 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Firstly, I'd like to take a point of clarification. Contrary to what we originally planned for COVID-related reasons, we'll be having a hybrid event tonight. Dr. Rook, as you can see, is joining us in person. And Dr. Wolk from New York. That being said, the format of the event, it's unchanged, and we expect to have an equally engaging experience. Before we get into tonight's event, I want to offer some words of introduction. My name is Adam Robbins. I'm the Libertarian Caucus Chair of the Penn Political Union. I'm addressing you this evening, because I originally proposed this event and wanted to briefly explain my motivations for doing so. All too often, political debates of our age center on trivial minutiae, the details of congressional procedure, the finer points of tax policy, et cetera. This myopia obscures the fundamental life and death issues of our time, the principles without which we cannot hope to begin the task of understanding what is wrong with our society, much less how to fix it. The debate concerning capitalism and socialism is a major point of connection for nearly two centuries. Although abstract, it is not divorced from particularities. As both speakers would likely agree, this key alternative is paramount, understanding just about each and every issue facing our society today. A fundamentally more important topic in scares in the amount. To help us understand this question, we have with us two eminently qualified speakers. Arguing for capitalism, we adopted your own book. Dr. Brooks is the chairman of the board of the Meinra Institute, opposed to your own book show online, and has written books on the topics of finance and income inequality. Arguing for socialism, we have Dr. Richard Wolff. Dr. Wolff is an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is currently a visiting professor in the graduate program at International Affairs at the New School in New York City. He also hosts an economic update with Richard Wolff weekly show and has written numerous books on the topics of socialism, capitalism, and Marxism. As you listen to the arguments presented here tonight, I implore you in the audience to do two things. Firstly, I implore you to recognize the gravity of this discussion. This is not mere idle chatting. The issues being discussed tonight will influence the future course of not only our politics, but our entire civilization. Secondly, I implore you to listen to the speakers with an active mind. Check your premises. You find yourself agreeing or disagreeing with a particular point after yourself. Why is this? And what assumptions are perhaps prejudices as my assessment depends? I hope many of you come away from tonight thinking differently about these issues than you did before. Before we begin, some thanks and acknowledgements are on order. First and foremost, I'd like to thank Dr. Broke and Dr. Wolff for making time on their busy schedules to be with us this evening. I would also like to thank our co-sponsors, Penn Justice Democrats, Penn Deliberty, College Republicans, and Warden Undergradments and Public Policy. Please contact us if you're interested in getting more involved in any of these organizations. Lastly, a bit about who we are and what we do. This event is hosted to join me by the Penn Political Union and the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Demonstration. The Penn Political Union is UFEN's premier non-partisan political debate society. We hold debates like these, not only with guest speakers, but with students as well. In addition to supporting the Penn Political Union, the Andrea Mitchell Center sponsors workshops, lectures, fellowships, and research grants for a variety of political initiatives. If you want to hear more about events like this one, please check out our website and follow our social media. I will now hand things off to our moderator, Government and Politics Association President, Sumon Ra. Good evening, everyone. The resolution for tonight is should the United States embrace capitalism or socialism? In terms of the format, this debate will consist of altering speeches by each side, along with several questions and answer periods throughout, with a longer question and answer period towards the end. We have talked to Cohen and determined that Dr. Wolfe will go first. Dr. Wolfe, you're opening statement. You have seven minutes, and I will inform the speaker when there's a minute left and 30 seconds left. Let me just ask a question. If I read the instructions correctly, the opening statement is seven minutes. Is that right? Yes, sir, that's correct. Okay, good. Thank you. Let me begin by appreciating the work I know goes into having meetings like this and to sustaining organizations like those that have sponsored this event. And I congratulate those students and any faculty involved that work to make these kinds of events happen. And let me also thank you for choosing this topic of socialism, since in many cases around the United States in my lifetime, faculties and students have been afraid to do that, either not touching the subject or bringing in someone to perform what we kindly call a hatchet job. So I'm not gonna do that, obviously, and I appreciate you're giving me the opportunity. So why am I in favor of socialism for the United States? Well, to be real honest, I'm mystified as to why you aren't. But I'll get back to that as I get towards the end. Socialism is just about as old as capitalism. Maybe a little younger. It represents the recognition by millions of people across the world that whatever capitalism is, and however much it's better than the slavery and feudalism and the other systems that preceded it, like all of those systems, the human race can learn from capitalism and can do better. I'm grateful that people feel that way because that's why we got out of the slavery and that's why we got out of the feudalism and that's why we will get out of capitalism too and for many of the same reasons. Socialism is always here because it is capitalism's own creation. It is the shadow of self-criticism without which capitalism cannot exist. If you want to understand why socialism is here, then the answer is because capitalism is here and socialism is the criticism. And from whom does the criticism come? On the part of the victims of this system, about which I'll have more to say, and on the part of the critics. And when the system finally comes to its end, it will be because of a merger between the victims and the critics. But I have a special problem in speaking with you because you are in the United States and the United States has had a very peculiar relationship to socialism for most of its history. In the United States, things have to be explained that in most other parts of the world are already understood. Socialism in this country is portrayed as exotic, as strange, as exceptional, as evil, and as a whole lot of other things, most of which are quite negative. It's only possible to sustain that image if you live in a society where you cannot regularly interact with large numbers of people from many walks of life who are in fact socialists. And that would teach you what, for example, is the truth in most European countries. And because of the similarity, let me mention a few of those things that might come as a surprise to you. Two weeks ago, there was a national election in Germany. And when the votes were counted, the largest single party, which is now forming a government in that country, is the German Socialist Party. A few miles away is a country you've heard of, Portugal. Portugal has, for the last five, six years, been governed by a coalition. I'm sure you're all familiar with it. The coalition consists, number one, of the Portuguese Socialist Party. Number two, its coalition partner, the Portuguese Communist Party. And the third member of the coalition is the Portuguese Green Party. And if, in fact, you didn't know that Portugal was governed as I've just described it to you, that's because you live in a society which is very uncomfortable about acknowledging the enormous interest in support for an enthusiasm for socialism all around the world with the partial exception of the United States. Yet, that exception is changing, isn't it? And I dare say that had something to do with your decision about the topic tonight and about inviting me to address it. For the first time in 75 years, we have candidates on the ballot who don't run away from the label of socialist, who embrace it, who win victories in election after election. And there've been more every time, every year, in the last six or seven years, there's an interest growing in this country. And it's not a surprise, it was only a question of when it was never a question of whether. And what would a socialism in America mean? Well, here there are two problems. I'm gonna answer my own question and then I'm gonna tell you about the problem with the question and with my answer to it. The answer is that capitalism presents us here in the United States with a collection of negative failures, flaws and breakdowns that it would be the goal of socialism to overcome. The first one, and this is not in order of importance, is a level of inequality that is mind numbing. We all watched a few weeks ago as our billionaires played in the sand, or I should say in space, to fly around for a few minutes while we watched them spending their money at a time when we are suffering the deaths of huge numbers of people because our capitalist system, sorry? Oh, you have 30 seconds, sorry. Okay. Let me jump into the problem and we'll come back to the flaws that created. Socialism is an evolving tradition. It is not what it was 200 years ago or a hundred. And part of what I have as a task tonight is explained to all of you, if you're not familiar with it, that your images of socialism, whether drawn from the United States or from the Soviet Union or from China or from Venezuela are different from other conceptions of socialism. And that if you want to understand it, then you have to learn a little bit about an evolving tradition that is different and has multiple dimensions. Thank you, Dr. Wolff. Yep. I'd like Dr. Brook to give his seven minute opening statement. Thank you, the seven minutes go by fast. Again, thank you to the organizers. Thank you for putting on this event. Thank you for all of you for being here. It's, I have the advantage of, and the benefit of seeing you in three dimensions, which is a lot of much more fun than to see you through Zoom. Done those talks and it's a lot less fun. I too am bewildered about the state of the world. I'm bewildered about this debate. I'm bewildered by the fact that there is any debate. Socialism in this coming from somebody who as when I was young was a socialist, lived in a country dominated and ruled by a socialist political party for much, most of my youth. Then bewildered by the fact that anybody is still interested in socialism. In every attempt made by the socialist in every form, it has failed. It failed in Israel of my youth. It failed on the kibbutzim in Israel. It failed in the examples that Dr. Wolf just gave whether it's a Soviet Union, whether it's Venezuela, whether it's the wide array of different experiments going all the way back to the commune of Paris. It's never been successful. It's never even come close to being successful. If, what do you mean by success? Is human flourishing? Human success, individual human beings achieving a better life for themselves. It results from, it results not only in economic failure, it results in social failure. Maybe the best example of this is the Israeli kibbutz. I don't know how many of you know about the Israeli kibbutz, but it was a communal village, if you will, in which people lived, folded on everything and shifted jobs, rotated jobs, the kids were waste communally, food was made communally, life was communal in every aspect. And all it resulted was in resentment, hatred, backstabbing. Every commune, every story of every commune ends the same way. So the idea of socialism, first of all, what is it? What is it the core of socialism? Yes, there are a lot of evolving different ways in which to implement it, but what's the heart of it? What's the core? Well, the core of it is the supremacy of the group, a group, figure out which group, over the individual, whether it's politically, economically, and most importantly, moral. It is the placing of the collective as the unit of measure. Of the collective as that which the individual must sacrifice to and be sacrificed to. It's no wonder that some forms of socialism end in bloodshed because it's just individuals and we're trying to make it omelet. So the whole idea of socialism is the subjugation of the individual to the collective, to the group. It is an indication of individual freedom, individual choices, the individual mind, your ability to choose your values, to pursue your life and gain your individual happiness based on your standards, not somebody else's, not the groups, not the collectives. Now, I'm not here today to defend the status quo. Indeed, I think the status quo today in America and Europe is much closer to socialism than it is to what I'm here to defend, which is capitalism. Capitalism is not the system we have today. Indeed, capitalism is in our minds would be unknown ideal. What we have today is a mixed economy. It's a mixture of elements of freedom of markets, of private property and vast, vast elements of state involvement in the name of the collective of one form or another in the name of the common good. So what we have today and all the problems that I think Dr. Wolfe would list problems of capitalism, almost all of these problems to the extent that they are even problems, we'll get to that I think later, are not problems of capitalism per se, but are problems of a mixed economy. Yes, there are cycles caused by a central bank. Central bank is not a feature of capitalism. It is the enemy of capitalism. So what is capitalism? Capitalism is a system of individual rights. It is a system of political and economic freedom. It is a system that respects the individual mind, a system that respects individual value choices, a system that respects and leaves individuals alone to pursue their own values, their own choices, their own happiness free of the one enemy that human mind has, the one thing that prevents us from attaining our values. And that is physical force, coercion, authority. The authority of a thug, the authority of a dictator, the authority of a witch doctor, the authority of a church, the authority of somebody with a gun who can force you to do things you don't wanna do, the authority of unlimited majority democracy. So capitalism is a complete separation of economics and state. It is the idea that the state's job is not to run an economy. The idea is that the state is there to preserve our freedom, to protect our rights, to prevent the cook, the fraud stuff from violating our rights. And otherwise, leave us alone. Indeed, if you wanna be a socialist under capitalism, you wanna go start your communists somewhere, start your kibbut somewhere, start a company run by employees so that you can do it under capitalism. Nobody is preventing you from doing it. I think it'll fail, but you have every right to do it as long as you're not cursing, as long as you're not forcing anybody else. In contrast to socialism, economic freedom, capitalism, elements of capitalism, whenever they're trying just a little bit, whenever the elements introduced into the system of freedom of capitalism, of economics, economic freedom, they are unbelievably successful, even a little bit of freedom, because it's huge weight, exact opposite of socialism. The more consistent you apply it, the worse the outcome. The more consistently you apply capitalism, even in it's not pure form, the better things are. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Brick. You will now move on to cuddles for your star speaker. You'll lift up five minutes and you'll start with Dr. Wolf. Dr. Wolf, you have five minutes for your rebuttal to Dr. Brick's opening statement. Okay, let me pick up on a couple of points and focus on those. I really have no idea what the word success means given its use in the last few minutes. I'm an economist. That's what I do for a living. So one of the ways we measure success, it's an imperfect measure, but we use it all around the world is economic growth. And your GDP, your total output of goods and services. So I want to compare with you the freedom you get if you're no longer poverty stricken. If you have minimum wealth, health fare, welfare, health, food, shelter, clothing, you're not a terribly poor person. The People's Republic of China, I'll use as an example because they call themselves socialist. Over the last 40 years that they've been developing their society, their annual rate of growth has averaged between six and 9%, particularly over the last 25 years. Over the same period of time, the rate of economic growth of the United States has averaged between two and 3%. That is the Chinese are growing three times faster than we are as a nation. And that's why they're the superpower in the world that you see and read about every day. Over the last 30 years, the real wage of the United States has been stagnant, growing very, very small. Over the same period of time, the real wage of the average worker in China has quadrupled. They promised their people to deliver to them an exit from the lack of freedom that goes with extreme poverty. An extreme poverty that China suffered because in the capitalist division of the world, economy over the last 300 years, what was left to China was the bottom of the barrel. Every Western capitalist country took a piece of China as best they could and didn't use it for the benefit of the Chinese to put it politely. And then let me talk about freedom and the experience of socialism. The Kibbutzim had a problem. Every system has problems. For every socialism that had a difficulty, I'd be happy to give you a capitalism that did. One of the most successful corporations in the last 70 years, for those of you who may not be familiar, is something called the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation. It's a company in Spain. It's the seventh largest corporation in the country. It's a family of 150 to 200 worker co-ops that reject capitalism. Why? Because when you enter a capitalist enterprise, you're entering a place from which all that individual freedom you've just heard about is pretty well gone. A very small number of people at the top of that enterprise tell you what to do, how to do it, where to do it and when to do it. And if you don't like it, they'll take the job away from you and you can go home and be unemployed and suffer through that with your family. Lots of freedom you have in a system like that. You don't go to work in a democratic space. You don't go to work in a place that recognizes your individuality. And for those of you who have ever had a real job in the world that I live in, know very well what freedom isn't when you're working on the job and allowing you to leave and go to another place of work where you'll likely be treated in the same way is hardly a solution. Socialism is the yearning for people to do better than what capitalism has in store, to provide you with an education without crippling debt, to provide you with the necessities of life without humiliating you and subordinating you. And to do that, you cannot be asked to go work in an enterprise whose whole internal structure makes a mockery of the notion of democracy. Now you want to do the kind of growth by another one. Look, it is absolutely true that it is a disgrace, the rate of growth in the United States as being so pathetic. It has. And the reason for that is the lack of capitalism in this country, the fact that it is so controlled, so regulated, so much redistribution of wealth, so little role for the private sector in this country that economic growth is stilted. But to associate China's growth with socialism is bizarre. China grew when it liberalized whole regions of its geography, whole areas which were left free, free to have wage laborers, free to build corporations, free to build businesses. Alibaba is not owned by the employees, although now, of course, because it's against socialism, it's being crushed by the central government. The successful businesses in China, the ones that are responsible for the economic growth, the ones that are responsible for the export of all pseudo private companies that behave like private companies in a relatively free economy. There are many businessmen in the United States who claim that in China they can do business with less regulations than they can in the United States of America. So to posit China over the last 40 years and to ignore China when it was truly socialist and where tens of millions of people died of starvation, I'll give you one short story because I think it indicates a lot, even though it's gonna eat up most of my five minutes. How did China go from a position of starvation to a position in which it can actually feed its population? Well, there was a little village, a little village and I've got its name here. Somebody asked me in the Q and A, I can pull up the name of the village. It's in my notes. This little village in 1978 decided because they were starving, because they had communal farms and everything was grown for the party and for the community and there was no private property. They decided to create private property. They had a document in which they assigned different pieces of land to different families and within a year, they were growing four or five times more than they had grown as a communal farm and they were scared because they knew the communists would come down and they would probably shoot them all. And luckily for them, at that point, Deng Cha Peng decided to be a pragmatist and not insist on communal farming on socialism in farming. And he said, wait a minute, this is amazing. You mean if they divide these parts up into private property, food production goes up four to five X? Maybe we can repeat this in other villages and slowly this idea of private property, of employees and employers, of owners spread through China and production of food went through the roof, a country that was starving its people was suddenly feeding them and more. So, no, China is no example. It's not an example of capitalism. Again, it's a mixed economy, but with the balance of some socialist elements and the growth is all happening. If you look at the numbers, the growth is all happening in the private sector. Look, the state of the world today sucks to put it in technical terms. It's not a good situation where we just went through COVID, we went through financial crisis. It's been a bad time for a lot of young people. The solution to that, it's not to go backwards in teams of economic success. The solution is to go forward. The solution is to look for a system that can enhance our lives, that can make our lives better, what I mean by better, living longer, fewer children dying, having more wealth, getting a greater education, compare the somewhat partially capitalist world with any other world, socialist otherwise, in terms of success over the last seven years, that is success. So we should reject today's system, but to move towards socialism is suicide. And it's unoriginal. If you wanna be a radical, if you wanna be somebody who thinks differently, who thinks outside of the box, don't be a socialist, people have been socialist for the last 150 years, to no avail. Their veil was pretty destructive. Be a capitalist. Embrace an idea that is new, that is radical. And that is actually focused on individual human well-being, flourishing, freedom, happiness, success. Thank you. We'll now move on to audience question and answer period. Now we'll get into about five minutes for this, and we want those speakers to have at least one minute to respond to the question. So if I take three audience members, we might be to come up to the center in a while, and then I'll stand at the mic and present a question, just so that I'm not too worried. Come up to the end. The question is raise your hand and you'll... Yeah, so the person in the back. Can we go ahead? Yeah. All right, great. Thank you. Thank you to the viewers. So we heard a lot of high-level issues. I would like to hear just a few of the chatterboxes that were behind me commenting a little bit. I think it might be helpful to notice some of the fundamentals of the difference between a market economy and a community economy. I was wondering if Professor Wolth would mind talking about how a socialist system, whereas it's more about control versus voluntary value creation, how that's a benefit to the individual. Most of your students and spring registrations coming along right now. And so I'm sure you're all fighting for the best classes and you are limited in terms of what classes those are. It's an allotment. It's not something that's earned. You have a good choice to be offered into this system called the university. And so that's what we would seek kind of in a socialist system. So I'm curious how you would speak to that. And then also even comparing the U.S. to Portugal alternative science, but it's not really a good measurement. Thank you. Well, someone will have to rephrase it because that was not, I couldn't hear what the young lady was saying. So someone will have to repeat the core of it. Otherwise I can't respond simply because I could not hear what it is she had to say. I think she was asking how a social system would actually work. That's the simplest way I could put it, I think. Is that right? Yeah, this might be then my chance to explain what the differences are among the socialists. Because for anyone to speak of socialism in the singular is either misleading you intentionally or is based on ignorance. Socialism has evolved. It has learned from its own mistakes and it has learned from the change of time. For a while in the 19th and 20th century, socialism meant something about what the government was doing and how the government would intervene and how the government would take the rough edges off of capitalism or maybe somehow help make a transition to a different society. Giving that amount of power to the government that the revolutions, for example, in Russia did caught the socialists that there's a problem. On the one hand, you get mobilization of resources for rapid economic growth. And by the way, just a footnote. Read Pearlbuck if you never have and you'll learn about starvation in China before 1949. But to accuse the government since then as if they had some special lease on starvation is an extraordinary reading of history that I don't find recognizable and I've done a lot of work on what happened in China. We don't live in the same universe to listen to that kind of talk. One of the reactions of socialists to the experiences they've learned from has been to focus on a different location as the goal of socialism. Socialism in the 21st century has a different focus from what it had before. And if you don't pay attention, you don't know. Yeah, this is a really important point. Let me get my 30 seconds won't intrude too badly on anybody else. The focus now is on the transformation of the workplace to make it a democratic place, one person, one vote where we all together decide what to produce, how to produce, where to produce and what to do with the output. We don't allow a tiny minority of owners, investors boards of directors to dictate because that's what they do, what is done with the labor, the brains and the muscles of the vast majority of people. The radical democratization of the workplace is the key focus of socialism that's rising in the world today. And it has to be at least acknowledged before you collapse a changed relationship into something old that you want to explore it. And if indeed we're gonna tout capitalism versus socialism as socialism being an old idea, capitalism predates it by a good bit. So to celebrate capitalism makes you in love with something even older than any socialism that exists on this earth. I'm removed. Yeah, just a confidence thing, you'll give Dr. Britt a natural amount of time to respond to this question. Yeah, so I'll just say this idea of democracy in the workplace is bizarre. It is a rejection of the idea of division of labor, it's a rejection of the idea of specialization, of expertise, of the knowledge that it takes to run a business, to run particular aspects of a business. We don't have democracy in science, science is not decided, truth is not decided democratically. We don't have the democracy in families, we don't have democracy in marriage, we don't have democracy in sex. The group doesn't decide for me what values I should pursue, what I should and shouldn't do. Now, if you want to start a business in which employees get a vote on everything, do it. See how long it lasts. I mean, this is just one more form of socialism which is going to fail. Again, it's very similar to the kibbutz, the kibbutz to a large extent ran exactly this way. And today in Israel then no kibbutz him, none of them has survived, not a single one because it is economically, morally, socially important and it doesn't work. So, I mean, if anybody's ever worked in a company beyond just at the lowest level, if you've actually advanced, if you've been a manager, if you shadow the CEO around for a day, you know that the kind of decisions that have to be made cannot reasonably in any world be made in a democratic process. And the only result of such a thing would be a complete destruction of that business. It goes nowhere, it is completely devolved from the actual world in which we live. Now, yes, there is one corporation in Spain. Every debate I've ever done was to socialize. Say, there's one corporation in Spain. Yes, it's the seventh biggest in Spain. If you ranked it in America, it would be not very high. Right? I will ask the speaker to both find or restrict your answers in one minute to set up other people and ask questions. And if they remain two people who need to ask questions, you can please ask them from this mic. Dr. Burke and I will just step away. So, I'm gonna make sure Dr. Walker can answer questions. Thank you. It's a great pleasure to meet you both. Get close to the mic. It's a great pleasure to meet you both. And you both, I see, claim that China's record of growth in recent years has been attributable to your system. And Dr. Burke, you mentioned how in the past, China's issues were stemmed from socialism. I was wondering if you guys would talk about how your or your opponent's system has played a role in China's recent issues with economic inequality and its egregious human rights violations. Thank you. Anybody want to start off? Are you asking anybody specific? Why is it different? Okay, it's my turn to start. So, I'll start. China's egregious human rights violation are completely consistent with the human rights violations that have been part of the Chinese Communist Party's history for a long, long time. It was the Chinese Communist Party that sent the tanks in to Tiananmen Square to kill who knows how many thousands of students fighting to liberate themselves. It was Mao Zedong, and yes, I will hold Mao Zedong responsible for the famines of the 1960s and 1970s. I will hold him responsible for the deaths of the Cultural Revolution. Absolutely, he is responsible. It's blood on his hands and anybody supports the Maoist agenda. So, human rights violations are clearly a consequence of socialism, of the socialism of the Communist Party. You might not want to call it socialism anymore. It's not the new socialism, but it's still socialism. As to the inequality, I mean, somebody should ask me a question about inequality. Why is inequality a problem? I still don't understand. We're unequal. We're different. Thank you, Dr. Wilkin. Dr. Wilkin, one minute to respond to this question. Yeah, I take my hat off to my opponent here. It takes a certain kind of extraordinary courage to speak in a country that has just completed a 20-year war against two Muslim countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, killing and destroying countries and people on a scale. The Chinese activities in that province couldn't begin to approach. It takes a real remarkable discovery of evil in the world located conveniently where you need to be politically hostile and never to notice where you're talking from and who you're talking about. I also know it's popular to do this bizarre analysis by death counts, counting people who died in Russia in the 1920s and 30s or in China in the 60s. Do you really want to do your analysis that way? Well, let's see what happened under capitalism's rule. I see, mm, World War I, oh, World War II, oh, the colonial period from which we're still not in. After Wilkin, man is up. It's important to understand that these are ways of arguing that can only be done if you do not see your own complicity. Thank you, Under Wilkin. Will you accept your last audience question for this period? Yeah, so my question, you know, like nobody believes that of course, like Adam Smith's, you know, the wealth of nations is like the still form of capital that we have today. But I'm just kind of wondering what both of your thoughts are on kind of the way that capital has evolved and what that means for the right and the left in the United States, specifically Dr. Wolff, I wanted to ask you like Marx's first critic of capital and like how those implications on the ways capital has changed, the way that we interact with it and the way that labor has changed for the last 25 years and the implications that left us in the United States, so, yeah. Who goes first here? The question was for you, so. Oh, okay. Before you begin, Dr. Wolff, can you stay closer to your computer? Some of the people in the back of the room are in, are having trouble hearing you, so you're trying to make sure you're on your own in terms of detail. Okay, how about this? Is this audible? Good. Yes, yes, yes. Okay. Marx's point was to be a critic of capitalism. Marx wrote very little and didn't believe in looking into the future and guessing what might happen. Everything he did was focused on analyzing capitalism, but to doing it differently from the way Adam Smith or David Ricardo did, namely as a critic. What Smith and Ricardo did was criticize feudalism that went before in the advocacy for capitalism. What Marx does is criticize capital to take history the next step. Marx's feelings and what animated him was his love of the French and American revolutions. He believed in liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy, which were the slogans. But his judgment in the middle of the 19th century was that capitalism, which had promised those things, never ever delivered on that promise. And so he was the critic who said, let's figure out why not. And he answered the question. The reason capitalism cannot and never has delivered liberty, equality, fraternity, or democracy is because it is the obstacle to the achievement. And that's why a socialist is always first and foremost, someone who wants to go further and to do it in a different way. And the core idea is to change the relationship in the production situation. So we're not a minority governing in the jar. Thank you. Dr. Baruch, do you have one more? Yeah, I don't quite understand the question. The question was about capital and the modern world. Capital and the modern world has evolved very much based on a regulated, status model. And the capitalists, the ones who manage capital have tried their best to try to allocate capital in spite of constant government interventions and the fact that their product money was nationalized with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. But again, I think this idea of changing the structure of production will only lead to no production. And if what you want is poverty, then yes, take over the businesses, replace the entrepreneurs, replace the minds of the CEO with voting in town halls like this and see how much gets produced, nothing. Thank you, Dr. Baruch. I will conclude this question and answer period. We have two more. The first and then the round of the level, 500 levels for the first speakers. And we'll start with Dr. Wolfe for a five minute session. Okay, because my counterpart here thought that only Mamdragon is listed, let me give you a couple more examples since even the most cursory study of worker co-ops around the world will indicate to you that they exist in virtually every country on this planet and often in huge numbers. I'll pick one for you. Around the area of Bologna in Italy is a province called Emilia-Romagna. In that province, 40%, 40% of all enterprises are worker co-ops. It's been that way for decades. They wouldn't have it any other way because these are stunningly successful businesses. Mamdragon is important because over its 70 years, it had to compete with capitalist, top-down, hierarchical, undemocratic workplaces and it out-competed them, eventually absorbing them to become the seventh largest corporation. That's why it's important. Two American corporations pay Mamdragon to allow their scientists to learn from them. One is General Motors, the other one is Microsoft. The people on the left don't want to face it but the reality is these are very successful businesses and there's lots of literature to demonstrate it. Number one, number two, capitalism, this is a remarkable business, this notion of blaming the government. Every capitalist failure that we point to, my adversary wants you to believe it's the government. This is doing a wonderful service to big business. They get to kick us, to fire us, to kick us out of our homes, to abuse us on the job in a hundred different ways, to sell us faulty products and here we have a cabal of people who tell us it's the fault of the government as if we hadn't figured out years ago who it is who controls this government, who it is who funds the lobbyists that write the bills, who it is that donates the bulk of the money. This notion of protecting big business from the criticism its behavior deserves by focusing all the blame on the puppets who sit in the offices is a nice move for the corporations but it's not a serious proposition for anybody who thinks. Thank you, Dr. Wolfe. I'm going to go to Dr. Graves Bow. Cronism, we can agree, is an awful thing. It's terrible. But what is the solution to cronyism? More democracy? No, of course not. The solution to cronyism is to get the government out of the business of economics. The reason cronyism exists is because you've given a bunch of politicians power over our lives. You've given a bunch of politicians power over businesses. Businesses are going to, if they can, they're going to try to influence their power. They do everywhere. I suspect that even the co-ops in Spain and Italy lobby the Spanish and Italian government and maybe it's not an accident that Madrigal in Spain grew over the 70 years primarily under fascist government. Fascism being a close relative ultimately of socialism. So cronyism is bad. Let's get rid of it. We get rid of it by making politicians impotent. By taking away the power of politicians over our lives, over the lives of businesses, over the choices and decisions of production. But look, I think there's a much more important point here and it is a moral point, not an economic point, although economics flows I think from morality. And that is the fundamental question of who does your life belong to? Who should make choices about your life? If you want to be an entrepreneur and go out or if you want to be a worker and you want to get a salary and do something else in the rest of your time or if you want to join a commune, who gets to make that decision? Do you make that decision? That's what freedom means. You being able to make a decision, start a company, become an employee. And by the way, I find it funny about all these big businesses firing everybody. I don't know how many of you have ever worked in Silicon Valley. I fear very few of you. But in Silicon Valley, it's the employees that are firing the companies all the time. People are job hopping all the time to get higher and higher salaries and do better and better. That's the beauty of a semi-even capitalist economy. But do you get those choices? Do you get to make decisions for yourself? Or does some central planner, or does the group in the case of a democratic company get to make decisions for you? And what's the group do you think are gonna decide if they don't like you about your salary next year? Because they're gonna decide it's not gonna be based on your productivity. It's gonna be based on how much you suck up to the group. How nice you are, how friendly you are to the leaders of the group. So the entire system is built on. The entire socialist system in all its forms. I recognize the wide variety of socialist forms. All of them are based on one principle. Your life doesn't matter. Your choices don't matter. It's the group that gets to decide what you do, how you live, where you live, what you do. Yes, Dr. Wolf has replaced the dictatorship of the proletarian with the dictatorship of the majority. The majority gets to decide how you live, what you do. He's replaced the philosopher king with the majority. The majority rule is not moral rule. Pure democracy is rule of the mob. Pure democracy is placing the group above the individual. It's denying the minority. A right, and this is why the founders of this country were so critical of democracy. So critical of Athenian-like democracy, which kills Socrates of the idea that the majority should dictate the minority. And this is why we have a bill of rights to protect minorities. And what's the smallest minority in the world? The individual. And that's why a capitalist system is a system that is there to protect the individual, his rights, to protect them from the majority, to protect them from the authoritarian, to protect them from cooks, to protect them from fraudsters, and to protect from the majority infringing on that individual's rights and rights of freedoms of action. The freedom for you to live your life based on your mind in pursuit of your values, to the achievement of your happiness. Let us live, leave, them mob away from this. The audience questions answer period. I'm the same format as the last. There will be a longer 30 minute audience question answer period or is the end? So we have a question. Yeah, I'd be like to invite our first audience to answer the question. Hi Dr. Wolk, my name is Connor and I'm a member of the West Penn. In your introduction, you praised social democratic parties in Europe for the recent electoral successes. However, in your first rebuttal, you praised China's steep economic growth, a country very different than European social democracies. My question is, should socialists support any quote unquote socialist country that has positive economic growth? Or are there distinct political goals that a socialist movement should aim to achieve? Thank you. Anyone who spends time thinking about different societies and who's a reasonable human being will come up with a number of indices. It would be strange to have one or even two would be like going to a doctor who simply takes your temperature, tells you you're fine because it's 98.6 and sends you home. You know you need a new doctor. You need someone who uses a variety of measures and a variety of indices. So of course, socialists of all different kinds use a variety of indices. But if you want to talk as apparently some of us do about individual freedom, then ask yourself how it helped your freedom to have to go into debt to get a college degree, a debt that you will carry for the rest of your life. What a crazy capitalism that puts your income and the cost of an education in such a relationship that you'll have to go into lifelong debt and we know what it's costing. Of course you can blame the government because we have a theory here that blames everything that's unfortunate about capitalism on the government so that the capitalism can still escape the responsibility that it ought to have. Social democracy in Europe has one index. China has a different. I'm not sure it makes much sense to apply the standards of one to the other but both of them have gone a long way in changing the conditions of the capitalism they inherited. Thank you. It is truly amusing to hear student debt blamed on capitalism. You know, there are three prices in the US economy that have gone up nonstop. Education, housing and healthcare. All student debt. Who do you owe the student debt to, by the way? Who do you get the student debt from? Banks, private banks? Is there a private sector involved? No. 100% of student debt today is to the government. If you forget Obama basically nationalized the whole student debt, you are paying your student debt the interest payments to the government. Healthcare. Healthcare in the United States is close to 60%. Government run. 60 cents of every dollar is spent by the government on healthcare. And finally housing, well we all know the degree to which local governments in this case control the supply of housing and create an artificial shortages. So every other price in the economy, almost every other price in the economy is declining. Particularly in those areas where the government has had relatively hands up like technology. Prices are plummeting. It's only in the areas where the government is hands on, aggressively hands on where prices only go up. Markets, reduced prices, increased quality. Always. Hi, so this question is for Dr. Gord. Freedom and success have been major points this debate and I'm sure we all agree that happiness is integral to those two ideas, freedom and success. So considering that, how would you explain that compared to other social democratic countries, I won't call them socialists, but countries adopt more socialist policies like France, Sweden, Norway, Finland. The United States has higher mental illness rates, overall lower quality of life by pretty much all metrics and lower health outcomes. How would you explain that? First of all, I dispute all of those statistics. That's just not true. The French, suddenly the French, they live in smaller houses by smaller cars and smaller lives than Americans do. They make a lot less money. They have a lot less wealth. And when you are sick and you have a little bit of money, you don't go to France to get treated. You get on a plane and you come to Mayo Clinic, which is what Belosconi and pretty much any political leader in Europe does when they get sick. They don't go to France. They don't go even to Germany, which is significantly better healthcare than France. But look, I'm not here to defend the American system. The American system, as I said originally, is no good. The American system is way too socialist. It's way too, has way too much government involvement in it. We would be much happier, much richer, much wealthier. We'd have a thousand times better healthcare if it was privatized. If it was actually, if the government got out of the business of healthcare and actually allowed, you know, the little bit of private sector healthcare that we have in the United States today provides 70% of all the innovations around the world. It provides almost all in every aspect of healthcare. I think the statistics brought forward by the young lady are spot on. I have no idea what my adversary here is talking about. The United States spends a larger share of its GDP on healthcare than any other of the countries in Europe by a wide margin, even though they have a greater degree of state support for health insurance for everybody from birth to death. And let me assure you, if you ever want to look at a statistic that might interest you, my family is French, so you'll understand my response. The number of Americans who go to France to enjoy the quality of life there dwarfs by an order of magnitude, the reverse flow. And you might think about why that is. This is a question very doctoral. Many socialist countries are extremely homogenous. How do you imagine your idea of socialism would work to any degree in America with many different races and ideologies? And if it is always just true majoritarianism, is the system always destined to fail because of the oppression of the minority? Well, many of the countries that have made experiments in socialism have not been whatever exactly you might mean by homogenous. They've had to deal with all kinds of ethnic, religious, regional minorities. If you remember the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics called itself that odd name because it was in fact a collection of very different people, very different nations with different religions, with different ethnic and value systems and so on. And they had to struggle all through their lives about how to deal with that kind of a situation. No, socialism is not some panacea that solves all problems. That's a caricature, it's not serious. Socialism, it's a little bit like slavery. You get rid of slavery because it's valuable to make people free. You don't imagine that with slavery gone, all of our other problems have disappeared. It's the same with capitalism. We gotta get rid of a system that organizes itself for the control by a very small minority of employers who have absurd power over the mass of the majority, which have to be sustained in that unequal situation by being endlessly regaled with stories about their individual choices, which of course they can't make because of the structure of the system that constrains them. That's the issue. Absolutely. I mean, the idea that because in America we have employees, therefore they have no choices, is bizarre. All you have to go is walk into a grocery store in the United States and see them out of choices that you have and if anybody ever, ever went into a grocery store in the Soviet Union, you would know the difference in the kind of choices that you have, not just material choices, but the spiritual choices of the kind of music you wanna listen to, the kind of art you wanna experience, the kind of experiences you wanna have, the array of choices that we have with just a little bit of capitalism in the United States is stunning as compared to any socialist experiment that has ever existed. And this idea that American working class is somehow suffering and burdened and in misery is ridiculous. The working class in America, some of the richest people in the world in terms of the capital income or wealth, we have been an enormous success across the board, yes, inequality is high, but that's part of that is that the people at the bottom are much richer than they used to be, much richer than people in the middle class or upper classes in other countries. Yes, if we're all equally poor, it looks like we have inequality, but now the inequality is in a space where we're all relatively rich. Wow, wow. Thank you all the audience members for asking that question. We'll now move on to our last rebuttal period. The rememberance speaker has five minutes, so you can rebuttal. I was invited by the speakers to expand on any of their thoughts and experience, my experience and experience and some of the time during those three minutes. I'm sorry, Dr. Wohl, can you find that? Okay, I'd like to go back to the differences of the socialism so that people understand that socialism is an enormous movement around the world. You know, Karl Marx died in 1883, that's barely 150 years. And over that time, his thinking and the thinking of other socialists have moved from Europe to every corner of this planet. Here was a set of ideas, a critique of one kind of economic system, capitalism and the advocacy for a transition to a different and better one. And this yearning for doing better than capitalism, from Scandinavia to the tip of Africa to Latin America to Asia, everywhere has spread like very few sets of ideas in the history of the human race because they speak to something, they speak to an innate human desire to do better than the situation that they're in. The last time capitalism crashed globally was in this century. Three times we've had a collapse of capitalism. The dot com crash of 2000, the subprime mortgage crash of 2008 and now this crash of 2020 and 21. Wherever capitalism has settled every four to seven years, it crashes. A system as unstable as that should have been pushed aside long ago. If you lived with a roommate as unstable as capitalism, you would have moved out years ago. Why do you accept this? Why do you accept this grotesque inequality? You can't play to go in space the way Mr. Bezos did. Even individual, you're an individual but that's where the similarity comes to an end. And the splits and divisions in our society coming out of the inequality, coming out of the bitterness of a declining empire. These are really serious problems of Western capitalism. And they are leading people to rediscover what? The socialism that has been pronounced dead and gone a dozen times only to come roaring back with yet another surge. It speaks to something in the human experience. Don't forget to listen, weigh it in any way that you want, but to have it shut out, to think that the only debate is whether the government is the bad guy or the private capitalist is the bad guy is not systemic thinking. It's getting lost in a defensive maneuver to keep the capitalists who run this system from bearing the responsibility for what their decisions do. Blaming the puppet means you don't understand the puppeteer and socialism has as one of its goals to focus your attention there. And then also learn from the experience. Socialists who did the Paris commune in 1871 learned and then they did the 17 revolution in Russia and the 49 revolution in China and many more. And each time they learned, this is what we did that is progressive and this is what we did that we must not do again. By the way, that's exactly how capitalism emerged out of feudalism. And the history doesn't stop. Every economic system in the history of the world was born, evolved and died. Capitalism is not unique. It was born, we know that. It has evolved, we know that too. So guess what the next step is? It's not a question of whether. It's a question of when and the when may surprise us as this society we live in continues to disintegrate. So I'm going to agree with my opponent on two points. One is we are disintegrating, I agree. Socialism is on the rise in the United States and the rest of the world. I fear for your generation if you have to live through its victory. It will be a disaster as it has always been and will always be. It is a system that negates and goes against human nature, negates and goes against the very essence of what it means to be an individual human being. It is immoral and therefore unsustainable and the body count is not an accident but a necessary consequence. And yes, I'm willing to do the body count because no system in human history has killed more of its own people than socialism has. And I agree too that any system that collapses every four to seven years is a system where we trash, we should get rid of the system absolutely. We should strive to a much better ideal for something much better than what we have today. But it is economic ignorance not to attribute the dot com bubble buzz to the Federal Reserve's expansion of the money supply and flooding the market. Knowingly, irrational exuberance, Alan Green's fan told us. Or not to attribute the financial crisis to the government subsidizing of mortgages and lowering of interest rates, the negative real rates which is insanity for any economist, anybody in finance who knows anything about finance and to blame lockdowns on capitalism. Rather than a government policy which resulted in which dictated lockdowns, dictated that you're wearing those a ridiculous mask right now. Yes, it's government, it is government. And unless you understand it's government you don't know what the solution is. And the solution is freedom. Look, from the beginning of time there is a fundamental human conflict out there. A fundamental human conflict between the idea that the individual is alive to serve the collective, that he is a slave to the group. It goes back to tribes, it goes back to Plato's Republic, it goes back to Christianity, it goes back to almost the entire human history. We have been slaves of one kind or another. And it's only in a brief period of time the last 200 or so years we have recognized the value of the individual. When we've recognized that the individual is what matter, not the group, the groups are just collections of individuals. This is the great achievement of the Enlightenment. And to ridicule it and to minimize it is absurd. This is the greatest intellectual era of sort of Greece in human history. It's the discovery of the individual and the role of reason in the individual's life. The importance of your ability to think freely, free of authority, free of the group, free of people dictating to you what you can and cannot think, can and cannot say, can and cannot do. Capitalism is an affestation of that freedom which doesn't exist today. Capitalism doesn't exist today, that freedom doesn't exist today. You wanna start a business, you have to get permission, you wanna put a product out there into the market, you have to get permission. You wanna make, you know, use those words, Jamal. Yeah, when you guys invent something like Amazon and work your butt off for 40 years doing Amazon, you can go to space too. But until then, you won't. When you build, create, change people's lives, change the world, then you can benefit from those changes. But to sit here and demand, I wanna be like Jeff Bezos. But you're not, you're not as equal. The fact is that we have different abilities, different intelligence levels, different degree of diligence, different work habits, different levels of productiveness, different levels of honesty, different levels of morality. We're different. And the idea that somehow we should be equal as an outcome is dissolved. And the only way you can achieve that kind of equality is by suppressing and repressing anybody who expresses any form of minor ability by pulling everybody down. That is what socialism has always done. And that is when you don't predict the rights of minorities. And particularly the individual is what always gets done to the individual in two minorities. So be radical and be ambitious. Fight for freedom. Fight for capitalism, real capitalism, not that nonsense we have today. That makes the economy we have today. Thank you. That concludes our remote period. We'll now go and save a longer audience by the end answer period. I heard that as a last move on to closing statements and then doing both. So I think we should do this in batches of three so that people don't have to stand in queue long. Okay. Just wanted to use, like, people. Just people line up here. Step out and line up. Line up? Okay. It's kind of a long line. It's a long line. No, you can't. It's kind of a long line. All right, come on. This question is that it will last 25 minutes and then we'll go and close the statements. Sam, like, if I have a first line, he's going to go first. Sure. Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. I have a question for Dr. Wolf, although I'll try to bring in Professor Wolf as well. What do you take of Marx's critique of co-ops? You mentioned a lot about co-ops today as the kind of principle of socialism. Marx is a famous critique of poverty and philosophy where he says that the socialist principle of equality is really no more than a reflection of the factory, which already overcomes differences and levels people down. In other words, what Marx is saying is that socialism is a reflection of capitalism. And so, you know, asking this question then, and you mentioned earlier Marx is a critique of capital. You might say Marx is actually the greatest critic of socialism ever in order that it would have to become reflexive of the contradiction, right? This kind of industrial forces of production. And what Professor Brook is called the rights of property, which Marx would call the rights of the burgers, right, property and labor and everything like that. So what do you think of Marx's critique of co-ops, especially when you're talking about different co-ops today? So thank you. When Marx was writing, there were already different kinds of co-ops. So you have to be careful to understand what he was criticizing, which kind of co-ops. For example, in the United States today, we have food co-ops where you can be a consumer and a member. That's a completely different thing from a worker co-op where the workers together run the enterprise. Marx's point in that critique was this, that the revolution against capitalism requires the organization and mobilization of the employees, the direct people hired by the employer class, they've got to stop it. You can't withdraw into another formation and be able to make the revolution at the time that he was living in the way that capitalism was at that time developing. And that was his point. It wasn't a critique of socialism. It was a critique of seeing the co-op at that moment as a way out of a confrontation that in Marx's view at that time under those conditions had to be fought out directly between the employees on the one hand and the employer class on the other. And it goes to the earlier point that Marx was there trying to get it clear that the worker in the workplace, in the factory, in the office and the store is systematically denied his or her individuality in order to generate profits for somebody else. And that that limitation on individuality was the critique of capitalism. Yeah, I mean, Marx was wrong in terms of his critique of capitalism and in terms of his critique of individuality. Indeed, it is only capitalism created individuality and choices for the vast numbers of workers who used to be, used to be subsistence farmers, used to have a life expectancy of well under 40, used to have child mortality rates where half the children were dead before the age of 10. Suddenly, capitalism raised the standard of living made possible for all those workers to have choices, provided them with employment, to provide them with income several times higher than what they made as farmers or as blacksmiths or as workers in feudal times or any other system that existed in human history. You know, we haven't talked about the massive benefits during the 19th century that capitalism created in this country all over Europe, anyway that adapted even a little bit of it. The rise in the standard of living and quality of life and the increase in individual choices that indeed capitalism makes possible for individuals for the first time in human history. Funny, it was an argument I made in the beginning about China that you didn't like, that you now resuscitate in order to celebrate capitalism, a bizarre kind of switcheroo. You might want to rethink that. Thank you, Admiral. Well, invite a second audience, my master point. Hi, Dr. Wolf, I was wondering if you could explain how with the oppression of workers under capitalism and the purported success of workers' co-ops and communes, why are more people not rushing toward these workers' co-ops? Do you believe your system could thrive on a voluntary basis or will the government have forced people into it? Well, it depends where you look as to whether or not people are rushing. Capitalism is a system that is not friendly to new developments like this. For example, I work with worker co-ops across the United States. You go to a private bank, it's very difficult to get a loan to a worker co-op compared to getting a loan to a top-down hierarchical enterprise that the bank is used to dealing with. This is not surprising. New systems have a hard time developing out of the old. Early capitalism had a very hard time developing out of feudalism. And because my adversary doesn't know his history real well, the predecessors were not self-sufficient subsistence farmers. They had a name in Europe. They were called serfs, and they lived an unspeakable existence in which their individuality had almost as little role to play as the role of a factory worker 50 years later when capitalism had taken over. That's why socialism exists. It's the celebration of the individual and the creation of social arrangements above all production to enable that freedom to be realized. Otherwise, it's purely a pretense that denies the actual situations that workers are facing and more and more in this country. I might remind you all that life expectancy of the last few years in this country before pandemic has been going down, not up. Capitalism is having a real hard time, which is why we're having this debate. Life expectancy is indeed going down. It's going down because of... Yes, right. Yeah. Because of the lack of jobs. But more importantly, because of the lack of purpose because people have been promised things that government cannot provide them because people have been told to sit back. Their jobs are going to come back. Don't worry, be happy. The government's going to hand you a check. You're going to be in welfare and you're going to be happy. The world's going to be wonderful, not working, not providing, not being productive. That is the consequence of a welfare state. The level of suicide, the level of drug addiction that has plagued this country and resulted in a declining life expectancy in the United States. It results of forced promises made by statists of all kinds. Left and right. I'm no big fan of the Republican statists either. Left and right will be making forced promises instead of encouraging those steel workers in Ohio to get in their car and drive to Western Arkansas. Where there are plenty of jobs and where they can make a good living at a lower cost of living. But God forbid anybody take personal responsibility over their own life and actually act in a world where we tell them they will be taking care of. So across the entire political spectrum of the nation, I think both parties would agree that public education needs to be deeply reformed. How would capitalism and socialism reform public education today? I've spent my adult life as a professor in the American academic system and partly in private institutions and partly in public institutions. And for me, the decline is obvious, severe and very depressing. And the way I would describe what capitalism is doing to the university, it is teaching the university to model itself after a corporation. Indeed, I spent a good bit of my life at Yale University, which is governed by something called the Yale Corporation. They even wanted the name as well as the reality. And in these universities, a tiny administration, a tiny percent of the people involved, smaller in number than the faculty, much smaller in number than the students and smaller in number than the staff make all the key decisions. They humor the professors to have a faculty senate but overrule it whenever they need to. It is a replication of the capitalist enterprises organization when what it could be and what it should be and what the early universities in Europe that started the whole idea once were were collections of teachers who gathered together with collections of students and tried in a very, very interesting way to produce a collective learning experience, radically different from what capitalism has done to the university. So under the political system of capitalism, there's nothing preventing a bunch of professors and a bunch of students forming such a collective learning experience. Let them compete with Yale and let's see who provides the better education. But the solution to the decline in public education is to privatize it. It's to get rid of the last remnants of government involvement in education. Indeed, the situation today is horrific and it is horrific primarily for the poorest among us. It is the poor who suffer the most from public education, so-called public education, really it's simply called government education. What don't we have an education? No innovation, no competition, no progress, no change. We have unions dominated by teachers unions, we've been told by the socialists that unions are wonderful. Look what a mess the teachers unions have made of public education in America, they've destroyed it. But public education is a contradiction to term. Education should be private fraud. You don't mail an important letter using the post office because the government runs it. You use private companies like FedEx and UPS. Why do you send your kids to the post office to get educated every day? Thank you, everyone. I like to my record audience member ask a question. This is a question primarily for Dr. Wolf. When you mentioned capitalism today, you mentioned things like the word Afghanistan or lobbyists. Whereas the capitalism that Dr. Wolf mentions is as he put it, an unknown ideal. So it seems to me that there is a contradiction where you blame words on capitalism when it's actually governments that carry out or lobbyists that are turned into the government. Moreover, I was wondering how feasible you think it would be under the equal outcomes of socialism, for example, picking the example of yes-basos. If not everyone is able to have a rocket ship to go to space. Is no one supposed to go to space? And if so, how do you maintain motivation in the social society to make progress? Thank you. It used to be easier for folks to argue that somehow socialism in the places where it is established does something negative to initiations or efficiency or starting a business. I don't face that conversation very often anymore because it's so easy to demonstrate that countries that call themselves socialists and mean something significant by that have been able to show initiative and achieve efficiencies and economic growth and all those things that they weren't supposed to be able to do. My adversary is saying things which only politeness hold me back from pointing out are simply errors of fact. I mean, they really are not something for us to debate over. What was done by the communist government in China after 1949 is everywhere in the world recognized for the humanitarian transformation of those people's lives that it was. Did it along the way involve all kinds of conflict? You bet. But that's the reality of every society. Capitalism comes into the world in violent revolutions, French, American, British and so on. It has had two world wars. It is a society that has a lot to account for. Now it's convenient to blame the government always because that lets the big businesses off the hook. And I hope you're well paid for it. But otherwise it's an act of love and a kindness on your part, which I do admire. I wish I was paid kind of well for it. The rewriting of history under Mao Zedong is stunning. A lot of my Chinese friends in China will be stunned to find out that the 1949 revolution liberated them and made them better off. It's, you know, the rewriting of history here, but this is what happens. Let me say something about, you know, capitalism has been blamed for World War I, World War II, Austrian-Hungarian empire ruled by emperors. Doesn't sound like capitalism to me. The German welfare state doesn't sound like capitalism to me. Where was capitalism in World War I? Indeed, World War I was the end of an era of capitalism. It was the demise of relative freedom in Europe. And again, the fascism of Hitler is capitalism. The communism of Stalin, which, if you don't know your history, cooperated with Hitler in starting World War II. That is capitalism, really? The 9-11 was capitalism. Yes, it was in a sense, because one of the reasons the Islamists hate us is because of our freedom in our capitalism. Yeah, like, in my next line in the room, I have a question for the speaker. Also, just for the audience, I'm going to ask a question. Please, let me know your question in one of the sentences. No, I just wanted to point out, I have a question. I just wanted to point out that the setting for anyone who is free or watching that we're in, what is it? Like, University City, transportation, all those good things. And I believe that the word for has only come up twice, once in Dr. Brooks's question to go for the bottle. So I just wanted to point that out, because this is an issue about capitalism and socialism. And I think those who are actually at the bottom would really like to know what you guys are thinking. And I'm not seeing anything here. Okay, so my question is for Dr. Brooks. There is a contention in your definition of capitalism in terms of, yes, there are inequalities amongst people. Yet that we all share the same freedom and the same pursuit of happiness, let's borrow that. But yet you claim to this dynamic in the workforce where there is an employee who has to obey to an employer. Yet I know you're going to say, oh, choices, they can move, all those things. But labor history doesn't really say that. They have to struggle to actually get those choices. So my question is, I just want to clear up that contention there. Can you formulate a question? Sure. How do you account for labor history in terms of that employer-employee dynamic that you claim that it is innate to capitalism? Yeah, there's been an employee-employee dynamic since the beginning of capitalism. As my opponent has mentioned, capitalism evolves in an understanding of that relationship with an employee-employer. Evolved. Evolved from long weekdays and low productivity as capital was invested, as productivity increased, the number of hours worked declined. The number of children left the factory because they weren't productive anymore. So capitalism, as capital was invested, as productivity increased, its relationship with labor changed. And it became much more beneficial in a sense of time off, in a sense of, and yes, there is a struggle. Nobody denies that sometimes you have to stand up to get a raise. Yeah, you should walk in your boss's office and say, I want a raise, and if not, I'm leaving. And sometimes you as labor have to do that. There is negotiations. It's completely natural in an evolution of a system. So the higher wages, the lower number of hours, the fact that children don't work anymore, all of those are consequences of the fact that productivity of labor has increased dramatically and therefore fewer workers are needed. Well, I remain astounded by the different universes we live in. Capitalists and capitalism have stood against every single advance of the working class. You had to fight to get the working day from 16 to 14 hours, then from 14 to 12 to 10 to eight. We celebrate May Day around the world, not in the United States, because it was the time that the eight hour day was finally won. Capitalists have never given anything to workers. If the productivity went up, the capitalists clapped and took it as profits. The irony of ironies is that the capitalist who stood in the way of every single gain my opponent mentioned now want us to give them credit for the fact that the workers forced it in strikes and upheavals and revolutions. But you can't have it both ways. It's very clear who's opposing a rising minimum wage in the United States over the last 10 years and who isn't. It's very clear where the capitalist employer class stands on all these issues. And then to turn around and think we're so bereft of historical awareness that we're gonna give them credit for what was fought for and died for by generations of workers struggle. Wow, you have to rewrite history with an extraordinary pen to come up with that. We have a lot of time for a few more questions. So people that far away don't mind. I'm gonna hit someone from the middle or back just because I feel bad at, you know, the people in the back didn't have a fair chance to ask questions. So, are some of the blue masks are the black top? Yeah. Okay. Okay, where should I? Okay, hi, everyone. I have a question for Dr. Brooke. So I am an international student. I was born and raised in Italy and I grew up in a system where I received a public education from first grade until like the end of my university years. And I'm also a first generation student. So I come from like I'm the first person to graduate being my family. And I was able to graduate just because I was given state support basically and I never had to pay one single cent. And I was given like economical support to study especially doing university years and so I was wondering how do you feel that state intervention and the distribution of resources in my case would have been too much. And you know, like, yeah, because one of the things that you say is that, you know, like one of the problems of a social demographic system is, you know, excessive state intervention. And a related question is how do you feel that my education or the education of a person like me coming from the peripheries from an uneducated family under their privilege as well would look like in the society that you are advocating for. And I would like to specify these and not talk to me about the United States that as I say, it are excessively socialist and we too much state support already. I think that in the capitalist system, in consistency capitalist system, you would have got a better education. Your family would be wealthier. Your family would be wealthier. That education would have cost a lot less than it costs right now. I'll just give you one small example. This is about 10 years old so the numbers might be off relative to today. But in the city of Chicago, I know Chicago better than Italy so I apologize. In the city of Chicago, it costs the city of Chicago $15,000 to educate a kid in the south side of Chicago. It costs the IHDS diocese, the Catholic schools, $7,500 to educate exactly the same kid in exactly the same neighborhoods across the street and provide them demonstratively with a better education. And take that $30,000, $50,000 and give it to the parent and let the parent decide where the kid gets an education and let private enterprise enter into these neighborhoods and start competing for that money and start innovating along education and start providing the best service and let parents, parents in the south side of Chicago decide on what school to send their kid rather than some state-regulated deciding what and suddenly you will get a flowering of innovation, progress, competition and a dramatic improvement of education for the poorest of the poor here, for the people who most at this point need it. Is it possible for me to respond or not? Yes. Okay, there's another make-believe here about private and public. Let me tell you about Yale University that you may not know. It loves to represent itself as a private university, but it isn't. The largest single source of revenue for Yale University are grants from the United States government. They get way more money at that private school than most of the public schools in the United States could ever dream of getting. And the same is true of U-Pen and of Harvard and of all of the others because one of the consequences of capitalism that organizes its enterprises top down with a few people at the top is that those few people use the system for themselves and not for the rest of us. And they've organized the university and they've organized the government that my opponent keeps wanting to blame to do their bidding, which is why Yale has the money that it has because it siphons off from the government way beyond what any welfare mom could dream of. You're making my point, that's what happened under cronyism, not capitalism. Yeah, calling it cronyism doesn't erase the capitalism that it's the crony of. No, it's not crony capitalism, it's cronyism. We only have time for one more question, so I want to take the person at the front of the line. We're sorry to everyone who went to a stand-in line. Let me just ask. So hello, I have a good question for Dr. Richard Wolfe. So it sounds to me like one of the biggest arguments against socialism is that the masses of the people are not qualified to run a successful business. And so if you bring democracy to the workplace, suddenly you'll have all these people who are not trained to run a successful business, running the business. So I think that issue kind of shows itself when it comes to things like setting salaries or hourly wages. So I was wondering if you could comment on the details of what democracy and the workplace would look like and why do you think the workers should have a say on how to run the business? I'd be glad to do that. By the way, the arguments that the workers can't run a business, that workers can't together run a business, those are the same arguments that we use to tell us that we can't have parliamentary government, that we can't have elections because we need leaders who are specialists, who are so excellent, like that retarded king that we've had for the last 40 years because he had the great good luck to be born to a retarded parents or whatever else story we're told. It's an insult to human beings. When workers get together to run a co-op and we have thousands of examples across the world right now, they're not stupid. They know that some people have skills in one area more than another and they accommodate that in a variety of ways. What they don't do is allow some people to lord it over others because of the structure that gives them the place to do that. They rotate functions. So if you're in a leadership position now, you'll be in a non-leadership position later, which is a very good guarantee that you don't abuse the position that every capitalist in power has always done. So yeah, a worker co-op uses the belief in the democracy of each individual to make a informed decision together and believe in it. And the resulting enterprises are now more efficient than any capitalist enterprise. I mean, the ignorance of how a business runs is stunning. I mean, this isn't how business works. I mean, yes, let's vote on the shape of the iPhone. Let's figure out how the iPhone should be constructed based on, let's rotate positions between programmer, janitor, and CEO of Apple. That'll work really well. It's stunning. We live in a complex technological society and we think we can vote on things that we can think we can rotate jobs like we did on the kibbutz. It's exactly, I mean, everything that is being described functioned on a kibbutz in Israel and it failed. It could never competed. It was subsidized by government from day one before the state of Israel was subsidized by which Jews were on overseas. It has never been a model that has succeeded. It can't because it denies the nature of specialization. It denies the advantages of nature, the division of labor. It denies the fact that we have different capabilities, different abilities, different skill sets and provide different contributions to the productive venture. And this denial is destructive. Thank you to all the audience members who follow our questions and ideas and came to ask part of the questions. Yeah, that will be one of our closing statements for the last 10-plus speakers. Each speaker on five minutes and then we'll start with Dr. Lord. Okay. I'm amazed at the contents of this discussion. I think it could have been a lot more productive. I don't find the debate between private and state enterprises all that meaningful. My understanding is that state enterprises have long ago in most societies copied what private capitalist enterprises did. That is they copied the employer employee structure whether it was public or private, which is why the workers in both of these types of enterprises share the same alienation, the same resistance, the same dissatisfaction. You know, the history of the human race at least from much of the last two or 3000 years displays a sequence of economic systems that have something very troubling in common. In the slave system, we had two positions basically, master, slave. One had all the power and accumulated the wealth and the other ones did the work. And when that was no longer tolerable, at least in Europe, it was overthrown and it was replaced by a feudal system in which once again we had two positions, a lord and a serf. And the lord were few and the serf were many and the lord had the power and the wealth and the serfs did the work until they couldn't stand it and they made revolutions and we had capitalism. And when capitalism arrived, it promised something. It promised in the French revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity. And in the American revolution, they added democracy. And those were supposed to be brought by capitalism. Well, we got capitalism. Feudalism was gone and slavery was gone. But guess what? Capitalism, which made big promises didn't deliver and Marx figured out why because they had replaced the master slave and the lord serf with the employer and the employee. Notice the parallel of tiny minority or employers. They gather the wealth and power and the employees, the vast majority do the work. As long as you organize your economic system that way, liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy are gonna be dreams you have unless and until you realize them by making the social change that was at the root of all of the earlier ones, namely to finally have a social and economic system that wasn't broken into a minority that run the show and the rest of us that are squeezed spectators. And the way to do that is to bring the democracy home into the economy. Because it was never there, the political democracy we had was formalistic and hollow and inadequate as we know it to be. The solution is to bring democracy to the workplace, to tap all of the skills that are now not tapped because we don't educate, we don't recognize, we don't respect and we don't value the vast majority of people who are, after all, merely employees. Capitalism doesn't recognize the individual, it disrespects the individual at every turn. And that in the end will be one of the major reasons the transition to socialism, which you now see around you will likely succeed. So my opponent has never talked about the force, the coercion, the authoritarian nature of his so-called democracy. What if you don't wanna play the game as they have set it up? What if you want to start a business? What if you want to be an employee? Can you do this under this new system of socialism? Can you open your own bank? Can you distribute your own capital? Of course not. Of course not. You're constrained to let the majority dictate for you. We replace the lord of the manor with the mob. The mob will decide on what job you have, what your salary should be. The majority will decide on what you get to do and not do what job you rotate into or not. Maybe on who you marry, like in Plato's Republic. Why not? Since all wisdom lies in the majority under democracy. Coercion is an essential element of socialism. You cannot manifest it. You cannot bring it into reality without forcing, coercing people into doing things they don't want to do. Maybe some do, but into some people will not wanna do. And this is the exact opposite of capitalism, which is the system not that exists today. Imagine, you have a little bit of imagination. Imagine a system in which there is no cronyism because the government is too small and insignificant in terms of its economic involvement to give you anything. Imagine a world in which you can choose. You wanna start a co-op. You can start a co-op. You wanna start a keyboard. You can go voluntarily as long as you don't force anybody. You can do it. And you can suffer the consequences of those choices. You wanna start an Amazon and you wanna be employed by Amazon. You can do that too. You wanna go to the moon. Raise the capital, make the money, go to the moon. It's up to you. You get to make decisions. Free, free of coercion, of authority. And you get to benefit from the consequences if it goes well and you get to suffer the consequences when it goes badly. It's your personal life, your personal responsibility. Live it. Don't live it for the sake of some collective and common good. Live it for your sake. Figure out what your values are. Figure out how you wanna live. And hopefully you're still in a political system which allows you to manifest those values. Allows you to strive to act, to pursue your values. Somebody mentioned, let me also say, it seems to be such a poverty of imagination. Imagine a world where you could divide everybody into two groups. Employers and employers. Bizarre. How many employers become employees? How many employees become employers? How many people have multiple jobs? How many people start multiple companies that then become employees or start as employees learn the skill, figure out how to do it and then start a business? We have an opportunity and the capitalism, we live in a mixed economy today, so the capitalism would be 10 times greater. We have an opportunity to do so many things with our life. What a poverty of thinking. The number of businesses started in the United States is in millions a year. People start their own businesses because they don't wanna be employees. Great, that's wonderful. And they land up employing people. And those people learn a skill and ultimately they become employees. I have to say something about the poor because somebody mentioned it and he's right. The only system in human history to raise people out of poverty is being capitalism. The only places in which people have come out of poverty have been places that apply some capitalism. It is socialism that enslaves the ambitious poor into a mediocre life of choosing between an employee and an employer. No, you have a richness to life. The possibilities are infinite if you are free to make those choices. Don't let's evolve into a system where we are less free. Let's not evolve into a system where we reduce choices. Let's not evolve into a system where we have less imagination. Let's embrace a system that expands human freedom, that expands human prosperity, that expands the possibilities of what can be done. Imagine new business forms that none of us have thought of and the capitalism you can make them real and the socialism you need permission. I want a permissionless society. I want a free society. I want a capitalist society. Thank you. All right, that concludes our closing statements. We're glad it's like to thank both of our speakers, Dr. Wolfe and Dr. Grofe for making that person, Dr. Wolfe, for joining us from New York. It was a pleasure to have both of you and I'd like to get you back around.