Has Capitalism Killed the American Dream?

coming up on american grift i've been trying to depict myself as a sensible reasonable person as nick as an extremist i guess i'll just go castro right now um socialism versus capitalism take the just simple re-education [Laughter] and you know if those re-education camps are schools of choice i'm there okay [Music] after a few months of exploring the strange absurd and frequently depressing periphery of the american economy from trailer park denizens to tick-tock kids and nft billionaires we decided that we should take a step back and rather than just looking at the faults within the system look at the system itself is capitalism the way forward for the american economy or is it time to lurch towards a more socialist model all sides of this debate agree on one thing the current american economy looks pretty grim so rather than wallow in that grimness we invited two of our smartest most entertaining and ideologically opposite friends to a comedy club to argue about how to fix this mess i'm going to introduce these two guys on one side nick gillespie the editor-at-large of reason uh which would be reason.com the magazine the podcast the whole the whole kitten caboodle the uh broadway musical the broadway musical uh and the author of the declaration of independence right and what's the subtitle something about how libertarians how libertarian politics can fix what's wrong with america i don't know why you're clapping they haven't fixed america that book came out about 10 years ago so as uh yeah as a matter of fact we made it a little bit worse yeah and bashkar sankara is the founding editor and publisher of jacobin and the editor of the abcs of socialism and the socialist manifesto the case for radical politics in an era of extreme inequality thanks both of you for joining us so we have the two polls here right we have the man who says that socialism can solve our problems and the man who has lied to us and told us that libertarianism has solved our problems uh nick it's not a problem if you ignore it politics it's like cancer if you just don't go to the doctor that's you know this is nothing to worry about yeah this is not going to go well just so you guys know so i was looking at the washington post the other day and i came across an old piece it's a news piece not an editorial and the headline was the crisis in capitalism if one puts that in quotation marks and searches the internet literally every publication has done some iteration of this over the past 10 years is the premise right are we in right now or have we been in the past decade in a crisis of capitalism well you know it's interesting because the last decade from like about 2009 february or something in 2009 to 2020 we had the longest economic expansion in american history so if that's a cri maybe that's the crisis that everybody's getting rich or something like that i think we're not in a crisis of capitalism the main problems in america are that are the places where we don't have enough capitalism capitalism works pretty well you know i'm sure we're going to talk about housing you know when you allow supply to grow to meet demand housing prices come down services get better et cetera when you look at the places that are most up it's things like education where there's you know 90 percent of the schools are run by the state healthcare where you know more than 50 percent of health care dollars are paid for by the state uh retirement which gets screwed up because of things like that so if we have a crisis of capitalism i would say it's that we don't have enough the salient thing for me is that even when capitalism is growing and things are going well when there's productivity gains and things like that we're in a situation where the vast majority of those gains are going to the owners of capital and relatively less of those gains are going to workers compared to let's say in the post-war period when we had stronger unions we had state policies to facilitate uh more of a share going to working-class people quantitatively because there is so much wealth in society we've been building more and more wealth since let's say the 60s since this like golden age of capitalism that people across the political spectrum kind of harken back to that a lot of people are better off now than they would have been in the past the question though is if you have this wealthy society that's been built off the socially created wealth if you have all these productivity gains then why are we only marginally better off your average american so but if this is yeah but you have to compare us to other countries the uk and the us are less mobile than countries like denmark finland norway or even canada which is not a social democratic country so why is that i think a lot has to do with the decline of unions and the kind of working-class power in civil society [Music] the one thing that does seem uniform to me is something that both of you seem to acknowledge and it's something that i've seen going out and talking to people everyone feels this way right i mean the republican party turned on a dime that was a party of free markets and discussing free market solutions and things to almost totally abandoning that in becoming a make america great again you're being set upon by these rich people attacking wall street which was never a thing that the republican party did so consistently as they've done under trump why is it that people feel this way for the republican party a party that's trying to win elections uh someone like trump i think it pursued an agenda very similar to a lot of mainstream republican agendas but he tied it in with trying to speak politically to some of the anger in places in the rust belt and you need to get people behind your ideas so for example the some of trump's tariffs were smart even though they were bad at the policy level because it was a signal to people saying i'm on your side i'm doing something for you we lose a fortune on trade the united states loses with everybody the european union is brutal to the united states they don't take and they understand that they know it you have to create a narrative that tells people that you are a hard-working person you want to show up and work and take care of yourself and your your family and you are the protagonists in the story of rebuilding and regrowth industrialization like the industrial sector of the economy peaked at about 40 percent in 1943 and since then if you look at you know the charts it's been a straight-line decline and i'm you know i'm 58 i've been through at least four or five cycles where people talk about the deindustrialization of america i went to grad school in buffalo in like the in the early 90s and people were talking about you know like i don't know what happened the jobs just left and they were talking about as if it had happened in 1989 those jobs had fled a long time ago and but we tell this story of like everything was good until globalization everything was good until this until that and i think we if we look and we're more honest about that kind of stuff we would realize that the deindustrialization of america is good we make more stuff with fewer things what we need to do is create an economy where the people whose jobs get put out you know they they just disappear you know like who who runs photo map booths anymore that's gone right uh dry cleaning is on the way out how do we create an economy where those people can shift into what's coming next and this is one of the big failings of government and of politics i don't know that they can do that uh you know that there are effective the government runs like dozens of job retraining programs that they don't even track the effectiveness of because they don't work for reasons you describe the industrialization is actually a misnomer in the in the fact that the us is producing more cars than ever the share of employment and manufacturing is is declining but but you're diagnosing the problem but you were you had the conclusion right there in the palm of your hand but because of your your ideological background you had to back away from it which is no which is simply state active labor market policies which is if you have a dyna you could have a dynamic economy you could have there's actually were higher levels at the height of nordic social democracy in a country like sweden there was more firm failure than in america but the effects of firm failure were felt less by the working-class people that were losing their jobs because there was effective state policy for retraining what's the state policy that you would you know that would help people in buffalo so other than bus tickets to anywhere and i i don't mean that i don't mean that as like a cheap joke the way the story gets told it's always detroit you know detroit peaked in like 1950. you know in terms of population and stuff like that it's over for detroit it maybe it can remake itself but a lot of people have already left and we've got to figure out how to get them to the places where the jobs are when you hear people on on your own side of the ledger say things like late capitalism crisis of capitalism what do you make of that so the term actually was was first pioneered by this belgian marxist um ernest mandel this will definitely not make the final cut yeah you know um advice moynihan is big in belgium yeah yeah you do realize that just like the producers we're all trying to get fired right now so we'll start with that um for mandel what he was trying to do was just to say okay the three phases of capitalism there was the initial very competitive small-scale phase and there was industrial capitalism then now i'm in this post-war war moment how do i explain the growing internationalization and shifts in capitalism but i think people have used it as like a pejorative term saying we're leading to crisis in part because people see are we i mean there's an ecological crisis looming but i think in general it's a better bet to say that a system can adapt and change and survive rather than to predict it's its downfall to me going beyond capitalism or or building a better society is fundamentally a political choice rather than something that destined to to come we have a social welfare net and it gets a lot of things done i'm a libertarian i'm not an anarchist so i'm not opposed to taxes and i'm not opposed to certain types of transfer payments i suspect that we might agree i mean i would like to see for instance social welfare spending instead of uh taking a bunch of money from everybody and then saying okay vasco here's here's a voucher for housing here's a voucher for healthcare his voucher for certain foods in the grocery store just give people money like give them unrestricted cash transfers and i think that would that would make the system easier to administer and it would also allow people it would give them dignity and the ability to kind of fix their lives and they know better let's talk about something like the pandemic right that's a huge government intervention into the economy just giving out cash etc um was that a good thing and if you look back were we a little too heavy breathing about what the obama administration did in those interventions before no i mean i i think that and it wasn't just obama it was uh george bush as well when you look at like the tarp program and the auto bailout which started under under bush these were bad policies that did not have intended effects and they just kind of paper papered over things added to national debt you know i i believe and there's a bunch of both right-wing and marxist economists at the university of massachusetts who have demonstrated that having large national debts over time where there's no pretense that you're going to reduce them harms long-term economic growth when we get to the pandemic you know in 2019 the federal budget was 4.5 4.4 trillion dollars of record the two next two years was 6.4 and 6.8 trillion dollars like we have massively increased the size scope and spending of government the economic import of it is you know we have pumped so much money into the economy including telling people giving money people money not to work um which slows things down it's you know it is not a surprise that right now we're in an inflationary period you'll notice that all of the people are like oh it's transitory uh inflation it's going to clear up in a couple months now it's a couple of years and i think it's going to be you know a real tough slot in the case of of gm and the the auto bailouts i think they were necessary for for many reasons i think that was a case where the state intervention preserved a lot of employment and in america employment um is tied to your health care so there's a lot of like ramifications that could have stemmed from that that were far greater than the loss of of just um uh of of some temporary government money so is there a size thing when the government should intervene and save an industry i think it's a question of policy case by case i think there's a there's there's reasons why states all around the world sometimes shelter certain industries or and also for for what it's worth i think american auto would be a lot better off if they didn't have to pay for their workers health insurance and i'm not suggesting that the uaw take a cut to their health insurance but i in other countries they're competing in against korean and german and japanese auto manufacturers that have government-run health insurance so that the burden is less on those those industries to begin with and also that means that the price for allowing these firms to fail would also be a lot less too uh let's talk a little bit about housing if you look at a place like new york city uh san francisco et cetera major metropolitan areas is the highest housing prices in the world right or in the country some of them what is the government to do about something like that uh if anything you know i've been trying and mostly failing and trying to pick myself as a sensible reasonable person as nick as an extremist so i guess i'll just go castro right um yeah i think take the land i think shoot the coulombs uh no no no no shooting but i do think there's something wrong i always say that um uh just simple re-education that's it you know you know if those you ever watch patient camps or schools of choice i'm there okay school choice for re-education no but i i i'm for the state building far more well-funded well-maintained public housing in in my favorite example in sweden from the 1960s and 70s one million homes were built in a country at the time of eight million people now what that would do is essentially create a greater public option for for housing it would ease the the rental markets it would not have the same sort of distortion effects that sometimes uh libertarians correctly point out that sometimes badly constructed policies around rent controls uh housing costs stockholm are out of control i mean they're crazy right now and particularly it's very difficult to get an apartment in in stockholm well we're talking about uh i imagine that the housing crisis would be a lot greater if there was 1 million less units of supply in the in the in the country but i think there is a a truth to the idea that one solution one important solution to the housing problem is generating more supply the question is whether we could just wait for the free market to generate supply that is going to help working-class people as opposed to right now you loosen restrictions and regulations you create more of an incentive for people to create create housing that's going to have some net benefit effects but it's going to take longer to take effect than building housing public housing we should have absolutely we should have more public housing public housing works quite well in singapore and a lot of other countries reinvested this is the kind of yeah but it doesn't it doesn't work well in america what happens and and here's an instructive case this is where i think if we had more capitalism in housing we would have better housing more housing and cheaper prices a couple of years ago tokyo was one was the most expensive city in the world to uh to live in uh and for a variety of reasons the japanese government actually loosened up uh you know all the regulations on it that tokyo created 150 000 new uh housing starts in like 2018 which was more than new york la houston and i think san francisco combined tokyo is now a cheap relatively cheap city to live in because there's more housing that gets done through the free market if it's allowed to in places like san francisco new york la nobody can build housing at scale anymore the best way to do it is to relax land use regulations and allow developers to build bigger taller and more stuff uh that's the solution i'm not i'm not in favor of brownstone preservation and and existing zoning requirements what i am in favor though of is having the state play a role constructing housing for people near to where they work well maintained affordable housing nick i know what you think the government shouldn't do right what should the government actually do proactively for poor people when it comes to housing i think that all transfer programs should be in the form of unrestricted cash grants because then you just instead of like section 8 housing uh you know which is like government finance housing it carries a stigma with it and things like that um if you gave people you know if the poverty level is you know thirteen thousand dollars you know for an individual or something like that if you gave them that in cash rather than saying we're gonna parcel out here some food stamps here it's this here's that i think they would make the best decisions with those dollars i'm for a welfare state that has less conditions and and giving cash is one way to uh to do that so there's no real point of disagreement um there uh what i would say is that in general nick can say those sensible things but broadly the libertarian world allies themselves with politicians and with large business interests that advocate against the politics of redistribution as i i think that's the political aspect that we we have to take aside for these policy debates who is the coalition that could build a better constructed welfare state even if it's just in your vision for for people on the margins of society that coalition that's built welfare states all around the world some poorly constructed some better constructed have been labor unions and has been forces of the left [Music] a brief digression on something that um is kind of funny to me because we filmed two episodes about cryptocurrency nfts things like this um the metaverse which i still don't know what that is it's just having an avatar of yourself as far as i can tell um very exciting it's very exciting the one thing i found pretty interesting about it at this nft conference was that there are people that were avowed socialists that i spoke to and the usual kind of libertarian types um so it was a really good looking it was a great looking crowd it was not socially awkward in any way and both of them have different kind of enthusiasms for something that essentially cuts the government out of monetary policy what do you bashkar make of this and how does that kind of slot into your worldview because i've seen people on your side say this is great but for different reasons than what the kind of libertarian side says well the good thing about being a socialist in america in 2021 is that it's a lot less lonely than being a socialist in america in like 2006 2007. uh the bad thing is obviously you have you know people saying all sorts of stuff who identify as as a socialist so i would say that the utility of uh cryptocurrency is primarily to either uh have more privacy for legal transactions or for black market uh activities also it's it's a tool of speculation um so if you see you could buy dips and you could uh sit your phone to alert elon musk whenever he he uh he boosts up something and then immediately go and buy it and then sell it you know i think a lot of the talk about the utility of cryptocurrency is just a way to maintain the bubble you know maintain the bubble for a little bit longer no this thing actually has intrinsic value it has this value of that value there are more stable forms of of currency that people can use that have a far lower transaction cost like the british pound or the american dollar nick you're a bit more bullish on this yeah yeah i like uh i like bitcoin in particular but crypto more generally and and i see it less as a it's not a speculative thing in the short term a lot of people are making bets and trying to make money and things like that but i went to the big bitcoin conference in miami uh in june and what was fascinating is that the people there were not talking about it like okay here's you know we're going to pump up dogecoin and become dogecoin billionaires and then sell it and all of that kind of stuff it was primarily about creating this alternative system that allows people to conduct their business the way that they want to um and you know there's a guy named alex gladstone at the human rights foundation who talks about bitcoin as a way of people in authoritarian countries you know venezuela iran china to buy and sell things and get stuff i mean people in venezuela were you know venezuela has subsidized electricity so heavily because it's an oil producing country they had massive bitcoin mining there and the people would you know they would send bitcoin out of the country and have people send back stuff from amazon to it it's it's it's a way of getting around authoritarian governments it allows a currency to um you know circulate independent of central banking i i think that's great countries can't fool around with their currency as much and bitcoin is a great way of talking about that you said something was interesting uh about how it's less lonely to be a socialist in uh 2021 than it was in you know 2012. you know for a lot of people particularly in the media class it looks as if the world is going your way that people are on your side that you know the democratic party joe biden has lurched left in a lot of ways uh aoc in the squad get a lot of attention you know the republican party is certainly talking about populism is the world going your way i mean is america becoming more friendly towards socialists which it wasn't certainly in the past well no it's a short it's a short answer uh but i think the the longer answer is that it's the norm in advanced capitalist democracies to have a strong socialist current and to have strong socialist and civil society it's it's a norm to have marx taught in academia even in econ departments actually a lot of econ departments are in other countries still call the old name the you know departments of political economy why in this moment are people talking about socialism rather than a form of left populism like with podemos and other countries i think a lot has to do with the randomness of bernie sanders being an old lefty who got politicized in the socialist party of america yeah but it's not i mean the bernie thing is not a sort of you know one-off is it i mean he's an amazingly popular figure amongst people in the democratic party i mean he obviously almost won the nomination a couple of times what happened do you think that's just a fluke there's something i think true and simplistic about the bernie sanders appeal are you ready for a radical idea all right together we are going to create an economy that works for all of us not just the one percent very proud that our campaign does not have a super pac [Applause] which is telling people you know you work hard and you're not getting enough and there are people who are getting what you deserve there are millionaires and billionaires there's some eternal truths to the appeal of class every billionaire is a policy failure right i mean i i i was aoc's chief of staff said that and it's like when i hear that um you know i'm thinking like what would the pandemic have been like if jeff bezos that billionaire policy failure had not created amazon we would have had as bad as it has been it would have been in it would have been unlivable what would the world be without jeff bezos will probably be a lot of other smaller firms creating employment and workers at those firms helping to create value um as well like there would have been people bringing you know the same day when i need you know uh uh i don't know you know a ketamine infusion and they'll be like we're gonna get into amazon it's same day delivery yeah you know i think there's an old school old-school kind of socialist talking point kind of which is that all capitalists are parasites which is a very hard position i think doesn't really make that much sense the question is can we do better can we create a better system it's not in absolute terms whether it's better to have the status quo of an economy dominated by a handful of powerful people uh versus an economy where nothing is produced and we're just starving and poorer forever when it comes to the realm of politics and also when it comes to the the firms in which wealth is constructed ordinary workers are still relatively replaceable now nick with you at reason i i get told every my annual review it's like you know you are eminently replaceable if you had let's say upper management or something like that maybe not you but someone else like you at reason can actually go to meeting with your boss and say you know um i deserve 10 more i have some sort of leverage i have this skill i have this whatever they can negotiate as individuals yes or that photo if if you're if you're at a worker at cvs and you go and say hey i'm earning 12.50 an hour i want to earn 15 16 an hour as an individual worker your boss will probably tell you to to have off right um but if you go with the rest of your workforce and you make that demand then collectively you might be able to make that happen cause you have a threat of slowing down or stopping but that's a collective logic that works at a firm and that's the reason why we need unions at firms but that's also the collective logic of why broadly working class people need political parties and need institutions actually say yes we as a collective have a common interest and these other people have a different interest let's say you as an owner of private property nick decide to um build a factory and you make this investment and whatever else and you convince a hundred other people to work at your your factory or restaurant or whatever else on terms of fourteen dollars an hour wage and 10 hour shifts but everyone's really happy there and they they like it then the government comes about where a political party pushes the message of we're going to demand that everybody gets paid 15 an hour but eight hour day maximums or whatever else so for the ordinary workers at that firm they're now gaining more freedom they're getting two hours extra day they can do whatever they want um they can speculate in cryptocurrency they can bet on the next they could they could you know i don't know like what normal people do like watch tv read po i don't know what normal people do you know they uh read poetry yes read poetry right you know as a representative of the worker you shouldn't say i don't know what ordinary people do well you know you know you know you know i would say i would say i would say i don't know what ordinary people um do because there is no real or people are are are incredibly weird and eclectic whatever which is why the state should stay out of civil society [Music] [Music] there's nothing nothing in libertarian philosophy or ideology that precludes collective bargaining or forming unions if the government comes in and just arbitrarily sets the wage rate uh at twenty dollars an hour and the company is barely getting by you're not going to keep the same number of workers it it it's not a costless intervention and it's not just like oh we can pull all of this money out of the profits that the you know the the swells um so it's true that that for our version in our country a higher minimum wage would encourage firm failure of certain less efficient producers but if less efficient producers collapse and more efficient producers expand you know that's good for productivity that's good for the economy and if you're the right set of active labor market policies then you know it's a net benefit i mean firm failure is not not a not a bad thing if you can't afford to pay your workers a living wage market it might be better the market kind of is the thing that sorts that out good firm services bad firms or efficient firms versus inefficient firms and i will point out the companies that push for minimum wage now it's places like walmart it's places like amazon because they are using the power of the government to kind of price out their competition firms businesses you know one of the first things they do after they get big and successful is they buy government regulation that helps them maintain their market position and screw over competitors um and that's happening now in big tech facebook is running ads saying like you know we want to be regulated we need to be regulated it's time to be regulated because they know they're going to write the regulations in a way that there will not be any more competitors to face if you had the sort of dictatorial power um actually i don't know the socialist the dictorial power sometimes ends poorly um but if you had dictatorial power right and you say i need to correct where this economy is going where this culture is going and you have this sort of lay of land i can say i'm gonna implement x n you know policies whatever it be what is the main concern for you and how does one fix it you know sort of wave of the wand so when it comes to my wider dreams of of being a socialist you know i believe that ordinary people are capable of running their own workforces electing their own management i think we'll always need divisions of labor we'll always need firm failures i believe that the market is necessary for both price calculations and also incentives but i believe there's certain spheres of life like for instance health care in which we don't want it to leave it to the market and we see effective models you could say that hey i prefer the american system to the british system uh but the british system works in its own in its own way and i think the flaws in the british system could be correct by policies the american system to me seems like the worst of both worlds where you're subsidizing a failing system that has this mix of public and private in a very incoherent way i think there's a real solution that can be found in a more social democratic direction in america if capitalists control the flow of investment at some point capitalists can just say no the gig is up we're going to stop investing because the system doesn't make sense and we prefer to be in a situation similar to our peers in britain and the united states so i think fundamentally we have to grapple with the need to collectivize that sources of of investment precisely because capitalists are not parasites so we need to grou we need to take control of the thing capitalists do productively in some in some way that's why i think we need to go beyond social democracy but you know the quest for my lifetime in the united states i think is getting people access to free and affordable healthcare nick what i would argue is we're moving in many ways to a better society where when you look at you know broad social movements and this is things like equality of of all individuals you know on racial terms on ethnic terms on gender sexual orientation we're moving in the right direction that's good i think we're becoming more adult about things like drug legalization and letting people choose their intoxicants i think the key things that we need to do with the federal government is reduce its size scope and spending which has blown up enormously over the past 20 years in particular and we need to you know the government we can't pay for this the debt that we accrue for that is slowing down economic growth it comes with a lot of regulations that clog up the ability of creative destruction of an innovative economy to change so it's supplying uh the demands of people that change over time and things like that we've been living in what i call the long 20th century which starts with like bismarck's germany and it's the social welfare state it is no longer viable in a world where um population growth is shrinking you know where the fertility rates are down you you know all of these systems that are bankrupting america and they're bankrupting countries all over the world are based on the idea you'll have 10 or 20 people contributing to a system you know per beneficiary that's no longer the case we need to radically change that and say we want a government that keeps peace does a couple of things you know for the common good and then it helps people who need help and other than that kind of get out of the way and let's see let's see what we develop well thank you guys um that was the hardest hour of my life to not jump in and say things so we're going to do now is if anybody has any questions if you can come up here um and there you go what are the like cultural norms or things that we should ask like what are the ethical obligations of capitalists to create a more fair society i think they have none the role of businesses and capitalists is to maximize profit that's what they should do that's what they're built to to do is militant treatment ladies and gentlemen that's that's the thing is milton friedman it's it's it's it's the role of the state to regulate capitalists uh and it's a role of unions to uh to demand that workers get get more share of a production more share of that wealth but in other words there's nothing i hate more sorry this is not an attack on you there's nothing i hate more than an ethically conscious capitalist no just be capitalist let us regulate and admonish you and collectively bargain against you but like it's just the most insufferable trend i think of the last like how can goldman uh like sex help bridge the racial welfare it's it's like it's it's the worst thing in culture in the past like 10 years reason in 2005 staged a debate between milton friedman and john mackey the ceo of whole foods who pushes a whole kind of conscious capitalism and i think one of the things that some capitalists do and you can argue about it like whether or not it's just a way of building more into the bottom line or not but whole foods is a great example where it is not a it's not an employee owned or run company but the people who work there are really incentivized to be more productive they get the you know the extra money that they bring into the company a lot of it goes to them whole foods is always integrated into its local communities and you know that's a model like i don't think you need one of the things that we should also think about in a free society you're going to have a lot of different models and there will be the you know the capitalists who are like my only interest is uh maximizing shareholder value but then you have other people who have a social mission i think that's becoming more and more the case partly because we have entered a post-scarcity world you know we're not living there and so all we're doing is more and more kind of symbolic value and you know it is a value when you are you know you know the hard rock cafe you know we're going to save the planet so every time you're rolling craps it's like look at me i'm saving the planet people pay extra for that and that they can do that so capitalists don't have to just be ruthless profit maximizers but you want them wait wait no the constraint the constraint is will will it put me out of business so you could cut your bottom line a little percentage as long as you're not being undercut by competitors so it's just kind of a ridiculous thing when every little company needs to tell you it has a social uh purpose when like that's not the way our system is built our system is built in a not immoral sense but in a moral sense on the generation of prophets or accumulation of surplus it's not built on you know uh gender equity yeah and i'll give you this uh raytheon you know the the defense contractor was proud during like pride week you know they were like raytheon supports lgbtq plus things and it's like yeah that's it it also supports the saudi royal family exactly like you know they're putting them into college because my father worked for ethiopia there are weapons their weapons will kill you all regardless of your gender or sexual orientation it doesn't matter yeah you're pronouncing it they will murder you um yeah let me go here first i feel like there was a lot of effort here in this debate to like appear sane and like find some common ground so i was curious like maybe each of you could say like your most extreme view that might not be popular best part nick give me your extreme positions well i already laid it out which is worker ownership of the means of production we've had classes we've been a class society since the neolithic revolution uh so that's a pretty big shift yeah i was hoping to say i love stalin or something like that to really shock everyone huge stalin fan nick i know you're going to tell me about like heroin for 12 year olds but uh go ahead yeah what i i mean i want heroin and vending machines in charter schools that's pretty much it well then actually oftentimes this used to drive my liberal friends in saying when i would say like all welfare should be in the form of unrestricted cash grants and then they would be like are you kidding because poor people are going to see you know they'll spend food stamps on cigarettes etc but the drug legalization thing it's like i think all drugs should be legal and i also think that the prescription regime should be abolished because that arrogates a huge amount of power to pharmaceutical companies to doctors to pharmacies that then get to control things in a way that i find extremely unhealthy what are your thoughts on internalized capitalism the prioritization of work over well-being and its links to the increase in mental health issues in america nick we start with with you in that uh you know it's a common criticism of capitalism that it uh prioritizes profits uh over the well-being of its workers is that something that you are concerned about uh well you know one thing that i'll say uh that is a real shift uh is that over the past few decades i think people have been um i wouldn't call it internalized capitalism but uh people are demanding that their work express their deepest commitments their values their morals their mission things like that and that is probably one of the reasons why millennials and gen z have a lower labor force participation rate than boomers people over 55 are are actually working more than they were 20 years ago people under 35 are working less you know in labor force participation rates i think it's a good thing that people uh demand or want their job to express who they are and to you know but it also um you know it's really difficult to find those jobs and it's also it makes it raises the stakes on everything we have become a world again i think we're in a largely symbolic economy now you want everything you do to reflect your deepest commitments and that is exhausting it's hard to be maintained consistency in that and i think that may be leading to some kinds of mental uh mental health issues or more broadly speaking you know i think the the thing that is upon us is actually a kind of crisis of meaning in our lives because we have so many choices which is good but then it's kind of hard to pick one and go with it and maintain it you know over time yeah i would agree that work um or politics can't solve every existential problem that people have i think that one of the core demands in history of the labor movement has always been freedom from production freedom the eight-hour day was the galvanizing demand of the international labor movement it wasn't for more media work it was just for uh less work a more reasonable time spent work eight hours to work eight hours to sleep eight hours to do whatever you you want in in life and i think that we need to advocate um something um something like that i i i think also a lot of people find meaning in work um that's one reason why i'm skeptical about a universal basic income even though i agree that uh a lot of welfare payments and so on would be would be better as as um as cash i think people do want to feel like they have a stake in society and don't just want to be at the mercy of the government or politics or whatever else and just be on a dull thank you thank you so much ladies and gentlemen comrades campagneros socialists and capitalists thank you so much for coming and uh we'll see you soon thanks guys [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] i'm michael lairmonth editor-in-chief of vice news too often traditional news outlets shy away from the real stories and experiences of those living through global conflicts not vice news our reporters are on the ground fearlessly covering the human stories that shape our world you and millions of others can continue to read watch and listen device news for free but we hope you'll consider making a one-time or ongoing contribution of any size advice.com contribute every contribution no matter how big or small helps support the journalism 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Channel: VICE News

Views: 595,099

Keywords: VICE News, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, VICE on SHOWTIME, vice news 2020, american dream, poverty in america, poverty in america documentary 2022, Capitalism, Socialist Manifesto, Democratic Socialists, Bhaskar Sunkara, Libertarian, Nick Gillespie, Michael Moynihan

Id: smUCKnnBQBg

Length: 44min 35sec (2675 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2022