Anand Giridharadas: Should Billionaires Exist?

Democratic presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have made no bones about going after the ultra elite mega millionaires and billionaires that's also the stomping grounds of our next guest onon geared our TAS is author most recently of winners take all the elite charade of changing the world is an editor at large for time and a political analyst for MSNBC and he joins us now for more it's so good to have you back here good to be back hair thick was ten years ago you were on this program of my first TV appearances ever is that right and we didn't ruin and it didn't shut down they don't shut down my TV it did not cause you've been on numerous times since then so good to have you back let me read something that Matt flegenheimer wrote in The New York Times back on November 8th he wrote there is probably never a bad time to be a billionaire but this at least is an especially complicated one across politics technology and popular culture the wisdom and purpose of the extremely wealthy is being questioned as never before do you see this shift taking place yes and and it's what was very interesting in that phrasing I love that piece the wisdom and purpose of these billionaires being questioned what's so elegant in that phrase is it's questioning both the wisdom of the billionaires as in their wisdom but also the purpose of having billionaires as a society not just a billionaires sense of their own purpose but our sense of purpose in allowing fortunes like that to be amassed as a priority before we take care of priorities like making sure most people have the rudiments of a decent life and over the last you know 30 to 40 years in the United States we have practiced a social model that is billionaire friendly first allow people to run companies in ways that make as much money as possible by cutting every social corner imaginable pay people as little as possible pay as little as taxes as possible use Caribbean islands to dodge things use trusts double Irish for the Dutch sandwich tax maneuver not that delicious and so on and so forth lobby in Washington for public policies bottleservice public policy that's just good for you and your friends not good for the Commons and then what you get is a defamed government that's not able to do big things for people multiplying social problems because of that defanged government and because of all the ways you're employing people etc and then billionaires coming along and CEOs and others coming along and saying what a shame what a shame these festering social problems makes my heart hurt and this government not able to solve it that's a shame let me step up I can fix it we have been talking though about the 1% ever since the Great Recession broke so why do you think there's anything particularly different right now I think well first of all movements take time to build right there was Seattle protests in 1999 occupy was in 2011 I think the financial crisis in 2008 2009 had an enormous role in shattering not only opportunity particularly a lot of young people whose lives never were able to get off the ground then or since but also shattering a certain mythology that the United States has practiced but also preached around the world the mythology that the best society is achieved by leaving entrepreneurs alone that that that you that that if you do that one thing all other good things flow on the face of it doesn't sound like a terribly dumb idea you know if you let the best and the brightest and smartest go out and do their thing we'll have a better society on the face of it entrepreneurs are just one type of person in society pursuing one type of good which is money and growth you know it turns out that what teachers do is not motivated by that kind of calculation and actually turns out to be really really important to a civilized society I'm sure someone as intelligent as you could make more money doing a whole bunch of things in the society but you do what you do because the pursuit of the truth and that's fostering debate is a really important part of society if if we abandoned if people who went into medicine if people who went into public service if we abandon all of that because we just said you know the pursuit of money is a great end goal and I don't I think we'd have a very impoverished Society and part of what has happened in the United States and to varying degrees in other places is as money became the lodestar it became more than just the economy it became the culture to the point that in day in America people talk about optimization right people use corporate jargon to discuss personal life there's nothing that's beyond the realm of this of this kind of business thinking and and I wrote the book to question the idea that the very people who prosecuted this business revolution this leave entrepreneurs alone revolution can now miraculously reinvent themselves as the solution to the problems they have caused I appreciate that but I do want to know how far you would go - well let me put it this way Bernie Sanders says billionaires should not exist you prepared to go that far I think he's right and I would say this we have tried the other way for a while which is leave Malone to do anything right having billionaires we've tried to having billionaires approach and it turns out in the United States to be pretty inconsistent with the flourishing of most people so I'm intellectually honest enough to say let's try another approach which is having a tax code and regulatory structure that would make it you know impossible or at least much harder to become a billionaire and let's see what we get if after ten or fifteen years of that it turns out that's counterproductive and bad for most people I'll be happy to come back on this show and advocate for the reenlist you know in reinstatement of billionaires but I think we should talk about the myth that has upheld the idea that it's good to have billionaires the myth is that what's good for them is good for everybody else right it's the win-win ideology anybody believe that anymore I think people are starting to not believe it in droves but it has been a defining myth of the last 40 years and at the heart of the myth is this is this idea that if you just have business flourish you have these people do whatever they want to do everybody's welfare will increase and I think what people are waking up to and my own attempt to intervene in that discussion is to say in certain moments in history people are not down below because they have failed to join the people up above they're down below because people have above are standing on their necks and when you are in a situation like that in in in a society the only solution to lifting people is to actually stop people standing on their necks and that's not gonna happen with them voluntarily signing statements to have better behaved business it's not gonna happen through them giving one pair of shoes for every pair of shoes they sell to you it's not going to happen through impact investing where you you know also factor in social returns it's not going to happen through social enterprise or philanthropy it's gonna happen the old-fashioned way which is democratically which is putting business in its proper place in society through regulation taxation and and and policies and laws is it immoral to be a billionaire i I was called to the Oxford Union to engage in a debate about that and you know the Oxford Union I was told is sort of famous for framing these debates in a way that favours the kind of conservative landed gentry side of the argument because it is the Oxford Union so I was you know asked to argue this it's immoral to be a billionaire position and I argued that it is it's probably a touch more strenuous claim that I would make I think it's immoral for a society that allows it to be billionaires as congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio Cortez has said when asked that same question but the reason I argued it is immoral to be a billionaire it may be immoral to be a billionaire is that if you are the beneficiary of a system that predictably reliably foreseeably favors your continued hoarding of resources while most people are not able to have the rudiments of a decent life and if you are not doing everything in your power to dismantle that system that you're standing on top of you become complicit in that system it doesn't mean that everybody who is a billionaire has you know is the same level of sinner it doesn't mean that everybody is committed fraud to become a billionaire there's a whole bunch of stories right and the wealth of the Sackler family members of which are behind the opioid crisis in the United States is really really different from the wealth of Serena Williams it was just really good at tennis but both benefit from a set of societal arrangements that favor them in a way that I think if you are a responsible citizen you have to spend your time fighting against I was wondering if you were going to make a hierarchy between those who sort of inherited their billions and those like Kocher burger gates who actually went out and made it on their own do you make a distinction well it's a its first of all it's a distinction it becomes complicated I mean if gates us someone who made it on his own he also you know happened to go to one the only high schools in America with computers at that moment which is not something that he did on his own you know Mark Zuckerberg happened to be a white guy from upstate New York and only it's a coincidence that you know his demographic is the only demographic generally who started some of these big tech companies I'm not saying they didn't have anything else going for that right clearly but everything even the notion that they are self-made which is their story right it's complicated we are all socially made in addition to being self-made we are all a mix of the socially and the and socially made in self-made and I think part of what bothers me about the billionaire a narrative self making is these are actually people who benefit more than most people from the high-quality structures and systems set up in a country like Canada the United States right this is something people don't talk about like a regular person benefits you know a regular amount from Canada or the United States or any other country having good courts and whatever but if you own Facebook you really really benefit from the United States having one of the greatest court systems ever invented in the world you really benefit way more than a regular person you really benefit from the Securities Exchange Commission being what it is relative to the one its counterpart and you know Somalia like if you are at Goldman Sachs you may complain about regulation but actually everything you are able to do and the trust you are able to have when you pick up a phone and place a trade is entirely based on these public systems so these are people who benefit way more than average people from the regulatory infrastructure that we all pay for and then they have the gall to turn around and malign that infrastructure that they so leverage and so use just in those moments when it is expensive for them it's it's extremely ungrateful and I think part of what I'm advocating people need to do is to offer the plutocrats of the world or of our of our countries a deal here's the cost of doing business in Canada by the United States of America here's the tax rate here's the minimum wage right we think we have a pretty great country here if you disagree if you if you really if you want to take facebook elsewhere because our wealth tax that you don't like no problem well let me put this to you Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren has proposed a wealth tax 2% on assets over 50 million bucks 3% on assets worth more than a billion dollars billionaire investor Leon Cooperman wrote this in a letter to Elizabeth Warren in October he wrote however much it resonates with your base your vilification of the rich is misguided ignoring among other things the sources of their wealth and the substantial contributions to society which they already unprompted by you make earlier in october Cooperman said i believe in a progressive income tax and the rich paying more but this is the we're a family program here so i'm gonna say but this is the effing american dream she is SH ITN on on November 5th JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said she uses some pretty harsh words you know some would say vilifies successful people I don't like vilifying anybody I think we should applaud successful people okay let's pull this apart a little bit here the what the war on wealth tax what do you think for starters couple things first of all when I Jamie Dimon contacted me to I was going to get the challenge I challenged some of my public comments on these kinds of issues and he had no problem vilifying hardworking people when I suggested to ended a lot of workers are exploited in America by the CEOs that he admires and pals around with and he said now some people just don't like to work so he has no problem vilifying punching down he this is apparently problem with people vilifying billionaires you know if you think that a 3% tax only on those assets you have above a billion is vilification you need to get out more you may be living in such a cosseted cotton ball bubble that you actually don't even know what it means to be to have anybody tell you the truth 3% is a lower percent then all these people make in their annual returns on capital ok she's literally not even going to make I actually disagree with her plan in that you want it higher I actually don't think anybody's fortune would get smaller because now she's raised it to six because of her medicare-for-all plan so that could but even six most of these people have a rate of return on capital that is in excess so you know it's in the tens or teens in many cases and so the idea that a person who is proposing to merely reduce the rate at which you continue to get richer than other people is vilifying you you gotta get out more and you know what's really interesting this is the couple talking points that we're seeing emerging under what I call kind of the great loot freak out of twenty nineteen all these people you cited some of them I would say Michael Bloomberg is now exploring running for president out of the same motivation right Leon Cooperman just went on CNBC and cried Michael Bloomberg is maybe the first person in history to run for president as a form of tax evasion right just to literally avoid this this nominee who might tax you three percent and what is so interesting is you're seeing the talking point so talking point number one is the one is the one you cited you're vilified you're demonizing class warfare that holds awful point right when in fact you know Boren actually gets attacked on the left for not going after these people hard enough for saying she's a capitalist for saying she believes in capitalism second the talking point is hey this is not bad for us we don't we're not about us this is bad for you if you tax us billionaires more you guys are gonna get hurt and here's why so Zuckerberg says there's gonna be no diversity in medical research because all these rich people are funding different medical research thing apparently the kind of diversity Mark Zuckerberg believes in is in medical research so there's gonna be none of that Leon Cooperman says all these good works all this money that I'm going to spend on charity won't be able to do it they give to the arts and that's cetera right so this is what's called I would call economic concern trolling where in your instead of just saying the truth which is hey I kinda want to keep my money they make up this whole elaborate thing of if you tax us more it's gonna be bad for you even though we now know and this is remarkable we look at the Warren plan you'll get some of Bernie Sanders's plans by taxing like a hundred thousand people which is a really small number of people in a country of 350 million people you could fund programs that would transform the lives of every American citizen wipe out student debt fund universal free college at public universities Universal Day I mean like there's no person in America who wouldn't have their life altered including affluent people and very poor people and everybody in between buy these plans the idea that you can do that entirely multiple things like that and now actually added to it Medicare for all under Warren's plan just by taxing hundred thousand people tells you how much money those hundred thousand people have under their mattresses right you my guess would be in this country you couldn't do that much social spending just from taxing the top hundred thousand people maybe you could but my guess is that you don't have that level of concentration which the fact that you could do it is evidence of the problem well the Panama papers was a big deal a few years ago at least it was a big deal in the placement it got in the media for a few days and it certainly reflected on all of the wealth that is being sheltered in tax havens offshore it was a big moment investigative journalism and it looked like it was going to lead to something and it ended up leading to nothing and I'm wondering why you know I mean I think it goes back to your Occupy thing I don't think any of these things on their own leads to something I think this is a cumulative effect I think the permanent Panama papers are baked into why you and I are having this conversation the way occupy is part of why you and I are having this conversation and why the 2008 financial crisis is part of why you and I are having this conversation to me what has slowly happened that in a creative way is that various stories have like needles started to kind of prick the balloons of a belief system that said entrepreneurs are heroes government is bad government is bad now again this may not really resonate in Canada as much but in the United States we really have been on the receiving end of this 40-year ideological war that government is terrible government is evil right government we called the DMV I don't what you call it here and then you know Department of Motor Vehicles and rice your driver's license you know all of government was sort of cast as being kind of like the stodgy slow DMV and it's simply not true it's simply not true the idea of you know I often say to these philanthropists who who talk about their work change in the world which rich personal company has done more for old people than Social Security didn't roll which rich personal companies had more for women than suffrage did for women which rich person or company did more for black people than the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act the United States you know this is a fantasy that we change the world by having rich people make as much money as possible by being miserly and hurting the society and then throwing some coins at a fraction of the victims of their of their practices I hear what you're saying about Canada of course all our hospitals are publicly funded all our universities here are publicly funded we don't have any private universities in the province of Ontario Wow well I guess I mean they're all privately run their governance is private they're all publicly funded congratulations and well I mean on the one hand we have a more egalitarian society on the other hand I think everybody being would have to acknowledge that we're a heck of a lot less dynamic than the United States is as well will there be a price to be paid down the road for going after these people will they leave will they take their money or they take their ball and go home you know pick up their hockey puck and go home any concerns about that first of all on on that I am NOT a card man but I'm willing to play poker with any of these billionaires who are claiming that if we enact some of these policies they would have no choice but to go right because they think it's gonna become Venezuela if we have light rail or it's you know I mean like you Beast that's actually not like they actually say things about light rail leading to gulags and and I just challenge any of these folks okay if you really like I am a patriot so I actually happen to think the United States is a phenomenal country and as a business I actually not sure any big business in the world is gonna want to not be there but hey if you guys say it's you know we're gonna make it just too difficult to do business the United States you're gonna leave go to Singapore cool I'm gonna I'm gonna play poker on this one cuz I actually don't think people are going anywhere they're not gonna leave I don't think they're leaving and the ones who do great and you know in terms of the dynamism point I mean maybe Canada is or isn't you know as dynamic as United staes it depends what dynamic means I mean I don't know you tell me do a lot of people and when people in this country have a business idea right you have a job right here you got a business idea to do something else make cupcakes or whatever whatever it is you want to do how many people in this country don't start those businesses because they're afraid of losing their health care well that's a fact that's a fact right zero zero yes he may they may not started for other reasons so you got millions of people in this country presumably cooking up business ideas all the time and you're telling me no none of them don't start that business no but there's the health care but the other joke in Canada has always been you know how do you have a small business in Canada you open up a large one and you wait five years okay I mean we hear that we do too but I think this is part of the like second-hand anti-government smoke like what you're saying is remarkable because in my country I would say most people with a business idea when I talk to people the number one reason most people don't do it is because like what are you into about health care for that year do you know so whose dynamic like I'm trying to problematize some of these assumptions we have I actually don't think the United States is as dynamic as it looks at as high corporate profits and that's what we're talking about but it's a society in which most people live in terror of following their dreams it's a society in which going to college is now a potentially economically fatal decision for many people it's a society in which you know daring to do something great is a recipe for falling on your face or many people are not going back up so I would argue that a society that actually assures a certain level of decency and dignity and a horizon of the future for people may be more dynamic depending on how you define dynamism I was in San Francisco earlier this week I'm sure you'd find a lot of dynamism in San Francisco there's also a lot more homeless people on the streets of San Francisco than there are in many other affluent countries on earth so I'm not sure what dynamism really means and I would subscribe to a definition of dynamism that included dignity let's bring Barack Obama into the conversation shall we where is he you can get anybody it's a pretty good program I can't get him but I can read them and here we go here's what he had to say on the democratic party's presidential nomination race mr. Obama this isn't in the New York Times mr. Obama cautioned that the universe of voters that could support a Democratic candidate are not driven by the same views reflected on quote certain left-leaning Twitter feeds or quote the activist wing of our party and here's the former president even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision we also have to be rooted in reality mr. Obama said the average American doesn't think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it his remarks offered an implicit critique of senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who have urged voters to embrace political revolution and big structural change how problematic are the fissures inside the Democratic Party today first of all Barack Obama is someone who I respect tremendously I think he's trying to do the right thing here but I think he's wrong in the quote that you read and I don't say that lightly because I think he's one of those thoughtful people the United States has ever produced but I think he is also someone who revealed himself to be temperamentally conservative on some of these things he's not a flame thrower and he's not a revolutionary and I think a lot of that was the necessity of being a black man in America trying to become president there was a lot of things he couldn't do in ways he couldn't be we got to be real about that but I don't think his own temperament and his own approach to the world which worked for him and worked when it worked and should distract us from the fact that for many years before his presidency and continuing through it the fundamentals in America of inequality of who of how many people feel like the country is working for them or not did not improve and he did not go after Wall Street the way I think most people now feel like someone should have gone after Walsh there's too much money from them correct and and and so I think he's entitled his views I think he's trying to play a peacemaker role I think he's in touch with a lot of these candidates and is trying to just make sure they yeah but but but to your point about fishers I think fishers are good I think fishers are good you know and I I actually would say contrary to this kind of worry I actually think the Democratic Party in the United States right now is having an incredibly important fruitful argument right this is a graduate seminar level argument taking place in thoughtful sound bites at the scale of tens of millions of people they are having in particular what I would describe is a referendum on capitalism in the United States in a way that we have not had and I actually don't mind I think they have a second you know high number of candidates and they won in for Democrats in America is running for president right now but but besides that this has been a thoughtful conversation about what do regular people want incremental ISM because people are cautious which is true or sweeping structural change because things aren't working in their life also true you know do people believe that you can lift up those down below in a way that makes that does not change anything fundamental for those on top which is what Joe Biden promised some donors and many other centrists would kind of argue or are Warren and Sanders right that the only way to lift people up down below is to cramp the style of those on top this is a good worthy argument that we are having for sure and and the former presidents position would be if you're trying to turn the Titanic around and you turn it around too quickly it's going to tip over but but that I I don't know that I accept the metaphor I'll tell you what I what I think is going on that makes me not believe that quote when I go out there I think people like you and me who analyze politics overestimate how political the average voter is how much the average voter thinks in terms is left-right most people do not wake up every day thinking of themselves as left or right of this and that we live in very polarized aven't there's a lot of people in the middle who go up you know the famous boot voter in the United States what voted for Bush Obama Obama and Trump right no pundit can explain that how how can you like Barack Obama and a white nationalist and Donald Trump how what people do a lot of people do people are complicated people are messy people don't fit in these boxes so I think sometimes and Donald Trump's presidency indicates this the vodka version of something is actually more appealing to people than the beer version of it right the more purely distilled version yeah it's stronger yeah it's harder yeah it's more extreme but if this if Barack Obama's theory was correct Jeb Bush would be President the United States right now right so I don't think it can be a universal truth at all times that the more cautious moderate version of a policy is more gets more votes and for the simple reason the math to me is this when you get closer to the center it is true that there's a bigger you know pool of people available to you however you become less exciting also okay so your enthusiasm goes down that's what that analysis is not factored in when you say something like Medicare for all who want it but you can keep your insurance but this isn't it okay maybe you're not as scary to me but I also don't know what you're saying I'm on Obama care by the way I don't understand Obama care I'm like my kids aren't Obama care I still understand what Obama care is so it's cautious it's moderate it's also incomprehensible not that exciting but it's what was possible sure at the time I think he could have sold more than he did we can have an argument about that but if you say I want a society sort of like in Canada where you are free from illness I want freedom from illness the new patriotism in America is freedom from illness you know what that is a more extreme policy he's right I think that's way more exciting to people I need a lot of people on the right who actually also have health problems and I actually think when you frame things like that even though it may sound more extreme because you are making it simple accessible moral you are often able to have way more votes on things like that then the cautious incremental thing that sounds like a KPMG report okay I hear yet but and let's finish up on this the election we know is going to come down to a handful of states right we you can tell me today these states are gonna vote red and these states are gonna vote blue I mean you know Alabama is gonna vote for Trump and you know Massachusetts is going to vote for whoever the Democratic candidate is so you're looking for a candidate who will be appealing to voters who live in places like Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Indiana and you know those kinds of the purple states what are normally purple states who's the more likely candidate that is going to beat Trump in those states somebody like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or somebody like Joe Biden mayor Pete Amy Klobuchar somebody more centrist I think there is truth in the notion that right now as things have been framed and it's early in the game and remember people are pandering to the liberal base right now they're not they're not playing to a centrist voter in Michigan right now and they will a year from now but right now I get the argument that someone like Biden kind of more milquetoast middle is more appealing those places I think that's probably true the math bears that out I think what Sanders and or Warren need to do and I think could do and will do is very much have a strategy for speaking to those kinds of places because you're right about these policies in a way that flips the script that actually takes these things that we might think of as extreme and liberal and actually does two things I think message number one is a lot of these more structural or sweeping policies are actually more patriotic than the alternative that's you need to say in Michigan it's unamerican to let people die just because they forgot to register for health insurance we don't do that in foreign battlefields we shouldn't do it here talk like that in Michigan it's a different framing that's a different framing yeah when when Michael Bloomberg says medicare-for-all would bring America to its knees uuuugh talk back to Michael Bloomberg and you say you know what the country that beat the Nazis can probably survive the implementation of medicare-for-all so if you don't believe America can handle that you're not a believer but I'm a patriot that's this is the kind of language that's that's the first thing I think these policies need to be made patriotic need to be and they are patriotic actually took care for people in your country is patriotic second sort of oppositely I think Sanders and war and others at lower levels in the in the in the of electoral politics who are running on these ideas I think need to do a better job of telling people what their lives will be like if these things succeed you just told me something that I won't forget that presumably no one in this country doesn't didn't start a business last year because of health care worry well for an American that's a really shocking fact we have Medicare for all and so instead of just saying Medicare for all what you just told me is there's a whole category of human anxiety that people have below the border here that you have eliminated as a matter of course we have other anxiety correct and I think what so in addition to kind of framing some of the stuff is patriotic for those places I think you want to go to Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and say who will you be in a world of Medicare for all who will you be when you don't have student debt who will you be when you're not sitting around worrying about these things what businesses will you start what books will you read to your child when you don't read medical bills around the table I don't see them talking like this in the way that I think they could so there you go free consultative that's a good vision for a candidate free of charge you just gave it to them let's see what happens there's lots of time left for somebody to jump on that uh non-gear dard ass has been our guest his book winners take all the elite charade of changing the world and we're glad it's brought you back to our studio the first time in ten years good to see you so happy to be back the agenda with Steve Paikin is brought to you by the chartered professional accountants of Ontario CPA Ontario is a regulator an educator a thought leader and an advocate we protect the public we advance our profession we guide our CPAs we are CPA Ontario and by viewers like you thank you

Channel: The Agenda | TVO Today

Views: 354,401

Keywords: The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, billionaires, philanthropy, wealth disparity

Id: Om-B9cGR6N8

Length: 33min 50sec (2030 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/lhjmq]

Everyone should give this a listen. Anand really goes behind the core argument of why billionaires today shouldn't exist.

[u/PretteyPretteyGOOD]

Great starting point on that video. The entire last few minutes is worth the watch.

I agree, that many of us and I believe I have seen it in comments from other redditors in this reddit about framing it about "who we could be" or "what we could be" That right there is key. Many times when I have spoken to people on the fence about M4A, refocusing it around the economic opportunity it could create for people, has helped win people to support it. Being able to unshackle people from their jobs they're tied to simply for insurance would be incredibly freeing.

With a Bernie presidency, I can't help but continue to imagine of what America could finally be with M4A, Free Public College, and Medical and Student Debt removed. Who Could We Be?