 Hi Dr. Wolff, my name is Connor and I'm a member of Clout of Us 10. In your introduction you praised social democratic parties in Europe for their 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 the same 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 U.S. economy that have gone up nonstop. Education, housing and health care. 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 sect they invoke? 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. Health care. Health care in the United States is close to 60%. Government run. 60 cents of every dollar is spent by the government on health care. 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, 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. This question is for Dr. Breg. Freedom and success have been major points this debate and I'm sure we'd 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 that 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. You know, the French, suddenly the French, they live in smaller houses by smaller cars, 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 Bill of Scorni 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 is. 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 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. 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, you know, 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 a struggle all through their lives about how to deal with that kind of a situation. Now 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. The same with capitalism. We got to 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 has 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. 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 want to listen to, the kind of art you want to experience. The kind of experiences you want to 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 then this idea that American working class is somehow suffering and burdened and in misery is ridiculous. The working class in America is 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. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see The Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.