 Dr. Carlson, he is here with Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald, they have become very close friends, associates, brothers-in-arms, you might even say. Glenn Greenwald is a real socialist, but he's also, you know, has certain populist views. He's also anti-war and was a skeptic, I guess, over the whole COVID thing. So he has gained a lot of supporters and farmed kind of the populist right. And he is, what did I want to do here? Yeah, he is, I guess, part of the populist right. My guess is that Glenn Greenwald would vote for Trump over Biden and so on. So I'm not going to play anything with Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is basically, this is his show. He's interviewing Tucker Carlson. And this is Tucker Carlson's answer to a question about basically the economic views of the populist right. What are these views regarding the economics as they're held by the populist right? And let's listen to what Tucker, our friend Tucker Carlson, has to say. Whoops. Why is that? Seems like that's muted. Let's see. I think a lot of people have awakened to the now demonstrable fact that libertarian economics was a scam perpetrated by the beneficiaries of the economics. So libertarian economics was a scam. Libertarian economics, I assume by libertarian economics what they mean is free markets. It's a private property, respectful private property. It's, yeah, free markets. Libertarian economics is really free markets. When have those been tried? I mean, Tucker's not an idiot. Tucker used to be considered himself a libertarian not that long ago when it was convenient to be so. But when was it tried? Was Ronald Reagan a libertarian economics? Did we really deregulate everything? Is the government not involved in every aspect of our lives from an economic perspective? Is the government not everywhere? Is the government not engaged even today in industrial planning? Is the government not engaged in taxation and tariffs and manipulation of what we buy even under Reagan? Weren't there limits on how many Japanese cars could be imported? Didn't Reagan bail out Chrysler? I mean, when is this mythological time of libertarian economics? Now, he claims that now we are living through the consequences of libertarian economics. I mean, and they keep repeating this. Now, the reason I'm emphasizing this, the reason is that a lot of people listen to Tucker. This particular show with Green Guild World only has 39,000 views over the last four days. But Tucker is listened to extensively. Many, many, many Americans are now adopting the view. Many, many Americans who used to have a different view but are now adopting the view that the problems we have today in economics, the problems we have, the challenges we face today are a consequence of too much free markets, of too little state intervention, of too little statism. This is what Americans are internalizing. And this is what Tucker keeps reinforcing. And indeed, I think Donald Trump and I think many of the new commentators on the conservative nationalist, on the new right, keep emphasizing Reagan's free market policies have failed. Libertarian economics, no good. What we need is populist economics. There's another way for another name for populist economics that at the end of this segment, which I will not play. Glenn Greenwald mentions the fact that maybe Tucker Carlson is now a little bit of a socialist. Yeah, it's called socialism. That's populist economics. Helping out the poor, structuring industrial policy to help up the poor. How has that worked? All right, industrial policy is a massive failure everywhere it's tried. But it doesn't prevent for a variety of moral reasons and political reasons. It doesn't prevent the purveyors of statism and those who would want to appeal to a large array of people, particularly people in the lower middle class, in the working class. It doesn't prevent them from constantly hopping back to status policies that we know fail and blaming all our problems on. This is Tucker Carlson. This is the new right. These are the people you think should govern. And many of you think should be supported. According to them, of American people are free markets. Free markets. All right, let's listen a little bit more. That was 21 seconds of Tucker, six minutes of me. We're not going to get very far at this rate. That they were defending. So they created this whole intellectual framework to justify the private equity culture that's hollered out the country. That's my personal view. And I've seen it up close my whole life. So private equity culture hollered out the country. Complete nonsense, a private equity culture that has kept the economy, the US economy functioning. It's kept it growing. It's brought increased efficiency, increased productivity. It has actually enhanced American businesses. And it made it so that we live in a world in which unemployment is basically effective. Unemployment is zero. And where American companies are, to a large extent, the envy of the world, private equity culture is a culture of profit maximization, which means increasing efficiency, increasing productivity. Hullered out the country, what hollered out the country is the fact that conservatives, conservative people, left and right, sat around waiting for the same old, same old instead of innovating, instead of building new businesses, instead of getting on a bandwagon of new technologies, instead of changing with the times. What's destroyed the old steel jobs is not private equity. What's destroyed the old steel jobs is technology, competition. But people like Tucker Carlson, politicians like Trump and Biden and the rest of them, keep promising to bring the steel jobs back, that hollows out the country. That creates people sitting around waiting for the steel jobs to come back, waiting for their prospects to improve, rather than doing something to prove their prospects. That is the mentality of stagnation. That is the mentality that is destructive to America. It's a sitting around waiting rather than doing. And that is encouraged by those like Tucker, like Trump, like Biden, like Elizabeth Warren. I put them all together for a reason, because they all belong together, like JD Vance, like Manchin from West Virginia, who just complained about the sale of financial security reasons, the sale of US steel. Instead of looking backwards as they do, oh, went to 50s a wonderful time, instead looking to the future, a future of AI, a future of robots, a future of immense prosperity, all they can do is sulk and skulk about the fact that some people are making money by making America a better place to live, by making our businesses keep on working. And if we have a soft landing, and if we've survived the last few years with a decent economy, with people having jobs, you can credit a lot of that to private equity. Now, I know Tucker and Glenn would have liked the state to be bailing everybody out, would like the state to be guaranteeing everybody's job, would like the state to be running all those businesses. But this is why Tucker Carlson is and has been for years, but nobody listens to me, the enemy. I think it's a fair assessment. I think a smarter way to assess an economic system is by its results. So you can assign whatever name you want to the economic system of the United States. You could call it market capitalism. You could call it, I mean, you could call it a whole host Well, certainly calling it market capitalism would be a deception, because it is not market capitalism. It has elements of market capitalism here and there, like private equity. And it has, but even private equity is a lot of private equity success is by taking on debt that with the interest is tax deductible. Even there, it is a product of the mixed economy. But what we have is a mixed economy with heavy, heavy, heavy role of the state, heavy, heavy, heavy role of regulations, controls, taxes, manipulations, subsidies, tariffs, and on and on and on you go. So you can call them market capitalism, but that would be particularly coming out of the mouth of somebody educated and knowledgeable, like Taka Kalsen is, that would be plain and simple dishonest. It would be a lie. But lying is the way to achieve popularity. Lying is the way to achieve political power. And indeed, the results, yeah, the results are not good in the United States. They're better than in any other Western country, but they're not good. They could be a lot better. They should be a lot better. But the solution to getting this there is not to abandon the remnants of market capitalism as Taka would like, but to embrace them, embrace them consistently, and apply them consistently, and to get rid of the cronyism that he is demanding by demanding greater government involvement in the economy. Greater government involvement in the economy can only make things worse, not better. Different things, but I don't think any of that's useful. Those are boring conversations. I think you need to ask, does this economic system produce a lot of dollar stores? And if it does, it's not a system that you want. So the problem is dollar stores. That's the problem. Dollar stores where people find bargains, where people go and find cheap stuff, buying cheap stuff, which makes it possible for them to spend more money on other stuff. So we shouldn't let the market provide for people. Dollar stores have always existed in the United States. It's not like they didn't exist in the 1950s. They would just call it something else. I remember really, really, these really, really cheap stores that you could go to in the 1970s and buy stuff, basically, for a dollar, the equivalent of dollar stores. And that story, if I remember right, that was in Brookline, Massachusetts, a relatively wealthy place. But it succeeded because everybody likes a little bargain. Everybody likes to buy little knickknacks, a little stuff, to stocking stuffers or whatever, however you want to call it, at the dollar store. Why not? But this is Tucker's problem. The dollar store. Now, if he was complaining about poverty and he's using the dollar store to represent that, but it's not what he's doing. He's complaining about the very essence of bargain hunting and the fact that freedom, freedom of consumption, we still have some freedom in retail, freedom of consumption. The freedom of supply and demand in the world of consumer products, he's complaining about that, the fact that something has arisen to provide a service to people who want these kind of cheap stuff. Some of them are poor, some of them might be students who one day will be richer, some of them are middle class, some of them just want knickknacks, all kinds of stuff. Because it degrades people and it makes their lives worse. It degrades people and makes their lives worse to seek bargains? Really? How is that? I could get it if he was talking about TikTok, but he's talking about dollar stores. This is the complaint about capitalism, produces dollar stores, produces bargains. But isn't that, if you look at the nature of retail over the last 150 years, from the beginning, yes, there was a high end, but there was always a lower end to be able to satisfy efficiently, productively, cheaply, the needs of a lower middle class, the needs of a working class, the needs of the poor, so that they too could have fancy stuff. I mean, here he is sitting in his, I don't know what brand of sweater it is, but Tucker Carlson is a very wealthy man. He comes from a wealthy background. He comes from an elite society. He's sitting there making fun of putting down dollar stores. He's such a snob, a snob speaking for, for the downtrodden. I mean, is there anything worse? Is there anything less appealing than that? It increases exponentially the amount of ugliness in your society. And anything that increases ugliness, is equal. Ugliness? And it's just kind of, let's just start there. Is it the people that are ugly? Is it the stuff in the store that's ugly? I mean, yes. Tucker, I mean, everybody should be able to, it would be great if everybody could shop where you, you know, at Saxford Avenue and places like that. That would be amazing. And maybe one day we will reach that point if we allow for capitalism. Capitalism will make everybody richer. And one day everybody will be able to afford a Saxford Avenue. But they can't today. See, so the fact that some people can't, that makes the system bad? The system that has brought people out of poverty? The system that actually is creating economic growth in the United States and nowhere else in the world? Because it's not, it's being adopted here a little bit better than any elsewhere? I mean, is that really bringing ugliness to the world, dollar stores? So if it's such a good system, why do we have all these dollar stores? Because there's a demand for dollar stores and there's a need to be fulfilled. And because people like bargains and because yeah, there's still poor people in this country, relatively speaking. But you know, wouldn't it be cool if there were dollar stores all over the world and people who could get bargains all over the world? I mean, really? And the dollar store is the clear, I mean, it's not the only ugly thing being created in the United States, but it's one of the most common and it's certainly the most obvious. So if you have a dollar store, you're degraded. And any town that has a dollar store does not get better. It gets worse. And the people who live there lead lives that are worse. Again, I lived in Buckeye, Massachusetts that had an equivalent of a dollar store at the time. I don't think it got worse, I think it got better. You know, and actually today is probably one of the richest towns in the United States and probably still has some kind of dollar store. I mean, it's just... So, and the counter argument to the extent there is one, oh, they buy cheaper stuff, great. But they become more unhappy. How do they become unhappy about buying cheaper stuff? Now, there is a happiness problem in America, but is the dollar store the fault? Is the economic system the fact that there's too much freedom in the fault? Is that the problem? And the dollar store itself is a sort of symbol. What's a physical thing? It's a real thing. It's not just a metaphor, but it's also a metaphor for your total lack of control over where you live. Total lack of control for where you live? God, aren't they, really? So if you have a dollar store in your neighborhood, you should immediately be depressed because you don't have any control over where you live. You would never want to live in a neighborhood that has a dollar store nearby. And over the imposition of aggressively in-your-face ugly structures that send one message to you, which is you mean nothing. Ugly structures. Ugly structures. See, he wants all our small towns in America to have cathedrals in them. Is that the gist? I mean, so an efficient block structure so that you can sell products for cheap so that people can buy stuff and get a bargain and improve their lives and maybe go home and renovate their kitchen and maybe make their lives a little bit more beautiful because they saved money because they didn't have to buy stuff in a beautiful moderns, 5th Sacs 5th Avenue type store or an ancient cathedral. Is that it? You were a consumer, not a human being or a citizen. You're a consumer, not a human being or a citizen. Is consumption not necessary in order to be a human being? Is consumption not part of being a citizen? I mean, this is nuts. This is truly nuts. And this is the most influential public, what would you call it, in the media, public intellectual in the media today? Certainly on the right, the most influential, probably the more influential, period. And so again, I don't know what we call our current system, but its effects are grotesque. They're grotesque. It's wrecked. I've been here 54 years and I watch carefully. That's my only gift is I watch. And this has become a much uglier place. A much more crowded place. A much more hostile place. A much more crowded? Have you really traveled around the country, Tucker? Really? God. A place that cares much less about people. So whatever system that produces that outcome is a bad system. And you can call me whatever you want. Oh, you're a socialist. I don't care what you call me, actually. I'm beyond caring. Yeah, well, he is beyond caring. That's fine. So we'll call him the statist that he actually is. But it's more than that. He's dishonest. He knows much better. And look, there is a lot of ugliness in the world out there. A lot of the art that is supposed to be beautiful is part of that ugliness. The architecture, I would say, of the 1960s was far uglier than the architecture of today. I think the architecture today is much better than it was in the 1960s, block buildings, glass squares. There's a lot more attempt to make architecture more beautiful than there was in the 1960s when Tucker, I guess Tucker wasn't born yet, but maybe born at the end of the 60s. So I don't know what he's talking about. If anything, there's been an improvement over time in much of the public and much of the architecture that's, I don't know that there's been an improvement much in homes, but there certainly has been an improvement in public. And yeah, there's a lot of ugliness out there. There's a lot of decay. There's way too much poverty. There are way too many problems. I wish everybody did shop at Sex Fifth Avenue. But what is the solution? What is the solution? Is the solution more state intervention, more and more powerful unions? Is the solution more redistribution of wealth? Is the solution more central planning? What is the solution? I mean, you could say in many ways, a city like Copenhagen is a really pretty city in many ways, prettier than many American cities, although if you value skyscrapers, you're not gonna find them in Copenhagen. So do we want 70% or 50, 60, 70% marginal tax rates? Do we want everybody riding on bicycles even in the winter? Do we want people living in tiny little apartments and tiny little homes? Is that what we want? Would that make him feel better? Are they no dollar stores in Copenhagen? I don't know. It's certainly more aesthetic than many American cities, particularly the bad parts of American cities. But what is the price one has to pay for that aesthetic beauty? And by the way, Copenhagen, Denmark, Sweden, less regulated than the United States. So in some parameters, more market capitalism than the United States is even. So what does he want? He doesn't know, and indeed he doesn't want to label himself because the one thing Tuck has given up on, and the one thing the entire right, particularly the new right has given up on when it comes particularly to economics, one thing they've given up on is on principles, complete negation of principles. All that matters is what works? Does that sound familiar? There's a philosophy relating to that, and that is pragmatism. So let's drive dollars stores out. Do you remember how many, what do you call it, pawn shops? I remember when I lived in Texas, Austin, Texas, in the 19, late 80s, early 90s, there were dozens of pawn shops. Now I liked the pawn shops because I would go there and buy stuff. I bought some of my stereo equipment in a pawn shop. I bought other stuff in a pawn shop. So I enjoyed pawn shop because there were always deals and opportunities there, but are pawn shops better than dollar stores, worse than dollar stores? Are they more pawn shops today, more dollar stores today, more now than they were in the 1980s? What are we talking even about? What we have today is pragmatism. Tuck is a complete and utter pragmatist. He is also, I think there's an element of nihilism. I mean, one of the things I find striking is how angry he started to look over the last couple of years, the frown he has, he has a constant look, that look of, I'm angry, I can't be fooled. I'm gonna see through you. I'm really scowling and it's pathetic.