Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this no sponsor this week.

patreon.com slash philosophize this if you want to help keep the show going. We also have an

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I don't know stay away. Let's if you're going there anyway. Hope you love the show today. Let's get

on to the program. Whenever somebody has a problem with something that Mark says, they can disagree

with the guy on a number of different levels but it's usually in one of two places. They either

disagree with communism as a political ideology or they disagree with the economic inferences that

Mark's makes, you know, the way that he viewed markets, how they work, people within markets, etc.

But one important thing to understand before we move forward throughout history and talk about all

the different thinkers over the years that have spent decades of their life trying to prove to

people that Marx is wrong. One important thing to understand is that a good way to organize all of

these critiques of Marx that we're going to have to cover is to understand that there is a very

real connection between the beliefs that Marx held about economics and the political ideology that

he created and espoused. One sort of justifies the other and I think you know which is which.

It's actually really interesting to think about how it relates to us and the way that we think about

things, you know, how the beliefs that we have about how economic systems work are often directly

related to who we're willing to vote for in an election. Now whether that's true or not, just

imagine if it was true, think about how important economics becomes, think about how crucial it is

for us to have an understanding of the history of economics. Maybe this is a little bit too vague.

For example, imagine you're a card-carrying Marxist living in the United States in the year 2016,

like me. Imagine you have two presidential candidates to choose from, Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump.

Well, if your economic views are that capitalism is a fundamentally immoral system based on theft

...