 All right well good evening, good to be in Longhorn country coming down from the mountains up in Steamboat Springs. Hopefully you can hear me now. Thanks Carlos and Mario. The Center for Enterprise and Policy Analytics has been great to work with and bringing this debate to you tonight. I'm going to just make some very brief opening remarks and we're gonna get on with the show. I was talking to my husband before I came over here. He's a UT law grad even though we live up in Colorado now and I was saying you know I'd like to open with something kind of funny a little humor to open my remarks tonight. He said well the only problem with telling a joke about socialism is that everyone has to get it. So come on. The crowd in Maryland thought that was funny last night. Okay in the 11 years since our founding the Steamboat Institute which is based in Steamboat Springs Colorado has earned a nationwide reputation for offering high-quality programs which provide ordinary citizens like all of us with direct and personal access to our nation's leaders whether it's in journalism, media, government, education, the entertainment industry, the military. We like to put people in direct and close contact with these leaders. Through our innovative programming and providing direct and personal access to these leaders on the national and global stage the Steamboat Institute hopes to inspire ordinary citizens to learn critical thinking skills and to use those skills to then gain a better understanding of public policy, individual liberty and the proper role of government. Last year we kicked off our inaugural campus liberty tour with a nationwide debate on nationalism versus globalism featuring Nigel Farage and Vicente Fox. That was quite a tour. The goal of the campus liberty tour is to bring reasoned and respectful debates to college campuses across the country while encouraging the development of critical thinking skills. We've all seen that in on many campuses there's a lack of civilized discourse. People bring in speakers who are screamers you know seemingly for the sole purpose of having protests and that's not how we do things. Last night we kicked off our socialism capitalism debate tour at the University of Maryland in College Park and tomorrow night we will wrap up this week's tour at the University of Colorado in Denver. We hope to show the students and everyone else who attends how to once again use critical thinking skills to engage in robust but reasoned and respectful debate. You will see a robust debate tonight but I think you will see that our speakers won't be screaming at each other. In other words we want to teach you how to think not what to think. I would like to finally thank our university partners once again the Center for Enterprise and Policy Analytics at the McCombs School of Business. All of our university partners at Maryland, University of Colorado and our other sponsors for sharing our vision for bringing free speech and ideological diversity and respectful debates to college campuses across America because without their support we wouldn't be able to bring you this very compelling debate this evening. So tonight's debaters are Yaron Brooke Chairman of the Eindran Institute, author of several books including In Pursuit of Wealth and Bosco Sankara, author of The Socialist Manifesto which was just released earlier this year. Bosco is also publisher of the Quarterly Socialist magazine, Jacobin. The moderator for tonight's debate is Tom Rogan of the Washington Examiner. He's also a Tony Blankley Senior Fellow with the Steamboat Institute. Let's give a warm welcome to our debaters and our moderator. Well thank you very much Jennifer and thank you to all of you for coming regardless of your political views. It's great to see so many people here being open to a discussion but before we get to that discussion I want to see where everyone stands at the moment and we'll do another vote at the end. So if you're in favor of capitalism more so than socialism put up your hand. Okay and if you're in favor of socialism more so than capitalism put up your hand. Okay so it's pretty bad. Okay and if you're undecided if you really haven't made up a definitive opinion put up your hand. Okay well one or two. All right well let's get into it then so Yaron do you want to start us off with your opening remarks? You could whatever you prefer you can sit if you want whatever you prefer. I'll stand and then we'll sit. Is this on? No. I think that just feeds into the camera. You might need that. Oh do you need all right why don't you take my mic. No you don't have you need another mic. You're not mic'd. Yeah you can you can be heard. There we go. All right. Okay I hope I hope everybody doesn't expect me to do this in rhyme after that video because I'm not ready for that. It's great to be back in Texas. I forgot how hot it is but other than that it's it's always great to be in Austin. So when debating a social system when debating something like what is better capitalism or socialism when it first has to really define what is the standard for better what is better actually mean and my standard for better is individual human fruition. How do we as individual do in all the different social systems that are out there socialism and capitalism being too often. What system is best for individual human success individual human flourishing individual human happiness at the end of the day. Now what leads to flourishing what is required for individuals to be successful at life at living well what is it that makes us human what is it that allows us to create values to build a life to make a life for ourselves to pursue the values that are necessary for us to survive what is it that allows us as human beings to actually survive what makes it possible for us to have the things that we have around us well first and foremost what makes all this possible is the use of our reason the use of our mind ability to have ideas ideas that often the majority of people don't agree with don't like offend them even i mean Galileo offended the church Newton offended pretty much everybody uber still offends particularly city council in austin although i guess they resolved their dispute recently new ideas new phenomenons always offend the majority of people so what does what does human reason require in order to actually lead to a better life in actually lead the individual human flourishing what is reason our means of survival as individual human beings need in order to sustain us in order to allow for human survival and flourishing it needs freedom it needs freedom you need the freedom to think new thoughts often offensive thoughts and you need the freedom to act on those thoughts so i'm for freedom but of course everybody is right if i ask an audience of any anybody you know who's for freedom every hand in the room goes up so because we have to define our terms and you'll see there'll be a disagreement between us about what freedom actually means freedom is the absence of coercion freedom is the absence of a gun pointed at you the absence of an authority telling you what you must think and do freedom is the absence of force freedom is the absence of force it allows you to make choices your choices and as long as you're not using force against anybody else you're free to do to pursue your values the values that you believe based on your judgment based on your mind leads you to a better life that's what freedom means and that's what capitalism is capitalism is a simple thing it's a system that leaves individuals free to pursue their values based on their rational choices based on their evaluation of what it will lead them to a successful life it's a system that says you can't use force you can't force people to do what you want whether it's by majority or whether it's by an authority force is out of the equation we're going to limit the government we're going to limit that institution that has a monopoly over the use of force to only using force in self-defense so capitalism system that leaves us free to make choices for ourselves to act on those choices to pursue our values free of coercion where the government does one thing and one thing only protects our freedom and we have a name for this freedom this freedom of action the concept of freedom of action is the concept of individual rights individual rights are rights to act they're the right to act on behalf of your own life in pursuit of your own value free of force that's what Locke's conception of rights means which means i can't have a right to your stuff i can't have a right to your time i can't have a right to you my right is limited to me acting in pursuit of my values and as long as i'm not using force against you it's nobody's business what i do how i do it where i do it so capitalism is a system that leaves us free that defends our rights that protects us from the use of force against us and the consequence of this inevitable when you leave people free to think new thoughts and to act on those thoughts to interact with one another not as masters and slaves but as traders as exchanges value for value in win-win transactions what you get is the creation of immense material wealth what you get is the creation of immense spiritual values what you get is a flourishing prospering society everywhere it's tried and it's never been fully tried granted there's never been capitalism that i would like to see the kind of pure capitalism has never happened before but every way capitalism is tried to the extent that it is tried it is incredibly successful at achieving those material goals it's said incredibly successful at allowing people the freedom to pursue their values to pursue their dreams to pursue their happiness every way it's tried it leads to success now i've got about a minute to do socialism right socialism is a system in which the means of production a whole section of choices that human beings have about what to produce how to produce and how to interact with one another relevant to production where that is socialized that is now owned restricted by the state or by workers or by communities where everything is voted on where everything is political and what is politics what does politics deal with politics deals with force politics deals with coercion socialism is all about force all about coercion socialism shuts down the human mind and shuts down human action and that's why that's why whenever it is tried and to the extent that it is tried it only leads to destruction to poverty and ultimately to death and i'm sure we'll have an opportunity to discuss some of the historical examples of those but most of you are familiar with them thank you just yes this is this is on um thank you i got one supporter in the audience there we go um here yeah so i should say that like any american talking about politics in any context no matter where you are in the political spectrum i'll also frame my talk on the grounds of on the grounds of freedom but first i'll define capitalism and i'll define socialism as i as i see it capitalism is not the market the market the exchange of goods and services have existed for a very long time it's existed before capitalism and my vision of socialism there'll be a role for it and it'll exist after capitalism as well capitalism has not been around forever it's been around for just several hundred years and it's a system that i believe is fundamentally characterized by the division between people who own the places where goods and services are produced and those who are forced you might say into working for them under a contract that appears to be free but is in fact a contract signed under duress a contract that says work or starve that is the the coercion that underpins our society what i propose is a system that allows more personal freedom and personal autonomy from this coercion what i propose is a system that gives people both voice and also exit so the very minimum what does it mean to be a socialist well plenty of people have used the label socialist throughout history tyrants and liberators people who used it to advance the cause of human freedom and people who used it to throw humanity into even deeper forms of despotism you don't often hear socialists quoting Burke but to paraphrase Burke the only thing worse than existing tyranny is a failed revolution to upturn that existing tyranny now for me at a minimum what socialism is what the social's vision is is guaranteeing the basics of life to people your right to housing your right to health care your right to child care your right to pursue an education and that if these rights are guaranteed then more people will be free to reach their individual potentials can we guarantee what they'll do at this point no we can't guarantee some sort of crude egalitarianism where we all eat the same slice of bread where we all have the same exact outcomes and even income and so on but we can guarantee this bedrock of social rights that should be decommodified in other words taken out of the market and enjoyed as social rights that's a whole layer of society that i will admit that i believe should be taken from the realm of profit and from the realm of markets and turned into social rights health care for instance i believe in the use through democratic mandate through a legislative process that would have judicial review and so on of expropriating the health care industry because i don't believe that health insurance should be something that is determined your your ability to see a doctor is determined by how much money is in your pocket just like i'm sure many of you don't believe that if there happens to be a fire in your apartment building you'll after you call 911 frantically and evacuate the building have to sit around and go to the fire department and talk to a billing department i don't think you agree that'd be just in any sort of just society i think for the basics of life at least that we need to ensure them and that does mean the erosion of the market but this erosion of this market this erosion of certain people's private property rights enhances personal autonomy for the majority so imagine for example if you're stuck in a job you don't like and one reason why you're there is at least there's an employer-sponsored health care system and you don't want to go without your health care being able to leave that job but you have more autonomy to do so is one way that you would have more personal autonomy if you're a woman with a child that you're looking after and you're in your 20s and you decide i can't go pursue higher education because i can't afford child care and i can't afford the tuition i can't juggle both a democratic social society would allow you the freedom to pursue that option in your life maybe you don't want to take it maybe you do that's your decision but that option is there through eroding the private property rights of a small minority we enhance the freedom for the majority now what i'm saying in other words is that there is a trade-off here but it's not a trade-off between freedom and equality it's a question of freedom for whom freedom for the majority who do not own private property the places where goods and services are produced or freedom for the majority who the minority who who does now beyond this where does the market come in what does the market mean under socialism now i think for certain things we can imagine a state sector or various other forms of either planning at a municipal or state level working i think for example telecommunications infrastructure our national rails our healthcare system can indeed be a function and administered that way education and so on but do i want to see forms of planning for the production of the iphones in your pockets or forks and knives or what not no we need to have forms of competition but there's a difference between saying that we're going to live in a society where cutthroat competition determines every single life outcome and say well i might lose in competition at my fork firm and this man might have figured out how to produce a better form of forks by the way it does exist it's the spork and i don't know why it hasn't touched on um only kfc is the only capitalist company who sees the power of the the spork now you need the sperm failure in my view to compel each other to innovate and to challenge each other but in these firms that are competing against each other one of the outcomes of defeat will be different you'll land on this cushy welfare state you'll bounce out through active labor market policies and you'll go to a sector that is expanding you'll try something else but the penalty for losing is a destitution and beyond that within the structures of these firms ask yourself do you think the democracy is a good thing in the ballot box why don't we accept that democracy is also a good thing from nine to five why do we accept the fact that we live in workplaces that are authoritarian by nature now you might say society is complex we'll always need hierarchy and so on i agree we'll need divisions of labor we'll need hierarchy but the question is should these hierarchies be held to democratic account workers can in fact administer their own workplaces they can elect their managers they can make decisions and they can instead of receiving just a regular wage they can receive a share of the dividends of the profits of their their firms and a regulated market economy the difference being of course this market economy would exist behind this layer this cushion of a welfare state that ensures at least the basics of life i'm not proposing crude egalitarianism i'm not proposing that one should have to stand in line for every single thing but what i am proposing is we have a society in which we guarantee people's the basics and we also slowly figure out how to expand democracy and diminish hierarchy over the course of decades thank you so how many of you think that workers would have voted steve job ceo of apple i mean he was a jerk nobody would have voted him ceo of apple you don't get an iphone if democracy determines a product and if democracy determines who the ceo is going to be genius or no genius you're not going to win that beauty contest if products are designed based on democracy you don't get this doesn't happen never will happen cannot happen what socialists ignore is the role of the mind in production production is not an issue of muscle it's not an issue of voting truth is not an issue of democracy it's not an issue of how many people think a particularly thought indeed every innovation every innovation as i said earlier is offensive to the majority the majority would never vote for it so the idea that not only do we have to turn over a politics to majorities bad enough given that they've the way they behave towards all of us now we have to turn it over every single product every single decision every single wage every aspect of our lives now get determined by a vote everything is now about coercion everybody everything now is about what size gang you can lobby to get on your side to vote for your favors there's a simple principle about rights talked about and hopefully we'll get into health care and these others later there's some principle about rights you cannot have a right to other people's stuff if i make something if i could use something it's mine and you can ask me for it i might voluntarily help you and hand it to you but you don't get to pull out a gun and take my stuff we know that's called theft and even if you vote for it even if a majority vote for it it's still theft democracy doesn't turn a vice into a virtue magically so rights cannot include using your fist thanks so for a capitalist i think you have a strange vision of capitalism where some magical singular genius an innovator comes around with an idea and puts this idea into the world and this idea becomes a product no the modern corporation is filled with bureaucracy it's filled with meetings it's filled with with committees assigned to different tasks and you see jobs is probably a poor example because he's just a marketer there's plenty of capitalists who who who accomplish great things but they accomplish things in conjunction with others now what i propose is taking this social form of production and instead of the spoils of the social form of production being distributed a socially to distribute it more socially to subject more things to democratic scrutiny so in a social society would there still be wage differentials i would imagine so people who are doing management work who have more pressure and more authority more responsibility might indeed be elected and pay more and what kind of elections will we have would it be every single day there's a new election your boss gets reelected no we live in societies that are in large function representative democracies where people are elected to terms and we see results and so on the modern corporation isn't so different then it's not a private little bodega or some sort of of of of institution that's run by one or two people who oversee everything they're at its core it's already a social activity the question is why isn't it democratic we've seen the extreme vision presented here in the same way we saw the failures of authoritarian forms of socialism of communism the 20th century we've seen the failures in the 19th century of what he's suggesting which is a world without regulations where a boss gets to the side who to employ went to employ on what conditions we've seen this world too and it hasn't worked so one of the themes we've seen both of you mentioned there is the idea of healthcare either as a social good or something that should be perhaps controlled more by the or determined more by the private sector and i want to just throw out a couple of points to both of you that might foster a sort of debate on this but medicare for all so baska in the united kingdom in europe healthcare is provided free of charge largely but pharmaceutical companies the drugs that they produce are provided at a far lower cost than in the united states primarily because socialist governments or social democratic governments negotiate to that point is it fair to say though that american taxpayers are subsidizing that profit incentive and that absent if the united states government was to prevent that export market then those drugs would not exist and then to your own you suggest that socialism in your opening remarks ultimately ends up with death of its worst apex conservative parties across europe including the united kingdom boris johnson new british prime minister now promoting big investments in in the socialist healthcare system does that throw a spanner in your argument that those conservatives say actually on this point socialism is great so basket do you want to start well yeah to start with of course drug companies invest in research and development they're also forced in our system to invest huge sums of money into billing into you know beyond that advertisement and other things where they wouldn't in a different sort of system and a lot of the research and development that does go on is subsidized by universities and by other other sectors with money coming out of the public sector and public research that ends up being appropriated by the private sector so you see into the development of penicillin and insulin in particular forms of new dramatic innovations that have changed and saved lives that did not come out of the same the same motive for for profit so i would say fundamentally there is a difference between let's say an nhs and what the prominent demand in the american uh leftist for medicare for all simply what we're saying is that the system that already covers a large portion of americans the extended to cover all americans which will give us more bargaining power against these drug companies and against hospitals and and other large billers but that through this economy of scale will have savings and the system does work work abroad i mean you could say that the american system has certain merits of people talk about wait times and whatnot well in fact the wait times in the american system for ordinary procedures are quite similar to wait times in other systems and also if that's going to be your main argument you have to say well maybe your wait time would increase by a week if you cut 50 million people from from the who are underinsured or uninsured from the line you're wrong so uh and feel free to jump in on that yeah um look the american healthcare system is is not a model for anything the american healthcare system is clearly broken uh there's far don't don't clap yet uh there is far too much government involvement in the american healthcare system over 50 percent of all government of all spending on healthcare is spent by the government through medicare and medicaid uh the the massive inefficiencies uh massive uh you know we don't know what things really cost the the whole idea of health insurance through employers i mean they're massive problems with the healthcare system the solution is not to go copy what is in my view failing in europe the solution is to have a little bit of imagination and come up with a new idea about how to solve the health care problems in the united states which i believe would involve hundred percent privatizing the entire system including privatizing medicare and medicaid so moving in the other direction and i wish there was a voice in that and that relates me to the conservatives the conservatives are sellouts they've always been sellouts they they they've sold out capitalism a hundred years ago what have conservatives done one thing the conservatives have ever done to promote capitalism in any form never mind health care so of course the conservatives in europe have already given up just like conservatives in the u.s never reversed anything in the new deal never reversed anything in the great society they argued at the time that the great society was terrible they argued at the time that the new deal was terrible but as soon as they got into power they bought into it and today there's no bigger defenders of medicare and medicaid than republicans right they're huge defenders of these programs even though you would think they go against their free market principles so no i don't i don't consider barris johnson an authority and pretty much anything certainly not on health care look i you know i i i was i lived under socialized health care for a long time my father's a doctor in a socialized health care system i watched what a socialized health care system does to a doctor how it treats a doctor i know what it's like to get health care in a socialized system and it sucks that's a technical term um it's awful it's not about one week more of of of wait time it's about months more of waiting time it's about inability to choose whether it's your doctor or whether it's your surgeon or whether it's the treatment that you have uh i mean the freedom we have in america the freedom we have in spite of how awful the system is it's still better than any place in the world by far if you have insurance which most people almost all americans have insurance and the reason the people who don't have insurance don't have insurance it's because of all those government regulations that make insurance so damn expensive but the the choices that we have are unimaginable in in in these other countries the idea that you could actually get cancer and go online and do a little bit research and choose whether to you know what kind of what kind of treatment you want and who to see and what specialist right and in spite of all the horror stories about insurance companies it's amazing what insurance companies will cover i had i had back surgery a few a few years ago i went i got nine second opinions because i didn't want the surgery right all nine agreed i needed the surgery so i had it nine second opinions i never heard from the insurance company saying no no no that's too many we won't we won't cover that they covered every single one of those visits now it's in israel where i come from where my father's still a doctor where he worked his butt off and never made any money from it where you know he had to work during the day for pathetic salary and then had to work and a private practice in the evening to somehow make a little bit of money to survive a middle-class life which for a doctor was difficult right i mean in israel you're told what treatment you're going to get the doctors tell you you don't have choices you don't have third opinions you don't get to go to where you want to go you don't get to to go to cleveland clinic or to the male clinic now granted not everybody can afford it but a lot of people can in this country a lot of people can pretty much anybody with insurance can get some of the best treatment in the world in the world let's bring in my well to begin with many people in this room or some people in this room it's a young crowd have medicare some people in this room have medicaid are you not able to see your doctor you're not able to decide who you want to see as far as wages for doctors well in fact in the current system in the u.s we subject people especially people doing internal medicine and preventative care to a tremendous amount of stress tremendous amount of of risk of liability and so on and so on and i think these people will actually get paid more if we had a simple medicare for all system and we cut the administrative bureaucratic bloat of billing away now certain specialists yeah i think the the wages of certain specialists would would go down i think the primary interactions that people have with their doctors our ability to ensure certain outcomes like infant mortality rates going down to ensure access to our our weakest most vulnerable citizens having regular checkups a broader metrics of our health in society would would increase i mean this is the one case where where there's ample empirical evidence in every single other major country on earth that a system exists and that it has stronger health outcomes now we could talk anecdotally about the Mayo Clinic in certain of our most prestigious institutions and the funding that those institutions have or we could talk about baseline health indicators and outcomes and i think that health indicators and outcomes are stronger in other in other countries and i do think again this is the key thing there's no one that's going to come to your door and say you are now assigned in tenement block a to doctor b down the street you don't have a choice about it actually that's how dental coverage kind of works at your ppo like in this country and the way it is but but the freedom of choice will exist because it exists for people with medicare today and what we're proposing is not a new system but an extension of medicare isn't there a challenge though baska that that if you look at again if you look at europe triage is a factor in terms of access to care of basically every system in terms of the ability that that a lot of people are sending you know they have to do a uh you know patreon or whatever online to get money to bring their kids to the united states for treatment i mean is that is that a not a failing of socialism as it's rendered well i think the way these systems operate if there's not enough specialists in certain fields and the wait times are too long and people don't want to wait and they have the means people do either pursue private insurance as supplementals or they they go to the the united states we're a very large country we have a lot of doctors um you know if you want to expand h1b1 programs you could bring in some more i got some cousins you could call um i don't think that i think it's a it's a question of small countries with aging demographics and i think i think often the scale is but also some people that you perhaps indeed there needs to be if you find out there's not enough people incentivized to be in certain specialty medical fields then you increase the pay for those specialty medical fields you could do that you could if you have a single insurer you could change how much payment goes for doctors for certain procedures to incentivize people to to move to other fields and central planners are really good at identifying those things they're phenomenal they've been incredibly successful notice how many doctors and you might know some i certainly know some a dropping medicare and dropping medicaid because they can't survive treating medicaid and medicaid patients because they pay so little so what you're doing is if we shift it to a medicare for you drink the number of doctors then the kind of treatment that you would get would become standardized treatment doctors would not have the kind of options that they have today to use their own mind to figure out the best treatments to experiment to innovate there's a reason why as you said people triage in order to come my father if he had a patient who could afford it would put him on a plane and was sick enough as good as the medical system in israel is would put him on a plane and bring him to the united states because it's just that much better over here so the very the very fact that people can do that suggests that those countries are fully socialist right in a truly socialist healthcare system that would not be possible when you truly if you truly socialized everything but everything was put to vote if everything was run as as as is suggested here there's no private health insurance there's no private sector in healthcare there is one sector and that is a socialized sector they want to continuously have a little bit of capitalism so they can steal from it so that they can fund their socialism that's the only the only kind of socialism that has ever survived social democracies they keep enough freedom running enough freedom going enough innovation happening in a private sector and then steal as much as they can from it in order to subsidize everything else because if you actually socialized everything everybody would be poor there would be no doctors as in the huge doctor shortages in european countries because of this there would be no doctors and everything would collapse as it has collapsed when people have taken socialism seriously so they have to have a little bit of privatization in order to steal and that's exactly what happens with medicare today and why medicare for all is such a bad idea yes there's a chunk of american healthcare system about 40 percent which is still private that 40 percent is where the innovation where the experimentation where our doctors are pushing the envelope and where the doctors make their money and then that is used to subsidize the 60 plus all of our taxes now if you had 100 percent then there would be no drug innovation not only in the united states by the way the europeans as you said earlier the europeans would hate it if we socialized the system in the united states because they wouldn't get their drugs anymore all right let's let basket jump in here well there's a reason why european conservatives have abandoned the struggle against socialized medicine it's the same reason why american conservative and the american right has abandoned the struggle for privatized fire brigades it doesn't make sense these this is in fact a good that yes planning can work when it comes to our our health sector there are certain things that planning can do there are certain medium and long-term investment decisions that you want planning to do if it's a hand the ability for the state to plan is like a thumb it's very useful it's necessary to adjust an effective society but yes it can't do anything you wouldn't want your thumb to to navigate nimble things in the same way you wouldn't want your your state to get into the production of consumer goods and and other things where you do want failure now i think there's there's there's plenty of examples of this this working in other countries is it not a sign of failure the fact that americans have to go across the border to canada to buy pharmaceutical drugs is it not a sign of failure that america has worse health health outcomes when it comes to our children at certain years than costa rica is it not a failure that huge disparities exist in rural communities in the communities of color between children just because they don't have access to the same same standards of care no certain things should in fact be administered in such a way that we guarantee broadly equal outcomes and yes there will need to be constant adjustments and tweaks we'll need to constantly examine that system and if the system isn't working of course you could reprioritize the system there's a campaign now in the united kingdom to reprioritize parts of the NHS so far it's unpopular if the NHS really collapses then it'll start being popular and it would happen that's living in a democracy so can i say something about health outcomes yeah i mean because everybody you know the data is if you if you have a serious disease cancer heart disease you're better off in america than any other place in the world second if you adjust for the bad lifestyle choices americans make if you adjust for the kind of food weed and the lack of exercise and everything else you know outcomes here are not worse than anywhere else they're actually they're actually better and then if you adjust which is not politically correct so i have to be careful here but if you actually look at swedes in america versus swedes in sweden health outcomes are very similar marginally better in the u.s. if you take japanese americans and you compare them to japanese japanese americans live about the same as the longest living japanese in japan so once you adjust for some of these other environmental and other factors how these health outcomes studies fall apart so so one issue here basco and you can jump on this first is that the left would say when you the way we allocate resources in terms of whether it be policing schools etc poorer communities in the united states the schools tend to be less good the public schools than wealthier communities is that do you think how much does that play into the rise of the you know the the most socialist element of the democratic party in a in a narrative that perhaps conservatives have ignored for a while well i think education is an acura you know it's hard to expect children to perform well in school or deal with standardized testing if they have to deal with going to school hungry and in fact the way we fund our school districts in america we do have a social democracy in america in little bits and pieces but it's exclusionary and it's funded largely to property taxes within two years of coming to this country my father asked a stranger you know he was living around new york new jersey said the schools are terrible here i want to educate my children better where should i go the next day he got looked in the penny saver and he moved us to westchester county he found a place to rent so he was able to access the good school district for his kids and you know i guess the property taxes were kind of embedded in the rent he was playing the landlord but it was a good kind of way way around you know i think that in fact the types of of schools that we have in our suburbs could in fact be the schools that we have elsewhere if we ensure that working class communities rural communities communities colors especially all have access to decent jobs and bedrock of security a safe environment to put their kids in well-funded schools and when it comes to the lifestyle choices so-called of the american people sometimes we make this seem like this is purely a cultural phenomenon well in fact we work longer hours than most people around the world we have a tremendous amount of stress we have debt it's more expensive and difficult to see a doctor it's difficult when you're working till six o'clock to make sure that your kid is out running around from the end of school at three to six you know a lot of the choices that we make are in fact forced it upon us by our our conditions and we're pumped just excess garbage from the agricultural system and some of this is rooted in subsidies i'm sure you would oppose as well that that we feed our kids crap in school you know too and this this isn't just a point of pride in and culture you're on should government centrally allocate because of that property tax issue centrally allocate school funding no i mean again anything the government touches we get lousy products so the government has 60 of the healthcare system that's where all the problems are the government is uh is the owner funder and and and proprietor of the entire educational system in the united states or a big chunk of that educational system and we get a lousy product as a consequence of that and we get a very expensive product i mean you might you might make these arguments a lot of money and stuff but look in in the city of chicago in the inner city of chicago it costs the city of chicago $15,000 to educate one child now educate is a loaded word because all those schools are basically places where they house these kids during the day because they don't educate them there's no education that goes on there now i'm not a big fan of catholic education but the fact is the catholic schools exist in those same neighborhoods in chicago where the catholic diocese spends $7,500 educating one kid and out comes a far superior at half the price so the issue here is not money the issue here is when you free up the human mind to compete to innovate to progress that's when you get great products and great outcomes i would like to see just i'll end with this i know we limited i would like to see a complete and other privatization about educational system i'd love to see love to see competition and innovation i'd love to see the next entrepreneur not think about this figuring out how to create the next angry birds app but instead of that figuring out how to create the next school they can educate all kids including poor kids at a reasonable price and there's a guy here in austin i would encourage you guys to look at the actin at what actin is doing uh with regard to pre-prime education all over the united states okay baska you can jump in here but while baska is doing his concluding remark we're going to have some questions and i think we're going to be lining up over here so if you have a question if you get in this aisle here and line up then we'll come to you but baska do you want to respond to it well i must say this has been an easy debate for a socialist no one is asked i have been asked about the soviet union i haven't been asked about any of the the horrors and hardships of collectivized farming and well but by the way this these are things that i documented my book that i i do think were failures of this authoritarian uh system what we've talked about is healthcare and public education two things that the state has consistently done well in major countries across the world now when it comes to certain of the facts the light out i can't verify off the top of my head his his figures but let's say when it comes to who's going to catholic schools well people whose parents have selected and decided to take them to catholic schools so even if they're also poor kids they're kids that have that level of parental involvement and a different environment there's all sorts of other measures but public schools work i think you're a product of public public school in israel i am too okay maybe it's not working but there's so many issues here yes sorry to interrupt we have so many questioners though if you can keep your questions very tight five seconds no speeches please otherwise i'll tell you to shut up i'll try and do that but um my question is directed at both of them and i think it's something they could possibly agree on because you know many complaints made by socialists oftentimes they're for problems which have gotten significantly worse you know a 1950s voluntary solution existed like mutual aid societies for insurance uh you know there were asylums that helped with question question yeah you know there are extended families how do you how can you argue for basically what might be failures of the welfare state that we could possibly fix by just undoing some regulation and is there some common ground that could be explored in a volunteerist way between socialists and free marketers and let's get basket to do this one because then we can go unless very quick should we take three maybe just so that well we'll do as many as we can just quick on should we take a stack of three in a row and then respond no okay well let's do one at a time we'll do i mean i can i'll respond quickly i mean under capitalism the beauty under capitalism is i don't tell you how to live if you want to go and start a commune and to from each according to his uh ability uh from each from each according to his ability to each according to his need and go and do that and live a pathetic miserable life in your commune that's great nobody is going to stop you from doing that so you can experiment under capitalism under socialism you have no options you are told exactly what to do whatever the majority vote that's what you have to do it's authoritarian by nature well i think the the common ground between people more libertarian leading and and democratic socialists is that we um are broadly kind of free speech absolutists you know i obviously besides their direct incitements to violence i think you should be able to say whatever you want without state interference and i think there's a bedrock of a personal rights that we need to preserve in this this country so i think that's a that's a point of next question coming right oh hi uh i was an intern at the kato institute so i understand where you're coming from but here's the question what if anthropogenic global warming is true yeah ron what if global i think they are just hypothetically then then we should we should use the best minds available to figure out a solution to it but i'll tell you what the solution cannot be the solution cannot be to stop using fossil fuels tomorrow that is insanity that is destruction of all human life so so what you're actually doing is you're bringing out about the disaster faster by stopping using fossil fuels and the idea that i don't know windmills and the sun is going to solve that problem is absurd let's get you know that at mit they're working on something it sucks co2 out of the atmosphere and all kinds of other things i mean i'm all for using technology it'll solve these problems and when it warms we'll figure out technologies when it when it warms we will figure out technologies how to enhance human life in a war environment we've done we've we've achieved greatest things all right all right let's let's let's get i mean obviously the global warming debate is one based on interpretations of science so we're probably not let's go to the next next question i uh i've always been uh pretty amazed by the fact that the united states government created the internet and actually the technology that's in the iphone if you read maria masakata's book the technology in the iphone came from the united states military sector question so how do you respond to the idea that the u.s can't create government can't create anything when they created the internet and the iphone or the technology in the iphone yeah why don't you guys yeah so i think this actually relates to the other other question we're we're corporations businesses firms whether structured in any way can be very good at making these short term decisions but it's guaranteed by this short termism and for something to global warming we need medium and long term investment and degrees of planning which cannot does not exist currently at the level of it should in our society there's all sorts of decisions that are being made by by government but even in within capitalism through the use of carrots and sticks a state can shape development outcomes you can look as a corollary what happened like even taiwan south korea these other development states i think we need a similar program of fostering our renewable sector through carrots and sticks now nobody by the way proposes getting rid of fossil stop using fossil fuels tomorrow no no no that the point is you transition away away from it by speeding up the point at which the market can take over if there is a point right now it's not logical to invest in renewables even nuclear power which which is effective and are a clean option despite all the problems with it requires huge amounts of state investment and whatnot it's cheaper to dig up let's cool yeah let's get to the next question there was once an article after the soviet union failed that capitalism won and that was the end of history however we're now seeing the rise of socialism once again what are your thoughts about why it's come back in such a strong manner you're on do you want to take that yes i mean it's a big question i mean i think the reason is that we live with them all code i think for 2 000 years we've lived with them all code that is basically uh consistent with socialism and inconsistent with capitalism i mean back says right that socialism is much more popular his you know any version of of socialism is is more popular than my version of capitalism i'm in a minority because i believe that to embrace the kind of capitalism that i'm talking about we have to challenge very fundamental beliefs about the purpose of life and about morality i believe that capitalism can only stand on a foundation of self-interest of individual self-interest on the morality of individuals pursuing their own happiness and yet at least since the rise of christianity the dominant moral view has been that individual sacrifice is the moral purpose of life that the purpose is other people's well-being not your own that has been secularized was secularized in the 19th century by primarily german philosophers but a number of german philosophers and then completely secularized by socialism by mox i mean mox basically secularized christianity and turned turned you know the whole mox system is basically the application of a christian morality in a secular world it's about sacrifice it's about the negation of the individual it's about the negation of the individual's pursuit of his own happiness which i view as the the essence of morality that's negated so socialism is more consistent with what people believe is right and good hey so um at the core of the debate in the video which i wrote with marshal walker lee here is uh that mesis poses to marx and that he wrote in 1920 was this question of sort of calculation let's assume that the planners are our wonderful christians how are they going to decide which aspects of production to use in which lines should we have more bread should we have what kinds of bread where how in what amount baski talked about well let's collectivize just the things we need just the basics in each country that socialism has been executed they've collectivized farming to horrible effect i would argue food is more important than health let's get faster in this food right centrally planned well i mean you have the right you have the right to access nutrition which in this country for example exists through a food stamp program which is essentially the injection of some public dollars into a system that is still run by by a long market market means so i mean i i think there is a problems in that that stem from planning that is both problems of calculation like you mentioned but what goes less talked about among socialists is problems of incentives too right we need to compel each other to produce in more innovative ways and we need therefore firm failure if you don't have firm failure you will end up with a system that requires more human toro and suffering and whatnot so i would love in a socialist system to have one firm out compete another by the use of of capital intensive technology because that'll probably mean that we're more efficient as a whole society and eventually we could enjoy three you know day weeks yeah okay and there's the the british book isn't that from aaron the aaron bestani yeah okay sir yes first of all thank y'all we really appreciate what you all are doing up here it's very interesting but help me with socialism please capitalism seems to require an individual and an idea yes they then go form a business hire people and so forth but but the the individuals in the idea are the catalysts for capitalism what socialism seems to require is government to distribute things but all they have to distribute is what the capitalists have created so you're arguing that it seems to be socialism requires government but also capitalism and a quick part via that is when congress has an approval rating of 20 percent you really want a larger government let's get back on that and then we'll next one for y'all well i should say that the the composition of congress is all but you know two or three people of them are self-avowed um you know capitalists um so so what what i would say is that we of course in our society yes the welfare state is dependent on the taxation of profitable firms now the question is why do the are these firms structured in the way they're structured my the question isn't that these firms should exist and and produce goods and services and these goods and services should be taxed in some way to fund a public public sector because we've seen various levels of public sector work we've seen large welfare states like they have in northern europe work we've seen to the extent where we live in a functional society this society work we haven't seen either a society that's fully socialist or your vision of a fully capitalist more marketized a society that i would argue we kind of saw some of that in the 19th century now so my my argument is that these firms should be structured in such a way that isn't dependent on wage labor in other words isn't dependent on receiving a salary from a capitalist that's determined in a contract under a worker star of choice uh firms could be structured in other ways there's other ways to reward incentives and new ideas too time time is tight so let's let your own quickly come in on this in the next question very quickly yeah i mean i mean there's a lot of cherry picking going on here right in those areas like food where it's been shown that socialism fails there we want a little competition of failure health care where i guess we haven't proved yet that everybody fails we want complete state control and no competition of failure i mean what the socialists ultimately need is they need a sacrificial animal and that sacrificial animal is is is the capitalists and the capitalism that area in the economy that they allow to remain free they can milk it for all its worth until it collapses and then entire society collapses and you can see that in places like venezuela right now where they've milked it so much that there's nothing left to steal anymore because they've stolen everything and that's how socialism has to work it has to work that way if cap if capitalism exists in the absence of force including positive force is motivation rooted in sympathy generosity empathy and love coercion no i said that's right no absolutely the the beauty of capitalism is again you can do what you want that is if you want to uh you can establish a company based on the principles we just heard you can establish a company that's completely employee owned where everything is voted on which which runs like a commune or runs like a employee you can do you can you can start a charity where you hand out money to anybody you choose to hand out money to the thing the difference is that you're not cursing anybody people voluntarily give you money into the charity and you voluntarily distribute that money the difference between that and a welfare state is that the welfare state requires coercion requires force sorry i'm just want to make sure we get as many questions as we can um dr brooks this is directed towards you you said that it's amazing what healthcare can cover earlier but i just want to stand here and let you know that for the majority of americans it does not cover anything at all for people like me with autoimmune diseases we are okay do you have a question madam i do there's a question at the end of this i promise well quick quick quick people behind you socialism you want to share okay i've been i've been off my medication for a while i don't have it consistently i can't keep up with it and it's because of this capital assistance the capitalistic system so my question to you is how can you ethically justify allowing capitalistic healthcare when the system inherently dictates that people with less money are somehow less deserving of health than those with more without i mean i i bet you i drive a much safer car than you do because i have more money and i've bought a better car than you have uh the fact is one of the reasons it's worthwhile to make money and to become wealthier is because you live a better life you can buy better stuff buy safer stuff and have a higher quality including in the healthcare so i'm not i'm not for equality of outcome not equality of outcome in healthcare not equality of outcome in what kind of food you eat or what equality of outcome in anything you get a produce what you own now i was a student here at ut and my wife got pregnant unexpectedly and we had student insurance that didn't cover pregnancy and you know what and we had no income i mean i worked at the university i worked in the finance department i was an assistant and we managed we managed now was it easy no it was hard and we we got into a little bit of debt we had to pay off of that but we managed and today today i'm lucky to be lucky i've worked hard to be pretty successful financially you own your life take control of it and make something of it don't blame the system and other people if you can't manage that's what freedom necessitates you taking moral responsibility for your own actions and nobody owes you anything just because you don't have something okay so we're going to go straight to closing statements and if we keep it to two or three minutes that'd be great you want to finish the questions that about what closing statements do we ever want to vote would you prefer a couple more questions or closing statements for more questions hands up for closing statements hands up all right more questions has it all right next question i'll go quickly uh nassim taleb said that modernity modernity starts with the government monopoly on force and ends with the government monopoly on fiscal responsibility now that's a very like libertarian view of looking at it so from a socialist perspective does that mean that the idea that government has force should stem from a different morality and from a libertarian perspective as an ran guy is saying does that mean that the majority that the modernity that we have right now with the modern government should never exist have existed in the first place well i mean i can't actually and i didn't fully get get the gist of that that that question but for the role the there should be a role of the state and the role of the state should be to administer basic social goods to regulate a uh functioning market and yeah there's i mean essentially when i my vision of a just society um is a vision which looks at what what succeeds it is a vision that cherry picks because it's a vision that's not purely ideological i priority but looks at experience i see the success of social democracy which was fueled by labor-based parties rooted in large part in marxist ideology and then i see pitfalls of social democracy and how we can maybe deepen democracy within social democracy my view social democracy is getting football season just started it's a bad analogy but getting within field goal range and you know democratic socialism is a touchdown now that i say it i realize that i should not have said uh but but in other words so i look empirically and well what role the state you know we i think the role of the state under social democracy but expanded somewhat is basically what what i think the role of the state so i'll do it in two sentences i say yeah we could do a lot better than we have today and a lot better than we have today is a much more limited government a government limited to defending individual rights and getting out of any kind of central planning of health care or anything else pie so this is directed towards the director of the iron rand i didn't catch your name sorry so fine apologies but subscribe to my youtube channel you are on i guess i have to know so pure capitalism seems to be a reactive system supply follows demand innovation follows demand but how do you need to necessarily account for things that require proactive action for example milk companies in the 1920s put glue and milk that led to deaths which is what helped create part of a regulatory system so how do you account for the necessity of proactive purposes for a justice society so first of all you've got it all background backwards demand doesn't create supply if anything supply creates demand so there wasn't a demand for an iphone nobody demanded iphone there were no people in the streets wanting iphone once iphone came out we all wanted them supply creates demand not the other way around now it's a virtuous circle right once you create the supply people want demand but we don't have this is the problem with letting production become democratic we don't have the idea of creating an iphone or the idea of having anything some individual organizers has the idea then has the genius and any of you think you can be a ceo and and run a company you know go try it go try it for a few days see what it's like right or managing a worldwide supply chain like some of these guys do that takes real brilliance hard work real thinking and education and experience okay so somebody has to produce this stuff but you don't just reallocate just to jump in there is there was a market for phones there was a market for computers and look you're going to put a computer in your pocket and it works as a phone of course there are existing markets and as far as planning things I mean yes I actually have run multiple publications and other other things in my life and it requires a lot of planning you don't know what the market is you have projections you decide how much of something to make before it goes to market there's plenty of I mean it just okay well it was just a logical next question so the opening of the debate you said that the criteria for what or which side should winch be based on individual flourishing but it kind of gotten left out of the debate it was brought up that you know within the world of jobs the world of capitalism from the get-go our only thing that we can choose is to work or to starve is to do something within the horizon that capitalism provides us where we make money rather than something of true creativity per se and then I could also bring up how you know technology only okay question question movies being remade etc the question the question was how is that not coercion where my only ability is to work there is I mean it's it's it's funny it's funny that we live in such in such a I guess a wealthy society that you think that you should just deserve to do whatever the hell you want and other people should work hard to pay for you I mean so you want to tax people who work so that you can do your hobbies no you want to do your hobby work and then do your hobby but you have to own your own survival you are not born guaranteed anything you have to earn it you have to make it so that is not coercion that is a metaphysical fact of life that is human beings we have to go out there and produce make something do something in order to in order to feed ourselves so in in olden times you had to go out and work in the fields now you have the privilege the amazing ability to have a choice between jobs and a choice between so so on the first part of what you're saying yes in a in a just society increases in human productivity would lead to increases in leisure so for example if you get a union contract in a place you're working you might go from working 45 hours a week to 35 hours a week and that's 10 hours to do what you what you will but I do think there's a danger to play play someone devil's advocate there's a danger in thinking that certain things are worthwhile pursuits and certain things are not worthwhile pursuits so there's danger in thinking let's say let's say certain left liberal critiques of consumerism that in itself is a potential danger because certain things that you might think of as necessary and true and virtuous another person might might think of as as frivolous and you know just a fetishization of consumerism and so on so I think that and in my vision of a social society we would still have to compel to produce and we're still operating in a condition of relative scarcity in the future as society advances as we can get robots and do more things for us and maybe the goal one of the goals is the distribution more leisure time but the way society is structured today more and more advances in productivity just means that your boss gets more money and you're still working your 45 hour work week in other societies with stronger unisation and a different social contract that's not the case okay let's get to the next question we go this is for dr brook uh so say a government or say a watch tech company decides to censor conservative voices on like youtube or facebook uh in that instance a government steps in to try to stop this sort of censorship is that a violation of their property rights or should it be a lot or they should they be a lot to censor them whatever they want private companies cannot censor censor as an actor force private companies do not engage in force unless they're violating the law so it's not censorship when a when a private company says you can't speak here just like it's it's not force when i employ you and we voluntarily come to a contract you voluntarily use their product they determine the terms of use and if they choose exclude certain voices they have every right to do so okay next question i think put alex jones back on youtube youtube's choice they can do whatever they want this is a question for mr brooks so i want to go back to your point about how you're talking about basically people are not born deserving anything and they have to work their way to get whatever they want whether that be better healthcare to simply survive but basically there was a study from uh michael hoot at the new york university that found that your parents wealth is actually the most statistically significant factor in your future wealth how you reconcile that with your views i have no problem with that i work very very hard to create wealth so that my kids have a better life and you should too that is we all work hard part of the reason we work hard part of the reason we engage in productive activities to make sure that our kids are better off the fact is inequality is a feature of life it's a feature of freedom the fact that you're free is what makes inequality inequality the only way to reduce inequality is by using coercion by using force by taking some and giving to others by eliminating my motivation to work hard because you're not going to let me leave it to my kids i want to i want my kids to do better so i work hard you want you're not going to let me give money to my kids you're not going to let me give more opportunities to my kids i'm probably not going to work as hard okay i'm going to be four yeah let's let's have the last question and then i'll let baska add a little a little bit on if he wants earlier this is for mr brooks earlier you mentioned that europe is facing a shortage of doctors because of problems such as low pay but in the u.s. we are also expected to face a shortage of doctors in the next decade so how do you reconcile well it's the same phenomenon again as the government has increased it's involved in health care and as salaries of doctors and you can see this particularly not specialists but particularly family doctors are making less money there are fewer of them and that market is shrinking so the number of people going into medicine because it's become a less lucrative more bureaucratic more government-run system the fewer people are entering health care and i worry also about the quality of people who enter health care i think it's a less ambitious the less motivated people the people who want to be bureaucrats in a government system are now entering the health care space instead of what we used to have which was a flood of people entering health medical school plus you've got a whole system of certification and regulation that limits the number of doctors because the people who are ready doctors have an incentive to keep the number of doctors to keep scarcity so that they can charge higher prices freedom soles all those those those are a lot of those are just professional associations and not not state is like the bar association and whatnot obviously is in stride in relationship to the state but it's fundamentally a thing that exists in civil society it's a cartel that that if you want to change it but the difference is but the difference is that once you institute the state people go to jail if they violate it whereas whereas if it's if it's just a civil society thing then yeah i can i can choose to go to these doctors and not to those doctors based on the certificate they have so so just to sum up for the last last couple questions i i think i think first of all i have appreciated our conversation the last couple days because you are morally and ideologically consistent and and i think that counts for counts or something it's very clear what what he's saying but what might have surprised some of you for a debate between a socialist and a capitalist is that there was a debate with an extremist and with someone who is trying to be pragmatic with someone who is trying to look at the experience of of history and what what is extreme about about this vision is that it's a vision of a society that very few people want to live in now i don't think there is a huge base of people in the united states of america today that wants to live in a society with a fully socialized economy even a worker-owned economy what i do think is that there's a base of people in the united states who believe in their own self-interest and in their own self-interest and in the interests of their families and loved ones they want to make sure that their their employment is not tied to their health insurance they want to make sure that they're able to see a doctor they want to make sure they don't have to deal with medical debt because of no fault of their own falling into medical debt they want to make sure they're able to pursue higher education they want to pursue higher education and if they don't they have a well-paying union job to come to these are the bread and butter concerns of most most people their concerns that the state can't solve all these problems and concerns but it can solve some of them and we create an environment in which we take the inequity of capitalism this inequity between the people who own the things that produce goods and services and the rest of us and we can even the odd so that we're not bargaining alone but we're bargaining together yes there are limits to what the state should do but it's common sense to the majority of americans 60 70 percent of people that that there should be a different sort of social contract let's so let's before we have the concluding remarks from jennifer very quickly hands up if you prefer capitalism to socialism hands up if you prefer socialism okay hands up if your mind was changed somewhat in the debate two people that's good or three people all right jennifer how about a huge round of applause for our debaters and moderator you did a tremendous job great debate gentlemen i would just like to thank the the center for enterprise and policy analytics uh carlos uh mario really appreciate your support i want to remind you if you enjoyed this debate the steamboat institute is a non-profit non-partisan educational organization we depend on the support of people like you to put on these programs so we would love to come back to ut love to have your support pick up some of our materials on your way out the door follow us on facebook twitter and instagram we would appreciate your communicating about tonight's event the video of tonight's event will be posted at steamboatinstitute.org thank you for coming and enjoy the rest of your evening