Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Redistribution ===

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I'm not even a Marxist, Peter, but the thing that I was going to say is that as you talk about the fact that we can solve some of these problems socially, I want to talk about from the progressive side, I'm not interested in using social programs where markets continue to function. I mean, the idea of making people personally accountable for their own happiness and their own success and path through the world is incredibly liberating, and I view markets as providing most of the progress that we now enjoy. So, there is something that's very weird and punitive about the desire for redistribution. I mean, there's almost a desire to tag the wealthy that has nothing to do with taking care of the unfortunate, and what I really am talking about here is how do we get a conversation between left and right, which isn't cryptic, which isn't-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. Of course, I have a much more cynical view of this where I think the redistribution rhetoric, it's mainly not even targeted at the wealthy.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Oh, it's targeted at the sub-wealthy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's targeted at the lower-middle class, at the deplorables, or whatever you want to call them, and it's a way to tell them that they will never get ahead, nothing will happen in their life and, and that's actually why a lot of people who are lower-middle class or middle class are viscerally quite strongly opposed to welfare, because it's always an insult to them. It's always heard as an insult. I'm not sure they're wrong to feel that.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, and I feel that a lot of the talk about redistribution is actually families of high eight through eleven figures trying to figure out how to target families of six-figure through low eight-figure wealth as the targets of the redistribution, that the very wealthy will be able to shelter assets and protect themselves or maybe even switch nations, whereas people who are dentists and orthodontists and accountants are going to be the ones viewed as the rich, who are going to be incapable of getting themselves out of the way.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, I think that partially, what good faith conversation between left and right opens up is that we have a shared interest in uncovering all of the schemes of the people who enjoy pushing around pieces of paper and giving speeches in order to engineer society for their own reasons.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. So, one way I would restate what you just said would be that redistribution from the powerful to the powerless, from the rich to the poor, is like from the powerful to the powerless, and so using power to go after those with power, and that's almost oxymoronic.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's almost oxymoronic.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's almost self-contradictory. So, there may be some way to do that. I think most of the time you end up with with some fake redistribution, some sort of complicated shell game of one sort or another. I know the causation of the stuff is much, much trickier, but if we look at societies that are somehow further to the left on some scale, the inequality, you have to go really far to the left, and maybe just destroy the whole society, before you really start solving the inequality problem.

'''Peter Thiel:''' California, when I first moved here as a kid in 1977, would have been sort of a centrist state in the US politically, and was broadly middle class. Today, California's the second most democratic state. It's a D plus 30 state. It's a super unequal, and at least on a correlated basis, not causation, but at least on a correlated basis, the further to the left it's gone, the more unequal it's become, and there is something pretty weird about that.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' There is.