where you manipulate symbols.
You manipulate symbols and you get paid.
And so your salary, you can use your salary to consume and you consume products and so on, but mostly actually you consume services.
Services constitute the bulk of modern economies.
What are services?
Manipulation of symbols.
What is finance?
Manipulation of symbols.
What is the internet?
Manipulation of symbols.
What is information technology?
Manipulation of symbols.
It's all symbols.
People move symbols from one place to another and they get paid in symbols because what is money?
It's electronic.
It's in the ledgers of banks and the central bank.
It's a symbol.
We have transitioned from a real economy grounded in hard toil and hard-earned soil. We have transitioned from this to a symbolic economy, an economy of make-believe, a shared fantasy, a total delusion.
These are all Ponzi schemes.
Feared money is Ponzi scheme.
Corporate debt is a Ponzi scheme.
And of course they crumble because they're Ponzi schemes. They're pyramid schemes.
These are scams.
We're being swindled.
The poor are being swindled time and again.
And all these contraptions intended to disguise reality, to brainwash the masses, crumble periodically in cycles of boom and bust.
Capitalism is a zero-sum game because the rich want it all and because there's a limit to how much we can produce and consume.
When you have a group of people who are predatory, rapacious, ruthless, callous, relentless, merciless, dysempathic, when you have such a group of people, all the others fall prey to this group of people.
And today we are led by these kinds of elites, especially in the business sector. Of course, it's a zero-sum game.
Who told you otherwise?
And why are you stupid enough, dumb enough to believe them?.