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do you agree with anarcho-syndicalism?

I do not think that syndicalism as I see it is compatible with the market model I propose. Nor do I think it would achieve the prosperity that a free market economy would. But I’m not at all against allowing people to have their own section of land where they practice anarcho-syndicalism as long as they respect our right to have a section of land where we can practice anarcho-capitalism.

In response to your video of “Help the Poor by Ending State Welfare” that was posted about a year ago you asked in the comments:

Q: “Exactly how many were on welfare in 2005?”

I’ve looked into it:

A: ~4.5 million (http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/data-reports/caseload/2005/2005_recipient_tan.htm)

You need to make sure that you use the term “welfare” consistently. The $404 billion is the total number allocated to various social welfare programs. The number 2 million (families not individuals) is the number of TANF recipient families which is a small amount of the social welfare budget.

Once that distinction is made I found it fairly straightforward to find the numbers that you have been looking for. If the efficiency measure that you are using for the charities is applied to TANF then it seems to show an efficiency of ~90% with a reported 9.3% going to administrative overhead (see page 5 of http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/data-reports/annualreport8/chapter02/chap02.pdf found from the TANF “Data & Reports” page).

The entire $404 billion in 2005 of course includes other services such as:
* 26 million people receiving food stamps (http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/qc/pdfs/2005_state_activity.pdf)
* 6.6 billion school lunches and breakfasts served (http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FoodNutritionAssistance/gallery/Child/childnutrition.htm).
* Workers comp
* the Unemployment Trust Fund
* Tax credits for the poor
* SSI, a part of social security.

Some of these may be higher or lower in your efficiency measure than others, but on the whole they are probably not too far off from the one quoted for charity organizations. Some are much better in fact: the social security program costs less than 1% to administer (http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/227) which is then possibly a similar number for SSI.

This means that your argument perhaps is that you do not think that the government should provide these services in the first place no matter how good it ends up being at providing them. That is a viewpoint that you can argue, but make sure that if you are going to use numbers for that argument you have got them right.

It would be nice if you updated the “Help The Poor By Ending State Welfare” video or the description of it to reflect these numbers so that other people are not mislead by your invalid reasoning.

A long time ago, I put an annotation in the video requesting to see the description. In the description I wrote –

“It was, and remains to be, very difficult for me to find any actual figures from the government itself on exactly how many families were on some kind of welfare for 2005. To give an idea of what the maximum number would likely be, we can look at the poverty rate, which is roughly 13% of the population. That would be 39 million people (3M*0.13). Considering that families on average consist of 4 people, that would mean 9.75 million families are below the poverty line (39M/4). Assuming all families under the poverty level are receiving welfare, they should each have received $41,435.90 for that year alone (404B/9.75M). Assuming the average amount of money made every year from welfare (which again is a tedious figure to find hidden in government psuedostatistics) is $11,000 a year, the government would only have been 27% efficient (11,000/41,435.90). The very fact that the government refuses to post what their actual efficiency ratings are and force us to estimate instead causes me to think that they know exactly how horrible they are at spending money and are embarrassed to make that figure public.”

My extremely liberal estimate of 39 million people is overshooting the true number you point out (4.5 million apparently) by a huge long shot. And yet, it STILL demonstrates the massive inefficiency of welfare.

So i came across your videos while in a giant debate against a friend of mine over socialism. As this debate began i was against socialism and communism but not totally for capitalism i am now completely on the side of capitalists and he keeps telling me im an idiot, ive used ideas from your videos over and over again but he just keeps saying im stupid. I would love to see you debate this fellow, i think it would make for a great debate.

My friend and I got into a debate of socialism vs capitalism.  He used the example of the de beers mining co as an example as to why the government should intervene in the economy.  He talked about the millions that died working for this “evil” corporation.  In one of your videos you said that only through the nationalization of the diamond mines was this abuse possible.  Where have you heard this I need help to research this to see if de beers was trult a failure of capitalism or a government induced nightmare.

Do a search for debeers on mises.org and poke around.

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=debeers+site:mises.org&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8