 Socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom, equality, and prosperity. That was the proposition at an in-person Soho forum debate held on Sunday, April 18th in the villages Florida. Ben Burgess, a philosophy professor at Georgia State University Perimeter College and a contributor to Jacobin Magazine, spoke in support of socialism. His long-term political goals include giving workers control of the means of production through labor cooperatives and redistributing wealth and power through direct democracy in the workplace and prohibiting wage and salary labor. Gene Epstein, director of the Soho Forum, former economics editor at Barron's and a former senior economist for the New York Stock Exchange, argued against Burgess and socialism. He contended that free markets already allow for worker co-ops and that if they were that popular and effective they would be more widely adopted than they are currently. He also objected that Burgess's proposed ban on wage labor is a direct assault on individual rights and reveals the coercion behind socialist economic policy. The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by reason, conducts Oxford style debates, meaning the audience votes yes, no, or undecided before and after the event. The winner is the debater who convinces the most people to switch sides. At the start of the event, 8.6 percent of the crowd agreed that socialism is preferable to capitalism. 76 percent disagreed and 15 percent were undecided. Here are Ben Burgess and Gene Epstein in a Soho Forum debate on socialism versus capitalism. Sam Peterson of Libertas served as moderator. The resolution is socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom, equality, and prosperity. And with that could we please welcome to the stage Ben Burgess. Thank you. And many thanks to Gene and to the Soho Forum for inviting me. It's been an interesting weekend, among other things. I've definitely seen more golf carts in the last two days than I had in the previous 41 years of my life. So, you know, that's definitely something. So, approaching this, I'm keenly aware that the villages is not exactly Bernie Sanders country. And that most people who follow the Soho Forum are libertarians. I also know that there are lots of people on all ends, the political spectrum, yours, mine, lots of others who primarily approach debates as opportunities to cheer with the person they agree with has a nice turn of phrase. And to crow about how the person they disagree with was destroyed with that the chances that people who like me will think I've done that to Gene. And the chances that people who like Gene who think will think that he's done that to me are right around 100 percent and will remain right around 100 percent regardless of what either Gene or I say tonight. That said, I also know that there are many, many people who come to events like this because they're genuinely curious, open-minded people who, even if they have poor socialism, are genuinely curious about what the best case for socialist ideas look like. And they're not content to just argue with some cartoon caricature of what socialists think. And in what follows, I'm going to try to talk to those people. I don't want to just talk to the, you know, a few people here who agree with me or give my YouTube producer for us something to clip later. I want to try to make my best case to you because even though I'm perfectly aware that it's unlikely that all 200 shouldn't change of you, are going to experience road to Damascus conversions and fill out DSA membership applications tonight, I do think that it's possible that I can leave you with something to think about and to make you think that there really is something on this side of the argument. So I'm going to try to take all three parts of the proposition seriously, freedom, equality and prosperity. But I'm guessing that I'm going to need to do the least work out of the three to convince you that a socialist society could be more equal than what we have right now. We live in a society where the average CEO makes hundreds of times as much as the average worker and truly wealthy individuals make those quote unquote average CEOs look like peasants. Jeff Bezos has told interviewers that the only way he can think of to spend all the money he's made from Amazon would be to go into space. Meanwhile, the men and women who drive his trucks and work in his warehouses often resort to peed and bottles because they're afraid that if they walk to the bathroom and back, they won't make the demanding quotas that Bezos enforces through constant electronic surveillance. He doesn't need to worry too much about his terrorized and subservient workforce unionizing, because as we just saw at Bessemer, Alabama, he could effectively utilize economic blackmail. That's a nice job you've got there. $15 health insurance, shame or something happened to it. And that's threat is effective in a society like the contemporary United States where people like Shane Patrick Boyle exist. Boyle is a diabetic who died with not enough people donated to the GoFundMe he set up to pay for a month's worth of insulin. A society where Jeff Bezos and Shane Patrick Boyle both exist is extraordinarily unequal. And I'm sure that even many of the libertarians in this audience would have no trouble believing that a different economic system could be dramatically more egalitarian. Maybe Jane will dispute that last claim, but even if he does, I don't think that's where the real action is going to be this afternoon. The reason I don't think that is that I don't think anti socialists are usually motivated to oppose socialism because they don't believe a socialist system could be more equal than capitalism. Instead, I think they oppose it because they don't think it would be as prosperous or as free. They think that if the capitalist system involves the unequal distribution of riches, socialism would be in a more equal distribution of crumbs. And they think that we can only get from capitalism to socialism by doing things that violate economic freedom. Those are the main ideas that I'm going to try to push back against this afternoon. First, let's sort out some definitions. Capitalism, at least in the original meaning of that term, is a society divided between a capitalist class that owns the means of production, distribution, exchange, and so on. I'll follow convention and using the abbreviation, the means of production and a working class with no realistic choice except to rent themselves out to the capitalist class. That's what Louis Blanc meant when he first invented the term capitalism in the 1850s. That's what the socialist left is always meant by it. And it's what I mean by it. Now, I understand Gene is probably going to use the term a bit differently. I'll wait for him to lay that out for himself. First, let's talk about what socialism might mean. Because historically, the socialist movement has been a very big tent. It's included socialists whose idea of socialism is that the state would just own everything. And it's included socialists who are also anarchists. And if it's included many points in between. Libertarians are sometimes surprised to hear this. But historically, the overwhelming majority of people who call themselves anarchists also call themselves socialists. What all of these kinds of socialists had in common for all their differences was that while they recognize the transition from feudalism to capitalism was important progress, definitely an increase in freedom and prosperity, and even an increase in certain dimensions of equality, they also weren't satisfied with capitalism. They wanted a version of modern industrial society that would no longer be divided between a working class and a capitalist class, because there'll be some sort of social or collective ownership of the means of production. So what form of social ownership do I advocate? Well, believe it or not, I'm not an ideologue, at least if an ideologue is someone who formulates a vision of a good society from first principles and sticks to it, no matter what, I'm interested in learning the lessons both positive and negative from all the societies that existed in the 20th century. Soviet style economic planning was very good at rapidly charting out tractors and tanks. And thank God for it, or else Hitler might have won World War II. But it also faced calculation problems. It was very bad at coordinated production with fine grained consumer preferences. As my friend Baskar Sankara puts it, it was all thumbs and no fingers. And even if we imagine a better version of the Soviet Union, one where that economic model was combined with free speech and real multi-party elections, such that whichever party won a majority in parliament got to a point that had the state planning office gush plan, that version would be hobbled by many of the same problems. So that's not what I advocate. But libertarians who accurately point out Soviet Union faced calculation problems tend to try to stretch the point wildly beyond what the empirical evidence really supports and say that the government running any enterprise is going to lead to such problems. The fact is that there are sectors of the economy that Western democracies have quite successfully planned outside of the market. Health care is an obvious case. State-run health systems in countries like Canada and the UK aren't perfect. I've got a whole list of ways that they could be improved. But there is a reason that they're so wildly popular that even conservative politicians in those countries have to at least pretend to want to preserve them or they would never win an election again. Another obvious example is education. Even many charter school enthusiasts will acknowledge some of the best education results in the world are in Finland, a country where every school is public. I'd also nominate energy and broadband as industries of a type unlikely to run into calculation difficulties if they're planned by the state. But I'm perfectly happy to say that if we want prosperity, in other words, if we want there to be enough to distribute that our more equal distribution is going to be a big improvement for people currently holding the short end of the stick, we probably do need a market sector with price signals and firm failure. Even if I want to big welfare states, the price of failure isn't destitution and begging for your basic needs on GoFundMe. So far, what I've described is just social democracy, what exists to varied extents in countries like Norway, Denmark and Sweden, where capitalist property rights have been rolled back in some domains with many positive and civilizing consequences, but where the fundamentals of the economy are capitalist. But I want to go further than that. I'm a socialist. I want social ownership of the means of production, even in the remated market sector. So how can we do that? Well, if we need private firms, they could at least be worker owned private firms on the model of the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, or its equivalents in the Emilio Regano area of Italy, where pay scales and operated agreements are democratically determined annual mass meetings and day-to-day management is at the hands of managers who are either directly elected by the workers or appointed by an elected workers council. And to ensure a long-term stable domination of the private sector by such firms, the banks that give out grants to start new businesses would be nationalized. So would this arrangement be more equal than what we have now? Of course it would. At the world's largest worker owned firm, Mondragon, the maximum allowable difference between the highest paid and lowest paid worker member is 11 to 1. And many of the member cooperatives within Mondragon insist on must lower differentials. This is in a country, Spain, where the CEO to worker pay differential is 143 to 1. And Mondragon has to compete for managerial and technical talent with regular capitalist corporations. In a country where every private business was organized like Mondragon, those differences would be lower. That doesn't mean that everyone would earn exactly the same salary. Firms would need to offer worker members financial incentives for all sorts of purposes. But if you have to convince a majority of workers to approve a pay scale, you're just not going to get the difference that you get between what Bezos pays himself and what he pays the people who work in his warehouses. So far, we've covered equality and prosperity. What we have akin to, of course, is the thing that really makes libertarians tick, which is liberty. They think that if we, you know, it might be sad if having a society that respects property rights leads to a wildly unequal distribution of resources and opportunities and life outcomes. And they might hope that it won't work out that way. And they might have all sorts of reassuring stories to tell themselves about how a really, truly free market wouldn't work out that way. But at the end of the day, they think that if poverty and inequality and extreme alienation and worker exploitation are the price of freedom, it's a price worth paying. But what's all too left unexamined that calculation is what kind of freedom we're really talking about. And whether on reflection, that kind of freedom is the kind that matters the most. Many libertarians will define their kind of freedom in terms of the non aggression principle. This is freedom against interference with your person or your property. And look, I have no trouble understanding why rights against interference with your person are important. I'm sure I have lots of ground with libertarians in this audience. When it comes to the right of consenting adults to pursue whatever sexual or romantic relationships they want, without socially conservative interference, to use whatever drugs they want to make whatever family planning decisions they want to without harassment and legal barriers and mandatory ultrasounds. But let's take a much harder look at the claim that it's wrong to aggress not just against your person, but against your property and the means of production. What kind of property is yours? Well, it can't be whatever kind of property you're legally entitled to because if so, libertarians could have no objection to legally mandated redistribution. You just aren't legally entitled to the property claimed by the IRS. Instead, as Matt Brutig points out, what we're really talking about is the property that you're morally entitled to. And the real issue at stake between libertarians and redistributionists isn't whether it's wrong to interfere with whatever people are morally entitled to keep a tautology if there ever was one, but which redistribution of resources is morally just. One theory of distributive justice is that everyone is entitled to whatever they could get from market interactions, no matter how unequal the starting places of those interactions. But if you want to convince me of the moral superiority of that theory, over theories of distributive justice to emphasize regular human values like fairness and solidarity and giving everyone a way to flourish in life. All I can say is that all of your work is ahead of you. Instead, I would suggest the kind of freedom that matters most is freedom from unreasonable domination by one person over another. The kind of freedom we should care the most about is our freedom in practice to determine the course of our lives. And it should be obvious that redistributive social democratic programs greatly enhance this kind of freedom. In a society where you can lose your health insurance if you lose your job, you're a bit less likely to get a tattoo or a nose ring your boss doesn't like or express opinions he doesn't like, or talk back when he asks you to do something you don't want to do. In a society where labor laws favor strong union protections over the property rights of employers, you're a bit more likely to take the risk of getting your picture taken marching down the street in a protest march for a cause that your boss hates. These are important kinds of freedom. Another important kind of freedom emphasized by political theorists going back to ancient Greece is civic freedom, your freedom to help shape the institutions that govern your life. I care about that. And that's one reason I'd rather live in a capitalist democracy like the United States, rather than one of the capitalist dictatorships the United States has propped up in Latin America. But I also don't think that a kind of democracy that stops at the door to workplace is good enough a society where some people have no realistic choice but to accept jobs, where they have to pee in bottles to make their quotas. And some people already have private jets and ponder upgraded to spaceships, maybe an improvement over slavery and feudalism, but it's not enough. We deserve better. Oops, I hope everybody hears me okay. Thanks, Ben, and getting right to it. I'll be arguing that even the deeply flawed capitalism we have now heavily distorted by government government interference on behalf of the powerful is preferable to bend socialism in promoting freedom, prosperity and equality. And if Ben would join me in rolling back crony capitalism, freedom, prosperity and equality could be radically enhanced along with Ben's own aim for enhanced worker ownership of firms. Let's start with emphasizing that private property rights in the means of production under capitalism consists of wide open choices about the way firms are owned and organized. Ben strongly favors worker owned firms run democratically, and they already exist in the US, as he himself said. Back in the 1980s, the pro capitalist weekly national review published an article strongly endorsing worker ownership. I'm quite familiar with that article since it was written by me. When I covered the worker ownership movement in the 1980s, we heard much about the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, an immense worker owned firm that Ben also celebrates. It was built up by the workers themselves with virtually no government help in a country much poorer than the US. Yet four decades later, we see no worker owned firms on the scale of Mondragon in the US. According to Ben, if you work in a conventionally structured capitalist firm, you are, quote, here I'm quoting them, subject to a totalitarian level of control of your every action, unquote, and in return for your labor, you are paid, quote, poverty wages. Ben has also written that, quote, worker cooperatives do about as well and last about as long as traditional hierarchical firms once they get going, unquote. So if Ben is right, then given what must be a huge reservoir of anger about working under totalitarianism for poverty wages and given the track record of worker owned firms, you'd expect workers to use their financial power to make Mondragon's the dominant mode by now. To clarify what I mean by workers financial power, let's review a few readily available figures. Ben has mentioned, quote, libertarian economist Gene Epstein as having emphasized that low income people do control a massive chunk of the wealth of our society when all of their incomes are pulled together, unquote, which Ben goes on to call a true statement on my part to elaborate on the truth that he graciously acknowledges, consider that the bottom half of the population accounts for one third of all consumer spending, and the bottom 90% for nearly four fifths. Since I assume that Ben would agree that the fat cat capless belong in the top 10%, that means the workers in the lower 90% collectively control nearly four fifths of the consumer dollar. Now take wealth, which is defined as assets minus liabilities. According to the Federal Reserve data, the lower 90% holds 37 trillion in wealth, including trillions in stocks and bonds and more than 8 trillion in real estate that could be converted to cash via second mortgages. This financial fire power could establish Mondragon's nationwide through any number of strategies. Take the classic capitalist tactic, the consumer boycott. The profit margin of non-financial corporations has been ranging from 13% to 17%. Again, the lower 90% accounts for nearly 80% of all consumption. Now say we target certain firms with a sustained consumer boycott that denies these firms 20% of the normal revenue. So if you do the math, the boycott would then turn their profits into chronic losses, driving them into bankruptcy and making it possible for workers to buy them up for pennies on the dollar. The funds for acquisition could come from part of the trillions, the lower 90% already hold or perhaps from the more than a trillion held by labor union pension funds or the tens of trillions held by labor unions worldwide. These are all conventional capitalist maneuvers, totally acceptable under capitalism. Ben has actually recognized that boycotts can be effective in achieving their goals, but he fails to see the role of boycotts in achieving his own goals. He writes quote that geographically diffused customers, encouraging each other to engage in long term boycotts of a long list of companies for a long list of reasons detached from any realistic strategy or even well defined goals simply isn't in the same category as those other boycotts unquote. But for anyone serious like Ben about worker ownership, the strategy would be quite realistic with a single quite well defined goal. When Ben speaks the difficulties of motivating quote, geographically diffused customers, he seems to have forgotten his own claims about the the anger of the lower 90% who work under totalitarian conditions for poverty wages or the potential of worker owned firms to thrive once they get going. Socialists like Ben could surely reach these geographically diffused customers through grassroots movement movements amply supplemented by social media and they could unleash all this passion once they clarify the goal of the boycott and the odds of its success. Ben has also objected that achieving worker ownership through capitalist means isn't feasible since most new ventures fail. But in this case, I'm not talking about new ventures, but about buying up established ventures for very little. And then once they become co-ops underwriting their longevity, the workers favoring these firms as consumers, similar to the way consumers have preferred products, but bearing the union label. But again, I'm using the boycott as just one example, say that that 20% of the consumer dollar could be committed to patronizing worker owned startups. Since capitalist investors have awesome respect for the power of the consumer dollar, there would likely be no difficulty in getting any number of conventional sources to back these ventures. Another problem in Ben's view is that quote, it's easier to attract investors for businesses that can reward investment with ongoing investment shares. But it's a common practice to issue different classes of stock that would leave voting rights exclusively with the worker owners, while otherwise permitting outsiders to retain ongoing shares. Or of course bonds could be issued to outside investors while exploiting the huge tax advantages on borrowed funds that the federal government already makes available to employee stock ownership plans. Ben has also objected that worker owned firms can't compete with established firms since these firms pay poverty wages. But the aggregate data revealed that in 2019, all private sector firms spent an average of 75,000 per employee in compensation. A lot of that average is of course soaked up by the inflated pay of the executive class. And just as Ben says, the worker owned firms would of course save fortunes on that inflated pay. So worker co-ops could easily compete and probably pay their workers more than most workers own earn at Mondragon. Of course, another obstacle is that most workers may not want the headaches of owning and operating their own firms. The unwillingness of workers to follow the Marxist playbook is as old as Marxism itself and in response, socialists keep resorting to the coercive power of government. In keeping with that disastrous tradition, Ben once quote to nationalize a few big banks unquote and then direct them to bankroll worker ownership. Since I want to end the banking cartel run by the Federal Reserve that enriches the powerful, I strongly object to any centralized authority commandeering scarce funds in this way. Ben surely rejects such scruples in special especially in view of his lofty goal. But he should still be troubled by the old contradiction of radical change from below being implemented by the iron fist of government from above. He should recognize that any radical change worth having should be actively implemented by the people it's supposed to benefit. He should also see this strategy as the best way to achieve his own goals. Instead of having to convince a majority of the electorate to vote for worker ownership, a massive worker ownership movement could be built from a minority in the capitalist marketplace. And if Ben is right that this is a better way to spend one's working life, the worker own sector should soon win over the majority to the force of its example. But Ben might also be plagued by the feeling that he's selling a used car that most workers don't want. A 2016 Pew Research Survey of workers reported that half of respondents said they were very satisfied with their jobs, while another 30% reported being somewhat satisfied, which hardly sounds like angry people working for poverty wages under totalitarian conditions. But visionaries like Steve Jobs were never deterred by surveys, and I'm not trying to deter Ben. I'm only asking him to recognize that free market capitalism offers him clear ways to turn his vision into a reality and that is only real obstacle and that his vision may not be that inspiring to those he hopes to inspire. Ben's preference for the iron fist of government is the reason he and I are taking opposite sides in this debate. One dark part of his vision, especially dark part, is that he would specifically outlaw voluntary agreements between individuals and firms to work as wage and salary employees, even after worker co-ops become dominant. So in this key respect, Ben's concept of freedom is disturbingly different from mine and may be different from yours. He advocates a form of socialism that will put freedom, prosperity and equality under siege just like the old socialism did. Let's assume that a socialist party wins a national election and the government makes Ben's socialism a reality. Since wage and salary employment would soon be outlawed, the government would no doubt put all such firms and workers on notice that their days are permanently numbered. Since there would be resistance, could be resistance to this edech, the government would have to be willing to threaten the offenders with jail. And Ben not only wants to nationalize a few banks, referring to the finance sector as part of the quote commanding heights of the economy, he writes that finance would be quote moved out of the market entirely, unquote. So he would shut down the nearly 50 billion raised annually through crowdfunding and the several hundred billion allocated through various forms of venture capital. He regards it as an improvement to place finance in government hands since finance would then be under democratic control. But very little can happen in any economy unless funds are available to finance it. And to pick up on an objection raised by journalist Conor Friedersdorf, we might ask how easy will it be to get the democratically run finance agencies to fund the expansion plans of firms that produce Muslim prayer rugs and Koran's and and the building of new mosques. Friedersdorf asks, quote, would you prefer a social society in which birth control is available if and only if a majority of workers exercising their democratic control assents? Or would you prefer a society in which private businesses can produce birth control in part because individuals possess economic rights as producers and consumers, the preferences of majority of people around them be damned, unquote. The question applies to the related issue of freedom of speech and press. Would you prefer a social society in which dissenting journalism is available if and only if a majority of workers exercising their democratic control agrees? Or would you prefer a society in which private enterprises can produce dissenting journalism, the preferences of a majority of people around them be damned? So at best, our freedoms will be thwarted by the tyranny of majorities, but we don't have to push this decisive objection because in practice, elected representatives and their appointees will exercise most of the real power. Directly confronting this issue, Ben has written, quote, the heart of democratic socialism is an acknowledgement that private sector authoritarianism can be as much of a threat to meaningful freedom and equality as authoritarian government policies, unquote. Our most beloved living president, Barack Obama, might correct Ben on that point. According to an article in an August 2014 issue of the British newspaper, The Guardian, five minutes, Jean, five minutes, quote, New York Times reporter James Risen, who faces jail over his refusal to reveal a source, has called President Obama the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation. As left wing journalist Glen Greenwald has pointed out, Obama used the 1917 Espionage Act to criminally prosecute more journalists, including James Risen, than all previous presidents combined. So he has just one key difference between the authoritarianism of government and the authoritarianism of the private sector. The worst Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook can do is deplatform you. The worst Barack Obama could do is lock you in a cage. And if he made it plain that he was quite prepared to do just that. If, as Ben says, the heart of democratic socialism is to see no meaningful difference between these two forms of authoritarianism, then democratic socialism is badly in need of a change of heart or even a heart transplant. It was an outrage when the Tom Woods show elite Facebook began to get a rest by frightened fascists at Facebook for dissenting statements by some of its members. But that offered an opportunity to a competitor named Miwi. But if Ben gets his way and Obama is president, then he'll choke off all funding for Miwi because if he's prepared to jail us, he's certainly prepared to cut off funding. So free access to financing without free access to financing, you have personally no chance of exercising the rights of free speech and free press. Now take prosperity. The force that brings prosperity is innovation or what economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. Ben thinks as long as people can be offered another job, they'll agree to giving up their current job to allow creative destruction to happen. But since people naturally resist change, imagine the response if Steve Jobs sought funding for a smart phone that would that upended so many different industries, the financial planners will have at least two perfect excuses for rejecting any projects they don't like. First, most new ideas don't work out. Second, the economic reality of scarcity. There is never enough to go around. So the planners will easily reject any proposals they don't like. And in Steve Jobs case, he'd probably be rejected right away because he might adamantly insist on employing wage and salary workers. So freedom and prosperity would both be under siege under Ben's system of socialism. And on the issue of equality, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, you can find income in equality in a prison where power is quite unequal. And political power will be more unequal than even under our flawed system of capitalism, which is preferable by far to what Ben proposes in terms of freedom, prosperity and equality. Because we have so many avenues of private funding, dissident publications like Jacob and magazine, Reason magazine, books like Ben Burgess and the debate series like the Sore Form Can't Persist. Because we have private funding and reasonably functioned consumer and capital markets, innovation that brings prosperity and can persist and even flourish. And on income inequality, the turn toward capitalism in countries like China and India has lifted hundreds of millions out of grinding poverty and is therefore meant a narrowing of income inequality narrowly, but certainly the most important equality, political equality will mean that the political, that the power of the few to dictate to us through that power over financing will mean a great decline, a great widening of political equality. As mentioned, if Ben would join me in rolling back crony capitalism, we could give workers more access to new jobs if they lose old ones and more access to higher paying jobs. Therefore, thereby reducing income inequality, enhancing the prospects for working ownership. We could rein in the Federal Reserve, whose policies clearly foster wealth inequality and inequality of power. And maybe Ben will join me in fighting for the radical rollback of state power, making it harder for politicians like Obama to threaten dissonance with prison and harder for the government to intimidate and coopt big tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg. Thanks. Thank you very much, Jean. Ben, you have seven and a half minutes. All right, I could try to be quick because there's a lot there to get to. First point I want to make is that Barack Obama, who's not beloved by me, could could could prosecute James Ryzen. The one thing that he would not be able to do is fire random public employees who who agreed with James Ryzen because public employees have free speech protections in our society that private employees typically do not. I would also point out that I'm very confused about where he gets this idea that I want to eliminate GoFundMe. This came up in his previous debate with my friend Bhaskar Sankara. He said, you know, he said, somehow when Bhaskar said we want to nationalize banks, he interpreted as we want to nationalize GoFundMe. And Bhaskar said, you know, when he like it finally came up, said no, I don't want I want to get ready to go fund me where you get in that. And I said the same thing last time he debated gene on Dave Smith's show. So I'm very confused about where this idea comes from. OK, what have I said? What I have said is that I want an economic system with a division of society between workers and capitalists has been a race through social ownership of the means of production. I've argued that a grounded and realistic instantiation of this vision might look like an extremely advanced version of social democracy with the key difference that the remaining market sector would be composed of worker owned firms. Gene doesn't seem to like the first half of that vision, although he hasn't really told us why not. And he thinks the second half could and should be achieved without violating any capitalist property rights simply through building up a network of worker owned firms within the existing system and using consumer boycotts to bring down the remaining capitalists. So there are two claims there a could and a should. Let's start with the should. Gene's normative claim is that it would be wrong to break about workers control through political action because this would violate property rights. I argued against the conception of freedom that that assumes my opening statement. And all I could say on that point is that I've yet to hear a response on the second claim, the descriptive claim, the social change can happen more quickly or effectively through the use of consumer power. That's just not what the empirical record shows. We're holding this debate in Florida state where last fall, Donald Trump won the election, but the $15 minimum wage ballot resolution won by more five minutes. Ben, no surprises there. A higher minimum wage has long been wildly popular, but ask yourself a very simple question. Why didn't Floridians accomplish this goal by using their consumer power instead of waiting to accomplish it with politics? Why did they only patronize companies that paid at least $15 an hour when they roamed the aisles at Publix or Winn Dixie? I used to live in Florida. They had raised the wage floor that way with no state intervention necessary. Does the fact they didn't do it this way show that Florida voters don't really want to hire minimum wage floor that they're, you know, refusing to follow the higher minimum wage floor playbook like Gene said about workers and the Marxist playbook or think about one of the most important expansions of human freedom in American history in the last century, the end of the doctrine of coverage where many of the legal rights and obligations of a married woman were subsumed by those of her husband. Was this hideous restriction of women's rights ended by a mass refusal of couples to legally marry, perhaps instead go into lawyers to draft contracts that replicated certain aspects of marriage but without coverage or one could imagine a 19th century gene upstate insisted that doing things this way was the only way to bring about an end of coverage or without violated the freedom of contract of better women who had voluntarily got married the old way. But of course, Coverture didn't end that way. And of course, Floridians didn't get their $15 wage this way. And of course, the end of the division of society between workers and capitalists isn't going to happen that way. When we're making life decisions like getting married or starting businesses, most of us realistically will take the path of least resistance and work within the institutions of life as we know it instead of worrying in that context about how we think those institutions should be different. We make these decisions not as engaged citizens brought together at the ballot box to pursue collective action but as atomized individuals shepherded along by considerations more pressing to us in the moment. And that's nowhere more true than where we go shopping. While we're at it, segregation didn't end primarily because of consumer boycotts although the civil rights movement did use them and I'm not against using them as one of many tactics to bring about more worker cooperatives. That didn't happen any more than slavery was ended by abolitionists building up networks of free labor cotton farms and boycotting slave plantations as the primary mechanisms. These Martin Luther King's key tactic was using citizens to violate capitalist property rights and then further curbing those property rights with you know by successfully advocated for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 without which I think we all know there would still be plenty of whites only signs in restaurant windows. You can object to this as Rand Paul infamously did on the grounds that the most important freedom is the freedom of business owners to do whatever they want with their property but you can't plausibly argue that social change occurs more quickly and effectively when its advocates abstain from political action and only use consumer power. Two minutes. Following Conor's freedom. Conor I could never say Conor's last name. Conor F. Following Conor F. Jean has argued that economic democracy would endanger the rights of minorities but if he thinks this would happen not due to worker ownership which he likes if it comes about the right way but due to grants from us publicly owned banks is the primary form not exclusive form but primary form of finance and new cooperatives in my democratic socials vision. All I can say is that we should be deeply skeptical of that vision. Status zoning boards and liquor boards already exist but somehow or another we still have kosher restaurants being routinely approved for liquor licenses in a predominantly Christian society. We still have mosques being routinely approved for by zoning boards in a society where Islamophobia is a real problem and we still have libertarian magazines to advocate the end of all of these things delivered every day by our publicly owned postal service. So this I don't think is a compelling worry. I think a real disagreement centers on one issue whether stamping out the savage and immensely destructive levels of economic inequality that existed in our society and giving working people far more control over their lives on the job is more important than respecting capitalist property rights. I think it is. Thank you very much. Gene, you have seven and a half minutes. Well, correcting Ben on the could and should. As I hope Riley implied, I don't think that working people are interested in the used car that Ben is trying to sell. He just got through talking about the savage inequality, the suffering of people and yet and then he suddenly talking about the atomization of society and how can you reach these people? I mean, again, the problem is that maybe secretly Ben believes his own bluff is being called. The point is that if there is indeed a working class misery nationwide as Ben likes to allude to, then it's not difficult to tap it to tap this energy to point out the way forward, more or less like Martin Luther King did when he said, let's boycott the buses. And yet Ben seems to veer from being a Marxist firebrand to being a cynic about what is possible in society. But in fact, if you take his Marxist firebrand rhetoric seriously, then these opportunities are staring him in the face. It's a little bit, of course, ugly to deal with boycotts and not just with boycotts. By the way, Ben, you have 80% of the consumer dollar. You've got 35 trillion. You've got all that anger out there, presumably. The savage inequalities and the lack of power that workers get. Well, then go for it. And yet Ben refuses to, because the next thing you know, he's talking about the atomization of society and people only vote for it. Well, then maybe people don't want what you're selling, Ben. So the real test would be try to, we don't have a Mondragon in the US, built in a much poorer country. Try to build it. Roll up your sleeves. Get out of the, try to inspire others. You want to stay in your ivory tower. Go ahead. Now, with respect to go fund me, I mean, there's this gesture which is that, oh, well, you can have a little bit of capitalism, a little bit of independent financing. You just can't have any venture capital firms. You, and by the way, we're going to keep the Federal Reserve. We're going to keep all the centralization of financial power that Ben and I should both object to. But of course, I guess I could ask Ben and hypothetical. What if, what if if go fund me is the only way to finance something financially to invent society? Then what if it grows to five trillion dollars? What if it could become now? You know, because it's under control because there are so many other ways. But the point is that there's this business of a little bit of capitalism. You know, you play with that. That's good. But, you know, don't let it get too big because then we socialists will get upset. So we'll let you keep go fund me. But we won't let you keep all the other ways in which people get financing and start their own enterprise. I mean, with respect to Obama and changing the subject with respect to whether people could be protected when the First Amendment or not, that's a separate issue that we might be able to discuss. But again, the act under which Obama was indicting people, you could get imprisoned and indeed you could get executed. The the alien that that act had executed the Rosenbergs. So it was just an indication that even a nice politician like Obama is willing to use his power, give him the power and enhance power over finance. And and he's not going to tolerate any dissent. These are realities that are staring should stare Ben in the face, given what he's proposing. A little bit. I mean, with respect to the atomized individuals and the what the other one was had to do with my idea that if you leave it to a vote in all cases, by the way, obviously, most of us will not have any time in the day to vote on all the enterprises that people want. It's we'll obviously have to have elected representatives making up their minds about who gets funded and who and who doesn't. But even we want to accept that fantasy again. I know Ben is suddenly talking about the real world in which people don't have to take it to a vote in which you can start a deli. You can do what you want. You can exercise that freedom. But Ben only wants to leave you with a little bit of GoFundMe, although I can guarantee you that if GoFundMe becomes so popular because there are no alternatives that it grows to five, six trillion dollars, Ben is going to shut it down. And no, no, 20 trillion dollars. Ben, at what point are you going to stop it? No, never. Fascinating to hear you tell me what I think. OK, well, well, that's wonderful. OK, then Ben is going to let and then then I guess let let a thousand. But I don't know why he's going to prevent venture capital from happening because because that funds businesses that he doesn't like because he wants to make it a criminal offense to work for a firm as a wage and salary worker. And so and so he doesn't want to allow that. So he's going to have a government that is going to be endlessly on the prowl to suppress our misbehavior. And that that way lies a dystopia. I don't even know if Ben is going to stick to his plan with respect to to not allow wage and salary labor to happen. I mean, the reason why we might want it, even if Ben's fantasy happens and workers get enthusiastic about his idea, which he, by the way, he's not the least bit in selling them because you're just a bunch of atomized idiots. On the other hand, of course, you're filled with savage anger. But you're you're a bunch of atomized idiots. And therefore, I don't need to bother with you to advocate what we can do with a consumer dollar and with all the trillions that you're holding. But but what? But I would be perfectly happy to live in that society. If indeed, that's what people voluntarily want. That's what they create, just like they created Vandragon. So that's fine. But Ben, but then then I might say, look, a lot of these companies are kind of mismanaged. I've been part of co-op apartment buildings. I've been part of landlord apartment buildings in New York City. You know, I actually prefer the landlord apartment buildings because there are people who take over, who are nutty, who make crazy decisions, who mismanage. So I might say I would like to work for that guy as a wage and salary worker. Is that OK? Ben is going to say, no, go to jail, go to directly to jail. This is not allowed in a socialist society. And so again, I even think if I'm over-psychologized, that Ben is a little bit fearful about the seductiveness of actually working for a capitalist firm and working under those circumstances. And clearly, clearly, he doesn't trust seemingly, doesn't trust people to share his anger about all that totalitarianism under capitalist firms. Thank you. So we are now moving on to the 30 minute question and answer portion. If you have a question, please line up at one of the two microphones in the back. But before we do that, would either of the speakers like to ask a question for each other? I have one question for Ben. You have a question for me, Ben? I do. Can you hear me here? Yes. OK, go ahead, Ben. Yeah. So I'm curious about your interpretation of the claim about atomization because about the claim about atomization. Atomization. Because it seems to me that what I thought I said was that it is realistic to organize a democratic majority at the ballot box and that this is a more effective strategy than hoping to get it done through consumer power. I don't think that's calling people idiots. I think that it's saying that there are certain paths to social change that are more realistic than others, although they certainly include persuading a majority. So could you say a little bit more about why I think how it is that you got the idea that I was I was calling people idiots or I didn't think I could convince them. I think I take it back about the idiot part of it. Ben, apologies, a thousand times over. I'm only I'm only trying to say that that a socialist analysis would say that people have certain things in common and great leaders like Baskov-Suncara or Ben Burgess can articulate to them those common feelings and grievances that they have and render them and say, look, this is what you have in common, you 90 percent. You work under totalitarian conditions. You you take orders all the time. You're miserable. It's wretched just like you said. And therefore I would think that those people should listen to you if it resonates, if there's validity in what you say. And then the other benefit is that voting, voting for something in a voting booth is very different from actually living it and implementing. That's what we did during the 1960s and 70s. We didn't wait to vote for it. But we voted to live it to actually embody it. And so again, that's why I'm suggesting to you as a good Marxist, as a good socialist, recognize that this atomization doesn't have to last because according to you, what people have in common is this misery of working under under capitalism. So that's a common problem. That's as old that analysis is as old as Marxism itself. Go for it. And yet you refuse to. And that's my problem with you refuse to see that that that the ways of going about it are staring in you in the face if you use the power of the consumer, the power of finance. That's what Martin Luther King did. He organized people according to grievances, excuse me. It's not the primary thing that Martin Luther King did. It's a tactic that he used, but it wasn't the most the primary tactic. It was the most effective tactic. That's in part what Martin Luther King, which you can also do. But you don't seem to want to. And I wonder why you don't seem to recognize that the atomization can be overcome by simply articulating to these people the common misery that they all suffer from. It's a very Marxist view. May I ask you my question, Ben? I'm curious about this with respect to Mondragon. I read a very sympathetic portrait of Mondragon and and what one of the things it pointed out to is that the growth of Mondragon has by and large been fueled by by the expanded employment of wage and salary workers. Now this now, I believe, by the way, I would comment that that while I'm all for worker cobs, one of the contradictions in the worker cobs is that is that the worker owners are often reluctant to give up their ownership. And now, again, this is what is fueling the expansion of Mondragon, the increased employment of wage and salary workers. You do want to outlaw that in your social society, right, for starters. And and on top of that, then doesn't it disturb you that Mondragon is growing based upon that kind of corruption? That's my question. All right. So first of all, just to make sure that we're clear about this for the record, the overwhelming majority of people who work for Mondragon are voting members that's compatible with saying that recent growth has has been of contractors. And of course, we live in a capitalist society where that's that's that's an option. There's for bed disincentives to take it. It's very unsurprising. But it's still, I think, Mondragon remains as a model of a very successful firm where where you have democratic worker ownership. Now, Anshin's question about outlawing certain kinds of wage contracts. I think that I think that, yes, I'm totally comfortable with that. And perhaps might be cheating to to turn this into a question. But I would be I'd be very curious about his thoughts about labor contracts that we already outlaw in the society that that exists right now. I would give the two examples of minimum wage laws and sexual harassment laws that we already outlaw in a minimum way. We already outlaw labor contracts where the wages are too low. We do that without constantly roving around for people to put in prison as as if that were the only way that we could enforce some regulation. We already outlaw jobs where you have to accept the advances of the boss as a condition for working there. People are already not allowed to enter into those contracts. I'd be very curious if Jean thinks that those prohibitions should be maintained or if he objects to those as much as he objects to labor contracts that take away people's democratic voice and vote in the workplace. And if he does object to one, but not the other, what the difference is. OK, Ben, I guess I have to sort of finesse the issue a little bit because if we go down the road of the sexual harassment, the workplace and all the rest of it, then I should have invited somebody from the New York Times, not a bona fide real life socialist such as yourself. I can only say, Ben, that that there were over 100 million people, 140 million people in this country who work under totally legal and non threatened wage and salary agreements. That's what I did most of my life. And so it's quite radical for you if you take over to say to these 140 million, your days are permanently numbered, you can persist in this. You're going to go to prison. So I have to finesse the issue by only saying that I did not see anything wrong with the wage and salary agreement that I had. And and I don't see anything wrong with with 140 million wage and salary agreements that are pretty much set. Certainly nothing wrong in the sense that I would make them a crime as you would. And I and I believe that you would make them a crime because you're afraid of this creeping capitalism. Indeed, you put your, by the way, a perfectly right that if we go in the direction, which I don't anticipate of work or ownership, and we might get tired of it, we might find that so many firms have mismanaged that wage and salary employment becomes more popular, and that's apparently a real hellish possibility for you and you want the iron fist of government to prevent it from ever happening. This will cause a lot of resistance. Then I myself would be a part of civil disobedience to anybody who would tell me I can't sign on with somebody for the kind of job I had as a wage and salary employee. That is true fascism. So notice that he didn't answer my question. I know I didn't answer your question about sexual harassment, Ben. It's true. And I didn't ask you to answer your question about minimum wage. I'm only trying to address the larger question, which is that the 140 million people who have wage and salary employment should not be thrown in prison. But notice, first of all, throwing people in prison for accepting such employment is an obvious straw man for reasons I've already pointed out. We already have laws against all these other labor contracts, and we're not going around rampantly putting people in prison. We have accepted employment. We have a hundred and four inhibited conditions. So that's just not right. Clearly, we can enforce regulations without having to throw workers in prison for rushing to accept the prohibited arrangements. And this 140 million people think is also not a disanalogy between outlawing taking away people's voice and vote at the workplace and outlawing labor contracts where people are paid too little or accept sexual harassment on the job before we had minimum wage laws. There were surely at least 140 million of people with the equivalent given the population at the time who were working in workplaces where the lowest paid people could be paid less than that before we had sexual harassment laws. There were tens of millions of women working in workplaces with no such no such prohibitions. Those are just not disanalogies. Of course, all of these things are radical changes at the time that they're proposed. But the question is, do we think that there's any reason why we would need more of a carceral solution rather than simply fines and later forms of punishment to the overwhelming majority of cases to enforce this? Then how we enforce minimum wage laws and sexual harassment laws? And do we have any reason to think that if Gene is right? Right? Let's say his prediction is completely correct that that we have democratic socialism, it's a disaster because even though our current empirical evidence suggests otherwise, worker owned firms are vastly less efficient, etc. OK, he should have no trouble convincing the majority of his fellow citizens at the ballot box to democratically restore capitalism. Why isn't he confident about that? Well, why doesn't he believe in himself and his ability to spread his libertarian message and win a democratic majority at the ballot box? I've got it. OK, I see. I see. And you would never, ever let's say we let's say you passed the law. I mean, and obviously the analogy is that if you if you sexually harass or you're getting paid better wage than you generally would before. I had a decent wage and salary job. Tens of millions of people do. You're going to tell me I can't do it anymore or indeed, not that it's a disaster. May I finish then again? I had you added for a while that you're you're you're going to tell. Yeah, I didn't say that's going to be disaster. Only that it could be an option. I there are decent co-ops in New York City. So many of them are owned by lunatics. I would prefer a landlord building. But now Ben says, OK, once again, if you want to avoid prison, then go to the ballot box. Then again, my question to you is that let's say let's say 30 million firms and 20 million workers refuse the edict and they continue to work as wage and salary workers and that reason we have. How are you going to stop it unless you throw them in prison? The same way we stop people from working for some minimum wage without throwing people in prison. The same way we stop people from working at workplaces where there's sexual harassment without throwing them in prison, the same way that we enforce every other labor law without mass imprisonment, this idea that the only way to enforce an economic regulation is by throwing people in prison left or right. I don't understand where this comes from and how are you going to stop them? What are you stopping them for? You're giving them a democratic voice and vote on the job. If they choose not to participate in management elections, of course, nobody's going to force them any more than people are currently forced to want to vote in regular November elections. What hardship are you seeing people being given by being given the option of voting in such elections? It's great that you raised that question, Ben. I'm in a cove. I have the option of voting. I would rather live in a landlord building. The point is that I have the option of I will have the option of voting. But if somebody advertises, look, I think I can manage a firm better in this industry and give you wage and salary employment, I'll have the right to sign on. The idea that everything, everything has to happen through the ballot box, that everything has to happen by by changing a law. And the idea, by the way, in your view that that the wage and salary employment, which is immense, totally unprecedented in terms of what you're suggesting in size and the idea that you would never have to use the force of government, that's a fantasy. But apart from that, again, let me teach you the point is that you might want to work for a wage and salary employment because it looks because others have told you or looks as though it's better managed. That's where I would rather work in the landlord. But just, just vote, just stay there and vote. No, you're not allowed to work for wage and salary employment. That's forbidden. But vote and and and and do your thing. Well, you may find that you can't even do your job. Well, if it's mismanaged, that's why it's healthy to let 100 flowers bloom. That's not what you want, Ben. And I don't know, by the way, I don't even know why you're so fearful of it. Why shouldn't why why should it not happen? Let's say people want it. Why is it a fear for you? Everything you said, literally everything could apply to somebody advocating minimum wage laws in a country where they did not exist. Look at how many people work in workplaces where they have less. They make less than this. How are you going to stop people if they post advertisements for jobs for less than a wage, but somehow we don't have mass imprisonment in the enforcement of minimum wage laws. And yet they are by and large, we're enforced. You believe it's property rights. One percent of the workforces in the minimum wage. I'm talking about that. We have to talk to people left and right for squatting, right? You think, though, that somehow or another those laws are going to be enforced. So I think this is really a talk about 80 to 90 percent of the workforces, economic regulations. And we enforce economic regulations through mass imprisonment. OK, 89 percent of the workforce, Ben, is what you're talking about. Totally unprecedented. And again, you ducked my question. What question do you think I ducked? What makes you fear people? Oh, well, that's just my dream. You're claiming to know my motivations. And I obviously don't accept your ability to read my mind and detect. Well, obviously it is a fear, not not in terms of emotion. It's obviously a bad thing to happen. It's a bad. What would happen if it did happen? What? What is what happened if what happened? Wage and salary employment, Ben. With wage and salary employment. Then what would happen is workplaces where people were denied rights that I think that they should have. So, yes, I think that in that sense, if you want to call being against something, fear of it, sure, so do I. But on the other hand, I think go around the streets. The overwhelming majority of people in Florida and the United States support minimum wage laws for any of Floridians just voting to $50 an hour. Do you think they're afraid of what would happen if we had workplaces where you could earn lower wages? That's that's that seems like a very silly claim to me. What you basically said to me as a wage and salary employer is that, you know better about how I should have spent my life. I would have been you may want to what excuse me. That's that's what I basically say. Well, it is that what you basically say. And I and I suggest to you then that you bring your case to people and tell them that that there is a way to a better life, but they're too atomized for you. You don't want to do that. Anyway, they're not. If we do it at the ballot box, which is where we change has happened most effectively in American history, they're not too atomized for that. I think that this equation of thinking that some strategies for social change involve a democratically majorities based on persuasion or more effect of the others means saying, oh, people are too atomized. This is a caricature. I'll give Gene a few more seconds to respond to that. We need to move on to the audience Q&A pretty soon. Please state your question in the form of a question and address to the speaker, which you'd like them to answer. Yes, a question for Ben, please. It seems that Ben, you keep making the assumption that a majority of people would like, let's say a minimum wage. Well, a majority of people would like a million dollars in their bank account. Does that make it right? Just because a majority of people want something, a majority of people could vote that all redheaded Chinese babies should be thrown in the Atlantic Ocean. Does that make it right, Ben? No, but I also don't know. Yeah, I'm going to take a bold stand here. I'm against throwing the redheaded Chinese babies into the Atlantic Ocean. So which is good. I would hate to let this go by without me saying something controversial. But I'm also not sure where you get the idea that I am saying that. I didn't say at any point in this debate. I have never hinted at thinking that anything, a majority of the public supports is, therefore, morally right. I'm not sure where that comes from. What I have said is in response to Jean saying that I am not confident that I could convince people to what what I want. I've said, yeah, I am confident if we do it in the way that history has taught us that persuasion, building that majority coalition, achieving social change is most probably certainly done, which is through democratic management mechanisms at the ballot box. Well, let me let me comment on that again just briefly again. Obviously, obviously grassroots movements, people actually implementing change and being part of it, that's a true radical vision for Ben. The ballot box is very easy. You you vote for a particular candidate and 90 different things. People often don't even know what the heck they're voting for at the ballot box. But that's indeed historically things have happened at the ballot box. And Ben honors that tradition. He doesn't want to persuade workers specifically because he doesn't think that they can be organized easily enough. Clearly, that's the problem, even though I clearly think I could convince majority. But to vote it to a majority to to to do a consumer boycott, 20 percent to do a consumer boycott again, I think if we look at the track record, it is easier. I know you don't think it should be easier, but I think that what the facts show is that it is easier for majorities to work their will through the ballot box where people are brought together as citizens to engage in collective action rather than through consumer behavior, where there are a great many more confounding factors in influencing individual decisions, even among people who, by and large, advocate the change in question. You lack the courage. It shows that I think the segregation example shows that I think many other examples you lack the courage of your convictions. Frontline, you lack the courage of your convictions, or you would be confident that if democratic socialism turned out badly, you could convince the majority of your fellow voters to vote in an anti-socialist party and reversing again. Ben, you were clearly, clearly, clearly infatuated with tyranny of the majority. Frontline, go ahead. You addressed freedom and prosperity, but I don't think you addressed equality. Yeah, well, no, I only only addressed the equality issue in a political sense. I don't I think that if Ben can't Ben clearly would it would would cause an assault on freedom and prosperity and and that and one out of three is not should not convince anybody. But of course, as I said, even that one out of three is weak because the political inequality that would necessarily result from from the the irrigation of government power over finance, over labor markets, all of that is is important as well. The word equality also means political equality and Ben Ben system would clearly foster a greater widening of political equality. Exactly the opposite is true. Yeah, exactly the opposite. Political equality is most meaningful when everybody has the same level of influence over government decisions that is ludicrously and on its face impossible in a society with extreme concentrations of wealth, extreme concentrations of wealth always lead to extreme concentrations of political influence, a more egalitarian democratic society would necessarily be one with vastly more political equality. Ben has no interest in in rolling back the crony capitalist system. Indeed, he would tend to enhance it. I think that crony capitalism entails capitalism, obviously not what I've advocated. Microphone in the back. Hey, this is for Ben. Yeah, are you married to socialism or do you want the outcomes that you believe that they'll get to you? And I just wanted to provide a little bit of context. So a lot of socialists, they kind of cite the Mercatus Institute study. And then Charles Blayhouse, he came out and he wrote a no. It kind of rejected what Bernie Sanders and the left had been saying. So what he found was it's going to guarantee that everybody in America, ritual poor, it'll double your tax rate. And I'm pretty sure you're familiar with the Roman Romer study. So, you know, after 33 percent, you're actually losing GDP. That means that you're actually increasing poverty. So if you're having really bad outcomes by the things that you're actually championing, so my questions are, I mean, obviously, we can even go into like the quality of it. You know, I know there's a bad WHO study. But my question is, if there are, if your, if your solutions are going to create more poverty, worse outcomes, are you still married to that? Or do you, would you be OK with any solution that actually got you to the outcomes that you would like? So I'm not married to socialism. I'm married to Jennifer Burgess. So just for the record, she should be very upset if she watched this later. And I didn't say that. But but no, I think that I'm not married to socialism, but I do believe and I think I have a justifiable belief that socialism is the best way to achieve meaningful political quality, as we just discussed, that socialism is the best way to achieve vastly greater material equality, that socialism is the best way to achieve democracy. And you know, both at the at the ballot box in a more meaningful way that we have it now at the workplace. And so I support I support socialism. But if it turned out that I was I was dramatically wrong on all points, then obviously, you know, that would change things for me. I'd actually be very curious about Gene's response to a directly parallel question, because whereas I'm sure that he would consider the antecedent as fantastically unlikely, as I would consider the antecedent that capitalism could lead to better outcomes than socialism. But if Gene were convinced that that that he's just wrong in his empirical predictions that the sort of socialist system that I advocate, the Bosco advocates, etc., actually would lead to greater outcome, you know, better outcomes. Would he support it anyway? Or is the bottom line end of the day reason that he supports capitalism in principle, libertarian considerations about property rights? I guess I guess there are two answers to that question. One of them is, you know, of course, if I'm proved wrong, I guess I'll have to acknowledge that I'm wrong. That should go without saying. I guess I just have to give Ben a slightly old fart answer as well. You know, I was raised in socialism. I was a part of the Democratic Socialist of America. My teens, I was very active and interested in the worker ownership movement. I saw those people who, unlike Ben, were actually working to build worker ownership and and and and I recognized that that's the way you built something worth having. I saw the horrors of how government imposed socialism works, whether it comes with a ballot box or not. If it's a lack, if it comes through election, it can still be tyranny. So I've been around the block with these things. And again, I can only say that I'm impatient with people who, like Ben, who will tell me, well, consumer boycotts, they historically don't work, but you rack the courage of your convictions. The the the anger is supposed to be manifest out there. It was supposed to be manifest in the 1980s. We don't see any mind your guns in the US. Maybe, maybe this is not something that people go for. And then maybe if you're going to ram it through the ballot box and ram it through government, it's going to end up corrupt like the old socialisms. So that's my problem. My problem with wanting to get Ben to to quit with syndical remarks about history has shown that consumer boycotts don't work or consumer actions don't work. But you are in the business of changing history. That's the tradition that I understood as part of the left wing tradition that I inherited from my mother. But Ben is not interested in that much easier, much easier to think in terms of getting it voted in rather than thinking in terms of actively building a kibbutz, building Mandragan, doing it in terms of the actual grassroots way and showing that people really want it. That and I was raised in the 60s and 70s. That's that was the ethos of the time which Ben has regrettably tragically repudiated. So I would not recommend getting your impression of what I have or have done in my life from from what Jean has managed to to glean from from articles. What sorts of activism I may have been involved in. What I may have done actually existed. Worker cooperatives like Red Emma's, the bookstore, where I always tell people at home to order my new book, RedEmmas.org, you know, which is, you know, which is a worker cooperative. I do take his point that June is much older than me. And so he can claim to have have experience. But I take great comfort for the fact that I have met quite a few socialists, Jean's age front microphone. I've watched the geometric rise of all the employee unions in the old federal. Most of which the employees have little or no choice whether they belong or not, changing a little bit in education. But it's basically a union shock. And a lot of the people are getting this point when they're not going to have you with this in terms of their compensation and the way to treat it. Over the since World War Two, the private enterprise companies, the unions have gone from approximately 40% down to now where it's 7% because they have a democratic system they backed away from unionization. Do you know what you might have? Yeah, I can't explain it, although I think that part of that explanation is that you're as wrong as wrong could be about the chain of cause and effect. So it's true that unionization as an all time low due to the success of union busting efforts, often times involving economic blackmail. If you form a union, we'll shut down the plant like the threats that were just used so effectively in Bessemer, Alabama, often evolving, actually shutting down and outsourcing plants where employers could not, in fact, persuade people not to unionize, often involving every dirty trick in the book, much including the crony capitalism that Jean so deplores. But if you're interested in the empirical facts on the ground, the proportion of American workers who tell pollsters that they would want to join a union if they could vastly outstrips the portion who actually are members of unions. Last point about this, I always find it fascinated when people who are big defenders of capitalism and big critics of labor union say that a closed shop means that people have lost their freedom of choice. The reason I find this fascinated is because if just this one instance, those people are rejecting their theory of what freedom is, that freedom is all about property rights, freedom is all about freedom of contracts, that it's, you know, you're not being forced to do something if you choose to accept a job where it's a condition. And just in this one case, they're temporarily adopted. My theory of freedom by which if you're told that you can only get this job if you accept this condition, that's coercion, that's unfreedom. And I would say you can't have it both ways. Either people are, as Jean says, these 140 million people working as wage laborers, either they are freely accepting that or it's not the case that either that they're accepting that employment contract means they're freely accepting whatever the conditions are of the employment contract with those conditions or giving up their power over their workplace or people are not being free when they voluntarily accept a job at a closed shop and the condition is joining a union or at least paying an agency fee, but I have never understood how you can have it both ways. Notice just a brief comment. Notice that even though Ben would want a society in which worker ownership and control is an option, he still wouldn't trust people to voluntarily go for wage and salary employment. Second, again, every time I hear Ben talk about what workers want, they want unions, they want this, I always and or indeed Ben talk about how he worked for this worker owned enterprise. I always want to say, well, then go for it. The the anger is out to there. You I'll I'd be happy to consult or you need you. You've got 90 you got 80 percent of the consumer dollar. You've got the power. The anger about totalitarian conditions is endemic. Look at Mondragon. How difficult could it be to do that? Indeed, all Ben then tells me as well. History shows well, consumer boycotts don't work. Well, that's an uninspiring example. Yes, it's much more inspired to talk about what history shows does work. Well, it's well, it's recently. It should be as Florida last November. Ben, I don't think you've met allowed me to finish. What what should be inspiring is for you to talk about the totalitarian conditions that workers are slaving under, the brutality, all of the rhetoric that you like to use, then you would be addressing that 90 percent and they would be inspired by your word. I've got a way out, consumer boycotts. We've got 30 trillion. That's the way out. That's the way to address them. That would be inspiring if you have the courage of your convictions. Gee, Ben, if you would like to respond to this, please do so in the summation. We need to get some more questions in the back. Yes. Yeah. So, Ben, you were really offended by income inequality, right? So I want to touch specifically on that. So if we did what Jean said and rolled back chronic capitalism and and really had a true clean capitalism where, you know, the intersubjective ones of consumers are honored much more. And we had a radical increase in standards of living because of this, but still had income inequality. Does that really matter? Is it just not envy at that point? I'm sorry, you were people last part of the question. Yes. So if we had a had much higher prosperity with clean capitalism, but still had income inequality, does it really matter at that point? Why would you still be offended by it? I got you. Thank you. So, yes, I think that, first of all, of course, it goes without saying that I don't accept the hypothetical that the truly clean capitalism would result in this greater prosperity. In fact, I think in the real life in numerous ways, every successful market that's ever exist has been propped up by numerous forms of state intervention that without state back currency, without limited liability corporations, without intellectual property protections, all sorts of things that many libertarians object to, I think it's very unlikely that we would have a form of capitalism that was even close to the level of prosperity that we that we had right now. But even if I did accept the premise, right, so it's an interesting thought experiment, if we had much less poverty, but we still had rampant income inequality, would that still be objectionable? Well, it would certainly be less objectionable because one of the things that's wrong with income inequality is that it results in the coexistence of great wealth and great poverty and redistribution could solve a lot of that. But that's not the only thing that's wrong with income inequality. Another thing that's wrong with income inequality is that it makes political equality ludicrously impossible because concentrations of wealth in every country that's ever existed always lead to concentrations of political power. Sometimes Americans believe we can campaign, finance, reform our way out of it. Not going to happen. Concentrated wealth always leads to concentrated political influence. Another thing that's wrong with economic inequality is that it gives some people much more power over others in workplaces. So, yes, in the I have to say, I find extremely unlikely hypothetical that you just gave me, then that I would think that would remove one of my objections to income inequality, at least income inequality as extreme as we have, it certainly wouldn't reject. It certainly wouldn't would remove all of them. And I am very, very curious about how far Gene would actually want to go in removing the state from the economy and whether he really believes that really removing the state from the economy so we can have some libertarian vision of clean capitalism is going to lead to more prosperity as opposed to realistically quite a bit less. Well, OK. Well, thank you for the question. Ben, briefly, again, I don't know. I didn't invite Paul Krugman. I invited you with respect to that question. It's a it's a big topic. Obviously, I do believe that under crony capitalism, the rich and powerful are supported. You even seem to believe in regulatory capture. You suggested that that clearly if we weaken the state, if we go back to something like the vision of the founding fathers, we'd have much greater justice in this society because the state is used to protect the powerful. That's the basic nature of the state. You pass laws, you pass regulation, the powerful and the money and interest get interested. That's my mind is just sort of basic political economy. The only thing I would say, however, in terms of actually relating to the larger question is that what Ben wants to do is foster a dystopia of greater government power by given government power, basically overall financing or major allocation of labor. And and it would not be even even if it is the fantasy of democracy. Clearly, Ben seems to not understand the difference between freedom and democracy if 51 percent of the people vote on something that's absolutely anathema, I could make something up, then clearly that's not freedom. 51 percent of the people vote to crush the freedom of the other. 40 percent, 49 percent, that's not freedom. And I guess fundamentally, I guess that's where he and our part company, although I do say that it's a fantasy for him to think that there will be enough hours in the day for any of us to know what's going on with all of the government agencies that are deciding on where the money goes. We can rest assured that the Obamas of this world will make sure that the money does not go to any dissenters whom they don't like. And so again, he's going to create a society that will take us in exactly the opposite direction. I've said for the sake of the discussion, I'll to spend our chronic capitalist system, however corrupt it is, against what he's proposing, clearly what he's proposing would put freedom under siege. Microphone in the front, front, please. Ben, you can address that in the summation. Yeah, means of production. And remember, that's a that's an abbreviation, you know, since we're obviously also interested in distribution, exchange and so on, is is a term that refers to things like factories, farms, grocery stores, workplaces, right? It refers to workplaces. Now, of course, socialists have always thought going back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, writing before the term capitalism was even even been formulated by Louis Blank, that personal property is something that people have real rights to, that they that property that's that's primarily for personal use is something that should be relatively sacrosanct. We can come up with exceptions, you know, philosopher kind of edge cases, you know, but more or less. Now, is there going to be a blurry line between personal property and and property in what would usually be considered to be its production? Are there going to be gray areas? Yeah, of course there are. But we don't want to make the mistaken logically from the existence of gray areas between categories to the conclusion that the distinction between the categories doesn't exist or is it important? You could start out with the gentleman there. If you rose up his head, his head, I'd say, OK, he's bald. We add a hair to his head. Yeah, he's still bald. We add a hair to his head. He's still bald. We add it until he looks like Fabio. And at some point, of course, he has crossed the threshold from being bald to to not being bald. Good luck pinning down exactly how many hairs have to be on his head for that threshold to be crossed. But we all think that that threshold exists. I think when it comes to laws and regulations, there are numerous real world examples of distinctions being made in practice about employees and so on. Those distinctions are necessarily imperfect, given the nature of human institutions, but I think that they could be drawn in ways that are, if not perfect, at least reasonable. Microphone. Building on building on Ben's response, I would only again urge him to recognize that private ownership, the right to private ownership of the means production, by the way, be it whether you're constructing your firm as a worker on firm or wage and salary firm or whatever, the right to that private ownership is essential to freedom. Because if you give the government any power over that scarce resource, then they have every excuse to allocate in ways that interest them. That's why we want 100 flowers to bloom. That's where we want not only crowdfunding, why we want investment capital, why we want to end the dominance of the Federal Reserve over banking. We want we want as many possible avenues whereby people can pursue whatever they want, whether it be at creating a deli or a hot dog stand or a printing press or a Jacobin magazine. That's essentially the importance of free market capitalism because capital is a scarce resource. And if you give the government the power to allocate that scarce resource, then that way lies totalitarianism. Microphone in the back. All right. This is for Ben. Fairly, I have a pretty good example with me. I have a small business. I breed cats, but me and my wife have been doing it for a long time. It's not a job that we make a ton of money at. But let's say, for example, my neighbor decided he has a few extra hours in his day. One of the major parts of my job is to spend two to three hours a day cleaning the cat room because it's important to make sure they have a clean environment. Let's say they decide they decide to do it. I don't make enough money to be able to pay them above minimum wage. And also in yours, in your, I mean, not to assume entirely what you would assume in your society that that wage and salary wouldn't be amenable. There'd be some rules around it. Let's say just between us, we make some sort of agreement. What should happen to me? What would actually happen to you if you decided to make an agreement where you're paid less than the minimum wage or where you violated numerous other labor laws? What should happen to you if you're a libertarian who believes very strongly in property rights, if you own a vacant building and and people squatted that, right, what should happen to them? I think in all of these cases, we can recognize that there are ways of enforcing laws that don't involve massive rampant imprisonment. I think that I think that focus, you know, that we could have very lenient enforcement, we could have fines, we could, you know, we could have, we could focus on restorative justice. And I think that's what you would say about enforcing the laws that you like as somebody who believes in very strongly in property rights. So, for example, wants to use the power of the law to stop those squatters. I think that that's what I would say about enforcing and get a law's bad dating worker ownership. And I think that's what everybody would say about not everybody else would say about minimum wage laws, sexual harassment laws, and every other labor regulation. Microphone in the front. Not to hog the mic. If you don't mind, what what if I decide not to pay those fines? What would happen? I'm sorry, what if I decide not to pay those fines? What would you think should happen? Yeah. And again, what if those squatters don't pay those fines, right? What if people who violate any number of laws that you advocate don't pay those fines? Of course. If we live in a society that still has imprisonment as a punishment of last resort, you can come up with scenarios whereby somebody would eventually be imprisoned after every other avenue has run out because they were squatted because they didn't use their turn signal and they refuse to pay the they refuse to pay the fine for getting pulled over for not using their turn signal, et cetera. So all of these anytime you have a law, sure, you can come up with scenarios where that last resort is used. But I think if we're going to be realistic about it, the vast majority of the time, all of these laws are enforced without that. And this objection cuts both ways to the laws you want to protect your property rights to the laws that I want to enforce fairness and democracy in the workplace. I think Ben, again, when he talks about outlaw and wage and salary employment, does not appreciate the quantitative magnitude of what he's proposing, 140 million workers, tens and tens and tens of thousands of firms. The what with respect to a sexual harassment and minimum wage laws, it's numerically quite minor and very different. It's numerically quite minor because we have those laws. It wasn't numerically quite minor before Ben gave him a chance to respond. You're not allowing me to finish. He doesn't appreciate the potential for the for the vast amount of anger that he would be engendering by imposing that kind of draconian requirement that that people can't get a decent wage and salary job because he doesn't think that this is the sort of thing that they should do with their lives, that kind of arrogant attitude toward the way people should live their life, couldn't engender anger on the part of 140 million people who do it all the time. So he's taking on, he's really playing with fire when he proposes that. And his analogies don't hold up. He lacks history. Historically, those analogies are minor compared to what he wants to take on in terms of the law. There might be disanalogies. We certainly haven't heard them yet, despite repeated challenges. And the draconian thing being imposed on those workers is that they are allowed if they choose to participate in elections at the workplace. That's it. If Jean thinks that most people hate being permitted to vote if they want to, so much that there would be somehow, even though this was passed democratically, there would be mass resistance to this. I have not yet heard a reason to take that seriously. Jean, please respond to this in the summation. I can vote in my co-op. I don't want to live there. I thought you just told me. Respond to this in the summation. I'm sorry, what? Respond to this in the summation. Well, we'll have one more question. Microphone in the front, please. The question is for Ben, is there a form of democratic socialism in you, the ironcloth oligarchy? And if not, why should I be comfortable with handing the means of production of a 95 group over to a small group of people? You're not handing it over to a small group of elites. You are dramatically reducing the power of elites right now in the society that we live in, the means of production are to a great extent under the control of a genuinely small group of elites. What we're talking about is extended control to the workforce. I know, of course, that we're told that workers don't want that, that even if a majority of them voted for elections, they wouldn't really want it, because if they really wanted it, then they would engage in the consumer tactics, the gene wants. I would say that all of the historical examples that have been discussed show that those things quite frequently come apart, that a majority wants something even though and will vote for it, will tell pollsters they want it. For some reason, the union example, he doesn't take polly data seriously, even though they're not willing to engage in the tactics that he's willing to engage in. I think all institutions are corrupt. I think that human beings are often going to be cruel and capricious and exercise their power in institutions. That is why I'm a democratic socialist, because I want to limit the power that any person has over another person, because to the extent that you're worried, that given too much of a power imbalance between any two people, one of them is going to treat the other one like a little boy with a spider trapped in the jar. That is a reason to want a relatively equal distribution of power, which you get by extending democracy to the workplace. Thank you very much. With that being said, we now move on to the concluding portion. Ben, please take the stage. You have seven and a half minutes. Yeah. So I want to start out by making the point about cover sure that, you know, this is not a slam on the moderator. I know it's a thankless task to try to get everything within the format. But that that, you know, due to the time limits, you know, I wasn't able to get around earlier because when we're talking about the end of coverage or marriage, which happened due to state action to reform the institution of marriage, you can imagine every single rhetorical technique that my friend Jean has used tonight, being used by someone saying, hey, if coverage or marriage where many of the legal rights and obligations of a married woman were subsumed by her husband, if this were as impressive as you say it is, Ben, if this were as bad for women as you say it is, then why do women still agree to get married? Can't be that bad. Why can't you just convince them to mass boycott the institution of marriage and do it that way? But of course, it didn't happen that way. Of course, it happened through state action. You could say with civil rights. Well, if it's the case that Jim Crow segregation is really as bad for black people as you say it is, there should be so much anger. So why is it that you that you aren't getting black people refusing to buy every product made by an employer that use segregation? And of course, so they aren't doing that. So they must not really buy that much. Of course, most people in most circumstances who are miserable conditions, except those conditions most of the time, they can be persuaded democratically to enact democratic change. And the fact that that is a more realistic route for making that happen, to me, is not cynical. Gene will refer to any to any empirical observation that he dislikes as being cynical. To me, it's not cynical. It's incredibly inspiring. Because what it allows us to do is to focus on what has been shown time and time again to be effective and to focus on using those more effective tactics, that's a good thing. Now, I want to go back to the five minutes of that we started out with. Right. So I want to think about the proposition and I want you to think about whether anything that Gina said tonight has actually undermined the case for that proposition, because there are three elements of freedom, equality and prosperity on one of them, equality. We heard a concession. Sure, it would be more equal, but one out of three shouldn't be enough. They're still the other two. That leaves prosperity and freedom. Well, on prosperity, Gene, I've got to say, spent about 30 seconds gesturing in the direction of some sort of prosperity based objection. I don't really know what that is, because we haven't heard enough about it. But but certainly not very much. He thinks that it's impossible, I guess, you could have publicly owed bags like actual state development bags that have worked very effectively in the real world where people function as officers of those banks, like relatively efficient and political technocrats being promoted through the civil service on the basis of objective criteria, like picking winners. I guess he must think that's impossible. I don't know why he thinks that's impossible. He hasn't really told us. So the real question, I think, separating us is not equality. Where do I seem to disagree? It's not prosperity where I don't think the gene has made his countercase. It's freedom. That's the real issue is freedom. So let's talk about freedom. If we define freedom the way that he wants to that libertarians define it, right, freedom is not interference with your property. Well, what's your property? We know it can't be property that you're legally entitled to because then legally bad data redistribution and even legally bad data nationalization would be fine. It can't be property that you're currently in possession of because then that would mean that you couldn't even recover stolen property. It could only be property that you have a moral right to. And at that point, it's just a tautology. You have a moral right to that property, which you have a moral right to. So the question is, which property do you have a moral right to? It's possible that the best answer to that question, I suppose, is the libertarian one that you have a moral right to whatever property you happen to accumulate by observing the rules of a market system. That's the only relevant criteria. But all I could say is that if you think that that's a more plausible theory, that a theory that emphasizes regular human values like solidarity and compassion and fairness and give it everybody a reasonable shot two minutes at good life outcomes, that all of your work is ahead of you. Final thought. I read a while back that in 1971, Noam Chomsky debated the French philosopher Michel Foucault and that Foucault insisted on being paid in hash for a long time afterwards, or I don't know how long it took them to smoke at all. Every time they broke it out, he and his friends would delight in saying, we're going to smoke some of the Chomsky hash. Now, as a good statist, I haven't been paid for my honorarium tonight in some sort of barter system. I'm accepted payment in good old fashioned government back fiat currency. But I'll certainly spend some of it on a nice smoky bottle of Scotch. One minute. And I'm not going to call it the the Epstein whiskey, because my friend Jean is unfortunately not currently the world's most famous Epstein. But I'll say, perhaps would you like to my friends, would you like a glass of the Soho forum whiskey? That's what I'll be left with. And I'll be all appreciated. What I want you to leave leave you this leave all of you with is this. If we define freedom the way libertarians want to define freedom, I've argued that that's circular. I haven't heard a response to that argument. 30 seconds. If you define freedom the way that I define freedom, then this could be a problem if for some reason you think that abuse and bigotry is could be a much bigger problem in state bags that it currently is in real world liquor boards and zoning boards. We haven't heard that case yet. But the more important point is that if you're defining freedom the way that I wanted to find freedom as freedom in practice to live your life the way you want, then that means the capitalist employment contracts are unfree. Thank you, Ben. Jean, you have seven and a half minutes. Well, I mean, in terms of the actual implementation of his plans, perhaps the the most telling contradiction that Ben lives with is that he's a big advocate of Mondragon and yet Mondragon was created by the workers themselves without any government help. But so Mondragon is very inspiring. It was inspiring to us all in the 1980s. And yet and yet we see no companies on the scale of Mondragon in the US and Mondragon was created in a much poorer country. So Ben says, well, don't go the way of Mondragon. After all, they they're successful and they built it up through tradition. Don't go the way of the cabuzzes because they were successfully built up through tradition. You want to go the way of the ballot box. And he draws analogies with the institution of marriage and with segregation. Well, both of those issues having to do with the Jim Crow's laws having to do with the laws of marriage, they were very much bound up with the state. And what I'm trying to show and I guess Ben has mostly agreed because he initially said that capitalism necessarily means that that there were capitalists and then there were workers. What what I've tried to show is that clearly capitalism has a whole range of possibilities and that if there is indeed a groundswell of feeling about it, then capitalism offers the way and and that Ben's analogies are not valid. There should be a hunger for the sort of thing that he's talking about and the power of the consumer dollar, the power of of the 30 trillion of wealth that workers have should be more than enough to bring that about. And I do suggest that that Ben doesn't want to advocate it partly because it's a little bit ugly to use capitalist means. It's it's conceiving too much to imagine that you're going to achieve this thing through capitalist means. And finally, it also tends to imply that maybe people aren't interested. And again, I'm appalled when Ben says, well, they're all that you can't reach them because, you know, boycotts are so so lacking in focus. Well, that don't have to be lacking in focus. If you say this is the purpose, we're going to target this firm. Or indeed, we're going to build worker owned firms. Five minutes, Jane, five minutes. We want a commitment from you to build it. All of those things are quite obviously possible through capitalist means. And again, Moundragon is in itself a refutation of Ben's views. I guess Ben felt I didn't clarify prosperity enough. I guess when I mentioned Steve Jobs, perhaps that was what I meant to imply. Take take take three innovators, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton. We don't know Ben. Ben seems to think that state run banks are going to be the ones who are going to recognize what's good and what's bad. Well, these three were pretty much self-financing. They came out of nowhere. The fact of the matter is and that's the reason why so many of the innovative firms are still in the US and why when you have domination by government, you don't get a whole lot of innovation. Innovation is a very difficult and precious thing. And to glibly say that the state run banks are going to do it, they'll they'll suck up all the capital. Of course, we'll give you a little bit of a go fund me, but otherwise they'll suck up all the capital. We're not really going to get very far with prosperity because we're going to choke off innovation. Finally, again, I don't even concede. I don't know whether there would be greater inequality of income under Ben's socialism. It could go either way. I do know that there would be injustice, stagnation. I do know that that if Ben wants to do all of these unprecedented things, then he ought to recognize that that that the legacy of socialism is pretty appalling, that that we're where we can do direct comparisons. North Korea versus South Korea, East Germany versus West Germany. We get pretty dismal results, even when we're talking about imperfect capitalism. And therefore, I think that it even behooves Ben just given his respect for history to recognize that that you want to work in the grassroots. You want to prove that these systems are possible. The kibbutzim have failed. The to the extent that we've got anything going on, it's become very difficult to believe that any of these dreams are worth sustaining. And so what Ben really ought to do is roll up his sleeves and go back to all that misery that's out there and use the numbers that I told him about, the control that they have over the consumer dollar, the control that they have over wealth and use capitalist means and recognizing again that institutional marriage segregation is not the way to go. Also recognizing that what people vote for in the ballot box, you know, again, lots of people voted for Biden, lots of people voted for Bush, you don't always know what you're getting. It's it's rather it's not exactly the way to go, especially when capitalism offers the way. And so I think it's tragic that Ben doesn't see that. I guess the final thing in terms of my notes is that Ben seems to think that that if I'm working for a worker owned firm and I'm unhappy, I can always vote. I can always try to persuade the people in that co-op the error their ways. But I'm one thing that's just not open to me is to opt out. The freedom to opt out, which is what capitalism offers as such a sacred right. You know, I live in a co-op building. I can vote, you know, my God, yeah, if I can vote, what am I going to complain? Well, there are some lunatics running it. I'd rather my options are limited so I can't move. But the point is that what Ben seems to think is that all you got to do is vote. All you got to do is leave it to the majority and that will solve. Well, that's that from the standpoint of the free market from one minute of libertarianism is a very bankrupt philosophy. Majoritarian fascism is not exactly a new concept. The even if we did indeed have majorities running things, the idea that they could tyrannize the minority or that all you got to do is vote. All you got to do is push through your your plans to the ballot box rather than using the magic of the market to go your own way, to do your own thing, to prove as jobs did as Bezos as Walton did that there are better ways of doing things and show the majority of the population be damned to quote Connor Friedersdorf. So therefore, I do believe you should vote against the resolution that Ben has been defending. Thank you very much. Let's give one more big round of applause for our speakers. Jane, if you would please open the voting. If you could all go to SohoVote.com and cast your vote. Yes, no, or still undecided on the resolution. Socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom, equality and prosperity. Ben Burgess started off with eight point six percent and ended with six point five percent, meaning a change of negative two point one five percent. Jean started off with seventy six point three four and ended with eighty eight point seventeen, meaning a change of eleven percent. And with that, Jean is the winner. Thank you both for coming out. I really appreciate it.