Peter Schiff on Joe Rogan

[ThomasDoubts]

 

 

Overall, a pretty good show, check it out.

 

I was a bit disappointed however with Peter's handling of the environmental questions.  These were discussed at length and I don't recall him ever referencing property rights.  Joe goes after Peter on fracking and the BP oil spill and argues that environmental damage is unquantifiable and should be avoided at every cost.    I wish Peter had made the arguments from a property rights perspective, rather than going on about market mechanisms.  Maybe this would have led down a rabbit hole of "does any have a right to own a section of the planet and do anything they want with it," or "who owns the ocean."  Most, if not all, of what Peter says is true, but perhaps not most effective if you're trying to speak to the "environmentalist" crowd.  Of course, maybe that wasn't his goal...  I also thought he could have handled the questions about China better, but he made some pretty good points in doing so.

 

Happy listening

[Culain]

I was more disappointed in Joe. After watching for the first hour Joe continually falls back into the comfortable minarchist role of, "but we still need government".

 

Peter is not skilled at debating people on an emotional level because he doesn't connect with them (or at least not to Joe). Simply saying the market will figure it out and do it better is tough for someone who is mentally dependent on government to understand. This is why I think he should look into the "slavery" argument as better method of explaining it, or point out the "gun/elephant in the room" whenever Joe would bring up "but we still need government" topic.

[A__]

Schiff was way too dismissive. I'm glad Joe Rogan spoke against fracking. I haven't listened to it all yet: I'll bookmark it for later. Thanks for posting this.

[PatrickC]

Yes, I think Peter, could have approached Joes criticism less obstinately. But then again that is Peter's way. Given all the idiot opponents he's faced in the past, it's not altogether unsurprising. However, I think Joe, whilst I might not have agreed with all his points made some interesting ones all the same. Particularly the fracking issue. I'm a little skeptical of it, given how much govts seem to drawn to it. Even after listening to good arguments for it. The jury is still out on it, environment wise.

[BrianBrian]

There was a documentarian on Schiffs radio show who was soliciting support for his documentary countering all of the arguments against frakking and highlighting the fraud in the documentaries against it as well. Hummed peter couldn't think of him on the spot.

Ah, the documentary exposing.the myths of anti-tracking is fracknation.

 

http://redalertpolitics.com/2013/01/18/fracknation-documentary-exposing-the-truth-about-fracking-in-the-u-s-set-for-release-next-week/

[Carl Green]

Joe later tweeted this (between tweets about reactions to the Schiff podcast)

 

"The economy is such a fascinating subject. Like peeking into a complicated mess of sparking wires that runs the world and no one cane fix it."

 

Which immediately made me think of...

[Josh F]

This is great, molyneux and schiff.  Who is next?  I vote praxgirl

[Culain]

"The economy is such a fascinating subject. Like peeking into a complicated mess of sparking wires that runs the world and no one cane fix it."

 

The wording for this needs some work.

[Xtort]

The trouble Schiff ran into regarding environmentalism was in addressing an emotional topic (for Joe) by responding with pragmatism.  When a person has worked themselves into a good emotional rant talking about numbers and efficiency is just going to push them further over the edge.  You can hardly blame the guy, he runs an investing business so he has to think like that 99% of the time.  A better tact in my experience is to at least start off talking about all the ways the government and the EPA protects polluters, the amount the government itself pollutes, etc.  I believe one of the original founders of green peace actually wrote a book about how the environmental movement has been taken over by corporations and turned into a front for some very un-environmental practices.

[LanceD]

The trouble Schiff ran into regarding environmentalism was in addressing an emotional topic (for Joe) by responding with pragmatism. When a person has worked themselves into a good emotional rant talking about numbers and efficiency is just going to push them further over the edge. You can hardly blame the guy, he runs an investing business so he has to think like that 99% of the time. A better tact in my experience is to at least start off talking about all the ways the government and the EPA protects polluters, the amount the government itself pollutes, etc. I believe one of the original founders of green peace actually wrote a book about how the environmental movement has been taken over by corporations and turned into a front for some very un-environmental practices.

Agreed. Peter seemed to limit himself to arguments related specifically to economics. Rogan essentially painted China as some bastion of freedom allowing their people to run amok and destroy the environment and Schiff just failed to answer that. Peter took a very one dimensional economics based approach to responding to this and totally failed to bring up exactly how their environmental destruction is caused by an extremely large and powerful government. Yet an uneducated listener could easily have come away from that part of the discussion thinking China is suffering from too little government!

[LovePrevails]

I'm enjoying the lively debate, Joe Rogan is throwing in the kind of objections that his audience will be having in mind so a good chance for Peter to explain although on the environment and on pharmaceutical regulation I think I could do better myself and more concise.

on Pharameuticals Joe says "so if there is no regulations or governing body"

 

Peter doesn't even say "there could be independent watchdogs competing - and one drug company could try to do reserarch to debunk the competitions drugs"

Edit: He's actually wearing on me, Schiff is the classic example of why liberals think conservatives are heartless and don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves and just love big corporations. In response to the point on CHinese factory workers he says "if that's the best opportunity they can get then they should be glad they have it."

 

oh dear oh dear oh dear, I'd liek to send him to work in one for a year and tell him he should be glad

 

the correct argument for a liberal is in a free market more companies would come in and bid up the price of labour

[ThomasDoubts]

I have a hard time telling whether Joe is truly in disagreement or playing devil's advocate, and I think both are the case at different times.

I guess it's a mark of someone who's good at playing devils advocate; which is probably easier on topics where he's changed his beliefs, but is still very familiar with the opposing arguments.

 

He used to believe the moon landing was faked until he brought it up with Neil deGrasse Tyson.  I'm sure he could still argue strongly from that side, without maintaining the belief.

[Alex Bell]

I posted this in another related thread already, but this one seems more appropriate so:

 

I got angry when hearing Joe's attacks.  After finishing the episode, taking a step back and calming down, though, it seems he was just using the state as a crutch.  It's obviously an emotional issue for Joe, which means he's probably never been helped to reason through the ideas.  When people are confused by or afraid of (Joe) an idea or event (BP Oil spill), the inner authoritarian takes over in order to return to a state of peace as quickly as possible, even if it's a false peace ("There will always be greedy fucks and we need violence to keep them in check").

 

Peter never addressed the actual issue, how could such an event be prevented without the state, and instead wrote it off because "we have bigger problems" and repeated "if government got out of the way, it would fix itself."  This isn't an argument, just a statement of belief; one that doesn't resonate with someone who doesn't also believe it.  When you add on top of that Peter's admitted his fracking interest, it further weakens the strength of his assertion (I don't know if fracking truly is dangerous or not, but the public image is that it is, so if you're open about your financial relationship with it, you'd do well to be able to effectively argue why it is safe lest your Ethos be damaged).

 

I think the point could have been better argued, who knows if Joe would have been convinced or not.  This seems like an excellent example of why, as Stef said in his "Ending History" speech, we should stop discussing "free market solutions" as a way of converting people; they're useless if someone hasn't first accepted the fundamental immorality of the state and thus is honestly looking for an answer themselves, not just defending their current beliefs as both of these men did.

[Brandon U]

You can hardly blame the guy, he runs an investing business so he has to think like that 99% of the time.  A better tact in my experience is to at least start off talking about all the ways the government and the EPA protects polluters, the amount the government itself pollutes, etc.  I believe one of the original founders of green peace actually wrote a book about how the environmental movement has been taken over by corporations and turned into a front for some very un-environmental practices.

 

I love this and it highlights the idea I've been trying to come to terms with: Do investors really care about the environment from which they derive their wealth?

 

I personally know a couple of investors who have put money into fracking in the Western NY community. They are well meaning men, but the question I should ask and never realized until now - do you stand to make more money by preserving the land that they frack on or is it just a "one and done" scenario where you take all the resources out of the ground and move on. I assume that it would be beneficial to maintain the land as well as possible in order to extract as much resource as possible. Kind of akin to the forestry businesses who have to plant new trees in order to have trees to log in the future.

 

Nevertheless, I think Peter Schiff did a good job breaking down basic Austrian economics that the JRE crowd can understand and appreciate. Not to speak down to the JRE crowd, I'm a member of that forum and I've learned a lot from ideas generated from that pod.