 I was talking to my husband about how excited I was about this debate, but also how it's challenging to pick off a debate like this. Personally, because you should think of something funny to say at the beginning, he was telling me, you know, you really want to be careful when you're making jokes about socialism and capitalism, but socialism in particular. And I said, why? And he said, well, if you're making jokes about socialism, it's only funny if everyone gets it. That is actually a really serious debate, and I think it is something that's defining right now for our culture and for this particular political moment. And it's something that young people have unique bearing on. So your generation in mine, millennials and Gen Z, make up 37% of the electorate in 2020. And we are completely polarized about socialism versus capitalism. I was looking at statistics today on this. AXIA School found that in 18 to 24 year olds, 61% were favorable towards socialism, 58% favorable toward capitalism. So there's some overlap there, which I found weird. But I want to start this off by getting a sense of where this audience stands. We're going to do this toward the end of the debate as well. I'm going to give you three options here. Socialism, capitalism, or undecided. And I'll just have you raise your hand. Say the one that you feel most open to or best identifies you. So on socialism. Who would that be? Okay, capitalism. You find the words out there. And who's undecided? Okay, great. We'll kick this off. I'm going to have our two speakers begin with an eight minute opening statement. All the chance to respond to each other. I'm going to ask a couple of questions. And then we'll open it up to audience questions too. So be thinking about something that you want to ask. Please make sure that it is a question and not a speech or debate yourself. But I'm really eager to hear what you have to the correct interview. So we'll kick it off. You want to take it first? Sure. Well, thank you all for coming. I heard I was quite good. I was not this interested in anything when I was in college. I just don't exactly think it was a college, but I would go out to an event at 6.10 when there was other things to be doing. It's still nice outside. It's still me. But I'm 30 years old now. I just turned 30 this summer. And I became a socialist when I was 14 or 15. You know, way too young to be making this kind of lifelong decisions. But I'm stubborn as I stuck with it. And at the time, when I was a teenager, and I would tell people I was a socialist, it would prompt a lot of worry of questions, sometimes disdain, sometimes whatever. It was just general confusion. Now I think in part because of Bernie Sanders and AOC and the general climate of the country, people are just saying, yes, sure, leave me alone. So it's good that you're here for the conversation. So fundamentally, the socialist vision is at a minimum the idea that everyone deserves certain basic rights. And these basic rights, these foundations of being a free individual should be providing to us as social rights and not things that are captive to the market or captive to our ability to pay. So your housing, your healthcare, your education, your childcare, your access to basic nutrition. These are things that we need in order to reach our potential in order to be free individuals. So a socialist mentality isn't necessarily an anti-liberal mentality. So it's not a mentality that says that, oh, you know, free speech. This is a bourgeois right. Free speech and these other rights are rights that we're struggling for or want and need to be defended. But what the socialist says isn't that these aren't fake rights compared to the real rights of your right to eat. The socialist says that these are rights that can only be truly reached if it's combined with other guarantees. Like, for example, the guarantee to a strong public education that allows people to be literate, to engage fully as citizens in a free press. So a country like India, for instance, which has a huge percentage of the population that's functionally illiterate. This is a country that we oppose their system not because it has these basic liberal democratic rights which we respect and doesn't exist in every country in the world but because it doesn't fully realize it. So at the very least, it's about creating this bedrock of decommodified social goods. So social goods taken out of the market and enjoyed as rights. At the very least, it's a last stopping point. Now beyond that, socialist question. The weight of society is structured. We question the fact that we live in, essentially, tyranny is in the workplace. Tyranny doesn't mean that it's a completely visceral place. It doesn't mean that your workplace is necessarily, you know, a Dickensian terrible sweatshop or something like that. What it means, though, is that you're in your workplace from 9 to 5 and you're in a society that tells you that at best 9 to 5, that tells you that democracy is a right but within the workplace you don't have any democratic resource. You have no rights. Your employment contract is a contract of course that you freely enter into but it's a word for a star of choice that put you into that employment contract because essentially under capitalism, workers and capitalists are the people who have the word for a living and the people who owns the facilities that produce goods and services that the rest of us have to work in are dependent on each other. Your boss certainly needs your labor, your contribution to his or her workplace but you need your version money and chances are your boss needs your individual contribution to the labor process more than you need your... less than you need your version money or your way to pay your rent and so on. So what a socialist says essentially is that we need to democratize this fear of society so in addition to guaranteeing a certain set of rights that allow us to be free individuals to maximize our individual potential we also need to create structures in which there's more democratic participation and deliberation so for example in a workplace we might still need to have markets markets existed before capitalism though I might use this after capitalism but we don't necessarily need workplaces structured as carriers where bosses and managers are elected by their workers so socialist in other words think about what capitalist potentially contribute to the production process so obviously in the propaganda of old say well capitalist and their parasites they contribute nothing they just take from the sweat of the worker well in fact capitalist and the spirit system contribute by a way to the way of society and structure for one capitalist take entrepreneurial risks to start new ventures where goods and services are produced and where people are employed and to the extent that we have a welfare state we have it because we're taxing those ventures capitalist also contribute as managers they're convening and helping to arrange production more often than not especially in small firms the socialist argument isn't that the capitalist contributes nothing it's that where the capitalist does can in fact be replicated by the free association of workers so you and your workplace could decide to elect your own management instead of just taking home a black wage you could take home a share you could take on a living out of profits so in a sense what we're suggesting is not a decline in ownership of participation but society is a true ownership society a society in which every single person has a democratic state and civil society and a democracy is guaranteed a bedrock of rights to their society but also has a state in their place of work where they're not just being treated like replaceable cops and a machine where they're able to participate in deliberations and discussions and so on does this mean untrammeled democracy at every single level? no it's in large firms you elect your management and certain decisions are made on the principles of representative democracy you can't vote on every single decision that business makes day to day and small firms maybe you can have higher levels of direct democracy in the same way within civil society we want to expand the rights of ordinary people to be democratic actors but it doesn't mean that by right to speech by right to all these other bedrock rights should be decided by votes what we essentially are looking for is a society that reaches social democracy what has been accomplished in northern countries and elsewhere countries which unlike the United States don't have children dying from higher rates of infant mortality than other major countries countries that don't have people struggling with huge amounts of debt just to get an education countries that treats and rewards people for their efforts and guarantees the bedrock of rights I think we want to take this logic of social democracy and extend it further into our workplace we don't want a year-zero break with the present we want a society in which ordinary people can reach their potential we want to fulfill in other words the promise of the enlightenment the promise of liberty, equality and solidarity this promise has been made possible by the riches of capitalism by the riches of all this abundance in the last two, three hundred years we now from this starting point no longer have to structure our societies in such a way that oppresses a few and allows people to accumulate their wealth from the labor and work of others so it's always good in a debate to define your terms so let me tell you what I think capitalism is or what capitalism actually is and what I think socialism is and why I think one is a moral and practical system and the other is immoral and impractical capitalism is a system of freedom now freedom is a tricky word because everyone is full of freedom I could be in front of a group of Marxists and everybody raised their hand socialism is a system of freedom but what does freedom mean? what does freedom mean? again definitions freedom means the absence of courage freedom means the absence of authority freedom means the absence of a gun put your head where you're told what to do whether it's in the name of the volunteer in the name of your race in the name of the majority in the name of Donald Trump it doesn't matter a gun put your head force, authority of the church authority of the state is anti-freedom freedom means the absence of courage capitalism is a system that systematizes the absence of courage it eliminates courage from society by protecting the weight of individuals now what about race? how? we have to define all these things weight of freedom is an action not freedom of action sanctioned by a majority not freedom of action sanctioned by politicians or sanctioned by an authority not freedom of action sanctioned by the church but freedom of action sanctioned by you as an individual then people say it's too loud and they will find the middle ground I yell like all of them it's your name the microphone it's your name the microphone your freedom your freedom to choose your values using your mind in pursuit of your happiness that's what capitalism allows it leads you free free from coercion of other people free to pursue your life free to choose what path to take for yourself that's the moral foundation of capitalism that's what capitalism is more because it leaves individuals free to use their mind in pursuit of their own happiness their own values which is the ultimate purpose of life not to sacrifice violence not to live for the group not to live for the collective as an individual to make your life the best life that it can be to pursue your individual happiness capitalism makes that possible by leaving you free what you do with it is up to you and some people don't do much with it but what you do with it is up to you and you have the freedom to do with it so your values, your choices that's what capitalism is about and as a consequence of being moral it is also the practical system I mean one of the things that amazes me about capitalism versus socialism debate is that we're having them I mean this is over to the extent that capitalism has been tried to the extent that it's been tried anywhere in the world at any point in time in the world it produces freedom and enormous wealth to people everyone including in Scandinavia by the way where they have elements of capitalism and those elements are produced so well that they then steal the industry and we can talk about Scandinavia later it works it's worked every way now my vision of capitalism a society with no coercion has never existed and suddenly in the United States today we do not live under a capitalist system this is a mixed economy lots of coercion lots of interference lots of authorities lots of people voting to be produced to be other people's wealth lots of regulation of businesses of the government central planets elements of what to produce how to produce when to produce it how much to pay employees what to pay them what benefits to give them there's no end to the amount of control government has today on the economy less than what some would like but what we have today is no capitalism what we have today is a mixed economy elements of control elements of statesism elements of some socialism and some private property some businessmen making decisions for themselves but usually heavily, heavily controlled that's capitalism and the more we expand it the more we allow it the more we let our minds free the richer we get the better the quality of life the better life is the more we strain it the more we constrain it the slower economic growth the less wealth is created the poorer we all become and it's simple what is the social wealth? now again, Marx has typically argued that the social wealth is labor no the social wealth is the human mind the social wealth is ideas the social wealth is entrepreneur and everything takes risks not because it deploys capital but because he has an idea and he is able to deploy that idea and I know I know it's hard to understand what CEOs do and it's hard to understand what capitalists do and it's hard to understand what entrepreneurs do but you know if you've ever worked in a startup if you've ever worked in a large company you know the laborers the workers, particularly those who use their hands need the managers a thousand times more than the manager needs the worker because without the manager without the idea without the organization without the talent to put together global supply chains which require massive amounts of talent this idea that workers can just elect somebody and they just go and do it is bizarre but let me quickly define socialism socialism in my view is either the state of workers control that means production control of our lives control of the choices we made in the economic realm and this idea that you can somehow separate the social and intellectual realm from the material property rights realm is bizarre if you don't have property rights you don't have any rights property rights are just one manifestation of individual rights of that freedom of action but if you're free to act to produce the creative then you have to be free to keep the product of your labor and if you can't keep your product of your labor then you have no rights and you have no right to life and all other rights are up for a vote why limit it why cherry pick which rights we're going to have which rights we don't I believe we have all the rights that are required for human beings to survive free speech but free property we're right to property because it's our requirement of human life but I've got 30 seconds so I'll just say this socialism is in my home it's immoral because it sacrifices an individual to the collective immoral because it violates the rights of the individual in every respect it places the tyranny of the mob the tyranny of the majority over the individual it denies minority rights there's only one real minority the smallest minority and that's the individual socialism rejects that it denies that and suppresses that and stomps all over the individual and it's immoral and there's consequences so it's impractical and I'm not going to give you the litany of all this failures of socialism maybe we'll have an opportunity later I'd love to bed from from the Soviet Union to China to Venezuela today it is one to the Kibbutz one disaster after another you're out of time sorry so maybe we can talk to you for a while well I think who in America worked in a workplace any form of work okay have you been exposed to coercion at work in other words have you had to take a job and had to work under terms and conditions set by someone else now you can say that the contractors are their contract that you entered into but there's obviously coercion involved in any form of production in particular though the capitalist form of production is a form of production which many people who have wealth and have power are able to maintain their wealth and power over other people who have to work for them this to me is coercion now it's a form of exploitation too exploitation doesn't necessarily mean it's a majority thing in all forms so I assume every single capitalist on the planet even someone as I think we both think as odious as Donald Trump opposes channel slavery now if you're opposed to channel slavery you might be in favor of wage labor you might not consider that a reprehensible force of exploitation but the dynamics of having your conditions of life determined by someone else is the same in the sense that you do not it's a contract signed under duress it's obviously capitalism has created wealth and it's created abundance but the question is can you not recreate forms of wealth and abundance and animation and animism from worker owned firms you have to make a case that management who has their power or an owner has their power by virtue of owning a property or a priority is necessarily better than management decided democratically by people at a workplace in my experience that people at a workplace actually know how to make things at every level from design to implementation I guess use it any way you want but what's that meaning coercion means something when somebody engages into a contract voluntarily that is not coercion you might say they didn't want to do that contract but you still chose to do it and the fact is that capitalism is the only and first system in all of human history that's given us choices what choices do we have before capitalism one, live in a farm grow that food into age and die in your 30s and most of your children dead capitalism has liberated us to have choices we have multiple employment opportunities we have multiple educational opportunities we can choose our destiny the idea that owners and managers course workers is to eliminate to make coercion a meaningless concept coercion means force coercion means putting a gun to your head when you violate the law the government comes it takes you to jail government can't do that companies can't do that government is force it's very dangerous force and what is happening here is we're conflating two types of power economic power and political power the essence of political power is force is coercion coercion is a gun you have no choice but to follow the law you have no choice but to do what you are told to do otherwise you go to jail economic power is fundamentally voluntary you don't have to buy an iPhone you don't have to go to company X you can go over company Y or you can go to school and study and do something else you have the choice in your hand you are in other words free capitalism provides you with freedom socialism provides you with the kind of slave meat that tells you through a majority what you must do and how you must do it how much you get paid and what are your working conditions voluntary choice is helped alright well one thing I'm interested to hear from both of you it sounds like both of you make that you're not currently in the system you'd like to be in so I'm curious what you think the transition is to either socialism or capitalism looks like what I mean by different kind of socialism isn't just a socialism that has doses of socialism within capitalism it's a socialism that's after capitalism and that hasn't been successfully implemented anywhere in the world what we do know though is that following the logic of collective action social democracies have a rose and a lot of collective action is as follows so this unequal relationship called for or should call something else exists in the workplace in that the average worker as an individual can't go to your boss and say give me a $20 raise or an app I'm going to go stop working in the CVS I'm going to go this Friday down the street they're going to say okay goodbye and go but collectively you can get together with 20, 30 of your employees your fellow co-workers if you go to that boss you can make a difference in a partner you can use your power to withdraw your labor from work and you can even up the odds collective action is difficult you're taking this dependency that you have with your boss and you're evening up the odds that's the logic of creating unions now you have to take these individual isolated unions we need to adapt them together so you create a union federation but then you need to express your power and you need to get certain laws and certain rights and strides at the same level so then you create a political party and in the case of Scandinavia and many countries of Northern Europe there were periods of decades and decades where parties build on this logic this logic of collective action for the workers movement government and government successful states the government states that had a decommodified sector in other words social rights for healthcare and education and so on so in the same way that some of our geniuses in the United States some of our greatest talents or even our mediocre talents will never get the chance to reach a potential you had a better chance of doing that that's where we had tremendous disparity at every level for racial to gender to just on the base of your zip code that didn't exist in the same way it still existed, it didn't exist in the same way in these other countries so that's what I what I believe is a model that has worked yes it was fundamentally trying to take and yes of course a capitalist system with certain outcomes it was using regulations but particularly the power of 640 to shape capitalist outcomes but the logic of it was a lot of rooted collective action and rooted in the workers movement and rooted yes and socialist ideology that succeeded can we build beyond social democracy into a form of worker ownership that's an open question I would like to get to a social democracy and let's find out can we roll back in Sweden there were attempts to use the logic of collective action to go beyond social democracy institute forms the minor plan and these other plans the institute forms of collective ownership it never was fully pursued but that's my logic I have no problem embracing the good and bad of socialism saying what I disagree with said the vlog parts of Scandinavian models are rooted because I think if we have to go through stats and mentality it just becomes a semantic thing where anything good isn't real socialism anything bad isn't real socialism and everything good is that that's the only real socialism and I think sometimes people who are full capitalist form and step because anything bad in this society it's not capitalist enough to get a conversation do I get a comment to that or to I actually I would like you to first of all thank you I'd like you to first of all talk about how you think the tradition of capitalism as you see it would work from what we have right now and then I'm going to let you guys respond to each others well I think that trajectory towards capitalism is a hard one much harder than I think the trajectory towards socialism because I think the world is moving more towards socialism than towards capitalism the general agreement is that socialism is a good that corrosion is good, that force is good forcing people to behave in a particular way that you want them to behave is right the idea that force corrosion forcing somebody to do something they don't want is wrong, morally and should never be exercised that idea is not a popular idea I think the only way to move towards capitalism is a real educational campaign challenging the philosophical foundation of the existing system that we have the existing system the existing system of thought that we have the idea the moral idea the purpose of life is to live towards others the moral idea that the collective is more important than the individual the moral idea that the state is above all that we see on the democratic side and on the republican side we see politics across the introspective those things happen to challenge until we are willing to challenge collectivism and model altruism until we are willing to to embrace the morality of individualism and a political system of individualism a political system that elevates the freedom of the individual that is built around freedom for the individual I don't see how capitalism comes about I think you see in the west movements to move towards a little bit more free markets but then as soon as they fix their things a little bit and the economy starts going again and people feel comfortable they need to bounce back towards socialism so they will weigh in and bounce back so they will fashion the bounce back because neither even a venture challenge of fundamental beliefs that are required in order to build the capitalist society and those are deeply rooted and they are philosophical and they require changes at university level and changing in young people's thinking and I see that move towards capitalism towards my vision that's much harder much more challenging and much more educational I don't like political because politics is what? politics is false but think about how that eats at you that this guy is lazy and he's going home early this is exactly what happened to the people and you work very hard and you start resenting him and you start hating him every time I see socialism or resentment hatred because it creates envy rivalry and hatred because it's a zero sum world I don't get paid for what I produce I get paid what was negotiated what was voted on where people agree not based on my productivity and some of you might get paid exactly the same as I do even though the lotless productive that's what collective action does and that's why union is a decline because union members don't want to be in unions because it doesn't make any sense to them particularly in the modern era where they can negotiate salaries for themselves unions is a decline because manufacturing jobs you know, physical labor is a decline because of technology because of robots, because of computers and no software engineer no software engineer who is an employee? wants a union to represent them are they going to be able to bounce around like they do in Silicon Valley beating themselves, they salary up every time they do it? No not when socialism can't do anything so this conversation seems to be shaking a lot about origins I want to ask you both a question perspective, your preferred economic system about origins I'll start with you Yarn one thing that I hear is a critique of capitalism is that if you pitch economics against each other that there is an incentive for businesses to get government on their side and use that coercion against their competition and the question when we're talking about transitioning to a purely capital system from the banks that we have right now is do the really big companies already have the advantage that they can wield that power against smaller businesses and against entrepreneurs in a way that there's no control about from them so let me be clear, you know, chromium which is what you're describing is a feature of statism it's a feature of systems like socialism it's not a feature of capitalism if you have a complete separation of states from economics businesses don't lobby the state because the state has no power, no goodies to give them it's only because the state has power has resources has favors to give businesses do you get the lobby, do you get the manipulation do you get the quantism and then it develops to protect themselves from others so if we talk about the transition my first, if I were president God forbid the first thing I would do is pass that anti-chromism law and it would be very simple zero subsidies zero corporate taxes which are stupid taxes if you know anything about economics corporations don't pay taxes you pay the taxes, all the taxes on consumption taxes all corporate taxes and consumption taxes will lead to taxes, so employees and consumers pay all corporate taxes so you can't give any loopholes and favors there zero subsidies and dramatic reduction in regulation across the board so every year I would eliminate 25% of the regulations on the books and once the state is separated from economic power this lobby goes away, I'll give you one quick story about this in the early 1990s the largest corporation in the world based on market capitalization was Microsoft how much money did Microsoft spend in those years while being washed well the exact figure is zero largest company in the world did no chromism no lobby no law firm, no building, nothing there are no persons in DC and they came from Congress invited them in whenever Congress does there's a gun there they came in and they sat in front of a senate committee headed by a Republican, a young unhatched from Utah and unhatched stood up and he yelled at them and he said you better be here in Washington DC we have to build buildings here you have to hire Williams in other words you have to write and you can't say that in America you're couching in other terms I mean you can find this this is all well documented and Microsoft said you know what you leave us alone, we leave you alone we're not interested and they went home and they continued to vote exactly zero dollars a lot six months later, several months later not going to do it we're here from the justice of one room and you violated anti-trust laws and we're coming after you you remember what the violation was that they had to be harassed for over 10 years by the Justice Department they gave away something for free a browser I remember downloading Netscape for 70 bucks you guys can you believe you had to pay for a browser, you don't pay for anything I mean it's free, it's calm, it's pretty amazing and they gave it away for free and that was an anti-trust tradition and they had it, guess how much money Microsoft spends today on lobbying 10s of billions of dollars if you go downtown DC about equal distance from the White House in Congress, they have a beautiful building they've got massive numbers of lawyers because they realize that Washington won't leave them alone so they better fight back so you want to get rid of colonialism get rid of government intervention so most of our viewers have a question to you about coercion about literal transfer of ownership violation of property rights in a way and I guess my question for you is what happens when a business owner says no, I don't want to get this company up to workers? well, I think that then we have to separate between private property rights and personal property rights and I think that so in other words you're right to own a car, own a toothbrush own whatever, whatever else this is not a right that impinges on the rights of other people now, if we say that the workplace is the sole domain that because of private property rights it belongs to the capitalist and the capitalist alone like you would say then the terms of additions of work are just up to the capitalist and whatever internal power dynamic of pressure and so there's still going to be a battle of industrial conflict that's going to go on between workers demanding certain things and capitalist demanding other things by the way, a lot of those programmers are going to see in the next 20, 30 years that they can be skilled it's already happening they might want a union really badly in 10, 15 years as they go from artisans to just regular workers like the rest of us now all of this involves taking and enshrining certain rights these workers have or taking a victory in one union contract and applying it across the sector for instance this implies an erosion of property rights now if there are certain sectors that I will admit right away, the snapper finger I do want to take away private hands and put into public hands not even necessarily the hands of workers but the hands of the state there's limited sectors, there's natural monopolies where I think that would make sense there's the health insurance industry which I think will vitally as a moral imperative within the next 5 years we need to take as a trauma commodified sphere and bring through a Medicare for all system into the public as a right now what happens with the CEOs of these companies these companies say no they don't have the right to contest the ruling they have the right to use law to contest the judicial system to contest an expropriation but I think there are certain sectors where we don't want the private sector and we have in the past taken sectors away from the private sector and brought into the public sector the New York City subway system one reason why it's so difficult to maintain is because it's essentially the amalgamation of 3 or 4 different private subway lines they all have different tokens they all have different cars they all have different types of tracks I think even most defenders of the existing capitalist system would say public transit is something it should probably do because it allows people to move around and exchange gifts and services and I think in that case yes it was an expropriation but it was done lawfully and it was done in a transparent way and it was done by rule of law it's not something where some sort of leader struts around and points at something and says expropriate this, don't expropriate this I know this person, no it has to be done in such a way that it's governed by certain certain principles but we are for and most people are for all sorts of intrusions on the rights of our property, we just believe and democratically setting what these limits are and in what way we want to intrude on these rights most people agree with a most people agree that there are certain recourses and people shouldn't be firing basis of their gender or race or whatever most people agree on these these are coercions I want to shift a little bit can I comment on this? can I comment on this? who's we you'll notice that we are going to decide who gets to keep their property and who doesn't get to keep their property we are going to decide to get to keep your toothbrush or not we are going to decide which workplaces are okay to be privately owned and which workplaces are not okay we are going to decide in other words the rule of the mob the rule of the majority is going to decide and again I don't see why this we stop from fighting property, why can't we decide to kill socrates we simply haven't asked without mobby rights without mobby rights without the entrepreneurs without the owners of property there is no industry, this is a fantasy and a joke there is no example in history of a system that can work even on a small scale that can work when we by vote decide what iPhone to produce imagine what this would look like if a committee designed imagine what this would look like if we voted on it if we voted on our iPhone I mean, it's insanity that you can run any kind of business even a small grocery store never mind a complex supply chain global supply chain business on the basis of voting and on the basis of public opinion and on the basis of coercion because the weed the weed, the whole point of the weed is to cross the individual the whole point of the weed is to know what they cannot, cannot do in the realm of property you can speak all you want, can you if I don't have property if I don't own the microphone if you don't let me own the microphone, can I speak is there a relationship I want between private property and freedom of speech of course there is but all rights are to viscerate once you viscerate the right of property and once you place the weed above the individual the real nature, the individual becomes a cog the individual becomes a sacrificial animal the individual becomes somebody to be exploited and exploited and real that's what socialism is about socialism is not, doesn't care it cares about the group about the weed about the majority and the majority in any particular situation is going to be different with just a couple just very quick misnomers well if you want to look at even the sets of cooperatives within capitalism well the fourth or fifth largest business in the entirety of Spain is run on this basis, the Mudford Gown collected now on the case of yes should the iPhones for commodity be produced with direct democracy at every level no, what I'm proposing is a system in which workers own firms so there is ownership but it's collected and it's regulated just like the market economy, yes just like every capitalism will always be regulated we're living in a mixed economy in the way he describes it we're living in a socialist or in a capitalist economy that's been chastened in certain key ways so yes of course there'll have to be firm failures and there'll have to be animations and of course there's a limit to the things that we can decide through democracy I think there's a role for markets and consumer goods I don't think there's a need and a provision of healthcare and other basic social goods so I think there is a difference there but the key is when we say as socialists that there's certain collective rights that belong to people of course when I say it now it's just rudder these are rights that people will need to deliberate upon they'll need to democratically enshrine and yes like any right and any just democratic system it's a right that can be rolled back so we can enhance through our democratic deliberative processes the rights of the state providing guarantees over the provision of childcare or the provision of healthcare then eight years later we can say oh this system is working it's more inefficient we want to go back to the private system and we can roll it back I mean that's a way any just society works am I suggesting a year zero need to be I know something like the person dangerous seems like a good way to regulate what state and appearance and speech should be in a social society I don't think social jurisprudence will be spun full cloth out of the whatever else what I'm proposing is taking what works in our society because it's filled with people who want to live in a more just place and it's filled with many wonders and abundance and providing a base level of guarantees and deepening our democratic participation so we don't have a class of people that have our traveling and our Davos and they're around making decisions that affect everyone else but the rest of us are accountable to corporate bureaucracies libertarians and others most of them are just so obsessed with state bureaucracies they can't see how much of their lives are dependent and decided by corporate bureaucracies and borderlands most of us will never get the chance to stay moving as much as I think alright well Matt put it up to Hanyu he's doing it in just a moment but I did want to ask you one more question and then my response is to it to be somewhat short so we can't open it up but so let's try to be maybe a minute or two but I would like for you to answer whether or not you think income inequality economic inequality in and of itself is a bad thing so yeah so no I don't think it's a bad thing if it's if it's generated in the free market I think the only situation in which income inequality is a bad thing is when it's a consequence of coercion when it's a consequence of illiquomism which is not part of capitalism which is anti-capitalism it's a part of every social system and every state system or it's a part of the distribution of wealth so I believe that any wealth you own is if you own a lot of wealth because you produce huge amount of value and you own a lot of wealth I don't envy billionaires I think billionaires are fantastic they've created a much better world for me and I think that's wonderful that we have all the products that they've created that change the world so I don't think inequality is a problem at all and I think when we conflate when we talk about inequality which I think is relevant both economically and morally with political inequality political equality is crucial you know all men created equal was not a statement about income or wealth it was a statement about rights we all have the right to life whether the majority wants it or not whether the majority likes what I do with my life or not I have a right so the only system with equal rights with equal liberties is capitalism socialism might generate equality of outcome but undermined by definition it undermines equality of freedoms equality of rights it's a violation of the principle of equality of living well I don't believe that income is perhaps vast I don't believe that income in equality in and of itself is the goal is equality and power for us too as political actors have the same democratic states for us to have certain guarantees that we'll be able to reach our individual potentials it might be that in the society that I envision if someone working at one firm wants to work longer hours is having a position of more responsibility or is doing with a socially undesirable job that's still vital sanitation workers or whatever else it compensated more than people in other in other jobs that's not a problem unless it's connected to inequalities of power and less it means that this extra wealth that I have isn't just more spare time for me or more money for leisure over trips or for whatever else but in fact it means that I hold more power over you and today often when we talk on the left more broadly the populace left when people talk about income in equality and denounce it often it's because it's correlated to these inequalities of power because in our society if you have wealth and if you have power you'll use that wealth and power to keep your foot on someone else's neck you'll use that wealth and power naturally it's not just these a cabal of curry capitalist you'll naturally use that wealth and power and up regulations and systems that keep you powerful and keep your competition behind this isn't an aberration this is a natural outgrowth of living in a class society what I propose is going towards a society in which we have a free association of producers income and equality isn't the main problem the problem we have is inequalities rooted in the workplace and rooted in society we have a faculty with that I'm going to open up to Q&A it has to be Q and actual Ava so after a sentence after after Q&A you can have a question then I'm going to cut you off and also just a reminder I'm really excited we're having some old debates on that student symbol hi I have a question for Mr. Brook so I was especially intrigued by this concept of a state of complete separation of the state and the economy and what I was wondering is if you'd lay out for me how exactly a small state such as this could enforce these anti-trust rules especially in industries in which economies of scale come into play I don't believe this should be anti-trust rules that's exactly what I mean by separation of states from the economy I don't have any anti-trust rules or any violation of economic rights in the United States in 1890 there are lots of things as monopolies in free markets and I'll take the classic examples I've encouraged audiences to challenge me in this hundreds of engagements never fallen on yet spend it all spend it all at 90% of all the defined capacity in the United States in the 1970s a monopoly you expect them to happen what we have tried in economics 101 monopolies do. They raise prices and they lower quality. Well go to the data, the data's available, it's all archived and you'll find that the prices went down, every single year, quality went up dramatically, every single year. And by the way, wages went up as well, every single year in spite of the monopoly power supposedly that Rockefeller had. Not only did prices not move in the way we expected, who ultimately competed Rockefeller out of the business that he was in? Because he ultimately got a zero market share in the American democracy he was in in the 1870. In the 1870 he was producing what? Carousel, which was used for late, who competed in all of his business. Thomas Edison, who would have predicted that? Which bureaucrat, which government entity would have predicted that Thomas Edison was actually the competitor of Rockefeller? And by the time, anti-trust laws woke Rockefeller up in the 1920s. How much of the percent of the oil market that Rockefeller had then? 23, I think, 8%. So market competition drove it from 1923 and waked out a whole industry forward by through what we call an economic substitute product and electricity. So the idea that a bureaucrat, that a government, that voters, that a majority, can figure out what a monopoly is and when it's appropriate and when it's not is absurd. And this is why the principle has to be, and I believe in principles, no government intervention in the economy, not for anti-trust laws, for any other cause you or a bunch of economists might think is worthwhile. There is no cause worthwhile enough to violate some of these popular rules. All right. We'll take one from the side. By the way, if you have any questions, could it be helpful if you head to the side over there, once I get there? So I should very quickly say that that has very good to do with the debate around socialism. I'm not, Elizabeth Warren, I'm not in favor of necessarily the former bank of trust legislation. I think there's often efficiencies with the context and scale. Often you have to decide on social democracies. The wage pressures, for example, of our many in social democracy led to the concentration in larger firms. So that, so you answered a lot of your questions. Yes. Thank you very much. This has been very fascinating and like for state of transparency. I agree with both of you, and I disagree with both of you, but I do have a question for Mr. Groh. So let's say you're living in Indiana. I'm one of your friends who's an entrepreneur who opens up a plant and needs energy. Another entrepreneur, a friend of yours, opens up a coal-fired coal plant. As a result, you have arsenic, other heavy metals that are leaching and gradient leaching into the water. You and your family drink that water, you get sick and go to the doctor and you don't get better because you find out the doctor's not actually medical biologist or something pretending. What's the remedy for all that? Property rights. So if water is part of the property and if you have, we call it the legal system where you can show that something is good to you, we've always known you can't drop your copies in my backyard. We've always known you can't poison me. That's simple law going back 1,000 years. The legal system takes care of that and once a certain compound is proven to be destructive to human life, it's completely appropriate for the government to then step in in the section of the life, of the right to life and you say you can't admit that part, right? But there has to be a process by which that is objectively defined. The legal system has always worked pretty well to do that. That's the system by which you did that. But remember, let me just make a general comment. People talk about the environment all the time and good generations, but you can press about the environment. The world's going to end in 12 years or something like that. Life has never been as great as it is right now. You've never lived longer. You've never lived healthier. You've never breathed cleaner air. You've never drunk cleaner water. You know why they did tea in China? Because it used to be an ancient time there. The water was polluted, they had boiled the water. One way to guarantee that was by drinking tea. Same about beer in Northern Europe. It's limited, it's amazing world. The human environment has never been better. Primarily because of the capitalist elements in society. So, these questions are easily dealt with in a property way of respecting capitalist system. By the way, the most dirty places in the world are socials. Always have. When the war kicked down, Eastern Europe was filthy because nobody takes care of public property, but you take care of your property. So, we want more of your property and less of your property. All right, I'm here. Mr. St. Groot, St. Carol, would you please explain Venezuela's state of socialism? Well, first of all, on that point, I mean, these are also countries in Eastern Europe that didn't have democratic socialists or green parties. And I think to freely enact the title of legislation that cleaned up Western Europe and cleaned up these countries from the muck of the damage the industrial revolution did, is that they had their own industrial revolution, which was left behind by that party. When it comes to Venezuela, Venezuela in my mind is not a socialist society. It never was a society that always maintained property rights. But it was a society that embodied, in many ways, it came to embody their words to both worlds. You had a systems of patronage that developed from oral ranks being trick or down. You had a popular style of mobilization used by all sectors of political parties in Venezuela. You had certain programs that were in fact misguided. Like you had a price control program, which I think backfired tremendously. So in many cases, there were huge mistakes being done in Venezuela. And it's an economic crisis that was worsened by continued US sanctions, by a violent opposition. It's a disaster on many levels. I don't think it reflects one way or the other on socialism in particular. Now, if you have parties in, let's say, an actual socialist party, governated with the confines of capitalism in Bolivia and in Ecuador. Now, many people have complaints about the Morales government. They have complaints about the record of the Greya government. They have complaints about the first two terms of the Peje government in Brazil. But these were countries that were able to preside over long periods of economic growth. They were able to redistribute the proceeds of that growth to create stronger social infrastructure. Social indicators went way up. So I think you saw during the same time the successes of left-of-center government in Latin America as you saw the decline of Venezuela under Maduro. So I think at a certain level, we have to say that certain factors are in fact contingent. I wouldn't sit here and claim that a capitalist is responsible, on the pro-capital side, is responsible or defending the systems we saw under Pinochet and Chile. In the same way we could say that socialist and egalitarian redistributive systems and left-popular systems in particular can lead in very dark directions or that they lead towards further progress and emancipation. You saw both the same kind and the same continent. So I think we need to make clear that we're for certain bedrock social rights that need to be combined with political rights. We're for free press. We're against government authority in any context. No matter who's using it, no matter what flag they're flying. So let this be very clear. Venezuela is clearly inferior to socialism. If you look at industry by industry, the industries that failed in Venezuela are those that lead and nationalized or collectivized. Forming in Venezuela was used to deprive it and at that point Venezuela was an exportable food, was nationalized, creating communes that made decisions about what they go and as a consequence food production has plummeted. Now this is the case everywhere that you collectivize farms from the peoples to Mars, China, to the Ukraine, everywhere where farming has been collected by the result of each starvation. The oil industry, which elements how it used to be private or nationalized by sharp heads and as a consequence a country that has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia is now has no oil to get to the oil because it doesn't have the technology, the ability because it collectivized it. So it's exactly because of socialism that Venezuela failed. Now truly they didn't collectivize everything and those parts that they didn't collectivize are still somehow functioning and why Venezuela still doesn't have tens of millions of people dying of starvation, just hundreds of thousands of people dying of starvation. You emphasized a lot about capitalism being set up on persons of individual freedom, happiness, and rights. But you recognize that society is made up of individuals who pursue their rights in different ways. Some go to extremes disregarding the effects that their choices cause to other members of the society. So without a uniform or without a partisan regulatory body, how do you govern centralized institutions where some individuals with extremist ideas exist? Thank you. So I don't follow people having extremist ideas. I think a lot of people think I have extremist ideas and it worries me when people want to silence people with extremist ideas because I would be one of them for a silence. It's not your ideas and what do you mean it's your actions. If your actions violate people's rights, and again violation of rights is poisoning their water, violating their rights is stealing from them, violating their property rights, or harming them physically or committing fraud against them. Those things you put them in jail, those are the laws that a capitalist society passes because they're laws that detect individual rights. But everything else is up to you as long as you're not violating other people's rights. You can go to a company and start a company and build a business, you can become an employee, you can decide you don't want to work and you can be a hand handler outside. You can choose what you want to do. And it's your right. I don't have to help you if you made bad choices. I don't have to help you if you're out of luck. I can choose to help you if I want to. And I can choose not to help you if I don't want to. So any help, any, what do you call it, safety man is voluntary. Every interaction between human beings should be voluntary. It's very simple, capitalism's very simple. It's a system in which we interact with one another voluntarily. We don't pull guns out. We don't collect little gangs to vote, to take your property or to take your stuff away from you. We just, each individual interacts with other people on a voluntary basis. If I don't want to deal with you for whatever reason, I don't deal with you, I walk over here. So actually, I wanted to get your answer to that question, too, because I think the good one, how does social assistance deal with extremist ideas? Well, I think by much the same standard, the level of if you're presenting an immediate harm or physical threat, if you're inciting people to do violence, then no. But if you're just marching down the street with a swastika or whatever else, I think we have to trust that the vast majority of people will not go down that path. Today, it's not illegal to start a monarchist party in the United States. There's no monarchist party, because very few people want to get rid of a Democratic Republic. And I think the standard has to be a very high standard for state intervention in stopping so-called extremism and whatnot. And I think the standard has to be direct incitement to harm and violence. All right, well, we are, unfortunately, out of time for more questions. I'm going to pick this up, see the gentleman to give closing statements. And then I'm really interested in seeing your statement. I want you to see the closing statements and take more questions. Yeah, maybe we can take two at the time. Well, let's do one. OK. We'll see that in two times. So you get one and you get one. Well, let's do four and we'll choose what to answer. OK. That would be a closing statement. Let's do four. Four questions. Three and four. There are four more questions. No, I don't believe in four. All right, see for these sides. My question is, I wanted to, at the beginning, define some terms, like what socialism is and what capitalism is. I think even more fundamental is that it should define what would mean by rights. Because the definition of rights as being a right to education means that somebody else's rights have to be violated. You have to take it. So the question is what it's rights. Right. OK. I did define it in my question. And over here. That was about my question, but to just go off of that, I was wondering if you agree with Daniel to pause it. If you happen to agree with Daniel to pause the rights, why are somebody else's labor or someone else's actions? How do you justify that given how that might come to this? Just that closing statement of rights. Yeah, two more questions. You mentioned that it is the role of government to protect our freedom. And yet you also admit that the nature of government, or nature of the state, is that a coercion and that one of violence? How can you expect an institution that is apparently violent to protect our rights? So an analogy question. Always get one in every event that we're going to address. In the world of visions, I would say that the role of the government was to regulate market forces. Because I believe you understood that there was a limit to market forces, and they needed to regulate it. So then my question would be, if we do get rid of regulations and we get rid of the government, assuming that you can have a functional economy or functional capitalist society with a small government, how do you ensure that we do not fall into the system that political scientists throughout the world would call inverted totalitarianism? Whereas you have the inverse of classical totalitarianism where the corporations capture the state and be made under the tyranny of the corporations instead of the tyranny of the government. All right, you just have two minutes. I should start at this, because you started first. Yeah, you got to start, and I'll leave you with the question. OK, so let me just quickly do the rights question. I mean, I said, and I would say that the rights are the recognition that we have the freedom to act in pursuit of our God, except for the way it is. That's what I defined it early on. They cannot be positive rights in that sense. I think rights are positive. The positive nature of action, that is, they sanction your ability to act on behalf of your life in pursuit of your values, in pursuit of your rational mind. So in that sense, they're positive, but this is a principle of rights. You cannot have the right to other people's stuff. This is any time you think there's a right, but you require thinking stuff from other people, it can't be a right. You can't have other people looking for you. We call that slavery without compensation. You can't have a right to health care. That makes the doctors, the nurses, the whole, all the people who have worked hard and educated themselves in anything in order to provide a product to surface. They get additional rights. They have to provide it to you without any compensation because you have to wait. So you cannot have a way to other people's stuff. The only way you have is to be left alone. In other words, the only way you have is to be free of coercion, free to act in pursuit of your own values. And I'll just say quickly in the last question. This idea that somehow corporations will take over the state, the state has guns. Corporations don't. The state is the monopoly over the use of force. And if you separate states from economics, corporations are about making money, creating values, producing stuff. They're not about political power. And if you leave them alone, they will leave you alone. And if a corporation doesn't, then you use the power of the state to stop them. That is, they are violating rights of using force against citizens. But if they use force against the government, then government has to be waiting to stand up and stop them. Corporations are not too long ago, they're used to have guns. And the Peterkins ran amok in this country and killed workers and decide law until Paris. And corporations still had guns, but being the state after that, they're forced to separate. Look at what U.S. group did. U.S. corporations have guns. This is the natural dynamics of what happens if you allow concentration of wealth and power in a so-called finance bearing world still. Now, when it comes to the kind of rights and freedoms that we want to see, yes, I believe strongly in our negative freedoms. I believe strongly in the Bill of Rights. I also believe that there needs to be a second Bill of Rights. And in this, I share with not just democratic socialists, but also with the best of American liberalism that share the same belief. From FDR's speech in 1944 onward, there's been demands for a certain bedrock of guarantees and a certain bedrock of rights. But yes, I believe it does mean taking away something from someone else or from another group of people. I think there's limits to what one can take from someone else. You can't abridge someone's speech, you can't take someone's life, there's all sorts of limits. But taking someone's right to provide you your HMO's right to rebuy you with health insurance and turning that into a social guarantee, that's a right that I'm more than happy to take away. And in this vision of society, well, I think it just doesn't drive what most people think, which is that it's not about altruism or whatever else, most people want to take care of themselves and take care of their families. And they're seeing themselves get squeezed at every moment, they're seeing an establishment of both the left and the right, both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, we take them for granted, we take their votes for granted. They say, you know what, I need a little bit more relief. I need a little bit more freedom to do what I want and not have to worry about my medical bank, not have to worry about how I'm gonna pay to send my kid to school. I need to not worry about whether this banker writing me a mortgage is trying to rip me off. This is what people want. And this is why I don't know if socialism is not the one. I don't know if socialism will work, but I do know that social democracy is the path that most Americans believe in and it's a path that America's gonna march into in the next 10, 20 years. All right, well with that, I want to know what you guys think. So who here still supports capitalism? Who supports socialism and what holds your names if you're a convert? Who's still undecided?