Ep. 1272 Gene Epstein on How to Debate a Socialist
The Tom Woods Show
Tom Woods
4.8 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 October 2018
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Fresh off his Soho Forum debate victory (as measured by Oxford-style rules) against Jacobin magazine editor Bhaskar Sunkara, Gene Epstein joins me for a review of the event and the arguments that gave his opponent so much difficulty.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Tom Woods Show, episode 1272. |
| 0:03.4 | Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion. |
| 0:08.0 | Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Woods Show. |
| 0:14.5 | Hey, folks, it's my job to equip you with the strongest arguments for the libertarian position on issue after issue where you tend to get |
| 0:22.9 | cornered by your friends. Well, deregulation caused the financial crisis is still a big one |
| 0:29.0 | ten years later as people reflect on those terrible times. Very, very important to smash this one |
| 0:36.3 | with a baseball bat. And I've got just the baseball bat for you. |
| 0:40.4 | It's my free e-book, The Deregulation Boogieman. Grab it over at Regulation Myths.com. |
| 0:48.1 | Hi, everybody, Tom Woods here. This is going to be a great one because we're doing kind of a post-mortem |
| 0:52.7 | on a debate Gene Epstein did. Gene's our guest |
| 0:56.0 | today, by the way. Gene is recently retired from Barron's and is the director of the Soho Forum, |
| 1:02.0 | which is that monthly debate society in New York City I'm always telling you about. But Gene did a debate, |
| 1:07.2 | a big one, on socialism versus capitalism on October 15th of this year, 2018. |
| 1:13.6 | And it's an Oxford-style debate, so they poll the audience before the debate. |
| 1:18.6 | They asked the audience's opinion on the resolution, and then they poll the audience after the |
| 1:23.3 | debate, and you see which debater changed more minds. And Gene, by that metric, was the winner of |
| 1:29.2 | the debate. I'm going to have a link to the video. The video will be posted on the show notes |
| 1:34.0 | page for today, of course. You really are going to enjoy watching it. I want to talk to Gene about |
| 1:39.2 | it just because a lot of people attended. It was a very interesting debate. There were a lot of interesting topics raised. |
| 1:45.9 | Gene took a rather novel approach to the debate and the kind of arguments he made. I'm sure were |
| 1:53.2 | unexpected. And Gene was quite animated throughout the debate. So it was just fun. It was fun to watch |
| 1:59.7 | and I think you'll enjoy it. I'm just glad the Soho Forum exists and events like this exist. So I want to talk to Gene about what he thought about it and as a way of encouraging you to watch. It won't spoil the debate if you haven't seen it. It will certainly enrich it. Gene, welcome. Tom, it's a pleasure to be back |
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