S5 E11 - Capitalism, Protests, and the Bear vs. Commissar

Boycotting Starbucks to End Capitalism? The Contradictions of Socialist Protest | The Tenth Man

Kevin Travis argues that boycotts rely on capitalist competition, criticizing Seattle mayor Sarah Nelson’s Starbucks boycott as using capitalism’s tools to protest capitalism. He contrasts outrage over Shell’s windfall profits with little protest against state-owned oil firms like Norway’s Equinor and Mexico’s Pemex, claiming the anger is selective and more about who controls money than profits themselves. He discusses New York mayor Zoran Mamdani’s proposal to tax accumulated home equity, contending socialist programs depend on wealth created under capitalism and rarely involve voluntary collectivism in advocates’ own communities. Using bear-and-salmon and coyote analogies, he claims “nature is capitalist,” says communism destroys prosperity, and argues only under capitalism can people safely denounce the system, while noting capitalism’s real problems and asking “compared to what?”

00:00 Boycotts Need Capitalism
00:50 Protest Paradox Setup
02:11 Seattle Starbucks Boycott
03:38 Oil Profits Selective Outrage
04:59 State Oil Money Trail
06:27 Taxing Home Equity
08:34 Why Not Start a Commune
10:20 Nature Is Capitalist
12:33 Bear Versus Commissar
13:40 Only Capitalism Allows Dissent
14:31 Capitalism Flaws Compared
15:30 Wrap Up And Call To Share

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Transcript

The Tenth Man 0:03

boycotts are a capitalist tool. Under socialism, there's no competing coffee shop to switch to. They demand the abolition of capitalism while live streaming the protest on devices built by capitalism. Every socialist government spends wealth it did not create. They never volunteer their own neighborhood for collectivism. They want yours. The bear leaves enough salmon for next year. The commissar never does. And in every country where their system actually won, this podcast would be illegal. So let's talk about protests, specifically a certain kind of protest, the kind where you use a twelve hundred dollar iPhone, you post it to X, a platform owned by Elon Musk, organize via apps built by venture capital-funded startups, and march through a city whose infrastructure was built by private contractors to demand the abolition of capitalism. I'm not angry about this. I find it kind of fascinating, like watching people drive a car to a Just Stop Oil rally, which of course happens all the time. If you're new here, welcome. I'm Kevin Travis, and this is The Tenth Man podcast. The idea is simple. Whatever the consensus is, somebody has to be the one who pushes back and follow the logic wherever it goes, and that's us. If you like what you hear today, share it with someone. Word of mouth is how independent podcasts survive, and frankly, it's how good ideas spread. Now, back to the protest. Now, I want to be fair here. That's the whole point of The Tenth Man. The easy thing is to mock. The harder thing is to actually follow the logic wherever it goes, so let's do that Here's my question, just one question. Sarah Nelson, mayor of Seattle, self-described socialist, has announced she's boycotting Starbucks as a political statement. Fine. Boycotts are a time-honored American tradition, and Starbucks has managed to make itself unpopular across the entire political spectrum simultaneously, which is actually kind of impressive. But here's the thing I keep turning over in my head. Under the system she's advocating for, under socialism, whom exactly would she boycott? Think about it. If the state owns the means of production, if there's one provider of goods and services determined by central planners, what's the move? Write a strongly worded letter to the Ministry of Coffee? Organize a march on the Department of Approved Beverages? The whole mechanism of the boycott, the idea that your dollars are a vote, that you can withdraw them, that competition means there's somewhere else to go, that's capitalism. That's the system she's protesting. She's using capitalism's tools to protest capitalism, which is a little like driving your car to a Just Stop Oil rally and then acting surprised when someone points it out. While we're on the subject of oil, and we are now because I'm pivoting, I've been noticing a lot of outrage lately about Shell Oil's profits. Oil profits are up, tensions with Iran have pushed them higher, and Shell is making money. Windfall profits, evil capitalism at work. And look, I get it. Nobody loves paying four dollars a gallon, four or five. That's a real thing. But here's what you don't see. You don't see protests outside the Norwegian consulate over Equinor. That's Norway's oil company, and the Norwegian government owns sixty-seven percent of it. When oil prices spike, that money flows directly to the Norwegian state. Where's the outrage? Where are the signs? And Pemex, Mexico's national oil company, is one hundred percent owned by the Mexican federal government. Every barrel Every price spike, every windfall goes to the state. In fact, Pemex provides about a third of all Mexican federal tax revenue. The Mexican government runs on oil profits. And how is Mexico doing? But nobody's marching on the Mexican embassy. Now, here's the thing you need to think about. When Shell makes a windfall, you know exactly where that money goes. It goes to shareholders, many of whom are pension funds, by the way, meaning your retired teachers and firefighters. And it's disclosed in quarterly filings that anyone can read. When Equinor has a banner year, the Norwegian government gets its cut. What does Norway do with it? Well, they publish that too, actually, because they're Norwegians, and they're organized about everything. But when Pemex has a good year, when a state oil company in any number of less transparent countries, and that's everyone in the Middle East and Venezuela, when they cash in on high global prices, that money goes somewhere into a government budget managed by people who are not elected on an oil platform and allocated by officials you never heard of in a process you cannot audit. And that includes Iran's oils for weapons, which is what they do with their oil money. And yet the outrage is entirely selective. The outrage lands on the company that has shareholders, the one that has to actually answer to a market, and completely ignores the ones that answer to nobody. And that tells you something. The protests aren't really about the money. It's about who has it and who controls it. Now let's go to New York. Zoran Mamdani is the mayor of New York City, and his platform includes taxing the accumulated equity of middle-class homeowners. Yes, he said he's gonna tax the billionaires, but you see how that has been working out. So people who bought a house, paid the mortgage for thirty years, and now find that the house is worth more than they paid for it. Revolutionary. Here's what you'll notice about every socialist program at every level, in every city and state or country where it gets tried. It is always, without exception, funded by wealth that was accumulated outside of socialism. Always, every time, no exceptions. And here's the part that doesn't get said enough. Those houses are valuable because people want them. That's it. That's the whole reason. People made choices freely about where they wanted to live, work, raise families, build something, and those choices created value. That's why houses in some neighborhoods are worth a million dollars and why houses in other neighborhoods where people don't want to live are being torn down by the tens of thousands, demolished because nobody wants them. The market is just reflecting human preference and human choices, wise human choices. You can agree with the choices or not, but you can't wish it away. The tax base Mamdani is drawing from, the home equity, the investment accounts, the business revenues, all of it was built under the system he's telling you is broken. He is drawing from a well dug by other people while explaining why wells are a form of oppression, and then proposing to fill the well with cement. At some point, you have to ask, if the model works, why does it always need a running start from capitalism? Here's one I genuinely can't get an answer to. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is stopping anyone from starting a socialist commune. Go find some land, pool your resources, agree that everything will be shared equally. Grow your own food, make your own goods, distribute them according to need. The law allows it, and people have done it. You could start it this afternoon if you wanted to. Or better yet, don't even go that far. Just walk outside, ask your neighbors on the block, tell them you want to put everyone's property together. Pool the houses, the cars, the savings accounts, split everything equally, make decisions collectively. See how that conversation goes. We all know that the people who suggest such a system are really wanting to be the ones who control the decisions. Because if socialism is genuinely superior, more efficient, more humane, better outcomes for everyone, then a commune should outcompete its neighbors. It should attract members. It should thrive. People should be lining up to get in, but they're not. They're lining up to get into America, which is mostly capitalist. So no one will take you up on this, and I think I know why Because it's one thing to demand that other people reorganize their lives around your theory. It's another thing entirely to bet your own house on it. When it's voluntary, when there's no force involved, when people can leave whenever they want, then somehow the utopia never quite materializes. Now, here's the crux of this episode and why all these things are true, and that is that nature itself is capitalist. And I mean that literally. When the salmon are running, thousands of them moving upstream, a bear will wade into the water and kill dozens of them in a single day. But it won't eat most of what it kills. It eats the brains, the skin, the eggs, the fattest, most calorie-dense parts of the fish, and it leaves the rest on the bank to rot. And nobody complains about this. Wildlife documentaries report it, but they don't editorialize. The bear is just following its nature, maximizing return on effort, taking what's most valuable and moving on. that's the market at work. maximizing return on effort, that's capitalism. Now, people on the other hand, are the opposite. We eat the meat And beyond that, we try to find a use for the whole animal because there might be value in that as food or fertilizer or something. And again, that's capitalism. That's the market at work. And look at the coyote. The coyote will eat anything, anything that fits in its mouth that's edible. It can be trash, it can be roadkill, whatever's easiest, and it goes wherever the pickings are best. Pure opportunism. No loyalty to any system, just maximum return for minimum effort. And to a degree, we all want the same thing. But if you think about it, the coyote describes a certain strain of political thinking pretty well. The people who want communism are just looking for easy pickings, which is just capitalism, but with a dishonest streak. They want the consumption without doing the production. They want the share without making a contribution. They just want someone else to make the kills. But here's the crucial difference between the bear and the commissar. The bear cannot kill all the salmon, and that's a survival mechanism of the salmon species. The bear can't kill them all, but it eats as many as it can, leaves the rest, and the ecosystem survives. Next year, the salmon come back. But communism destroys prosperity wherever it goes. Not slows it, not strains it, destroys it. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, oh yeah, that was years ago, but also Cuba today, Venezuela, we watched it happen in our lifetime, lifetimes. Every single implementation has ended in poverty, famine, or both. When you abolish the price system, you don't just disrupt the market, you kill the ecosystem, and the salmon don't come back. The bear is smarter than the commissar, and that's not a joke. And that brings me to this. You can only safely protest capitalism because you live under capitalism In every country that has actually implemented the system being demanded, the USSR, Maoist China, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, this podcast would not exist. Not because it would be unpopular, but because it would be illegal. And you and I would be at best in a re-education program. The freedom to stand in public and denounce the system you live under, that freedom is a product of liberal market-oriented democracy. Remember, nature is capitalist, but it doesn't exist in the alternatives being proposed. And the people proposing them either know that and don't care or don't know it, which is arguably worse and unfortunately probably the case. So we'll do what the Tenth Man always does and give the other side its due. Capitalism has real problems. There is such a thing as inequality. Market failures are real. There are people who get left behind and pretending otherwise is not analysis, it's cheerleading. But the question never was, is capitalism perfect? It isn't. The question is, as compared to what? And when you actually compare it in outcomes, in freedom, in human flourishing, in the ability to course correct without a revolution, the contest is not even close. Nature figured that out in the case of the bear and the coyote in its own way. And in the absence of the domineering hand of a socialist government, capitalism is the natural force which exists both in nature and in human society. So tell a friend about the Tenth Man podcast with Kevin Travis. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a review if you're so inclined. It genuinely helps people find the show. And if you know someone who's been to a protest on their iPhone lately, send them this episode. But be nice. We're not here to make enemies. We're here to make people think. This is the Tenth Man helping you to think it through.