(dramatic music)
- I was talking to my husband
about how excited about this today,
but also how it's challenging
to kick off a debate like this.
Personally because you should think
of something funny to
say at the beginning.
He was telling me you really want
to be careful when you're making jokes
about socialism and capitalism,
but socialism in particular.
And I said "Why?"
And he said, "If you're
making jokes about socialism
"it's only funny if everyone gets it."
(audience laughs)
(audience applauds)
It is actually a really serious debate,
and I think it is something
that's defining right now for our culture
and for this particular political moment.
And it's something that young
people have unique bearing on.
So your generation and mine,
millennial's and GenZ make up 37%
of the electorate in 2020,
and we are completely polarized
about socialism versus capitalism.
I was looking at some
statistics today on this,
exit polls found that
in 18 to 24-year-olds
61% were favorable towards socialism,
58% favorable towards capitalism.
So there is some overlap
there which I find weird.
But I wanted to start this off
by getting us into where
this audience stands.
We're gonna do this before
the end of the debate as well.
I'll give you three options here,
socialism, capitalism or undecided.
And I'll just have you raise your hand.
Say the one that you feel most open too,
or best identified to.
So on socialism?
Who have we got?
Okay, capitalism?
You've got your work cut out for you.
And who's undecided?
Okay, great.
Well to kick this off I'm
gonna have our two speakers
begin with an eight
minute opening statement,
they'll have a chance to
respond to each other,
I'm gonna ask a couple of questions,
and then we'll open it up
to audience questions too,
so if you've been thinking about something
that you want to ask,
please make sure that it is a question
and not a speech or to debate yourself.
But I'm really eager to hear
what you have to contribute.
So we'll kick off, do
you want to start first?
- Sure, well thank you all for coming.
The turnout is quite good,
I was not this interested in
anything when I was in college.
I actually started campaigning
when I was in college,
but I wouldn't go out to an event at 6:10
when there was other things to be doing.
It's still nice outside,
you can still leave.
- You can leave.
- I'm 30 years old now, I
just turned 30 this summer
and I became a socialist
when I was 14 or 15.
Way too young to be making this
kind of lifelong decisions,
but I'm stubborn so I stuck with it.
And at the time when I was a teenager
I would tell people I was a socialist
it would prompt a flurry of questions,
sometimes disdain,
sometimes whatever,
it was just general confusion.
Now I think in part
because of Bernie Sanders,
the AOC and the general
climate of the country,
people are just saying
yes, sure, leave me alone.
So it's good that you're
here for the conversation.
So fundamentally, the socialist vision
is at a minimum the idea
that everyone deserves
certain basic rights.
And these basic rights,
these foundations of
being a free individual
should be provided to us as social rights
and not things that are
captive to the market,
or captive to our ability to pay.
So your housing, your
healthcare, your education,
your childcare, access to basic nutrition.
These are things that we need
in order to reach our potential,
in order to be free individuals.
So a socialist mentality
isn't necessarily an
antiliberal mentality,
so it's not a mentality that says,
free speech, this is a bourgeois right,
no, free speech and these other rights
are rights we've struggled
for for one and need to be defended.
But what the socialist says
isn't that these are fake rights
compared to the real rights
and the right to eat,
the socialist says that these
are rights that can only be
truly reached if it's combined
with other guarantees.
Like for example, the guarantee
to a strong public education
that allows people to be literate,
to engage fully as
citizens in a free press.
So a country like India for instance
which has a huge percentage
of the population
that's functionally illiterate,
this is a country that
we oppose their system,
not because it has
these basic liberal democratic
rights which we respect
that doesn't exist in
every country in the world,
but because it doesn't fully realize it.
So the very least it's
about creating this bedrock
of the de-commodified social good,
so social good is taken out of the market
and enjoyed as rights
at the very least as
a last stopping point.
Now beyond that, socialist's question
the way that society is structured.
We question the fact
that we live in essentially
tyrannies in the workplace.
Tyranny doesn't mean that it's
completely miserable place,
it doesn't mean that your workplace
is necessarily a Dickensian
terrible sweatshop or something like that,
what it means though is that
you're in your workplace
from nine to five,
and you are in a society
that tells you that,
at best nine to five,
it tells you that a democracy is a right,
but within the workplace
you don't have any democratic resource.
You have no rights, your
employment contract is
a contract of course that
you freely enter into,
but it's a work or starve choice
that put you into that
employment contract.
Because essentially under capitalism,
workers and capitalists
are the people who have
to work for a living
and the people who owns the facilities
that produces goods and services the rest
of us have to work in are
dependent on each other.
Your boss certainly needs your labor,
your contribution to his or her workplace.
But you need your grocery money,
and chances are your boss needs
your individual contribution
to the labor process more
then you you need your,
less than you need your grocery money
or your way to pay your rent and so on.
So what a socialist says essentially
is that we need to democratize
this sphere of society
so in addition to guaranteeing
a certain set of rights
that allow us to be free individuals,
to maximize our individual potential,
we also need two create structures
in which there
is more democratic
participation and deliberation.
So for example, in our workplace,
we might still need to have markets,
markets existed before capitalism,
and will in my view
exist after capitalism,
but we don't necessarily
need workplaces structured as tyrannies,
where bosses and managers
aren't elected by their workers.
So socialist in other words think
about what capitalists potentially
contribute to the production process.
So obviously in the propaganda of old
we would say capitalists
are mere parasites,
they contribute nothing,
they just take from the
sweat of the worker.
In fact capitalists in this current system
contribute in vital ways
to the way our society is structured.
From one, capitalists
take entrepreneurial risk
to start new ventures
or goods and services
and produce and where people are employed.
And to the extent that
we have a welfare state
we have it because we're
taxing those ventures.
Capitalists also contribute as managers,
they are convening, they are
helping to arrange production
more often than not
especially in smaller firms.
The socialist argument isn't
that the capitalist contributes nothing,
it's that what the capitalist does
can in fact be replicated by
the free association of workers.
So you in your workplace
could decide to elect your own management
instead of just taking home a flat wage,
you could take home a share,
you can take dividends out of profits.
So in a sense what we're suggesting
is not a decline in
ownership and participation,
but a society that is a
true ownership society,
a society in which every single person
has this democratic
stake and civil society
and in democracy is guaranteed
a bedrock of rights to their society,
but also has a stake
in their place of work.
Where they are not just being treated
like replaceable cogs in a machine,
where they are able to participate
in deliberations and
discussions and so on.
Does this mean untrammeled
democracy at every single level?
No, in certain large firms
you will elect management,
and certain decisions are made
on the principles of
representative democracy.
You can't vote on every single decision
that a business makes day-to-day,
in smaller firms maybe
you can have higher levels
of direct democracy.
In the same way within civil society
we want to expand the
rights of ordinary people
to be democratic actors,
but it doesn't mean
that my right to speech,
my right to all these other bedrock rights
should be decided by votes.
What we essentially are looking for
is a society that
reaches social democracy,
what has been accomplished
in Nordic countries and elsewhere.
Countries which unlike the United States
don't have children dying
from higher rates of infant mortality
than other major countries.
Countries that don't
have people struggling
with huge amounts of debt
just to get an education.
Countries that treats and
awards people for their efforts
and guarantees a bedrock of rights.
I think we want to keep this
logic of social democracy
and extend it further into our workplace.
We don't want a year zero
break with the present,
we want a society
in which ordinary people
can reach their potential.
We want to fulfill in other words
the promise of the Enlightenment,
the promise of liberty,
equality and solidarity.
This promise has been made possible
by the riches of capitalism,
by the riches of all this abundance of
the last two to 300 years.
We now from this starting
point no longer have
to structure our societies
in such a way that oppresses a few
and allows people to
accumulate their wealth
from the labor and work of others.
- Alright.
- So it's always good in a
debate to define your terms.
So let me tell you what
I think capitalism is
what capitalism actually is
and what I think socialism is,
and why I think one is a
moral and practical system
and the other is immoral and impractical.
Capitalism is a system of freedom.
Now freedom is a tricky word,
because everybody is for freedom,
I could be in front of a group
of Marxists and everybody
would raise their hand.
We just heard that socialism
is in favor of freedom.
But what does freedom mean?
What does freedom mean?
Again, definitions.
Freedom means the absence of coercion
freedom means the absence of authority,
freedom means the absence
of a gun put to your head
when you are told what to do,
whether it's in the
name of the proletariat,
in the name of your race,
in the name of the majority,
in the name of Donald
Trump, it doesn't matter.
A gun put to your head could force
a felony of their truth,
a felony of the state
is anti-freedom.
Freedom means the absence of coercion.
Capitalism is a system
that systematizes the absence of coercion,
it eliminates coercion from society.
By protecting the rights of individuals.
Now what are rights?
We have to define all these things.
Rights are freedoms of action,
not freedoms of action
sanctioned by a majority,
not freedom of action
sanctioned by politicians
or sanctions by the authorities,
not freedom of action
sanctioned by the church.
But freedom of action.
Sanctioned by you, as an individual.
- Mic higher.
- Mic higher.
- Then people are saying it's too loud,
all right, we'll find a middle ground.
I yield, I apologize.
- The tyranny of the microphone.
- The tyranny of the microphone.
(audience laughs)
Your freedom, your freedom
to choose your values
using your mind in
pursuit of your happiness.
That's what capitalism allows,
it leaves you free,
free from coercion of other people.
Free to pursue your life.
Free to choose what path
to take for yourself.
That's the moral foundation of capitalism,
that's why capitalism is moral,
because it leaves individuals
free to use their mind
in pursuit of their own
happiness, their own values,
which is the ultimate purpose of life.
Not to sacrifice for others,
not to live for the group,
not to live for the collective,
but to live for you as an individual,
to make your life the best life it can be.
To pursue your individual happiness.
Capitalism makes that
possible by leaving you free.
What you do with it is up to you.
And some people don't do much with it,
but what you do with it is up to you
and you have the freedom to do with it.
So your values, your choices,
that's what capitalism is about,
and as a consequence of being moral
it is also a practical system.
One of the things that amazes me
about capitalism versus socialism debates
is that we are having them.
I mean this is over,
to the extent that
capitalism has been tried
to the extent that it's been
tried anywhere in the world
at any point in time in the world,
it produces freedom and
enormous wealth for people.
Everywhere, including in
Scandinavia by the way,
where they have elements of capitalism
and those elements produce the wealth
that they then steal and reissue.
And we can talk about Scandinavia later.
But it works, it's worked everywhere.
Now my vision of capitalism,
a society with no coercion
has never existed,
and certainly in the United States today
we do not live under a capitalist system.
This is a mixed economy, lots of coercion,
lots of interference, lots of authorities,
lots of people voting to
redistribute other people's wealth.
Lots of regulation of businesses
and the government
and central planners
telling us what to produce,
how to produce it, when to produce it,
how much to pay our
employees, when to pay them,
what benefits to give them.
There is no end to the amount
of control government
has today on the economy.
Less than what some would like.
But what we have today is no capitalism,
what we have today is a mixed economy,
elements of control, elements of statism,
elements of some socialism,
and some private property,
some businessmen making
decisions for themselves,
but usually heavily, heavily controlled.
That's capitalism.
And the more we expand
it, the more we allow it,
the more we let individual money free,
the richer we get, the
better the quality of life,
the better life is.
The more we constrain it,
the slower economic growth,
the less wealth is created,
the poorer we all become.
And it's simple, what
is the source of wealth?
Now again, Marxists typically argue
that the source of wealth is labor.
No.
The source of wealth is the human mind.
The source of wealth is ideas.
The source of wealth is an entrepreneur,
not because he takes risks,
not because he deploys capital,
but because he has an idea
and he is able to deploy that idea.
And I know,
I know it's hard to
understand what CEOs do
and it's hard to understand
what capitalists do,
and it's hard to understand
what entrepreneurs do.
If you've ever worked in a start-up,
if you've ever worked in
a large company you know
the laborers, the workers,
particularly those who use their hands
need their managers
a thousand times more than
the manager needs the worker.
Because without the
manager, without the idea,
without the organization,
without the talent to put
together global supply chains,
which it requires massive
amounts of talent.
This idea that workers
can just elect somebody
and they can just go
and do it, is visible.
But let me quickly define socialism.
Socialism in my view is either the state
or workers control of
the means of production,
control of our lives.
Control of the choices we
make in the economic realm.
And this idea but you can somehow separate
the social and intellectual realm
from the material property
rights realm is bizarre.
If you don't have property rights,
you don't have any rights.
Property rights are just one manifestation
of individual rights,
a manifestation of that figure of action,
but if you're free to
act, to produce the cream,
then you have to be free to
keep the product of your labor.
And if you can't keep the product
of your labor you have no rights,
and you have no right to life,
and therefore all other
rights are up for a vote.
Why limit it, why cherry pick
which rights were gonna have
and which rights we don't.
I believe we have all the
rights that are required
for human beings to survive, free speech,
the right to property.
Because it's a requirement of human life.
But I've got 30 seconds,
so I'll just say this.
Socialism is immoral, it's immoral,
because it sacrifices
individuals to the collective.
It's immoral because it violates
the rights of the
individual in every respect.
It places the tyranny of the mob,
the tyranny of the majority
over the individual,
it denies minority rights.
There's only one real
minority, the smallest minority
and that's the individual.
Socialism rejects that, it denies that
and suppresses that and stomps
all over the individual,
and it's immoral.
And as a consequence, so it's impractical,
and I'm not gonna give you the litany
of all the failures of socialism,
maybe we'll have an
opportunity later, I'd love to
from the Soviet Union to
China to Venezuela today,
to the kibbutz in Israel,
one disaster after another.
- You are out of time.
- Sorry.
- So I'm gonna kick it
off to you for a rebuttal.
- Well I think who here's
worked in a workplace,
any form of work?
Have you been exposed to coercion at work,
in other words have you had to take a job
and had to work under terms
and conditions set by someone else?
Now you could say the
contract was a fair contract
that you entered into,
but there's obviously coercion
involved in any form of production.
In particular though that
capitalists form of production,
is a form of production in which
many people who have wealth and have power
are able to maintain their wealth
and power over other people
who have to work for them.
This to me is coercion.
Now it's a form of exploitation too,
exploitation doesn't necessarily mean
it's a pejorative thing in all forms.
So I assume every single
capitalist on the planet
even someone I think
we both think is odious
as Donald Trump opposes chattel slavery.
Now if you are opposed to chattel slavery
you might be in favor of waged slavery,
you might not consider that
a reprehensible force of exploitation,
but the dynamics of having your conditions
of life determined by
someone else is the same
in the sense that you do not,
it's a contract signed under duress.
It's obviously capitalism
has created wealth
and its created abundance.
But the question is, can you not recreate
forms of wealth in abundance
and innovation and dynamism
from worker owned firms.
You have to make a case that management
by a manager who has their power
or an owner who has their power
by virtue of owning
private property a priori,
is necessarily better than management
decided democratically
by people in a workplace.
In my experience the people at a workplace
actually know how to make
things at every level,
from design to implementation.
- You could take a concept
and use it anywhere you want,
but what's the meaning?
Coercion means something,
when somebody engages into
a contract voluntarily,
that is not coercion.
You might say I didn't
want to do that contract,
but you still chose to do it.
And the fact is that
capitalism is the only
and first system in all of human history
that's given us choices.
What choices did we
have before capitalism?
One, live on a farm,
grow the food that you ate
and die in your thirties.
And most of your children dead.
Capitalism has liberated
us to have choices,
we have multiple employment opportunities,
we have multiple
educational opportunities.
We can choose our destiny.
The idea that owners and
managers coerce workers
is to make coercion a meaningless concept.
Coercion means force,
coercion means putting a gun to your head.
When you violate the law
the government comes
and takes you to jail.
The government can't do that,
companies can't do that,
government is force, it's
very nature is force.
What is happening here is
we are conflating two types of power,
economic power, and political power.
The essence of political power is force,
is coercion, is a gun.
You have no choice but to follow the law.
You have no choice but to
do what you are told to do
otherwise you go to jail.
Economic power is
fundamentally voluntarily.
You don't have to buy an iPhone.
You didn't have to go to company X,
you can go work for company Y,
or you can go to school and
study and do something else.
You have the choice in your hand,
you are in other words free.
Capitalism provides you with freedom,
Socialism provide you
with a kind of slavery
that tells you through a majority
what you must do and
how much you must do it,
how much you get paid and what
are your working conditions.
Voluntarily choice is out.
- All right, well one thing
I'm interested to hear from both of you,
it sounds like both of you
think that you're not currently
in a system you would like to be in,
so I'm curious what you
think the transition
to either socialism or
capitalism looks like?
- What I mean by democratic socialism
isn't just a socialism
that has doses of socialism
within capitalism.
It's a socialism that's after capitalism.
And that hasn't been
successfully implemented,
that hasn't been implemented
anywhere in the world.
What we do know though is that following
the logic of collective action,
social democracies have arisen.
And a lot of people collective
action is as follows,
so this unequal relationship,
call it coercion, call it something else.
Exists in the workplace,
in that the average
worker as an individual
can't go to to your boss
and say give me a $20 raise or I'm out,
I'm gonna stop working at CBS
and go to down the street,
they're gonna say, okay goodbye, go.
But, collectively you could get together
with 20 or 30 of your employees,
your fellow co-workers,
and go to that boss and you could make
a different sort of bargain,
you can use your power, your ability
to withdraw your labor from work
and you can even up the odds.
Collective action is difficult,
so you're taking this dependency
that you have with your boss
and you're evening up the odds.
That's the logic that creates unions.
Now we have to take these
individual isolated unions
and we need to band them together
to create a union federation.
But then you need to express your power
and you need to get certain
laws in certain rights
and strive at the state level.
So then you create a political party,
a labored based social
democratic political party.
And in the case of Scandinavia
and many countries in northern Europe
there were periods of decades and decades
where the parties built on this logic,
the logic of collective action
from the workers movement
govern and govern successful states.
They governed states that
had a de-commodified sector,
in other words social rights
for healthcare and education and so on.
In the same way that some
of our geniuses in the United States,
some of our greatest talents,
or even our mediocre talents
will never get the chance
to reach their potential,
you had a better chance of doing that.
In the same way we have tremendous
disparity at every level,
from racial to gender to just on
the basis of your ZIP Code,
that didn't exist in the same way,
it still existed, but it
didn't exist in the same way
in these other countries.
So that's what I believe
is a model that has worked.
Yes it was fundamentally trying to take,
and yes coerce,
a capitalist system
towards certain outcomes,
it was using regulation,
but particularly the power
of sectorial marketing
to shape capitalist outcomes.
But the logic of it was a logic
rooted in collective action
and rooted in the workers movement
and rooted yes, on socialist ideology.
That succeeded.
Can we go beyond social democracy
into a form of worker ownership,
that's an open question,
I would like to get to a source
of democracy and let's find out,
and if it doesn't work,
then people won't be for it
and it'll be rolled back.
In Sweden there were
attempts to use the logic
of collective action to go
beyond social democracy,
Institute forms of the Miter
plan and these are the plans
forms of ownership,
it never was fully pursued,
but that's my logic.
I have no problem embracing
the good and bad of Socialism,
saying what I disagree with,
authoritarian forms of
socialism I disagree with.
Saying the flawed parts of
the Scandinavian models
I don't agree with,
because I think if we had
the go to scouts mentality,
it just becomes a semantic thing
where anything good isn't real socialism,
anything bad isn't real socialism
And everything good is that's
the only real socialism.
And I think sometimes
people who are procapitalist
fall into the same step,
because anything bad in this society
they say it's because
it's not capitalist enough
and so on, it makes it difficult
to have a conversation.
- Do I get to comment on that?
- I would like you to first of all.
There we go, I'd like you
to first of all talk about
how you think the tradition of capitalism
as you see it would work
from what we have right now,
and then I'm gonna let you
guys respond to each other.
- Well I think the trajectory
towards capitalism is a hard one,
much harder than I think a
trajectory towards socialism,
because I think the world,
in spite of all my efforts,
the world is moving more towards socialism
than it is towards capitalism
and the general agreement
is that socialism is a good,
that coercion is good, that force is good,
that forcing people to behave in
a particular way that you
want him to behave is right.
The idea that force, coercion,
forcing somebody to do something
they don't want is wrong,
morally, and should never be exercised.
That idea is not a popular idea.
I think the only way to
move us towards capitalism
is in real educational campaigns
challenging the philosophical foundation
of the existing system that we have.
The existing system of
thought that we have.
The moral idea the purpose in life
is to live towards others,
the moral idea that the collective
is more important than the individual.
The moral idea that
the state is above all.
We see on the Democratic side
and on the Republican side,
that we see in politics
across the entire spectrum.
Those things have to be challenged.
Until we are willing to
challenge collectivism,
and moral altruism,
until we are willing to embrace
the morality of individualism in
a political system of individualism,
a political system that elevates
the freedom of the individual,
that is built around
freedom for the individual,
I don't see how capitalism comes about.
I think you see in the West
movements to move towards
a little bit more free market,
but then as soon as they
fixe things a little bit
and the economy starts growing again
and people feel comfortable,
they immediately bounce back to socialism.
You saw that with Reagan
and it bounced back,
you saw that with Thatcher
and it bounced back.
Because neither Reagan
nor Thatcher challenged
the fundamental beliefs that are required
in order to build a capitalist society.
And those are deeply rooted
and they are philosophical,
and they require changes
at university level
and change in young people's thinking.
And I see that move towards capitalism
towards my vision as much harder,
much more challenging
and much more educational than political.
I don't like political,
because politics is what?
Politics is force.
But think about how it eats at you
but this guy is lazy and
he's going home early,
this is exactly what
happened in the kibbutz,
and you work very hard and
you start resenting him,
and you start hating him.
Every time I see socialists, socialism,
what you see is malevolence
towards other people,
resentment, hatred.
Because it creates
envy, rivalry and hatred
because it's a zero-sum world.
I don't get paid for what I produce,
I get paid what was negotiated,
what was voted on, what people agreed.
Not based on my productivity.
And somebody else might get
exactly the same as I do.
Even though they are
a lot less productive,
that's what collective action does,
and that's why unions are declining.
Unions have declined because
of union members don't
want to be in unions,
because it doesn't make any sense to them,
particularly in the modern era
where they negotiate
salaries for themselves.
Unions have declined
because manufacturing jobs,
physical labor is in decline
because of technology,
because of robots and
because of computers.
And no software engineer,
no software engineer who is an employee
wants a union to represent them.
Are they gonna be able to bounce around
from company to company like
they do in Silicon Valley,
bringing their salary up
every time they do it.
No, not under socialism
you can't do any of that.
- So this conversation
seems to be shaping up
to be a lot about coercion,
so I want to ask people a question,
respective of your
preferred economic system
about coercion.
So let's start with you Yaron,
one thing that I hear as
a critique of capitalism
is that if you pit
economics against each other
that there is an incentive for businesses
to get government on their side
and use that coercion
against their competition.
And the question when we're talking about
transitioning to a
purely capitalist system
from the mix that we have right now
it is due to really big companies
already have the advantage,
so they can wield the power
against smaller businesses
and against entrepreneurs in
a way that there's no coming back from.
- So let me be clear.
Cronyism, which is what you're describing
is a feature of statism,
it's a feature of systems like socialism,
it's not a feature of capitalism.
If you have a complete separation
of state from economics
businesses don't lobby the state,
because the state has no power,
no goodies to give them.
It's only because the state has power,
has resources, has
favors to give businesses
do you get the lobbying,
do you get the manipulation,
do you get the cronyism
and then develops into protecting
themselves from others.
So if we talked about the transition,
my first if I were president, God forbid,
the first thing I would do
is pass an anti-cronyism law,
and it would be very simple,
zero subsidies.
Zero corporate taxes,
which are stupid taxes,
if you know anything about economics
corporations don't pay
taxes, you pay the taxes,
all taxes are consumption taxes.
All corporate taxes are
consumption taxes or leaver taxes,
so employees and consumers
pay all corporate taxes.
So zero corporate taxes,
so you can't give any
loopholes and favors there.
Zero subsidies,
and dramatic reduction in
regulation across the board,
so every year I would eliminate
25% of the regulations on the books.
And once the state is
separated from economic power,
lobbying goes away I'll give
you one click story about this.
In the early 1990s the
largest corporation in
the world based on market
capitalization was Microsoft.
How much money did Microsoft spend
in those years lobbying Washington?
while the exact figure is zero.
Largest company in the world,
did no cronyism, no lobbying,
no law firm, no building, nothing in DC,
they had no presence in DC, nothing.
And Congress invited them in,
Whatever Congress does it's an invitation,
there's a gun, they're
saying you better come.
They came in and sat in
front of a Senate committee
headed by a Republican,
a young Aaron Hatch from Utah.
And Aaron Hatch stood
up and he yelled at him
and he said you better
appear here in Washington DC
you have to build buildings
here you have to hire lawyers
in other words you have to bribe me.
Now you can't say that in America,
so you coach it in other terms.
You can find this, this
is all well documented.
And Microsoft said, you know what,
you leave us alone, we leave you alone,
we are not interested.
And the went home and continued
to devote exactly zero
dollars to lobbying.
Six months later,
or several months later
a knock on the door,
we're hear from the Justice Department.
you violated such and such laws
and we're coming after you.
Remember what the violation was,
anybody know what Microsoft
did that was so evil
that they had to be harassed
for over 10 years by
the Justice Department?
Anybody know?
The give away something for free,
a browser.
I remember downloading
Netscape for 70 bucks.
You guys can you believe you
had to pay for a browser,
you don't pay for anything,
and everything is free in this
economy, it's pretty amazing.
And they gave it away for free
and that was an anti-trust valuation,
and guess how much money Microsoft
spends today on lobbying.
Tens of millions of dollars,
if you go downtown in DC
about an equal distance from
the White House and Congress
they have a beautiful building,
they've got massive numbers of lawyers.
Because they realized
that Washington won't leave them alone,
so they'd better fight back.
So you want to get rid of cronyism,
get rid of government intervention.
- Alright, so here's one question to you,
we were talking about literal
transfer of ownership,
violation of property rights in a way.
And I guess my question for you is
what happens when a business owner says
no, I don't want to give
this company up to workers?
- Well I think that we have
to separate private property rights
and personal property rights.
- Can you clarify for me that a bit?
- So in other words
your right to own a car,
own a toothbrush, own
whatever else, own a home,
this is not a right that impinges on
the rights of other people.
Now if we say that the
workplace is the sole domain
because of private property rights
it belongs to the capitalists
and the capitalists alone,
like he would say,
then the terms of negotiations
of work just up to the capitalists
and whatever internal
power dynamics of pressure,
so there's still gonna be a battle
of industrial conflict that's gonna go on
between workers demanding certain things
and capitalists demanding other things.
By way, a lot of those programmers
are gonna see in the next 20 or 30 years
as they get de-skilled,
it's already happening,
they might want the union really badly
in 10 to 15 years as they go from Artisans
to just regular workers
like the rest of us.
Now all this involves taking
and enshrining certain rights
that these workers have,
or taking a victory in one union contract
and applying it across
the sector for instance.
This implies an erosion
of property rights.
Now if there are certain sectors
that I will admit right away
at the snap of a finger I do want
to take away from private hands
and put into public hands.
Not even necessarily the hands of workers,
but the hands of the state.
There's limited sectors,
there's natural monopolies
where I think that would make sense,
there's the health insurance industry
which I think vitally as
a moral imperative within
the next five years
we need to take from a commodified sphere
and bring to a Medicare for all system
into the public as a right.
What happens if the CEOs
of these companies say no?
They don't have the right,
they have the right to contest the ruling,
they have the right to use law to contest
the judicial systems,
contest an expropriation,
but I think there are certain sectors
where we don't want the private sector
and we have in the past taken sectors
away from the private sector
and brought into the public sector.
The New York City subway system,
one reason why it's so
difficult to maintain
as because it's essentially
the amalgamation
of three or four different
private subway lines.
They all had different tokens,
they all had different cars,
they all had different types of tracks.
I think even most defenders of
the existing capitalist
system would say yes,
the public transit is something
that the state should probably do
because it allows people to move
around and exchange goods and services.
And I think in that case yes,
it was an expropriation,
but it was done lawfully
and it was done in a transparent way
and it was done by rule of law.
It's not something where
a leader struts around
and points at something and
says and says expropriated this,
don't expropriated this,
I know this person.
No, it has to be done in such
a way that's governed
by certain principles,
but we are for,
and most people are for
all sorts of intrusions
on the rights of private property.
We just believe in democratically setting
what these limits are
and in what way we want to
intrude on these rights.
Most people agree with an eight hour day,
most people agree that
there's certain resources
and people shouldn't be fired
on the basis of their gender
or race or whatever else,
most people agree on these
things, these aren't coercions.
- All right, so I want
to shift a little bit.
- Can I comment?
- Sure.
- Who is we?
Notice we are going to decide who gets
to keep their property
and who doesn't get to
keep their property.
We are going to decide if you get
to keep your toothbrush or not,
we are going to decide
which workplaces are
to be privately owned and
which workplaces are not okay.
We are going to decide, in
other words the rule of the mob,
the rule of the majority
is going to decide.
And I don't see why this we
stops with private property,
why can't we decide to kill Socrates.
We certainly have in the past.
But property rights are essential,
without property rights,
without the entrepreneurs
without the owners of
property there is no industry.
This is a fantasy and a joke.
There is no example in history
of a system that can work
even on a small scale
that can work with we by vote
decide what iPhone to produce.
Imagine what this would look like
if the committee designed it.
Imagine what this would
look like if we voted on it,
I know how I'd vote,
it wouldn't look as pretty.
It's insanity to think that you
can run any kind of business
even a small grocery store
never mind a complex supply
chain global supply chain
business on the basis of voting
and on the basis of public opinion
and on the basis of coercion.
Because the we,
the whole point of the we
is to coerce the individual.
The whole point of the we
is to tell the individual
what they can and cannot
do in the realm of profit.
You can speak all you want, can you?
If I can't have property if
I don't own the microphone,
if you don't let me own the
microphone, can I speak?
Is there are a relationship
I wanted between
private property and freedom
of speech, of course there is.
But all rights are eviscerated
once you eviscerate the right to property,
and once you place the
we above the individual.
And that is the real danger
that the individual becomes a cog,
the individual becomes
a sacrificial animal,
the individual becomes
somebody to be exploited
and expropriated,
that's what socialism is about,
socialism doesn't care
about you as an individual
it cares about the group, about the we,
about the majority,
and the majority in any
particular situation
is gonna be different.
- There's a couple of
just very quick misnomers.
First of all if you want to look at
even the success of the
cooperatives within capitalism,
well the fourth or fifth largest business
corporation in the entirety of Spain
is run on this basis.
The mantra down collective.
Now on the case yes shouldn't
an iPhone as a commodity
be produced with direct
democracy at every level,
no, what I am proposing is
a system in which worker owned firms,
so there is ownership, but it's collective
and it's regulated just like
every other market economy,
and yes just like every capitalism
will always be regulated,
I don't think we are
living in a mixed economy
in the way he describes it,
I think we're living
in a capitalist economy
that's been chastened in certain key ways.
So yes, of course they will
have to be firm failures
and will have to be innovations,
and of course there is limited to
the things that we can
decide through democracy.
I think there is a role for
markets and consumer goods.
I don't think there is a
need or role for a market
necessarily in the provision
of healthcare and other
basic social goods,
so I think it is a difference there.
But the key is,
when we say as socialists,
that there are certain
collective rights that belong to people,
of course when I say it
now it's just rhetoric,
but these are rights that
people need to deliberate upon,
that we need to democratically enshrine.
And yes like any right and
any just democratic system,
it's a right that can be rolled back.
We can enhance through our
democratic deliberative processes
the rights of the state
providing guarantees
over the provision of childcare
over the provision of healthcare.
And then eight years later we could say,
this system isn't working,
it's more inefficient,
we want to go back to the private system
and we could roll it back.
That's the way any just society works.
And am I suggesting a year
zero leap into the unknown?
No, certain principles that exist,
how to regulate speech
something like the
clear and present danger
seems like a good way to regulate
what state inference
in speech should be in
a socialist society.
I don't think socialist jurisprudence
could be spun full cloth
out of whatever else.
What I'm proposing taking
what works in our society
because it's filled with people
who want to live in a more just place,
and it's filled with many
wonders and abundance and whatnot
and providing a base level of guarantees
and deepening our democratic
participation in society
so we don't have a class of
people that are traveling
that are devils and are
around taking decisions
that affect everyone else,
but the rest of us are accountable
to corporate bureaucracies.
Libertarians and others close to them
are just so obsessed
with state bureaucracies,
they can't see how much of their lives
are dependent and decided
by corporate bureaucracies
in boardrooms most of us
will never get a chance
to be in the same building
as much less enter.
- All right when I'm gonna open it up
to audience Q&A in just a moment,
but I did want to ask
you one more question
and I'd like to responses
to be somewhat shorter
so we can open it up.
So let's try to make it a minute or two.
But I would like both of you to answer
whether or not you
think income inequality,
economic inequality in and
of itself is a bad thing?
- So, no I don't think it's a bad thing.
If it's generated in a free market.
I think the only situation
in which income inequality is
a bad thing is when it's
a consequence of coercion.
When it's a consequence of cronyism,
which is not part of capitalism
which is anti-capitalism,
it's a part of every socialist system
in every state system.
Or it's a part of the
distribution of wealth.
So I believe that any wealth you earn
you should own,
if you own a lot of wealth
because you produce a
huge amount of value,
then you own a lot of
wealth, huge amount of value.
I don't envy billionaires,
I actually cherish billionaires,
I think billionaires are fantastic,
they have created a
much better world for me
and I think that's wonderful
we have all the products they created,
they have changed the world.
So I don't think inequality
is a problem at all.
And I think what we conflate
when we talk about inequality,
is income and wealth inequality
which I think are irrelevant,
both economically and morally
with political inequality.
Political inequality is crucial.
All men are created
equal was not a statement
about income or wealth, it
was a statement about rights.
We all have the right
to life living in the
pursuit of happiness,
whether the majority wants it or not,
whether the majority likes
what I do with my life or not,
I have the right.
So the only system,
the only system consistent
with equal rights,
with equal liberty is capitalism.
Socialism might generate
equality of outcome
but it undermines by definition,
it undermines equality of
freedoms and equality of rights,
it's a violation of the principal
of the quality of liberty.
- While I don't believe that income,
I don't believe that income inequality in
and of itself is the goal.
The goal is equality in power,
for us to as to as political actors
have the same democratic stakes,
for us to have certain guarantees
and will be able to reach
our individual potentials.
It might be that in the
society that I envision
if someone working at one firm
wants to work longer hours,
has the position of more responsibility
or is doing really socially
undesirable job but still vital,
like sanitation workers or whatever,
should be compensated more
than people in other jobs.
That's not a problem unless
it's connected to inequality of power.
Unless it means that this
extra wealth that I have
isn't just more spare time for
me for more money for leisure
or for trips or for whatever else
but in fact it means that
I hold more power over you.
And today, often when we talk on the left,
more broadly the populist
left or the socialist left
when people talk about income
inequality and announce it,
often it's because it's correlated
to these inequalities of power.
Because in our society
if you have wealth and you have power,
you'll use that wealth and power
to keep your foot on someone else's neck,
you'll use that wealth and power naturally
it's not just a cabal
of crony capitalists,
you'll naturally use that wealth and power
to set up regulations and
systems but keep you powerful
and keep your competition behind.
This isn't an aberration
this is a natural outgrowth
of living in a class society.
What I propose is going towards a society
in which we have a free
association of producers,
income inequality isn't the main problem,
the problem we have is
that inequality is
rooted in the workplace,
and rooted in civil society
and it's a product of capitalism.
- All right, with that
I'm gonna open up to Q&A.
It has to be an actual Q&A though,
so if after a sentence--
- You have to go to the mics at the side.
- If you're not gonna ask a question,
then I'm gonna cut you off really.
And also just a reminder
I'm really excited we're
having a civil debate,
so let's keep it civil.
- [Man] Hi, I have a
question for Mr Brooke.
So I was especially
intrigued by this concept
of state with complete
separation of state and economy.
And what I was wondering
is if you would lay out for me
how exactly a small state such as this
could enforce these anti-trust rules
especially in industries in
which economies of scale apply.
- I don't think there
should be anti-trust rules,
that's exactly what I mean
by separation of state from economy.
I think anti-trust rules were
the first great violation
of economic rights in the
United States in 1890.
There are no such things as
monopolies in the free market.
And I'll take the classic examples,
I've encouraged audiences
to challenge me on this
in hundreds of engagements,
never found one yet.
Standard Oil, Standard Oil had 92%
of all the refining capacity in
the United States in the 1870s.
A monopoly, you'd expect a monopoly.
What were you taught in
economics 101 monopolies do,
they raise prices and they lower quality.
Well go to the data,
the data is available,
it's all archived and
you'll find that the prices
went down every single year
and quality went up
dramatically every single year.
And by the way, wages went
up as well every single year
in spite of the monopoly
of power supposedly that Rockefeller had.
Not only did prices not
move in the way we expected,
who ultimately competed Rockefeller out of
the business that he was in?
Because he ultimately got
a zero market share in the
market he was in in 1870,
and 1870 he was producing what?
Kerosene, which was used for lighting.
Who competed him out of existence?
Thomas Edison.
Who would have predicted that?
Which bureaucrat, which government entity
would predict that Thomas Edison
was actually a competitor of Rockefeller.
And by the time anti-trust laws
broke Rockefeller up in the 1920s
how much of the percent of
the oil market did Rockefeller have then?
23 I think percent.
So market competition
drove him from 92 to 23,
and wiped out a whole industry for him
through what we call an
economic substituted product
in electricity.
So the idea that a bureaucrat
that the government,
that voters, that a majority
can figure out what the monopoly is
and when it's appropriate and
when it's not it is absurd,
and this is why the principal has to be.
And I believe in principles,
no government intervention in economy.
Not for anti-trust,
not for any other cause you or
a bunch of economists
might think is worthwhile.
There is no cause worthwhile enough
to violate somebody's property rights.
- All right, we'll take one from the side,
and by the way if you guys
want to ask questions,
it would be helpful if you
head to the side over there,
one side or the other.
- So I should very quickly
say that has very little to do
with the debate around socialism.
I'm not Elizabeth Warren,
I'm not in favor of necessarily every
form of anti-trust legislation,
I think there's often efficiencies
with economies of scale.
Often as we saw in social democracies
the wage pressures from
sectorial bargaining
and social democracy led to
the concentration in larger firms.
You're answering the
question, I'm just saying.
- [Woman] Thank you very much,
this has been very fascinating,
and I'll stick to transparency.
I agree with both of you and
I disagree with both of you,
but I do have a question for Mr Brooke.
So let's say you're living in Indiana
and one of your friends is an
entrepreneur who has a plant,
and needs energy,
another entrepreneur friend
of yours opens up a
coal powered fuel plant,
as a result you have arsenic
and other heavy metals
that are leaching and radium
leeching into the water
and you and your family drink that water
you will get sick and go to the doctor
and you don't get better
because you find out
the doctor is not actually a doctor,
he's just someone pretending.
What's the reckoning for all of that?
- Property rights.
So if water is private property
and if you have recourse
to the legal system
where you can show that
somebody has hurt you.
We have always known
you can't drop your
garbage in my backyard.
We've always known you can't poison me,
that in civil law going
back a thousand years.
And the legal system takes care of that.
And once a certain compound is proven
to be destructive to human life
it's completely appropriate
for the government
to then step in in protection
of life of the right to life,
and say you can't emit that product.
But there has to be a process by
which that is objectively defined,
the legal system has always
worked pretty well to do that,
that's the system by which you do that.
But remember, let me just
make a general comment.
People talk about the
environment all the time,
and your generation
is pretty depressed about the environment,
the world is gonna end in 12
years or something like that.
Life has never been as
good as it is right now.
You've never lived longer,
you've never lived healthier,
you've never breathed cleaner air.
You've never drunk cleaner water.
You know why they drink tea in China
because it used to being
in ancient times the water was polluted,
they had to boil the water,
one way to guarantee
that was by drinking tea.
Same about beer in northern Europe.
We live in this amazing world,
the human environment
has never been better,
primarily because of the
capitalist elements in society.
So these questions are easily dealt with
in a property rights
respecting capitalist society.
By the way, the most dirty places in
the world are socialist, always have been.
When the wall came down,
Eastern Europe was filthy
because nobody takes
care of public property,
but you take care of your property,
so we want more of your property
and less public property.
- All right, over here?
- [Man] Mr. Sunkara
would you please explain
Venezuela's state of socialism?
- First of all on that point,
there are also countries in eastern Europe
that didn't have democratic
socialist or green parties
that freely enacted the title legislation
that cleaned up Western Europe
and cleaned up these countries
from the muck of the damage
the industrial revolution did.
They had their own industrial revolution
which left behind that part of it.
When it comes to Venezuela,
Venezuela in my mind is
not a socialist society,
it never was, it's a society
that always maintained property rights,
but it was a society that
embodied in many ways,
came to embody the worst of both worlds.
You had systems of
patronage that developed
from oil rents being trickled down.
You had a populist style of mobilization
used by all sectors of
political parties in Venezuela.
You had certain programs
that were in fact misguided,
you had a price control program
which I think backfired tremendously.
So in many cases there were huge mistakes
being done in Venezuela,
and it's an economic crisis
that was worsened by
continuing US sanctions,
by violent opposition,
and it's a disaster on many levels.
I don't think it reflects
one way or the other
on socialism in particular.
If you have parties, an
actual socialist party
governing within the
confines of capitalism
in Bolivia and in Ecuador.
Many people have complaints
about the Morales government,
they have complaints about
the record of the Correa government.
If complaints about the first
two terms of the PK government in Brazil,
but these were countries that were able to
preside over long periods
of economic growth.
They were able to redistribute
the proceeds of that growth
to create stronger social infrastructure,
social indicators went way up.
So I think you saw during the same time
the successes of left of center
government in Latin America,
as you saw the decline in
Venezuela under Madura.
So I think at a certain level
we have to say that certain
factors are in fact contingent.
I wouldn't sit here and claim that
a capitalist is responsible,
someone on the procapitalist side
is responsible defending the systems
that we saw under Pinochet in Chile
in the same way we
could say that socialism
and egalitarian redistributive systems
and populist systems in particular
can lead in very dark directions,
or they can lead towards further
progress and emancipation.
You saw both at the same
time in the same continent,
so I think we need to make clear
that we are for certain
bedrock social rights
that need to be combined
with political rights,
we are for free press,
we are against government
authority in any context,
no matter who's using it,
no matter what flag they're flying.
- So let's be very clear,
Venezuela is clearly a
failure of socialism.
If you look at industry by industry,
the industries that failed in Venezuela
are those that were either
nationalized or collectivized.
Farming in Venezuela used to be private
and that that point Venezuela
was an exporter of food
was nationalized creating
communes that made decisions
about where to grow and how to grow it
and as a consequence
production has plummeted.
Now this is the case everywhere
that you collectivized farms,
from the kibbutz to Maoist
China, to the Ukraine,
everywhere where farming
has been collectivized
the result has been starvation.
The oil industry, elements
of it used to be private,
it was nationalized by
Chavez, and as a consequence,
a country that has more oil
reserves than Saudi Arabia
it is now has no oil.
It can't get to the oil
because it doesn't have the technology
and the ability because
it collectivized them.
So it's exactly because of
socialism that Venezuela failed,
now true, they didn't
collectivized everything.
And those parts that
they didn't collectivize
are still somehow functioning
and while Venezuelan still doesn't have
tens of millions of people
dying of starvation,
just hundreds of thousands of
people dying of starvation.
- [Man] You emphasized a lot
about capitalistic things
like that of individual
freedom, happiness and rights.
But you vocalize that society
with men are more individuals
who pursue their rights in different ways.
Some go to extremes regarding
the effects their choices
cause to other members of the society.
So with a uniform or without
a partisan regulatory body
how do you govern where some individuals
with extreme ideas exist?
Thank you.
- So I have no problem with
people having extremist ideas,
I think a lot of people
think I have extremist ideas,
and it worries me when people
want to silence people
with extremist ideas,
because I would be one
of the first silenced.
It's not your ideas that
worry me, it's your actions.
If your actions violate anybody's rights,
and again violation of rights
is poisoning the water,
violating their rights
is stealing from them,
violating their property rights,
or harming them physically or
committing fraud against them,
those things you put them in jail.
Those are the laws that
a capitalist society
passes because the laws
protect individual rights.
But everything else is up to you,
as long as you're not
violating people's rights
you can do what you want,
you can start a company
and build a business, you
can become an employee,
you can decide you don't want to work
and you can be a panhandler upstate.
You can choose what you want
to do, and it's your life.
I don't have to help you
if you made bad choices,
I don't have to help you
if you're out of luck.
I can choose to help you if I want to,
and I can choose not to
help you if I don't want to.
So any help, any safety
net is voluntarily.
Every interaction
between human beings
should be voluntarily.
Capitalism is very simple,
it's a system in which we interact
with one another voluntarily.
We don't pull guns out,
we don't collect little gangs
to vote to take your property
to take your stuff away from you.
Each individual interacts
with other people
on a voluntary basis.
If I don't want to deal with
you for whatever reason,
I don't deal with you, I walk away.
- Actually I want to get your
answer to that question too,
because how do socialist systems deal
with extremist ideas?
- Well I think by much the same standard,
a level of if you're
presenting an immediate harm
or physical threat if you are
inciting people to violence,
then no, but if you're just
marching down the street
with a swastika or whatever else,
I think we have to trust
the vast majority of people
will not go down that path.
Today it's not illegal to start
a monarchist party in the United States.
There is no monarchist party,
because few people want to get
rid of a democratic republic.
And I think the standard has to be
a very high standard
for state intervention
and stopping the so-called
extremism and whatnot,
and I think the standard has
to be direct incitement
to harm and violence.
- All right, well we are unfortunately
out of time for more questions,
I'm gonna kick this off to the gentleman
to give closing statements and then
I'm really interested to see
if they changed anything.
- Do you want to cede
our closing statements?
- I'm willing to cede
our closing statements
to take more questions.
- Maybe we could take two
at a time or something?
- Yeah okay, we'll take two more.
We'll take two at a time, so
you get one and you get one.
- Well let's do four and
we'll choose what to answer.
That will be our closing statement.
Four questions straight and we'll go.
- [Man] Can we vote on the questions?
- No you don't get a vote,
I don't believe in voting.
- Okay, two from each side.
- [Man] I wanted at the
beginning to define some terms,
what socialism is and what capitalism is,
I think even more fundamental is
that you define what we mean by rights.
Because the definition of
rights as being your right
to education means that somebody
else's rights have to be violated.
- So the question is what is rights?
- [Man] Right.
- Great.
(audience laughs)
- I did define them by the way.
- And over here?
- [Man] That was about my question,
to just go off of that
I was wondering if you
happen to agree with
the idea of positive rights
to acquire somebody else's
labor or someone else's actions,
how do you justify that
given how that might--
- We should just have
closing statements on rights.
Two more questions?
- [Man] You mention that it
is the role of government
to protect our freedom, and yet you also
admit that the nature of government,
the nature of the state is to
is that of coercion and one of violence.
How can you expect an institution
that is apparently violent
to protect our rights?
- It's an anarchy question,
I always get one in every
event I always do, yes?
- [Man] In "The Wealth of Nations",
Adam Smith argued that
the role of the government
once to regulate the market forces.
As I believe he understood that there is
a limit to market forces and
they needed to regulate it.
So then my question would be if we
do get rid of regulations and
we get rid of the government,
assuming you can have a functional economy
a functional capitalist
society a small government,
how do you ensure that we
do not fall into a system
that political scientists
would call totalitarianism
where you have the inverse
of classic totalitarianism
where the corporations capture the state
and we live under the
tyranny of the corporations
instead of the tyranny of the government.
- All right, you each have two minutes.
- I should start, I
guess you started before?
- You go ahead and start, and give him a--
- Okay, so let me just quickly
do the rights question.
I said in my opening statement
that rights are the
recognition that we have
the freedom to act in
pursuit of our values,
that's what a right is and that's
how I defined it earlier on.
They cannot be positive
rights in that sense,
I think rights are positive.
The positive nature of action,
that is they sanction your ability
to act on behalf of your life
in pursuit of your values
in pursuit of your rational mind.
So in that sense they are positive.
But this is the principle with rights,
you cannot have a right
to other peoples stuff.
Any time you think there's a right,
but it requires taking
stuff from other people,
it can't be a right.
You can't have other
people working for you
we call that slavery without compensation.
You can't have a right to healthcare
that makes the doctor, the nurses,
all the people who have worked
hard and educated themselves
in order to provide a product, a service,
they become your slaves, they
have to provide it to you
without any compensation,
because you have a right to it.
So you cannot have a right
to other peoples stuff.
The only right you have
is to be left alone,
in other words the only right you have
it is to be free of coercion,
free to act in pursuit of your own values.
And I'll just say quickly
on the last question,
this idea that somehow corporations
will take over the state.
The state has guns,
corporations don't.
The state is the monopoly
over the use of force,
and if you separate state from economics.
Corporation is about making
money, creating values,
producing stuff, they're
not about political power.
And if you leave them alone
they'll leave you alone.
And if a corporation doesn't,
they can use the power of
the states to stop them.
That is, if they are violating rights,
if they are using force against citizens
or they are using force
against the government
then the government has every right
to stand up and stop them.
- Corporations not too
long ago used to have guns.
The Pinkerton's ran amok in
this country and killed workers
and decided law in its own terms.
Corporations still had cons via
the state after that in
the twentieth century.
Look at what US Fruit
did in Latin America.
US corporations have always had guns,
this is the natural
dynamics of what happens
if you allow a concentration
of wealth and power
in a so-called private
sphere and let it spill over.
Now when it comes to the kinds of rights
and freedoms that we want to see,
yes I believe strongly
in our negative freedoms,
I believe strongly in the Bill of Rights.
I also believe that there needs
to be a second Bill of Rights,
and in this I share with not
just democratic socialists
but also with the best
of American liberalism
that share the same belief.
From FDR's speech in 1944 onward
there's been demands for a
certain bedrock of guarantees
and a certain bedrock of rights.
But yes I agree, it does mean taking away
something from someone else or
from another group of people.
I think there's limits to
what one can take from someone else.
You can't abridge someone's speech,
you can't take someone's life,
there's all sorts of limits.
But taking someone's right to provide you,
your HMOs right provide
you with health insurance
and turning that into a social guarantee,
that's a right that I'm more
than happy to take away.
And in this vision of society you have,
I think it just doesn't jive
with what most people think
which is that it's not about
altruism or whatever else.
Most people want to take care
of themselves and take
care of their families,
and they're seeing themselves
get squeezed in every moment,
they're seeing an establishment
in both the left and the right,
both the Democratic Party
and the Republican Party
take them for granted, take
their votes for granted.
They say, you know what, I
feel a little bit more relief,
I need a little bit more
freedom to do what I want
and not have to worry
about my medical thing,
not have to worry about
how I'm gonna pay to
send my kid to school.
I need to not worry about
whether this banker writing
me a mortgage is trying to rip me off,
this is what people want and this is why
I don't know if socialism is for everyone,
I don't know if socialism will work,
but I do know that social democracy
is the path that most
Americans believe in,
and it's a path that
America is gonna march into
into the next 10 or 20 years.
- All right, with that I want
to know what you guys think,
so who here still supports capitalism?
- It's hard to tell.
- Who support socialism,
and put up both your
hands if you're a convert.
All right, who's still undecided?
Great, well thank these gentlemen
and give them a round of applause.
(audience applauds)
(upbeat music)
