Ben Shapiro

The big problem with...

societies that have castles and cottages is that they were expropriative is that you're talking about feudalist societies in which there was literally a fixed pie of wealth and the, and the, and the,

Lorde would come in and take part of the pie.

But that's not what you're talking about with the free market.

The reason we live better than our ancestors.

Yeah.

I mean, so I agree with, I agree with what Clevenson, but I think there's a broader critique and, and Matt will maybe appreciate this, this sort of take from, from Seoul.

So, uh, the, the, this is a, so we'll take on the, the, I think extraordinarily flawed argument that I first saw actually from Yanis Varoufakis, who is a socialist

economists, this idea that economic statistics can't capture the value of a sunset.

This is Burke's point.

You saw it in conservatives first.

Okay, it's wrong.

The reason I will say that it's wrong is not because, of course, economics can capture the value of a sunset, but that is a category error.

Economics is not trying to tell you how much a sunset is worth.

The point is, of economics, what are you willing to trade for what?

That is literally what economics is about.

And so when you say,

I'm going to completely elide the question of cost and benefit analysis in public policy because you can't value a sunset.

That ignores the fact that we routinely value sunsets.

We do it by determining how much we are willing, for example, to pay for light.